Day: January 18, 2006

Trader Joe’s but no Nordstrom

The Trib has heard the scuttle, too. Around town, on Web logs and in coffee shops, people are talking about what they’ve heard is coming to the Duke City. Among them, J.Crew, Nordstrom, J.Jill and Urban Outfitters.

The first two gave The Tribune a definite and resounding no on plans to announce an Albuquerque store opening. Women’s clothier J.Jill, however, seems more promising – the customer service department says yes but couldn’t find confirming details. The company’s spokeswoman said she would not be able to confirm anything for a few weeks about the Boston store’s expansion in the West.

Urban Outfitters, which is rumored to be ready to occupy space on Central Avenue, also did not return calls for this story.

The Albuquerque Tribune

The excitement is over more Wal-Marts, Office Depots and — hold your breath — a second Bed, Bath & Beyond.

NewMexiKen loves Albuquerque, but where’s Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Panera, an Apple Store, jeez, a Kohl’s even?

The first Albuquerque Trader Joe’s opens soon.

Female Boxer Offers Hope to a New Mexico Town Short of Heroes

NewMexiKen would be remiss if I didn’t point out this article from the National section of today’s New York Times:

She is more Cinderella than Cinderella Man and no one’s Million-Dollar Baby, but Monica Lovato, a slip of a super flyweight boxer at 5-foot-5 and 115 pounds, is carrying the hopes of her drug-ravaged hometown on her narrow shoulders.

Heroes have been hard to come by in Espanola, the mile-high seat of Rio Arriba County, where drug overdoses lead the nation in taunting proximity to northern New Mexico’s moneyed enclaves of Santa Fe, Taos and Los Alamos.

Ms. Lovato, 28, who has fought her way out of a tormented family history to a 4-1 record and has been known to relax by jumping out of airplanes, is as much a champion as Espanolans have cheered in some time.

Our very own “Mo cuishle.”

The article is as much about the problems — especially drug-related — in Rio Arriba county as it is about the boxer.

Key quotation: “[W]here a Rio Arriba County commissioner once protested a [drug] crackdown saying, ‘We’re not going to declare war on our own relatives.'”

The Classic Won’t Be a Classic Minus Cuba

From George Vecsey’s column in The New York Times:

But first the Classic needs a gesture of diplomacy, or at least a quiet bureaucratic stamping of papers. The Bush administration has refused permission for Cuba, one of the great baseball powers in the world, to enter the United States to play in the tournament, as part of the longstanding American embargo on trade with Cuba.

The Castro regime has offered to donate any profits from the Classic to Hurricane Katrina victims, but the Bush administration is under intense pressure from Cuban exiles in South Florida to apply the ban against the Cuban team. The Treasury Department is reconsidering the application, while baseball officials nervously await the answer.

As athletes who never had a chance to play in a world competition, [Sadaharu] Oh and [Henry] Aaron seemed concerned that Cuba could be kept out.

“I don’t know anything about politics, but since it is called the World Classic, I hope Cuba will play,” Oh said through an interpreter.

Aaron said: “The world is not the world until it’s complete. I hope Cuba will play. I hope politics doesn’t get involved in this, the way it does everything else.”

This isn’t the worst thing the Bush Administration has done, or the stupidest, but it is certainly the most asinine. No justification for the denial other than catering to the Cuban vote in south Florida. Let Cuba play.

The War That Made America

Virginia Heffernan reviews the PBS four-part edutainment series on the French and Indian War that debuts this evening. An excerpt:

She [co-executive producer Laura Fisher] has set out to render in lavish particulars the story of the strange war between the French and British empires for control of the Ohio River Valley in the 1750’s and 60’s. The war was triangulated: American Indians, for whom the valley was a homeland, played the empires against each other, eventually tipping the balance of power in favor of the British. The Indians’ strategy, diplomacy and unorthodox military tactics are the chief focus of this program, which attends closely to their considerable role in the war. (Graham Greene, the actor and Oneida Indian whose ancestors fought in the war, serves as narrator.)

Update: The first two hours (of four) were shown January 18th (remainder January 25th). NewMexiKen watched and it was good, though somewhat slow-paced. Greene’s narration explains most of what is happening in a useful but not burdensome way. The Indian role and agenda is demonstrated more thoroughly than ever before in a production of this type.

NewMexiKen assumes (but has no documentation) that I may well have had ancestors fighting for both the English and French sides.

Now here’s a pessimist

I still say “Gore/Obama 08,” but I think McCain will be nearly impossible to beat and I’ve changed my mind about him being un-nominatable. (Jeb is the wild card, by the way.) But if McCain does turn out to be the nominee, maybe Democrats had just better nominate Hillary and get it over with”.

Eric Alterman

McCain will be 72 in 2008, or some other age if that suits his ambitions better.

Annie Proulx tells the story behind ‘Brokeback Mountain’

From Advocate.com, an intreview with Annie Proulx that includes this:

AP: How did you feel about seeing it on the big screen?

Proulx: It was really quite a shock because I had had nothing to do with the film. So for 18 months, I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea if it was going to be good or frightful or scary, if it was going to be terribly lost or sentimentalized or what. When I saw it in September, I was astonished. The thing that happened while I was writing the story eight years ago is that from thinking so much about the characters and putting so much time into them, they became embedded in my consciousness. They became as real to me as real, walk-around, breathe-oxygen people. It took a long time to get these characters out of my head so I could get on with work. Then when I saw the film, they came rushing back. It was extraordinary—just wham—they were with me again.

AP: What did you think of the performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal?

Proulx: I thought they were magnificent, both of them. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist…wasn’t the Jack Twist that I had in mind when I wrote this story. The Jack that I saw was jumpier, homely. But Gyllenhaal’s sensitivity and subtleness in this role is just huge. The scenes he’s in have a kind of quicksilver feel to them. Heath Ledger is just almost really beyond description as far as I’m concerned. He got inside the story more deeply than I did. All that thinking about the character of Ennis that was so hard for me to get, Ledger just was there. He did indeed move inside the skin of the character, not just in the shirt but inside the person. It was remarkable.

NewMexiKen read the story again last evening and it is excellent. It’s in Proulx’s wonderful collection of Wyoming stories Close Range. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapted Proulx’s story for the screenplay.

Link via kottke.org.

Update on iTunes

Last week NewMexiKen posted that I was holding off on installing the update to iTunes (6.0.2) because it installed software that collected information about the music you were listening to without informing you. They’ve changed it, so that now you are given a choice:

The iTunes MiniStore allows you to discover new music and videos right from your iTunes Library. As you select items in your Library, information about that item is sent to Apple and the MiniStore will send you related songs or videos. Apple does not keep any information related to the contents of your music Library.

Would you like to turn on the MiniStore now?

It’s the birthday

… of Kevin Costner. Costner won the Oscars for director and best picture for Dances With Wolves and was nominated for the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Lt. John Dunbar. He’s 51 today.

… of Jesse L. Martin. The Law & Order star is 37.

It’s also the birthday of Cary Grant (Archibald Alexander Leach, 1904-1986) and Danny Kaye (David Daniel Kaminski, 1913-1987).

White Sands National Monument (New Mexico)

… was established by President Herbert Hoover on this date in 1933.

At the northern end of the Chihuahuan Desert lies a mountain ringed valley called the Tularosa Basin. Rising from the heart of this basin is one of the world’s great natural wonders – the glistening white sands of New Mexico.

White Sands

Here, great wave-like dunes of gypsum sand have engulfed 275 square miles of desert and have created the world’s largest gypsum dune field. The brilliant white dunes are ever changing: growing, cresting, then slumping, but always advancing. Slowly but relentlessly the sand, driven by strong southwest winds, covers everything in its path.

White Sands National Monument

Best line of the day, so far

“If the Democrats are like the dithering ‘Desperate Housewives,’ the Republicans have come across like the counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer on ’24’: fast with a gun, loose with the law, willing to torture in the name of protecting the nation. Except Jack Bauer is competent.”

Maureen Dowd, who adds: “How many things do you have to mess up in the country and the world before you lose your reputation for machismo?”

Update: The Daily Howler reminds us who put the skirts on Gore.