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Features

  • Life in the Tecolote Pueblo, AD 1200

    The National Park Service and Fort Union National Monument announces its’ monthly “Glimpses of the Past” presentation. The program will be held at the CCHP/Santa Fe Trail Interpretive Center, 116 Bridge St., in Las Vegas, Thursday, Sept. 18 at 7 p.m.

  • The Cabeza de Vaca Gallery

    It was the early 13th century, in the Sierra Morena mountains north of Seville. The Spanish were rebelling against centuries-old occupation by the Moors.

    The Spanish soldiers were at a standstill, the Moors controlling all the passes leading to their stronghold, but a shepherd named Martin Alhaja turned the tide — he told the Spanish soldiers of a secret passage, and marked the entrance with the skull of a cow.

  • Our problems are our solutions

    One of the truisms of permaculture is that problems can be solutions. We tend to view problems in a vacuum, but this is often the result of a limited perspective, and of our failure to ask big enough questions. It is a good discipline, in gardening and in all endeavors, to look at what we believe is a problem, and ask ourselves whether there is some other problem to which the problem before us is a solution.

  • Not much to do

    People are always asking me, “Why do you want to leave?” ‘Why would you rather go to Albuquerque when you graduate?’

    Its simple, there is absolutely nothing to do here. There is nothing that can be offered to young adults besides Highlands and Luna. I have to say, though, Highland and Luna can offer a very good education but besides that, there really isn’t much here.

    Speaking as a student and a kid that grew up here in Las Vegas, there isn’t really much that the kids can do.

  • Viva la print revolucion

    A massive football player, his uniform black, heavy, robotic, runs through a modern city, a flutter of torn books beneath spiked shoes.

    He carries a graduation cap in one hand, stolen from the head of a statued scholar, the other hand extended in an evil claw toward a group of diminutive young children sitting at simple desk — a hawk ready to pluck his prey. The city ignores the indignity; it crowds the horizon with shiny righteousness, a new stadium earning center stage, separating education from progress.

  • Talking about literacy

    Yunus Peer remembers the sting of apartheid in the early ‘70s when he was 13 years old and ranked the No. 2 tennis player among non-whites in South Africa. An Indian, he wanted to compete against all talented players his age, to swing the racket to the best of his ability across the court from any worthy opponent.

  • Harpsichord and Native American...

    Before I could afford a car, I walked as fast as I could those mornings I was late for work. I jumped over the cracks in Carnegie Park’s sidewalk, letting my eye catch the echo of sun against lone blue spruce.

    Before I owned a cell phone, my afternoons resonated with natural silence, with only the crack of frog and cricket against ear. Before I bought a computer, my hands knew how to hold a pen, how to round my letters with legible panache. Today, my body forgets the simple, the sane.

  • Youthful Exuberance

    A tall man in a pink Nehru shirt and wrinkled linen slacks stood at the edge of Ilfeld Auditorium’s stage, his head and shoulders cocked at an awkward angle, no other musicians at his side. He held a violin, a instrument that seemed tiny, insignificant, compared to his large frame. The audience shuffled program and purse as he lifted the wooden body to his chin in a gentle arc.

  • Play tells the story of New Mexico...

    ‘The reason I agreed to do this interview is because I exist. I am not a myth,” says 78-year-old Emilio Coca, a once crypto- and now practicing Jew who traces his fractured family history back to the Diaspora ignited by the Spanish Inquisition.

    Coca’s life story is one of many woven into A Light In My Soul/Una Luz En Mi Alma, a new drama created collaboratively in an unlikely partnership between a the New York-based Tectonic Theater Project, choreographer and director Krista DeNio and the Working Classroom ensemble, a theater company based in Albuquerque.

  • A river falls through it

    Until the mid-1800s, gristmills in New Mexico were small, primitive, difficult to use, containing two rotating grinding stones powered by water.

    Called “molinos” in Spanish, early gristmills were most often used to grind the hearty corn grown to make tortillas and tamales. By 1850, wheat flour crept into the local consciousness, and as the population of Mora County grew, farmers added wheat to their crops. The founding of Fort Union increased demand for wheat even more. New Mexico was hooked. Flour became local king.

  • The art of caring

    A tiny gray rock outlined in craggy black paint rolls against a stack of comic-book Stonehenge slabs.

    The stones expand in an exponential arc, a burst dam of yellow-red emotion mixed with icy blue spikes. The large abstract expression calls to mind subdivision sprawl, the furious cell-division chaos of mother earth egg and tractor sperm. Las Vegas artist Dakota Mills’ oil painting, “Reproduction,” asks the viewer to step inside the collective hive mind — an unsettling place of highway noise and microwave energy.

  • Angel Fire festival in Las Vegas

    This summer, celebrate the power of music through the 25th Anniversary Season of Music from Angel Fire, the Festival that brings chamber music to the mountains of Northern New Mexico.

  • Medical glimpses of the past

    The National Park Service and Fort Union National Monument announces its monthly “Glimpses of the Past” presentation. The program will be held at the CCHP/Santa Fe Trail Interpretive Center, 116 Bridge St., in Las Vegas, Thursday Aug. 21 at 7 p.m.

  • Harvesting water, reusing newspaper

    I will be teaching a continuing education course at Luna Community College soon. The topic is “water harvesting and watershed restoration.” It occurred to me, though, that since this is an esoteric subject maybe I should share with Optic readers some basic knowledge on the topic.

  • Just a thought

    ‘Success is peace of mind that is the direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” This is John Wooden’s definition of “success.”

    On a vacation trip I had the opportunity to read Wooden’s entire book, Wooden, A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections on and off the Court in one day.

  • The local landscape

    Take away the sun, and Douglas Avenue becomes small-town Broadway, becomes a mosaic of textured cement and palm-smudged glass, the Salvation Army thrift store an all-night diner offering plastic fruit on chipped wood table. Streetlights become perfect eight-pointed stars in photographer Sean Weaver’s time-lapsed meditation on Las Vegas at night. Reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s famous painting, “Nighthawks,” Weaver’s Vegas is jaded, mysterious, a city of daisy-chained facade.

  • The Song of Jonah

    The Song of Jonah

    by Gene Guerin

    University of New Mexico Press, 2008

    ISBN 978-0-8263-4336-9

    $18.95 paperback

    232 pp.

    ‘A mixed and unsettling atmosphere colored the rest of the day. The procession after Mass, with the santo carried on its pallet along a path lit by kindling fires that snapped and spit resin, was for some a triumphal parade. For others it was a slow, solemn march with funereal undertones.” (p. 163)

  • Getting the credit(s) you deserve,...

    In part 1 of this article , I outlined the available federal and state tax credits and the incentives PNM has to offer Las Vegans who install a PV/solar electric system. Now we will look at two specific examples to see how the costs and benefits actually play out.

  • Dreams

    All my life, I’ve always had very vivid, realistic dreams. The oldest dream I can remember is one from when I was 4 or 5.

    In my dream, I was walking down the street with my friend and her mom. We saw two people walk into an elevator, smiling and waving at us as the door closed.

  • Dark Knight does not disappoint

    I can’t remember if I’ve written a column about a movie before or not. I know that I’ve definitely considered it, but I’m not sure I ever did. If not, well, there’s a first time for everything. Besides this (possibly) being the first time I’ve written about a movie, it’s also the first time in a while I’ve felt so enthusiastic about such a blockbuster.