Leaving China: An Artist’s Visual Memoir
Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood is a memoir by designer and illustrator James McMullan, who has long been the principal poster artist for Lincoln Center Theater. I saw a few of the plays his works advertised when I lived in New York, but remember many of his posters. Like his posters, his illustrated memoir is clearly contemporary as well as vital and emotional.
Leaving China is categorized as a Young Adult book, targeted at teenagers. It would be a fine gift for any adolescent (especially young misfits), but it deserves a wider audience...
A love letter to New Mexico
Dear New Mexico,
No one writes letters anymore. No one ever writes to states. They should. I’m writing to you because I’ve just driven through your land, beneath your open sky, for ten days. Now that I’m back in Colorado, my belly is too empty. I miss you.
I miss you, and I’ve never taken the time to tell you how I love you.
The first time I met you, in 1998, I was twenty. I’d traveled all the way to Las Cruces because I’d fallen in love with a boy who was from there. He said he wanted to show me the desert...
A Story of Three Women
This is a story of three young women in Juárez, Mexico. These three stories are intertwined by virtue of the asylum and the leadership of its founder, Pastor josé Antonio Galván, who has created a family atmosphere where not only the patients but the members of the larger “family” provide an enormous amount of support for each other...
Television and the Ghost of Washington Irving
I was born at Sleepy Hollow, in New York, a village that Washington Irving described as, “one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee…there lies...one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose.”...
Fracking Fights Loom Large in Mexico
Mexico is emerging as the next big battleground in conflicts over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as the method of extracting natural gas is commonly known.
While Mexican lawmakers consider regulatory legislation to put into practice the 2013 energy reform that opened up their county’s oil and gas reserves to private investors, anti-fracking forces are mobilizing for a moratorium or an outright ban of the controversial practice from the Mexican Congress...
The Journal, Guatemalans and American Exceptionalism
Atop their dusty perch, the Albuquerque Journal’s editorial board adjusted their monocles last week, put on their flag attire, and took a stab at defining patriotism. The piece was entitled, “Why celebrate the Fourth? Try asking a Guatemalan.” While the piece neither quoted, referenced, or made any attempt to include the voice of an actual Guatemalan, it did spew forth a surreal, Bush-esque view of American Exceptionalism that equates to ‘Shut up and wave the flag'...
The guilty children
Let me start by telling you that my children are guilty. Guilty of being born to middle class, not wealthy, parents, guilty of having special needs, guilty of being the kind of poor test takers who falsely convict their teachers of being bad at their jobs. Most of all they are guilty of being children living in New Mexico...
Leaving the world to find it
For a vast, remote and harsh expanse of southwestern desert, the Kaiparowits Plateau has seen a lot of life, from prehistoric Indians to migrating Mormons to adventurers that, during the Memorial Day weekend, included my son and I. Just as this seemingly inhospitable area helped save earlier travelers, so it redeemed our own trip that otherwise could have gone off the tracks. Sometimes, it would seem, you have to leave the world behind in order to find it...
The outrage over Kendall Jones – What’s really going on here?
Via social media (Facebook) and one of our more sensationalist online dailies, we recently learned the story of Kendall Jones, a Texas Tech cheerleader whose penchant for hunting and killing exotic animals for sport has outraged many of those she hoped to impress. The Huffington Post article, headlined “Meet Kendall Jones, The Texan Cheerleader Whose Exotic Animal Hunts Outraged the Internet,” appeared on July 1, 2014. Jones’ Facebook post was probably uploaded around the same time. It is no longer available. Either FB or Jones’ herself removed it from public scrutiny.
This narrative raised a range of issues for me, some of them uncomfortably contradictory...
Dodgy Art Bar Finally Shuttered
All of us who are educated to Susana New Mexico standards and who have proudly displayed our third grade reading proficiency certificates know that art is exceptionally dangerous. We should avoid ahtsy fahtsie and those who create it as much as is humanly possible. That means on seeing a known artist, one should smile politely, lower one’s head, and without dispatch, cross to the other side of the street.
Think, if you will then, how really menacing and perilous art is when mixed with demon rum...