My subscription to New Mexico Magazine began today with the arrival of what I thought would be the Valentine's issue, but turned out to be the March issue. I was disappointed because I wanted to read about what's considered romantic in New Mexico. It would be the logical thing to get the next issue after I subscribed in January, but I guess I didn't subscribe early enough. I'll either see if a newsstand around here has it, or I'll order it from the website, as I did with the 90th Anniversary issue I bumped into at the Boulder City Library that introduced me to New Mexico Magazine.
Then I looked at the March issue: "25 Reasons to Love Taos." And it came to me: When I was 11, a confluence of events made me become a writer. It must have been brewing since 1992, when I was 7 years old in Casselberry, Florida, and copied by hand onto a sheet of posterboard an Orlando Sentinel review of the animated movie Bebe's Kids. That also eventually made me a film critic, but seeing those words come alive after each letter was attached had apparently made a deep impression on me.
That 11th year, in South Florida, I found in a thrift shop a huge book called The Most of Andy Rooney, bringing together his previous books A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney, And More by Andy Rooney, and Pieces of My Mind. I had seen him on 60 Minutes, when I knew the show to be a magnet for car commercials. There were a lot of those during the broadcasts. But reading Rooney's commentaries, about restaurants, woodworking, tools, winter, how cold it gets at night, I was amazed. I didn't know writing could involve all this! I thought you simply go to restaurants, you eat, you enjoy whatever of the experience you like, and leave. But to write about it? To dwell in corners, to notice decor, to see whether it's food or atmosphere that's most important? I never thought writing could be like that! I wanted to do it and after reading that book, I tried writing like Rooney did, but learned quickly what writing style is, that his voice isn't my voice, that my voice can be anything that I feel I am.
Then came Natalie Goldberg. I was gradually learning more about writing, and at my local library, I found Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life. Here was a writer telling me to be playful, be bold, be daring, be free. Remembering some of the books I had read up to that age, including bringing John Grisham novels with me to class to read in 3rd grade (and I could read them, which made my teacher actually call my parents in for a conference, concerned that I was reading on a level far above my classmates, which never made sense to me), I thought writing had to be mostly formal in execution. You had a viewpoint, you pinpointed that one story you wanted to tell, you wrote all you could about it, and that was it.
But here was Goldberg, telling me to write about home, to go back there in my mind, to read my writing aloud to understand the rhythm of words, to write about spiritual experiences. Still surprised at what Andy Rooney wrote about, Goldberg made me want to write about everything on the planet, to discover who I wanted to be, to think, really think, about my life and what made up my life.
I checked out Wild Mind a lot. I wanted to absorb her book in my body and know it without picking it up, always guided by it, always prodded to do my best and my worst in my writing, and make that my best too.
Goldberg wrote about New Mexico, about Santa Fe, about Taos, because she lived there, and in other books of hers, it was noted that she lived, and possibly still lives, in Taos. I didn't think about it much at the time. I only knew she was the spirit I wanted to follow.
And then, in September 2011, came The Secret of Everything by Barbara O'Neal, who wrote How to Bake a Perfect Life, which I had only read because the front cover had a blurb by Erica Bauermeister, author of the deeply felt The School of Essential Ingredients, and that was enough for me. I loved How to Bake a Perfect Life and wanted to read everything else that O'Neal wrote, starting with The Lost Recipe for Happiness which was wonderful, detailed, emotional, vividly realized. But The Secret of Everything was it for me. It cracked New Mexico wide open. It is the reason I want to travel throughout New Mexico. I learned that the fictional Las Ladronas was a combination of Santa Fe and Taos, and I want to visit both. I fell hard for the beauty, the peace of New Mexico through O'Neal's descriptions, and out of everywhere I want to travel, I want to know New Mexico the most. I want to see every inch of it.
Reading it a second time last year, I realized that Natalie Goldberg started me on this path, but I hadn't known it yet. The Secret of Everything sealed my fate.
Walking back to our house from getting the mail, I quickly got over my disappointment of not getting the Valentine's issue when I saw "25 Reasons to Love Taos." As I learned just now from her Wikipedia page, Natalie Goldberg no longer lives in Taos. She lives in Santa Fe. But when I discovered her books, when she made me want to write and write and write and write, she lived in Taos. It's appropriate that "25 Reasons to Love Taos" is one of the stories of this issue. Goldberg gave life to the beginning of my writing life. This issue marks the beginning of my eventual travels to New Mexico, my desire to read the literature of the state, its history, its poetry, its desert, and its other landscapes. This subscription and this first issue is when I get serious about going there, moreso than before. Taos is here again, as it should be, another introduction, another path to begin.
Showing posts with label new mexico. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new mexico. Show all posts
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Socks, Books, and Nothing from New Mexico
Last Friday evening, Dad, Meridith and I went out to get groceries while Mom stayed home to rest. Our usual route took us to Sprouts Farmers Market and Pavilions, with a different stop at Albertsons because the fish looks better there now than at Sprouts. It turns out that Sprouts has merged with another company, and also plans to expand into Las Vegas, so that explains why the quality of foodstuffs there has begun to nosedive over the past few weeks.
At Sprouts, there was a basket near the refrigerated case that has containers of potato salad, cole slaw, tuna salad, chicken salad, pasta salad, and whatever other kinds of salads that aren't really salads that you can glop into plastic containers. In the basket were little bags of Zapp's Potato Chips, touting a "Voodoo" flavor, a mix of five flavors, and the words "Original Cajun Kettle Recipe" at the bottom of the front of the bag. "Cajun" could only mean it was from Louisiana, but this could also have been a case of something claiming to be Cajun, yet it was manufactured in, say, Minnesota.
I turned the bag over, and indeed, it was from Louisiana. Gramercy, Louisiana. That's authentic enough for me! And it made me want to get closer to where I want to go in the future, specifically New Mexico. One thing I like to do in a supermarket, at Target, at Walmart, at any pet store, is to turn various products over to where I can find out where they come from. So I vowed to find something that came from New Mexico.
We had an afternoon of errands today, all four of us. First stop was Walmart Supercenter on Carl Boyer Drive because I needed more socks. I wore out a few pairs to the point of holes in the heels, and found myself running out of pairs more quickly and having to put them in the wash more frequently.
I don't think a great deal about clothes. 90% of my wardrobe is printed t-shirts. I don't like jeans that are too-dark blue. As long as they're a close-to-getting-gloomy blue, and they fit, I'll buy them. I love buying socks and underwear because I only have to be aware of my sizes, find the bags that match on the shelves, and that's that. That's all I needed when I found Fruit of the Loom crew socks, with gray heels and toes. Five pairs, $5.77 each, and I bought two bags. I turned the package over and found a location of Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Mom wanted to stop at Dollar Tree in Canyon Country, next to Big Lots, for a mobile thing she wanted to hang at the front door to make it a bit cheerier until we arrive at the front door we want in Henderson after we move. Near the far left of the store, in between two sets of aisles, I found racks of books and got excited, which is normal for me, but these were racks of books that looked like they might be worth something to me, so I got even more excited.
I had no idea that Robby Benson, the voice of Beast in Beauty of the Beast, among other roles, as well as a fairly prolific sitcom director in the 1990s, wrote a novel about that experience, apparently inspired by directing six episodes of Friends, called Who Stole the Funny?. There are undoubtedly elements of Benson's experience in here, though it's up to the reader to pick out what might be true or what they think is true. The Publisher's Weekly review listed on Amazon states that "Benson offers in his debut a derivative parody of behind-the-scenes Los Angeles that fails to skewer any of its easy targets." Well, he hits a few, I think. I've not been directly in the industry, but I've met many flakes involved in it, and my dad has met many Hollywood parents as well, having taught their kids. What Benson writes possibly isn't that far off. I'm on page 141 already, which is a good sign that I'm seeing this one all the way through, and I do cringe at some of the personalities featured, but it's not because of Benson's writing. It's because I wouldn't be surprised if these people do work in Hollywood.
I also found America the Edible by Adam Richman, host of Man v. Food on Travel Channel, American Adulterer by Jed Mercurio, which describes JFK's philandering ways in the clinical language of a detached psychiatrist (though Mercurio isn't one, which I think would make it all the more fascinating), Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle (short stories, and one of them is about a raid on a neighbor's meth lab that strengthens a friendship between a "solitary woman and a teenage Goth girl," so I had to buy this one!), and Model Home by Eric Puchner, which I wanted to buy when it was published in February 2010, but $17 seemed steep. It's been in paperback since September 2010, the hardcover edition is being sold for $9.47 on Amazon, and I got it for a dollar. It's about a family keeping secrets from each other, including the patriarch having made a bad real estate investment, and the children are distant. They're forced to move to the patriarch's abandoned housing development in the desert and have to face head-on what may tear them apart.
I can relate. My father rushed us here to Southern California after he learned that he wouldn't have a job at Silver Trail Middle in Pembroke Pines, Florida, because the state put more emphasis on the FCAT exam, which meant far less money for electives, including him. I knew nothing about Southern California, didn't even have time to try to get used to the idea in some respect, and then there we were, living in an apartment in Valencia, which I liked well enough because it was at least surrounded by a supermarket, the local mall, the movie theater, and if you had an extra half-hour, you could reach the library on foot. But when I was a student at College of the Canyons in Valencia, trying to learn about Southern California, trying to make sense of it for myself, the books that I read were about Los Angeles, not about the Santa Clarita Valley. There were no books about the Santa Clarita Valley. That I was reading about Los Angeles trying to understand that should have been my first sign that things would turn upside down here, as they have over the years, as we've not had lasting happiness in any of those years. And that there were no books about Santa Clarita Valley should have been a sign that this was not the place for me, that there wasn't some focus on its history, which is an indicator to me about how worthwhile a place is. If its history is there in some form, either with a museum or on display at a library or a section of a library with actual books about it, then it's worth it to me. This never has been. Plus, I won't drive the freeways here. This byzantine maze has been insane from the day we arrived. Is it any wonder that drivers in this region are always ticked off? I want to see what this family in Model Home goes through in 1980s Southern California, if perhaps some of them feel as I have all this time.
Five books came out to $5.44. Let me repeat that: Five books. $5.44. For that price, I got a total of 1,518 pages to read. For as long as books remain this cheap, I will be happy for the rest of my life. While I likely won't buy as many books as I have once I get my Henderson library card (which is valid in the Clark County library system once a certain sticker is affixed to it at a Clark County branch that makes it so), I love so much that I can have all this for so little.
Contrast that with the 99 Cents Only store in Newhall. Their book selection hasn't changed in, I think, two years. I bought the hardcover edition of The War Within by Bob Woodward then, and there are still copies there. In hardcover.
Seeing this, I've come to believe that the Dollar Tree is for the rare reader that happens to walk in, like me. The 99 Cents Only store is for those who either don't like to read or don't have time to read or only read once every few years. However, this observation is based on only one store. It may be different at a store in Las Vegas, and Mom, Meridith and I did go to a store in North Las Vegas, but all I remember there, because of my excitement over it, was finding a VHS tape of The Best of Beakman's World for 59 cents, which I've since bought on DVD. They might have had books. Maybe it depends on where the store is located. They might not have reason to stock that Newhall location with books for the reason that very few sales come from books.
Before Dollar Tree, before the 99 Cents Only store, we went to PetSmart in Golden Valley, where I turned over bags of food, and toys, and cleaning supplies, hoping to find something from New Mexico. Nothing. I'm starting to think that New Mexico must not be so business friendly, at least toward any businesses that ship out goods. I have books by people who live in New Mexico, so that's good enough for me for now. I still hope to find some item from New Mexico in a store somewhere. Maybe I'll find something during our next visit to Las Vegas and Henderson, and maybe in further exploration after we become residents. Since Nevada is a bit closer to New Mexico than California, there should be something. I want to feel that I'm getting somewhat closer to my desire of traveling throughout that state, and while books and music and art do their part, I want a tangible example, something I can touch that I know came from there.
At Sprouts, there was a basket near the refrigerated case that has containers of potato salad, cole slaw, tuna salad, chicken salad, pasta salad, and whatever other kinds of salads that aren't really salads that you can glop into plastic containers. In the basket were little bags of Zapp's Potato Chips, touting a "Voodoo" flavor, a mix of five flavors, and the words "Original Cajun Kettle Recipe" at the bottom of the front of the bag. "Cajun" could only mean it was from Louisiana, but this could also have been a case of something claiming to be Cajun, yet it was manufactured in, say, Minnesota.
I turned the bag over, and indeed, it was from Louisiana. Gramercy, Louisiana. That's authentic enough for me! And it made me want to get closer to where I want to go in the future, specifically New Mexico. One thing I like to do in a supermarket, at Target, at Walmart, at any pet store, is to turn various products over to where I can find out where they come from. So I vowed to find something that came from New Mexico.
We had an afternoon of errands today, all four of us. First stop was Walmart Supercenter on Carl Boyer Drive because I needed more socks. I wore out a few pairs to the point of holes in the heels, and found myself running out of pairs more quickly and having to put them in the wash more frequently.
I don't think a great deal about clothes. 90% of my wardrobe is printed t-shirts. I don't like jeans that are too-dark blue. As long as they're a close-to-getting-gloomy blue, and they fit, I'll buy them. I love buying socks and underwear because I only have to be aware of my sizes, find the bags that match on the shelves, and that's that. That's all I needed when I found Fruit of the Loom crew socks, with gray heels and toes. Five pairs, $5.77 each, and I bought two bags. I turned the package over and found a location of Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Mom wanted to stop at Dollar Tree in Canyon Country, next to Big Lots, for a mobile thing she wanted to hang at the front door to make it a bit cheerier until we arrive at the front door we want in Henderson after we move. Near the far left of the store, in between two sets of aisles, I found racks of books and got excited, which is normal for me, but these were racks of books that looked like they might be worth something to me, so I got even more excited.
I had no idea that Robby Benson, the voice of Beast in Beauty of the Beast, among other roles, as well as a fairly prolific sitcom director in the 1990s, wrote a novel about that experience, apparently inspired by directing six episodes of Friends, called Who Stole the Funny?. There are undoubtedly elements of Benson's experience in here, though it's up to the reader to pick out what might be true or what they think is true. The Publisher's Weekly review listed on Amazon states that "Benson offers in his debut a derivative parody of behind-the-scenes Los Angeles that fails to skewer any of its easy targets." Well, he hits a few, I think. I've not been directly in the industry, but I've met many flakes involved in it, and my dad has met many Hollywood parents as well, having taught their kids. What Benson writes possibly isn't that far off. I'm on page 141 already, which is a good sign that I'm seeing this one all the way through, and I do cringe at some of the personalities featured, but it's not because of Benson's writing. It's because I wouldn't be surprised if these people do work in Hollywood.
I also found America the Edible by Adam Richman, host of Man v. Food on Travel Channel, American Adulterer by Jed Mercurio, which describes JFK's philandering ways in the clinical language of a detached psychiatrist (though Mercurio isn't one, which I think would make it all the more fascinating), Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle (short stories, and one of them is about a raid on a neighbor's meth lab that strengthens a friendship between a "solitary woman and a teenage Goth girl," so I had to buy this one!), and Model Home by Eric Puchner, which I wanted to buy when it was published in February 2010, but $17 seemed steep. It's been in paperback since September 2010, the hardcover edition is being sold for $9.47 on Amazon, and I got it for a dollar. It's about a family keeping secrets from each other, including the patriarch having made a bad real estate investment, and the children are distant. They're forced to move to the patriarch's abandoned housing development in the desert and have to face head-on what may tear them apart.
I can relate. My father rushed us here to Southern California after he learned that he wouldn't have a job at Silver Trail Middle in Pembroke Pines, Florida, because the state put more emphasis on the FCAT exam, which meant far less money for electives, including him. I knew nothing about Southern California, didn't even have time to try to get used to the idea in some respect, and then there we were, living in an apartment in Valencia, which I liked well enough because it was at least surrounded by a supermarket, the local mall, the movie theater, and if you had an extra half-hour, you could reach the library on foot. But when I was a student at College of the Canyons in Valencia, trying to learn about Southern California, trying to make sense of it for myself, the books that I read were about Los Angeles, not about the Santa Clarita Valley. There were no books about the Santa Clarita Valley. That I was reading about Los Angeles trying to understand that should have been my first sign that things would turn upside down here, as they have over the years, as we've not had lasting happiness in any of those years. And that there were no books about Santa Clarita Valley should have been a sign that this was not the place for me, that there wasn't some focus on its history, which is an indicator to me about how worthwhile a place is. If its history is there in some form, either with a museum or on display at a library or a section of a library with actual books about it, then it's worth it to me. This never has been. Plus, I won't drive the freeways here. This byzantine maze has been insane from the day we arrived. Is it any wonder that drivers in this region are always ticked off? I want to see what this family in Model Home goes through in 1980s Southern California, if perhaps some of them feel as I have all this time.
Five books came out to $5.44. Let me repeat that: Five books. $5.44. For that price, I got a total of 1,518 pages to read. For as long as books remain this cheap, I will be happy for the rest of my life. While I likely won't buy as many books as I have once I get my Henderson library card (which is valid in the Clark County library system once a certain sticker is affixed to it at a Clark County branch that makes it so), I love so much that I can have all this for so little.
Contrast that with the 99 Cents Only store in Newhall. Their book selection hasn't changed in, I think, two years. I bought the hardcover edition of The War Within by Bob Woodward then, and there are still copies there. In hardcover.
Seeing this, I've come to believe that the Dollar Tree is for the rare reader that happens to walk in, like me. The 99 Cents Only store is for those who either don't like to read or don't have time to read or only read once every few years. However, this observation is based on only one store. It may be different at a store in Las Vegas, and Mom, Meridith and I did go to a store in North Las Vegas, but all I remember there, because of my excitement over it, was finding a VHS tape of The Best of Beakman's World for 59 cents, which I've since bought on DVD. They might have had books. Maybe it depends on where the store is located. They might not have reason to stock that Newhall location with books for the reason that very few sales come from books.
Before Dollar Tree, before the 99 Cents Only store, we went to PetSmart in Golden Valley, where I turned over bags of food, and toys, and cleaning supplies, hoping to find something from New Mexico. Nothing. I'm starting to think that New Mexico must not be so business friendly, at least toward any businesses that ship out goods. I have books by people who live in New Mexico, so that's good enough for me for now. I still hope to find some item from New Mexico in a store somewhere. Maybe I'll find something during our next visit to Las Vegas and Henderson, and maybe in further exploration after we become residents. Since Nevada is a bit closer to New Mexico than California, there should be something. I want to feel that I'm getting somewhat closer to my desire of traveling throughout that state, and while books and music and art do their part, I want a tangible example, something I can touch that I know came from there.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Finding a Happy Anachronism in Online New Mexico
I burned out at the end of writing What If They Lived?. I had tunnel vision, and it was all I could think to do with my days, since I had a deadline of about six months after I started my research. Luckily, that deadline was extended twice, but I spent more time researching, writing, and worrying about making the deadline than pursuing any interests I vaguely remembered having before I began that book.
I can't do that this time with Mayday! Mayday!: The Making of the Airport Movies. It can't be the center of my universe and all I live for, even with my personal deadline, beginning on March 21, my birthday, of being published again by the time I'm 30.
So I'm reading other books at the same time, such as Watergate: A Novel by Thomas Mallon (Mallon does what Ann Beattie couldn't do in Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life: Bringing vast personalities and emotions to the historical figures of the Watergate scandal. He doesn't dwell on them endlessly like Beattie did with Pat Nixon, without doing anything with her), and I'm of course thinking about Las Vegas and Henderson, intending to also read soon the books I have about Vegas, and I'm also thinking about New Mexico. I want to travel throughout that state in the years to come, and I want to know what New Mexican culture is like. I want to know what binds Natalie Goldberg, my first writerly influence through her books, to Taos, New Mexico. (I think that's what planted New Mexico in my mind when I was 10 and 11.)
I want to know as much of its history as I do Las Vegas's and Henderson's. I want to hear music by those who are so entrenched in New Mexico, as residents, who have absorbed the land, the light, the weather, the sounds, the places, the populations, everything. And the music is what I'm pursuing first.
I found one website called Mitch's New Mexico Music Connection, with listings of musicians who embody various genres. There's a lot of them to explore here, and through them, I'll also be learning about other cities in New Mexico besides Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos.
And then I found the website for KANW, 89.1 FM, New Mexico Public Radio in Albuquerque. In the middle of the night, they've got "New Mexico Spanish Music" running for 3-4 hours, seven days a week. And there's also NPR's "Morning Edition," "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, and every Monday morning, a half-hour program called Report from Santa Fe, about important issues emanating throughout New Mexico, the audio from the televised interviews.
There was one show on the KANW schedule that seized me, one that's not even local to New Mexico.
There are some shows that don't require that you listen to them in a certain place. I think that's true of most radio shows online now, but take the example of my family and I listening to Las Vegas radio stations from here in the Santa Clarita Valley of Southern California. We can hear them, they come in clear, but it's not the same. There's a big difference between listening to them on the radio in the car from which you can see the tower of the Stratosphere Casino and Hotel from afar, and listening to them in a neighborhood and surrounding area that has clearly given up on itself, where people just want to be left alone and don't want to do anything to make their community more livable. I would make an effort if I felt like this was my community.
This is why I rarely listen to the John Tesh Radio Show online or find a station in the U.S. that's playing it at that very moment. I discovered it in Las Vegas. That's where I want to hear it. That's where it means a great deal to me.
But what I found on the KAFW website is really something. It seems like an anachronism with the wide availability of audiobooks, but it feels like a calm oasis in the midst of the noise and rush of what we are: It's The Radio Reader, hosted by Dick Estell, who has been doing this since 1964, taking over from previous figures who had kept this going since 1936. 75 years now.
For half an hour each day (though he records a week's worth of shows at his home in East Lansing, Michigan), Estell reads from a book. That's it. That's as simple as it gets. Tomorrow, on radio stations in 16 states (including New Mexico), he'll begin reading The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks. That'll last until March 28, and the next day, he'll begin The Litigators by John Grisham, taking him nearly to the end of April.
This is what Estell does. He reads to people. They turn on the radio and they listen to him read. The website claims a listenership of over one million. And this is how he does it now, recording on a laptop, and uploading it to a program that distributes his show to the radio stations that put him on the air.
I'm always fascinated by what people devote their lives to, be it fishing, or pinball, or culinary pursuits, or endless road trips, or diners, or reading books to people on the radio. I loved reading about the people profiled in Killer Stuff & Tons of Money by Maureen Stanton, who devote their lives to antiques and flea markets. Antiques are what actor Barry Nelson (The first James Bond in a visual medium, in 1954 on CBS in Casino Royale, and Captain Harris in Airport, as well as the manager of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining) devoted himself to after he retired from acting. I love books like Stanton's because here I am, a writer and voracious reader who loves Jeopardy!, The Big Bang Theory, The West Wing, movies, the video game Galaga, pinball, and so much else that would flood this entry out of its space, and here are these other people, in other states, who live their lives quite differently, either in antiques or some other pursuit that keeps them living every day.
And I think about Dick Estell in the same way. There's nothing on the website that indicates why he does this, but it looks like he's made a good life from it, and that's what matters most. Here I am, looking over this entry again and eyeing a book on Amazon called Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon, and there in East Lansing is Estell, perhaps set on another recording session in the morning, possibly reading more of The Litigators, if he isn't done with it already. The world will forever interest me that way.
Addendum at 11:35 p.m.: I mentioned fishing, and a few minutes ago, I found a blog through Google called Southern New Mexico Explorer, about one guy's experiences fishing, hiking, and camping in Southern New Mexico. I am not that adventurous, so I will happily live vicariously through him. I will also read every single New Mexico blog I find.
I can't do that this time with Mayday! Mayday!: The Making of the Airport Movies. It can't be the center of my universe and all I live for, even with my personal deadline, beginning on March 21, my birthday, of being published again by the time I'm 30.
So I'm reading other books at the same time, such as Watergate: A Novel by Thomas Mallon (Mallon does what Ann Beattie couldn't do in Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life: Bringing vast personalities and emotions to the historical figures of the Watergate scandal. He doesn't dwell on them endlessly like Beattie did with Pat Nixon, without doing anything with her), and I'm of course thinking about Las Vegas and Henderson, intending to also read soon the books I have about Vegas, and I'm also thinking about New Mexico. I want to travel throughout that state in the years to come, and I want to know what New Mexican culture is like. I want to know what binds Natalie Goldberg, my first writerly influence through her books, to Taos, New Mexico. (I think that's what planted New Mexico in my mind when I was 10 and 11.)
I want to know as much of its history as I do Las Vegas's and Henderson's. I want to hear music by those who are so entrenched in New Mexico, as residents, who have absorbed the land, the light, the weather, the sounds, the places, the populations, everything. And the music is what I'm pursuing first.
I found one website called Mitch's New Mexico Music Connection, with listings of musicians who embody various genres. There's a lot of them to explore here, and through them, I'll also be learning about other cities in New Mexico besides Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos.
And then I found the website for KANW, 89.1 FM, New Mexico Public Radio in Albuquerque. In the middle of the night, they've got "New Mexico Spanish Music" running for 3-4 hours, seven days a week. And there's also NPR's "Morning Edition," "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, and every Monday morning, a half-hour program called Report from Santa Fe, about important issues emanating throughout New Mexico, the audio from the televised interviews.
There was one show on the KANW schedule that seized me, one that's not even local to New Mexico.
There are some shows that don't require that you listen to them in a certain place. I think that's true of most radio shows online now, but take the example of my family and I listening to Las Vegas radio stations from here in the Santa Clarita Valley of Southern California. We can hear them, they come in clear, but it's not the same. There's a big difference between listening to them on the radio in the car from which you can see the tower of the Stratosphere Casino and Hotel from afar, and listening to them in a neighborhood and surrounding area that has clearly given up on itself, where people just want to be left alone and don't want to do anything to make their community more livable. I would make an effort if I felt like this was my community.
This is why I rarely listen to the John Tesh Radio Show online or find a station in the U.S. that's playing it at that very moment. I discovered it in Las Vegas. That's where I want to hear it. That's where it means a great deal to me.
But what I found on the KAFW website is really something. It seems like an anachronism with the wide availability of audiobooks, but it feels like a calm oasis in the midst of the noise and rush of what we are: It's The Radio Reader, hosted by Dick Estell, who has been doing this since 1964, taking over from previous figures who had kept this going since 1936. 75 years now.
For half an hour each day (though he records a week's worth of shows at his home in East Lansing, Michigan), Estell reads from a book. That's it. That's as simple as it gets. Tomorrow, on radio stations in 16 states (including New Mexico), he'll begin reading The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks. That'll last until March 28, and the next day, he'll begin The Litigators by John Grisham, taking him nearly to the end of April.
This is what Estell does. He reads to people. They turn on the radio and they listen to him read. The website claims a listenership of over one million. And this is how he does it now, recording on a laptop, and uploading it to a program that distributes his show to the radio stations that put him on the air.
I'm always fascinated by what people devote their lives to, be it fishing, or pinball, or culinary pursuits, or endless road trips, or diners, or reading books to people on the radio. I loved reading about the people profiled in Killer Stuff & Tons of Money by Maureen Stanton, who devote their lives to antiques and flea markets. Antiques are what actor Barry Nelson (The first James Bond in a visual medium, in 1954 on CBS in Casino Royale, and Captain Harris in Airport, as well as the manager of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining) devoted himself to after he retired from acting. I love books like Stanton's because here I am, a writer and voracious reader who loves Jeopardy!, The Big Bang Theory, The West Wing, movies, the video game Galaga, pinball, and so much else that would flood this entry out of its space, and here are these other people, in other states, who live their lives quite differently, either in antiques or some other pursuit that keeps them living every day.
And I think about Dick Estell in the same way. There's nothing on the website that indicates why he does this, but it looks like he's made a good life from it, and that's what matters most. Here I am, looking over this entry again and eyeing a book on Amazon called Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon, and there in East Lansing is Estell, perhaps set on another recording session in the morning, possibly reading more of The Litigators, if he isn't done with it already. The world will forever interest me that way.
Addendum at 11:35 p.m.: I mentioned fishing, and a few minutes ago, I found a blog through Google called Southern New Mexico Explorer, about one guy's experiences fishing, hiking, and camping in Southern New Mexico. I am not that adventurous, so I will happily live vicariously through him. I will also read every single New Mexico blog I find.
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