From Hollywood to the New Mexico Desert

0:00You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're in a podcast, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Or your new podcast for free today at RSS.com. Imagine for a second, right, that you are the only son of absolute Hollywood royalty. Okay. So you're born in Los Angeles in 1940. Your mom is the actress Edith Barrett and your dad is, well, he's none other than the legendary horror icon Vincent Price. Oh, wow. That is quite the shadow to grow up in. Right. I mean, the path for your life is practically already paved in red carpets and, you know, silver screens. The expectation, the sheer momentum of that world is just pulling you toward the spotlight.

1:00Naturally. But instead of stepping into that whole technical machinery, you just pack up, turn your back on Hollywood entirely and flee to the stark sun big desert of the American Southwest. Just a complete pivot. Exactly. You decide you're going to become a poet and fierce environmental critic and eventually like the literary conscience of New Mexico. It's just the ultimate rejection of an inherited narrative, isn't it? Yeah. So we're looking away from an engineered reality to find something infinitely more grounded that requires a massive leap of faith. And that is exactly the leap that Vincent Barrett Price, who went by VBA price, actually took. So we're looking at a stack of sources today centered around his life and work, largely starting with his Wikipedia biography. And the mission of this deep dive is to explore how a person's identity can become so completely, you know, inextricably intertwined with the landscape and the culture of a specific place. That's right. And we really want to look at how paying microscopic attention to your surroundings can actually

2:01transform you into a relentless advocate for them. Exactly. Because we are tracing a fascinating arc today. Yeah. We will follow Price's journey from that 1940s Los Angeles childhood straight through to his arrival in New Mexico in 1958. Yeah. The massive literary ecosystem he built analyzes really blistering heavily research critique of the Cold War's environmental toll on the American West. And finally, look at how we process the ultimate frontier, human mortality. Okay. Let's unpack this. We have to start with this Hollywood prince fleeing to the desert. So he's born L.A., August 30th, 1940. He makes his really pivotal move to New Mexico in 1958, which is right around the time he'd be heading to college. Right. Yeah. He's 18. New Mexico City of New Mexico, UNM in 1962. And the source material specifically notes here that Price came to deeply identify with New Mexico's quote, isolation and eccentricity. Oh, I love that phrase. Right. He identified with its people, its traditional cultures, the architecture, the harsh beauty

3:04of the landscape. He didn't just relocate to get away from his parents. Yeah. Wasn't just a teenage rebellion thing. Exactly. He found a mirror for his own soul. Yeah. A geography that just resonated with his internal frequency. In a way, the studio back lots of Hollywood just never could. It's honestly like a reverse wizard of Oz. Huh. How do you mean? Well, think about it. Dorothy gets sucked out of the drab, black and white, dust bowl of Kansas, right? And drops into this hyper-saturated, artificial, technicolor dream world of Oz. Oh, right. Yeah. Price did the exact opposite. He left the manufactured, glamorous, technicolor illusions of mid-century Los Angeles and deliberately chose the raw, stark reality of the desert. That's a great way to look at it. And the degree he gets from UNM in 1962, it's a BA in anthropology, which fundamentally dictates literally everything he does next. See, I have to push back on that a little bit. Okay. Go for it. Does studying anthropology, you know, the academic study of human societies and cultures, does

4:07that actually make someone a better poet, or does it just run the risk of making their poetry incredibly academic and like dense and dry? I see where you're going. Right. Because you usually think of poets studying romantic literature or fine arts, not digging through the structural history of human migration patterns. Well, anthropology didn't make his poetry clinical at all. What it did was give him a really rigorous framework for observation. Okay. It taught him how to look at human history, built environments and natural landscapes, run as isolated backdrops, but as an interconnected web, like a web of survival and culture. Give me an example. Take his relationship with Chaco Canyon, for instance. He first visited this massive ancient Puebloan complex in New Mexico back in 1961. Go. Now, if you go as a tourist, you just see beautiful stone ruins. But if you go with an anthropological lens, you see the weight of deep time. Oh, I see. You see how a civilization organized itself around the sun and, you know, the scarcity of water.

5:07And decades later, in 1992, he published his seminal work of poetry, Chaco Body, alongside the photographer Kirk Giddings. Wow. So it stayed with him that long. Absolutely. The anthropology taught him how to look at the bones of the landscape. So his poetry could express the heartbeat that was still echoing there. It's the difference between merely looking at a landscape and actually reading it. Precisely. Which brings up a question for you listening right now. Have you ever visited a place that instantly felt more like you than the place where you were actually born? That's a powerful feeling. Yeah. Like a city, a forest, a coastline where you just stepped out of the car and thought, oh, this is where my brain finally makes sense. Yeah. Because that is exactly what happened to VB Price in 1958. And because he looked so closely at the land for his poetry, he began to see the mechanics of how the modern state of New Mexico was functioning. Right. Deep observation inevitably forces you into documentation. I mean, you don't just passively observe a place you love and stay quiet about it when things start changing.

6:08Which perfectly explains his evolution from just an observer to a really relentless journalist teacher and literary champion. Exactly. So he publishes his first poem in 1962, the same year he graduates. But by 1971, he starts a weekly column in New Mexico. And when I say he started a weekly column, I mean, he started a column that has run almost continuously from 1971 to the present day. That's wild. That is over half a century of weekly output. What's fascinating here is this year's stamina required to maintain a weekly column for 50 years. It's almost difficult to comprehend. Seriously. He's writing through multiple presidencies, economic booms and busts, the whole rise of the internet and massive demographic shifts in the Southwest. Not to mention his other jobs. He served as an architecture critic for the Albuquerque Journal in the mid 80s and contributed regularly to the Albuquerque Tribune for 30 years until it closed in 2008. Yeah. And he co-founded the New Mexico Mercury online platform where his mercury messenger column still runs.

7:08Yeah. But his output wasn't just about his own voice. No. And that is actually the most striking part of his resume to me. Oh, yeah. Yeah. As the series editor for the Mary Burrett Poetry series at the University of New Mexico Press, this was from 2004 to 2012, he brought the work of more than 500 New Mexican authors, poets and scholars into print. 500. Yes. Plus, he was the architecture editor for ArtsBase Magazine, the editor of New Mexico Magazine, and the city editor for the New Mexico Independent. Think about this through like an agricultural lens, okay? Press wasn't just a farmer content to plan his own crops, you know, his own poems and columns. He looked around at the literary desert of the Southwest and realized that if the culture was going to survive, it needed an irrigation system. Oh, I love that. By editing those magazines and curating that poetry series, he was literally building the aqueducts. He was creating the infrastructure and the economic conditions for 500 other voices to thrive in a landscape that the broader East Coast publishing world just completely ignored.

8:13Which explains how he managed not to burn out. It's like a marathon runner who decides to also pave the road they're running on. He wasn't just screaming into a void, he was cultivating a massive conversation. He was writing his own works like Albuquerque, a city at the end of the world, which won the Freyfrenzisco Adonacio Dominguez Award, while simultaneously teaching in the UNM School of Architecture and Planning and the Honors College. He was just constantly feeding the ecosystem yield build. But you know, when you spend decades building an irrigation system for a culture and paying that kind of microscopic attention to the health of a landscape, you inevitably start to see the poison in the water. You cannot be a fiercely protective local advocate without eventually confronting the macro threats imposed by outside forces. And this marks a massive pivot in his body of work. It really does. So in 2011, the University of New Mexico Press published Price's heavily researched book, The Orphaned Land, New Mexico's environment since the Manhattan Project. Such a heavy title.

9:13It is. And now, before we dive into the contents of this book, I really want to make it unequivocally clear to you listening. Yes, important disclaimer here. We are strictly reporting the historical analysis and the arguments presented in Price's text regarding the military industrial complex and corporate pollution. We are not taking any political sides, nor are we endorsing a specific environmental platform. Our role today is just to synthesize how Price utilized 50 years of his own journalistic observations and archival research to formulate his thesis. And the methodology behind The Orphaned Land is staggering. I mean, Price analyzed half a century of newspaper articles, government reports, and environmental data to expose the toll of military munitions, testing, uranium mining, and just unsustainable population growth. The scale of it is hard to grasp. It really is. To understand the scale, the book documents 2100 waste sites at Los Alamos National Laboratories in northern New Mexico. 2100. Yes.

10:14And another 400 waste sites at Sandy and National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Wow. And Price stated in an interview on K&METV's New Mexico in focus that the Manhattan project both transformed and deformed the American West. Transformed and deformed. Yeah. Because it elevated New Mexico into one of the intellectual and scientific epicenters of the Cold War, right? Drawing the absolute brightest minds on the planet. Right. But it came at a massive, often hidden, environmental cost. It's like, it's like inviting a brilliant, world-famous scientist to be your roommate. Okay. I like this analogy. Right. They make you look incredibly smart to all the neighbors, but you eventually realize they're leaving poxic radioactive trash in your living room that will persist for 10,000 years. Yeah. That's exactly it. If we connect this to the bigger picture, the core argument in the orphan land is that New Mexico serves as a microcosm of global ecological degradation. A microcosm. Yes. Price uses the state to illustrate the mechanics of how multinational corporations and military

11:15interests extract resources from local environments. It is a story about the systematic strain on a fundamentally limited resource, which is water in the desert and the persistent breaches of public trust. But I want to challenge prices thesis here for a second. Go ahead. Is it really fair to judge the desperate, you know, existential actions of the Cold War, military industrial complex through the lens of modern 21st century environmentalism? It's a valid question. Because during the 1940s and 50s, the government felt it was literally fighting for the survival of the free world. Environmental impact studies weren't exactly the top priority when you're facing down the threat of global nuclear annihilation, right? Well, historians grapple with that exact tension constantly, but prices critique, as outlined in the text, isn't just retroactive finger pointing at the panic of World War II. Okay. What is it then? He is analyzing the momentum of those initial decisions. The military industrial complex effectively viewed the American Southwest as an empty sandbox. They looked at the vast expanses of the desert and saw a void where they could test their

12:19weapons and bury their waste. They didn't have his anthropological lens. Exactly the point. They lacked the anthropological framework price had cultivated. They didn't see the ancient indigenous cultures that had stewarded the land from millennia, and they completely ignored the profound fragility of the desert water table. Wow. This argues that this empty sandbox mentality didn't just stop when the Cold War ended. It established a really dangerous precedent for development planning that persisted for decades, basically normalizing the sacrifice of local ecosystems for the sake of abstract national or corporate interests. So he's truly documenting the physical life and death of his state's environment. Yes. And the passion and rigor behind that journalism is exactly why he won the ACLU-NM First Amendment Award for Excellence in Journalism in 1996. And later, he won the Paul Bartlett Ray Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Well deserved. Yeah. But as we move into the later chapters of his life, the focus of his writing undergoes this really profound, deeply personal shift.

13:20It does. After spending decades fighting for the macro survival of the environment and the civic soul of Albuquerque, the lens pulls focus. Yeah. It's from the massive geopolitical fallout of the atomic age all the way down to the micro-survival of the individual. His work becomes a reflection on mortality, intimate collaboration, and the concept of rebirth. So what does this all mean, like how does this shift manifest? Well, a massive part of this introspective era is directly tied to his wife, Rene Price. Right? They were married in 1969 and were fierce lifelong collaborators. Rene was an accomplished artist, and starting in the early 1970s, their professional and personal lives just merged completely. They worked side-by-side at Century Magazine, which he founded in the 80s. Yes. And she created the visual covers for the majority of his books of poetry. Their disciplines were in this constant dialogue. Like his 2005 book of poetry, Death Self, prominently features her paintings. She wasn't just decorating his books. You know, her visual art was providing the atmosphere context for his words.

14:24They built this shared unified legacy until she passed away in 2019. And the loss of a partner of 50 years, I mean, that completely re-orients a person's universe. Completely. In January, 2021, at the age of 80, Price appeared on the K&M-E TV series, Chloris. Yeah. And he didn't go on television to talk about civic architecture or uranium mining. He went on to discuss the most universal human experience, dying, grief, and the agonizing process of coming back to life. He actually read from an unpublished poem titled Travel Notes on Coming Back to Life. Which is just beautiful. And his recent bibliography is entirely defined by this exploration of the internal frontier. Yeah. He published a collection of selected poems spanning 2008 to 2020, called Polishing the Mountain, or Catching Balance Just in Time. In 2020, he released Innocence Regained, Christmas Poems. Oh, which was a compilation of 50 years of intimate work? Exactly. And it became a finalist for the New Mexico and Arizona book awards. Yeah. And then came Lucretius and the logic of Venus in 2023.

15:25And his upcoming poetry volume, which is scheduled for 2025, is titled Orpheus the Healer. The mythological weight of that title is staggering. It really is because Orpheus is the legendary poet of Greek myth, who is so consumed by grief that he literally travels down into the underworld to try and bring his wife, Eurydice, back to the land of the living. His music is so beautiful, it temporarily suspends the torments of hell. You simply cannot separate a title like Orpheus the Healer from the loss of weighty and price his own meditations on attempting to heal through the power of verse. It's incredible. It proves that while price really cherished the isolation of the desert, his art was fundamentally born of connection. Yeah. He was in constant conversation with the physical landscape, with the 500 authors he separated to print, with the thousands of citizens reading his weekly column, and most intimately with his wife. The legacy he built is a testament to the power of deliberate, sustained attention, which makes me wonder, and for you listening, think about this, how do the people you collaborate

16:28with, whether that's in your career, in your creative pursuits, or just in your daily life, shape the legacy you will eventually leave behind? Because Rene literally illustrated V.B.'s words intertwining her vision with his voice forever. Yeah. Let's take a step back and look at the entirety of the terrain we've covered today. You've covered a lot. We really have. We started with a young man born into the artificial glow of Los Angeles royalty. We watched him flee that manufactured reality for the stark, unforgiving truth of the New Mexico desert in 1958. We saw how a degree in anthropology equipped him with the framework to read the deep history of his new home, transforming him from a passive observer into a foundational pillar of a regional literary ecosystem. A literal aqueduct builder. Yes. We tracked the mind-bending stamina of a 50-year column. We unpacked his unflinching, methodical exposure of the atomic age's toxic legacy in the orphan land. And finally, we witnessed a poet turning his gaze inward, utilizing the mythic power of

17:33his craft to navigate a deepest grief and his own mortality. It is a masterclass in what happens when a human being refuses to look away. And that brings up a final thought to consider. Coming on in this deep dive, we noted that the source material emphasized prices identification with New Mexico's isolation and eccentricity. Right. Well, we live in a modern world that is aggressively hyper-connected. We are driven by algorithms designed to smooth out our rough edges, encouraging us to just blend in, follow the prevailing trend to become easily categorizable data points. Definitely. It is, in many ways, the digital equivalent of the suffocating Hollywood machine price ran away from in the 1950s. The pressure to be universally palatable today is immense. So the question becomes, in our algorithm driven reality, is finding our own personal New Mexico-like, a physical place, or perhaps just a fiercely protected mindset of deliberate isolation and eccentricity, is that the absolute prerequisite for cultivating a voice that actually matters.

18:34Oh, wow. If you never disconnect from the relentless noise of the consensus, can you ever observe anything deeply enough to write about it with conviction for half a century? That's a great point. You cannot write chocolate body or investigate the orphan land if your attention is constantly fractured by a social media feed. You have to be willing to be a little eccentric. You have to be willing to sit in the quiet and read the bones of the landscape. Exactly. So tomorrow, when you walk out your front door, take a moment to look a little closer at your own surroundings, look past the obvious everyday utility of your environment, notice the architecture, consider the hidden history buried in the dirt beneath the pavement, and recognize the people actively shaping it. Because as the son of Hollywood's greatest horror villain proved, the most terrifying and beautiful things in this world aren't found on a silver screen, they are revealed when you finally decide to open your eyes to the stark, unvarnished reality of the place you choose to call home. You're listening to a podcast right now.

19:34Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are, you have something to say too. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at rss.com.