Word: ranch
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...American flags in front of the Red Bull souvenir shop. The only sound on this placid afternoon is the tinkling of wind chimes. It wasn't always so quiet in this tiny rural community of 730 in central Texas where former President George W. Bush has maintained a ranch since 1999. Four years ago, there were some who wondered if the noise would ever stop. The President's five-week summer vacation at his ranch brought the turmoil over the Iraq war into every corner of Crawford. Led by Cindy Sheehan, a California mother who had lost...
...ever since the spotlight shifted to Bush's successor and the war in Iraq left the front pages, things have been quieter. Along Prairie Chapel Road, the country lane leading to the Bush ranch, the crosses symbolizing the war dead, the makeshift tents, the signs, the satellite trucks, the flag-draped Harley-Davidsons, the Joan Baezes and the right-wing talk-radio hosts are all gone. Sheehan quit her protest, disillusioned with both Republican and Democratic leaders, in 2007. The once flattened roadside grass, parched yellow by drought, now stands straight. The only movement is a hawk landing...
...Instant enlightenment. As the '40s film critic Cecilia Ager said when Citizen Kane opened, "It's as though you had never seen a movie before." Colors and textures are richly, plausibly vibrant, with an astonishing depth of field; all those Fordian shots of the Plains as seen from a ranch-house door lend equal clarity to the foreground and the far horizon. Blu-ray gives a 3-D impression, as if the figures in a scene were in your room; you could almost walk among and touch them. The sensation is the same with old black-and-white films like...
...like David Herrera, a Las Cruces film technician whose work depends on what movies are being filmed in the area, shopping around his newly earned sheep-shearing skills might just be a way to supplement his income, and return to his family's rural roots. His grandfather was the ranch foreman for the western artist Peter Hurd in southern New Mexico's Hondo Valley and even appears in some of his pastoral paintings. Herrera's classmates included NMSU undergraduate and graduate students, some of whom considered sheep shearing an important part of their studies. "I'm doing a graduate project...
...recession, debt-financed, image-obsessed Los Angeles, Death By Leisure is spot-on in its details, though the British writer succeeds in making the city sound like the worst place in America, full of status-obsessed grifters like himself. Whether it's sneaking into Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch or finagling his way into a studio exec bash, Ayres simultaneously spits on and revels in the all-consuming shallowness of his time and place: gargantuan SUV's, gated communities, multi-million dollar homes and hot-bodied ladies...