So, yeah….I was a guest on the KNME current events show In-Focus, specifically the panel discussion, “The Line”:

Santa Feans, you’ll want to skip to 8:50 to get to the good stuff. The first segment is about Albuquerque ditches and ditch boards and, as you might imagine, I had absolutely nothing to say about either.

I did however jabber on LGBT rights, reverse racism, the Chinese and the death penalty. Sometimes, though, watching these embedded things, I wonder about my internal filter. I never took that poke at Joe Monahan, but I did get to correct Whitney Cheshire.

Props to Kathy Wimmer at KNME, host Gene Grant and the rest of the fine regular panel. A special terrorist fist jab to Jim Scarantino and Gene and for giving me lifts to and from the station and to David Alire Garcia for the embed code.

Cross-posted at Maassive.com

For the first time in history (well, that we know of anyway), a city will designate a Slam Poet Laureate. Not only is the position new in that it differentiates slam poetry from traditional poetry (slam being performance-based, traditional being more inclined to be created and appreciated on a page), but the designation of said SPL is unique: The SPL will be determined by a panel of judges in a knock-down, drag-out competition.

Slam poetry is usually performed in a competitive nature, so it’s fitting that 20 poets will be narrowed down in two rounds, leaving 10 finalists to compete for the title on June 13 (event details can be found at the very bottom of this post). Not only does the creation of this position speak to a modern objective – us crazy kids and our hippity-hop music – but it opens up a venue for dialogue about choosing who represents us and why, and what that representation does for the image of a city and its population.

That being said, I have a confession to make: I’m a bit notorious for declaring how much I dislike slam poetry. I guess I’m a purist in that I think that poetry exists mostly on the page; it is the words, after all, that we’re manipulating, right? And when spoken, words are too fleeting to pin down. In order for a word to have any substance, it needs to be written. When a poem is purely spoken, when a poem doesn’t hold its own or have the most effect when it’s written in ink, it comes and goes too quickly.

Or does it?

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KNME’s public policy news show, New Mexico In-Focus, has invited me to serve as a guest panelist again. We’re shooting today in Albuquerque, but the show runs Friday night at 7pm on TV. You can also check back here over the weekend for the embedded clip.

Tentatively, “The Line” panel will discuss issues including the new Supreme Court appointee, Sonia Sotomayor, the effect of Prop 8 on New Mexico, the lingering issue of the death penalty, China’s ties to New Mexico, and whether Gov. Bill Richardson will come to the rescue of those journalists imprisoned in North Korea. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to share that list, but hey–it can’t be bad to build up the hype, such as it is, for televised public policy debates.

For those following my fashion style, I will not be wearing my guyabera today, nor my one, single tie. Instead, I’ve donned my one another nice, button down shirt, grey with vertical stripes. I have, however, used my roommate’s styling gunk in my hair.

The main goal of tonight’s appearance, for me, is to not let Republican strategist Whitney Cheshire derail my train of thought. Damn, that woman’s clever on a panel. Remind me never to join her on Weakest Link.

The secondary goal is to sneak in a sideways jab at Joe Monahan, who announced his paranoid obsession with my appearances on the show a few weeks back during the miniature blog war.

Cross-posted at Maassive.com

An addendum to this week’s story on the sure-to-be-slow summer tourism season: Last week, SFR asked city of Santa Fe finance director David Millican what the projected 10 percent drop in hotel occupancy would translate to in terms of gross receipts tax revenue for the city.

Millican got back to us*, but too late to make the print edition. Here is his reply, in part:

We are predicting 9% drops in GRT generally and have not done a detailed study on tourism because tourist and non tourist information is lumped together in two major categories, Retail and Accomodations and Food…

In other words, it’s hard to say what a slow tourism season means for the city budget. More from Millican after the cut:

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of visual trespass and peculiarities to copyeditor [at] sfreporter.com,
subject “eyedropper.”

Not everything is doom and gloom, even considering that by now most of us are either unemployed or homeless or at least preparing to be. Every once in a while something comes about that is truly, honestly, 100-percent-without-irony wonderful. Today, it comes in the form of a glorious mailbox.

This underrated correspondence vessel is festooned with what are possibly the greatest things: astronauts and dinosaurs, presumably at war. The two opposing forces negotiate the steep tundra that is their battle zone.

They are accompanied, inexplicably, by blithe tulips and a single red heart. Whoever is responsible for this zen, I salute you. Everyone else, your mailboxes need some work.