su libro

pass the enchantment, please From chiles to the Chuska Mountains, a flurry of books celebrate New Mexico. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, “there’s more to America’s architectural stepchild than first meets the eye.” Plus books on Western family homes and the end of Taos commune life.
By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Winter 07 Su Casa

Real Women Eat Chiles, by Jane Butel, Northland Publishing, Flagstaff, Arizona, 194 pages, hardcover, $21.95.
Recently a small flood of books celebrating various dimensions of life in New Mexico has washed over the Su Casa offices and settled permanently on our library shelves. They testify both to the unique, even signature highlights of the state’s cultural and geographic landscape, but also to the vitality of regional presses—even if one, Northland Publishing, calls Flagstaff, Arizona, home.
Let’s just follow that thought and look at a Northland book first: Real Women Eat Chiles, by author, internationally known culinary expert, and New Mexican Jane Butel. Butel is familiar around these parts for her cooking academy, Jane Butel’s Southwestern School, which has also been named one of the world’s best vacation cooking schools by Bon Appétit magazine. All of this seems to support the publicist’s moniker for Butel as New Mexico’s Queen of Chiles.

The recipes in Real Women offer some substantiation for that claim, but first a word about this book as a beautifully designed artifact. Everything works, from the apt photography to the typography, the no-nonsense organization of recipes, and even the introductory chapters on Butel’s “lifelong love affair with chiles” and on other women who cherish our spiciest official state vegetable (oops, Butel says it’s a fruit). The art of bookmaking rises to a high level here.

Those early chapters create the context for the luscious recipes, with Butel asserting that her goal is to show “how chiles do so many good things for our bodies”—like controlling appetite, helping burn calories, and zapping our brains with a mood-elevating endorphin rush. Party on! Chile also has curative powers and its antioxidative properties help preserve meat—carne adovada, anyone? As if any enchilada-loving New Mexican needed persuading, Butel provides an extensive discussion of the various maladies and diseases susceptible to the chile remedio, or more accurately, the capsaicin cure, since that’s the active ingredient.

For chile lovers—a show of hands, everyone!—the issue isn’t “do I want it?” but “let me count the ways,” with Butel’s book reaching a high number. In Real Women Eat Chiles (and by the way, I refuse any sexist slight in that title), Butel has handpicked a bushel of her “personal, easy-to-make recipes,” each averaging five ingredients and requiring but 20 minutes to prepare (eat your 30-minute heart out, Rachael Ray).

In one quick early chapter, Butel provides the Chile 101 rundown you need to get the most out of capsaicin-centered cooking. For instance, did you know that you can cut the heat by adding an acid like lime juice, vinegar, or even wine? Or that broad-shouldered, blunt-tipped chile pods are milder than slimmer, sharper ones? Butel also talks about how to prepare and store chiles, both red and green.

Then come the recipes: appetizers, main dishes, red meat, white meat, seafood, vegetarian, pizza and pastas, soups, wraps, meal complements, sauces and salsas, and desserts. They all look good and doable in the allotted 20 minutes, especially if you prepare a basic sauce ahead of time. The variety is tremendous, ranging from Swiss chard-wrapped salmon to chile-spiked banana oatmeal cookies, cucumber salsa to spicy hot chocolate mousse, black bean enchiladas to veggie chimichangas. If you can’t find a half-dozen meals you love in here, you’ve lost your taste buds.

One warning: do not read this book if you lack immediate access to chile, be it powdered Chimayó red or fresh roasted Sandía green. You’re gonna crave a chile fix like a September squirrel craves nuts.

Mike Butterfield’s Guide to the Mountains of New Mexico, text by Peter Greene, photographs by Mike Butterfield, published by New Mexico Magazine, Santa Fe, 216 pages, 101 color plates, paperback, $29.95.
The Mountains of New Mexico, by Robert Julyan, photographs by Carl Smith, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 392 pages, 10 maps, 83 halftone photographs, $22.95 in paperback or $39.95 in hardback.
Chile keeps many of us here, while landscape expands that bond into three dimensions—or maybe four, if you count the spiritual. As we experience outdoor New Mexico, some of us are desert rats, while others crave altitude. For the latter, only mountains will do. What great timing, then, for two high-quality books on New Mexico’s high country to hit the shelves virtually simultaneously. Although they overlap with almost eerie parallelism, these titles offer enough complementary virtues to each demand purchase. After all, you can’t really have too many peak-bagging daydreams.

Mike Butterfield’s Guide to the Mountains of New Mexico presents a high-level tour of New Mexico in more ways than one. For every range in the state, from the soaring-above-timberline Sangre de Cristos to the lowest yucca-fringed nub in the extreme southeast, this guidebook takes them all seriously, listing useful key facts for each “range” in a handy chart. These details include location, access highways and local roads, elevation range, major peaks, attractions (whatever they may be), hiking trails, other recreational activities such as skiing, wildlife in residence, water sources (a key bit of information for the hiker), wilderness areas, land ownership and administration (e.g., U.S. Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, or private), and so on. Perhaps because guidebook readers expect a standardized set of information, you’ll find most of the same information in Robert Julyan’s The Mountains of New Mexico. In either case, it’s useful.

Both books also delve into the geology, history, and lore of each mountain area, along with personal anecdotes that maintain a pleasing entertainment level. Butterfield’s consistently appealing photos give a strong sense of each place, author Peter Greene covers the field guide summaries in lucid prose, and a scattering of “I-remember-the-time-when” reminiscences by But–
terfield elevate the book beyond purely glove compartment status to be used only for reference on the trip-to.

Greene is a longtime veteran of New Mexico State Parks and author of New Mexico Whitewater: A Guide to River Trips. For his part, Julyan, author of The Mountains of New Mexico, has earned a deservedly wide audience for his books and newspaper columns on hiking around the state. I’ve used his Best Hikes with Children in New Mexico for various outings with the kids, always finding his directions accurate and his descriptions true to their subjects, thus heading off the disappointment of inflated expectations. So, too, with his mountain book. Though not a point-to-point trail-hikers guide, the detail certainly supports thorough armchair reconnaissance of vertical terrain. Like Butterfield’s, Julyan’s book covers the really high and the only kinda high places all over the state. His authoritative prose, with thoughtful and enjoyable digressions, never fails to hold interest, and Julyan finds something informative, pithy, and particular about every cerro or cerrito worthy of three squiggled lines on a topographical map. While Butterfield’s postcard pretty photos appear in lush color (which you’d expect from a book published by New Mexico Magazine), all the photos in Julyan’s book—good as they are—have been reproduced in black and white, while the regional maps help the reader get geographically oriented.

Atomic Ranch, Design Ideas for Stylish Ranch Homes, by Michelle Gringeri-Brown, photographs by Jim Brown, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, Layton, Utah, 192 pages, 235 color photos, hardcover, $39.95.
Bemoaning the lack of respect for and preservation of mid-century ranch-style homes, architectural historian Carol Ahlgren argues that “not everything is architect designed. Simpler vernacular buildings may not jump out and grab you, but as part of a district or collection, they make a statement about the era and the design and what it represented in people’s lives.”

Ahlgren is quoted in Michelle Gringeri-Brown’s Atomic Ranch, which is determined to prove “there’s more to America’s architectural stepchild than first meets the eye.” In a trend no doubt related to the glamorizing of mid-century American muscle cars—another realm of mass-produced Americana enjoying vogue as an outlet for “simpler times” nostalgia (as if!)—more and more people are indulging in the kitschy “tomorrowland” charm of the black-and-white TV era. We see it here in Albuquerque, from architect Jon Anderson’s genre-busting makeover in the Altura Park neighborhood that won a Su Casa/AIA design award last year to more modest but equally loving transformations of mid-Northeast Heights tract homes that predate the existence of Rio Rancho.

I love how “ranch style” implies something Western, invoking cowboys and freedom and endless blue skies. Gringeri-Brown does mention the rambling architecture of Southwestern haciendas as a design influence on ranch style, which gives it a certain garbled legitimacy here. The book’s title (and the like-named magazine started by Gringeri-Brown and photographer Jim Brown) only winks at the dark side of mid-20th century life, the long shadow of nuclear nightmare. But in these pages, it’s all sunlight, sparkling Formica, and chrome dinette sets. Either you love it or you’ve spent the last 40 years trying to purge your memory of linoleum tile patterns, aluminum slider windows, and exposed concrete block. Gringeri-Brown is the first to admit that you either “get it,” or you don’t. Look deep inside, my friend, before you answer. Atomic Ranch embraces it all in a great big Burma-Shave–scented bear hug. “Love it or leave it” hasn’t yet been uttered.

While Gringeri-Brown sets the postwar historical context for ranch homes and parses the elements that comprise this diverse, ill-defined style, the real heat of Atomic Ranch flares in the present-day makeovers lovingly captured in Brown’s unfussy, elegant photography. Gringeri-Brown knows the best way to write about houses is to let people tell their stories. That approach humanizes an inanimate subject—architecture and design—and lets readers either fantasize themselves into that remodeled home or crib ideas and sort through options for their own ranch rescue.

The kitchens chapter, for instance, offers a gorgeously photographed gallery of cabinetry and countertops, regardless of their ranch house settings. Elsewhere, the indoor-outdoor lifestyle enabled by this architecture has been well-exploited by these new homeowners, some of whom spoof the suburban yard (a vintage beauty parlor chair enthroned above a pool, ready for cocktails) or find expressive ways to reimagine it altogether, with plantings and surfaces miles beyond Kentucky bluegrass.

Several New Mexico cities boomed with new residents after World War II, flush with Cold War spending at nearby air force bases and national laboratories: Albuquerque, of course, but don’t forget others including Roswell, Alamogordo, and even—yes, admit it!—Santa Fe. This book will resonate with residents of those now-classic and much sought-after neighborhoods, where people are rediscovering the virtues of homes built to human scale, nearby groceries, unpretentious streets, and just a wee bit of outdoor elbow room in shady yards.

Another incentive behind this trend is puzzling, though: that embracing of kitsch, of anti-taste, whereby mocking a style and the supposed naive simplism of an earlier era and a previous generation stands-in for developing an informed, discriminating sense of style. Nostalgia is no substitute for creativity. Like so many other creative fields, though, this brand of architecture and design reinforces the notion that culturally we’re stuck in a holding pattern, endlessly circling our past. Not that there’s anything wrong with renovation and preservation—they signal respect for history and for cultural legacies. But here in the land of adobe style, we might all reconsider the difference between restoration and endless re-creation. Where’s the next innovation?

Family Home of the New West, by Eliza Cross Castaneda, Northland Publishing, Flagstaff, Arizona, 144 pages, color photography throughout, paperback, $21.95.
Essentially a captioned photo album of various approaches to design, Family Home of the New West serves up its stylistic treats within a handful of distinct architectural genres: rustic log homes, Santa Fe style, contemporary cozy. It’s all visual comfort food, mood-leveling eye candy. Nothing here will either shock the reader by its edginess nor offend by its mass market homogeneity. That’s fine. We all want our homes to be unique and particular, but never uncomfortable or agitating. And many of us like them to express the heritage of our region. Thus Family Home offers classic cabins, cow-skulled Pueblo Revival haciendas, and brick suburban bungalows, decked out in earth tones or bright colors, bare wood, antlers, Oriental rugs, and Talavera tile.

Author Eliza Cross Castaneda has assembled a fine collection of photos and organized the material into natural categories, with chapters on dining areas, living rooms, gathering places, baths, bedrooms, and the like. Her captions are relevant interpretations of the design or decor and its effect. If you are building, remodeling, planning a project, or just daydreaming, Family Home of the New West deserves a place on your coffee table, especially if you want a break from the all-Santa Fe, all-the-time theme of other titles.

Leaving New Buffalo Commune, by Arthur Kopecky, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 213 pages, 29 photos, 2 maps, paperback, $19.95.
In this second volume of Arthur Kopecky’s journals about Taos commune life, the author’s bittersweet, starkly honest tale of the disintegrating hippie utopian dream reads with the narrative momentum and simmering conflicts of a novel. His first book, New Buffalo, also used the structure of daily journal entries to document the quotidian tasks and hard-earned, often ephemeral triumphs, the circle-room good vibrations and venomous spats, the lofty goals and gritty grind of the back-to-the-landers who settled into New Buffalo commune circa 1971. Energized by idealism, Kopecky and his compadres set about learning, in faltering, stumbling steps, how to be farmers, eventually settling by friable consensus on dairy farming as their cash endeavor.

The whole trip never quite worked out. Leaving New Buffalo shows why. The journal format, shorn of embellishment, excessive analysis, or the perspective of hindsight and maturity, simply unfolds the story frame by frame. Finally the moral of the hippie myth—if such can be distilled from that confusing, even chaotic historical moment—stands bare, and really it’s the moral of America: a perfect society will never form around imperfect people. And who’s perfect?

The narrator of the story, Kopecky is both observer and protagonist. His integrity and objectivity, writing as events unfolded 30 years ago, make him a reliable interpreter of this archetypal counterculture scene. Never quite the leader, Kopecky participated as a sturdy standard-bearer indefatigably promoting the vision of New Buffalo as a model community for a new Aquarian Age.

Anyone who thought all hippies were lazy layabouts need only read a few days of Kopecky’s journals to dispel that notion. He and a handful of other core members toiled away, day in, day out, like all farmers, from haying to irrigating by shovel, from the continual firewood runs in the mountains to solar construction projects on their “pueblo.” Still, dopers, alkies, wigged-out lunies, and freeloaders dropped out and dropped in frequently. The commune—really a leaderless, loose-knit affiliation of renegades—never embraced a fair or effective method for controlling membership and weeding out the slackers or—worse—the troublemakers.

Finally, naturally, it was the troublemakers (at least from Kopecky’s perspective) who drive out Kopecky and Sandy, his partner and eventual wife, but not after he and a few others nurtured New Buffalo into a nearly sustainable, professional dairy farm with the self-perpetuating structure of nonprofit corporate status.

Still, a sense of impending failure pervades. They lived in constant empty-pockets poverty. Fewer new, young, idealistic recruits dropped in. The “precarious perch” of subsistence farming always threatened to snap and drop the commune off the economic edge. At one point Sandy, now a mother of two, lamented that she and Arthur were “getting older and getting nowhere,” that New Buffalo was a “dead end.”

Despite well-intended but sometimes misguided efforts to implement their vision of a cooperative enterprise based on brotherhood, the jealousies, clashing visions, hurt feelings, and utter lack of a governance system began wedging into the tribal unity. Soon a disgruntled communard named Rebel and his lady split, but just far enough to sit on a hillside with his rifle and take potshots into the dirt around Kopecky. The end was near. Kopecky had become too dominant, perhaps too domineering, and the others expelled him and Sandy plus the kids in an ugly scene of thinly veiled threats and vindictiveness. They moved away, the dream over for Kopecky. A handful of years later, it also ended for New Buffalo as a going agriculture venture.

Kopecky, Sandy, and the two kids migrated first to a dairy in Nebraska, then to California, where they have remained. Kopecky now works as a finish carpenter. New Buaffalo itself has undergone various transformations. This past summer I talked to a Taos architect who said he had recently helped with the renovating and remodeling of the buildings for the most recent owner, a doctor from California.

Kopecky hasn’t lost the faith, though. With the accrued wisdom of years, he writes a brief concluding essay summarizing the fatal flaws of the old “Left consciousness” and asserts a budding “new paradigm” based on self-reliance, diminished consumerism, free enterprise, communal cooperation, and sustainability. Idealism dies hard for Kopecky, which is an endearing trait, but the sometimes naive optimism of these 30-year-old journals has yielded to a tempered acceptance of our foibles, best summed up in his shortest line: “Ah, humans.”