Stories From Telluride

September 5, 2013

The 40th Telluride Film Festival opened unceremoniously with the first North American screening of “ALL IS LOST” in a fine new high-tech theatre. Robert Redford stood out of the light as director-writer J. C. Chandor told us: “This film is about YOU.” He paused, or faltered, continuing: “About you and the end of your life.” As the lights went down I wondered if a solo passage on a doomed sailboat in the middle of the Indian Ocean is truly a good way to die.  About 107 minutes later I caught on. It’s a parable. As Ernest Hemingway (I’ll explain the […]

Self Government, Subdivided

June 27, 2013

The subdivider land rush on Western ranches in the 1970’s, stopped after  a few years by environmentalists, left behind conglomerates of lot owners governed under covenants written by the subdividers. The rule of law — and influence of lawyers — elsewhere does not often apply to these non-profit corporations any more than democracy applies to business corporations. The Baca Grande, carelessly platted on an old ranch in southern Colorado’s arid San Luis Valley, is one such subdivision. But there are many others, such as the more prosperous Eldorado near Santa Fe and Rio Rancho near Albuquerque. Of about 3,500 lots […]

What Did You Expect? Privacy?

June 17, 2013

  Finally, some media attention to the thin legal basis for the NSA surveillance of telephone and e-mail communications. Stories today about the decision of  U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon that the program is unconstitutional report his dismissive comments on Smith v. Maryland. The 34-year-old Supreme Court opinion says you don’t have an “expectation of privacy” when you dial a telephone. This opinion was the basis of the government’s defense in the case before Leon. He wrote that “the government’s surveillance capabilities, citizens’ phone habits, and the relationship between the NSA and telecom companies” today are so unlike 34 years […]

Writer Takes Refuge In “Nada”

March 30, 2013

Cloistered near Crestone, stranger in a strange land, sleeping or perhaps not, Beverly Donofrio suddenly feels “a weight on the mattress, a tug at the sheet.”  Then, in the words of her memoir, “The rapist hovers over my bed, and I wake myself screaming.” Her cell-size cabin at Nada, a Carmelite Catholic hermitage, is isolated. Nobody can hear. “For a while, evil remains a presence in the room as real as a gaping door you know you’ve shut.” Her reaction, which might come as a surprise to readers of her first memoir, the bestselling “Riding In Cars With Boys,” was […]

Everything We Know Comes From Roger Corman

January 14, 2013

By LARRY CALLOWAY  (Originally posted Sept. 9, 2012) Knock. Knock. Who’s there? Argo. Argo who? Argo Fuckyerself. This punch line — the line, not the whole joke — is a running gag in Ben Affleck’s “Argo,”  based on the rescue of six Americans who hid in the Canadian embassy during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. The line is at home in Hollywood. It was in the mind of Clint Eastwood during his imaginary talk with Barack Obama at the Republican National Convention. It should be propped up in big letters on a Hollywood hill. And it is especially appropriate delivered […]

From The Uttermost Ends Of The Earth

January 8, 2013

Tourism paints over things, but the paintings in the cellblock at Ushuai were reality. Journey to the end of the world (and back).

“Stand Up That Mountain”

October 2, 2012

In search of my Appalachian gene, lite. To baby-boomer outsiders, “Deliverance” was a scary movie, but then so was “The Milagro Beanfield War.”

A Short (journalistic) History Of New Mexico Politics

June 20, 2012

“Everything based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico” — Gov. Lew Wallace

Saying Goodbye In Thai

April 24, 2012

      by Larry Calloway (c) 2012 In the new Bangkok air terminal a long sculpture on the way to international departures depicts a tug of war, demigods v. devils, in the clean bright primary colors of Theravada Buddhist  temples. This moral chemistry, this dynamic equilibrium of unresolved issues that has gone on since the beginning is a fine Hindu creation myth. In this story, “Churning the Ocean of Milk,” the Asuras and Devas pull back and forth on a rope hitched around a spindle. (The rope is a mythological snake, the spindle is a sacred mountain, and the […]

Minutes Of A Crestone Meeting

November 10, 2011

Baca Grande Membership Vote Update.  See Baca Blog. . .    By Larry Joseph Calloway The anti-government passion that animates politics nationally was echoing off the walls at Jillian’s studio, where I have experienced yoga classes, a Sufi zirka, a feng schui talk, a sales pitch for ionized water, and such. Crestone is not where Republicans bother to campaign. It voted overwhelmingly for President Obama in both the primary and general elections three years ago. But here before about 50 residents on folding chairs the speakers, backed by PowerPoint slides on a big screen, were saying we cannot depend upon […]

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