Choosing Santa Fe

Leaving Santa Fe

2011-07-17T16:54:00.001-04:00

Last month I left Santa Fe and moved to Providence, Rhode Island. I'd spent almost five years in Santa Fe and loved a lot about the city--there were other things I liked less. I loved the mountains and the sunsets and my friends in Santa Fe; the state government, the lack of customer service attitude, the problems with the educational system, the drought and thunderstorms--not so much.

A variety of reasons coalesced to persuade me to move back East--among them the fact that I turn out to be a city gal at heart. I didn't think I missed the green and the ocean until I got back here and realized how much. And there's an East Coast attitude that it's hard to define but, as Justice Potter Stewart famously said about pornography in 1964, "I know it when I see it." In addition, I'm working on a book about Boston in 1905--you can read about my observations on that year in my Boston 1905 blog. You can find the link on the upper right of this page, along with a link to my new Providence blog.

Thanks for being my readers!!!

A Plethora of Chile

2011-01-24T17:43:00.000-05:00

If you go into a grocery store in some other part of the country, you'll see a few linear feet of shelf space in the "ethnic foods" aisle dedicated to Hispanic foods. A few kinds of chiles, salsa, taco shells, etc. In the big chain groceries in Santa Fe, there is typically an entire aisle dedicated to Hispanic foods. Of course, this ends up taking the space of other products--so there is usually a much smaller selection of canned mushrooms, chutney, water chestnuts, etc.

The Hispanic food aisle in the Santa Fe Albertson's makes me feel like Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson, where the Russian immigrant he plays faints in the coffee aisle--overcome by the sight and smell of so many different kinds of coffee. No fainting here--but an overwhelming set of choices!!

New Mexico History Museum

2010-11-07T11:04:00.002-05:00

I toured the new New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe this week--what a terrific museum! Lots of interesting exhibits, clear and easy to follow history, and an established route through the museum that means you can pay attention to the displays instead of wondering where to go next. I had seen a lot of the material when it was in the smaller exhibit space in the Palace of the Governors, but there is so much more to see in the new space. It uses a lot of new thinking in museum design--audio and video displays, tactile exhibits, and comparative timelines.

There were many things I liked in this museum but the exhibit I wanted to share with you today is a sterling silver cigar humidor that's a model of the Taos Pueblo. It was manufactured in 1917 by Tiffany--part of a 56-piece set made for the ward room of the battleship USS New Mexico. It's just so beautiful!

The photo below, from 1919, shows the table and sideboard in the USS New Mexico ward room set with silver pieces from the collection.

And here is the ship itself, at the Panama Canal in 1919.

Illustration Credits and References

The wardroom photo was published in 1919 by A.M. Simon, 324 E. 23rd St., New York City, as one of ten photographs in a "Souvenir Folder" of views concerning New Mexico. U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph # NH 105048. Donation of Edwin C. Finney, Jr., 2007, from the collection of J. Louise Finney.

The photo of the battleship USS New Mexico, Official U.S. Navy Photograph, USNHC # NH 75719, now in the collections of the National Archives.

The Harvey Girls

2010-10-31T19:22:00.008-04:00

I just finished reading The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West by Lesley Poling-Kempes. It shed light for me on a whole aspect of Southwestern history that I didn't know very much about, and I thought some of the key points were worth mentioning here.

After the Civil War, the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe laid railroad tracks from Kansas to Colorado (1872), through Raton Pass to New Mexico (1878), into Lamy (the nearest stop to Santa Fe, 1880), and finally to California (1887).

As the trains began carrying passengers, the railroad built depots every 100 miles or so. There were no dining facilities on the trains and meals from home only lasted so long! Fred Harvey, a Londoner who had emigrated to the US at the age of 15, was a former café owner and a veteran clerk and agent for the railway, and was in the right place at the right time to start a train-oriented food business. The railroad he worked for (Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy) did not think much of his idea of restaurants at the various rail stops heading west, and they told him to go to the Atchison, Topeka, & SF because they "would try anything".

It's the same old story of start-ups being hungrier and more creative than the old, established, and more complacent businesses, and saying "yes" to Harvey turned out to be a brilliant marketing move on the part of the new railroad. Under their agreement, the RR provided depot space, coal, ice, water, and transportation, and Harvey provided food and staff. Harvey opened his first restaurant in Topeka in 1876, and his businesses spread southwest and west in parallel with the expansion of the railroad.

Harvey had exacting standards for his restaurants (and later the hotels that accompanied them). They provided elegant menus, an unparalleled choice of foods from all over the continent (brought in daily by train), white tablecloths and napkins, and split-second timing. (Telegrams would notify a restaurant of the precise time of the next train arrival, and of certain choices on the part of the passenger-diners.) Everybody had to be in and out--perfectly served and catered to--in 30 minutes. The restaurants gave the AT & SF a unique competitive advantage.

In the beginning, Harvey used male waiters in the restaurants. But in 1883 he fired all the waiters at his Raton, NM Harvey House because of poor service the day after a midnight brawl. It was suggested to Harvey that women might do a better job because they were less likely "to get likkered up and go on tears." The new waitresses were so popular that Harvey decided to replace all of the waiters in his establishments with waitresses, and he advertised in midwestern and eastern newspapers for "young women 18 to 30 years of age, of good character, attractive and intelligent" to go west to work.

Over 100,000 women served as Harvey Girls from 1883 until the 1960s. For many of these small-town girls and farmers' daughters, the Harvey establishments provided the college education they could not afford--a chance to travel, meet people they would never have had a chance to meet, broaden their horizons, live in a dorm with other young women, and find a husband in the male-dominated west. While many young women worked for a year or two and then returned home, many others moved from community to community over the years--sampling life in many different parts of the country. Thousands of Harvey Girls met and married Santa Fe railmen, cowboys, ranchers, and the occasional other Harvey employee (in spite of restrictions against dating within the business). They and their husbands became the founding mothers and fathers of many towns in the Southwest. (Will Rogers said of Fred Harvey and the Harvey Girls that they had "kept the West supplied with food and wives.")

The Harvey Girls had to adhere to a tough schedule and many rules governing their dress and behavior. They wore black uniforms and freshly starched white aprons and were thoroughly trained in service standards before being let loose on the floor. They were paid competitive wages, and since they were provided with room and board most were able to save or send home a substantial amount of money.

In many parts of the country, waitresses were considered to be barely a step above prostitutes, and Harvey's strictness helped to preserve the girls' reputations. However, they were more socially accepted in some communities than in others.

Harvey Girls had many opportunities that were unique for women at the time. The company instituted an early form of job sharing--where farmgirls were allowed to go home in the summer to help with the harvest, and Eastern schoolteachers worked in their place on their summer vacations. Girls in communities with colleges (such as Albuquerque and Las Vegas, NM) could wrap part-time work schedules and part-time college classes together.

In its heyday (roughly 1910-1940), the Fred Harvey Company operated a dozen or so hotels, 50-60 dining rooms and lunchrooms, and 60-100 dining cars on trains.

New Mexico was a particularly successful area for the Harvey Company. There were 16 Harvey Houses in New Mexico at the peak of the business--including some of the grandest in the country. These included the Montezuma and the Castañeda in Las Vegas, La Fonda in Santa Fe, the Alvarado in Albuquerque, and El Navajo in Gallup. (NOTE: The Alvarado and the El Navajo were eventually torn down. The Montezuma is now United World College, the Castañeda is privately owned, and the La Fonda has continued to operate as a very successful hotel and restaurant. In fact, my book club, which selected and discussed this book in October, met at the La Fonda for dinner and our discussion--to put ourselves in the right Harvey Girl mood!)

In many towns, the Harvey House became the center of local social life. It was usually the best and most elegant restaurant in town, and movie stars, presidents, and other luminaries were often spotted there on their way across the country by train.

The Harvey Company was run by Fred Harvey until his death in 1901, and after that by his son and grandsons.

Eventually, the Harvey Company fell victim to changing times, particularly the growth of auto and air travel. During the second world war, the company devoted a huge portion of its business to providing meals to troop trains as they traveled across the country, but the pressures of serving thousands of servicemen caused service levels to deterioriate and local community customers to receive short shrift. Many food were no longer available due to rationing, and there was no time to adequately train the increased staff needed.

Beginning in the 1930s, the Harvey Company had also expanded into large US train stations (Chicago and San Diego), bus terminals (San Francisco), and airports (Albuquerque). From about 1959 to about 1975, Harvey operated a series of restaurants along the Illinois Tollway.

The original Fred Harvey Company lasted until 1968 when it was purchased by the Amfac Corporation of Hawaii. Amfac was renamed Xanterra Parks & Resorts in 2002. In 2006, Xanterra purchased the Grand Canyon Railway and its properties, including the Grand Canyon Hotel. So now the reincarnation of the Harvey Company is operating a railroad!

Illustration Credits and References

The sketch of the Harvey Girls near the top of this post was found at the hubpages.com website.

The next photograph was taken at the El Ortiz Harvey Hotel in Lamy, NM around 1912. It was found on the New Mexico History Museum website.

The following photograph was taken in 2004 at the grand reopening of the Santa Fe Depot in San Bernardino, California, where a group of original Harvey Girls made a costumed appearance. It was found on the San Bernardino Railroad Historical Society website.

The final illustration is a touching 2005 painting by Tina Mion, entitled The Last Harvey Girl. On her website, the painter comments: "Only a handful of Harvey Girls remain. Most live in the desert towns they once escaped to. One day soon, someone will be handed a cup of tea or coffee by the last Harvey Girl, and in an anonymous kitchen or living room an era will silently pass."

Puye Cliffs

2010-09-27T19:04:00.021-04:00

Earlier this summer I toured the Puye Cliff Dwellings which are located near Los Alamos, about 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe. Puye Cliffs was the ancestral home of the people of Santa Clara Pueblo from the 900s until about 1580, when they moved to the Rio Grande Valley. According to pueblo legend, a black bear wandered through the village, harming no one, and led the people 10 miles away. Historians say the move to the river was occasioned by drought.

This site, now a National Historic Landmark, was closed from 2000-2009 due to flooding and erosion resulting from the Cerro Grande fire, which caused major damage to the Los Alamos area. It has only recently reopened to the public, and it was exciting to finally have an opportunity to visit this beautiful site.

We had a terrific tour by a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo who guided us up pathways and ladders from the bottom to the top of the mesa.

The cliff dwellings are on two levels with the bottom row about a mile long and the top level about 2,100 feet in length. Cliff marking are still visible like the one in the photo above. Many of these markings were the equivalent of directional signs.

Paths and stairways connected the two levels and allowed residents to get to the top of the mesa where additional dwellings were located. The mesa dwellings were in the form of a multi-story complex built around a central plaza, though only crumbling walls (like those shown to the left) remain.

An interesting feature of the site is one of the original Harvey Houses. These were a chain of restaurants/hotels that serviced train (and later auto) travelers to the Southwest. There were more than a dozen Harvey Houses in New Mexico, though this one at Puye was the only one built on an Indian reservation. The mother of a friend of mine recalls dining in the Harvey House in Santa Fe when they took the train from California to Maine in 1931.

Gunfighting in New Mexico

2010-07-14T11:35:00.007-04:00

I'm currently reading a book about Victorian America (part of my 1905 research) and came across some interesting statistics about gunfights. From 1870-1874, New Mexico had the third largest number of gunfights in the U.S. (states and territories), behind Kansas and Texas. In the next five years, New Mexico was second only to Texas--with 23 gunfights in New Mexico in 1878 alone. In 1880-1884, New Mexico earned the dubious distinction of being #1 in the gunfighting derby.

The 1878-1881 period in NM was known for the Lincoln County War in 1878, and the Dodge City Gang which terrorized Las Vegas from 1879-1880. Several gunfighters from the gang headed out of town to Tombstone, Arizona after a vigilante party of townspeople was formed, though some returned to NM in the next few years. Billy the Kid, present for the Lincoln County War, was killed in Fort Sumner, NM by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881.

The number of gunfights in the US forms a neat bell curve--starting with 13 in the period from 1854-1859, peaking at 106 in 1875-1879, and dropping off to 9 by 1910-1914.

In 1908, for example, there were only four gunfights in the US--though two were in New Mexico. One of the remaining two was the fight between Bolivian soldiers and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (This was counted as a US gunfight since two of the protagonists were Americans.)

Still, I guess it's all in what you count as a gunfight. An 18-year-old boy was shot to death by a 16-year-old in the parking lot of the Santa Fe Place mall this week--a fight over a girl apparently. So it's not quite over yet.

Illustration Credits and References

Statistsics on gunfighting appeared in Almanacs of American Life: Victorian America 1876-1913 by Crandall Shifflett (1996); the author credits Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters by Bill O'Neal (1979) for this data.

Other information from the Legends of America website.

Photograph of Billy the Kid's death marker courtesy of chucksville.org

The White Sisters' Legacy

2010-06-06T19:28:00.012-04:00

In April I was able to tour the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, a truly fabulous piece of property which houses this unique institution.

SAR got its start in the early years of the 20th century as the School for Archaeological Research, and it was headed by anthropologist Edgar Lee Hewitt from 1907 until his death in 1946. (He simultaneously headed the Museum of New Mexico after it was established in 1909.) SAR's mission was to train students, conduct anthropological research on the American continent, and preserve and study Southwestern culture.

Meanwhile, wealthy NY socialite sisters Martha Root White and Amelia Elizabeth White discovered Santa Fe in 1923. Both had graduated from Bryn Mawr, and served as Army nursing assistants during World War I. They found Santa Fe on a cross-country trip, and bought a large property here in the city. They built a home which they called El Delirio ("the madness"), and over the years the compound grew to include a kennel, guest houses, a swimming pool, and a variety of other structures.

El Delirio became a gathering place for artists, writers, and intellectuals, and the White sisters are said to have thrown some stunning parties in the 20s and 30s. Their home was the setting for lavish dinners, concerts, poetry readings, pool parties, plays, and masquerade balls.

Five women, including poet Alice Corbin Henderson, second from left, display their costumes at the swimming pool dedication ca. 1926.

The sisters also bred and raised Irish wolfhounds, and a cemetery for their beloved dogs can be seen on the grounds today.

Elizabeth helped to establish the Old Santa Fe Association, the Laboratory of Anthropology, the Wheelwright Museum, the Garcia Street Club, and the Santa Fe Animal Shelter--and all these organizations are still active.

The sisters were patrons and promoters of Native American Art and they opened the first Native American art gallery in New York City. Elizabeth was a founding member of the Indian Arts Fund in 1925, an organization which focused on buying up Indian pottery and other handcrafts to preserve these artifacts for future generations. She also served on the SAR managing board for 25 years.

Martha died in 1937, but Elizabeth lived to be 96 years old. And when she died, in 1972, she left El Delirio and its remaining acres to the School for Advanced Research, giving that institution its first permanent home. That same year, the Indian Arts Fund also disbanded and deeded its collections to SAR.

The Resident Scholars' communal dining room--all set for delicious food and stimulating conversation.

Today, SAR runs an advanced seminar series and a resident scholar program. The latter has provided over 160 pre- and postdoctoral scholars with nine-month residencies in which to read, reflect, and write up research results. A key part of the program is the unique intellectual interaction which takes place among scholars from different but related disciplines. Native artists have the opportunity to do residencies on site while they work on their art. SAR also houses the IAF collections and a state-of-the-art archaeological repository, and the SAR Press produces books on archaeology, anthropology, and Southwestern art and culture.

The mausoleum for the White sisters.

The grounds are beautiful, and a tour provides a look at SAR as it currently exists, and historical views of both SAR and the life of the White sisters.

The cemetery for the White sisters' Irish wolfhounds--each dog is identified by name.

Illustration Credits and References

Photo of the White sisters' party at El Delirio courtesy of the SAR website (sarweb.org). All other photographs by the author.

Santa Fe Municipal Airport

2010-04-07T10:08:00.008-04:00

When I first moved to Santa Fe, a couple of commercial flights were available from Santa Fe to Denver, but those were eventually discontinued. In June 2009, American Eagle instituted three flights a day--one to Los Angeles and two to Dallas. When a third flight to/from Dallas was added in February of this year, it became possible for eastbound passengers to make connections to and from Dallas, and I decided to give it a try.

The Santa Fe Municipal Airport is a charming step back in time. It was designed by noted Santa Fe architect John Gaw Meem, and constructed in 1957, in the southwest corner of the city. Its interior is full of southwestern accents.

It has one counter, one security line, one restaurant (The Airport Grille), one waiting room, and one gate. Parking involves writing a check for $3 a day for the duration of your trip and sticking it in an envelope in a box inside the terminal. "The Eagle has landed" heralds the arrival of the plane, and the gate agent greets arriving customers with a cheerful "Welcome to Santa Fe!"

Unfortunately, my travel experience was less than optimal due to weather-related interruptions at both ends (which caused me to miss my connection in Dallas and rerouted our return flight to Albuquerque due to wind, snow, and ice at the SF airport). But I am giving it another chance in May. It's so convenient--a 15 minute drive and no shuttle buses to the terminal required!

Photo Credits

The photograph of the terminal interior comes from the Veritas et Venustas blog by architect, urbanist, and author John Massengale. All other photos by Catherine Hurst.

Santa Fe School of Cooking

2010-03-08T16:59:00.008-05:00

I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to attend a "bonus" class at the Santa Fe School of Cooking. The School is a 20-year fixture in Santa Fe, and its bonus classes, aimed at the locals, are test classes where the School and its chefs have an opportunity to try out new themes and ideas, and practice for the more formal (and more expensive!) classes come tourist season.

This was the third such class I've attended in the last couple of years--the first was a southwestern-themed brunch, and the second was a class featuring foods appropriate (by theme and portability) for tailgating at upcoming summer operas.

Our recent class featured four different kinds of chiles rellenos (stuffed chiles): cream cheese stuffed jalapeños in escabeche, New Mexican tempura rellenos, ancho chile rellenos, and chiles en nogada.

The last was my favorite. It featured a stuffing that included ground pork, garlic and onion, tomato puree, apples, peaches, plantains, dried apricots, raisins, and almonds. And as if that weren't enough, it was accompanied by a sauce made from pecans, almonds, queso fresco (or feta cheese), half and half, and sherry. The chiles were stuffed, lightly battered, fried, dipped in sauce, and topped with pomegranate seeds. Scrumptious!

Our chef for the day was Danny Cohen, ably assisted by Noe Cano.

And "class" is really not the right word for this experience--it's really a demonstration. The chef (who also teaches culinary classes at Santa Fe Community College) kept up an engaging patter while he cooked, and we could all see what he was doing in the reflection of the overhead mirror.

We students drank coffee and wine, took notes, and ate--a very easy assigment!

I even learned a couple of new cooking facts/tips. For example, fresh jalapeños become chipotles when dried, and poblanos become anchos. And Chef Danny prefers the use of grapeseed oil for cooking (as opposed to canola oil), with olive oil only used to finish.

They do also offer hands-on classes, restaurant walks featuring private chef meetings and tastings in some of the best restaurants in Santa Fe, an onsite market for Southwestern foods and cooking tools, and one or two day team building seminars centered around the experience of cooking and eating together.

I highly recommend the Santa Fe School of Cooking, in spite of the steep price-tag ($70 and up for most classes). Visit in February and enjoy a "bonus" class!

Photo Credits

All photos in this post were taken by my friend and fellow student Linda McIlroy.

In Praise of the Sidecar, Part 2

2010-02-01T20:06:00.009-05:00

Almost exactly two years ago in this blog, I wrote a paean to my favorite cocktail, the sidecar. I promised I would get to history (the sidecar's and mine) eventually. . . . In January I had a wonderful elderflower sidecar at McCormick & Schmick's in Boston which prompted me to get back to the rest of the story.

Generally accepted bartending lore assigns the origin of the drink to a time period near the end of World War I. The place was either London or Paris, and the inventor was an American Army captain who was driven to and from his local watering hole in the sidecar of a motorcycle. The drink was first mentioned in a bartender's guide in 1922, and 1934 was the first recorded recipe with a sugared rim (my preferred presentation).

Elizabeth Bowen, in The Death of the Heart (published in 1938), offers the cocktail to one of her characters:

Indoors, among the mirrors and pillars, they found Mr. Bursely and Daphne, cozy over a drink. Reproaches and rather snooty laughs were exchanged, then Mr. Bursely, summoning the waiter, did what was right by everyone. Clara and Portia were given orangeade, with hygienic straws twisted up in paper; Daphne had another bronx, Evelyn a side-car. The men drank whisky. . .

The cocktail was popular through the sixties, but faded in the seventies and eighties. Karen Kijewski, in her mystery novel Katwalk, published in 1989, laments their demise:

"Hey, Kat." I turned. "What's in a sidecar?"
"Huh? Oh. Brandy, Triple Sec, sweet and sour and lime--with a sugar rim and a cherry. Nobody drinks them anymore."
He grinned and waved and I waved back, at him and at the memories.

But by the 90s, cocktails in general were coming back in style; an article in the Boston Globe in 1994 describes the scene at a local lounge:

At the bar, the young couple put down their drinks--he with a cubana (sugar syrup, lime juice, aproct brandy, rum), she with a sidecar (Cointreau, lemon juice, brandy)--and step out on the floor to tango.

Another Globe article, six years later, is titled: "Sidecar cocktail rides again." A 2004 Boston Herald headline boasts that the "Sidecar takes back seat to no other cocktail."

And the cocktail was sufficiently mainstream to appear in a NY Times crossword in 2007.

I have been faithful to the sidecar since 1966, and in a future post I'll talk a bit about my history with the drink.

In the meantime, you can watch this video of Rachel Maddow shaking up a sidecar in a New York bar.

Gruene, Texas

2009-12-19T17:22:00.007-05:00

"Gently resisting change since 1872."

That's the tagline for the village of Gruene, Texas. Located midway between Austin and San Antonio, it features a whole community of 19th century residences and businesses, which owe their survival to the Depression.

But before that, Henry Gruene built a home for himself and one for his foreman, a cotton gin, a "mercantile", and a dance hall/saloon. Business thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but after a major boll weevil attack and the sorrows of the Depression, the town was largely abandoned. As a result, 1970s restoration efforts had a treasure trove of original architecture to work with, and today the town evokes its origins in several streets of quaint shops, antique stores, and the original dance hall--Gruene Hall. (Unlike the rest of town, the dance hall/saloon never closed!)

On a recent trip to San Antonio, we detoured to Gruene to listen to Santa Fe musician Bill Hearne in the dance hall, meet an Austin friend for lunch, and tour the town. One of the things I really enjoyed was the wordplay in the naming of the shops, restaurants, etc. Though the original German name would have been pronounced "Groon'eh", the locals pronounce it "Green"--and that's how you have to read the signs in this post.

Institute of American Indian Arts

2009-12-16T18:26:00.016-05:00

Last week I had the opportunity to tour the campus of the Institute of American Indian Arts--a four-year tribal college in Santa Fe. IAIA is the only U.S. arts college dedicated to the traditions and culture of the American Indian, and is set on a stunning 140 acres just outside of the city limits. On the day we visited, the layers of mountains circling the campus were snow-covered and the sky was bright blue, creating a wonderful canvas.

The IAIA was founded in 1962, and was first located on the grounds of the Santa Fe Indian School. The Institute includes both the college, and the IAIA museum in downtown Santa Fe.

About 375 students are currently enrolled at the college and they represent roughly 100 different tribes from the mainland U.S. and Alaska.

Over the nearly 50 years of its existence, the IAIA has been home to students from about 90% of the recognized native American tribes. And about 15% of its students are non-natives who've come to IAIA to study native art traditions.

The IAIA's location is ideal for furthering its mission--in Santa Fe, which is the second largest art market in the U.S., and near the 19 native pueblos of New Mexico. In addition, the size and setting of the campus allowed it to be constructed in a way that references and respects native traditions (directions, solstices, etc.), and it is home to native plants and wildlife. On-campus housing includes residences for traditional-age students, as well as family housing units for older students. A new daycare center is expected to open soon.

All facilities are full of native art, and our tour included views of studios and galleries, and art that included painting, metalwork, jewelry, glass, beading, and leatherwork.

This painting by an IAIA student, a Native American version of the Last Supper, was hanging in the Administration building.

This spinning wheel in the IAIA library is by Apache artist Bob Haozous, son of Allan Houser (whom I've written about in an earlier blog).

One of the highlights of our trip was the welcome our group received in the student learning support center, where we were treated to a snack of hot blue corn meal (in a form somewhere between oatmeal and hot drink); a note on the blackboard in the student lounge area indicated that it was a "blue corn morning". Thus warmed and fortified, we were able to venture back out into the cold to complete our tour of this impressive facility.

Honoring the Navajo Code Talkers on Veterans Day

2009-11-11T09:52:00.011-05:00

Navajo Code Talker Lemuel Yazzie. AP Photo/Seth Wenig.

Today, 13 of the famed Navajo Code Talkers from World War II will participate for the first time in the New York City Veterans Day parade.

This Marine unit used Navajo language-encrypted military terms in a code that was never broken by the Japanese. One of the things that made it so hard to break was that different words could be used for exactly the same message. The Navajo were sworn to secrecy about the code, and kept their secret long after the code was declassified in 1968.

There were about 400 Code Talkers in all; it is believed that about 50 are still alive--most living in the Navajo Nation, which is located in northwestern New Mexico, northeastern Arizona, and southeastern Utah. (Navajoland, or Diné Bikéyah, covers 27,000 square miles, which makes it larger than many U.S. states.)

Recognition for these brave Marines was slow to come. In 2000, the Congressional Gold Medal was bestowed on the survivors of the original 29 Code Talkers, and silver medals on the rest. The Navajo Code Talkers Foundation is creating a museum in their honor which is expected to open in New Mexico, near the Navajo capital of Window Rock, Arizona in 2012.

Navajo Code Talkers (from left) Lloyd Oliver, Bahe Ketchum, and Joe Vandever. AP Photo/Seth Wenig.

New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman has devoted part of his website to information about the Code Talkers; click here for more information.

Sun, Clouds, Mist, and Aspens

2009-10-10T18:32:00.009-04:00

On October 8 we did our annual hike of the Aspen Vista Trail. In contrast to the blazing sun of the past two years, this was a cooler and less sunny walk, but beautiful still the same.

We lucked into a wonderful window of reasonably bright weather combined with threatening skies--which made for some great shadows and colors.

I would say that we were a few days past peak--good color on the lower and more protected slopes (at about 10,000 feet) but lots of lost leaves as we climbed higher.

Moments before we left (the temperature had already dropped about five degrees) a heavy, cold mist blew in. The time between the first and last of the following photographs was no more than four minutes--in the first you can see the entire valley from the parking area; by the third. the valley has been totally obliterated.

Time to hop in the car and go home! The mountain was covered in clouds the rest of the day, but the next morning we could see that the peak was clearly snow-covered.

Click the links to read about our 2008 and 2007 walks, with lots more detail on the Aspen Vista Trail!

Real Silver Linings!

2009-10-01T13:51:00.004-04:00

I never was as interested in clouds before I moved to Santa Fe! Sunset clouds, storm clouds, morning, afternoon, and evening--there's always something to look at when the sky isn't the pristine blue Santa Fe is famous for.

Here are some clouds from last night with a cold front moving in--real silver linings!

400th Anniversary Celebration Begins

2009-09-26T10:33:00.010-04:00

On Labor Day weekend, Santa Fe officially kicked off its 400th birthday celebration with Viva! Santa Fe, a weekend of concerts and festivities.

Historians and organizers have placed the origin of the city somewhere between 1607-1610, depending on who's looking and where.

1607 - Juan Martínez de Montoya testified before Acting Governor Cristobal Oñate that he had established the plaza of La Villa de Santa Fe.

1609 - Spanish Viceroy Luis de Velasco signed an order to make Santa Fe the capital of New Mexico on March 30. He also named Pedro de Peralta as Governor.

1610 - The new Governor arrived in Santa Fe to assume his office, and to let the residents know of their new status.

Santa Fe thus lays claim to being the oldest capital city in the U.S.--and it's been a capital under three governments (Spain, Mexico, and the U.S.).

Unfortunately, the weather was rainy off and on all weekend, but all events took place. At the Saturday night concert I attended it rained primarily before the performances began--and the dancers, singers, and musicians were all on a covered stage. Still, a lovely small-town evening! Photographs of performers throughout this post include Black Eagle (Grammy-winning Jemez Pueblo drummers and dancers), Blackfire (Navajo band), singer Lila Downs (whom I actually first saw perform in Massachusetts, at the Somerville Theatre), and the 13 women of the El Paso mariachi group Mariachi Femenil Flores Mexicanas.

Other performances (no photos) were by Ozomatli and "The King of New Mexico Music" Tobias Rene.

Roses and Apples

2009-09-22T12:43:00.006-04:00

In my garden this morning: blue skies and healing sunshine.

New License Plate for New Mexico

2009-08-14T19:11:00.010-04:00

To celebrate the upcoming statehood centennial in 2012, New Mexico is introducing a new license plate design in January. According to the state's website, the Centennial plate features "a 'retro' design--a classic look, using red and yellow colors from the state flag and the Zia; and a bold turquoise background, reflecting the state gem."

The plate replaces the so-called "balloon plate", which has been around for the past 10 years.

The question the Governor has for you is the following. Should this be the only standard (i.e. no extra charge) plate available to New Mexicans, or should they continue to be able to choose the other current standard plate, cleverly known as "the yellow plate"?

If you'd like to vote, click here to go the state's license plate survey website.

Those who are willing to spend an extra $25 can forego the above choice(s) and instead acquire the new Santa Fe 400th anniversary license plate, which will be available after Labor Day. The extra $25 will go to offset the costs of the 400th anniversary celebration.

Otowi - Pueblo Canyon

2009-08-06T18:53:00.010-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I joined Friends of Archaeology once again for a trip to Otowi in Pueblo Canyon.

Our trip was led by Office of Archaeological Studies (OAS) archaeologist Steve Lakatos, accompanied by OAS archaeologist Chuck Hannaford, ceramicist Dean Wilson, archaeobotanist Pam McBride, and San Ildefonso Pueblo representatives Bryan and Clarice Montoya.

Otowi or Potsuwi'i (gap where the water sinks) is an ancestral Tewa village, located along the north side of Pueblo Canyon. While many folks pass by this area on the way to Los Alamos, it has not been easy to visit. It was previously part of the lands appropriated by the Federal government for the Los Alamos National Laboratories, and then it was transferred to Los Alamos County. San Ildefonso expects the area to be restored to tribal governance later this year, and then it will most likely be closed to the public.

So it was very exciting to have this chance to tour the site! It was, however, a very hot day, and we probably walked at least four miles. FOA is very good about making sure everyone carried enough water--2.5 litres (which is heavy!) Our lunches were made (including fresh-baked sandwich bread) by the Totavi Café and were excellent. (At least we didn't have to carry those!)

For a general history of the area, check out my recent Tsankawi post. (Otowi is only about two miles away from Tsankawi.)

The various ancestral sites within the canyon now consist primarily of semi-cleared areas, mounded dirt areas, and rocks that were used in construction. When these residences were built (some as early as the 13th century) they were likely not intended for permanent use, and once they were no longer lived in, they "melted" back into the ground pretty quickly. The Pajarito Plateau was abandoned by the Tewa as a residential area by 1550; most went to settle along the Rio Grande where they still live today. However, the area still continued to be used for hunting and worship.

The first photo above shows a pile of volcanic rock that was used in construction; the second shows the rocks that were positioned for the corner of a dwelling--still in place. There is evidence on the site of hundreds of rooms, and 10 circular kivas.

Although we did not explore the "cavates" at Otowi (as we did at Tsankawi), we got a good view of them from the canyon (see the photo above). And we saw the place where the water sinks--a running stream disappears underground (on the way to lunch, and too hot and tired to backtrack for a photo!).

Grapes!

2009-08-01T13:17:00.004-04:00

This year for the first time I have grapes growing in my garden. My apple tree is also laden with beautiful fruit--hope the insects don't get them first! No peaches this year--a late frost killed my blossoms.

Somehow, with my limited knowledge of botany, it doesn't seem climatologically right that peaches, apples, and grapes would all coexist in my yard here in Santa Fe. (Take that Georgia, Washington, and Italy!)

Under the Rainbow

2009-07-28T15:42:00.005-04:00

More than half the time when it rains in Santa Fe, the sun doesn't stop shining right away, or it comes out immediately after (or during!) the rain, and we get the most incredible rainbows. I took these photos from my driveway a few days ago--it's all the same rainbow but I just wasn't far enough away to capture the whole thing.

See how dark the sky is--and at the same time how much sunlight is shining on my next door neighbor's house!

The Valles Caldera

2009-07-21T13:45:00.016-04:00

Last week I traveled to the Valles Caldera (which literally means "cooking pot valleys") with a Southwest Seminars group in conjunction with the Santa Fe Newcomers' Club.

Geologist Dr. Kirt Kempter (who has studied plate tectonics and volcanism around the world) was our guide for the day.

About 1.25 million years ago, a volcanic eruption occurred in the Jemez Mountains. After the first phase, which spewed magma maybe 10-12 miles up into the stratosphere, crystals and ash (known as tephra) rained (or more descriptively, snowed) down on the area.

After a few hours, waves of so-called pyroclastic flows (very hot and very fast--600-700 degrees in temperature, and moving at 100-200 mph) spread across the region, filling valleys, and forming plateaus such as the Pajarito Plateau (which was the subject of a recent post). The photo above shows a small part of the Plateau, which we passed on our way up to the Valles Caldera.

Finally, after the magma was depleted, the earth's crust around the vents began to collapse. The east side of what is now known as the Valles Caldera collapsed nearly a mile--the west side only about a quarter of a mile.

The area has had an interesting history. Pueblo Indians (from nine different pueblos along the Rio Grande) hunted, farmed, and collected tool-making rocks in the Caldera (such as the obsidian outcropping shown in the photo above which was used to make arrowheads) before the Spanish came. When the Spanish brought sheep, horses, and cattle, the lush summer grasslands provided ideal grazing.

In 1860, 12 years after the US took over the area, a land-grant settlement was reached by awarding a grant of 100,000 acres (almost the entire Valles Caldera) to the heirs of Cabeza de Vaca (see my previous post on the Cabeza de Vacas). Four private owners held the land until 2000 when the US government purchased it and established the Valles Caldera National Preserve.

Today, the Caldera is home to the second largest elkherd in the state (numbering about 3,000), and its beautiful meadows and slopes are also home to deer, golden eagles, mountain lions, bobcats, bears, 60 species of birds, and wild turkeys. Lottery-based fishing permits are available, and each fisherman gets about a mile of stream to him/herself for the day to fish for the native trout.

In the winter, it is a fabulous location for cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and sleigh rides when the weather cooperates!

The Preserve also hosts a number of special events including mountain bike rides, overnight birding events, fly fishing clinics, elk hunts, and night sky adventures. The number of visitors to the Preserve is controlled--so you really get a chance to experience nature and not crowds.

Illustration Credits and References

Thanks to my friend Gloria Gordon for the wildlife photo.

This post was informed by Valles Caldera: Map and Geologic History of the Southwest's Youngest Caldera, a High Desert Field Guide authored by Kirt Kempter and Dick Huelster, and by the website and brochures of the Valles Caldera National Preserve.

OKeeffe and Fisk, Resolution?

2009-07-19T17:12:00.006-04:00

Photo courtesy of Fisk University

The wheels of justice may grind slowly, but this week they spit out a verdict that seems right to me.

Nearly a year and a half ago, I wrote a post on the latest saga of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum vs. Fisk University. If you want a refresher, or need to start at the beginning (!), click here to read my first post in this series, from November, 2007.

Basically, the struggling Fisk wanted to sell two pieces from the Stieglitz collection that O'Keeffe donated to the university in 1949. The historically black college was in danger of shutting down, could no longer afford the upkeep on their art museum (and therefore could no longer safely display the works), and wanted to sell only two of its 101-piece Stieglitz collection. The two pieces to be sold were O'Keeffe's Radiator Building and another painting by Marsden Hartley. The O'Keeffe had been valued at more than $20 million.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe argued that Fisk was violating the terms of the bequest, and asked that the entire collection be turned over to the Museum (with, as far as I can tell, no money changing hands).

But on July 14, the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled that the O'Keeffe had no right to the work and no standing in court. This clears the way for a possible arrangement with the Crystal Bridges Museum described in a previous post. While the O'Keeffe has 60 days to appeal the decision, one hopes that they will have the grace to back down this time.

Sadly, this has been an expensive victory for Fisk. President Hazel O'Leary said she was pleased by the ruling, but "the expense the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum has forced Fisk to incur in its effort to gain ownership of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Modern Art could have been committed to scholarships for our students."

In other O'Keeffe news this week, the Museum was considering action against the Georgia O'Keeffe Elementary School in Albuquerque for abbreviating her name on a sign as GOK. The Museum contends that the only acceptable abbreviation is G.OK, because O'Keeffe would not have liked the way GOK sounded when it was pronounced. Seriously.

International Folk Art Market - 2009

2009-07-17T14:23:00.013-04:00

Ali MacGraw, just another red-shirted volunteer.

Last weekend was the 6th annual Santa Fe International Folk Art Market--two days of a bazaar with folk artists from all over the world. It was a VERY hot weekend for Santa Fe (93-94 degrees), and with somewhat reduced tourism and the economic climate, the sponsors were worried that revenues would be down significantly. But head count at the market was actually up nearly 13% over last year, with about 23,000 attendees. And sales were only off a few percentage points. The average artist took home about $13,500, and when you consider that 97% of the artists come from countries where the annual per capita income is less than $750, this is a significant piece of their incomes.

Over 400 applications came in for this year's market, which were winnowed down to 147 using a complicated weighting system. About 21 artists from among those selected were unable to attend due to visa or other issues.

This year for the first time I worked as one of 1,500 volunteers at the market. In an effort to become greener, and also to save money, the market (for the first time) did not sell bottled water. I worked at a water station where we gave away free water (Santa Fe water chilled and filtered on the spot by The Good Water Company) to refill customers' own bottles, or paper cones of water for those who did not have bottles. Lots of customers in that heat!

A first for the market this year: former President Bill Clinton, a folk art fan, commissioned three Folk Art Market artists to make the prizes that will be presented in September to the winners of the Clinton Global Citizen Awards. The award honors individuals and organizations for their contributions to solving global challenges. All three artists — Serge Jolimeau and Michée Ramil Remy of Haiti and Toyin Folorunso of Nigeria — work with recycled metals.

Tsankawi

2009-07-03T14:02:00.026-04:00

On June 13, I had the opportunity to go on a hike with the New Mexico Museum's Friends of Archaeology to Tsankawi. This area is a detached part of the Bandelier National Monument, and an ancestral home of the San Ildefonso Pueblo. (This was my second hike with FOE; click on the link to read about my 2008 FOA trip to the Zia Pueblo.)

Our group, led by archaeologist Chuck Hannaford and ceramicist Dean Wilson, toured the trails and settlement spaces of Tsankawi. This day trip was one of three envisioned by the Friends of Archaeology for the summer of 2009 to commemorate the founding of the Museum of New Mexico 100 years earlier. Edgar Lee Hewett, an ardent explorer and champion of the Pajarito Plateau area, of which Tsankawi forms a part, would go on to serve for 40 years as Museum Director (1909-1949). This hike also echoes the anniversary of a 1909 National Geographic article describing the beautiful remote location, with its trails and cavates. (In those days, it would have taken four arduous hours to get to the Pajarito Plateau from Santa Fe!)

Tsankawi (saikewikwaje onwikege) means “village between two canyons at the clump of sharp, round cacti” in Tewa, the language of the San Ildefonso Pueblo. Settlers had first come to the plateau during the “Coalition Period” in about 1150, and lived in small family structures of 1-20 rooms. By 1250 or so, there was a pueblo with a big plaza, and by about 1325, larger villages. The area was abandoned in the middle of the 16th century (about the time of first contact by the Spanish) with its residents moving towards Cochiti and Puye.

Archaeologist Hannaford noted three major influences on the area. First, years of volcanic eruption formed the beautiful eerie landscape. Secondly, the Ancestral Pueblo people, who lived here for 400 years, modified the land to their purposes: climbing, cultivating, building pueblos, cutting cavates (man-made caves in the soft volcanic rock), and creating petroglyph “rock art” in the cavates and on the public viewing surfaces. Finally, the coming of the scientists to Los Alamos saw further change happen--Hannaford remarked on the two vastly different realms of experience represented by the celebration of the deer dance and the splitting of the atom!

We walked up trails cut deep into the volcanic rock by years of footprints, down ladders, in and out of cavates, and through the settlement areas where room block wall bases, water capture pond outlines, and numerous pottery sherds were clearly visible. We tried to imagine that the Ancestral Pueblo people were still there to watch us.

A highlight of the day featured ceramicist Wilson on his knees among the plentiful pottery sherds, pointing out the differences between the biscuit and glazed wares, and the likelihood of particular pieces of pottery being made locally or imported from other areas. He observed that some were finished with a tempera made of anthill sand, actually bits of quartz “mined” by the ants.
We returned to our vehicles more knowledgeable about the vast Pajarito Plateau, and more conscious of the need to preserve and protect these prehistoric treasures.

Ford Ruthling House and Garden

2009-06-09T19:46:00.013-04:00

This week I had the privilege of touring artist Ford Ruthling's house, studio, and garden with the Friends of the Folk Art Museum. Mr. Ruthling sat and chatted with folks in his courtyard, welcomed them throughout his home (including bedroom and bath--no secrets here!), answered questions from all, talked about the art he's currently working on, and encouraged us to explore his two and a half acres of gardens in a secluded area of old Santa Fe.

It's hard to know where to begin! The house is an old adobe built in 1907, and occupied by Ruthling for the past 38 years. He told us that the woman who lived there before him was a recluse who lived there for 50 years, and it was in a fairly advanced state of disrepair when he acquired it. (For example, there was only one electric fuse for the entire house!) FR did everything to the house that he wanted done, and now says there is "very little that hasn't been done to satisfy my needs." The house is L-shaped, with terraced gardens and the entrance to a conservatory occupying the third and fourth sides to make a courtyard.

The house is chock full of old folk art, collected by Ruthling since his childhood. The gardens are masses of flowers, which bloom riotously outdoors, and fill silver loving cups indoors. Various outbuildings are nestled around the grounds forming little vignettes, and surprises at the ends of pathways.

One attendee asked Ruthling what he fed his plants. "Plant food," he said. "Whatever I find at the market--I'm not fussy and they'd better not be!"

FR was born in 1933 to a poor family in Tesuque. He started collecting young, buying things inexpensively in those days, and his collection started primarily with religious art (santos and relicarios and milagros). He owns a lot of silver (including a wonderful collection of native silver and turquoise cuffs), and is also a collector of African art. He told us he was not interested in contemporary folk art--the religious art he buys is in the vicinity of 300 years old. (He acknowledged that perhaps contemporary folk art might be worth collecting someday, but he didn't want to wait 300 years!)

He also spent some showing us some pieces from the series on which he is currently working. They involve cutting a pattern out of tin, pressing it with lithographer's inks, drying for a couple of days, and then adding brush detail to complete the work. These pieces are populated by apples, hearts, cats, birds, fish, and other images. No two pieces are the same--even if the same tin pattern is used, the colors and details vary. He presses one image from the tin to test the pattern--if he doesn't like it, he can usually modify the pattern to his satisfaction. If not, the patterns go into storage (sometimes a piece can be reworked) or are destroyed.

Ruthling's work has been collected all over the US--pieces are in the Smithsonian, Dallas Museum of Fine Art, and various New Mexico museums, as well as in many galleries and private collections. In 1977 four of his paintings of New Mexico Pueblo Indian pottery became a series of U.S. Postal Service first-class stamps. He has designed wonderful posters for various iconic Santa Fe events, including the Wine and Chili Festival and the Opera season.

One piece I loved was an image he called "Two of hearts--four melons" which showed melon slices with faces at each end. "It's a card that's not in the deck, but it should be!" He showed us another piece which featured an adult bear and a couple of small bears. "Someone said this was darlin'", he said. "I hate it if anybody says 'darlin' about my work," so he took the small bears out of the remaining bear prints.

Ruthling was named a "Living Treasure" of Santa Fe in 1993--and it's no wonder!

For further reading, check out this 1996 New York Times article.

What Passes for a Cloudy Day in Lamy

2009-05-31T14:03:00.013-04:00

This past week I drove to Lamy, New Mexico (about 30 minutes outside of Santa Fe) for lunch at the Lamy Station Café. Remember that old standard, "The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe?" Well the train never actually got to Santa Fe--the elevations around Santa Fe were deemed too daunting, so the train was run through Lamy instead, reaching there in 1880. (Eventually an 18-mile spur to Santa Fe was built, which today hosts an excursion train that runs between Santa Fe and Lamy.) The Lamy Station is still the New Mexico stop for trains to Chicago and Los Angeles.

Lamy was named for Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888), the first bishop and archbishop of the Diocese of Santa Fe. (You may know him from Willa Cather's 1927 novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, where he served as inspiration for the character of Bishop Latour.) In New Mexico, you pronounce the town as "Lame'-y", though the Archbishop is correctly referred to as "Lah-mee'.)

The town of Lamy includes the railroad station, a small museum, and a converted 1950s-era Pullman car that is the location of the Lamy Station Café. Excellent lunch--a distinctly un-1950s pasta with spinach and sun-dried tomatoes, and an entire dining car full of friends!

Illustration Credits

Photo of Archbishop Lamy from the Santa Fe, New Mexico Palace of the Governors Photo Archives Negative no. 9970 Photo by W. Henry Brown.

Photo of the dining car interior courtesy of the Lamy Station Café website.

Cloud photo taken from the train station looking across the tracks.

Carlton Cole Magee

2009-03-03T18:14:00.009-05:00

My brother sent me a story today about a piece of New Mexican history I wanted to share with you.

Carl Magee was a successful Tulsa lawyer who moved to Albuquerque in 1920 for his wife's health. He bought the Albuquerque Morning Journal from a group that included Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, and set about becoming a newspaper editor. According to his obituary in the New York Times, Magee:

played the newspaper "game" the way he played poker--hard and on the level. A famous crusader for freedom of the press in the Southwest, he was no reformer. He just wanted the cards unmarked and dealt from the top.

He had been a Republican when he moved to New Mexico, but became a Democrat within six months. He lambasted the Republican state machine in New Mexico, and was frequently threatened by his Republican opponents, including Secretary Fall. By 1922, he was forced to sell the paper, but used the proceeds to found Magee's Weekly, and then took over the New Mexican State Tribune.

He then used his bully pulpit to attack Secretary Fall for corruption, resulting in the uncovering of the famous Teapot Dome scandal. Teapot Dome was an oil field on public land in Wyoming. In 1921, President Harding, by executive order, shifted control of the field from the Navy to the Department of the Interior. The following year, Interior Secretary Fall leased the field to Harry Sinclair without competitive bidding. When Fall retired in 1923, Sinclair "lent" him a large amount of interest-free money.

Again according to the Times, "Magee was one of the first to raise the question of why Harry Sinclair's special train should spend many days on the railroad siding near the expansive Three Rivers (NM) ranch home" of Secretary Fall. And, according to a 1939 Time Magazine article, "it was a Magee telegram to Senator Thomas James Walsh concerning Fall's finances that made Teapot Dome a criminal case."

The US Senate pursued an investigation of both Fall and Sinclair, resulting in eventual prison sentences for both.

Magee, meanwhile, also attacked several judges for corruption, and was brought to trial twice for libel (once for each of two judges). In the first trial, the allegedly libeled judge presided over the trial and convicted Magee--but he was pardoned by the Governor. In the second trial, the judge directed the jury to convict, but they voted to acquit. In 1925, one of these judges physically assaulted Magee in a hotel lobby. Magee shot the judge in the arm, but also killed an innocent bystander in the process. He was again acquitted in this third trial.

And, oh yes, Carl Magee invented the parking meter! You'll be able to read this and other fabulous stories of inventions in the fourth book to be authored by my brother, Rick Beyer, The Greatest Science! Stories Never Told, which should be available in a bookstore near you by October 2009.

Illustration Credits and References

Photo of Carl Magee (and his parking meter!) courtesy of the Find a Grave website.

Sources for information in this post include Magee's obituary in the New York Times on February 2, 1946, and a March 20, 1939 article in Time Magazine entitled "Fireless Firebrand".

Who Are You, Dear Readers?

2009-02-15T13:00:00.005-05:00

In the two and a half years I've been writing this blog, I've seen a steady growth in readership and page views. During the past six months, I've averaged a little over 600 readers per month. SIte traffic in 2008 was more than twice what it was in 2007, and 2009 is showing further growth.

So where do you come from and what are you looking for here?

Well, 89% of my visitors are from the United States, but in the last thirty days I've also had multiple readers from the UK, Canada, Australia, France, and Turkey.

Of the US visitors, 27% of them live in New Mexico (probably not surprising!). 13% are in California, 7% in Texas, 5% in New York, and 4% in Massachusetts. In the last 30 days, I've had viewers from 40 states--the only states not to find me in that period were Alaska, Nevada, Wyoming, South Dakota, Louisiana, Alabama, Illinois, West Virginia, Maine, and New Hampshire.

83% of you visited for the first time in the last 30 days, while the remaining 17% were repeat viewers. (Welcome back to you!)

Many of you have this site bookmarked, or find it through links, but those of you who used search keywords to find it were looking for information on various Santa Fe topics. The top 11 keywords used in the last 30 days included:

Santa Fe blog (31)
Santa Fe 400 anniversary (29)
Acoma Pueblo (18)
Whole Foods/Wild Oats in Santa Fe (15)
Living in Santa Fe (12)
Madrid Chile Festival (12--and this is for an event that doesn't exist except in the movie Wild Hogs!)
Allan Houser (11)
College of Santa Fe (11)
Aspen Vista Trail (11)
Kevin Costner/Swing Vote movie (10)
Governor Lew Wallace (9)

So thanks for visiting, keep reading, and let me know what other Santa Fe topics you'd like to see explored here!

Illustration Credits

The photograph above is of a January seasonal display on the table in my foyer (taken by my brother).

Advocacy for College of Santa Fe

2009-02-10T17:32:00.010-05:00

Today was "Advocacy Day" at the New Mexico state house (aka "The Roundhouse") and various groups set up tables, signage, slides, videos, press conferences, etc. in an attempt to advocate with the legislators in support of their various causes.

Students, faculty, and staff from The College of Santa Fe (CSF) were there in droves in an attempt to save their school, which has been hard hit by the economic downturn. New Mexico Highlands University (a state university) is willing to take over the school which can no longer afford to operate on its own. A bill has been submitted in the legislature to permit this to happen, and the college community has its collective fingers crossed. Without a state bailout, the school will be forced to close at the end of the current academic year.

CSF is primarily an art school--a perfect fit for an art city like Santa Fe. Degree programs in film, theatre, art, music, photography, and creative writing have enrolled enormously talented students. The students in these photos are junior and senior majors in the Performing Arts Department, dressed in costumes they wore in recent productions. It's worth noting that costume design students at the college sew all the costumes in the Performing Arts costume shop.

If you have an "in" with a New Mexico legislator, they ask you to support their cause.

Amazing Skies

2009-01-29T11:14:00.004-05:00

My brother and his wife visited for the weekend and Rick took this fabulous shot of the mountains, light and dark skies, and an incipient rainbow. This picture was taken only a 15 minute drive away from the Santa Fe Plaza.

We crammed an entire week of tourism into one weekend--Palace of the Governors, O'Keeffe Museum, The Farmers' Market (where we briefly appeared in a promotional film for a local orchestra), Ten Thousand Waves (starlit hot tub and therapeutic massages), art tour at the state capitol ("The Roundhouse"), trail walks, a couple of terrific restaurants, and several mountain drives to get photos like this one!

Christmas Day in Puerto Vallarta

2009-01-05T10:56:00.017-05:00

This December, for the first time since I was 17, I was out of the country for Christmas--on the beach in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. On Christmas Day I took the photographs below. Happy holidays to all my readers, and best wishes for a wonderful 2009!

View of the beach from my balcony, Christmas morning.

Christmas morning--a very quiet pool deck at the hotel.

One of the many beautiful sculptures on the Puerto Vallarta seafront walk--the Malecon.

Artists creating sand sculptures on the beach.

The Holy Family and friends, a sand sculpture on the beach.

Part of the stone arches at the Los Arcos Amphitheatre on the Malecon.

An angel beckons on the beach.

Christmas poinsettias on the grounds of my hotel.

A large creche in downtown Puerto Vallarta.

An angel mermaid pipes in the sunset.

Aspen Vista 2008

2008-11-02T10:25:00.015-05:00

I took my walking group to hike the Aspen Vista Trail on October 9. This trail is located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains about 13 miles from the Santa Fe Plaza--almost all the way up to the Santa Fe ski area. The Aspen Vista is a beautiful, wide trail that starts at 9800 feet elevation and continues on up. (This makes it about 10 degrees cooler than the 7000 feet elevation we all live in. We went up the trail about a mile and a half and then back down again.

The key issue in walking the Aspen Vista this time of year is timing--getting to the trail when the aspen leaves have optimal golden color (and hoping that a windstorm doesn't do early damage!). And I have to say October 9th this year was perfect! There was a lot of rain and wind the weekend after the walk, so we were glad we made it when we did.

The aspen stand that gives the trail its name grew up around 1900 after a forest fire destroyed the pine trees in the area. Now the aspens are in decline because the conifers have regrown and are beginning to dominate sections of the forest.

It's still incredibly beautiful though!

After our walk we sat in a little rest area near the trailhead, and drank our coffee and looked out over the amazing view--layers and layers of mountains disappearing into the distance.

Lots of visitors to my blog have found it looking for information on the Aspen Vista Trail. For more photos, see my posts from September 27, 2007 and October 1, 2006.

Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta 2008

2008-10-17T09:39:00.022-04:00

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta for the first time. To see the mass ascent, you have to be there at dawn, so a group of us went down the night before and stayed over. (So we only had to get up at 5:30 in the morning instead of 4:30!)

We had bought passes to the "Diamond Club", upstairs at the Balloon Museum (which is shaped like a balloon lying on its side). The curve at the top of the balloon houses a windowed function room and an outdoor deck which faced onto the field where the balloons were taking off. A catered breakfast (quite good!) was served, and there were heaters on the deck to help make it not quite so chill. (Even though it was close to 80 degrees later in the day, it was still in the 40s when we started our vigil at 6:30 in the morning.)

Hundreds of balloons ascended in front of us, many passing directly overhead, and a few going down in an open area just to our left.

According to the Balloon Fiesta's official website, the event started in 1972 when Dick McKee, general manager of KOB Radio, approached Sid Cutter (a charter member of the local balloon club) about flying their “Roadrunner” balloon to help launch festivities for the station’s 50th anniversary. Dick asked: “What is the largest balloon race that’s ever been held?”
Sid replied, “Nineteen balloons in England.”
“ Can we get 19 balloons here?”
“ I don’t know why not.”

Thirteen balloons eventually turned out for the first Fiesta, and 20,000 people showed up to watch. The following year there were 138 balloons, and the event just kept growing. I heard there were 650 balloons this year, which is down slightly from 2007.

What an amazing experience!!

Casa Rondeña

2008-09-12T09:36:00.016-04:00

Did you know that New Mexico is the oldest wine-producing area in the United States? Settlers brought vines in the early 1600s, and the Catholic clergy oversaw the production of sacramental wine--it just took too long to transport wine from Spain to Mexico City up the Camino Real to Santa Fe.

There's nothing like a glass of wine with friends, outdoors, on a beautiful summer day! I had two lovely experiences in this category in recent months. Peggy, Ralph, and I had an afternoon adventure at the Santa Fe Wine Festival, held at El Rancho de Las Golondrinas just outside of Santa Fe. Thirteen New Mexico wineries were featured--a modest entrance fee got you a glass and a chance to sample a variety of wines from each winery.

Sunny skies, music, food, jewelry and local crafts, and an historical setting made it a memorable afternoon. My favorite wine was Black Beauty by Black Mesa, a red "New Mexico table wine" with chocolate added. I can just see you wine purists cringing, but the local paper reported the next day that it was the most popular wine at the Festival.

More recently, I went with a group of friends for a tour and tasting at Casa Rondeña Winery in Albuquerque's north valley.

The winery is in a beautiful setting--very Tuscan or Southern Californian. It is quite new, but the buildings were built to look old, and the combination of the heady scent of the grapes, the sun shining on the tile roofs, and the beautiful landscapes in which the vines, the pressing and bottling operations, and the owner's residence are nestled made for an idyllic adventure.

We got a chance to see pressing and aging, though no bottling, and then had a tasting around a circular table with a variety of wines, and cheeses selected to complement each.

I bought a couple of bottles of the 2007 Serenade, 87% Riesling and 13% Gewurztraminer, and a bottle of Chocolate Cabernet Wine Sauce (gee, there's that chocolate thing again!).

Think sun and summer and friends and wine.....

A Eulogy for Robert T. Beyer, 1920-2008

2008-08-29T00:36:00.004-04:00

This is the eulogy I delivered for my father at his funeral service on August 23. Click here to read the full obituary written my brother.

We’re here today to celebrate the life of Robert Beyer.

My father was a great man—in many ways both public and private.

He was a great husband to my mother.

He meet Ellen early in their college careers at Hofstra, and she was the only woman he ever loved. He loved her deeply and devotedly until the day she died, and her passing left a big hole in his life.

He wrote her sonnets and love poems, washed the dishes and the kitchen floor, and never forgot her birthday or their anniversary.

He was a great father, and a proud and loving grandfather.

He set high standards for all of us—but was always there to support us when we faltered. He was the father of a son and three daughters—and my sisters and I so valued his quiet feminism—encouraging our college choices and our career options—always proud of our accomplishments—never expecting anything less or anything different because we were women.

My mother never drove, so my Dad chauffeured all of us to school and various other activities—I can remember him coming to pick me up after CYO dances—sitting outside in the car grading a stack of papers under the dim interior car light.

He was invariably up to date on the exploits of his seven grandchildren—as proud of the youngest’s coloring as of the older ones’ college studies and careers.

He was a great citizen.

He was always well-versed in the backgrounds of all the political candidates, and made careful voting choices. He served his country for years as a CIA contact for potential defectors among Soviet scientists—a secret he kept from us for forty years. He had come from a family of proud and vociferous Democrats and the autographs of Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson hanging on the wall of his study were treasured possessions. I remember he cried when John F. Kennedy died—I had never seen him cry before, but JFK was an Irishman and a Catholic of his own generation.

A few years ago, when he was recovering from surgery, and in and out of consciousness, we asked him if there was anything we could get him. “Just get me a piece of paper that says George Bush is no longer president of the United States,” he said.

He was a great Catholic, and an incredibly ethical and moral man.

There was never, in our home, any expectation that we would not obey our parents, practice the golden rule, keep all our promises, be truthful on our taxes, share with those less fortunate, and go to Mass on Sunday. Dad was a lector for many years at St. Martha’s and here at St. Sebastian’s, and possessed a deep and unshakeable faith. He put his faith into action as a committed civil rights activist—traveling frequently to Tougaloo College in Mississippi in the sixties to support integration activities there. But he also demonstrated his faith every day by his language, his honesty, his behavior, and his genuine respect for every other human being.

His former pastor at St. Martha’s, Father Jude, told us on Thursday that he would see my Dad in Heaven. “And if he’s not there,” he said, “I don’t want to go.”

He had a great mind.

Growing up, I knew my Dad knew everything. He was never too busy to share, and he never talked down to us. A question to Daddy always went something like this. Me: “Daddy, why do I have these blue lines under my skin?” Daddy: “Let me tell you about the structure of the cardiovascular and circulatory systems.”

He had the intellectual curiosity of a child—always looking at the world through bright and shining eyes.

He could read and write in German, French, Russian, Latin, and a smattering of Chinese. He’s the only person I know who read Dr. Zhivago in Russian, and Proust in French. He edited the English language translation of a Russian physics journal--I can remember him sitting in his office at home, with an article in Russian in front of him, reading the English translation into a tape recorder.

He loved puns and wordplay. He loved opera and theatre and fine food and museums and world travel. He loved Sherlock Holmes and the New York Yankees.

He told jokes and stories with the Irish gift of gab—and it was always the right story for every occasion. A couple of weeks ago, I was working on some research about Eleanora Sears, an early 20th century long distance walker. I asked him on the phone if he knew who Eleanora Sears was. “Ah, Eleanora,” he said. “When I was a child, I had a primitive movie player and one of the film strips was of her walking from Boston to Providence in 1926—there she was, striding along.”

He wrote poetry for my mother, and wonderful speeches, and letters to his children that would break your heart. He could recite quotes from Shakespeare, baseball statistics, mathematical theorems, and the names of all the motels we stayed in our way to California in 1953.

He was a great teacher and mentor.

He was a full-time faculty member in the physics department at Brown for forty years, and part-time for another ten.

He advised and counseled generations of doctoral students—as with his own children, he established high standards for performance but was there with a helping hand, and some fatherly advice, if one of them was struggling.

But he didn’t just stay in the ivory tower. He also taught freshman physics, and used to cause quite a splash demonstrating principles of physics in a huge lecture hall—entering the room by riding a tricycle down an incline plane, or inhaling helium and starting his lecture with a chipmunk voice.

He taught courses for eight years at Laurel Mead where he lived since 1999. He started with a physics course, but wisely saw the limited appeal of advanced science in that setting, and moved on to his second great love—history. He taught a course in Russian history and a three-year course in the American presidency. He finished teaching a course in the Civil War less than three weeks ago—and told us it would be his last—it was getting too hard for him to lecture. I firmly believe his love of learning, his sense of duty, and his commitment to his students enabled him to complete that effort.

He had a great will and a great spirit.

His heart was damaged by two bouts of childhood rheumatic fever. He was tutored at home through high school because he was too sick to go to school. He wasn’t supposed to live to be 21, but his spirit and will always more than compensated for his weakened body. Though he suffered from damaged heart valves, multiple sclerosis, a lost kidney, and a variety of other ailments, he never ever complained, and was always ready with a joke or a quip about his situation. He came back from near-death so many times over the years that we somehow believed he would never die. His determination and his will to live—to do what he needed to do to make it back—were mind-blowing.

And he was a great physicist.

His doctoral research at Cornell was classified by the U.S. Government for years after he received his degree, so he had to start a whole new line of study. During his career he wrote four books, co-wrote three others, translated or edited several more, and authored more than 75 scientific papers. He finished his last book, The Sounds of Our Times, a history of acoustics, when he was nearing 80. A reviewer had this to say:

"To produce a coherent and enlightened summary of two centuries of work in any science requires a very special person: One who not only understands it all, but who has taught it all, and has personally contributed to its development; one with the patience and scholarship to research it all, historically and technically. Such a person is Robert T. Beyer. No wonder the resulting book is so remarkable and informative. A very hard-to-follow world class act.....”

I believe he was a man who had no regrets about the way he lived his life—as a husband, a father, and a grandfather; as an American; as a Catholic; as a teacher, mentor, and colleague; and as a truly good man.

And now that glorious mind, and that mighty spirit, are free from this mortal coil, and can join my mother again, and forever. And I say to him what my brother and sisters said to him often in these last few years:

Bye, Daddy. I love you.

Governor Lew Wallace

2008-08-03T10:39:00.014-04:00

Lew Wallace may be best-known as the author of Ben-Hur, which he wrote in 1880 (and which has never been out of print since). But he was also Territorial Governor of New Mexico from 1878-1881, and he wrote the final chapters of his best-seller by candlelight in the Palace of the Governors on the Santa Fe Plaza.

Wallace was a 19-year-old law student in Indiana when the Mexican War broke out in 1846. He interrupted his studies to take a commission in General Zachary Taylor's army, though he saw little (if any) combat there. After the war he returned to Indiana and was admitted to the bar in 1849.

After terms as a prosecutor and state senator, he was commissioned a colonel at the start of the Civil War, and had been promoted to major general by March, 1862. Due to what may have been communication problems, he was blamed by Grant for the loss at Shiloh. This loss, and the resulting damage to his reputation, haunted Wallace for the rest of his life. Some historians now feel that Ben-Hur told a thinly disguised story of Wallace's own life in that regard.

He was able to redeem himself somewhat by his delaying actions at the Battle of Monocacy, which held off Jubal Early's assault on Washington, DC long enough for the city to mount a defense.

His legal background and reputation for honesty landed him on the military commission that tried the Lincoln assassination conspirators, and he also helped to preside over the Andersonville court-martial. After the war he traveled to Texas and Northern Mexico to raise arms and money to help Benito Juarez in his attempt to win Mexican independence from Emperor Maximilian. His arrangements with Juarez forced him into deep debt, and he returned to Indiana to practice the law, write novels, and engage in an unsuccessful run for a Congressional seat.

During this period, Wallace was named to a committee responsible for counting disputed ballots in Florida after the 1876 presidential election. (Some things never change!)

In 1878, he was named Governor of the Territory of New Mexico. It is likely that the goal of sending Wallace to New Mexico was to clean up the corruption and lawlessness there. His predecessor, Governor Samuel Axtell, was accused of corruption and was involved with the infamous Santa Fe Ring. While Governor, Wallace apparently offered William Bonney (aka Billy the Kid) a pardon in return for testifying in the trial of men involved in the "Lincoln County War", but the Kid didn't uphold his end of the bargain.

Later Bonney would try unsuccessfully to elicit Wallace's support, as shown in this letter from 1881 (six months before Bonney was shot to death by Sheriff Pat Garrett).

While Governor, Wallace lived with his wife, Susan Arnold Elston Wallace, in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, and was the first to realize the historic significance of that building (which is the oldest continually-occupied public building in the US). He lobbied for its renovation in Washington, DC, and while he wasn't able to effect any change during his tenure, he planted the seeds for future efforts.

He also realized the value of the historical documents stored there from the Spanish and Mexican governments (documents his wife had discovered in a dusty unused office in the Palace) and hired a Spanish-speaking archivist to start work on the monumental task of organizing these materials.

From 1881-1885, Wallace served as US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, after which he and Susan returned to Indiana where he wrote two more novels.

Wallace, a true Renaissance man, holds patents for eight inventions (including a fishing pole with a reel inside the handle and two kinds of pads to reduce vibration and noise from railroad tracks). He also played (and made) violins and painted large canvasses.

His wife was also an author--she published six books, some of which were illustrated by Wallace. One of her most popular books was The Land of the Pueblos--her 19th century white woman's interpretation of life among the Spanish and Indian residents of the Southwest.

Wallace is memorialized in Santa Fe by the Lew Wallace Building. The building itself was built in 1887 as a dormitory for St. Michael's School, but was acquired by the state in the late 1960s, and now serves as offices for the State Engineer and the Department of Tourism.

For More Information

The website of the Lew Wallace Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana has some nice informal photographs of Wallace, and articles about Wallace geared towards young readers.

More detailed information about Wallace's time in New Mexico can be found on the website of the Indiana Historical Society. There are lots of wonderful images in their digital library of Billy the Kid's letters to Wallace, along with other historical documents of the period.

Movie Update: Swing Vote and Kites

2008-07-29T12:17:00.006-04:00

Kevin Costner's Swing Vote opens on August 1. Last September, during its New Mexico filming, I had the opportunity to be an extra in five hours of filming at the Santa Fe Rodeo Grounds. So look for me (haha) in the stands at the Rodeo--behind Kevin Costner (but waaay up and over) as he questions the candidates on stage.

Click here and here to read my two previous posts on the filming of this movie.

I also read in Sunday's paper that the Bollywood film Kites, with Hrithik Rosan, is scheduled to start filming in Santa Fe this week. Click here to see my previous post on this film, featuring photos and video of Hrithik, who some call "the Brad Pitt of India".

Chihuly in San Francisco

2008-07-26T11:01:00.018-04:00

Last week I traveled to San Francisco, ostensibly to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the MOMA, which was lovely. Since we were there in the city, we went the next day to the DeYoung to see the Dale Chihuly glass exhibit, and I was truly blown away by this show, which is the largest he's ever done. We were treated to eleven rooms of spectacularly colored glass in fantastic formations, with a theatrical presentation that included lots of dark backdrops, mirrors, and lights.

We were encouraged to take photos (sans flash) and I took quite a few, though the flat representations don't quite do justice to the impact of each of the rooms. I just wanted to lose myself in each space!

The photos above and below were taken in the "Tabac Baskets" room which showcases Chihuly's enormous collection of Pendleton blankets (rows and rows on ascending dowels) and woven Northwest coast native baskets, displayed with pieces of glass that echo the styles, shapes, and colors of the baskets.

The next two photos were taken in a room where two antique rowboats from Chihuly's collection(s) were filled with glass and displayed on a mirrored surface in a darkened room. One is full of glass balls inspired by Japanese fishing floats, the other with phantasmagorical glass beings--like some outer space craft!

This next piece was hung in a roomful of hanging chandeliers. Each piece had been shipped to the site disassembled--and then assembled in place (something like putting together an artificial Christmas tree).

A roomful of black glass.....

In the next room, shown in the photo below, the ceiling had been lowered and then glass installed and lit above it. Apparently, Chihuly has a swimming pool at his studio where glass is mounted in the same way at the bottom of the pool--fantastic! It's hard to show in a photo but there are all sizes and shapes of glass including cherubs and starfish who float peacefully among the other elements. On the audio tour for this room, Chihuly said he didn't know how many pieces of glass were mounted there--maybe a thousand? Wow!

In a film accompanying the exhibit, Chilhuly talked about how he started making the "putti"--click here to see a bit more about the process on Chihuly's website.

My last two exhibit photos are of a 56-foot long glass garden called "Mille Fiori" (1,000 Flowers). Chihuly is apparently inspired by his mother's garden in Tacoma when he creates these floral exhibitions. (I love tributes to Moms!)

So given my obvious enthusiasm for this exhibit, imagine my surprise on finding the quite snotty review in the San Francisco Chronicle. The reviewer calls the show an example of "empty virtuosity", and surmises that it is probably not art because it has no intellectual content and does not hold the attention of "educated viewers". In his view, the art is simply a collection of knickknacks. Ouch!

Chihuly, who is originally from Tacoma, Washington, holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (yeah for RI--my home state!) and studied Venetian glass techniques on a Fulbright Fellowship in Murano after graduating. He currently lives and works in a 25,000 square foot studio, a former boathouse on Lake Union in Seattle. (I imagine this must be a spectacular place--with the collections discussed above, the swimming pool with glass at the bottom, and all the glassmaking activities going on.)

He lost his eyesight in one eye in an auto accident in 1976, and wears an eye patch which gives him the air of a cheerful pirate. Because of the resulting depth perception problems, he can no longer handle the molten glass himself. He conceptualizes his ideas on canvas (some of which were shown in the exhibit), and then works with teams of glass blowers to execute the compositions.

According to a tour guide, the glass for the DeYoung exhibit arrived in 10 semi trucks, and took 19 people to assemble. The exhibit is only at the DeYoung--it's not traveling--and it will only be there until September 28.

Photo Credits

Photo of Dale Chihuly courtesy of Chihuly's website.

Mermaids at the Market

2008-07-13T13:22:00.021-04:00

This weekend was the fifth annual International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe. Another beautiful day on Museum Hill! According to today's newspaper, the market attracted 10,000 visitors yesterday, and sales are expected to exceed last year's.

I wrote extensively about the market last year and this year was equally wonderful. Bus service (from the state parking lots downtown out to the museum grounds) was significantly improved, and more buses and better traffic patterns meant shorter waits and happier customers! (I love it when something doesn't go that well, and people actually pay attention and fix the problem next time around!)

This year's market included folks from countries not previously represented, including Mongolia, Rwanda, Kenya, and El Salvador. According to the market brochure, artists are able to "participate in a series of pre-market workshops on sales, pricing, packaging, and marketing, with a new focus on Internet marketing."

In addition, the market has created an internship program that this year trained four African women to lead markets in their own countries. The women are discussing the possibility of collaborating on a combined southern African market.

The market estimates that an average of $15,000 goes home with each artist or coop represented. Surveys show that profits from the market have paid for clean water, teachers and school supplies, plows and goats, buildings and soccer uniforms.

This year's purchases included two Ecuadorean beaded collars made by Fundación Warmipak Wasi, a women's cooperative of Saraguros in highland southern Ecuador.

According to their handout, the Saraguros are "descended from the Incas and are characterized by distinctive clothing and cultural traditions. They grow most of their own food . . . and herd cattle to support their daily life. But the 21st century requires that they also earn money to pay for their family needs and the education of their children. Warmipak Wasi is the Kichwa rendering of The Women's House or Casa de la Mujer. This is a shelter home for abused women from the Saraguro area, and offers services to women of all origins: indigenous, white, and mestizo. . . . Many of the women who come to the shelter learn to support themselves through the making of embroidered blouses and beadwork pieces worn traditionally by indigenous women."
Flor Maria Cartuche, whose picture is shown here, is representing the cooperative at this year's market. She designed and sold bead collars to help fund her college education, and is now studying law.

I also purchased two Uzbek pottery pieces which are made in the village of Rishtan from local clay. According to the market brochure, these blue ceramics "have been famous for centuries. Forms are made on a foot-kicked pottery wheel, then hand painted and glazed with metal oxide. When the collapse of the Soviet Union closed the local factory in 1998, Rustam Usmanov, who designed patterns there, continued production in his home workshop. . . . Usmanov and his workers combine traditional forms and designs with original shapes and motifs. His work is exhibited at the Hermitage Museum."

My final purchase was another oil drum sculpture made by artist Winzor Gouin. I wrote about Winzor in last year's post; this year I purchased three diving mermaids--I plan to hang them over my bathtub so they look like they're diving in!

Photo Credits

I loved the Brazilian dolls (note in the photo at the top of this entry that the three women are black, white, and indigenous!) but they were out of my price range. Maybe another year!

The second photo is a small section of a large silk rug which was on display.

Butterfly on Canyon Road

2008-07-08T10:49:00.006-04:00

Yesterday, Peggy, Ralph, and I went up to Canyon Road to explore a few art galleries and have lunch at The Compound. So many of the galleries have beautiful gardens--some in front where they are visible from the street, some in back--little hidden gems.

Patricia Carlisle Fine Art has both--a series of little gardens in the back with sculptures and fountains, and a lush fragrant garden in the front. On my way out, I stopped to admire this beautiful butterfly; as I watched, it folded itself up tight and went about half-way down into a day lily to take its fill of nectar.

The Gallery was just finishing mounting a fun display of art by Melinda Hall. Click here to see the artworks.

Bollywood and Santa Fe Together!

2008-06-25T09:56:00.003-04:00

Photo courtesy of fan site kites-themovie.com
In late July, the Bollywood movie Kites is expected to start filming in Santa Fe. The movie features Indian star Hrithik Rosan (pronounced Rith-ik Rose-n if you want to sound Bollywood-knowledgeable) and Kangana Ranaut, as well as Latin American actress Barbara Mori. (According to preproduction rumors, Kangana plays his wife and Barbara his mistress.)

For those of you who can't get enough Hrithik, here he is an Acer TV commercial:

I do have this wonderful image of a big Hindi song and dance number on the plaza--probably too much to hope for!

Check out my other posts on Bollywood and movie-making in Santa Fe:

The 3:10 to Yuma, posted 01/27/07

Intercollegiate Bollywood Competition, posted 07/26/07

Kevin Costner's Swing Vote, posted 09/22/07

Kevin Costner Fans, posted 09/22/07

Little Lizards

2008-06-23T10:23:00.003-04:00

One of the charming features of my yard in Santa Fe is that several little lizards live here (or at least visit frequently). They can sometimes be seen sunning themselves on a stucco wall, but more often they are darting across the yard at 90 miles an hour--clearly distressed by my presence.

That's why it was so phenomenal to find this little guy (or gal?) posing for the camera this week. I first noticed the underbelly from the inside of the screen, and was able to get my camera, get outdoors, focus, and snap a couple of photos before I scared him (her?) off.

I'm not very good at lizard identification--I first thought it might be a New Mexican whiptail, but now I'm waffling on that claim. (The whiptail is an interesting lizard because there are only females--they reproduce by essentially cloning themselves.)

Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral Report

2008-06-01T14:49:00.010-04:00

Starting with mineral--the snow at the Santa Fe Ski Area is just about gone. When I drive down Cerrillos in the morning I can see the mountains which are snow-capped from some time in the fall (late October or so) to some time in the spring. There is just a tad still there--must be on the shady side of the mountain....

A bear was sighted on the college campus a couple of weeks ago--apparently forced to forage further down in the valley due to a long winter and late spring. Caused quite a stir!

Prairie dogs are available for viewing all over the college campus. NYC-based playwright Israel Horovitz, who comes to us each June to direct an early staged reading of a new play, has described them as "rats with cuter outfits." Lots of groups in Santa Fe protesting inhumane prairie dog treatment. There are women who feed them, and any contractor who builds in a prairie-dog-inhabited area has to plan for "relocation". A prairie dog even has a feature role in the new Indiana Jones movie! Try to imagine this happening in other cities with other varieties of rodents!

Wonderful local meat, cheese, and vegetables available at the Santa Fe Farmers' Market yesterday. Bought some grain-fed beef and pork sausage from Casa Verde Graziers, goat cheese with raspberry from South Maintain Dairy in Edgewood ("it's all about the girls") which the producer told me was "best eaten right out of the dish with a spoon--when you've 'had a day'", mixed salad greens and baby spinach, and some Taos tomatoes. Click here and here to read my previous posts on the Farmer's Market--it really is an out-of-body experience!

Planted some salvia in my garden earlier this week and it hasn't died yet. Happy summer!!

Carried Away in Santa Fe

2008-05-31T10:11:00.007-04:00

Photo courtesy of Yahoo! Movies

I went to see the new Sex and the City movie in Santa Fe last night. I usually try to avoid going to big new releases on opening day because I like to avoid crowds, get my choice of seats, etc. But I really felt like going to the movies and there wasn't anything else I wanted to see as much, so off I went to the Regal Santa Fe Stadium 14, a lovely year-old theatre with all those great new amenities like stadium seating and really comfy cushions on the chairs. Regal was showing the movie on four screens so I figured there was a pretty good chance there'd be a space for me!

I got there early enough to get my preferred seat--one of the seats in the front row of the second section--the ones that are designed with spaces in between groups of seats for wheelchair patrons. I love those seats because you can stretch your legs out, there's no one in front of you (except when you're trying to read the credits at the end of the movie--which I ALWAYS stay for), and I think it provides the best view of the screen....

Anyway, I have to say I think this movie is going to do huge box office. I know that the reviews have been only OK (reviewers B-, patrons B according to Yahoo Entertainment) but it's really all about the experience. The theatre was full of women (and I would say that they were mostly over-40 women) with a few brave men (though more than I would have expected). When the opening music for the TV-show started at the beginning, the audience broke into spontaneous applause. When Samantha lambasted a man who interrupted her toast at an event in Carrie's honor, the audience burst into applause again. I love that kind of spontaneity and interaction at the movies! The crowd was warm, and sympathetic, and appreciative--laughing and clapping at all the right places, and being quiet (with just a touch of non-audible cry-emotion) at the places that demanded it. No snickering junior-high students laughing at all the wrong places and hooting at the frank girl-talk.

So what that it's like five episodes of the TV show strung back-to-back? Not being an HBO subscriber, I first watched Sex and the City on Netflix DVDs in back-to-back viewing sessions--six seasons in six weeks--when recovering from surgery three years ago. So it's just like old times for me!

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe reviewer, gets it: "It's like going to somebody else's house to binge on a stack of new episodes surrounded by a bunch of girlfriends you don't know. . . . The movie is just like a half-season of the series - a funny, sappy, clumsy, crude, rambunctious, argumentative, gleefully vulgar attempt to balance the fantasy of romance with the reality that the fantasy is impossible."

Jessica Reaves, Chicago Tribune reviewer, gets it too: "Social critics are wringing their hands on the sidelines, fretting. They can't understand why so many women are so captivated by the SATC world, which is, after all, a totally fantastical place in which women have financial autonomy and healthy sex drives. It's a materialistic, completely unrealistic world, the scolds tell us. Yes, of course it is. That's kind of the point. It's escapist fun. But it's also a show (and now a movie) with an enormous amount of heart, the kind of viewing that reminds you to call your best friend, just so she knows you're there if she needs you."

Manohla Dargis at the New York Times doesn't: "I wish Ms. Parker had let that bee in her bonnet go silent, because the movie that she and Mr. King have come up with is the pits. . . . vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow — and, at 2 hours and 22 turgid minutes, overlong."

And Lou Lumenick at the New York Post complains that "the men serve strictly as plot devices." Hellloooo!!! What about every other summer movie made in the past ten years that was aimed at an audience of 14-year-old boys??? It's a trip and a treat to see a blockbuster-in-making that's aimed at an over-40 female audience!!! And it's clear to me, based on the response of the decidedly non-Manhattan audience here in Santa Fe, that its appeal to its target audience is universal.

Acoma Pueblo

2008-05-26T17:28:00.019-04:00

Enchanted Mesa

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to spend a half-day at Acoma Pueblo, which claims to be the oldest continuously occupied community in the U.S. "My ancestors have been living on this mesa since 1150," reported our tour guide. "And see that mesa over there?", he asked, pointing to so-called Enchanted Mesa a few miles away. "That's where they lived for 500 years before that, until a storm destroyed the path up to the top."

It's quite an amazing feeling to have someone telling you their family has lived within view of this spot for almost 1,400 years.

Acoma has a very organized tourism business, running buses from the visitor center located on the flatlands below the mesa, up to the top of the mesa, and then conducting a walking tour. Unlike many of the other pueblos I've visited, photos were permitted with the payment of a camera fee.

Acoma is located close to Laguna Pueblo, where I attended midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Click here to read my post about that experience. Acoma and Laguna share a common language (Keresan) and a high school, among other things.

At the end of the tour, several of us chose to walk down a path carved into the sandstone of the 367-foot high mesa (as opposed to riding the bus back down). While I think the guide was a bit over-enthusiastic about the path (stone stairs! 10 minutes!), it gave us some incredible views that we otherwise would not have seen.

Before the modern road was cut, this path was the only way up and down. Since the Acoma community farmed in the flatlands, carried up food and water, and brought the logs for the construction of the church in from Mount Taylor, 30 miles away, this must have been a very difficult trip.

According to our guide, the church of San Esteban Rey (Saint Steven the King) was built in the 1630s, under the direction of a Spanish missionary, and the men carrying the logs were not allowed to put them down anywhere on route (including on the path up the mesa) since otherwise they would be considered defiled.

Today there are relatively few folks who live on the mesa top, though it is used for all holiday and ceremonial occasions. Some Acoma people come and spend time on the mesa in the summer (much as others of us might go to a rough cabin in the woods or mountains). Since there is no electricity, cell phone reception, or running water on the mesa, it's really like going camping. Here are some outhouses set into the side of the mesa--you have to be brave, wide-awake, and surefooted to use those in the middle of the night!
Several artists were selling their wares along the tour--I bought a pot made by Selina Sanchez, who lives in Grants, NM, and specializes in Acoma "fine line"pottery painting, using yucca brushes that may continue as few as a single strand.

O'Keeffe Country

2008-04-23T11:49:00.021-04:00

Earlier this month, I took a drive north with a friend up to Abiquiu and beyond. We lunched at the Abiquiu Inn, and then drove to Ghost Ranch, where Georgia O'Keeffe lived and painted in the summer months for nearly 50 years, beginning in 1934. Ghost Ranch has a long and colorful history which is well and thoroughly covered by Lesley Poling-Kempes in her 2005 book Ghost Ranch. It was a dude ranch at the time O'Keeffe began her life there, and is now a Presbyterian retreat and conference center.

In the early 2000s an exhibit was developed for the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, which displayed paintings of O'Keeffe's in conjunction with photographs taken from the same vantage point. In 2004, these paintings and corresponding photographs were juxtaposed in a book entitled Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place.

After the exhibit and the publication of the book, the Ghost Ranch was besieged with questions on how to find the locations shown in the paintings and photographs. Many of the vantage points were in areas of the property not open to tourists. But it didn't take long for the Ranch to figure out that there was a great opportunity here, and they started a twice a week ($25 a head) van tour which drives down by O'Keeffe's house on the property and shows visitors her "front yard" and "back yard" views.

It was a middling kind of day--windy and a bit cloudy, so the quality of my photographs isn't quite up to exhibit work! But I've included a few photos and a few paintings to give you an idea of the day and its significance.

The photo above is of O'Keeffe's residence at the Ranch, El Rancho de Los Burros. Of the flat-topped mountain, Pedernal, which she painted many times, and which you can see in two paintings and a photo below, she said: "It's my private mountain. God told me if I painted it often enough, I could have it."

Here are a few of the Georgia O'Keeffe Ghost Ranch paintings completed between 1937-1945:

And my photos, April 2008:

Glasnost in Santa Fe

2008-04-17T11:20:00.007-04:00

Photo courtesy of the Green Cross International web site

On Monday night, I had the opportunity to hear Mikhail Gorbachev speak to an enthusiastic crowd of 800 at The Lensic in Santa Fe. When I first heard he was coming to town, I felt I had to attend--he was just such an important figure of the 20th century for me.

The event was a benefit for the Santa Fe Institute, and was the first stop on a US lecture tour for the former Soviet president. Ticket prices ranged from $35 for the nosebleed seats, to a $500 opportunity to mingle with Gorbachev at a dinner and reception before the speech. All tickets for the event, with the exception of a handful of $100 seats, were sold.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson was on hand to introduce Gorbachev, and to show a brief film on his life and work.

In 1993, Gorbachev founded Green Cross International, an organization whose mission is to to "help ensure a just, sustainable and secure future for all by fostering a value shift and cultivating a new sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility in humanity's relationship with nature".

Gorbachev stated that in the past few decades, "globalization" has largely benefitted the wealthy, and the gap between rich and poor has widened. Neither Russia nor the U.S. has fulfilled the commitments they made to poor countries, and a new generation of political leaders has "underestimated the need for cooperation". "Global glasnost" or "Planetary glasnost" was a phrase Gorbachev used several times in his speech. He decried the fact that only 1/3 of the world lived in "decent conditions", and stressed the linkage among poverty, environmental damage, and armed conflict.

For example, stresses on food and water supplies, exacerbated by environmental crisis, impact the poor the most, and have led to conflicts and riots which were then addressed by military force.

In Gorbachev's opinion, there are three keys to solve these problems: a change in priorities, global governance, and leadership through partnership. He wondered whether the world could actually turn things around because of vested interests, inertia, and a "deficit of leadership and political will." He feels that the United States has both the biggest capability to make action happen, and the biggest responsibility to do so. But as long as the US. continues its military expansion, the needed work gets neglected.

Gorbachev strongly supports the UN, and other existing world organizations such as the IMF and WTO. He also believes in the importance of regional agreements such as NAFTA and the EU. But he believes that NATO is becoming too powerful, and a UN rival, and that some of the issues NATO is charged with would be better handled by the UN Security Council. In the same vein, he denounced John McCain's proposed "League of Democracies", although he did not mention McCain by name. Democracies abhor dictatorships, yet such a league would propose that a number of "like-minded" countries would try to dictate to the rest of the world how it should behave.

Gorbachev concluded his speech (after noting that his daughter Irina's polite coughing in the front row signaled that he had been speaking too long!) with a famous quote from an address John F. Kennedy delivered at American University in June 1963:

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

The crowd in Santa Fe was clearly receptive to the message, giving Gorbachev a standing ovation both before and after he spoke. While the simultaneous translation sometimes made it hard to hear (you had to really focus in on the English and try to tune out the buzz of Russian just below it), the speech was quite moving, and I was really glad to have had the experience. I especially liked the holistic approach of looking at security/terrorism, poverty, and the environmental crisis through a single lens.

New Mexico Quarter

2008-04-07T22:55:00.018-04:00

Today the U.S. Mint issued the New Mexico quarter with a ceremony in "The Roundhouse", the New Mexico State Capitol Building in Santa Fe. The ceremony was due to start at 11 a.m. and I sauntered in about quarter 'til, café mocha in hand--minimal visible security, no X-ray machines, no one telling me I had to dump my coffee. Wonderful!

The ceremony was short and sweet--the New Mexico Coin Commission was introduced, Mint Director Edmund Moy spoke and presented ceremonial coins to Governor Bill Richardson and his wife, Governor Richardson made brief remarks and applied a giant coin cutout to the New Mexico outline on the U.S. map (which you can see behind the Governor in the photo), and a short historical address was delivered by State Historian Estevan Rael-Gálvez. (Unfortunately, the many assembled schoolchildren had gotten pretty loud and restless at this point, and it was hard to hear most of what he had to say.)

It's worth noting that the Coin Commission included Santa Fe sculptor Glenna Goodacre, the creator of the Vietnam Women's Memorial in Washington DC as well as the Sacagawea dollar coin. Goodacre suffered a serious head injury last year and has endured a long, slow recovery. It was great to see her back in action!

The Santa Fe All-Stars (bluegrass/country/punk according to their MySpace site) provided the musical entertainment.

Then the Governor, First Lady, Mint Director, and Coin Commission assisted in passing out quarters to all the under-18ers.
Us over-18ers got to buy rolls of freshly minted quarters for $10.

Here's a few facts for you:

500 million New Mexico quarters were made in preparation for today's release--they will never be minted again.

The quarter was called "two bits" after the Spanish dollar (or piece of eight). The dollar was often cut into four quarters, or eight bits, making a quarter "two bits".

The state quarter program has been the most popular coin issue program in U.S. history. Mint Director Moy estimates that there are 47 million collectors of the U.S. state coins.

The New Mexico quarter is the 47th state quarter issued; and the first to contain a Native American symbol. (The Zia sun symbol is featured on the coin; see my post of March 29 for more details.)

Blossoming Boughs of April

2008-04-06T11:41:00.011-04:00

The fruit trees in my yard have blossomed this week and the skies are a beautiful blue. Happy spring!

Zia Pueblo

2008-03-29T21:27:00.012-04:00

I spent most of today at Zia Pueblo on a trip with Friends of Archaeology (a support committee for the Museum of New Mexico Office of Archaeological Studies). Zia is located about 60 miles southwest of Santa Fe, with the main village on a mesa high above the Jemez River. It is a "humble" pueblo (according to the governor, Ivan Pino, who personally welcomed our group with a moving speech). Unlike many other pueblos in this area, it does not have a casino/resort on its lands. The pueblo earns income from a pipeline which runs through pueblo lands, a gypsum mine, and through making its lands available for movie filming.

The pueblo originated the Zia sun symbol which is now used as a symbol for the state of New Mexico, and will appear on the New Mexico quarter, which is being released on April 7.

The symbol has two parts--the circle and the rays. The circle represents the sun and also the circle of life. The rays which project in the four directions, and each have four lines, represent the four directions (N, E, S, and W), the four stages of life, the four seasons, the four periods of the day, etc. Four is a sacred number for the Zia people--for example, Governor Pino told us they dance for four days at Easter.

We had a unique chance to have a guided tour with Ulysses Reid, the Cultural Preservation Coordinator for the pueblo. He took us to a site of a former pueblo which has completely melted, leaving mounds and scattered rocks where 3,500 people once lived in multi-story dwellings. The amazing thing to me was that you could walk around this area and see bits of pottery all over the ground which date from about 600 years ago. (I guess that's what happens when tourists don't scavenge the life out of a space.)

We also toured the lovely church, built in 1612, which honors Our Lady of the Assumption, and had a chance to meet a number of pueblo artists who make the beautiful Zia pottery. This pottery is red clay with a white slip, and often decorated with a bird motif--a straight-beaked, bent-legged bird. The photograph above is of the charming little pot I bought from artist E. Shije. We saw where the artists dig their clay, just outside the village, and where they gather the ash for the slip. The artist also told me that she paints the designs with brushes made out of the yucca plant.

Then we returned to the Senior Center at the pueblo where the youth group served us a wonderful lunch. (Half of our registration fee for the event went to the pueblo as a donation to their youth group's activities--the kids are saving for a trip to a youth conference this summer.)

For a different kind of Zia art, refer to my post of January 2. The illustrations therein were all done by Velino Shije Herrera (also known as Ma-Pe-Wi, or "Oriole Egg") of the Zia Pueblo.

Will San Ildefonso Women Get the Right to Vote?

2008-03-17T22:57:00.006-04:00

The illustration, "Women with Water Jars", was painted by Gilbert Atencio from the San Ildefonso Pueblo in the 1960s.

Native Americans--both men and women--were among the last group of Americans to be allowed to vote. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 declared Indians to be citizens (and therefore eligible), but state laws kept most Indians off the voting rolls for many years. New Mexico was, unhappily, the last state in the country to permit Native Americans to vote (1962).

But despite a 46-year history of voting in state and federal elections, the women of San Ildefonso Pueblo are not permitted to vote in pueblo elections.

Now that might change.

According to tribal councilman Terrance Garcia, who described the pueblo's governing processes to a reporter for an article in the February 22 Santa Fe New Mexican, "San Ildefonso is governed by a general council which includes all male tribal members over the age of 18. That council elects tribal officers and a 13-member tribal council."

Garcia goes on to say: "Most men do consult with their ladies and their women to get a clear grasp of what the pueblo needs. Hopefully, in the next few years, this pueblo will go the route of letting women vote."

Well that's just a teeny bit patronizing, isn't it? It's all about the little women behind the scenes. . . I found it astonishing in this day and age that there were still women in America who were disenfranchised in this way, and that the men of the pueblo could talk about "letting" women vote. Aren't there any women in the pueblo who just want to assert themselves to make this happen?

Santa Fe Sunset

2008-03-05T10:16:00.005-05:00

This time of the year I am usually on my way home from work during sunset. We get about 300 days of sunshine a year in New Mexico, and nearly as many beautiful sunsets. I'm still not jaded by them--had to pull over by the side of the road and take this photo earlier this week. It's something about the colors and the elongated clouds and the silhouettes and the 180 degree view. (And if you catch it right, you get a few minutes of reflected glow off the mountains in the east--so the whole world is rose-colored.)

Al Gore in a Parallel Universe (SNL)

2008-03-02T10:40:00.003-05:00

O'Keeffe & Fisk, Update

2008-02-23T16:02:00.008-05:00

Photo, entitled "Georgia O'Keeffe Hitching a Ride to Abiquiu", taken by Maria Chabot in 1944.

In November, I wrote an entry about the O'Keeffe Museum and Fisk University, and how I thought the O'Keeffe was behaving badly.

This week, the long-awaited trial took place. Prior to the trial, the judge had thrown out the tentative agreement Fisk had made with Alice Walton's new Crystal Bridges Museum which would have allowed them to share the work in return for $30 million from Walton to help the struggling college.

At the trial, lawyers for the O'Keeffe argued that Fisk lost the right to the artwork when it took the collection off display, and tried to sell it. Bill Harbison for the Museum said that Fisk had held the collection "hostage in an effort to monetize it". The Museum's position at the trial was that the entire collection (worth $100 million or more on the open market) should default to the Museum, with, as far as I can tell, no money changing hands.

Lawyers for Fisk argued that the school has been doing the best it can with its limited resources. They pointed out that O'Keeffe, while she was still alive, had allowed Fisk to retain the collection, even though she wasn't always happy with its handling of the artwork. They say they did not violate the terms of the agreement with O'Keeffe, instead seeking legal redress to determine their rights in this situation. They were unable to display the collection because they could not afford to renovate their art museum, which had deteriorated to the point that the art was in jeopardy. They have drained their endowment substantially, and this week announced they were dropping their NCAA Division III athletic programs to save $500,000.

Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle may take up to 30 days to render her verdict.

Antonio Corsi

2008-02-15T09:02:00.013-05:00

I'm digressing from Southwestern history this week to return to my Boston roots, and tell a story about a man who was very well-known in the first quarter of the 20th century, but whom very few have heard of today. He was an artist's model (and a silent-film actor towards the end of his career) who worked in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, among other cities, and was the most sought-after artist's model of the day.

Although he was Italian-born, his Roman nose and exotic looks made him able to pass as a Turk, a Mexican, an American Indian, and a variety of other ethnicities. He maintained a studio in New York City with hundreds of costumes and could show up as any character an artist could imagine.

If you live(d) in Boston, you will have seen Corsi in many different settings. For example, he was the model for the famous Appeal to the Great Spirit sculpture by Cyrus Dallin, which has stood on Huntington Avenue in front of the Museum of Fine Arts for 99 years.

He also posed for 11 of the 16 figures in John Singer Sargent's Frieze of Prophets, which is one of the murals Sargent painted in the Boston Public Library (all of which I saw for the first time on a trip back to Boston last fall).

I encountered Corsi for the first time in the pages of a family diary from 1905. I have had this diary for years, and read it through once some time ago, but I am now transcribing it (both for posterity and for a diary reading event in April in which I'm participating) and I'm annotating the text as I go. Cynthia, the young woman writer (who was 22 at the time), was living in Boston and studying at the Eric Pape School of Art. Twice she mentions a model in class by the name of Antonio Corsi.

For example, here's her post from March 20, 1905:

Raining today; went in school. Antonio Corsi posed nude this morning, costume of pirate in afternoon.

That brief sentence intrigued me! I had to look him up, and was quite amazed to discover the level of his fame, and the prodigious amount of posing he did. Here's a photo of Corsi posing for an art class at about the same time as the diary. Imagine holding that pose for hours!

Here's another famous painting for which Corsi posed, The Storm by Pierre-Auguste Cot (owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC). Corsi was 11 or 12 at the time, and posed for both the male and female figures in this painting. (Look at the calves, thighs, and feet of both characters--they are almost identical.)

When I started researching Corsi, I immediately found a website dedicated to his work. Jake Gorst, owner of Jonamac Productions, is working on a documentary on Corsi, along with an exhibition of a treasure-trove of photographs (including those appearing in this post), and a book about Corsi's career. You can learn lots more about Corsi at this site--click the Multimedia tab to see all the photographs!

New Mexico Democratic Primary

2008-02-06T12:52:00.001-05:00

Photos by Charles Rex Arbogast/AP and Jonathan Ernst/Reuters at Time.com

New Mexico was supposed to be one of the swing states in yesterday's Democratic primary, and is it ever!

As of 10 a.m. Wednesday morning, Barack was 71 votes ahead of Hillary (out of 133,565 votes counted so far), making New Mexico the only "Giga Tuesday" state that's still too close to call. 98% of the precincts are reporting, so absentee ballots and provisional ballots must now be scrutinized. At least it's not a winner-take-all primary, which means that both candidates will get approximately the same number of committed delegates--whichever way the line falls.

In addition, today's Santa Fe New Mexican reports that many polling places in New Mexico ran out of ballots yesterday, which means that some people who showed up late in the day couldn't vote, or had to go to another polling location (if they were so inclined, after a long wait in line, and if there was still time) and cast a provisional ballot. Smacks of Florida election problems, doesn't it? At about a penny a piece (OK, let's say two cents just to pad it a bit), the Democrats could have printed 15,000 extra ballots for $300--a drop in the bucket when you consider they pay the hundreds of poll workers $150 a day.

We're not even discussing the impact of the weather--swirling snow all day and treacherous walking (at least at the Santa Fe County Fairgrounds) which made even urban voting a bit more dangerous than usual, and 33 inches of snow in Chama which has garnered that community state disaster dollars, and pretty much ground things to a complete halt.

Estebán of Azemmour

2008-01-31T11:29:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca who walked across America in the 16th century. Cabeza de Vaca was one of four men who survived from the original 600 souls who populated Pánfilo de Narváez's expedition to North America in 1527.

Photo of "Estebanico el Negro" by the sculptor, John Houser, courtesy of Borderlands, El Paso Community College Local History Project

Another one of the four, the Moroccan-born Estebán (variously known as Estebanico el Negro, Estebán de Dorantes, Little Stephen, Black Stephen, and Stephen the Moor) has his own interesting history.

I had planned a post about Estebán when I finished the Cabeza de Vaca post. Only a few days after that post, I happened to see the movie National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets. I had decided to see the movie after reading in Rick Beyer's history blog about the accuracy and detail of the many historical references in the movie. (Click here to read the details.)

So imagine my surprise to find that Estebán (and by implication--though not by name--Cabeza de Vaca) were also featured in the movie, which theorizes that the city of Cíbola, as visited by Estebán, still exists in the US (though there is no evidence that Estebán ever traveled further north than New Mexico).

Estebán was born in Morocco ca. 1503, and sold into slavery to Andres de Dorantes during a devastating drought and famine in his native country in 1520-21. Dorantes treated him well, and Estebán proved himself a smart, strong, and trustworthy servant. When Dorantes joined Narváez's expedition, he brought Estebán along. During their travels through Indian country in Texas, Estebán demonstrated exceptional language and relationship skills, learning numerous Indian dialects, and impressing the natives as a friendly, trustworthy giant. Because the group were also seen as powerful medicine men, Estebán was also the recipient of two sacred gourds and an engraved copper medicine rattle from the Arbadaos tribe in Texas.

When the travelers arrived in Mexico City in 1536, Estebán became a well-known figure about town. He liked to adorn his arms and legs with bright bells and feathers, and had acquired two handsome greyhounds who accompanied him.

The Viceroy of Mexico bought Estebán from Dorantes, and appointed him as guide and interpreter to an expedition seeking the "Seven Cities of Cíbola" (or the "Seven Cities of Gold"). The myth/rumors/legend about these fabulous cities had existed since the 12th century in Spain, and had been fueled by the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions of the pueblo cities they had seen and heard about.

The priest Fray Marcos de Niza was put in charge of the expedition which departed Mexico City in 1539. Estebán went on ahead of de Niza, and sent his own advance runner, carrying his special gourds and rattle, to announce his coming.

When Estebán reached the first Zuni pueblo in New Mexico (believed to be the pueblo of Hawikuh), he believed that he had found the cities of gold (or at least that was the word he sent back to de Niza). Some have theorized that the straw mixed in the adobe glittered like gold in the clear mountain air and strong sunlight (or glowing sunset light) of New Mexico.

But Estebán was not as well received by the Zunis as he had been by tribes throughout his journeys. They may have mistrusted his symbols (unfamiliar medicine rattles), or resented his demands for turquoise and women, or been angered by his crossing a sacred cornmeal line during a tribal ceremony. Perhaps it was a combination of all three.

In any case, he and his companions were arrested and kept in a small hut near the pueblo for several days while the Zuni council members debated what to do. In the end, Estebán was killed by arrow fire.

But he lives on in history in a variety of ways: in the figure of a black giant/monster/ogre Zuni kachina named Chakwaina, as a historical black figure (the first black man in America), and in the vision of contemporary artists like John Houser of El Paso, who created the bronze shown above, or Duane Dishta, a Zuni artist, whose images of Chakwaina are also shown here.

So Santa Fe

2008-01-27T11:13:00.000-05:00

Illustration courtesy of www.doggiefun.com

About once a month I have lunch at a restaurant called Counter Culture. The name is a play on words--you order your lunch at a counter, and it's served to you in the dining room when it's ready. But the menu and the decor also support the 60s and 70s hippie manifestations of counterculture. There's a big pot-bellied stove belching fire in the corner; the tables are rough-hewn wood; there's a concrete floor and lots of brushed aluminum; seating is moderately communal; sprouts, espresso, and Thai soups appear on the menu; and service is rude to middlin'.

But my favorite "so Santa Fe" indicator is a sign on the door from the restaurant to the outside patio:

For the safety and comfort of our customers, there will be NO barking or growling dogs allowed on the front patio. Extremely mellow dogs only.

Don't you love it? First of all, they have a patio where dogs are allowed. Well--OK, you see this a lot in urban sidewalk cafés, etc. So no sign at all would have been one option--people would assume dogs were OK. But obviously other customers were affronted by badly behaved dogs (as someone who's not a dog person, I get this!) so these dogs needed to be excluded. Another option would have been a sign that said "no barking or growling dogs" or "barking or growling dogs will be asked to leave"--a more rule-oriented posting.

But the "mellow dogs only" bit is perfect--it so fits with the "counter culture" image (perhaps these dogs have taken a puff or two of the weed?) and the combination of rules, politeness, direction, indirection, and chattiness in the sign just made me laugh!

P.S. The food is excellent, and they have "Arnold Palmer"s on the menu!!

In Praise of the Sidecar, Part 1

2008-01-24T09:23:00.000-05:00

Photo courtesy of www.foodandbar.ro

I ate at Jinja in Santa Fe this week--a lovely, warm, and welcoming spot with cozy booths, upholstered bar stools, terrific food, and friendly service. According to their website, they "feature a fresh, inventive Asian menu and a bar that will transport you to the tropics with vintage drinks of the 1930s and 40s." I was delighted to see that on their drink menu they were featuring:

Sidecar 7.95
Created at the Ritz in Paris during WWI when a regular customer arrived on his motorcycle, replete with sidecar, and asked the bartender for a cocktail that would take off the chill, this celebrated cocktail blends brandy, triple sec and fresh lemon & lime juice.

When the drink arrived it was just about perfect, and got me thinking about sidecars and my history with, and appreciation of, this truly excellent cocktail.....

When I was in college I probably drank what you drank in college--beer, wine, and frat party mystery punch. When I turned 21, and was presented with the rare opportunity to order a drink in a bar or restaurant setting, I would request a scotch on the rocks with a twist. I didn't really like it (was alcohol supposed to taste good?) but it seemed like a sophisticated and grown-up drink.

The summer after I graduated from college I got a job working in a Cape Cod seafood restaurant, and learned about cocktails from a knowledgeable bartender there. I was particularly intrigued by gin alexanders, bloody mary's, and, in particular, the sidecar, which has become my favorite cocktail.

There was a long wine-dominated period in the 80s when I had to explain to bartenders how to make them, so I developed a business card that had the recipe on the front and a rating scheme on the back. If I had to tell the bartender how to make it, I gave them the recipe:

SIDECAR: A CLASSIC COCKTAIL
BRANDY * TRIPLE SEC * SOUR MIX
SHAKEN WITH ICE
SUGARED RIM
SLICE OF LIME

If I didn't have to explain, then I scored the drink on the rating side, and presented my rating to the bartender.

SIDECAR SCORECARD
TASTE (0-2) ____ QUANTITY (0-2) ____ SUGAR RIM (0-2) ____
ICE (0-1) ____ COLOR (0-1) ____ GLASS (0-1) ____ LIME (0-1) ____
TOTAL: _____ OUT OF A PERFECT 10!
EVALUATED BY _________________________ ___/___/___

Let me explain my criteria.

Taste goes without saying--and here the dominant factor is the quality of the sour mix. There are some commercial mixes that are very tinny-tasting or have an unpleasant chemical after-taste, or are too sweet or too sour. There are some other good commercial mixes, but the best is when a bar makes its own with fresh lemon and lime juice, sugar, and water.

Quantity needs to be adequate--a drink you can finish in a few sips just isn't satisfying.

Sugared rim: I often have to remind the bartender about this. The best drink has a slightly sour tang offset by the sugared rim. And I love working my way around the glass, drinking a bit from each part of the rim--when the drink and the sugar run out at once, that's perfect!

Ice: I like my sidecars on the rocks and I like the ice cubes to be big. When the ice cubes are too small, they dilute the drink too fast. Don't shake the drink and then just dump it ice and all into the cocktail glass! Shake it with ice, then strain it onto fresh cubes.

Color: Usually a gauge of whether there's enough (or too much--though this doesn't happen often!) brandy in the drink. Should be a warm golden color.

Glass: Double rocks glass is the right size. Have been served this drink in a variety of different glasses, and I prefer an interesting glass with a flat bottom. Please don't serve it in a highball glass or a brandy snifter!

Lime: I like a fresh large wedge of lime--not those 1/64th size pieces they serve on airlines (did you know you could cut a lime that small?) and not something that's been dried out sitting on the bar for the last week.

Jinja's sidecar got a score of 9 in my book--pretty good! Their only failing was a maraschino cherry on a plastic stick in lieu of the lime wedge.

In a later post I'll talk more about history (you knew I'd get to history eventually!)--both the sidecar's and mine.....

Chile/i in New Mexico

2008-01-19T13:02:00.000-05:00

Photo courtesy of the Hatch, New Mexico website

The peppers in New Mexico are chile peppers (with an "e"); the semi-official state question is "Red or green?" (The bill designating this as the official state question was passed by the NM legislature some years ago, but vetoed by former Governor Gary Johnson as "lacking merit".) If you can't decide, you order "Christmas" (a mix of red and green).

The dish (with beans, meat, tomatoes, etc.) is chili, though it's much more popular in Texas (where it is the official state dish--do you think the state legislatures might have better things to think about?) than it is in New Mexico. (However, the last words of Kit Carson, who spent much of his adult life in New Mexico, are reputed to have been: "Wish I had time for just one more bowl of chili.")

I've been a chili lover my whole life (it was a favorite recipe of my Anglo-Irish mother)--and love to try different versions of the dish (different meats, with or without tomatoes, different kinds of beans, etc.).

Just came across a wonderful poem by New Mexico poet Simon Ortiz, who hails from the Acoma Pueblo. Here's about half of the poem to give you the flavor (so to speak):

How to make a good chili stew--
this one on July 16, a Saturday,
Indian 1971

It's better to do it outside
or at sheepcamp
or during a two or three day campout.
In this case, we'll settle
for Hesperus, Colorado
and a Coleman stove.
Ingredients
Chili (Red, frozen, powdered, or dry pods. In this case,
just powdered because that's all I have.)
Beef (In this case, beef which someone who works in a
restaurant in Durango brought this morning,
leftovers, trim fat off and give some to the dog
because he's a good guy. His name is Rex.)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Onion (In this case, I don't have any, but if you do have
some around, include it with much blessings.)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Directions
Put chile and some water into a saucepan with bullion,
garlic which is diced, and salt and pepper and onion
which I don't have and won't mention anymore because
I miss it and you shouldn't ever be anyplace without it,
I don't care where.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In the meantime, you can cut the meat (which, in this case,
I should mention, was meant for Rex the dog but since
it was left over from just last night and it's not bad--
I know 'cause I tasted it--that's alright, but if you
can afford it, cut the lean meat) into less than inch
pieces and you don't have to measure, just cut it so
it looks like cut meat.
Make sure you smell the chili in the saucepan once in a
while and think of a song to go along with it.
That's important.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Smelling and watching are important things, and you really
shouldn't worry too much about it--I don't care
what Julia Child says--but you should pay the utmost
attention to everything, and that means the earth,
clouds, sounds, the wind. All these go into the cooking.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Further Directions to Make Sure It's Good
Don't forget about the chili.
Look all around you once in a while. (In this case,
the La Plata Mountains in southern Colorado. It's
going to rain soon on them and maybe here too
if we're lucky.)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Waiting For It To Get Done
Oh, maybe about two hours for the chili to simmer
and then put in the hominy and cover with water
and simmercook for another two hours.
It's also good to have someone along,
and in case they don't know how too good
you can teach them, slowly and surely,
until they're expert. It will take more than
one time but that's okay and much better.
It's best to do anytime.
At Last
Well, my friends, that's all there is to it,
for the chili stew part, but as you well know
there is more than that too. So good luck.
And you can eat now.

Brrrrrrrr!

2008-01-18T11:22:00.001-05:00

It's very cold here in Santa Fe--down to near zero degrees the last two nights. Things are looking up for the daytime though--temps may actually rise to 32 today!

But there are little buds on the trees--just noticed them when I went outside this morning to take the picture for this post. It's possible that spring may come again! (Don't you love the way the snow looks blue in the cold shade in my front yard? The backyard is much sunnier and cheerier, but doesn't look as COLD!)

Cow's H.

2008-01-07T10:01:00.000-05:00

Since I moved to Santa Fe, I've noticed there are a lot of people here with an unusual last name: CDeBaca. Sometimes there's a period or an apostrophe or a space after the C--and sometimes not. Capitalization of individual letters also varies.

A little research yielded the information that CDeBaca was originally Cabeza de Vaca. Over time in this country the Vaca became Baca, and the Cabeza was shortened to C. (The most common current version of the name is simply Baca.)

A little more digging led me to the story of Martin Alhaja, a shepherd who had played a pivotal role in a battle that Spain undertook against the Moors in 1212. Alhaja offered to show the Spaniards a path that would circumvent the mountain passes held by the Moors, and used a cow's skull to mark the trail. As a reward for his service, he was given a noble title, and took the name Cabeza de Vaca (cow's head).

Three hundred years later, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, by this time a member of a well-established noble family in Seville, sailed for North America as an officer and second in command under Pánfilo de Narváez in 1527. Their group of 600 (which included 10 women and a handful of African slaves) manned a number of ships, but the fleet was destroyed off the coast of Cuba. After finding a new ship, Narváez sailed to the Tampa Bay area in Florida, and claimed it for the Spanish crown. He divided his forces into two--a land and a sea expedition. Both Narváez and Cabeza de Vaca were part of the land contingent--the sea forces were never heard from again.

Lost and starving, the land forces were sheltered for a time by the Apalachee Indians of North Florida. After being chased away by the Indians, they lived in a coastal swamp for a period, and were reduced to eating their horses while they constructed five barges. They began their travel hugging the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, but were once again struck by a hurricane. By this time, the size of the force had dwindled to about 80. Narváez and some of his men eventually headed back out to sea and disappeared.

Cabeza de Vaca and the few men left with him struggled to stay alive on the Gulf Coast, near where Galveston is today. According to Southwest Crossroads, "Indian groups variously befriended, fed, killed, and enslaved the Conquistadors." During this period, most of the party died of Indian attack, illness, and starvation.

During his six years of slavery, Cabeza de Vaca and also his companions, began to be seen as powerful medicine men. He had a little knowledge of medicine from his Spanish education, and he was also a faith-healer, employing indigenous remedies with Christian religious ceremonials. Apparently, he honed his medical skills over the time he spent in Texas, and actually developed and refined real surgical procedures like making incisions to pull out arrowheads and giving stitches.

Eventually, Cabeza de Vaca and his three surviving companions (two Spaniards and a Moroccan slave named Estebán) escaped, and resolved to walk west and south until they reached the Spanish Empire's outpost in Mexico.

They survived in part by trading, and in part because of their reputation as healers. On their journey they were often accompanied by hundreds of Indian guides and well-wishers; according to various analysts Cabeza de Vaca appeared to have been unusually sensitive to the Indian tribe members, and an advocate for their humanity--he is said to have prevented a number of them from being captured by a slave-taking expedition when they first entered Mexico.

Nine years after that first Cuba shipwreck, in 1536, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions walked into Culiacán, in Sinaloa, Mexico.

From there he was able to travel to Mexico City, and return to Spain, where he wrote an account of his adventures originally entitled La Relación, and now known as Náufragos. (The latter title translates to "The Shipwrecked".) The work was published in 1542, by which time Cabeza de Vaca had already left for the New World again, where he had been awarded the position of Governor of the settlements on the La Plata river (an area in present-day Paraguay and Argentina).

Apparently, he was a much less successful governor than he was an explorer/survivor, and a revolt against him led to his return to Spain as a prisoner. He was convicted of the charges, but finally pardoned, and occupied an honorable and lucrative position (possibly as a judge) until his death ca. 1557. He wrote a second book on his career in South America called Comentarios which was published in 1555. His books are valuable for their first-person history of Spanish colonization, and his observations (in the first book) of the customs and manners of North American Indians. (In Texas alone, Cabeza de Vaca named and located 23 Indian groups and their clothes, language, eating habits, rituals, homes, and migrations. )

More recently, the local Cabeza de Bacas are descended from Luis María Cabeza de Baca, who was born in Santa Fe in 1753, and fathered somewhere between 15-29 children with three wives. (The latter number probably includes a number of children who were stillborn or died in infancy.)

Some claim that Luis María was a direct descendant from Alvar Nuñez, though others feel there is not enough evidence to support that claim. It is still generally assumed, however, that all of the C deBacas and Bacas originated from the Spanish noble family named for their sheepherding ancestor.

Ezequiel C De Baca (1864-1917) was elected the first Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico in 1911, and became governor on January 1, 1917, but died the following month.

A perusal of the Santa Fe phone book yields the number of local residents with some version of this name:

BACA 148
CDEBACA 31
C'DEBACA 11
C DE BACA 7
DEBACA 5
CDEVACA 3
CDE BACA 3
CABEZA-DE-VACA 1
C' DE BACA 1
DE BACA 1
DE VACA 1
VACA 1

Illustration Credits and References

The painting of the young Cabeza de Vaca and the map are courtesy of the American School of Lima web site.

The surgical illustration is entitled Cabeza de Vaca Performing the First Recorded Surgical Operation on the North American Continent by Tom Lea; courtesy of the Moody Medical Library, The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

The 5 peseta stamp was issued by Spain in 1960, on the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Florida by the Spanish.

Sources used for this post include:

Research from the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University; if you're interested in more detail on Cabeza de Vaca's North American adventures, the two research articles included here are very thorough.

A review, in the California Literary Review, of a new book about Cabeza de Vaca by Andrés Reséndez entitled: A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza De Vaca : The Extraordinary Tale of a Shipwrecked Spaniard Who Walked Across America in the Sixteenth Century.

Southwest Crossroads, a site discussing cultures and histories of the American Southwest

The Sharlot Hall Museum, a museum of human and natural history in Prescott, Arizona

The University of New Mexico's e-library

The Catholic Encyclopedia

The Deer and the Antelope Play

2008-01-02T12:30:00.001-05:00

(Not to Mention the Buffalo and Eagles)

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, armed with lots of warm clothing and earnest instructions on behavior (No applause! No asking questions! No photographs!) we visited three Indian Pueblos to watch ceremonial dances. It is truly phenomenal that these dances have been going on in much the same place and the same way for hundreds of years.

Because of the season, the Pueblo dancing in December is typically animal-based (most harvest dances take place when things are still growing). Originally, the dances were part of a winter solstice celebration, but the Spaniards forced the Indians to integrate the dancing (when they still allowed it) with the sanctioned Christian holidays.

We saw buffalo dances at Laguna, Jemez, and Santa Ana; eagle dances at Laguna and Jemez; deer dances at Jemez and Santa Ana; and an antelope dance at Santa Ana. We also saw a corn dance at Laguna.

First, let me describe the settings.

As mentioned in the the previous post, the Laguna dancing was held inside the 400-year old San José Mission Church, immediately after midnight Mass. The pews had been moved out of the right side of the church, leaving a small but adequate space for dancing on the hard-packed mud and straw floor. It was easy to imagine the setting looking much the same in 1699, except that the brown-robed Franciscan was probably not sitting watchfully at the side of the altar. Parishioners sat in the pews on the left side, and in the choir loft. Some older teens and young adults stood outside the front doors of the church smoking--just out of sight of their parents and grandparents inside.

Dances were performed sequentially--with 8-10 drummers setting up shop first, who were then joined by about 10 corn dancers. When the corn dance was finished, all left and the drummers returned with the buffalo dancers (two buffalo, a maiden "buffalo mother", and a hunter). After the buffalo dancers exited, the eagle dancers (two adult men and two young boys) arrived. During part of this time I was upstairs in the choir loft, and the big window overlooking the front of the church was the site of much excited murmuring of "Here they come!", as they watched and waited for new groups of dancers--much like children waiting and watching for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

At Jemez, we were told that the Christmas Day dancing started at 8 or 9 in the morning, and went on non-stop until mid-afternoon. It was certainly continuous the whole time we were there (roughly 10-11:30 a.m.). Unlike the sequencing at Laguna (which may have been attributed to the confines of the church space), all of the dancers were dancing at once--buffalo, eagle, and deer. The dancing took place in a dirt plaza surrounded by adobe village homes. This was quite a large space--maybe the length of a football field, though much narrower. The drumming cadre consisted of about 30 men, three-deep--the front row of men drummed and chanted, and from time to time would pass the position and drum to one of the other men in the group.

Here again, the buffalo dance included two buffalo and a buffalo mother, but there were many deer and eagle dancers--both adult males and children of both sexes (though the little girls' costumes were much less lavish). The resident non-dancers had set up their folding chairs in front of homes along the long sides of the space--quite a lot of the chairs were empty, and I'm assuming that people came and went during the dancing, which goes on for three days at the Christmas holidays.

At Santa Ana, the setting was similar but the space was squarer. Again, the residents had set up chairs, though not as many, and some sat on benches in front of homes. Here again the dancing was going on when we arrived, with buffalo, deer, and antelope dancers and a large group of drummers and chanters which included both men and women. The buffalo dance was in the same configuration as the other two pueblos, and there were about 20 deer and antelope dancers--adult and older teen males. There was also a time when all the dancers and drummers left for 20 minutes or more--we were just about to leave when they returned and started dancing again.

The Buffalo Dance

The buffalo dancers all wore realistic buffalo headdresses and black body paint (probably why the Indians referred to the African-American regiments in the Civil War as "buffalo soldiers"). At Jemez, the buffalo dancers had black chests but red forearms, faces, and legs.

The "buffalo mother" (whose ceremonial job it is to drive the buffalo down from the hills so they can be killed) was attired in white--wearing her hair long and loose at two pueblos, and a complex feather headdress at the third. Buffalo dancing is often accompanied by Indians wearing plains Indian headdresses (what you will immediately conjure up mentally if you think of an Indian chief headdress from the cowboy and Indian movies of your childhood). These feather headdresses are not typically worn by Pueblo Indians, but since the New Mexico Indians had to travel to the plains to find buffalo, they often encountered Plains Indians en route.

The Deer and the Antelope Dance

As in the illustration above, the deer dancers (and also the antelope dancers) use short sticks in their hands to simulate the four-legged animals. Here the attire was very different in the two dances we saw.

At Jemez, the dancers wore evergreen headdresses and embroidered kilts--much like the illustration. The kilts were white with blue or green patterns--some (especially those of the young boys) looked to be of a pre-printed material, but most were embroidered or made of pieced fabric--some cotton, some wool, some felt. They wore turquoise-colored deer heads with antlers, and turquiose arm bands.

At Santa Ana, the deer and antelope dancers wore ceremonial clothing realistically depicting deer and antelope--what looked like simulated hides, worn almost like body suits over white thermal underwear.

The Eagle Dance

The eagle dancers at Laguna were attired in feathers and headdresses much like that in the illustration. They wore black pants and shirts, and were accompanied by young girls representing butterflies. One of the images that really stayed with me was that of a young boy--maybe 8 or 9 years old, carefully executing his dance with one luminous dark eye glued to the adult dancing next to him--moving his wings and head carefully to achieve the desired result.

At Jemez, the eagle dancers wore white kilts with red and black decoration. Their torsos were painted black, and their wings and headdresses were much less lavish than those at Laguna.

And Later. . .

After the dancing we had dinner at the Hyatt Tamaya Hotel on the Santa Ana Pueblo--quite a modern contrast to the ancient village traditions we had just observed!
Photo courtesy of www.hyatt.com

Illustration Credits

The illustrations are all by Velino Shije Herrera (also known as Ma-Pe-Wi, or "Oriole Egg"). He was born at Zia Pueblo in 1902, and educated at the Santa Fe Indian School. During the Depression, he was employed by the School of American Research in Santa Fe to depict his people's customs and traditions. His work appears in major collections in Phoenix, Santa Fe, and Tulsa.

The drawing at the top of this post was taken from a series of elementary school readers in English, sometimes Spanish, and Native American languages that was produced for Pueblo, Navajo, Sioux, and Hopi students in the 1930s by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It appeared in a book entitled The Young Hunter of Picuris.

Note the art deco bottom border in the eagle dance illustration--another interesting culture combo!

Pueblo Christmas Eve

2007-12-30T10:16:00.001-05:00

On Christmas Eve, I was privileged to attend midnight Mass at the San José Mission Church at the Laguna Pueblo, about 100 miles southwest of Santa Fe. The church was built in 1699 and is a beautifully-preserved gem. When the Indians drove the Spanish out of the New Mexico territory in 1680, they burned the churches erected by the invaders. So this was one of the first mission churches built when the Spanish returned in 1692. The photograph above, courtesy of the New Mexico Department of Tourism, shows the striking white church against the late afternoon sky.

Upon our arrival, a little before 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the rooflines, tops of the walls, etc. were filled with farolitos--brown paper lunch bags with sand and votive candles inside, the flames flickering in the cold night air. [1] We weren't allowed to take photographs anywhere on Pueblo lands, so here is a Santa Fe photo that shows what the farolitos looked like--you'll have to image them superimposed on the church image! [2]

We had been told that we would be invited to enter the church at 9:55 p.m., after all the Pueblo parishioners were seated, and that we might have to stand, and we might be outside. We were all long-underweared for the occasion, but when the priest came out to invite us in we found that they had generously saved seats for our group.

It is hard to do justice to the interior of the church without photographs. It is quite small, probably seating about 125-150. The interior walls are adobe with centuries of whitewash rendering them creamy and soft-angled. The ceiling features exposed, closely-positioned, hand-carved beams (known as vigas). There are no windows that I recall, except for one big one in the choir loft (visible in the photo in the front of the church). The stations of the cross adorn the walls as they do in most Catholic churches. Old wooden pews are arranged on the hardened mud and straw floor. Running above the pews and below the stations is a continuous border, larger than the small, wooden stations, painted in an Indian pattern in reds, taupes, golds, and other earth colors.

Behind the altar is a huge image of San José (St. Joseph, Jesus' stepfather) holding the infant Jesus. It's flanked by rough-carved turned columns with the turnings alternately painted red and green. The tabernacle is covered with a wooden board, hand-painted in a folk-art style--also in red and green. Below the altar is the Christmas creche.

The altar linens are white with red and green Indian embroidery all around the edges. The chalices and communion bread bowls are Laguna pottery, primarily white with a red and black design, similar to that in the photo below. [3]

All around the church are small figures of saints painted and dressed as either Pueblo or Colonial Spanish figures. The Virgin of Guadalupe is featured one large panel.

The Catholic Mass was like Catholic Mass in most US churches, but the beautiful, ancient setting made it a unique experience. While the (Anglo) priest used a brass censer for the burning incense, he used a Pueblo pottery bowl with a small branch of evergreen to disperse holy water. Also unique was the end of the sermon where the priest talked about the fact that Catholics still accepted and listened to the Old Testament, while celebrating the New Testament, and that Pueblo Indians still accepted and practiced their old traditional ways while practicing Catholicism. (Which, if you're counting, they have been practicing, in one way or another for 400 years--it's hard to consider them newcomers to the religion!)

At the end of Mass, the choir sang Feliz Navidad (OK--that's Pueblo culture, Hispanic culture, modern Western culture, and rock'n roll--all at once....). Then the priest came down from the altar and asked that all the able-bodied men (and any able-bodied women who wanted to volunteer) move the pews from the right side of the church out into the courtyard.

At about 11:30 p.m. the drummers entered the church and the ceremonial dancing started. We stayed for about an hour and a half; dancing was still going on when we left. Pueblo holiday dances (at Laguna, and at Jemez and Santa Ana on Christmas Day) will get their own post on this site in a few days.

Illustration Credits and References

[1] The Spanish word farolito means "little lantern". Originally, these lanterns were brought by the Spanish from the Philippines, but the flimsy paper didn't survive well in this climate. When the paper bag was invented in the Boston area, and brought to Santa Fe in the 19th century via the Santa Fe Trail, the locals adopted them for the farolito displays, and a new tradition was born. (These lanterns, for some reason, are referred to as luminarias in the rest of the state--e.g. in Albuquerque. Santa Feans use that term to describe the little bonfires that are also part of the local Christmas tradition.)

[2] Photo courtesy of Martin Wright's Santa Fe Real Estate site.

[3] This photograph is courtesy of the Frank H. McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee, from a 1997 exhibit entitled Singing the Clay. According to the exhibit catalog, "one potentially distinguishing characteristic of Laguna pottery is the use of comparatively large painted designs that interlock and completely encircle the vessel."

River of Lights

2007-12-27T17:26:00.001-05:00

For the past ten years, the Rio Grande Botanic Garden in Albuquerque has been the site of the "River of Lights", a holiday-themed display of lights open to the public in the evenings from Thanksgiving to December 30. A few days before Christmas I visited the site, and although it was quite cold (20-ish?), we spent two happy hours wandering around the curving walkways, greenhouse, and water features, viewing the hundreds of thousands of lights, multiple toy train sets, and various singing groups.

Proceeds from the admission fee go to fund the BioVan, an educational outreach program that visits the Albuquerque elementary schools and teaches kids about the Rio Grande, and the plants and animals that form part of its ecology.

I took all these photos at night, without flash--the light and color of the displays is phenomenal, and the photos don't quite do the experience justice, but you get the idea!

Happy Holidays from New Mexico!

2007-12-18T21:10:00.000-05:00

Every year during the month of December, the New Mexico Governor's Mansion opens its doors for a series of holiday open houses. Located about 15 minutes from the "Roundhouse" (New Mexico's capitol building in Santa Fe), the Mansion is home to presidential candidate (and governor when he's in town) Bill Richardson and his wife.

According to our tour guide, the 10,000 square foot residence reserves about 4,000 square feet for the first family, and the same amount for its public rooms. The remaining 2,000 square feet is dedicated to the security staff and equipment. The property includes a stable, a tennis court, and extensive grounds.

When we arrived at the Mansion, we were welcomed by the greeter, entertained by musicians, and served hot cider and bizcochitos. We did not see ALL of the public spaces, but we did get a look at the beautiful living room, dining room, and study, which were decorated for the holidays to rival any Junior League Show House! A feature of the living room decor was a guitar signed by the Eagles--apparently Richardson is a big Eagles fan. (We're talking the band here, not the football team....)

So Bill and I wish you a happy holiday season from New Mexico!

Women of the West, Part 3

2007-12-09T11:45:00.000-05:00

A brief mention of Maria Gertrudis Barceló (aka "La Tules") in Andy Lovato's Santa Fe Hispanic Culture, one of the texts for the class in the American Southwest that I took this fall, inspired me to find out a bit more about her.

According to Lovato, "Tules" is an affectionate diminutive of Gertudis. La Tules was born in Sonora, Mexico in 1800, and moved into the New Mexican territory as a child with her younger sister and widowed mother. She married Manuel Antonio Sisneros of Tomé in 1823, and in 1825 moved with him to a mining camp near Santa Fe. She started a gambling house and saloon at the camp, which she later relocated to West Palace Avenue, at the corner of Burro Alley, in Santa Fe. According to contemporaneous sources, the "Sala" was an opulent and popular facility, and Doña Tules (the Spanish equivalent of "Miss Trudy") was a renowned Monte dealer. She amassed a fortune from her business dealings during the 1830s and 1840s, which included trade deals and investments in addition to her income from gambling.

She was described as charming, beautiful, fashionable, shrewd, witty, and brilliant. She was also politically influential--during the 1840s she was a close friend (and probably mistress) of Manuel Armijo--the last Mexican governor of New Mexico.

Doña Tules, like a number of other New Mexicans, sided with the Americans when the US declared war on Mexico in 1846. She loaned money to Gen. Kearny to help him meet his payroll, supposedly in return for receiving a military escort to the Victoria Ball at the La Fonda Hotel. She also apparently alerted US authorities to a Mexican/Indian conspiracy in late 1846/early 1847. Her "Sala" undoubtedly provided a cultural bridge between the Americanos and the Nuevomexicanos, and she certainly was repaid her loan to the Army by the gambling losses of American troops!

La Tules died in 1852, leaving three houses, livestock, and cash to various family members, as well as money to the Church and city officials to be used for charitable purposes.

A highly fictionalized and romanticized account of her life is the subject of Ruth Laughlin's 1948 novel, The Wind Leaves No Shadow. The true history is harder to find! In an 1950 article in El Palacio, the historian Fray Angélico Chávez set out to find out the truth about her, which he reported as "new but not sensational." According to Chávez, her fellow Santa Feans (including church and community leaders) were tolerant and accepted her for her good deeds and status in the community. According to Chávez, "to the Latin there was nothing in the law of nature or in the scriptures that labeled tobacco, liquor, or gambling as sins in themselves. . . These activities were pleasant forms of recreation and relaxation and of social well-being."

Note on 12/13/07: A recent biography by Mary J. Straw Cook, Doña Tules: Santa Fe's Courtesan and Gambler, a book I discovered after my original post on this topic, may shed some more light on this fascinating figure.

Illustration Credits

The black and white engraving above of La Tules smoking a cigarrito (powdered tobacco rolled in pieces of corn husk--with all the materials carried in a pouch at the waist) was made in 1854, two years after her death, for Harper's Weekly.

The illustration of La Tules dealing cards at her gambling house was done by Bill Hughes for New Mexico Magazine in 1971. Here he depicts his subject as she was described by Susan Shelby Magoffin in 1846, "a stately dame of a certain age, the possessor of . . . that shrewd sense and fascinating manner necessary to allure the wayward, inexperienced youth to the hall of final ruin."

The illustration at the top of this post is a more recent one by Diana Bryer, commissioned by La Herencia, a magazine of New Mexican heritage and history. Bryer says of her subject: "She was the wealthiest woman in the Territory, a successful business owner, . . . an emancipated woman and a role model for others, although the easterners who came to Santa Fe judged her by their own puritanical standards. I decided to portray her with a cigarette in her mouth because at that time smoking was a symbol of liberation for women. I tried to be as accurate and historically correct as possible in depicting the furnishings and clothing from the era, since Doña Tules set a fashion trend that was admired by many local women, and may well have contributed to the 'Santa Fe Style' still popular today. . . . Her shawl is from Spain circa 1822; at her side is her reputed lover and confidant, Governor Manuel Armijo. Also standing next to her is Padre Felipe Ortiz, the Vicar of Santa Fe. . . . Sitting on either side of the table are an eastern trader and a Native American trapper."

What is the O'Keeffe Museum Thinking?

2007-11-29T09:17:00.000-05:00

Photo courtesy of Fisk University

This is a tale of what I consider to be very bad behavior by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.

The History

In 1949, Georgia O'Keeffe divided the art estate of her late husband Alfred Stieglitz among a number of institutions. One of the recipients was Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee. The school received 101 paintings from O'Keeffe including her own Radiator Building--Night, New York, painted in 1927, and a number of other valuable works.

Like many small private colleges, Fisk has struggled financially in recent years. Protection and display of the valuable art collection was always an issue--O'Keeffe paid to send the entire collection sent to New York for restoration in the 1970s, and before her death donated tens of thousands of dollars for maintenance of Fisk's Van Vechten Gallery and the donated works.

But the gallery was a building constructed in 1888 and formerly used as a gymnasium; the college was no longer able to guarantee protection of the works there and the paintings were put in storage at the Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville in November 2005.

The following month, Fisk sought to sell Radiator Building, its most valuable painting, along with Painting No. 3 by Marsden Hartley. The sale of these two works would, the college believed, allow it construct a new science building, make needed campus repairs, replenish its hemorrhaging endowment, and appropriately protect and display the other 99 pieces of art, which include works by Picasso, Renoir, and others.

Listen to the details in this 2005 NPR story.

The Dog in the Manger

Shortly afterwards, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe stepped on stage in this deal. The Museum got involved by virtue of the dissolution of the O'Keeffe Foundation in May 2005; the Foundation turned over all its assets to the Museum and asked that the Museum "step into its shoes" to protect the Stieglitz gift to Fisk. So the Museum started legal action to block the sale of the paintings, stating that Fisk was violating the terms of O'Keeffe's gift to the school.

And the Attorney General of Tennessee also became a party to this deal, representing the people of Tennessee, for whom these works were characterized as a cultural asset.

Christie's had appraised the O'Keeffe for $8.5 million in 2005, and the O'Keeffe Museum offered Fisk $7 million for the painting. A Tennessee judge gave the school 30 days to see if they could get a better offer that would allow them to keep the work in Tennessee. The judge eventually nixed the deal with the O'Keeffe Museum in April 2007. Several offers of $20 million or more had been received for the painting at this point, although none met the "undisclosed requirements negotiated between the university and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum." But clearly $7 million was not a good deal for Fisk and Tennessee.

By August of this year, the Museum had agreed to drop the lawsuit, buy Radiator Building for $7.5 million, and give Fisk "permission" (how does that work?!?) to sell the Hartley on the open market. The Museum also agreed that if they sold the O'Keeffe within 20 years they would give Fisk half of any profits (wow--what generosity! And how do they get to sell it if they won't let Fisk sell it?), that they would lend the painting back to Fisk for 4 months every 4 years, and give them a high quality reproduction to use in the meantime. In wonderful lawyer-speak, the Fisk attorney noted that this was "not a sale--just a lawsuit settlement".

Alice in Museumland

Photo courtesy of Marshall/Star Telegram/SIPA

But while the settlement agreement was pending, Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton offered Fisk a new deal. She would give them $30 million for a 50% stake in the entire collection. The works would be displayed half-time in the new Crystal Bridges museum she is building in Bentonville, Arkansas, and at Fisk the other half. The terms of the offer would also include $1 million for Fisk to renovate and upgrade their art gallery, as well as an art internship for a Fisk student. This seemed to me to be a real win-win offer--Fisk would get the money they needed, the paintings would stay in the South, the collection would be kept intact, and Fisk and the citizens of Nashville would have access to the paintings half the time. (This is in contrast to no access, which is the current state of affairs, since the paintings are in storage and not on display.)

With the Walton offer on the table, a Nashville judge vetoed the O'Keeffe Museum offer as detrimental to the interests of the people of Tennessee.

You Go, Hazel!

Photo courtesy of US Department of Energy

In October, the O'Keeffe Museum asked that the Tennessee judge block the deal with Walton. This was clearly not good news for Fisk. According to a 10/17/07 New York Times article by Theo Emery, "Fisk's president, Hazel O'Leary, said the university was being 'held hostage' by the litigation. 'Their intention is to bleed us to death,' she said. 'They know that time is not on our side here.'"

The O'Keeffe Museum now wanted (are you ready for this?) the entire collection removed from Fisk's control and sent to New Mexico.

WWGD?

1950 photograph by Carl Van Vechten, for whom the Fisk art gallery is named.

So what would Georgia O'Keeffe do? This seems to be at the heart of the various legal arguments. A trial is scheduled for February to decide whether Fisk's agreement to share the collection with Walton's Crystal Bridges (which is scheduled to open in 2009) is close enough to O'Keeffe's wishes to be approved.

On Tuesday of this week, Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen weighed in on the issue. According to an article in the Tennessean, he is quoted as saying: "As a businessperson, I would be very concerned at the deal Fisk has cut with the museum in Arkansas." Bredesen says that estimates from art experts and insurers indicate the collection "could easily be worth $150 million. And $30 million for half of it is not a very good deal."

Crystal Bridges executive director Bob Workman says the price reflects the restrictions placed on the collection by O'Keeffe. "This is a creative, long-term way to satisfy Ms. O'Keeffe's demand that the collection remain intact, to provide needed funds for Fisk University and to keep this historic collection in the public domain."

Amen to that, I say. Fisk says that they may have to close in 2008 if the deal is not approved. They have mortgaged all of their buildings and other loan options have been exhausted.

Imagine how much money has been spent by lawyers on this case over the past two years--probably enough to keep Fisk open for a number of years to come. And it is hard for me to imagine that Georgia O'Keeffe would have wanted Fisk to close, or would have approved her namesake museum's attempt to hijack the work(s). In a 1949 article in the New York Times at the time of the original bequests from Stieglitz's estate, she stated that "after 25 years, the (pictures) can be sold if the institutions have no further use for them." What's not clear about that?

First Snow of the Season

2007-11-23T16:38:00.001-05:00

Woke up this morning to see grey skies and several inches of snow on the ground. The temperature has been just about 30 degrees all day--with on and off spitting snow.

This shot was taken from my living room through my brand new sliding glass doors with incredibly clear new glass!

Movie Update

2007-11-14T09:38:00.000-05:00

I've had lots of hits on this blog with folks looking for information on Renée Zellweger and the filming of Appaloosa in Santa Fe. After my first post on this subject, I did not have any personal encounters with this movie, or anything to post that wasn't already covered in the Santa Fe New Mexican. According to that publication, Santa Fe filming wrapped up last week, and Renée (according to folks who encountered her) was lovely, friendly, and a generous tipper during her stay in Santa Fe.

This week's report concerns the local filming of Brothers, which, according to the New Mexican (clearly my favorite source for local movie news!), is "a remake of a Danish flick featuring 'a man who is sent to fight in Afghanistan while his black-sheep brother cares for his wife and child.'" Sound stage work is taking place on campus at the Garson Studios, shown above.

Purportedly, the trailers shown in the photo below are the (drumroll, please) ACTUAL TRAILERS where the stars (Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Natalie Portman) hang out when they're not on set. No actual star sightings yet, but the campus is abuzz!

Labyrinth

2007-11-12T10:56:00.000-05:00

Labyrinths are very popular in Santa Fe; I had never walked a labyrinth before I came here (if you don't count playing "jellyroll" hopscotch!) and I have walked four in the year and a half since I arrived. There is one in front of St. Francis Cathedral that is laid in cut stone in the style of the one at Chartres--that's next on my list!

(Click here if you want to learn about the difference between a labyrinth and a maze.)

Yesterday I was invited to attend a celebration of a new labyrinth in my friend Susannah's yard. After we were "smudged" with the scent of burning herbs, and had seen the labyrinth blessed by a local celebrant, my friend Elaine led us through the walk. There are 7 circuits in Susannah's labyrinth--it's a Celtic pattern. Each circuit has been laid with a different color of natural stone to loosely correspond to the red-violet spectrum, with pink stone in the center.

It was a beautiful afternoon; we finished with a potluck supper in the late day sun.

Allan Houser, Sculptor

2007-11-10T15:54:00.000-05:00

Last month I was lucky enough to go with a group on a private guided tour of the Allan Houser Compound and Sculpture Garden, just outside Santa Fe. On the grounds there is a museum/gallery, a bronze foundry, meeting rooms, the home where Houser's elderly widow still resides, and many trails with the beautiful sculptures (largely of Native American figures) created by Allan Houser.

There are only a few "open to visitors" days each year, but guided tours are available to groups by appointment--if you're in, or near Santa Fe, I highly recommend this visit; go to the Allan Houser website for more information. Our wonderful guide gave us a word portrait of Houser's life which was extremely evocative and touching; then walked us around the grounds pointing out various pieces of interest and telling us Houser's artistic biography at the same time.

When I saw the phenomenal output of this talented artist (who, incidentally, created most of his remarkable body of work after he "retired" at 61, until his death in 1994), I wondered how it was possible I had never heard of him--even many Santa Fe folk don't know about him.

Houser (whose original family name was Haozous) was born into the Chiricahua Apache tribe in 1914. His father, Sam Haozous, was with Geronimo's band when he surrendered to the US Army in 1886 in Mexico. Members of the tribe were held as prisoners of war for the next 27 years in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma. Allan was born shortly after his parents' release--the first child born to a tribe member after the Chiricahua were released from captivity. Click here to read Allan's full biography.

Here are some of the sculptures I photographed against the beautiful New Mexico skies.

Oh You Red Sox!

2007-11-01T09:40:00.000-04:00

I was in Boston last weekend (during the last couple of games of the World Series) and saw this banner at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Mrs. Gardner (aka "Mrs. Jack") was a colorful and influential Bostonian in the first quarter of the 20th century.

The biography.com website offers the following quick summary:

When the death of her two-year-old son (1865) was followed by a miscarriage, she and her husband went to Europe. After they returned (1868), ‘Mrs Jack’ soon established herself as the most flamboyant and sought-after hostess in Boston. At first her energies went into entertaining, interior decoration, gardening, travelling, and collecting friends and odds-and-ends, but by the late 1880s she set out seriously to collect great art. Assisted by (and subsidizing) Bernard Berenson, newly graduated from Harvard College, she began to purchase mainly works of the European Renaissance. To house her growing collection, she built an ambitious Italianate palazzo, Fenway Court. Incorporated as the semi-private Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (1902), it was opened to the first select guests in 1903. She continued to add objects over the next few years, and stipulated that everything must stay exactly where she placed it.

Fenway Court is, not surprisingly, located on The Fenway (the street that runs along part of the Fenway Park, which itself is part of the Emerald Necklace--a linear park that runs through Boston and was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead). The park was completed in 1895--just before Isabella started building her "palace" there.

And also, not surprisingly, the Red Sox's Fenway Park is right around the corner! Fenway was constructed in time for the 1912 baseball season, and Isabella was a huge fan. Later that year, according to a press release from the ISG Museum:

Red Sox fan and Gardner Museum creator Isabella Stewart Gardner celebrated the Red Sox championship win over the New York Giants in unique fashion – attending a Boston Symphony Orchestra performance at Symphony Hall wearing a white headband with the words “Oh, you Red Sox!” in red letters, an act that prompted one reporter to describe her as a “woman...gone crazy.”

Songs of the Tewa

2007-10-20T10:31:00.001-04:00

The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico can be categorized into three groups based on language: Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa. The Tewa (TAY-wah) speakers live in the pueblos all around Santa Fe: Ohkay Owingeh, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Pojoaque, Nambé, and Tesuque.

Here is a beautiful Tewa song called Song of the Sky Loom. [1] The photographs that accompany this post, and were inspired by the song, were all taken in and around Santa Fe in the last couple of weeks.

Oh our Mother the Earth, oh our Father the Sky,
Your children are we, and with tired backs
We bring you the gifts that you love.
Then weave for us a garment of brightness;
May the warp be the white light of morning,
May the weft be the red light of evening,
May the fringes be the falling rain,
May the border be the standing rainbow.
Thus weave for us a garment of brightness
That we may walk fittingly where birds sing,
That we may walk fittingly where grass is green,
Oh our Mother the Earth, oh our Father the Sky!

The sculpture of the Navajo woman at the top of this post is entitled Raindrops, and was created by Allan Houser (1914-1984), a Chiricahua Apache who spent most of his adult life in Santa Fe. Since rain is often slight and infrequent in this part of the world, it is appropriate to signify "falling rain" with a hopeful look at the sky--or maybe the first realization that rain has started to fall. (Allan Houser will get a full post of his own on this site soon!)

October roses in my yard in the sharp shadows thrown by the "white light of morning".

"The standing rainbow", photographed across the college campus on my way home from work one evening.

"The red light of evening" as taken from the steps of the Box Office, just before a show earlier this month.

References

[1] Songs of the Tewa was translated by Herbert J. Spinden, and published in 1933 under the auspices of the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, Inc. The poem was quoted in Bertha P. Dutton's American Indians of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983).

400 Years in Santa Fe

2007-10-17T10:11:00.000-04:00

Sometime in the next few years, Santa Fe will celebrate its 400th anniversary. The official period of celebration is 2008-2010, and the Anniversary Committee is hoping to attract a visit from the Spanish royal family. (Hey, Queen Elizabeth came to Jamestown, VA earlier this year, so why not?)

Part of the challenge is knowing exactly when to celebrate. According to an article in the October 12 Santa Fe New Mexican, "conflicting historical events that can be interpreted as the founding of the city put its inception somewhere between 1607-1610." (Lots more on this later.) Does anyone else think there's a problem with establishing a committee in 2007 that's has a potential starting celebration year of 2007? Just checking.... (As a basis of comparison, Jamestown started its committee in 1997, a full ten years before the celebration year, and managed to raise $140 million in public and private money to support these activities.)

A contest was held this summer to select a logo for the celebration. The committee has winnowed the list down to four finalists from 60 submissions. The one shown at the beginning of this post is my personal favorite, the one shown below has an egregious spelling error. (Couldn't they have asked the artist to fix this before publicizing it as a final entry?) Click here to see all finalists and cast your vote.

Charlie Siringo

2007-10-04T11:48:00.001-04:00

Almost every day I drive down Siringo Road in Santa Fe, and I was vaguely curious about the source of this street name. Then one night I was watching an old made-for-TV movie with Elizabeth Montgomery playing the role of Mrs. Sundance (Etta Place, previously played by Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). And the Pinkerton detective tracking Etta bore the name of Charlie Siringo--bingo!

L. Q. Jones played the role of Charlie Siringo in the film Mrs. Sundance

It turns out Charlie was quite an interesting character, and almost single-handedly helped to develop and propagate the image and myth of the American cowboy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He was born in Texas in 1855, the son of an Irish immigrant mother and an Italian immigrant father--like many of us, a true American mongrel! He left school at 15 to become a cowboy, and traveled much of the American West as a trail driver in the 1870s.

During this period he met Billy the Kid, later leading a posse into New Mexico in pursuit of the Kid and his gang. He was also around during the famed confrontation (or lack thereof?) between Wyatt Earp and Clay Allison in Dodge City in 1878, and contradicted Earp's claim that he and Bat Masterson had forced Allison to back down. (Siringo's claims appear to be supported by others; click here for a summary by the Ford County (Kansas) Historical Society.)

In the 1880s, Siringo became a merchant in Kansas, and authored his first book in 1885: A Texas Cowboy; or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony. The book was published to wide acclaim, and has been called a classic of "range literature".

By 1886, at the age of 31, he was bored with business and moved to Chicago to join the famed Pinkerton Detective Agency. In pursuit of various "bad guys", he traveled as far north as Alaska and as far south as Mexico City, and was one of the first to use undercover techniques, variously disguising himself as a robber, rustler, union member, railroad hobo, etc.

In 1892 he was engaged in undercover work as a union member in Idaho, and was on duty during the bloody Coeur d'Alenes miners' strike. According to this American Heritage article, Siringo had actually done his undercover work so successfully that he had been elected recording secretary of the Gem Miners' Union, and had a close call described in the article as follows:

During the night he had crawled under a platform to listen in on the conversation of union leaders and then had returned to his rooming house. When he was awakened by the shooting at the Frisco Mill, he decided it was time to abandon his disguise and join his true allies in the Gem Mill. He had not proceeded very far before he was halted by a company guard, who told him that he would never get past Daxon’s saloon, where some fifty union men were firing on the mill and at anyone trying to leave or enter it.

Returning to his room at Mrs. Shipley’s lodgings, the resourceful detective sawed a hole in the floor, pulled a trunk across to cover it, and wriggled under the house. Like most western frontier towns, Gem made it possible for ladies to keep their hemlines unsoiled by providing an elevated wooden walkway along the dusty road. Using the walk as cover, Siringo wriggled his way toward the mill. Overhead, he heard union men cursing the poor shooting quality of their rifles—and speculating about the spy in their midst. A bunch of them broke off and headed for the Shipley home after this discussion, and Siringo put more speed into his movement in the opposite direction. He finally reached another saloon bordering the walk, with room enough to crawl beneath it to a point where he had only to make a short dash to reach the safety of the mill.

In the late 1890s, he infiltrated Butch Cassidy's gang, leading to the arrest of several gang members, though not Butch himself.

SIringo first came to Santa Fe at the behest of Gov. Lew Wallace to investigate a politically motivated murder that involved members of the Santa Fe Ring. According to Howard Lamar, a former president of Yale University, Western historian, and author of the 2005 book, Charlie Siringo's West: An Interpretive Biography, Siringo liked Santa Fe so much he stayed on and established a ranch near today's Siringo Road. In 1907 he retired to the ranch, and authored two more books about his experiences, A Cowboy Detective and Further Adventures of a Cowboy Detective.

But after nine years of retirement he began to yearn for his former life again, and responded to the governor's invitation to become a New Mexico Ranger, tracking cattle rustlers for the fledgling state from 1916-1918.

He moved to Los Angeles around 1920, and, like other retired cowboys, became a film advisor and a bit player for the burgeoning western movie industry. He died in 1928 in Altadena, California.

References

Here are a couple of interesting sources if you'd like to read further:

The Handbook of Texas Online

Wikipedia entry

Legends of America website; the Charlie Siringo photos used in this post are courtesy of this site.

Aspen Vista Trail

2007-10-01T21:52:00.000-04:00

Took a hike last Thursday morning with some new friends on part of the aptly-named Aspen Vista Trail. The trailhead is located about 13 miles from the Santa Fe Plaza, in the Sangre de Cristo mountains near the Santa Fe Ski Basin. The entire trail is 12 miles long--we did not do anywhere near that, but had a beautiful uphill (not too steep!) hike for about an hour, and then turned around and came back down. The sky was an astonishingly deep blue, and the aspens were just beginning to turn color--another couple of weeks and they should be glorious! Click here to see my post from October 1 last year, with photos of the color much further along.

Aspens are unique in that many trees grow from a single root system. While each individual tree typically lives ony a hundred years (more or less), the root system can be thousands, or tens of thousands, years old. The trees bounce back well after forest fires because even though individual trees can be damaged, the root system quickly sends up new shoots.

This particular stand of aspen is one of the largest in New Mexico.

The view on the side of the trail

Aspens beginning to turn yellow-gold

Three of us (plus dog!) stopping to admire the view

Looking out over the valley just before we turn back

Cultural Bumping, Part 1

2007-09-29T09:38:00.001-04:00

I'm taking a course in the American Southwest this fall, and one of our texts is a book by Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez entitled Border Visions. The author describes "cultural bumping" as a process in which one culture bumps into another culture which can result in defeat, change, assimilation, or refreshment of one or both of the cultures. "Human populations often may become more distinct but sometimes more similar after bumping into one another."

While Vélez-Ibáñez is using this concept to describe major historical change over hundreds or thousands of years, I think it's also an interesting way to look at more recent change. There have been so many immigrants to this country in the past 100-200 years, and each group has brought its own cultural history with it to "bump" into the existing US culture and continue to change and enliven it.

Today this blog will start another new series in Southwest observations, that of "bumps" observed around town and on the road. I've already begun addressing this topic in the "Not Quite Spanglish" entries, part 1 and part 2.

On a recent trip north, I drove about two and a half hours from Santa Fe, a beautiful drive up Route 285, and stopped for lunch in the first town over the Colorado border, Antonito. I ate at a Mexican-American restaurant called The Dutch Mill. It was clearly a local hangout, and the food was fabulous. But I loved the incongruity of the sign (pictured above), which features the name of the restaurant, an illustration of a windmill, and the slogan "serving Mexican and American food".

Inside, more cultures clamored to be heard. The sodas were served in Japanese Coke glasses, and a small sign claimed that Antonito was where The Wild Bunch was filmed. The adjoining barroom next door (traversed to find the restrooms) was right out a movie about a small town in the west (sawdust floors, neon beer signs) but the restaurant itself was decorated with posters of impressionist art, including one from an exhibit at the Museum of FIne Arts in Boston.
Only because I loved the look of the building, I've included a shot of the Palace Hotel (established 1890) next door.

Just two miles after leaving Antonito, I drove through the most beautiful stretch of lonely highway fringed with yellow wildflowers and populated only by herds of cattle.

Kevin Costner Fans

2007-09-25T11:15:00.000-04:00

Writing about your own blog seems a bit self-centered to me, but I couldn't resist sharing my surprise at the huge outpouring of Kevin Costner fans who inundated my previous blog post Saturday-Monday. I had the biggest two days of site visits I'd had since I started posting, thanks to an observant fan who posted a link to my blog. (Click and scroll down to the second message in this thread.)

Not only did I have visits from every corner of the US, but from 12 foreign countries, with top honors going to Canada, Belgium, Britain, Italy, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. Who knew there were so many Kevin Costner fans all over the world! (And not only out there, but checking fan sites on a daily basis for info...)

So for all you Kevin fans out there, here's another photo from the concert!

Kevin Costner's Swing Vote

2007-09-22T10:31:00.000-04:00

Let me tell you what I was doing at midnight last night: I was watching Kevin Costner and his band Modern West entertaining a few hundred die-hards with a fast-moving 45-minute set of rockabilly, on the set of his new movie Swing Vote, on the grounds of the Santa Fe Rodeo.

After six hours of filming (we unpaid extras walked in lines towards the metal detectors for two minutes, then backed up and did it again and again; then sat in the stands while they filmed the distance shots with a helicopter, the mid-range shots, and finally the closeups) the cast and crew took a "lunch" break about 11:30 p.m., and Kevin changed out of his suit and tie, and spent the break entertaining the crowd. It was a lovely interlude!

At about 12:30 they wrapped up the concert, everybody came back from break, Kevin's hair people fixed his hat hair, and they picked up filming again. The remnants of the ever-shrinking crowd went back into the stands, but I was too tired to sit through another round (and hours on hard benches in the cold was taking its toll!).

What fun, though! The movie (an "indie political comedy" produced by Costner) tells the story of a very close presidential election, where a run-off between the two candidates is mandated, and it all comes down to the state of New Mexico, and a single vote to be cast by Kevin Costner's character--a small-town, not-very-successful, single dad. The scene we were filming shows the candidates on stage at the local rodeo grounds in what is billed as "The Final Debate". Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper play the candidates, and other cast members include Nathan Lane, Stanley Tucci, and Judge Reinhold.

Here's a short video interview with Kevin which also shows him with his band a few days earlier.

We couldn't take photos during the filming, so I have no on-set photos of Costner, Grammer, or Hopper, but here are a few set shots to give you a flavor.

Stand-ins for candidates Grammer and Hopper while they set up the mid-range shots

Stand-in for Costner

Setting up the close-up shots with two tracks for cameras

On my way out; part of the set