no such thing as bad publicity

Los Pollos Hermanos

File under sad, but true: a fast-food burrito chain where a fictional drug trafficker runs his organization has become one of Albuquerque, New Mexico’s more improbable tourist attractions. As “Breaking Bad” finishes filming its final season in the city, the popular show has brought about a major boost to the local economy – yet it’s also creating a dilemma for tourism officials having to consider the ultimate cost of exploiting their city’s ties to a show that centers around drug trafficking, addiction and violence. (The show follows the fictional character of Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher turned meth lord.) While other popular television shows such as “Sex and the City” and “Seinfeld” have spawned a veritable cottage industry of location-based tours, “Breaking Bad” has provoked a pattern of drug-themed products springing up around town. The Candy Lady store recently capitalized on the show’s popularity by selling blue “Breaking Bad” meth treats – sugar rock candy that looks like the meth sold on the show. And the Great Face & Body shop developed a new line of blue bath salts called Bathing Bad. (For the record they are not the street drug known as bath salts.) Meanwhile, Masks y Mas Mexican folk art store near the University of New Mexico sells papier-mache statues of La Santa Muerte — Mexico’s Death Saint who counts drug traffickers among her devotees. (During the chilling opening of the show’s third season, a pair of cartel assassins is shown crawling to the saint’s shrine in Mexico to request some divine help.) Tourists are also flocking to sites that before the show were unknown and unimportant: the suburban home of White, played by Bryan Cranston; a car wash that’s a front for a money-laundering operation on the series; a rundown motel used frequently for filming; and the real-life burrito joint, Los Pollos Hermanos, which is a fast food chicken restaurant on the show. “It’s raised the visibility of the city,” said Tania Armenta, a vice president for the Albuquerque Convention & Visitors Bureau, which created a website of the show’s most popular places around town to help tourists navigate. But whether it’s a perception tourists might come to equate with, say Ciudad Juarez, remains to be seen. Until then there’s apparently no such thing as bad publicity.

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in the eye of the beholder

Four hours ago I was in the middle of nowhere contemplating art, infinity, and my place in the universe; now I’m killing time in a suburban mall before flying home, fascinated by something called Hot Dog on a Stick. I guess art really is subjective.

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the sum of the facts does not constitute the work or determine its esthetics

The Lightning Field measures one mile by one kilometer and six meters.
There are 400 highly polished stainless steel poles with solid, pointed tips in the work.
The poles are arranged in a rectangular grid array (16 to the width, 25 to the length) and are space 220 feet apart.
A simple walk around the perimeter of the poles take approximately two hours.
The primary experience takes place within The Lightning Field.
Each mile-long row contains 25 poles and runs east-west.
Each kilometer-long row contains 16 poles and runs north-south.
Because the sky-ground relationship is central to the work, viewing The Lightning Field from the air is of no value.
Part of the essential content of the work is the ratio of people to the space: a small number of people to a large amount of space.

Some facts, notes, data, information, statistics, and statements:

The Lightning Field is a permanent work.
The land is not the setting for the work but a part of the work.
The states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Texas were searched by truck over a five-year period before the location in New Mexico was selected.
The region is located 7,200 feet above sea level.
The Lightning Field is 11 ½ miles east of the Continental Divide.
The sculpture was completed in its physical form on November 1, 1977.
An aerial survey, combined with computer analysis, determined the positioning of the rectangular grid and the elevation of the terrain.
The poles’ concrete foundations, set one foot below the surface of the land, are three feet deep and one foot in diameter.
Engineering studies indicated that these foundations will hold poles to a vertical position in winds of up to 110 miles per hour.
The shortest pole is 15 feet.
The tallest pole height is 26 feet 9 inches.
The total weight of the steel used is approximately 38,000 pounds.
Diagonal distance between any two contiguous poles is 311 feet.
If laid end to end the pole would stretch over one and one-half miles (8,240 feet).
The plane of the tips would evenly support an imaginary sheet of glass.
During the mid-portion of the day 70 to 90 percent of the poles become virtually invisible due to the high angle of the sun.
Only after a lightning strike has advanced to an area of about 200 feet above The Lightning Field can it sense the poles.
On very rare occasions when there is a strong electrical current in the air, a glow known at St. Elmo’s Fire may be emitted from the tops of the poles.
No photograph, group of photographs or other recorded images can completely represent The Lightning Field.
Isolation is the essence of Land Art.

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sundowners

One of the ancillary benefits of this particular location: little line on the horizon, which means a stellar sunrise in one direction and a spectacular sunset in the other. Returning to the rigors of civilization is going to be constricting.

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it’s electrifying

The landscape in and around The Lightning Field is a varied mix of desert scrub, powdery soft – almost pulverized, really -  sand, and hard-baked patches of petrified earth. Spidery sections of cracked soil appear at random and seem so alien that it leaves me to wonder if lightning has at times avoided the lightning rods altogether, striking the ground instead – or if it’s some by-product of electrical strikes hitting the rods and the resultant run-off cooking the soil into unrecognizable – from my perspective – geometric patterns, like fractals.

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panoramic perspectives

Of course, I couldn’t resist – despite the limitations of not only the medium but also my technique. Click each panorama – then click it a second time in the new window – for a sense of scale far greater than I would have thought possible.

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the lightning field

No single image could do justice to The Lightning Field, Walter De Maria’s epic land art installation. It’s just too big – conceptually as well as physically – to be contained inside the boundaries of a frame. Yet at the same time there is something in human nature which begs to try to capture it in some way, shape, or form. So, I thought I’d include a series of individualized perspectives. Taken together they might amount to something, but until film and photography develop multi-sensory properties, it’s not even close to experiencing it as both participant and observer at once. For greater detail, click each image.

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little house on the high plains desert

At last we’ve arrived at our little house on the high plains desert – home while visiting The Lightning Field. A composite of a number of early 20th century homesteader cabins, the house is comfortably spartan and even elegant. It has everything we might need and nothing unnecessary that might clutter the space or the mind. A fridge is stocked with a simple supper and the fixings for an earnest breakfast. A wrought iron bed aligns with the east-facing window, promising bedtime stars and a sunrise for an alarm clock. Oh, and did I mention there is nobody around for miles and miles? In short, it’s perfect: just us and the art.

 

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all’s quiet in quemado

Three hours due west – then south – of Albuquerque is the town of Quemado, home to the Dia Art Foundation‘s field office for The Lightning Field. It’s where you deposit your car and wait to be ferried another hour further into the desert by the caretaker. There is not much to the town; in quick succession there’s a magistrate’s building, el Serape diner, a gas station, the Largo Motel and an ATM. (This is why you make a point of stopping at the liquor store in Grants.) If you make it to the end of the road – and one assumes, the town limits as well – you’ll learn that Quemado is the Spanish word for burned. You’d be forgiven for doing a double-take and reading the word as burnt, however, because Quemado appears more than just dry – it looks scorched.

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el malpais

Ninety minutes due west of Albuquerque you’ll come upon Grants, New Mexico, a depressing one-horse hamlet if ever there was one. It’s sole redeeming feature is the only liquor store within many miles. (I bought both the red AND the white; I suggest you do, too, should you ever find yourself in or around Grants.) The town is also the turn off for Quemado, my next destination, which is another hour and a half away. The views on this part of the road trip have so far been little more than rock-strewn landscapes and truck stop casinos. Yet on the road south of Grants the underwhelming turns unexpectedly scenic – and amazingly untrafficked – as you enter El Malpais National Monument. The name means badlands in Spanish, which is an apt description given the extremely desolate and dramatic volcanic fields that cover much of the park’s area. Yet El Malpais is also home to some of the oldest Douglas Fir trees on the planet, so you’ll find the topography, at times, abruptly shifting from fallow to verdant and back again. An easily accessible point of interest is the La Ventana Arch, a naturally occurring sandstone arch. And if you have the urge to lay down in the road and have your photo taken, well, this is an ideal place to do that, too.

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get your kicks

The Mother Road, Route 66, is one of the most famous highways in American culture. It originally ran from Chicago, Illinois, through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, before ending at Los Angeles, covering a total of 2,448 miles. It’s brief but storied rise and fall reads like a parable of modern America. Route 66 served as a major path for those who migrated west, especially during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and it supported the economies of the communities through which the road passed. During World War II, even more migration west occurred because of war-related industries in California. Route 66, by then fully paved, became one of the main routes and also served for moving military equipment. In the 1950s, it became the main highway for vacationers heading to Los Angeles. The road passed through the Painted Desert and near the Grand Canyon. Meteor Crater in Arizona was another popular stop. The sudden uptick in tourism in turn gave rise to a burgeoning trade in all manner of roadside attractions, like teepee-shaped motels, frozen custard stands, Indian curio shops, and reptile farms. It also marked the birth of the fast-food industry: Red’s Giant Hamburg in Springfield, Missouri, site of the first drive-through restaurant, and the first McDonald’s in San Bernardino, California. Changes like these to the landscape cemented the road’s reputation as a near-perfect microcosm of the culture of America, now linked by the automobile. People doing business along the route became prosperous due to the growing popularity of the highway, and those same people later fought (unsuccessfully) to keep the highway alive in the face of the growing threat of being bypassed by Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. Route 66 underwent many improvements and realignments over its lifetime, but progress eventually won out and it was officially removed from the United States Highway System in 1985 after it had been decided the route was no longer relevant. Portions of the road now recognized as Historic Route 66 have since been designated as National Scenic Byways, including this stretch through Bernalillo, New Mexico. The state has almost 500 miles of Route 66 bisecting it, making me hip to Nat King Cole’s timely tip:  this isn’t the last chance for me to get my kicks on Route 66.

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thank you, i think i will

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skewered and spit-roasted

Named after the symbol for the Santa Ana Pueblo, Corn Maiden is the fire-roasted restaurant at Hyatt Tamaya. Blending local Southwestern flavors with traditional tapas plates meant for sharing in an adobe-style home, chef Sam Reed incorporates native tradition into present day concepts beautifully with such starters as Crispy Quinoa Fritters with piquillo pepper coulis and razor-thin Buffalo Carpaccio dressed with shaved Reggiano and a chiffonade of basil. Skewered, spit-fired meats however are the specialty of the house and they, too, do not disappoint. Brought to the table on a sword, the house classic, k’uchininak’u, includes a fiery local chorizo, Fresno chile chicken, and a hunk of chile-rubbed heritage rib eye. A trio of sweet and savory sauces – mole, peach salsa, and a cactus chutney - sets off each of the individual meats, leaving barely any room for the accompanying potatoes au gratin, let alone any desert dessert.

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the rhythm of the mist

Named for the soft morning mist that gently floats over the cottonwood trees and the Rio Grande, Tamaya Mist at the Hyatt Regency is a spa connected to the land. The Tamayame came to this part of the Southwest centuries ago, setting up villages throughout the region but always moving on – traveling from the north to the west, then south and then east. They were prosperous and peaceful wherever they settled and never forgot the instructions given to them: move on. They stopped only to regain strength by nourishment and as soon as their energy was renewed, the traveling continued. My own nourishing journey of well-being this afternoon is a truly original offering: Ancient Drumming; a treatment which begins with an application of mud from the neighboring Jemez Mountains, infused with detoxifying local red chiles. As the heat penetrates into the skin my therapist gently thrums away the stresses of a delayed cross-country flight with flax seed-filled muslin bags that have been dipped in an oil scented with pinon, the nut of the native pine tree. The repetitive percussive technique seems rather anodyne at first – not the deep tissue my body seems to crave –  yet the gentle rhythm and steady pressure slowly but surely lulls me into a relaxing trance. Afterwards I am drenched in warm oil and lightly exfoliated using an aromatic scrub of pinon resin. I feel clean and smooth but more to the point, I am hydrated against the desiccation which comes from the inhospitable environment of both planes and deserts. I’m ready – almost – to being an adventure in New Mexico.

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sunrise: bernalillo

Sunrise over the pueblo-style buildings at Hyatt Tamaya, northwest of Albuquerque in historic Bernalillo, is as picturesque as you’d expect for a resort which sits at the foot of a 10,000 foot-high mountain range:  it pierces through the cloud cover and creeps across the foreground before illuminating the Sandia crest with a flourish as dramatic as a magician who waves his handkerchief over an empty fist one moment, only to reveal a bouquet of flowers – or a bunny! – in the next.

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