The Chinese and the Mayans have their own calendar and I'm beginning to think Santa Fe should, too. It's not that there's anything bad about celebrating the New Year in the City Different, except that it's not so different. Schmucks all over the country and the world are wearing stupid hats, counting down in a slightly out-of-step, awful numerical karaoke while watching the apple drop. I thought our scrappy sense of small town cultural élan dictated long ago that we don't care how they do it in New York, anyway. And isn't Fiestas our real New Year in these parts? When the checker at the supermarket finishes your tally for celery and beer with a "Que Viva?" When the cop pulling you over for phoning while driving hails you with a "Que Viva La" before suspending your license? When there's a sense of festival that belongs to this community, and only this community, in the air? When we dispel our collective gloom by burning that futha muckin' Zozobra to the ground?
The holiday season was packed with weirdly thematic events. There was the SALON Mar Graff, sort of an art exhibition, hors d'oeuvres-snorting, wine-slinging, chatterboxing, strangely child-friendly event at a private home in Tesuque. All the driveways and spare ground in the vicinity were packed with cars, the rambling house was cleared of furniture and the walls were sagging with art. One painter was trying to give away a painting for free, but kept selling them, inexplicably, instead. Glasses shattered accidentally across the tiled expanse, children screamed, everything but the dish of goldfish crackers and the most challenging cheeses were eaten quickly and the night was somehow perfect. I don't know if the salon theme bore fruit-I never did see a group of people ensconced before a painting in heated but civilized conversation, or an angsty novelist cast her latest manuscript into the fire in a fit of masculine rage or existential dilemma, but then perhaps my understanding of what constitutes a salon is too narrow.
Between all the official holiday parties, pre-party warm-up liquor-crutch fests, shopping traffic, crowded stores and stomach flus, the actual order of events is somewhat foggy but somewhere in there was Bliss Magazine's White party/art/fashion event. Walking down into 707 Contemporary (707 Canyon Road, 820-1888) was like descending into Los Angeles, which would be just as heinous as caring about New York, except I'm pretty sure it was the near dark future Los Angeles of Blade Runner, only with the lights turned on because everything was white, except for many of the people (which was refreshing), and the diligent security guards' uniforms, which I mention because I wouldn't want any snitty little bureaucrats anywhere worrying that any laws were in danger during the copious pouring of free White Russians. The rooms were white, the floors were covered in specks of white, the walls were rimmed with white artwork and the whole space was full of people modeling white-themed fashions who were so beautiful, I'm pretty sure they were being vat-grown in a back room.
I'll admit it was impossible to know if the art was any good at all, because everything was so over-the-top thematic and, you know, the people were so hot that it was hard to find the time to stare at a painting. If it had in fact been in LA, it might have been the stupidest party in history, but there was something about it being in Santa Fe that made it work-no one sucked up to the extreme potential for pretension, choosing instead to do what Santa Feans do so well when they want to: have a good time. Even Santa Fe's own color-fixated performance artists, the perpetually, ostensibly Orange Man, went white showing up with a Tyvek-togged crew of milky jumpsuited art thugs to ogle the models, throw candy wrappers on the floor and politely terrorize the whole scene while embracing the theme. The icing on the cake was the inclusion of actual, strangely arty breakdancing as a component of the evening's entertainment. Go figure, right? But, as long as we're building our own calendar, color-coded bacchanals make more sense to me than capitalizing on Christ.
We'll keep the farolitos, thank you very much, but I for one am ready to support a citizen's advisory board to help the civic leadership kick the habit on tired, useless holidays like Groundhog Day and Columbus Day, get into some holidays that ought to get more respect like May Day and the solstices, decide when we want our New Year to be and start cooking up some new holidays and festivals that sound like they're worth having a party for. Change the days of the week! Prolong the weekend! Ethiopia uses a Julian calendar and an equatorial clock! Oaxaca has a Festival of the Radish! Santa Fe has a...pet parade.
I know, I know, never gonna happen. But if a boy can't dream in the City Different, where can he?
