TAOS--It rained all the way from ABQ to Taos. And then it rained until we finally called it a night during a walk and went back to our room.

TAOS PLAZA--It looks like this pony on the plaza has had plenty of experience with overweight cowboys. The sign says, "Please observe the 100 pound weight limit!"

TAOS--This guy walking out the door to his truck with two loaves of day-old bread from the Main Street Bakery reminds me of myself many mornings in Nob Hill...walking out of La Montanita Co-op with two day-old blueberry muffins for half-price. It is a reminder that no matter how exotic Taos seems, people do live here.

Weekend Bargain Has Us Heading North

NOB HILL--Right after work tomorrow, MaryAnn and I are headed up to Taos for the weekend. We got a coupon out of Crosswinds (I think) for the Taos Inn: $59 per night including breakfast @ Doc Martin's. Their website offers a Deluxe Winter Package of 3 nights, a welcome platter, drink coupons, and breakfast every morning for $299. Both seem like good deals for one of the premier destinations in the USA. Of course the forecast is for rain and snow both Friday and Saturday with clearing late Sunday. Maybe we'll just stay inside.

Rolling In Dough

NOB HILL--I have been babysitting my grandson Robby all week. Simone has changed jobs and has yet to work out a permanent situation for Robby. So far this week we have made tiny raised-beds for his garden, got our emissions checked, watched Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius on TV, and played in two different Playlands. Today we made biscuits. It is hard to believe, but the boy eats his plain...no butter...no strawberry jam.

Jimmy Smith Dies

Jazz organ pioneer Jimmy Smith dies at 79

By ARTHUR SPIEGELMAN
Reuters News Service

Smith

LOS ANGELES -- Organist Jimmy Smith, who helped change the sound of jazz by almost single-handedly introducing the electric riffs of the Hammond B-3 organ, has died at age 79 at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., his record label said Wednesday. More...

This Reuters article via The Houston Cronicle is as good a place to begin as any if you are not familiar with Jimmy Smith.

I first heard him on a jukebox while sitting in an all-night diner on the northwest side of Chicago. It was 1965. Although I had a dorm room to study in, I liked diners better. Coffee and cigarettes. Jukeboxes. I was trying to make the transition in my protected midwestern mind from the Dorsey brothers to jazz. It was Oscar Peterson, Jimmy Smith, and Lee Morgan. After that there was no going back...although I appreciate big band music to this day. But those jazz musicians liberated my mind. I could study to jazz...write to jazz. It fit with the big city that I found myself living in during the early 60's.

At about that time I heard Count Basie and his band live at the Club Laurel in Chicago. There was a $2 cover charge. The whole band was dressed in tan suits with white shirts and ties. The music was so powerful! Forty years later I still remember that night.

NOB HILL--I must be too emotional. A moment like this one at 7:00 this morning makes me feel like the luckiest guy in the world. Here comes MaryAnn, happy to see me, walking into my arms. And there's Victor Pena, taking a second from his job of washing every single paper machine in front of the Flying Star, smiling at the two of us. God, I love this life.

Kooser: 1974

The Goldfish Floats by Ted Kooser

The goldfish floats to the top of its life and turns over
A shaving from somebody's hobby.
So it is that men die at the whims of great companies
Their neckties pulling them speechless into machines,
Their wives finding them slumped in the shower,
Their hearts burst open like boiler doors.
At night, again and again,
These men float to the tops of their dreams
Only to be pulled back to their desks in the morning.
If you ask them, they all would prefer to have died in their sleep.

Counting The Seconds At Home And Abroad

NOB HILL--Most of our blended family were sitting around the dinner table tonight and the conversation drifted into how most people don't really figure out the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion. Especially in today's political environment, it seems easy to get away with enormous amounts of dough. MaryAnn's son Ethan came up with this enlightening illustration.

If a person counted one number per second, it would take about 11 days to count to one million. It would take 33 years to count to one billion. Yet they sound so similar to most of us.

Along that line, the British newspaper Guardian Unlimited ran a story today with enormous numbers. But unless you stop the think about the real enormity of the amounts, it hardly seems to raise an eyebrow. The Republicans in Congress attack the U.N. for mismanaging the Iraqi oil-for-food program...but there seems to be another story.

Fraud and corruption

Forget the UN. The US occupation regime helped itself to $8.8 bn of mostly Iraqi money in just 14 months

George Monbiot
Tuesday February 8, 2005
The Guardian

Memories of Claude's Bar, Santa Fe...1970

NOB HILL--This man eating a chocolate eclaire almost as big as his head is David Briggs. David and I have known each other since I first came to New Mexico back in 1970. This was up in Santa Fe. I was a bouncer in Claude's Bar on Canyon Road and David was one of our best customers. David Briggs, by the way, is an outstanding flamenco guitarist.

Back in 1970, Claude's Bar was probably the wildest place in the state of New Mexico. Not that there weren't other wild-ass places like Okie's and The Senate, but Claude's attracted such a mix of cowboys, Indians, Chicanos, artists and writers, freaks, politicians, and full-time road warriors that every night was a total eruption of fists. Every night. And as a bouncer I could depend on practically no one to help me out. Certainly not the police: Canyon Rd. at that time was 2-way and the police took half an hour to respond to fight calls. The main attraction of the job for me was that I could reach over the bar and pour myself a tall one whenever I got thirsty. I was up in double digits before the night got too old.

This fit in nicely with my theory on how to survive as an underweight bouncer in such a hostile place: drink as much as the customers. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but no sober person could even stand to be in the place as the evening wore on, much less talk to anybody.

My other rule of thumb was to never stand between two guys who were about to take a swing at one another. No...I would let 'em swing. In most bar fights one swing is all you get. Then the two fighters grab on to each other. And that is when I stepped in and grabbed them both and we all sank to the floor with me being careful to land on top of both of them. As we lay there in the pools of stale beer and cigarette ash, I would whisper to them something like this, "Now don't we look like the dumbest three a--holes on the face of the earth. I bet half the place is laughing at us." That, usually, was the end of the fight.

And David Briggs, was he ever fighting? No. He was drinking...and laughing. It is something of a miracle that we both survived those days. I worked at that job on weekends for about a year. Then I fell in love with the woman I eventually married. We went out to dinner one night at El Farol and I knew right then that I had to quit. And I did that very evening.

Three weeks later, the guy who took my place was stabbed in the stomach while breaking up a fistfight. The person who stabbed him wasn't even in the fight. He did recover.

Russell Adams: Art From His Trunk

NOB HILL--I was sitting in the Flying Star the other afternoon when The Artist Russell Adams had me follow him out to his car parked behind the Nob Hill Barber Shop. He unlocked his trunk and pulled out two really beautiful constructions. This is one of them. It was so darn cold out there that I forgot to ask the name of the piece. I do know he has some work hanging in the gallery at 208 Dartmouth SE.

But the big story on the street was about another show last weekend: a young painter 23 years old, described by another artist as being very talented for his age and having a very "aggressive" style, who had so much paint on his canvases that it was the only feature anyone who had seen the show talked about. I didn't make the show. I was at the Manguso reading. But, believe me, I have got to check this out and come back with more details.

The Bus Was Here Saturday...Gone by Sunday

NOB HILL--One of the great things about living on Route 66 is seeing the amazing array of vehicles traveling the byways crossing the USA. This "conversion" has been raised about 2 feet and most of the windows removed from the driver's side and added above the windows on the passenger side. This diesel Bluebird bus has Massachusetts plates. I could not find the driver.

Buses converted to motorhomes reached the height of their popularity in the '70s, when new motorhomes were expensive and used ones were virtually non-existent. Many included back-to-nature types of ammenities such as wood burning stoves. Most had paint jobs that echoed the organic shapes of a mental wilderness. Ken Kesey's bus, according to some, is still sunning itself under a northern New Mexico sky. The Pig Farm supposedly took their bus to the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968. People still remember the bus races in Aspen Meadows outside of Santa Fe about 1970.

It is so sweet to see this beauty. It really is what Rt. 66 was always about: being on the road as a metaphor for life itself.

Lobo Women Smash Colorado State 75-49

WALMART ON SAN MATEO--Now I am not sure, but if the team has to go to Walmart right before the game...is that a good thing? I regarded it as a good omen for the Lobos. Nice bus, though. But don't the men's teams FLY to games?

THE PIT--The Pit was rockin'. 11,551 fans certainly had the attention of the players. The officials seem to have lost a little of their focus during a timeout, and watch a fan attempt a halfcourt shot.

This was a really intense game. It required a lot of mental toughness. The Lobos met the challenge. For complete statistics and a recap visit GoLobos. Here are my impressions at courtside in the first half and in the nosebleed seats in the second.

Lobo post Dionne Marsh was double-teamed whenever she got the ball. Most of the time she still found a way to score. What a threat she has turned out to be...and she is only a freshman.

The Colorado State coach lets an official have it trying to stop all the fouls being called on his inside players. I was right there. The CSU post players would push the Lobos hard in the back, but they did it with their arms crossed. Apparently they thought this made it okay. At this point, with the Lobos fighting back with intensity and the mugging stopped in the paint, CSU had no game left. The Lobos went on a 22-3 run late in the first half.

Dionne Marsh sinks a free throw late in the first half. Because she jumps so high and seems to hang in the air, she does get fouled a lot. She also jumps with her legs and arms spread out, which also attracts a lot of contact when shooting. Dionne finished the game with 14 points and 10 rebounds.

By the end of the game, with a 26 point lead, most of the fans were happy and appreciative of the intensity and skill demonstrated by the Lobos. Fans did the wave. Also, something I can't remember seeing before, the fans stood and applauded during the last 30 seconds of the game.

Manguso Reads Into The New Mexico Night

University of New Mexico SUB--Sarah Manguso read from published and new work tonight at the Student Union Building. Her first book, The Captain Lands In Paradise, was published in 2002. She has two more books in the works. The first poem in her Captain book is "The Rider," which is posted somewhere below. It also started off the reading.

"The Rider" typifies the kind of tough questions this writer asks about life...in this case what is the nature of time, death, and beyond. It is a conundrum one cannot answer, the poet can only reframe it in such a way the reader recognizes the beauty of the question and the fierceness that the poet brings to the piece. This writer is not afraid of the big questions...which is as it should be. That is why poets are held in such high respect by some of us. Such bravery must be respected.

Her academic roots show through. There are lots of literary and historical references. But what is most engaging about her writing is the freshness of her vision, which combines a lot of mathematical terms with a sort of mystical search for answers. The end of "The Rider" has that sort of "what just happened here?" ending. But then, that is the nature of the subject: time, death..and beyond.

I bought the book.

UNM--Johnny_Mango poses for a picture with The Poet Sarah Manguso. Her poetry is a complex mixture of philosophy, science, and allegory. She was born in 1974, graduated from Harvard (where she studied to be a doctor), attended graduate school at the famous Iowa writing program, and currently lives in Brooklyn.