
Hey, New Mexico, you can do anything you want on your limited-edition quarter. No, really, you can do anything you want. Well, you could have, at least.
Call a spade a spade is the saying but it goes for ugly too. This week, there’s a lot of it. Sometimes it’s of the straightforward visual brand, like Neil Bernstein’s well-intentioned but appalling and ultimately egotistical outdoor artwork at El Museo Cultural (see visual arts, page 33). Or the “institutional illness” green stucco on the side of the new
building (at least the side that isn’t covered in distinctly non-teen, vaguely pre-Colombian, oafishly spiritual murals). I’m trying to imagine having wanted to go to a place in my youth, after the school day was done, that was the same horrifying establishment color as the classroom…
Obviously W21, especially with the new influence of Chris Jonas as program director, is a knock-down, blow-out success story once you get inside, but that color—it’s enough to give me nightmares. Nightmares of vice-principals’ offices and dentists’ waiting rooms.
Another prevalent ugliness is of the political variety. After sitting through a recent meeting of the
Capitol Buildings Planning Commission
, I am in deep fear of state Sen.
(D-Chavez). Mostly I’m afraid of being trapped in a broken elevator with him. You’d think a guy who has held the same legislative post since 1978 would have learned not to babble incoherently and to shut the hell up and gather salient facts that he would then use with the wisdom born of experience to parse in the service of excellent stewardship of the state. Or that he’d at least shut the hell up in long, boring meetings so that they could be over sooner.
But no. Apparently, there is little competition in the greater Roswell area for political office. Jennings single-handedly prevented the other 10 or so members of the committee from offering a single drop of useful input into the
’s plans for a major section of Santa Fe real estate, adjacent to the impending Rail Runner train platform southwest of the Cerrillos Road and St. Francis Drive intersection. He did so by waxing—you couldn’t call it philosophical…let’s go with idiotic—on his “ideas” about tourism, the drive to Española, crowding on Cerrillos Road, the future of Santa Fe and all the new car traffic that he is concerned will be generated by…people who ride the train.
Jennings very cleverly pointed out to NMDOT Cabinet Secretary
that the proposed development of the area was going to result in significantly higher concentrations of people, a thought that I’m sure had never occurred to the trained engineer and the state’s first woman transportation secretary when she was considering a facility with shared state offices, mixed-use development and a multi-modal transportation hub that includes Santa Fe’s major commuter railstop.
It was an ugly moment, especially for those of us who simply wanted some information on when a request for proposals would be issued for designing a master plan. The answer: “Soon,” is the best I could glean between Jennings’ interminable prattle. The coolest thing about him is that he’s a sheep rancher with the middle name of Zeph. The scariest is that, as Senate president pro tempore, he is third in line to the governor.
But speaking of petty despots, the thought of County Commissioner Jack Sullivan sputtering with exasperation on the telephone as he called in to a July 29 Board of County Commissioners meeting that voted to consider re-joining the North Central Regional Transit District is the kind of thing that makes me consider an initiative to require YouTube videos of public meetings. Sullivan led the charge to leave the district, for a host of reasons that he enumerated in a letter to SFR published on July 30.
He is the beast to Harry Montoya’s beauty in this story, as Montoya led the drive to reconsider leaving after initially siding with Sullivan. All I know are these two things: The NCRTD has proven flexible and accommodating to the needs of the city and county, whereas Sullivan appears to have an issue with everybody. And you know what they say: If you meet five people in a row who are jerks, maybe you’re the jerk.
At any rate, it’s an issue that incoming county commissioners should be able to weigh in on, instead of having it foisted on their laps by outgoing commissioners.
The question we are left with is when the City of Santa Fe, which dutifully pronounced that it would follow the county out of the transit district and now, presumably, will follow it back in, is going to, as they say, grow a pair?
You know what’s really ugly, though?
. I’m sure it was a tough choice for the governor-appointed New Mexico Coin Commission. After all, it had to choose between four variations of Zia suns and state outlines. The sun, arranged over Santa Fe geographically on the state, supposedly indicates narrative, but unless it’s meant to be a big target, I’ll be damned if I can figure it out, especially through the distraction of the ugly design. I knew they’d never be ballsy enough to go with a mushroom cloud, but as Jay Miller pointed out in one of his “Inside the Capital” columns earlier this year, the decision feels so pat and expected that it boosts the idea that New Mexico should compensate Zia Pueblo for blatantly thieving the symbol.
I’m not one to be in favor of copyright, or even implied copyright, but if the state’s ugly damned quarter proves to be the linchpin in forcing the state to cough up a significant amount of ugly damned quarters, well, that would be ugly.