Temper the gray-or face irrelevance.
I really, really, really want to believe in Santa Fe's economic development plan, subjected last Wednesday, Oct. 26 to a celebration of its first year in action. Unfortunately, as has become customary with these things, the crowd was not thick with teens. Or twentysomethings. Or thirtysomethings. There's a lot of effort being put into community engagement and buy-in with the city's efforts, but attracting input and, well, even the time of day, from the area's young creatives was, to me, a glaring omission in what should have been accomplished for year one. We heard about the fabulous and successful (truly) International Folk Art Market; we heard about the fabulous and successful (reportedly) Design Week; we heard about progressive energy schemes (pretty interesting: see
); and the crowd cheered wildly for the pro-local and -small business efforts of David Kaseman and the Santa Fe Alliance which was already doing its thing, with or without any kind of citywide plan, but nobody has bothered to figure out how to get, as a rule, anyone under 40 to care. There appear to be strategies for everything but getting the same basic group of people who were already insiders in their respective fields to offer input over and over again. I don't care if you give away concert tickets, lottery tickets or vodka mini-bottles, find a way to lure younger people and unexpected outsiders. Why not iPods? Everyone else has given them away. Use trickery if necessary but temper the gray in large economic development crowds or be introduced to dinosaurs and deep irrelevance to the future.
We were also treated, at last week's celebration, to the progress of three organizations which have received funding from the city, with mixed results. Creative Santa Fe, the organization meant to create a strategic plan for the near future's cultural development, did its job, but not to the pleasure of the city's economic development department: Word is CrSF has been given a short month to revise its plan and, presumably, the amount of money the plan requests from the city.
The Lensic's community box office (
) is a great thing to have. It's a locally based, central clearinghouse for tickets to (at least potentially) any and all events happening in Santa Fe at any venue. The site is now live and usable and just plain cool. With exceptions. First off, there aren't any events other than those happening at the Lensic listed yet. Supposedly this is a community partnership, so you'd think some, uh, community partners might be involved. Press materials for FanMan Productions' Charlie Sexton and Shannon McNally show at the expanded El Paseo venue describe the Lensic as the place to call for tickets, but you're SOL if you want to purchase them online; in fact, if you were perusing our community box office online, you wouldn't even know the show was happening. Second, the detailed listings of events on the site have no big, bright, "buy-tickets-now-before-it's-too-damn-late" button which, if I were a participating venue, I'd want to see. Instead, there's a discreet text link which takes you to a pointless intermediary browser window which confirms the fact that you might be interested in purchasing tickets before depositing you and your credit card at big, generic
, which doesn't feel community (in vibe or economics) at all, but is clearly a good place to get tickets for boxing in Modesto, CA or seats at a Bea Arthur comedy show in God-knows-where. Finally, since the Web site obviously isn't going to work for everyone, we need physical kiosks at places other than the Lensic-places with convenient parking for one, and south-side access for two. The libraries are an obvious solution, but with hours being dramatically slashed, you might have to use some strategic planning of your own to pick up your tickets and check out a book. Perhaps, as a small compensation for handing our heads on a platter to Super Wal-Mart, the mayor and the City Council can require a community box office kiosk in between Wal-pharmacy and Wal-photo and Wal-everything else.
The third leg of arts money has thus far been invested in what's whimsically called a culture portal. You know, a doorway, a rabbit hole, a path for potential visitors to Santa Fe and locals looking to network and represent to get, virtually, into the city.
It's true I've been far too polite about things that suck lately, but
looks better than I thought it would. It's got pretty pictures and an almost intimidating amount of content or, at least, potential content. It's a snazzy interface, but if I were a dial-up user, I'd be straight-up scared. Any other complaints? Oh, yeah. First, the interactive calendar, which ought to allow anyone to enter information about their event into a searchable database, sorts information in a way that, well, that just ain't right. The result is long lists of information that you're pretty sure you didn't ask for. Also, take a major community event like last Saturday's Metamorphosis Ball at CCA (where well over a hundred grand toward the warehouse gallery remodel was pulled in)-our swanky culture portal inexplicably listed that event, as well as several others, as beginning at 12 am. Also, why go live with drop down menus that don't yet function and whole sections void of any meaningful content? Racing for time and against a tight budget are the obvious answers, but there's a bigger question and it comes back around to that sense of missing youth.
What are we trying to do here, people? Are we trying to recapture the glory of the '80s when Santa Fe was the "it" city for tourism, turquoise was flowing like the international arms business and fringe coats were flipping like flapjacks? Or are we trying to build something more sustainable and long-term, with a holistic viewpoint that sees the importance of tourism, but also the importance of home-brewed entrepreneurism and vital, cultural risk-taking? The culture portal says something about that question. By having content geared toward people who might pay somewhere close to a hundred bones to have their dream Santa Fe vacation planned for them (this is really an option-I ain't, tragically, kidding), rather than content geared toward, say, folks who might want podcasts of what you'll encounter at local nightspots, or wiki-reviews of Santa Fe's culture scene. Why are there promos for the Opera, but not for the monthly LISP cabaret at Back Road Pizza? What is our target market and why? I don't think these questions have been asked and I think the obviousness of it is manifest in the schizophrenic uncertainty of these three big money arts and culture projects.
All these kinks are perhaps minor, easy enough to be worked out-there's plenty of room for evolution. Still, I can't help feeling that our eyes are not exactly on the prize, here. And, as I've said before, as far as basic economic development goes, the simple things are being overlooked, while we dress up Santa Fe in fancy clothes that may or may not turn out to be the emperor's. Freeing beer and wine licences from the obligation to serve food would change the world around here, giving independent venues for music, art and performance a way to pay the rent, and letting all the people with too much money quibble over the easy selling of hard liquor. There must be a dozen other issues that could be mightily tweaked by a subtle comparison of our own ordinances with those of cities whose creative cultures we admire.
But I suppose that'd be too easy.
