New Mexico Mercury

Island in the sky, Texas style

If I were a Texas mountain, I’d feel lonely. Contrary to the old adage that if God had wanted Texans to ski, he would’ve given them mountains, Texas does have 18 mountain ranges, none of them Texas-sized and all of them in the state’s remote southwestern corner. But Texas suffers the indignity of having to share its biggest and highest range with New Mexico: the Guadalupe Mountains, topping off at 8,751 feet, a mile higher than the desert that surrounds this island in the sky...

On Stage: A Thinking Animal, a Beastly Man

At the start of Act I, a rooster talks and acts like a man. At the end of Act II, a man talks and acts like a rooster. That in a nutshell is the story of Year of the Rooster, the current offering of the Fusion company at the Cell Theater in downtown Albuquerque.

How and why the rooster becomes humanoid and the human becomes beastly is the plot of this funny, violent, difficult and provoking story by the 20-something Eric Dufault that opened Off-Broadway in New York less than a year ago...

A Wasted Election

Candidates talked loud and said little as the pressing issues of climate change, immigration and economic disparity were left off the table.

Give people a chance

Nov. 1 was Day of the Dead but in Albuquerque it was an exceptional day of life. What made the day was a unique musical gathering called OneBeat. The performance Saturday night was a rare conjunction of time, place and people, an occasion to be not only remembered but treasured.

Some 25 young musicians from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Australia and North America joined to produce some three hours of music that blended a wide range of genres, traditions, styles and instruments into an evening that was a celebration—of youth, of international collaboration and harmony, most of all of music that can stir our souls and ignite our passions like nothing else on earth...

‘A walk back in time’

No cars. No TV. No radio. No internet. No landline phones. Just a little light at night and a little water in the shower. Furniture, decor and art from the 1920s. Wood frame buildings clinging to a cliff or squatting on the sand beside the ocean. Nothing newer than1938. An entire town built in the elbow of a gentle cove, then deserted, then re-inhabited as a state park.

The harmonies of our lives play out to the rhythms of crashing surf. The markers of our days are sunrise and sunset, waves and clouds by day, stars and a red, red moon by night...

“Greese” at the Albuquerque Little Theater

The year 1959 may have been the last cry of normal adolescence: the year before the ‘60s, John Kennedy’s election, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the freedom rides, the sexual revolution, the pill, miniskirts, the Beatles, the drug revolution and the endless war in Vietnam.

When the Albuquerque Little Theater ’s current production of Grease burst upon the Duke City stage with gleeful songs, acrobatic dancing and fresh-faced actors, the nearly sold-out audience was filled with those who can recall that period of their own youth...

“Oh, no, not again.”

My wife’s reaction was understandable. I hate giving bad news but sometimes you just have to face the miserable reality head on.

The miserable reality is that in recent days it has quietly developed that in two years the country will probably endure another Bush-Clinton shootout at the OK Corral.

With the exception of 2012, you have to go all the way back to 1976 to find a year in which a Bush or a Clinton (or both) wasn’t running for President...

Why Disenfranchise Teen Voters

When more than 100,000 youths 16 and 17 years old cast votes Sept. 18 in the most important election in Scotland in 300 years, they also cast a ballot in the United States and dozens of other countries around the world that have been debating youth voting.

In the Scottish election, advocates of independence lost, but youths on both sides of the heated referendum won. Polling showed that the newly registered voters were as well informed as their older peers, were as serious about the issues and by and large put reasoned calculations of economic benefit ahead of emotional appeals to Scottish nationalism. There was no indication that the young were more subject to manipulation or were more naive than older voters. As a result, all of Britain is on the verge of enfranchising teenagers...

Rafting: The Art of the Circle

Here’s how a couple of tight-wad, do-it-yourself river amateurs managed to survive a four-day, 68-mile rafting trip in Labyrinth Canyon on the Green River in Utah.

We bought a cheap little raft online. It weights 60 pounds. It takes about 10 minutes to pump up. It holds four adult passengers. And during previous day trips on the Rio Grande in Colorado, the Rio Chama in New Mexico and several New Mexico lakes, it has proven to be well-nigh indestructible, bouncing effortlessly off boulders, grinding uneventfully over gravel and brushing off the sharpest overhanging branches...

Comedy and tragedy on the Duke City stage

The continuing vitality of Albuquerque theater is a kind of marvel. The economy is tanking. More people are moving out than moving in. Unemployment is again rising toward 8 percent in a double-dip recession. Nearly every creative effort—including classical music, art galleries, book stores, magazines, newspapers, book publishing and writing— is in a world of hurt.

We still support, however, nearly 50 theatrical companies staging an extraordinary variety of classical and contemporary, edgy and conventional shows every weekend, year round, in and out of tourist seasons. To perceive just how remarkable the Albuquerque scene is just look around you. Santa Fe, celebrated for the visual arts, has almost no theatrical presence...