Lucid Dreaming

Off-Topic: Maybe...

2006-10-01T20:44:00.000-07:00

Earlier today, someone correctly pegged my personality - they called me a narcissist for more or less "having an ephipany at other people's expense." (my words, completely.) but that seemed to be about the gist of the complaint.

well, um, duuuuh. Of course I'm a *narcissist* - I post my private thoughts and not-so-well-thought-out opinions on a fucking blog. which is just one of the reasons I deleted the posts in particular - but it's not the only reason I deleted the posts.

There seems to be a vastly distorted perception that people - lots of people, MANY people, in fact, read my blog *all the fucking time.* I myself have absolutely zero proof of this, and in fact, have more or less stopped promoting my stupid, useless, lame-ass, not-so-well-thought-out opinions to no more than a half-dozen friends who love me enough to take pity on my lameness.

Thus, for the record, either a) no one reads this blog, which is certainly what I expect, or b) lots and lots of people are reading this blog, which would certainly explain why everyone from Site Santa Fe to some museum in Arizona to certain offended factions that shall be nameless are so freaked the fuck out by the stupid shit I have to say.

If the latter is actually the case, let's look at why more than my chosen half-dozen might actually be reading this blog.

Out on the vast wasteland of the American intellectual landscape, I can think of about two people who have strong opinions and aren't afraid to voice them - sometimes poorly, but definitively *often* - and these men are Howard Stern and Eminem. Five years ago, I wouldn't have bothered to listen to either of them - they're both morons, more or less, but their appeal to me is that they HAVE opinions and they fucking state them. Real loud, too. Howard I fell in love with just recently, listening on the way back from Burning Man - Eminem I've had a secret affair with for years, listening to his blistering diatribes about everyone from his *mom* (who disses their mom in public? That shit takes guts) to his ex-wife and "White America" of which he is most certainly an indelible part.

In case you haven't noticed, these cats aren't fringe looneys (like me) - they are quite literally at the very top of the American entertainment pantheon. And I think the secret to their appeal, and mine, if there is any - is that despite the fact that I am boorish, angry, ludicrous, occasionally intoxicated, always with a axe to grind - is that I HAVE OPINIONS AND I STATE THEM - which is such a far cry from what the rest of America seems to want to do, which is to waffle and mealy-mouth their way through post-modernity's "moral relativism" like Bill Clinton asking a grand jury to define "sexual relations."

Now, watch this - this brings me back, in my brain, to my utterly visceral reaction *against* Klaus Ottman's Biennial at Site Santa Fe. I was poised to hate it from the interview in the Reporter which I read before seeing the show, wherein Mr. Ottman more or less thought he could successfully deflect all criticism by simply saying, "This show will probably fail."

Did Site's PR department cringe when they heard that absolutely puerile, "allow-me-to-lower-the-bar-of-success" statement? I really think they should have, frankly, because inherent in that statement was "I really didn't have a lot to say with this Biennial. In fact, Biennials are sorta ludicrous and contemporary art really doesn't have a fucking thing to say, so just gimme my fucking check and I'll hide behind my disclaimer."

I just think, "hey, if you don't have anything to say, keep your mouth shut." In fact, why have a Biennial if the famous curator thinks the show will fail? Why not do as I suggested and turn the space over to outsider artists and homeless people?

The level of arrogance didn't end there, however. Mr. Ottman actually *must have* vanity googled Site Santa Fe Biennial in order to find my critique (which wasn't a review, as Zane Fischer pointed out) and then he basically called me out on my own blog, which is certainly fair, but you know, if you don't want further responses from a blogging crank, why would you write a response in the first place? Furthermore, what the hell is a world-famous art curator like Klaus Ottman doing googling and responding to my readerless blog in the dead of night if he really *believed* in the heartless polemic that he used to defend his (in my humble opinion) lackluster Biennial?

Here's my deal - I write strong opinions. I am frequently wrong and I frequently get in trouble for the stuff I write. The inability to be willing to be wrong is what's *really* wrong with America - it's not George Bush in the White House or Bill Clinton screwing his intern - it's not even as complex as whether or not they lied to us (of course they did) it's that when the evidence was available long long long before we *knew* for *certain* that they lied, that Tom Daschle and Hillary Clinton had all that evidence and they did absolutely NOTHING, because they didn't want to go against the grain.

If people have nothing to say that puts them against the grain, they should keep their mouths shut. Living in a visual art town, I'm in the wild position of always saying what I want to say with *words*, so there's a lot less wiggle room for me once I've said something, and I get constantly crucified for it. (It's okay, I have a Christ-complex, so it's cool.) IF THE ART HAS NOTHING TO SAY, PLEASE, DON'T SHOW IT. DON'T MAKE EXCUSES FOR IT. DON'T HAVE A BIENNIAL JUST BECAUSE IT'S *TIME*. Shutter the gates and go home.

The last thing America needs any more of is a lot of pomp and circumstance over people, work, art, or ideas that have nothing that desperately needs to be communicated. There is really ENOUGH wishy-washy shit and bad lies floating around right now. If the art is "doomed to fail", then why bother to ask people to care about it?

Or worse - why get yer feathers in an uproar when a blogger with a readership of six actually bothers to tell you that your emperor has no clothes? I'm only stating the obvious, after all - which is what America is *really* afraid of. What the hell happened to the backbone of the people in this country? Why is everyone so afraid of hurting someone's feelings? Why will people avoid hurting someone's feelings at the expense of simply saying nothing of value at all?

Fear me, America. I think you're all a bunch of wussies. ;-) But to borrow from Eminem:

"(guffaw...) I'm only playin' with you, America, you know I love you..." because I also know you lack the ability to identify irony even when it playfully bites you on the nose.

-gregoryp(tm)

Gone to CroatoanContemporary Art & the Playa

2006-09-09T10:59:00.000-07:00

To download the "Contemporary Art & the Playa"
MP3 podcast, right-click here.

this piece was written between 2:30am - 6am in the lobby of the Ashram Galactica Hotel, Restaurant & Spa at around 7 o'clock and Chance on Wednesday, then delivered at 3pm in the Erowid tent. The written transcript and the audio podcast may differ slightly. The {Gong} between sections siginifies the actual striking of a small gong that I brought with me to the Playa for this explicit purpose.

Introduction:

Greetings and thank you all for coming. I was sent an email at about 4am last Thursday morning asking if I'd like to be scheduled to talk at Erowid today, and of course, I agreed, seeing a whole week with which to prepare. But of course, I'd forgotten that between Thursday and Wednesday was preparation for Burning Man, plus a 24-hour thousand-mile drive and all the usual distractions that greet one when they arrive Playa-side. So last night I dropped a Modafinil to write on, then proceeded to quaff a small gift-shot of Absinthe, never assuming that the combo would drop me for about five and a half hours of much-needed sleep - gratefully, I woke up in the middle of the night to a 24-hour city, and finally found the time to outline the flash of ideas that came to me when I was initially asked - but of course, I could've benefited from a bit more time.

More time needed - that's always the case here. We're a time-based artworld here at Burning Man, because the time is always ticking down, down towards the end, the singularity, the final denouement of the Festival, the Burning of the Man. To paraphrase Mark Pesce's talk yesterday, we know our expiration date at Burning Man, which lends to all our works here a sense of immediacy that would make any Situationist proud.

{Gong!}

In 1587, a hardy band of New World settlers made their way to Roanoke, Virginia. With 171 men women and children, the colony seemed much too large to die out and disappear in the space of a year, but when supply ships returned to Roanoke in 1588, they simply found no one there. Plates were still set for meals - there were no signs of struggle, and yet all were gone. A single note was found which read, "Gone to Croatoan," and the word Croatoan was found carved into a tree.

Since that time, Croatoan has gone on to become a kind of origin metaphor within underground and alternative cultures throughout the Americas. This notion was solidified with the 1994 publication of Koehnline & Sakolsky's book "Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout." The book, which chronicles various alternative settlements and modes of living thoughout the U.S. prior to the 20th century, would probably be at home on the bookshelf on anyone in this room, certainly mine, alongside texts such as the Whole Earth Catalogue, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Lipstick Traces, and of course, Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone, which unlike the Croatan book's historical nature, is a projection of a future culture, a blueprint of sorts that perhaps the founders of Burning Man - and certainly today's participants - use in creating this community each year.

{Gong!}

In the summer of 2001, following the last major piece on a non-Native artist that I've ever written since, I was mysteriously awarded an intriguing grant: standing naked poolside at Murray Gilman's house in Santa Fe at a party where hundreds drank sangria and marvelled at the opulent art collection of the discoverer of the Quark, a young woman approached me and invited me to spend six weeks inside the Waterman Library of Contemporary Art in Soho, New York City.

I took the offer and flew to NYC, sleeping on the couch of this esteemed collection, housed in an unassuming sixth story loft in Soho, not far from the building that was filled with dirt for an Earthworks project in the 1970s and still remains so, in a way that was all I needed to know about the New York Art World to know I wanted no part of it, such arrogant waste in a city with absurd rents and uncountable homeless. The collection. however, was an overwhelming and mostly private treasure of over 3,000 volumes on and about the art of the 20th century, including such texts as Marcel DuChamp's handwritten diaries, reams of letters written by Salvador Dali to Gala, piles of situationist, surrealist and dada pamplets and screeds, as well as more pedestrian tomes like lovely signed first editions of Clarence Green's first book and Tom Wolfe's "Bau Haus to Our House," as well as stacks and stacks of New York art catalogues ranging from James Lee Byars to Christo and Laurie Anderson to Yoko Ono.

I slept on a Louis the 16th couch and just mostly stared at the books before me, the backs on them with their titles tempting me to read of times gone by: The Truth of Fluxus, The Lies of Dada, Tristan Tzara Speaks, wondering all the while, as people of our era often do, how on earth it was possible that it had seemed at one time that art had had something pressing and vital to offer to the time in which it was made, and why now it all just seemed like such total dross, an opening to attend, a friend to congratulate, a piece to buy for the sake of it in hopes that the artist might someday find a voice and then, in turn, have something interesting to say with it.

I spent a lot of my time in New York simply walking the steets, making a 'zine which is now lost to data crashes, and visiting one strange little gallery in the Chelsea after another, looking for something approaching a real art to sink my teeth into. The closest thing I got to truth was one fortuitous day spent inside the Dia Foundation at a Bruce Nauman retrospective, watching his kinetic dog sculpture and fence-digging videos with his grand-daughter Sophie and his son Erik, with whom I'd gone to hich school with. And I asked him, finally, point-blank and such:

"Have you ever figured out why your dad is such a famous artist for this stuff?"

And he just smiled and said, "It's just like Hollywood, you know - right place, right time," and I can't tell you how grateful I was that he didn't try to sham me with some absurd lie about how damn important and meaningful all this silly work is.

{Gong!}

I remember the day I knew for certain that I would soon walk away from this world forever. It was a delightfully crisp day in August, and I was walking the streets of the Chelsea district, but a stone's throw away from the Hudson River, this fabled neighborhood of galleries for the young and the hip, and I chanced into a street level space where red dots greeted me from titled placards, and the walls were covered with canvasses and photographs of grey, brown, and black murky images, each one containing the words "Self-Portrait" somewhere in their title. The artist's name was simply "K.M." but I snuck a peak at the bio and found a first name of Kelly and the pronoun She. And as my pupils flitted frantically from one piece to the next, searcher for richer content, a well-rounded biographical sketch of the artist in front of me began to emerge from the depths of my very backbrain. It read like this:

My name is Kelly. I'm from Westchester County. My father is an investment banker, my mother is involved in local politics and the historical preservation society. I went to private schools. When I was sixteen, my father caught me in bed with my girlfriend and called me a dirty whore, then bought me a tennis bracelet which I promptly threw away.

I have no culture. I have no culture. I have no culture.

I went to Vassar to major in women's studies, but all women's history was less interesting to me than my own self-expression, so I switched to studio. I went to Parson's and continue to paint now here, in New York, occasional jobs in graphic design but mostly living off my trust as I find myself and my voice as an artist.

I have no culture. I have no culture. I have no culture.

I have all the books I was supposed to read as an artistic radical, but I sold them on the sidewalk when I graduated. I'm not down with the male-dominated patriarchal consumer-capitalist culture, but my work is more important to me than all of that - at least to me. My friends and I speak in ironic cliches at the cocktail parties we attend in the Art World, cruising for important collectors and curators, and if you don't like my work it's because you don't understand it. If you want to *get it*, however, you'll have to master the specialized discursive dialectic found sandwiched between ads for high fashion in the pages of Art Forum - for every outsider like you who says my work sucks, there are a thousand super-serious arts writers who use a wall of words as the framework to slip in a little of their own poetic prose, serving not you but serving ME, and themselves, propping up the central regime in New York and Washington by telling you over and over again that if you don't *get* the art, then you are too stupid for art, and thus another avenue of expression and the propogation of ideas is closed to you.

I am a product of this culture - and my work and the machine which propagates it are what my art world has to offer - a tepid critique of dominant culture and vast fields of alienating work that is designed to mostly repel and confuse you. My art does not celebrate because I have nothing to celebrate. My work is not interesting because my culture is dead.

{Gong!}

It was then I knew that I could leave New York - and the New York Art World - behind completely, for it certainly had nothing to offer me. I could leave now and never look back, for by then I'd been fortunate enough to go to Burning Man, yanked into the melee by the scruff of the neck the previous year, by a friend from the future that I'd met in the past, who knew as I did that despite all the fine advances that the Western canon provided us with, like science and the principles of reason, there was something lurking in the warp and woof of the human experience that simply was not being addressed in the global mega-culture we had created.

"A ten-day rave," I scoffed. "Exactly what I fucking need."

"If only it were that simple," he said. "You simply won't believe me until you go."

And by then, I had seen it - seen an arts festival where no one handed me a business card, where no one listed off their arts-school pedigree, where no one gave One Shit if the work was "archival" because most of it would be burned at the end of the week. It was an arts world where attendees were also participants, where art on the walls could only be there if somebody bothered to build walls, a world where even if 90% of the art was utter shit, it exuded a deep desire to be understood, to be appreciated, to instruct and inform just as eagerly as That Other Art seemed bent to confound and confuse.

{Gong!}

Off-Playa, however, one still needs work to look at, and in late 2001, I began to catch a glimpse of the work I wanted to see - and see more of. I was at an opening in Santa Fe when I saw something that knocked my socks off, aesthetically and philosophically. It was a large-sized canvas with a black background, on top of which was painted a Hopi kachina figure. Silk-screened nearby on the same canvas was a giant blow-up half-tone of the Chanel No. 5 logo. The artist had several other pieces with similar juxtapositions - a Koshare trickster figure and the MTV logo, the Hopi butterly dancer and a Ferrari logo - in that work I had, for the first time in my life really, even growing in the southwest within 50 miles of 23 Pueblo cultures, an instant glimpse into another world - the hybrid reality of contemporary Native American people, many of whom live, work and bathe in US monoculture, while at the same time cling (praise the goddess!) to pre-Christian-conquest spiritual systems that make even the weirdest New Ager seem almost sane by comparison.

{Gong!}

In the Hopi worldview, the totality of the conscious and subconscious sensorium is represented by the Kachina pantheon, a League of Superheroes numbering at least 400 major icons. These would include "spiritual" beings such as Koshare (the trickster) and Eototo (the leader) as well as more pedestrian folk like Field Mouse, Butterfly Maiden, Squash, and Mother. Each year, between February and July, the Kachinas leave their fortress of solitude atop the San Francisco Peaks which form the border between the Hopi and Navajo reservations and fly into Hopi for a season of dancing. Incarnating themselves into the bodies of the human members of the Hopi Kachina Society, they re-enact various mythological rituals whose origin dates back to at least the time of Homer, an oral tradition as rich and developed as any Greek tragedy, only in this case it is a *living* tradition unbroken by conquest and diaspora.

To see the juxtaposition of a Kachina and a corporate logo struck me as no small affair, a signal of sorts that while my pagan roots are mostly a product of conjecture, wishful scholarship, and outright fantasy, here are a people, living in our midst, whose genetic memory and actual contemporary ritual practice dates back to the time before Northern Europe took over the world, before Xianity spread like a virus throughout the planet, before before before before before - and yet, they too were living like I am, in this modern world, not tromping through the jungle in loin cloths, but driving trucks and listening to 50 Cent and going to Dairy Queen and using interest-free checking to pay for it all. I had to know more - so I began to look deeper.

{Gong!}

Back on the Playa, an evolving aesthetic keeps developing. Burning Man is the Tabula Rasa, the place, sez I, where society goes to dream, and the overall collective, derived from the best and the brightest (or perhaps just the wildest and the craziest) of mostly California subcultures (punk, goths, ravers, hippies, all with aspirations towards a verifiable *meaning* in their lifestyle stances) are hurled together into the crucible that is the middle of the nowhere, hammered by wind and dust and heat and cold, rain and forgotten items, the need to reach out and borrow, trade, barter, and gift to all sorts of silly strangers from "other scenes" - an incredible cacophony of bridge-building and increased tolerance occurs here, (even for the dark demons of the hour, the DPW) in what I've come lately to describe as "the white man's pow-wow."

In the process, art is created, though bear in mind that the vast majority of artifacts created by this temporary culture could not really be classified as "art" outside this context! Remove the object from this place and it makes no sense, because most things here reference a conversation that only makes sense here, and many of the things we take pictures of and bring home are less considered "great" because of a singular flash of inspiration than as a refinement of what began as a rather dumb idea - el-wire on a golf-cart being a primary example - most just string it up and turn it on, and it works as radical free expression only because of the loose guidelines for artistry that we've set up her and have decided to live by - some, however, take the "el-wire wiring of golf cart" to new extremes, modifying the cart into the Starship Enterprise or a pink bunny festooned with neon - but off the Playa, it's still difficult to pull these moments from the gestalt that created it and at which it is at home.

{Gong!}

If I had to narrow down Burning Man's aesthetic to two greatest influences, it would be a short list comprised of just two people, one whom almost everyone knows, and one who almost no one has heard of, much less read. The one everyone knows is Moby, master electronic musician, whose main "instrument" (so to speak) is the sequencer, a device designed to allow people to create both music - and art and film and nearly everything else these days - in a step-by-step manner that has evolved a rapidly changing music whose evolution is really just a modification of the initial incarnation. In other words, it's an aesthetic that fits perfectly on the Playa, whose inhabitants seek both maximum efficiency and comfort without ruthlessness, improving one's camp and clothes and social stature while still being nice to other people, no easy feat by the end of the week, to be sure.

The other influence is Hakim Bey, who was probably read by every early citizen of Black Rock and is completely unknown by most of today's finest participants, simply because his meme is present in almost every act and artifact that exists here. In his seminal text, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Bey advocated an approach to art which resonates throughout Burning Man culture, a kind of anarcho-situationist-immediatism, one that encourages both the temporary autonomous zone which Burning Man most certainly exemplifies beyond a doubt, even with the rule and regulations that have developed within it, as well as the notion that all work created, be it large or quite dinky, should be treated as but ephemera, a notion flickering in the wind before the Burning of the Man, meant to be enjoyed here and only here by those who bothered to show up.

Thus, the best art of the Playa, the show pieces which inspires both attendees and those who catch it later in story, photograph, and film, is just not permanent. In keeping with the major underlying philosophical tenets that I've plucked out of thin air and outlined here, works like these achieve greater complexity with each passing year - and yet are *still* burned to the ground because fire isn't just part of the performance of the work, it is the contract that ensures that what is made on the Playa stays on the Playa. And if you want to actually *experience* the art, you have to come here and participate. And that's just too complicated and outside the rules of art's commodification by the mainstream art world, and thus never the twain shall meet. But the question really is - should they?

{Gong!}

I am doing a phone interview with Walter Bigbee, a Commanche photographer who was raised as an urban Indian just outside the Beltway and who "dropped in" to New Mexico in his early thirties to learn all he could of his past. Bigbee is a walking treasure trove of native skills, makes his own mocassins, builds his own drums, breaks horses without hardware, and is considered an expert in "brain tanning," a skill-set which so puzzled me that I just had to ask him what it entailed.

"I tan hides with the brain of the animal it came from," he said, non-chalantly. "There's a rule of thumb to brain tanning, that any animal has at least brain enough to tan his own hide."

Bigbee and I shared a lot as we spoke, about our mutual hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, about his strange journey to acquire the skills of his people, about his search into his heritage. And once I'd gathered all I needed from him to write his profile, I began to say goodbye and he said,

"But wait. What about you? Why are you looking to learn from me and my people?" And before I could answer, he spoke again in a singsong voice, "Do you know your songs? Do you know your dances?"

These are standard questions in Indian Country, when people are trying to ascertain the authenticity of the "Indian" in front of them. The full sequence goes like this:

"Do you know your grandmother?"

(What is your clan?)

"Do you know your songs?"

(Do you engage in ritual?)

"Do you know your dances?"

(Are you a part of your community?)

For a brief moment, a song danced in my head, an ancient track from The Orb, sequed into "Rhythm is a Dancer," my dances danced with passion and fire and Ecstacy and speed across a thousand mesatops and right here on this Playa, stars burning bright overhead, wind whistling gently on cool desert nights, both at home and in Black Rock, ten thousand party people twirling glow-sticks in poi-people patterns, twirling twirling twirling, no dance known really, just the twist of the body forcing it up and awake 'til dawn to feel the triumphant moment of having found a thing lost to us, a long long time ago....

"My songs and my dances are at least 9000 miles from here," I said, making a guess at the drive-time between Santa Fe and County Roscommon, smack in the middle of Ireland. "But even if I were to return to know my true past, I would find nothing - my people fell to British rule in 800 A.D. - your songs and your dances may be the closest I ever get to a pre-Xian, pre-Conquest reality."

Bigbee paused. "Crazy," said he. "I never thought of it that way - but maybe that's why I'm so popular in Europe, with the Germans and the French. I'm more than exotic - I'm a blast from a past they can't even imagine."

Think of it, really - if you want to catch a glimpse of what it might have been like, to live in a world before monotheism, before capitalism, before private property, one might look no further than the Native Americans of the southwestern United States. Despite invasion, genocide and conquest since 1492, many tribes still maintain their songs, their dances, their kiva societies, with some, like the Hopi, enjoying a more or less unbroken chain of what can indeed be described as a pagan culture, never conquered by Christians were the Hopis, living on their mesas, articulating their world-view with each passing year through song and dance, passing on themselves and their cultural beliefs from one generation to the next until now, when a long-haired Kachina dancer can share a canvas with a Ferrari logo, illustrating the moment when all that we have to offer as we chafe beneath the yoke of hyper-modernity jockeys against their greatest philosophical achievement, it falls as flat on the canvas as the silkscreen that printed it, and yet it is that very flatness which pushes us back to the Playa every single August, looking to learn new dances, looking to learn new songs.

{Gong!}

I haven't yet been out to see Uchronia, the Message From the Future that everyone simply calls the Belgian Waffle. I may go tonight, but I've avoided looking so far because everyone claims that it is simply the best piece of Playa art that has ever existed, and I want to savor that moment, see it when I've got nothing at all on my mind. Like David Best's Temple project, it seems to be one of those rare pieces of Playa art that transcends the localized creative dialectic and might be something that "belongs" on the contemporary art landscape in the Default World. But of course, like all art at Burning Man, great and small, it too will be burned, and will never tour the Whitney or appear in the U.S. Pavillion of the Venice Biennale.

But the question remains: "Should it?" And should anyone within this world, this secret society, this underground, this Croatan, this tabula rasa where all icons of our collective unconscious are writ large across the desert floor, should these objects even attempt to transcend this crucible whihc nurtures it and seek so-called "greater glory" on the playing fields of a culture that we know in our hearts to be dead? I, for one, think not, for Burning Man is not an incubator for the culture-at-large but a cultural millieu on its own. It's a true alternative (if only for a week) a crucible in which new ideas are born and nurtured and burned, leaving only memory upon which to build the next year's city. What happens on the Playa stays on the Playa. For it is here that we know our songs, here that we know our dances, here that we cobble together an understanding of ourselves in both the petty subcultures and the greater cosmos towards a cultural heritage that cannot be found only in our past - we too are a hybrid culture, standing on the edges of those flat logos, staring deeply into the eyes of our own personal kachinas.

You made it! As promised, here is the link to the Burning Man 2006 heavy-metal video slideshow.

More Bad News for the Service Industry

2006-08-26T14:32:00.000-07:00

The offender is not at fault - the provider is to blame.
Does this really make any sense at all?

Posted as a MySpace bulletin last night, by "Travis" (of Albuquerque) under the header:

THIS IS BULLSHIT

I am writing this on behalf of myself, a fellow co-worker, and all those in the hospitality business. Tonight at work, a gentleman comes in and orders a beer and a burger. He hangs out for about an hour and pays his tab for one beer and a burger. SID (Special Investigations Division) comes in shortly after he leaves (walking home) and presents a breathalyzer test with results of 0.17 BAC from the gentleman that had one beer and a burger. (The law states that it is illegal to serve someone with a BAC of 0.14). They proceeded to give my co-worker a citation for serving someone who is intoxicated. This gentleman, who had one beer and a burger, is a valued customer, who regularly comes in for lunch and has one beer and a burger. This evening he came in as always, showing no signs of intoxication. He was calm and cool, well spoken, and genuine, just as always. My co-worker greeted him as usual, and served him one beer and a burger. Now she is staring down a fourth degree felony and a thousand dollar fine! THIS IS ABSOLUTELY PROPOSTEROUS!!

Is she a criminal? NO! What she is, is an artist. A good one at that. A kind good person who always looking out for the benefit of others. What she isnt , is psychic. How would she have any inclination that this gentleman had five beers before he came in? What if she had asked and he said he didnt have anything. She had no means of determining that he was in anyway (legally) intoxicated. The point of this story should be clear. The new laws put into effect recently are completely absurd. Can we not serve anybody? Do you we have to go through twenty question with every customer before we serve them. Do we have to cut every person off after three drinks? Or even one!?

I have been bartending for ten years now. I am a professional bartender. We are not all college kids getting our friends wasted. There are some of us that take pride in what we do because we love what we do. Helping people through low times and celebrating their high times. Turning a bad day into a good day. We are not there to be down anyones throat about how much theyve had to drink. Thats their own business. In fact the fourth amendment in the Constitution of the United States of America states that we have the right to privacy.

Now, I am a single father. I have my daughter half of each week. I also have about thirty-seven thousand dollars in credit card debt, a car payment, insurance, my daughters school payment, gas, rent, etc. Just the same as most everyone in this business. We work in the bar industry so we can make good money, spend time with our kids, pay our bills and build a good future. What if the money I make gets cut in half? I lose my credit, my daughter loses school, I lose my vehicle, end up on welfare, with no future. With the new laws, this what I am faced with. Losing my job because I dont serve anyone or risk getting a felony and a fine EVERY TIME I SERVE A BEER! I understand that the state wants to stop drunk driving, but destroying peoples livelihood is the worst way to go about it.

This is harassment and unconstitutional. Please forward this to everyone in the New Mexico area. This needs to be stopped.

My Favorite Market Moment

2006-08-25T00:12:00.000-07:00

photo by Sam Haozous

At the Gary Farmer/Floyd Red Crow Westerman gig at the VFW Hall on Sunday night. I have this guy's name written down somewhere. I'll post it soon.

An Open Letter to Klaus Ottman: I'll Eat Humble Pi...

2006-08-23T11:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Klaus Ottman:

I received your comment to my post about the Site Santa Fe Biennial, and I have to admit you are right. My post, which is one of the highest rated articles on google for the search phrase "Site Santa Fe Biennial," is not a review. It is a screed and a rant about local art politics, a petty rivalry between myself and Zane Fischer, and about what happens when people (like me) allow their perceptions of a space and the discourse that informs it to take complete precedence over the work that is or was actually shown inside of it.

My only reasonable defense for trashing your show while elevating IAIA's show is this: while most Santa Fe art critics like to talk shit about diversity and multiculturalism, few, if any, have bothered to take Native American contemporary art seriously. That's my beat, my pet project, something I am willing to apologize for endlessly when it comes to its shortcomings - in the same manner that Fischer, THE magazine, and the Santa Fe Reporter will go to great lengths to cover the Site Santa Fe Biennial - even if many admit in private that they simply "didn't get it."

While interviewing an artist yesterday for a bio for that artist's website, I pointed out to him that here was an opportunity to explain his work to the public - as an arts journalist, if I don't *get* the work and I'm intrigued enough to *try* to get the work, I simply call the artist and ask. Or the curator. Many people do not have such luxuries, but I do, and thus for someone like me to say I didn't *get* your show was fully disingenous of me, and thus, I apologize.

However - because my review was never really about you and your show, nor about the artists and their work, I will take you with me for a moment down the avenue of comparison in our city's art politics. While your show was amply covered by *everyone*, (including Pasa Tiempo, The Reporter and THE magazine) the equivalent kinds of shows for Native artists were only amply covered by The New Mexican. This is not your fault - but perhaps you can see what makes me such a reactionary shit about a) (mostly) white Site Santa Fe, b) hearing from pooh-bah art critic Zane Fischer that "Indian Market sucks" while seeing no real retraction or analysis of any of the *ART WORK* in Indian Market, c) seeing that The Reporter had no coverage of Indian Market _at all_ other than a nice piece on Native Cinema, and d) hearing from the publisher of A Prominent Arts Monthly that Indian Market had nothing to offer him.

Again, this has nothing to do with you, but I am only mentioning this because while *I* can clearly see a racially-based bias about arts coverage in this city, and I can admit that my own white-guilt suck-ass apologist writings are focused firmly on the interests of promoting Native American art, no one in these other camps are willing to see at all, (it seems to me) that their coverage of your show and a lack of coverage of these other shows is a bunch of racist bunk about what Contemporary Art is supposed to be. Just as I think it's fine for me to say that "Site sucks and it's boring," Fischer thinks it's okay to say "Indian Market Sucks and it's all SWAIA's fault," and so we're all a bunch of rednecks yahoos (essentially) protecting our own little separatist turf.

You just happened to walk into this, however, and since you took the time to write to me, and to invite me to a private tour of Site's Biennial in December, I really have no choice but to write back and graciously accept your invitation. I, personally, know that neither the curator of a show nor the venue in which it is shown should have any bearing whatsoever on how a serious critic approaches *the work* itself - I wonder if it's possible for my esteemed colleagues to recognize that as well.

warm regards & please call when you arrive
Gregory Pleshaw (aka gregoryp(tm))

Does Indian Market Suck?

2006-08-15T15:10:00.000-07:00

post scriptum: I wrote this post on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, the Reporter came out and I read the Whole Damn Thing cover-to-cover. The only mention of Market at all was a piece on the Native Cinema Showcase, so the inspiration for the piece Was Not True. However...it's still a nice story.

So today, I was standing in the foyer at SWAIA talking to SWAIA PR Director Stacy Golar when the phone rang, and suddenly, I was plunged deep into the heart of the imaginary movie in which I find myself living most of the time. The movie is called "Art Town", and its the story of the continuing drama of a city "where all actions are fueled solely by the cash of wealthy white people, where the Creative Impulse and the Art World Aren't even in the same universe - and artist Bob Haozous is a brilliant feral animal who loves to spit in the face of those who love him."

The call was from Zane Fischer, arts columnist for the Santa Fe Reporter and my good friend, (most of the time, though perhaps not after today.)

"Hello Zane Fischer," I chirped into the phone, as I often do - I am little more than a trained bird in this ongoing movie, trained to speak my lines like a parrot, though I occasionally detract from my lines when I forget the prime directive of the tag-line above. (My opinions often keep me from the big juicy roles - the money is not in opinions, y'see.)

Staci sighed and slapped her hand against her forehead.

"I don't even want to know," she said.

I was puzzled and continued the convo about a party this evening for a magazine I don't write for anymore, then I rang off.

"What's up with you and Zane?" sez I.

"The Reporter is doing a cover story on Market tomorrow," she said. "We hear it's mean."

"Fuck that," sez I. "Call all your sponsors and tell 'em to pull their ads from that rag for a few weeks - those cowards follow the money just like everyone else in this town. Gerry Peters does it all the time - and how much negative press do you see about him?"

We had other more pressing things to talk about - like did they get me inside the SWAIA auction this year? (And they did, just so you know whose payroll I'm on in the access department.) But an hour or so later as I was pulling into the Baking Co., I called Zane and asked about the skinny.

"Yo no se," sez he. "I just write my column and send it in from home."

"Well," sez I. "Rumor down at SWAIA is that the Reporter doing a smear story on Indian Market tomorrow."

"Well, I hope they do," said Zane, perhaps the Most Important Art Critic in Santa Fe (after me, in my own narcissistic mind) "I think Indian Market sucks."

I shouldn't print that. We reporters rarely print each other's opinions - yet, I always seem to be the one with the vocal opinions, the no-compromise in-your-face dickhead don't-come-to-my-cocktail-party opinions, so since Zane had one inflammatory comment (for a change) I think I'm cool to print it now.

We proceeded to have a heated conversation (we have them all the time - Zane Fischer LIVES to bait me into writing more screed that gets me in trouble) about how Indian Market stifles creativity with its criteria for inclusion, its insistence on certain types of materials, and its "frozen-in-time" stance towards Native American arts & crafts. Clearly, Fischer hadn't bothered to read my story on contemporary native american artists that will be coming to Indian Market - but that's okay too, because we never read each other's shit either. We just pretend we do and argue from the hip about it, most of the time.

"Have you heard what people say about Indian Market? People who participate in it?"

Hee hee. Isn't that something? It's like - "I hate that chick, but I'm dating her 'cause her dad is rich." Kinda unseemly, don'tcha think, to participate in something but secretly hate it all at the same time? Man. And yet the question arises: Does Indian Market suck?

Here's my stupid narcissistic dumbass opinion on that point-of-view:

The idea that an organization stifles choice and creativity is an interesting one, because it essentially places the oppressed (the artist) in a position of more or less utter helplessness. Thus the detractors from the organization in question, (say, Indian Market, or perhaps, in my own case (for I've done it too) Site Santa Fe) look across the wide expanse of what is being displayed (say, at Site's beer-hall warehouse) or the Santa Fe Plaza) and sees not an endless supply of interesting and pretty objects but instead sees what is not there, either by dint of outright ommission, or worse, all that *might* have been created by all those unknown artists who *might* hgave created something INFINITELY COOLER were it not for the fact that the organization's criteria were so restrictive to the artist's "fragile little mind and delicate creative sensibilities."

The beauty of the latter argument is that since the imagined work is without question So Much More Fantastic than what has actually been produced, (since it exists, after all, ONLY in the detractor's head) there is no reasonable argument that can be made against the detractor - because his point is, again, Completely Unreasonable, on par with the logical capabilities of the nimrod in South Dakota who wants to outlaw abortion simply because an Einstein or JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF might lie somewhere in those vast fields of aborted seeds.

The issue at hand here is whether or not Santa Fe Indian Market (and perhaps the Heard Museum Show and possibly dozen of other "tokenistic" (my phrase, do you like it? I stole it, really) shows throughout the Native American Arts & Crafts world are totally fucked organizations because they have certain material criteria about what can and can't be produced by "official" Native American artists. (And hey, while we're beating on what can't be made, why not attack the DNA requirement as exclusionary and wrong too?)

Pushing aside the fact that criteria of *some kind* exists for every damn show and contest and production in the known world (except, of course, at Burning Man, which no one in the straight Art World has any respect for because it's not "archival" (they burn it) and there's Nothing to SELL when it's all over) let's look at some of the criteria that Indian Market has in place, both according to their own guidelines and complaints I've heard as I skip, merrily about town, parroting my lines to those who will listen:

(INSERT CRITERION CONTENT HERE)

For years, I've written all kinds of (mostly) worthless copy about music, technology, and the arts, and so some losers in those fields actually talk to little ol' me about their fledgling careers. And what they talk about most are complaints like these, "the bar that won't book us," "the company that thinks our idea is dumb" & the ever-popular "the curator who won't hang my paintings." And my response to such things is more or less always the same:

*** Book your own damn show. (ya wussy.) ***

*** Start your own damn company. (ya wussy.) ***

*** Hang your own fucking work and the work of your friends. (ya wussies.) ***

Be an imaginary David against the Goliath of your mind. DO IT YOURSELF. Really. You can. And you should. And unless you're a self-indulgent asshole like me, you'll do it *without* attacking the cash cows that make your independent work possible - you'll be graceful, instead, and pretend they're Not Even There.

The hypocrisy of those folks who'll tell you they hate Market (behind closed doors) and then still show up bright and early to participate in it -

Wait! Please. I have to tell you a story, you really have to hear it . I have a good friend named Gregory Lomayesva, an artist of Hopi descent, who was practically raised in a booth at Spanish Market, who swore up and down that he'd NEVER do Indian Market. And guess what? He didn't. He hasn't. And he's still famous and makes a good living as an artist. I ask you, man, WHAT DID HE DO WRONG?

- are just the kind of people who are too damn afraid to build their own Rolodexes. Indian Market, of course, has the biggest one in town, made up mostly of Those Wealthy White Patrons who Control the Native American Art Market (with a MAFIA, I was told today. Can you see it? Rex Arrowsmith and Sam Balleen and the ghost of Al Packard riding six-guns around the booths on the Plaza, ready to shoot any Injun who dared to show innovation in their work.)

So they HAVE TO DO IT. They MUST compromise and play the game of Indian Market. But what exactly (pray tell) keeps these folks from making all that cutting edge work they'd be making if they *didn't* have to fall pray to THE MARKET (you know, the market, the same one each and every one of us making any kind of stuff have to think about when we're pitching a story - don't you think I'd LOVE to make a living making this fucking blog every day? I SHOULD BE ALLOWED. And yet I'm not...sob....)

Sorry. WHAT KEEPS THEM FROM MAKING THAT CUTTING-EDGE WORK? And if they are, in fact, making other stuff, is it *really* so terrible that Indian Market is their cash cow that maybe gives them a little flexibility to make that super-duper stuff?

In either case - cutting-edge or traditional - the patrons will still be wealthy white people. Just like the rest of us. So...what's the problem again?

The Cheesy Fuckin' Obit (Better Late than Never)...

2006-08-14T19:49:00.000-07:00

(Composed while listening to Neil Young's "Needle & the Damage Done" on endless repeat.)

So, tonight, by accident, (more or less) it was revealed to me that my old pal Alex Magosci died in April. I guess that shows you how out of the loop I can be.

How fucking hard is it NOT to try heroin? I'm 36 and I've pulled it off, and I've done pretty much *EVERYTHING* else. Alcohol. Pot. Cocaine. Acid. Mescaline. Mushroooms. Crystal Meth. (snorted and smoked, like the wreckless high shithead that I can be.) Crack. (Yes, I did crack, read my fucking book.) I've even huffed Endust with a bunch of rednecks in the middle of Black Rock City. Warning. Do Not Do This. It is Stupid and Destructive. But somehow, I managed to keep from sticking a needle in my arm.

Ah, Dr. Dis - you needed this. You needed a kick in your dumbass about what a stupid waste of time - and life - heroin would be. And since you're fucking dead, you fucking loser, maybe someone else will read this and manage to Not Try Heroin.

I met Alex Magosci, aka Dr. Dis. (the name of a light-hearted yet mean-spirited music column Alex wrote for the New Mexican) in 199...shit, I *think* it was 1992. I had dropped out of college and I was writing for Pasa Tiempo, and so was he. I had written maybe three pieces for them, met Alex, and got him to write a piece about a rave I was producing. The rest was history...

Alex knew a LOT about music - so much so, that when he asked me to write about his band, I begged off for months because I hated his stupid band, and I thought it was because I didn't get it and I didn't want to reveal my musical ignorance. The name offended me - it was called "Junk," though at the time, GenX-nihilist stupid fuck Alex said he'd never done Junk, he thought of it as a metaphor for our time, since everyone with talent was doing Junk. Motherfucker...

I did, eventually, write about Junk. I probably lied about how great they were because Alex was my friend. I still couldn't get over the name, such a prim little shit I was about heroin, but you know what? I'm STILL a prim little shit about heroin, and for good fucking reason:

No good comes from it. If someone would tell me a story about heroin and enlightenment, I probably would've done it years ago, but every fucking story about heroin has a BAD FUCKING ENDING, and I've read all of them. Alex - WHY DIDN'T YOU?

Here's a list, for those of you unclear: Junky. Naked Lunch. Trainspotting. The Basketball Diaries. Hey - how much more fucking proof do you people NEED?????

I used to date an ex-junkie. She was clean before I met her, but I broke up with her twelve times over the issue before I finally did my namaste/compassion rituals enough to say, "Okay. She's clean. I accept that. I can love her and believe." We eventually broke up for other reasons, (she had the *worst* taste in jewelry) but the point is this: Speed kills. Smack destroys. And I don't want anywhere near it.

Alex...fucker. You were so smart and talented and pure, in your own stupid way. And yet...

In the middle '90s, I was living (oh-so-briefly) in a funeral home (I kid you not) in Austin, Texas. Alex found me and begged for a report from South by Southwest for Reverb, his short-lived online 'zine. I turned in a brilliant (maybe it sucked, but he ran it) report about Dutch pop bands, a wack-job act called Rope, and staying up for three fucking days snorting cocaine off the naked back of some cheerleader from Waco who glommed onto me for my press pass - wild sex, loud music, too many drugs, and total craziness at SXSW - that piece is lost from my archives, and the only person who might've had a copy was Alex...another piece of self-indulgent screed lost to herion. Thanks Alex, thanks a lot.

The last time I saw Alex Magosci was in the basement of the old mental hospital in downtown Santa Fe (a sanitarium, when it was active) in the Community Guidance Center waiting room. I was waiting to see my therapist and get a med check - Alex was there too, in some sweater vest, clean for eight months or something, talking twelve-step in the biggest way, I was so happy for him, but I couldn't help thinking - if you never loaded the needle, you fuck, you wouldn't be so shit scared that you couldn't ever drink a beer again, you fucking fool.

So - Rest in Peace, Alex - and for everyone else - DON'T TRY HEROIN. There are so many other stupid things to do, I promise.

Hippie Smiths

2006-08-10T09:50:00.000-07:00

from a letter to Gerald Hausman (author of the new book "A Mind with Wings", a biography of Henry David Thoreau.)

Dear Gerry:

So a funny thing happened on my way to attempting to really *get* Indian-ness art-ness. I saw a job listed in the paper that I had to apply for - "downtown store seeks individual interested in Native American art and Mexican arts & crafts." Sounded like my job. I checked their website and found they dealt in original Curtis prints, among other items, and basically begged them for a job.

Six weeks later (I cannot believe it's been such a short period) I know more about Native traditional arts that I thought possible. I can spot a Phase One piece of silver at a hundred yards. I can tell the difference between Santo Domingo and Acoma pots at a glance. I am familiar with major names and families in the creation of everything from ceramics to cradle boards to tablitas. (I even know what a tablita *is*!!!) I know which kachinas appear on which mesas at which time of the season. I know which kachinas have been incorporated into Zuni ceremonies and back into Hopi. I understand how and why redware becomes blackware and which cuts infer a "traditional" pot from a sgraffito pot. And yet...

The thing that is interesting me the most at the moment (in terms of something to write about) are the Hippie Smiths. As you are probably aware (in spades!) the hippie smith arrived in the American southwest round about the early 1960s. Folks like John Ripple, James Reid, James Neely, Russell Greene, and Jerry Faires dropped out of whatever rock they were living under somewhere else, and came to New Mexico to learn this venerable trade, studying what books existed on the subject, talking to Navajos, etc. I think there's an interesting book to be written about the subject - particularly when one considers (as I only recently figured out myself) that Native Americans had been working silver for less than a hundred years, having picked up the trade from the Spanish settlers and Mexicano plateros.

I didn't expect to study to find "my own" heritage - (heh) - though as I may have written to you at some point, I interviewed this Commanche photographer named Walter Bigbee for one of my stories for the Santa Fean (I'll send you a copy, I promise) and he asked *me* some very probing questions about why I was spending time (like an anthropologist) studying other people when I could be studying my own past - I told him, point blank, that a) I was living in a community that contained Indians and would feel remiss if I didn't learn anything about them, and b) that my Celtic culture had been conquered and absorbed about two thousand years ago and the closest thing I could get to an indigenous past was Someone Else's Tribe.

But in any case - I seem to have stumbled on a thread that is potentially both "indigenous" and Anglo, simultaneously.

I am thinking about book proposals - can you point me in the direction of a text for non-fiction books proposals? I figure it's worth the exercise. Maybe it's something John Muir might like...

cheers
gregoryp(tm)

The Season of Self

2005-08-03T12:38:00.000-07:00

So when I started this blog, I didn't want it to turn into one of those silly personal diary blogs - for one thing, I don't have the stomach for people seeing me freak out in print, for another, it just seemed so damn self-indulgent. However, since July 19's post from vacation in San Diego I've been sorta talking a lot about me and what I'm doing, and I'm going to do it again, one more time.

It's been cathartic to post personal things here - for one thing, I've discovered that a lot more people are actually reading my blog than I would've thought. And I've always found that once something is "published" - even if it's just a blog, that thought is kinda out there and ready to be expanded upon.

On July the 25th, (jesus...was that really only a week ago?) I wrote about getting dumped at a picnic, which was probably the closest thing I've had to an actual cry for help on this blog. For months I'd just felt obsessed about the fact that I wasn't with anyone for more than "a date and a half" and so I wrote something about it on my blog and then posted an ad on craigslist about it.

I received over two dozen replies from this ad - most of them short notes saying things like "I know just how you feel" and shit like that. I had one woman tell me it was all my fault and that I must just be a really boring guy or something - I wrote back to tell her that I might be many things but boring wasn't one of them and offered to meet with her but she never got back to me ;-0 Some people just like to talk shit and not investigate any of their stupid claims, I guess. And I had one really memorable letter from a person who with I am now corresponding with regularly who has sorta helped me figure out what I actually want. (And we've met too, but you will get no details!)

I think I'd just been really desperate and crazy about it all because I really missed being in love. It's nice to be in love, but since I wrote that post and started corresponding with some of these people who replied, I've come to find that I don't really *want* a partner to live with - I'm happy being single and living alone - but I do want to date people with whom I can develop some meaningful relationships with, friendly and sexual. There's a fine line between living alone and living lonely, and I'd like to stay away from the latter as much as I can.

I think I'm feeling better about this now.

Make the City Different Safe: Ban Alcohol Too

2006-07-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

Alcohol Kills Non-Drinkers - And It's Our Duty to Protect Them

In response to the recent decision by the Santa Fe City Council to ensure that smoking will not occur in any public spaces, restaurants, bars, or other businesses despite whatever opinions those business owners have to say about it, I say - why stop there?

The argument for eliminating smoking in any indoor or outdoor public space goes that secondhand smoke is responsible for the death of non-smokers as well as smokers. It's so true the surgeon general even says so. Yet, we've known for *centuries* (yes, centuries) that alcohol is also a killer of those who do not drink. Why punish just smokers and those who profit from the sale of tobacco products? Let's go after drinkers and drinking establishments too.

The statistical evidence for the dangers of drinking alcohol are quite alarming: at least 100,000 deaths a year for those who haven't had a drop can be attributed to alcohol, including fetal alcohol syndrome, drunk driving victims, accidental and intentional homicide, not to mention the innumerable instances of assault and domestic violence that are perpetrated by drinkers on non-drinkers.

Waiting for voluntary abstinence on the part of drinkers is wishful thinking. Like smokers, expecting any drinker to act like a responsible adult and refrain from drinking isn't enough - tougher drunk driving laws isn't enough either. We MUST ACT IMMEDIATELY to make sure that Santa Fe is safe from all forms of vice that might inadventently kill an innocent, non-drinking person.

A visit to Santa Fe might not be the same with a Margarita that only contains lemonade, but if the lack of appearance of any bar or restaurant owner to the meeting to protest the smoking ban is any indication, then we should easily be able to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol within the city of Santa Fe. And if Bill Richardson is as tough on crime as he claims to be, by 2008 we might even be able to make this a state-wide law.

For those concerned that alcohol provides a means to relax after a long day, we can direct those people to the pharmaceutical industry and the many safe alternatives for relaxation in their pharmacopeia, and perhaps hand them a remote control and point them in the direction of the nearest television set. If Valium and the Weather Channel doesn't relax you, then a prescription for Seroquel will surely do the trick.

As New Mexicans, it's important for us to take the lead on the sale and consumption of this highly dangerous substance. After all, we can't expect people to make meaningful decisions about the health and safety of themselves, much less others. And maybe when we're done, we can consider the possibility of banning the use of automobiles, darts, guns, and pens with pointy tips. And saturated fat too. We can make America safe and healthy, starting right here, right now.

Que viva!

- Gregory Pleshaw
Santa Fe.

Some Things Just Have to Be Shared

2004-11-30T22:12:00.000-08:00

So for the past couple of nights, I've been working on processing all of the nine hundred or so pictures I took at Burning Man this year, and I realized that I have the potential for hundreds of different things to write about, people, art, stuff, spectacle - but of course, the most important thing at Burning Man (and this can't be stressed enough) is the people. And there's the people you meet (who can be life-changing,) but there's a great deal to be said about Who You Camp With, because even if you don't know 'em when you get there, these folks become your de facto family and home-base when you're at the Man.

This past year, my S.O. and I were really lucky to camp with Baku, an odd assortment of electronic music fans (mostly from San Francisco) who met at a rave and shared an affinity for a stuffed animal that made cute little noises. Most of them I didn't know when I arrived, though Canton was the hookup and my very old friend Nick Winterhalter turned out to be among them when we arrived. It was a good crowd, and I have piles of pictures of all of them. Here's one. (up there!)

Flogging A Dead Horse: Site Santa Fe Biennial, 200...

2006-07-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

If Site Santa Fe is a Citadel, I'd Rather Pray Outdoors

My Review of the 2006 Fe Santa Fe Biennial (the straight-from-the-hip version):

If someone were to decide to give me the curatorial title for the next Site Santa Fe Biennial, my vision is as clear as day - I'd skim 15% off the top of their $600,000 budget just for my fee, then pull an additional $100K as a show budget. I'd fabricate a four foot by ten foot rubber stamp emblazoned with the word "HUBRIS," then hire a crane for opening night and train some fancy New York artist (Jenny Holzer springs to mind) to operate the crane. We'd hire Kim Jones to reprise his rat-decor on the front end of Site from Biennial 2004 onto the crane, and on opening night, the doors of Site would be sealed shut with super glue and everyone would settle in under the tent to watch the performance, Fancy Artist in rat-crusted crane stamping the word "HUBRIS" over and over again on the exterior walls of Site. We'd spend the rest of the budget on cheap jug wine and seriously bad punk rock bands to entertain the assembled throngs, and for the following six months, Site would be shuttered closed and everyone who works there would have to write their press releases and other institutional drek from their laptops in the front seats of their cars, while graffiti artists and "outsider" artists would have complete carte blanche over the rest of the walls and the entire grounds of the museum.

Now *that's* the Biennial I'd like to see. As you can see, it's a bit reactionary in regards to the current Biennial, but bear in mind that while it's roughly equivalent to what Site 2006 has been all about, it's at a fraction of the cost *and* we end up with a six-month installation tent city of gutter punks and ex-convicts who might actually make work we'd wanna see.

My Review of the 2006 Site Santa Fe Biennial (the sober and clear analysis, made possible by three heavily emotional argument/discussions with my dear friend Zane Fischer):

Dear Zane:

I'm only going to say this once.

I burned my Site Santa Fe card tonight. It was given to me as a gift by my mom, and though I don't particularly need it because I seem to have made the list of press important enough to be sent an email and given a little kit complete with a Valet Parking permit, I burned it anyway because it's symbolic of how I feel about the *place* - not the show, not the art, but the *place* itself. If the conversation that has been had about this show and all of the other shows in town is about presentation, then my feelings about Site and the work it shows won't ever change until they raze the building and present art as something I know it to be - as something fun, spontaneous, exhuberant, and maybe even a little Dionysian.

While Site Santa Fe hasn't always lacked that possibility, and has, in fact, delivered on it on several occasions, it is, as I said earlier, a Very Citadel of Contemporary Art - and all those capital letters have always left me feeling rather cold. The glossy brochures advertising "deluxe" tours of Biennials for the very well-heeled collector don't really help either, though I do understand that there is a difference between downtown warehouse guerrilla art-spaces, and an uptown institution that needs all the contributions it can get to keep hosting high-end cocktail parties for all those well-heeled johns who discretely keep the place open for the sake of their fancy collections of work that needs stacks of press releases in order to be understood.

I like to think that there are two kinds of people in the art world - those who gravitate to Art History departments, and those who gravitate to artist studios. I am one of the latter folks, and I am mostly a sucker for anyone who makes Damn Near Anything - from wax-resist painted eggs and santero carvers to wack-job theorists who make models of the universe with a single prism and a bowl full of water. Makin' stuff is cool, and since I don't make a whole lot more than a few scribbles on a page, people who can create form out of anything seem like deities to me, most of the time. I'm such a true believer in the making of art-things that I once travelled across two states to visit the Museum of Bad Art, and I was really really sad that I couldn't buy a couple pieces off the wall - until I made something even *worse.*

I tend to feel - and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but note that I said "feel" and not think and these are deeply different things - that the kinds of folks who gravitate to Site and stick around are of the former variety. Site's very building implies a certain kind of churchliness about "what you are about to see" and all that hushed and quiet tip-toeing from one piece of work to the next has always reminded me of spending a Sunday afternoon in the Hirschorn (my mother's favorite gallery) as a child. The whole process says, "This stuff is important. Please be quiet. People here are in quiet contemplation of beauty. Don't talk." And above all, of course, don't touch the art.

But I want to touch the art. And, of course, I'd like to be touched *by* the art without having to read a goddamn thing about what kind of ideas went into either it or the decision to select it for the particular room or space that I'm seeing it in. You seemed really ticked off that I hadn't bothered to read your preview before I went to the show - but I also didn't read any of the great big packet of press releases that Site was so gracious to provide me with. I wanted to experience the art, as they say, "in an unmediated fashion," and the fact is that it mostly just confused and bored me. And perhaps that's because, having been to a couple other Biennials, I was expecting some kind of blockbuster event - instead, I saw work left in quiet contemplation for me to pause and reflect upon, there in that Citadel of Contemporary Art. And I rushed off in search of richer content quite quickly, over to Evo and James Kelly and Victoria Price, and with the exception of Price's nifty Native American artifacts collection, didn't really find it at all except in the marvelous to-and-fro of tout le monde, who seemed just as happy to not be inside Site as I was.

Once I started reading those releases today, after our third argument/discussion about this show, I realized that behind all the art that had bored me were living breathing people - the artists - who have probably read a lot of the same books as I have and have probably had all the same wild thoughts as me, and who've probably wandered through dozens of cities around the world smoking hash and drinking wine and thinking about all the cool shit I do. And of course, at that point, I knew I couldn't dis the show - because there were artists inside of it, and people who make stuff, and as I think I've made clear throughout my life, I'm a sucker not just for art-stuff and art-people, but also for madness and frivolity and a damn good time. And all these folks just looked like fun - but the presentation of their work wasn't quite about *fun* - it was about the seriousness of it all, and there was (quite honestly) nothing in there that struck me as particularly serious - other than the space it which it was shown. And I'm just not serious enough for Site Santa Fe.

In the meantime, the rest of the city was teeming with interesting events, that taken as a whole and contrasted against the serious of Site, just seemed to suggest that anyone seeking a good time out of art could find it - providing they were willing to step outside of that building. In the course of the weekend, as you know, I saw authentic Hawai'an hula dancers invoking their gods in the Allan Houser Art Park to bless the Indigenous Dialogues show, drank beer and danced to techno at the Feral Art Gallery with two to three hundred other wanna-be art stars, ate hot dogs with the Renters, and caught the tail end of the Folk Art Market, where hundreds of artists and participants jostled one another in a Congo line to the beat of a half-dozen hand-drummers over at the Museum of International Folk Art.

What struck me as interesting about all of this, as you also know, was that *the* Site for "contemporary art" was without question, (in my meager brain) the dullest part of the whole weekend. And yet, what received the most coverage and what seemed, from the press perspective, the most important thing happening, was the Biennial opening. And all of that struck me as strange in terms of what we think of when we think of the word "contemporary" and what we think, in our little universe of contemporary art, as what is really important about the art we look at, laud, and make important.

Timothy Leary propagated the idea that taking LSD was all about "set and setting," and after this weekend, I would argue that viewing art is all about "set and setting." What puzzles me is why contemporary art, which seems to consider itself so important, cutting-edge, avant-garde, etc. is so often presented in spaces that seem more appropriate for a networking party than actually viewing something as interesting as "art." If contemporary art really isn't "your father's modern art" then why is it so often shown in places that seem about as interesting about my father's cocktail parties?

For years now, I have implored you and everyone within earshot to believe me when I tell you that Burning Man is the most fascinating and relevant contemporary art show in America. Its set and setting create a deep and rich visual and theoretical lexicon that is incredibly satisfying - and you can even show up to the "viewing" half-naked or painted blue, if you like. Compartively speaking, since Burning Man is *not* about sales, commodity, or collectors, it only makes every other space for viewing Contemporary Art seem less like a place to "experience art" than like a brothel where everyone is for sale. And while Site is not specifically set up for the sale of work, the indirect and behind-closed-doors sales that do take place seem so much more whorish to me than the actual sale of items at places like the Folk Art Market, because at least there everyone is aware that sales are an important part of the action.

When it comes down to what I really want from art, personally, what makes a work interesting to me are ideas and inventiveness. Accessibility is nice too, and if I can get my head around the work just by looking at, without having to be seduced by the bios and the press releases that I've written more of than I can count, then all the better. This is why I am delighted by such objects as carved soap boxes made by prisoners or fork-tine and polished stone necklaces made by travelling hippies, as well as the kind of stuff that hangs at Feral, the craft objects that can be found at Indian Market or Spanish Market or Folk Art Market, or the truly weird monumental works like the giant bronze sacred heart that spits fire out of the top that shows up on the Playa every August.

But when I come across a show that actually has a mission, a thing to say, a burning urgent desire to raise consciousness in the way that Bob Hoazous' Indigenous Dialogue show does, then I am tempted to blurt out, in a fit of pique as I did the other night to you, that Site's show blows by comparison and Indigenous Dialogues is *the* show to see right now, because it offers the same quiet contemplation that Site might want to offer, but it actually has in mind a coherent conversation that it would like us to participate in. That conversation has a lot less to do about informing whitey that Native Americans are here to stay than it is about calling all the tribes and asking questions about what they can do to get over the divisiveness between the tribes, but it's *still* far more interesting to an outsider like myself to that community than it is to me, a more or less "insider" in Contemporary Art, to what's happening over at Site Santa Fe. It has substance and urgency and spiritual components - and most importantly, there are high and important stakes about how that conversation turns out.

Site Santa Fe's Biennial, on the other hand, wants to pretend that art is just about stuff, and that the stuff that is presented can be "totally disconnected" (my quotes) from each other, and that the artists that have been selected are just there to be viewed on their own merits, without mediation. But the mediation is an a priori condition made real by the fact that the work is *in* Site, the Citadel, as I have said, of a certain kind of discourse without discourse, a clean-up crew of Art History majors and curators and artists who are more or less invested in little else than the language of Contemporary Art. Collectively speaking, there's no underpinning historical or philosophical agenda other than the agenda of Contemporary Art. It exists primarily to propagate itself and the spaces where work of its kind is shown. And the real beauty of that agenda is that if you don't get it, you just don't understand it, so if you were to bother to state the obvious and say the emperor has no clothes, you'd be ejected from the club because clearly, you don't understand that the point of the club is to propagate the form, not to actually generate discourse about anything but itself, a strange loop-tape, a mobius strip that is always turning but never really going anywhere in particular.

Though I am well-aware that labelling one's self a "Contemporary Artist" is important for those artists who'd like to vie for such prizes as a show in the Chelsea or a spot at the Whitney, Venice, or Site Santa Fe Biennials, I'm coming to a place where the very phrase Contemporary Artist makes me want to retch and run for cover. The pretense of the thing is just astonishing, as if only a few artists making work At This Moment can actually claim the title. Having spent the past few years roaming around looking at Native American/indigenous work of both a "contemporary" and "traditional" nature, as well as "folk art," "craft-objects," "outsider art," and making inquiries as the histories of these "traditions," I'm finding that very often traditional work is just a template of sorts that the "current" craft/folk artist can use to project his or her own visions, and a lot of things that get produced are very "contemporary" indeed, despite the fact that they may have a historical function that might disenable them from being viewed within the Contemporary Art world.

But this sort of thing is really just so much conceit, a means to separate "people we think are cool," and "people we don't know and don't want to deal with." And that's certainly fair for the members of the club - but something tells me it will be a really long time before I, personally, will feel comfortable in that club. For one thing - I never feel like I have the right shoes.

cheers
gregoryp(tm)

ps: Unless you have any strenuous objections, I'm going to post this to my blog as an open letter so that other people can get involved in the conversation, if they so choose.

Should Public Smoking Be Decriminalized?

2006-07-28T01:16:00.000-07:00

After talking to a number of people tonight about the ban some more, I discovered that the most likely folks to think the ban isn't worth fighting:

a) smoke

b) qualify as bona fide hipsters.

People with some sense of political intelligence are more likely to see that this ban is about a LOT more than just a health issue.

For the record - I feel no shame for smoking or being decadent. Sometimes I think about quitting, but for the most part, I have to say that I'll be damned if I'm going to stop doing anything because of some useless law. Drugs, gambling, and prostitution have been part of my past and engaging in all of these can get you busted in some states - I admit I have broken laws that I think are designed to make sure we all act like proper people ***based on someone else's definition of what that is.***

So I wandered over to Julia Goldberg's blog tonight, just to see what the grand dame of Santa Fe's "alternative" newspaper had had to say about the ban. Perhaps there was something I had missed. And this is what I saw:

"I never felt very comfortable protesting this law, and I guess no one else did either, although everyone I talk to about it (just about) has some very choice words to say about it and the city for implementing it.
But in writing? I mean, kind of hard to take a pro-smoking stance in writing.
Unless you're Gregory P. At least someone around here hasn't been completely intimidated by the PC movement. Of course, I think he lives in Albuquerque now."

No one is talking about being "pro-smoking." This law and any protest that might surround it need not have anything to do with smoking. It has to do with what businesses can do to create the environment they want to create, servers to make decisions about where they want to work, and about controlling the outdoors and the public sphere. And so I wrote to Julia and decided to share it with you:

Dear Julia:

I am so totally stunned that "no one feels comfortable protesting this law." (And I have just moved back to Santa Fe, and if I can find a half dozen people who'll agree with me that it's pernicious and worth fighting for, then I'll do it just for kicks.)

You said:

"At least someone around here hasn't been completely intimidated by the PC movement."

Julia, honestly - what's PC about the city enacting the nation's most draconian anti-smoking law for the sake of One Man (Nicholas Ballas of the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, with all due respect) so he can make his business non-smoking and not lose market share, but making sure that a bunch of high-powered men and women (presumably) can continue to smoke cigars at Rio Chama? There's absolutely NOTHING PC about this law except the cowards that refuse to point out that it's

racist
classist
impossible to enforce
and is already creating a sinister air of paranoia throughout this city?

it controls the rights of businesses to make decisions
it attempts to control the outdoors
it makes criminals out of those who weren't criminals yesterday
it turns everyone into a cop (staff members of venues) or a potential cop (See a Violation? Call this Number!)

There is NOTHING PC about this law. But the scariest thing about it is, no one will protest it because they're all ashamed that they smoke. And that's *really* scary.

This morning I woke with a grim realization. Big Brother is the physical manifestation of collective apathy. It's not the state or some bogeyman. It's people like you with the power to investigate and call "bullshit on that" refusing to do so. And I think it's really sad. No wonder we can't shift the balance of power in Washington or get indictments against those bozos - people are too afraid to speak up against something that is clearly a mean-spirited attempt to legislate morality and behaviour for most of us - but continue to allow the powerful to continue to do exactly what they want to do.

shame on all of you - you deserve to lose every last freedom you have
gregoryp(tm)

Sunshine & Roses

2006-07-26T23:51:00.000-07:00

I give up. Tonight I read the law in its entirety and decided that between Club Alegria and the Rio Chama's new cigar bar, I'll survive. I need to stop going out to bars anyway. I never spend any time on the Plaza anyway unless I'm at work.

Because I'm under strict personal orders not to do anything that would earn me a ride to jail in the back of a police car, I might even quit. Smoking, that is. I have an accupuncture appointment on Friday and maybe I'll ask about it. If the tide has turned so drastically and I want to be an acceptable member of society, perhaps I could become a part-time smoker, and smoke when I'm on vacation. Maybe I'll just sit in my garden and read more books on culture and religion. Maybe I'll write something nice about what a wonderful world it is, since I'm just as capable of that as anything else.

I just think it's crazy that no one is protesting this but me. I find it...sad. Today I had the startling revelation that no one in America protests anything anymore - they just bicker with each other about petty issues while the real villains rob the country blind. Ho-hum. I see something very dangerous in all of this and everyone keeps telling me to shut the fuck up. Okay. Fine. I'll just move around it and pretend it isn't there. Just like everyone else.

Kill the Smokers And that leaves you with whom?

2006-07-26T06:06:00.000-07:00

A reader writes: "With due respect for your pissed-offedness about all this, it's not right for ANYONE to be assaulted. I suspect your crazy waitress had been verbally assaulted by smokers, and that was the source of her reaction to you."

Perfectly correct. And so the brunt of carrying out oppressive laws is left to those least equipped to enforce them, and those they are most supposedly trying to protect.

In regards to our negative interaction the other day, (which I regret, because while I am finding it very difficult to remain civil about this law, it is my duty to do so) I think it's important that you and everyone else understands that my protest about this is not about defending smoking. It's a terrible habit, but one I happen to enjoy - but that's still not the issue.

The issue at hand is one of defining what is personal, private, social and public space, and then determining what is acceptable behaviour in any of those millieus. Let me break down my view of this law precisely:

1) A bar is social space. We can all agree on that. What then needs to be determined is whether or not the owner of a bar has the right to determine the rules of engagement in his or her establishment without governmental interference. I believe that bars can make those determinants all by themselves, using the market, patrons, and audience as a guidelines, without forcing every bar to do as one bar wants to do (the Cowgirl) without losing marketshare.

This law is not, and has not ever been about, "the health of workers." There are *plenty* of other jobs in this city of a $9.50 hourly wage to satisfy the demands of those who must work in smoke-free environments. Furthermore, if the City Council were actually serious about *public health*, we'd all be talking about the effects of "second-hand alcohol" which is far more dangerous and much more actively violent than cigarette smoke, as any bereaved relative of a totally sober driver can tell you following their death in a drunk driving accident.

Already, prior to this law, bars like the Second Street Brewery and the Santa Fe Brewery had made the decision to not allow indoor smoking, and by all accounts, these were among the two most popular live music venues in the city. So the argument that people *needed* this law to be able to go see live music is also a pile of pernicious nonsense.

2) A patio is outdoor space. While a lot of cities like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles are cited in making the case for this law, I will note that none of those cities disallow smoking in outdoor patios, with some exceptions for places where food are served. Thus, Bushee and Co. want to take the law one step further because we're so darn progressive around here - and I think it's just Dead Wrong. Again, businesses should make those determinations about the rules of engagement in a social space, in my humble opinion. People are FREE to choose whether or not to go to those establishments.

3) "25 feet from any open doorway" means downtown, which means *PUBLIC SPACE.* No smoking within 25 feet of any open doorway is simply an anti-vagrancy law, another means to a) keep the streets clean of undesirables (which in this case means, "the woman who walks the floor of a gallery and wants a cigarette on her break"), and b) to give the police another excuse that they don't need to hassle people. How will this law be enforced? How *selectively* will this law be enforced? Who will receive citations and who will not? A year from now, someone will do that statistical analysis and they'll *probably* find that white males like me are *least* affected by this law - unless they're young or obviously poor.

This law attempts to control business, eliminate choices for social space, and attempts to legistlate behaviour in both social and public space. To a degree, that attempt to change the rules of engagement in social and public space really defines the heart of why this law is terrible. You might feel "protected" - but the problem with this line of argument is that it can SO easily be turned around to eliminate CHOICE for other people in other types of situations.

As I have said before, I actively support a woman's right to choose, and so I watch with utter horror as the same side of the fence that might support that right is also keenly interested in eliminating choices for others: including, in this case, bar owners, bar workers, bar patrons and the smoking and non-smoking public at large. Another supporter labelled Patti Bushee a fascist over this yesterday and I don't think he's far off the mark. The warp and woof of culture is that some people choose activities and behaviours that others in the culture might abhor. You might say that you are offended by second-hand smoke - I could just as easily say that I am offended by a woman's decision to *kill her baby* (emphasis added, but my words are no less emphatic than some of the crap that gets thrown at me for smoking **outside**) and we have choices - we can agree to disagree, or we can do our level best to DICTATE THE PERSONAL AND MORAL CHOICES OF OTHERS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE.

If that's what you and other supporters of this law intend to do, then I say you're cutting your own throats. I say that all bets are off. I say that if you attempt to eliminate me from the public sphere, you will lose a potential ally. And while I don't mean this literally, I will say in making me and my kind utterly personna non grata, even OUTDOORS, then you are affectively eliminating me from the public discourse. And while I'm sure that Patti Bushee and the rest of those cowards think of me as nothing but poor and undesirable because I still *smoke* (heaven forbid, unenlightened Neanderthal!) the fact of the matter is: "If you eliminate us from the public discourse, then the only people you get are the people who aren't as fond of freedom as I am."

4) What's next? There's a small hipster city just like ours (without the zillion-dollar retail district) called Arcata, California that has actually outlawed smoking *on the Plaza.* That's right. No smoking in what was once the city's primary public space. Before the law, kids and hippies and general malcontents coated the Plaza with their skateboards and hacky sacks. Now - it's just *empty.*

What begins as a health issue can so easily become a crusade. But a crusade for what, exactly? Legislated morality and behaviour? A collapsed social core that no one spends any time in? Laws that eliminate certain people from the conversation, and makes criminals out of them?

If those cats on City Council think they're *any* less reactionary than Bush and Co., they need to think again. This law sets a dangerous precedence and it should be repealed. Any free-thinking person would have to agree.

ps: The waitress *did* feel harassed about the law - and she's a smoker TOO.

Still think it protects the worker? Bad enforcemen...

2006-07-23T19:31:00.000-07:00

Despite my virulent (some might say violent) opposition to the city of Santa Fe's utterly draconian no-smoking law, I can tell you that I have been vigilant in complying with it. In fact, I have mostly just STOPPED GOING OUT at all, and while my six pints every other night probably isn't having an impact on anyone's bottom line, I will admit I *have* become much less gracious about not smoking in places where it is permitted.

Case in point: Last weekend I attended the Violent Femmes concert at Paolo Soleri, and lit up a smoke while waiting for the band. Some lame-ass Baby Boomer chick behind me had the fucking gall to say, "Oh please, put that out. I can't stand cigarette smoke." Whereupon I stood up and said, (loud. Real loud.) "If you can't stand cigarette smoke, why don't you go LIVE IN A BOX? And don't plan a trip to Mexico, South America or Europe, you fucking whiner," before leaving the area.

Back in the day before the ban, I might've been really polite about it. But hey, these people have the law on their side, so all I can say is "GET YOUR LAWS OFF MY FUCKING BODY." Today's experience at the La Posada, however, really takes the cake for what a fucked up law this is and what a ridiculous time businesses are having with implementing it.

This afternoon, after my day gig, I went over to the La Posada to have some iced tea and write in my journal. This is a fairly routine ritual for me, though one I haven't engaged in since the Ban, since I don't go out anymore, other than to Fatso's, who are circumventing the law on their outdoor patio. But I went to LaPo because I like to hide there, and when I really have something to do on a bright clear day, I could, I reasoned (mistakenly) that I could just go out to the patio and smoke when I needed to.

After a half hour of writing in the bar, I stepped outside. I made a mental note of how far 25 feet from the door was, and saw another smoker sitting at a table. That must be the line, I thought, accepting a light from him and walking even further away to talk to a friend from out of state on my cell phone.

I was meandering around the outdoor water fountain when I heard, then saw, a woman racing up to me, shouting, "No smoking in Santa Fe! No smoking in Santa Fe!" I was stunned, to say the least, then heard my friend say, "Is someone telling you you can't smoke outside? What the fuck?" I started to tell my friend there was this new law, and then this chick grabbed me and dragged me a good fifteen feet across the patio. "What the fuck?"

I hung up my phone. "What is this?" The woman told me it wasn't her fault, it was a new law, I could only smoke at this one table and I had to stand there and be a happy smoker. I was just stunned. I had absolutely no idea who she was, could only assume that she was a drunk patron on a power trip, some friend of Patti Bushee's out to use the law to harass me unnecessarily. She pointed to the other guy and told him to go over to my table, and I just stood there as she went back inside, retrieved an ashtray, and came back, telling me, "If you want to complain, go to www.rockresorts.com, which I recognized as the parent company for the La Posada. "They haven't implemented a meaningful policy so you can imaginet the kind of shit I've had to take for this."

And that was when I realized that this woman works for La Posada. So this psycho trip was some kind of business-sanctioned intervention on my person on behalf of the hotel? Clearly, it was time for me to leave and never come back.

"You're a rude disrespectful bitch," I said to her as I stormed off the patio and into the bar to retrieve my laptop. "And you had absolutely no right to touch me."

I could feel a pile of righteous anger gearing up inside me and I just *knew* I had to get the hell out of there before I got really actively mad. Why the hell wasn't I told what the hell the goddamn policy in any other way but that? Unbelievable that I would be treated like a fucking criminal for smoking a cigarette. I am a grownup. As a teenager, no one pulled that kind of shit on me, and I'm thinking, I'm in khakis, I hold a regular job, I am a respected member of this community, I am an arts journalist, I write about the stuff that people come here to see, and this woman thinks it's perfectly okay to treat me like a pile of garbage because I smoke.

Thank you, Patti Bushee - and the rest of you cowards on the City Council. Thanks a whole hell of a lot.

On my way out, bar manager Don McCoss, whom I'd seen around before, asked if there was a problem, but I just said, "This is absolutely fucking outrageous and I have to leave." And I did. And as soon as I was in my car, I broke another one of Santa Fe's bullshit laws and immediately got on my cell-phone and dialed 411. I felt utterly assaulted - by this woman, by the La Posada, and by this law, that is designed, they say, to *protect* workers (many many many of whom smoke themselves) and absolutely eliminate smoking within 25 feet of everything.

I called the Manager on Duty and filed a formal complaint. I threatened a lawsuit for assault, and actually meant it for a few hours. It didn't help any when I was told she was suspended - yeah, this chick sucks, and she's crazy and she never should've touched me, but what I really want from this incident is this:

The La Posada - and every other bar and restaurant in this city - needs to have a clearly stated policy, in writing, posted outside their establishment, insofar as where smokers can smoke. No more ambiguity. If, as in the case with the La Posada, that the proximity of the bar makes it impossible for smokers to leave the premises to smoke and smoking isn't permitted on the premises, then that needs to be clearly stated AND PUBLICIZED. If the whole place is non-smoking, then I want to know that before I enter the building - because I just won't. I won't buy a drink, I won't waste my time, and I won't pretend that I can just have one over here, because I'll be at home enjoying a drink and a smoke by myself.

Right now, this law is no big deal because it's July. But just you wait until the tourists are gone and it's February - you think I'm going to go out and drink expensive alcohol in bars when no one welcomes me or treats me like that?

If the La Posada is unwilling and unable to post these guidelines in a clearly marked place, then your problem isn't with me - it's with the City Council. And maybe you should think about all the tips that the saintly "workers" that Bushee and Co. are trying to protect are going to lose because this law is wrong and should be contested strongly by the business owners of this city. Including the La Posada.

She never should've touched me and it doesn't matter why she did. But run-ins like that stemming from a behaviour that has only recently been criminalized can only be the result of poor poor planning on your part. And politically motivated poor planning on the part of the city. Which doesn't surprise me in the least.

A Protest of One

2006-06-28T09:20:00.000-07:00

protector of the people, Ms. Patti Bushee
psst...hey, Patti - KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY BODY!

So yesterday, after finding out about the Santa Fe Smoking Ban in BARS (bars - places where they serve ALCOHOL, you know, dens of VICE) I did a little informal polling. I asked a bartender at Del Charro what he thought about the ban and he held up a lit cigarette.

"Ninety-nine percent of people who work in bars and restaurants smoke," he said, on conditions of anonymity. "Patti Bushee has her head up her ass."

Ya think? Maybe. I spoke with a friend from California whose been dealing with this problem for years. She said, "Bars cope. They build patios."

But that won't work here. No smoking in bars in Santa Fe means no smoking in outdoor patios, no smoking within 25 feet of any open window or door. Which means that this law might be a little less about protecting anyone than it is about eliminating a certain "bad element" from the city of Santa Fe.

We knew it was coming. They took away the Plaza already - it's roped off to protect the grass from the people, and no working human who lives in Santa Fe has any compelling shopping reason to go downtown. Now, in addition to eliminating smoking inside any bar or restaurant (and probably hotels too) we now have an effective means of hassling anyone smoking outdoors. Way to go, you liberal fascist.

Why stop there? I think we need laws that protect young women from making the mistake of Abortion when Adoption is a viable option. I think we need laws that protect the sanctity of marriage and make sure only bio-boys and girls can marry each other. I mean, really, Patti - you just can't have it both ways. Choice is CHOICE, no matter what the arena. If you don't like abortion, don't have one. If you don't want second-hand smoke, don't work in a bar or don't go to bars that allow smoking. How much more DUUUUUUUUH can you get?

If non-smoking bars made sense, bar-owners would make their *businesses* (get it Patti, THEIR BUSINESS) non-smoking. Some do. Second Street Brewery is non-smoking - inside. They created a compromise without your damn law. Much to my chagrin, I found out yesterday that the Santa Fe Brewing Company, despite being outside the city limits and unaffected by the ban, is voluntarily non-smoking. Inside. They have an outdoor patio that may now also be non-smoking thanks to your invasive, (dare I say BIG GOVERNMENT?) nonsense.

This morning Mary Charlotte of the KSFR morning show asked me why I didn't protest the ban. I told her I only found out about it yesterday. She said I must've been living under a rock, but of course, I don't *read* anything in local papers but the horoscopes and the classifieds. She said, (and I have a really hard time believing this) that No One, not a bar owner nor a disgruntled smoker, showed up to protest the ban.

So at the risk of looking like a nitwit, (wouldn't be the first time) allow me to mount this Protest of One. Like the equally absurdist no cell-phone while driving law (what next? No eating while driving? No drinking while driving? No listening to the radio or smoking while driving?) this is an instance where some Well-Meaning (yet Muddled-Headed) Liberal has decided to over-regulate my existence to protect me from myself. Screw you.

I just hope it's not too late for me to burn my ACLU card and join the NRA.

They Made Johnny Rotten a Moron - They're Making M...

2006-06-27T17:13:00.000-07:00

{Warning: It's a rant. If rants offend you, tell the Santa Fe City Council and maybe they'll SHUT ME DOWN.}

June 27, 2006
The Santa Fe City Council (in its infinite wisdom, these are the people that rope off all the green grass on the Plaza so no one gets to enjoy it, among a half a dozen other Stupid Ideas) recently decided that there will be NO SMOKING in any bar or restaurant in the city of Santa Fe, including outdoor areas. Wow. It's enough to make you want quit drinking and smoking and shut down all the goddamn bars, because I can't see why I should pay treble damages on a drink in a place where I can't fucking RELAX. Stock up the home bar - as of July the 1st, you can forget all about your pint and a smoke - unless you're at home or at my place.

Who are these people to tell a bar owner what they can and can't do inside their own damn businesses? It's a BAR, for chrissakes. Don't want the second-hand smoke? Stay the fuck home.

Check this recent study:

"WASHINGTON -- Gritty rats and mice living in sewers and farms seem to have healthier immune systems than their squeaky clean cousins that frolic in cushy antiseptic labs, two studies indicate. The lesson for humans: Clean living may make us sick."

http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,71185-0.html?tw=rss.index

I'm getting sick just thinking about what a boring antiseptic world we're living in. Kill all THOSE people out there, (Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan.) Make it *safe* (squeal, squeal) for all us nicey-nicey folk here in the USA. Totally crazy. I wish the Damn Liberals would crawl out of my lungs and into the goddamn streets and Change Something REAL. So much easier to oppress ME than get George out of office, huh?

I'm just now starting to understand why the working class watches Fox News and votes against their class interest. Its because all the Damn Liberals want to do is protect me from myself. HANDS OFF, wimps. Go save the Big Environment or something. I'll be over here watching Bill O'Reilly and voting against MY class interests just to keep you away from me.

Hey - wait a minute! The Santa Fe Brewing Company is in Santa Fe COUNTY, right? Guess I know where I'll be going. Hope they've got Fox News on the TV.

Burning Man & the Angry Skin will our hero choose...

2006-06-19T23:01:00.000-07:00

After the car blew up and I was hit by a bicycle, I immediately broke out in an all-over angry attack of psoriasis, something I've had on my legs for years but never on my HANDS. I burst into tears when it happened, and the itch was over the top for days before I finally bit the bullet and set an appointment with a Chinese doctor. I'm signed on now for a full course in acupunture and herbs - three months or so. They don't take Medicaid, (natch) I'm still up to my eyeballs in debt from Mexico, and I'm still a WRITER, for chrissakes, which means that even when I make money it seems to take about 60 days to get paid from the time I complete the work.

The only thing keeping me afloat is an American Express my parents gave me (which I pay on) to go to Mexico and have been nice enough not to take back, because everyone sees i work all the time but just don't cover anything. last year i skipped out on burning man because i was tired of going - this year i know for certain that there is NOTHING more important than my health, and if Chinese medicine can help keep my wild energy cycles from creating a scenario where another fucking safe falls on my head, then i have to go into debt for that - and not BM.

But the opera ain't over yet...who knows...i might make it anyway. photo by Erik Aylen