Jake Fragua, the thin and furtive backbone and tireless promoter of kickin' local band/experimental art project Chocolate Helicopter, told me between acts at the High Mayhem Festival that he sometimes feels lost and out of place. Not with his artwork or his band, both of which are doing just fine, thanks, but geographically. Being from Santa Clara Pueblo, he sucks the high Southwestern desert dust like milk, he trusts the feeling of low scrub against his legs or a lonely, broken road beneath a fierce moon like quiet siblings-here, he's home. In other places, he knows when to go left, when to go right, but in a deeper way, he told me, things don't make the same complete and harmonious sense. Jake wondered if I knew what he was talking about, if had experienced the same sense of welcome place via cultural tradition, maybe in wherever the hell my people are from?
I'd have to say no, not in the same way at all. I've been to Scotland and Germany, and I have gotten all misty-eyed, with the ground buzzing beneath my feet and my heart pumping with the blood of my ancestors,
but then I'm given to romanticism and those are both countries with strong and abundant beer, so it's difficult to pin down such sensations with any real certainty. Also, I have a small bladder, so I can feel any number of things from true love to spectral presence before realizing I just have to pee.
I wondered what artist and designer Yuki Murata's feelings are on the same issue. Murata's exhibition
Split, Stitched & Whole
, on exhibit at Victoria Price Contemporary (550 S. Guadalupe St., 982-8632) through Nov. 28,
manages to leave a slash of eloquent violence across the gallery walls, a
study in contrasting red and white, in wax and in paper, a stormy centeredness. Murata is half Japanese and fluent in the language, but her features mark her as a foreigner, and she has never been able to feel truly at home in Japan. Though her works
on paper are literally split, stitched and then made whole again, the practice is a fairly intense personal ritual, stemming from the same sense of exploring identity, perception, geography and biology.
A friend in San Francisco, a writer and educator, said last week that her own immediate ancestors, scattered by war, had no real geography. Her father was essentially born nationless, without a passport, without even a native tongue, and finally settled in the United States. But she had a strong sense of home within the idea of global nomadism. It felt right. Jake Fragua's mythology is about a land he knows intimately, whereas my friend's mythology is less rooted and is centered on mobility, not only through geographies but through cultures as well. So many of us in industrialized nations live like this, making our homes within a personal and completely voluntary diaspora. Santa Fe's non-native and non-Hispanic populations often strike me like this, as loose tribes of people formed more by the fact that they've left somewhere else than the fact that they came here. And I wonder how that influences the kind of community we end up creating together.
Or, to get right to the point, I've blown some 500 words by way of getting around to saying that Santa Fe, for better or for worse, meaningful or shallow, is our collective place now, a spot on earth where many of us feel at home, in a way that might just be real. And I wish we'd all pay more attention to it. A case in point: Now is the time for everybody to take a good long look at the Downtown Vision Plan. I know it's just a plan, but it's always possible some kind of action will take place based on it. It's long, but it has more pictures than substance, er, words, and is a pretty easy read. Fifty-odd pages in two multiple-megabyte downloads on a city's Web site is enough to try a populace's patience, even for committed citizens in a blossoming digital age, but reading Santa Fe's plan reveals some surprisingly good ideas and a litany of questionable ones (if you don't do digital, go pick up a copy at City Hall).
On the good side, there's plentiful encouragement for river improvements and some suggestions for the city to streamline the bureaucracy around dealing with the river (like, choose a department to be responsible for it. Duh.) and some very ambitious sketches of a capitol promenade, a kind of leisurely, tree-lined avenue running from the Railyard past the capitol building. To my eye it looks very convenient for large acts of civil disobedience, but I'm sure it would be a nice place for a picnic or a meeting with Deep Throat as well.
However, the plan contains some enormously half-assed ideas about how to handle different tiers of retail businesses (with some catering to tourists, some catering to locals and some spanning the gap), some damaging concepts about parking and altogether too many references to the possibility of real, dynamic, human issues being solved through the use of "ornamental posts" and "sandstone benches." There's a two- or three-page nod to "arts and culture" that ought to be crumpled up into a little ball and stuffed in the mouth of the lead planning consultant as well as a blatant lack of understanding about how to complement or operate in tandem with other current plans and actual recent events in the same city the plan is meant for.
So, all the Santa Feans who have participated in the Downtown Vision Plan process are owed a debt of gratitude for their civic engagement, which the rest of us have been too busy or too lazy to contemplate, but we all need to know what's being considered at this point or get ready to be told we've got no right to complain about it as the face of the city goes through some major changes. I guess it comes down to whether you're at home here or just passing through.
