WhirledView

Gold for Everyone in Northern New Mexico

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The conquistadors riding north from Montezuma’s conquered capital were disgusted by the mud hut pueblos they found north of the Rio Grande.  Their reports would surely disappoint the king of Spain, and it is never good to disappoint one’s king.  Still, the legends about Cibola were clearly not true.  There were no hoards of gold and certainly no cities of gold in the arid lands now known as New Mexico.  The Crown treasury was not about to be stupendously enriched.

But, come autumn, all of us who live now on this high desert in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo mountains are immersed in a golden landscape.  

If you drive down to Albuquerque from Santa Fe about now, and you look to your right toward the distant  Rio Grande, you will no longer behold a long green snake slithering north to south.  You will see a necklace of gold.  Cottonwoods.  Just as you learned from the classic Westerns that transfixed you back East or wherever else you imbibed our national myths, cottonwood trees thrive along Western river banks. In the spring, they shower us with fluffy white seeds that swirl around like a mischeduled blizzard—or a diaphanous mini balloon Fiesta (the celebrated real hot air balloon Fiesta takes place every year about now in Albuquerque).  But, with fall, cottonwoods turn a rich yellow that’s as close as arboreal nature gets to mimicking the rock that turns humans into casino-haunting fools or gold-obsessed psychopaths, as in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, another Western classic. 

The legend about cities of gold (now the name of a local casino) was so strong that impecunious well-connected Spaniards in need of replenishing the family coffers actually anted up to lead expeditions north along the Rio Grande and farther, even penetrating the area now known as Colorado. Later, they paid to be appointed Governor-General of the territory (so little changes in politics). One of the oldest buildings in town—in Santa Fe, I mean—is a rambling squat one story adobe still called El Palacio, a pretty pathetic structure compared to the stone edifices built by Spaniards in Mexico City during the same era.  If New Mexico today is one of the poorest states in the U.S., the territory was a backwater of the first water even during the Spanish colonial period.  Those ambitious courtiers who were so eager to prove themselves that they bought the opportunity to run the place were lucky to get away with their reputations intact. As for wealth, this is a land of subsistence farming.  The indigenes had already mastered it–corn, beans, squash, turkeys.  The Spanish immigrants never did much better, economically.

But there’s another kind of wealth.  Come to Northern New Mexico in late fall.  You will discover a dazzlingly golden world.  New England has its panoply of reds and oranges and yellows.  It famously attracts hordes of visitors who sit for miles and hours with their noses pasted to tour bus windows.  In northern New Mexico the locals go loco.  They glory in the gold.

On the windy twisty route up to the Santa Fe Ski basin there’s a pull- out called Aspen Vista. Try and get a proper parking spot now.  Ha!  If you’re lucky, you’ll manage to find a close-in space on the up or down shoulder of the road, under signs that say “No parking,” though there’s an expectation at this time of year that spillover parking probably won’t be ticketed.  From Aspen Vista there’s a dirt road that winds up to some communications towers on the top of Tesuque Peak, at nearly 12,000 feet in altitude. Not everyone manages to hike the entire six

WhirledView Weekend - Sunday afternoon at the Lensic with Nobuyuki Tsujii and the Santa Fe Symphony

By Patricia H. Kushlis

The Santa Fe Symphony’s opening concert for the 2009-10 Season last Sunday featured Van Cliburn Competition winner Nobuyuki Tsujii performing Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor. The twenty one year old blind Japanese pianist is already a sensation in Japan. He burst onto the American scene at the 2009 Van Cliburn Competition in Ft. Worth, Texas where this crowd pleaser shared the gold medal with 19 year old Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang.   

 Tsujii is amazing – not just for overcoming his tremendous visual handicap – but for his wonderfully lyrical interpretation of Chopin, a welcome respite from the hard bitten pyrotechnics of far too many young celebrity pianists today.

 His performance in Santa Fe was filmed by Japanese television for inclusion in a documentary being made about Tsujii for broadcast in Japan.  How much of the  footage from Santa Fe’s Lensic Theater will make the final cut, of course, is another question but if filming a full house, multiple curtain calls, standing ovations, an excellent orchestra, an attractive and unique venue and an encore are indications of audience approval then at least a clip should appear. 

Tsujii’s win makes him the first Japanese ever to have won the 47 year old Van Cliburn Competition.  No wonder, then, that Japanese television decided to make the documentary.

Muffins Muffed, Chilies to the Rescue

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I planned to proclaim—Ta! Da!—that anyone can make a terrific muffin, anytime.  As I always have.  Super simple. Super successful.  This morning—alas!—I ended up with two dozen burnt-on-the-top, foam- rubbery blobs studded with lush, sadly wasted blueberries.  Two were edible.  Just.  The rest, I presume, are on their way to the Gulf of Mexico via whatever happens to waste water in Santa Fe.

Here’s the yummy anyone-can-do-it secret I planned to share with you, mainly because it prompted accolades from my grandson who voted yes! yes! yes! for last week’s batch of only twelve blueberry muffins: cinnamon sugar sprinkled plenteously over the batter just before the muffin tins are shoved into the oven.  My banana bread and apple cake often receive the same treatment.  Result: a delicate layer of spicy crunchy sweetness— and the prep’s quicker than mixing up a streusel.

Not that I would ever denigrate anything related to a crumb cake!  I make a weekly pilgrimage to a local bakery where I order a creamy cheese Danish sprinkled with crumbs a la français, plus a double espresso.  To earn this treat, I make myself walk six miles. It’s not torture, mind.  The route is lovely and not gruesomely hilly.  And the Sunday morning treats I remember most vividly from my childhood, aside from waffles flooded with real maple syrup: the crumb buns from a German bakery in South Jersey, whose closest kin I joyously found in Frankfurt-am-Main, when I was working the book fair one year.        

So what happened to the botched batch of muffins?  Stupid me, I forgot to turn a very hot oven down to 350◦ when the muffins went in.  The sugar burnt to black so fast all but two were beyond rescue by the time my nose detected trouble.  Also, having decided to make two batches at once, I blended the hell out of the batter when I was adding the milk and then the blueberries. Delectable muffin texture depends on a truly lumpy batter.  Finally, the butter had got so soft at tropical room temperature I figured I could whip it into the sugar instead of melting it and dribbling it in along with the milk.  Result of inattention  and bad guess experimentation: foam rubber. Usually I’m an apostle of spontaneity.  But, every so often, rules  matter.   How do you tell when?  Ah, well, age does have its compensations.

This tragedy, fortunately, has a deus ex machina.  The new chili season has begun. I’d already decided to turn a muffin story into a sumptuous breakfast story by making a green chili omelet. 

Everywhere in Santa Fe during these days of late summer there’s the smell of chilies being roasted.  This is how it’s done.  A huge cage-like cylinder is nearly filled with red or green chilies,  then rotated over a bed of coals.  When the skins look burnt, the chilies are ready.  (Some things are supposed to be scorched.  Sigh!)

UN in Santa Fe?

by Cheryl Rofer

Now that the movie industry has discovered Santa Fe, we see constantly changing yellow signs directing the crew and others to today's filming. They are remarkably standardized, each bearing an abbreviation referring to the title of the film. While I was stopped at the St. Francis and Cerillos intersection the other day, I saw this one:

UNDOC, hm? I'm not following which movies are being filmed here well enough to guess at that one. But my brain automatically referred to the United Nations.

The Eensy Beensy Spiders

by Cheryl Rofer

When I went out the other day, this caught my eye. At first, I thought, well, that's how much I haven't been gardening, the spiders are building webs, I'll sweep it away. And then I saw motion. The little gold specks you see against the wall were in a globular arrangement, and some were dropping down, more as I came near. Every little gold speck, each maybe a half-millimeter in size, is a tiny spider. They must have hatched the night before.

As I went away, they rappelled back up into the cluster, down as I approached, but not outside the web.

Do lizards eat baby spiders? I wondered. Probably would be hard or messy for them to get through the web. There have been plenty of lizards around lately, a couple with truncated tails, and two that emerged from the same hole in the rocks. They're usually solitary, so we can guess what they were up to!

The next morning, the web was ruined, and there were only three or four of the little spiders left. I suspect it was a raccoon.

Wednesday Yard Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

I haven't done this for some long time. I've got a new camera, this one nice and small for my purse. Got it with those credit-card points that the bankers are now going to take away if they can't overcharge on interest, nyah, nyah, nyah.

Lots of things are blooming in my yard, with lots more to come. I'm pleased at some of my attempts from last year. Perennials are suspenseful the second year. Even if they seem to take during the first year, they may or may not come up the next spring. As usual, some have returned and some haven't.

I'm dedicating this post to a good friend of mine whose father died recently. He loved native Wisconsin flora. Here's some native New Mexico flora, some free-living and some in my flower beds. I'm going to just post the photos with a bit of commentary, no scientific names this time.

Friday Diplomacy Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

North Korea and Iran often get pointed to as practitioners of non-rational diplomacy. That’s a dangerous thing to do. If they’re not rational, you can’t figure out what they will do next. But saying that they’re not rational may merely indicate that you’re not smart enough to figure out what they’ll do next. Or worse, that they’re not doing what you would do in their place or what you want them to do.

It’s always better to assume that countries or their leaders are acting rationally. That’s the only basis for analysis. Assuming that they’re not rational is equivalent to throwing up your hands or saying that you’re going to go ahead and do what you wanted to do, damn the torpedoes.

It’s not a bad first assumption that those in power want to remain in power and that they are likely to take strong steps to do that. The next is to figure out what they see as threats to their power.

The Usual Suspects

by Cheryl Rofer

One of the good things about blogging is finding the one idea that pulls together some things I haven't been able to understand. Jay Rosen provides one such idea today.

I have been bothered by the state of dialog on nuclear issues in northern New Mexico. On the one hand, we have Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, whose primary missions are to design and support nuclear weapons. On the other hand, we have a rag-tag band of antinuclear activists. My circle of friends and acquaintances include many highly-educated professional people who have questions and concerns about all things nuclear. They hardly ever find the information from either of these sources useful.

The discussion long ago became predictable. The national laboratories are close-lipped and avoid comment or tell us that everything is just fine. The antinukes want the laboratories closed down and all nuclear weapons eliminated - now!

The media in Northern New Mexico, with the reflexive he said, she said approach that Rosen describes, bear a large responsibility for the situation. When a nuclear issue surfaces, they go to the usual suspects, who provide the usual statements. You might even think that the reporters have programmed macros so that they can do this with a couple of keystrokes.

For a while, the LANL blog provided an alternative of sorts, but it long ago collapsed into a massive whine, a third predictable reaction. Practically all its commenters remain anonymous, so there is no way for a reporter to question them.

Nuclear matters frequently lend themselves to factual analysis; much material can be found on the Web, and there are experts at the universities, who are occasionally consulted.

But it's much easier to speed-dial the usual suspects. Too bad for the readers who wanted something more.