A Gallery of Photos: The Canyon Road Art Scene

"Outlook" by Jim Rennert.   (McLarry Modern)

Whenever I come to Santa Fe, I visit Canyon Road, said to be a mile long with a hundred art galleries.  It's a narrow road, mostly one-way, all in the town's pueblo-style architecture and featuring Native American pottery and silver, contemporary, abstract, figurative, and Western art, plus a goodly amount of indoor and outdoor sculpture. There are beautiful old cottonwood trees and tamarisk.  Ravens ... or are they crows? Shops selling clothing and textiles.  The Historic Santa Fe Foundation with a lovely garden in the summer.  A few casual eateries plus a couple of totally top-notch restaurants.

So it's always my pleasure to walk along Canyon Road during my visits and see what's new both inside and out.  Here are some photos of a few outdoor pieces.  (Gallery names are in parentheses.)

"Crowcado" by John Knox.  (McLarry Fine Art)

"September Song" by J. G. Moore.  (McLarry Fine Art)

Not identified.  (La Mesa of Santa Fe)

"Poppies of Oz" by Craig Mitchell Smith.  (Canyon Road Contemporary)

"Making a Wish" by Craig Mitchell Smith.  (Canyon Road Contemporary)

Not identified.  (Pippin Contemporary)

Not identified.  (Pippin Contemporary)

Not identified.  (Selby Fleetwood Gallery)

Not identified.  (New Concept Gallery)

By Allan Houser.  (Courtesy of the Houser Estate and Zaplin Lampert Gallery)

A Gallery of Photos: Santa Fe in February

So, yes, I'm spending the month of February in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the temperatures are decent, the skies generally clear, and the air fresh.  But as much as my part of the country--New England--is experiencing a heavy winter, the folks here speak of having had no winter at all.  Barely any precipitation.  Practically no snow, no skiing.   A reduced tourist population.

But otherwise, much seems as usual.  Several stores are gone.  With new ones (mostly) taking their place.  Cashmere shawls are in the three figures. A gallery featuring silver jewelry is closing.  A Danish string quartet is performing a concert featuring Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms.  A favorite local author, Natalie Goldberg, is doing a reading.  Chile powder is being sold at the farmers' market in hot, medium, and mild strengths. Local Native American artisans still sit out under the portal at the 17th century Palace of the Governors just off the Plaza and sell their pottery, turquoise, and silver as they have for decades.  Restaurants feature plates of enchiladas, sopapillas, posole, tacos, with a choice of green or red chile. Plus margaritas, my favorite being on-the-rocks with salt around the rim.

A sign near the Plaza in the center of town

A food cart on the Plaza

The Sanctuario de Guadalupe with the oldest extant shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in the United States

Morning shadow on pueblo-style house

Persian lunch at a Canyon Road restaurant featuring grilled chicken marinated in lemon juice and herbs

Guan Yin, Goddess of Compassion, outside the entrance to  Project Tibet on Canyon Road

Project Tibet is through the yellow doorway.  In the foreground is Wiford Gallery and a small part of its extensive wind sculpture garden.

Chile powder choices at the Saturday farmers' market

Looking across town ...

... then toward the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the opposite direction

Window display in a shop on the Plaza

A Gallery of Photos: Out the Train Window

Amtrak's La Junta, Colorado, fresh air stop

It's that time of year.  Another winter, another trip outta here.  And, with it, an excuse to return to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I am now staying for a month in a rented casita, a small but comfortable abode fashioned from a 100-year-old adobe with foot-thick walls and one of those kiva fireplaces built in the southwestern pueblo style that some people call "beehive." They're small, intimate, charming, distinctive, and aromatic, especially when burning the incense-like wood of this northern New Mexico region. Heaven, in other words.

My 3-day, 2-night trip from the East Coast via Chicago to New Mexico involved day and night tooting at each and every level-crossing, bouncing and rattling over tracks that could probably use some repair, and the realization that the dining car now features paper and plastic where it once took pride in using china coffee cups, freshly-ironed white tablecloths (and napkins) and metal cutlery.  (Ever try to cut up your chicken with a plastic knife?)  Everything is now dispensable except the glass salt and pepper shakers.  Everything is also in little packets--honey, mustard, salad dressings, butter, jam, "cream."  As well:  no toast, no fried eggs, no ice cream.

I spent my hours looking out the window and taking "snaps" (as we used to call them), jiggly focus and all.  Here are a few.

Massachusestts

Indiana

Iowa

Next morning, Kansas

 Colorado:  range-style water tank and windmill

Colorado

New Mexico.  This stretch of  highway follows the old Santa Fe Trail.

Raton, New Mexico

Five minutes away from my arrival  point

A Gallery of Photos: Winter Up Close and Personal

The outside temperature

Well, I've got to admit:  winter is like that around here.  That's January for you.  We had one day recently when the highest it got was zero.  Then day after day when the temperatures were single digits or sub-zero.  And one night when the wind-chills were down to minus 30.  My furnace was working hard, chugging away.  There it was, doing its best to keep things toasty, even as I bundled up in layers, warm socks, wool scarf, shawl, and a good warm hand-knit wool blanket.  Of course, I stayed indoors as best I could despite feeling house-bound.  But in trying to go out in such temperatures, even breathing through a scarf, I found myself edging toward getting asthma one day when it was 8 degrees.  I didn't want to collapse as I was putting money in the parking meter so I concentrated on staying upright, made my way to the bakery, got my bread, cancelled my other errands, and went home!!  Enough of that!

The beauty of the rising sun on trees out my window ...

... and of a tree covered in ice

(Another view)

It looks like the Antarctic, but in the summer, this is all green grass

The picnic table

Two neighborhood furnaces working at high speed

Where deer sometimes sleep

Best Fiction Reads of 2017

Of the 28 books of fiction that I read this past year, in alphabetical order by author, here are 18 that I especially enjoyed ... including 3 trilogies.  (Non-fiction was listed last time.)


1.  Jo Baker, A Country Road, A Tree.  The title comes from the stage directions for Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. This book is a fictional but seemingly accurate account of Beckett's life in France during World War II when he joined the Resistance movement.  He was an introvert, appreciated silence but liked people, too.  He and his future wife were nearly caught in Paris but left very quickly after discovering they'd been outed to the Gestapo by a priest, subsequently making their way to what was then the Free Zone in the south of France but which was soon taken over as well.  Beckett preferred staying in France during the war where he had friends and could be of help rather than staying home in Ireland, a neutral country, where he had culture shock upon finding there was such a thing as cream and real coffee.

2.  Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill.  Identical Welsh twins live on their parents' farm all their lives, on the boundary of England and Wales.  The story covers 80-plus years.  It's likely among the last of this sort of descriptive late 19th and 20th century prose in the style of Hardy and Lawrence--the hard family life with few amenities.  The book ends around 1980 when video games are now part of the culture and cell phones are about to make an entrance.  A lot of real characters here.  Lots of angst and self-appraisal.  It was published in 1988 just months before Chatwin died.

3.  Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career.  Her full name was Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, and she lived from 1879 to 1954.  This book, her own fictionalized treatment of a memoir, was made into a movie of the same name starring a young Judy Davis and Sam Neill.  It is autobiographical fiction of a teen in 1890's Australia who longs for a brilliant career that taps her imagination, intellect, and ability to work hard.

4.  Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea.  Or, what about The Old Man and the Marlin?  A rather amazing story of how old Santiago, in only a skiff, caught an 18-foot marlin far out to sea from Cuba.  A novella, it received a Pulitzer in 1953.

5.  Penelope Lively, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories.  Fresh topics, good irony and wit, intelligent, her newest book.  One of my favorite contemporary authors.

6. - 11.  Olivia Manning.  The following 2 trilogies comprise Manning's work called Fortunes of War which was made into a TV mini-series starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson.  (They met while filming it.)  It begins with the start of World War II and though fictionalized follows the author and her husband's route from Europe to the Middle East as the Germans kept advancing.  Lots of local color.  An abundance of well-defined characters.  I found all six books totally engrossing.
          The Balkan Trilogy:
                    Book #1.  The Great Fortune.  Set in Rumania from September
                         1939 to June 1940.
                    Book #2.  The Spoilt City.  Set as the characters are forced out of
                         Rumania and leave for Athens.
                    Book #3.  Friends and Heroes.  Set in Athens, then as they are
                          forced out of Greece to Cairo.
          The Levant Trilogy:
                    Book #4.  The Danger Tree.  Set in Cairo and Alexandria as the
                         Germans are advancing.
                    Book #5.  The Battle Lost and Won.  Describes the battle of
                          Alamein.  Otherwise, set mostly in Cairo.
                    Book #6.  The Sum of Things.  Set in Cairo and the Levant as the
                           war then ends.

12.  Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country.  Excellent, South Africa 1946, a black family and a white family ... and their shared tragedy.  Beautifully written.

13.  Kenneth Roberts, Oliver Wiswell.  A splendid historical novel published in 1940 about the Revolutionary War from the viewpoint of the Loyalists, taking the reader from 1775-1783.  A lot of material that I didn't know.  Quite enthralling.  Highly recommended.  (A gift from a college friend who called it one of the best books she'd ever read.)

14.  John Steinbeck, Cannery Row.  Amusing, precise, poetic.  The Chinese grocer, the bordello's madam, the flophouse guys, the marine biologist, all in a sardine canning section of Monterey, California in the 1930's.

15. - 17.  Katherine Towler, Snow Island Trilogy.  Chronicles the lives of those in a small, tight community on a fictitious island in Narragansett Bay. The time frame is World War II to the Gulf War.  Though each book can be taken separately, they are better as a unit. 
                    Book #1.  Snow Island.
                    Book #2.  Evening Ferry.
                    Book #3.  Island Light.

18.  Anne Tyler, Digging to America.  Two Baltimore families, one Iranian and one American, each adopt a Korean child on the same day and become friends as a result.  Good descriptions of their lives as family members and as representatives of their cultures ... with a nice mixture of the two told in an appealing way.

Best Non-Fiction Reads of 2017

My book reading for this past year pretty well matched other years in terms of the number read.  48 in all.  20 non-fiction, 28 fiction.

In alphabetical order by author, here are the non-fiction titles I liked best.  (Fiction will be listed next time.)


1.  Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years.  A chuckle-out-loud book describing his life back in the U.S. after living in Britain.  Though at the end, he and his family return to England.

2.  Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.  Dillard-quality writing about her rather privileged life growing up in Pittsburgh.

3.  Vicki Constantine Croke, Elephant Company, An Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II.  The setting is Burma 1920-1946.  The "unlikely hero" is James Howard Williams who worked for a British teak company and was in charge of their working elephants throughout a wide area, finding them courageous, loyal, and truly wonderful beings.  Then after the Japanese invaded and the British left, Williams and the elephants led two amazing evacuations over treacherous trails to India--one for refugees, the other for the elephants themselves so that they wouldn't fall to the Japanese.  Some amazing tales here.

4.  Eric Larson, Dead Wake, The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.  In May 1915, a single torpedo destroyed the Lusitania, Britain's fastest, most beautiful passenger liner, sinking it in only 18 minutes and killing more than a thousand people some dozen miles from the Irish coast.  There were plenty of life boats, but because the ship could not be stopped and because of its tilt and the fact that it sank immediately, only 6 were used.  In addition, after daily drills to familiarize themselves with how to release the life boats, those crew members were instantly killed when the torpedo struck when they were below-decks taking out passengers' luggage for arrival next morning in Liverpool.  It wasn't until another two years when the Germans said that any ship was fair game to submarine attack (including those of neutral nations and passenger ships) that the U.S. entered the war.  Grim and gripping.

5.  Lois Pryce, Lois on the Loose, One Woman, One Motorbike, 20,000 miles across the Americas.  A well-written tale describing the gutsy adventures of an English woman who traveled solo on her motorbike.  This relates her first attempt at such a venture, here from Anchorage to the tip of Argentina during which she encountered terrible winds, terrible roads, sudden snows, hours in customs, totally bare landscape, a prima donna riding companion part way, and oil leaks.  But great chutzpah.

6.  Lois Pryce, Revolutionary Ride, On the Road in Search of the Real Iran. Here in 2013 is our heroine again, riding her motorbike alone through Iran, wearing required hijab and proper Islamic Republic dress.  She had already traveled solo through the Americas (see #5) as well as from London to Cape Town, South Africa.  This book details her experience through Iran plus a good overview of contemporary Iranian history.  She liked the place well enough to return the following year only to find that the rules had changed and those from the U.K. and U.S. could not travel the country alone, only in a group.

7.  Katherine Towler, The Penny Poet of Portsmouth, A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship.  A fellow-writer and resident of Portsmouth, the author finds herself filling the niche of "family member" and unwitting caretaker for Robert Dunn, once New Hampshire's poet laureate and a man who valued his independence but who found himself needing support as he followed the unwritten road to death.  An honest, well-written account.

8.  Harriet Welty-Rochefort, French Toast, An American in Paris Celebrates the Maddening Mysteries of the French.  Funny, concise, enlightening.  We want to be nice; they want to be logical, witty, no matter whether it tramples on someone or not.  We want to have fun; they aren't so concerned with fun.  We spread ourselves wide, new friends, etc; they look to their family.  We smile thinking we'll be liked; they don't take anyone who smiles seriously.  When writing this she'd been married to a Frenchman and living in Paris for 20 years.

9.  Meik Wiking, The Little Book of Hygge, Danish Secrets to Happy Living.  A sweet rendering of the way Danes attain a happy life, especially since their winters are rather dour.  By being cozy with candles, hot drinks, friends, board games, and things that are simple, natural, and homey.

12 Movies That I Saw in 2017 That I Can Recommend

Once again, it's movies-of-the-year time.  (My source for all the movies I see these days is Netflix.)

1.  A Five Star Life.  2013, Italy.  A woman has the job of checking out the ratings of luxury hotels.  Nice job, fabulous hotels.  Amusing.

2.  Cairo Time.  2009, Canada.  Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig. Hypnotic, as the atmosphere of Cairo gradually enters both the heroine and the viewer.  Fabulous Arabic music.  It's called "a delicate love story."

3.  The Light Between the Oceans.  2016, UK, US, Australia, New Zealand. With Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander (who became a couple after making this film).  From the original book by M. L. Stedman.  Setting:  a lighthouse in far southwestern Australia where it is said the Great Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet.  The story line (set post World War I)  is centered around the moral dilemma of wanting a specific dream to come true.  Alicia Vikander overplays her part, to my mind.  Beautiful photography, wonderful setting.

4.  Sing Street.  2016, Ireland, UK, US.  Set in 1980's Dublin, a young teen, infatuated with an older teen-age girl, starts a band so that she'll have a place to sing and, he hopes, find that she's fallen in love with him.  He and his fellow band members then put their energies into being creative rather than destructive as some of their classmates are.  This is a rather sweet rendering of one boy's life and the initiative he takes in creating a new life for himself (and his friends).

5.  Snowden.  2016, US.  Oliver Stone's "biographical political thriller."  I found it well done.

6.  Strangers in Good Company.  1990, Canadian Film Board.  A busload of 8 older women become isolated in the back reaches of Canada when their bus breaks down and they are left with the need to hone their practical skills.  All they have is a lonely possibly abandoned house by a lake.  No road (they reached the house on foot), no vehicle, phone, or furniture except a few things stuffed in a barn.  And no food other than what they can come up with.  Apparently, much of the script was made up by them as they went along.  But each woman manages to tell her life.  The theme then is that no matter who, each woman has led an interesting life.  And the setting provides a good vehicle for listening to others without distraction or other obligations as well as for ingenuity and for letting time, not activities, dictate.  Very low key, very real, there's nothing phony or contrived.

7.  The Eagle Huntress.  2016, UK, Mongolia, US.  Documentary.  An apple-cheeked girl of 13 wants to be the first female in 12 generations of her Kazakh Mongolian family to become an eagle huntress.  So with the aid of her father, she sets out to compete in the annual eagle festival.  Stark gorgeous photography of the Altai Mountains in the far west of Mongolia.  A fine film.

8. The Kind Words.  2016, Israel.  3 Israeli siblings look for their father when they discover on the death of their mother that the man who raised them was not their biological father.  An important surprise greets them toward the end of their search.

9.  The Man Who Knew Infinity.  2016, UK.  Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons.  A biopic about an Indian mathematical genius and autodidact who was admitted to Cambridge from India during World War I. 

10.  Their Finest.  2016, UK.  This is a war comedy/drama set in 1940 London when propaganda films were being made to boost morale after Dunkirk.  It's taken from the book, Their Finest Hour and a Half.  An amusing film.  There is also a lovely rendering of the song "Wild Mountain Thyme" ("Will ye go, lassie, go") sung by actor Bill Nighy.

11.  They Were Expendable.  1945, US.  Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, Donna Reed.  John Ford started out directing this but broke his leg three weeks into the film, so Robert Montgomery took over.  Montgomery also acted in it as a PT boat commander.  It portrays the true story of the fall of the Philippines and the exit of MacArthur, and the PT boat squadron's early defense of the Philippines.  It's beautifully photographed in black-and-white with understated acting, and a good story line.  I had seen it as a child when it was first released and remembered it as being well done but had forgotten everything else about it.  One of those "best of" old-time black-and-white films.

12.  Unbranded.  2016, US.  Documentary.  4 Texas A&M friends "adopt" wild mustangs to train and ride from the Mexican border to the Canadian, all on public land.  They do this partly to help the horses from being penned up all day and partly to show that there is still enough public land that such a venture is possible.  The adoption program comes from having too many wild horses trying to graze land that will not accommodate that many (including other animals) so a good number of them are corralled until someone comes along who can use them.  Being wild, these were strong horses, used to 20-mile-a-day runs, and they did well on the trip.  Gorgeous photography.