The Santa Fe Review

There was an orange sign taped on the door of the McDonald’s on Pacheco Street:

	Please Remove Halloween Masks
	Before Entering Restaurant
	Thank You!

When did the holiday become so dangerous? Or at least its perception. In 1984, James Huberty walked into a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California and gunned down 21 people before he was shot dead by the San Diego police. I don’t think he was wearing a mask and it wasn’t Halloween. The murderer’s widow later sued McDonald’s claiming that monosodium glutamate in the restaurant’s food contributed to her husband’s madness.

I was stopping for a quick lunch on my way to Albuquerque to meet up with my brothers and my sister at the house where we grew up in Nob Hill. Yesterday our mother’s ashes were buried at the National Cemetery in Santa Fe. She was a sergeant in the Navy during World War II so she qualified for military honors. Here is what that means: The man who sits behind the desk in the cemetery office at the bottom of the hill plays a tinny recording of a bugler and gives the family a folded flag. He conveys thanks from the President. My mom would have been glad that it’s no longer George W. Bush. We were allocated only 20 minutes. Burials are tightly scheduled to maximize throughput.

In Albuquerque in the 1960s we would go trick or treating unsupervised with no one worrying about abductions or xraying candy for razorblades. We lived in something that barely exists anymore: an old middle-class neighborhood where dentists and doctors and public school teachers occupied the same blocks. While I was attending Monte Vista Elementary School, the first McDonald’s in the state opened on the corner of Lomas and San Pedro. At the shopping center across the street there was a Baskin Robbins. It was astonishing to think that there could be 31 flavors of anything.

Now I occasionally go to McDonald’s for the familiarity of the food and for the semi-random mix of customers. For the people watching. There are the old men from the neighborhood gathering over Quarter Pounders at what passes for the local pub. There are the drivers from the Interstate who exited on St. Francis Drive, lured by the golden arches a couple of miles away. As I sat there, a young couple with a Macbook surfed the Web and a wanderer with a reddish beard walked inside carrying a backpack and wearing military fatigues. I don’t think he was armed or dangerous. Through the window I watched a man striding toward the door, stopping suddenly to stare at the New Mexican vending machine. On the front page pictures of black bats hovered around the New Mexican nameplate, continuing the Halloween theme. The scary headline at the top of the page said End of buildup keeps county mired in recession. There was a picture of a construction crane.

It was an eye-opening story, by Bruce Krasnow, one of the paper’s editors. With the completion of big projects like the New Mexico History Museum, the Santa Fe convention center, and Buffalo Thunder, the pool of construction jobs has contracted by 25 percent. Real estate sales are down 21 percent since last year and 58 percent since the peak in 2005. Earlier in the recession we kept hearing how Santa Fe was faring better than the rest of the state. Now it seems we’re lagging behind in the recovery.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

The Reporter has moved again to the front of the pack with the most incisive look yet at the latest developments in the Thornburg Mortgage bankruptcy. In the story, Thornburglars, Corey Pein interviews two parties in the case and poses the crucial question:

	Was Garrett Thornburg duped by his longtime colleagues? Or did he
	and the board decide to throw their old friends under the bus?

The Thornburg Variations, a compilation of Mr. Pein’s reports on the company, is now online. Maybe the New Mexican can arrange to purchase reprint rights.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Mark Oswald, the editor of Journal Santa Fe, has written to note that he had the story on the appointment of a Thornburg trustee on Saturday, two days before Reuters. Apologies for missing that. Unlike the perfunctory brief in the New Mexican, the Journal had a full report, including some helpful context:

	The federal court system's Web site, in a section on
	bankruptcies, explains that the appointment of trustee in Chapter
	11 cases is "a rarity" and comes in cases of fraud, incompetence
	or to protect interests of creditors owed money by the bankrupt
	company.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

The new Santa Fe Review is now online.

The Santa Fe Review

Inez Russell, an editor and columnist at the New Mexican, has sent me an announcement from Pojoaque Pueblo that explains why its Buffalo Thunder gambling and golf resort has opened a storefront on Lincoln Avenue, half a block from the Plaza. The space will serve as “a downtown concierge and satellite office” and a gallery to sell Indian art. In June Buffalo Thunder missed an $11.5 million dollar payment on the $245 million it owes to bond holders. I guess it’s hoping to lure more Santa Fe tourists to feed the slot machines and roulette tables.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

There was more bad news last week for Thornburg Mortgage. According to Reuters, a federal court has taken control of the company by appointing an independent trustee to oversee the bankruptcy proceedings. This is a very big deal but the news got only a brief in the New Mexican — followed today by another Bob Quick puff piece about Thornburgh’s other venture, Thornburg Investment Management. The newspaper might just as well have reprinted the company’s press release.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

When a doctor is falsely accused of malpractive, the result is a lawsuit. A journalist who is similarly maligned is supposed to sit back and take it. I suspect that is what Anne Constable will do in light of the fulminations by the Fiesta Council, which has further embarrassed itself by publishing them verbatim in Sunday’s New Mexican. The statement by the council’s president, Alberto Montoya, appears both as an op-ed piece and as a paid advertisement. At least the latter will marginally add to the newspaper’s bottom line.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Five years ago, just before Santa Fe’s annual Fiesta, three members of Don Diego De Vargas’s cuadrillo were suspended for drinking and rowdy behavior at a Mariachi celebration at the Santa Fe Opera. Interviewed by the New Mexican, the president of the Fiesta Council was forthcoming and the incident was quickly forgotten.

If only the Council’s present leadership was so savvy. On October 14, Anne Constable, one of the New Mexican’s most experienced reporters, wrote about a fight at this year’s Gran Baile between some young women in the Royal Court. The ruckus resulted in the filing of dueling police reports, and La Reina, the Fiesta Queen, was treated at the hospital for a minor injury. Two days later, as more information became available, Ms. Constable expanded on the story.

Throughout all this, the Fiesta Council turned down her requests for interviews, but that hasn’t stopped it from complaining, in a public statement, that the New Mexican’s coverage was “one-sided.” It was also “sensational” and “gossipy,” and Ms. Constable, we’re told, “failed in her duty to produce a truthful, honest, fair, and objective newspaper article.”

Her real offense, of course, was refusing to be intimidated into dropping a legitimate story that some influential individuals wanted hushed up. By slandering a good reporter, the Council has brought far more embarrassment down on itself than that caused by the behavior of a few immature young adults.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

As if it weren’t difficult enough to be optimistic about the future of the Railyard Cinema, I just read the latest scoop by Corey Pein in the Santa Fe Reporter’s blog. Here’s an excerpt:

	SFR has learned that one of the principals in the company
	that wants taxpayers to help build a cinema in the Railyard
	has been charged several times with writing bad checks. . . .
	A resolution coming before the Santa Fe City Council's
	Finance Committee tonight would begin the process of issuing
	a $35.4 million bond to build a movie theater in the
	Railyard, and authorize the city manager to negotiate with
	Railyard Co.

	Why would the taxpayers entrust millions to a company whose
	leadership includes a man repeatedly charged with failing to
	meet his financial obligations? Incredibly, despite all the
	controversy that has surrounded the idea of a Railyard
	cinema, no one has asked this question.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

I feel a little foolish having become so exercised over the disappearance of the Burrito Company, only to learn that it has been temporarily commandeered by Hollywood. (Please see above.) I remember a similar incident, a few years ago, when my wife and I passed through Madrid on the way home from Albuquerque. The town was bedecked with carnival lights and filled with colorful amusement park rides. A banner hanging over Main Street said Madrid Chili Festival. The Texan spelling should have been a tipoff. What we had seen were props for the filming of Wild Hogs starring John Travolta. At the general store, some Madrid locals were hanging around and grumbling about having their town forcibly converted into a movie set. An entrepreneur later tried to turn the fictional festival into a real event, angering residents even more.

I received more direct exposure to the arrogance of the film industry when I woke up one morning to find that Cristo Rey Street, a stone’s throw from my house, was lined end to end with trailers and RVs. Dozens of men and women were milling about in what looked like 19th-century clothing and a gasoline generator was sputtering away. This was around the time of the scandal over the Bikini Virgin, and I thought at first that an army of conservative Christians was camping out in preparation for a protest up the hill at the Museum of International Folk Art. After several phone calls, I learned that the City had given a film crew a permit to use the street for a staging area (the filming itself was on upper Canyon Road) without thinking to inform the neighbors.

When I lived in New York City it sometimes seemed as if the movie industry had been granted powers of martial law and eminent domain. One day I was walking back from lunch to my job at the Times building on 43rd Street only to find the sidewalk blocked by an unctuous young security guard with a walkie-talkie. “Woody really appreciates your patience,” he kept telling the crowd waiting to get back to their desks. A Woody Allen film, Bullets Over Broadway, was in production. We waited and waited until finally a burly member of the pressmen’s union gave the guard a menacing look and said, “F– you. You’re not a cop.” He nudged him aside and we all laughed and went back to work.

On Fridays I usually left the building around 11 p.m. and caught a taxi at Times Square for a ride home to Brooklyn. One night the driver got all the way down Broadway to Chambers Street only to find that the Brooklyn Bridge was closed. The meter was running, but he refused to take me by another route (cabbies hated to leave Manhattan because it was hard to get a return fare). I refused to pay him and got out of the cab for the long dark walk across the bridge, which is a little scary around midnight. As I crossed over the water I looked down through the grating of the catwalk expecting to see that a semi-trailer truck had overturned, blocking the traffic lanes. Then I noticed them, the young men with the walkie-talkies. The Brooklyn Bridge had been closed on a Friday night for the filming of Diehard 3. I loved Diehard 1 and Diehard 2, but the third one was a flop, hardly worth the toll in human suffering.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review