COSS' KLATSCH
When the mayor has finally hosted his "Coffee with Coss" conversations with every conceivable special interest group in the city, the lingering question will be this: Does the dude now have an unprecedented comprehension of a civic totality, thus enabling him to carve a bold new vision for the future, or has he filled his head with so much informational noise and nonsense from so many disparate groups that he will instead lock himself in his office with a bad case of the shivers and a big case of Pepto Bismol and whiskey until his term expires?
Despite a healthy love for chaos and utterly broken politicians, I, for one, am hoping for the former scenario. The mayor's coffee meeting with the "art community" was, surprisingly, packed and, unsurprisingly, a bit whiny and ill-informed. The uninformed nature of the crowd stemmed both from a lack of information provided by the mayor and the city and from a lack of information provided by the crowd itself. For example, when different arts groups wanted to know about possible public locations for fairs, markets and other large-scale activities, the mayor referred confidently to a survey being undertaken by City Councilor Miguel Chavez (who could not attend as he was en route to Spain, poor guy) to assess exactly that issue. But so many ideas kept coming from the crowd that
the most important question-whether or not Chavez' survey will have public input sessions and, if so, how many and when-was not answered. When the mayor was asked if he would support a local "quality of life" initiative-i.e., a 0.25 percent increase in gross receipts tax that could benefit arts programs, libraries, etc., to the tune of $8 to $10 million per year-he opined that maybe the city was at its state-set limit for gross receipts taxes and would have to go to the Legislature to get permission for such a thing. Now, whether this is true wasn't answered at the coffee meeting, nor was whether permission from the Legislature would be necessary when the permission for individual cities to create this exact quality of life initiative was granted across the board by the last Legislature.
The crowd, for its part, asked things like, "Why are Albuquerque and Rio Rancho building production and post-production studios to host the film business, with Santa Fe in terrible danger of lagging behind?" When was Santa Fe going to show it could compete on that level? This is exactly the line of questioning that makes me wonder if these kind of meetings have hope of true productivity. There exists a comprehensive state strategy, recently created, for exactly the purpose of ensuring a long-term, profitable future for media industries in New Mexico. Said strategy describes in detail what sort of facilities, industries and entrepreneurial activities should be courted in Albuquerque vs. Santa Fe vs. Las Cruces vs. Taos, for example. The whole point of the plan is equal success, not to have individual cities sinking into spiteful competition and overlapping resources. It appeared that no one in the room was even aware of such a strategy. See, meetings tend to result in action plans which, in a best-case scenario, end in a strategy for actually improving things. But if no one pays attention to the strategy after it's created, well, you see the problem, right?
Finally, there were multiple cries for Santa Fe galleries to show more work by "local" artists. The only constructive idea on how this could be done was to offer a tax incentive of sorts for galleries that focus on locals. But how would that work? Would it cut into gross receipts and therefore a future quality of life initiative that would also benefit locals? I'm sorry to say this, all you hard-working local artists, but getting the city to find a way to force galleries to show your work is not the answer. Step up to the plate and accept the fact that you-and no one else-are responsible for the success or failure of your art career.
WHAM! BAM! SACCO!
Less packed than Coffee with Coss, and regrettably so, was the Oct. 4 Slippery Slopes: Ethical Dilemmas for the Contemporary World lecture event at the College of Santa Fe. Comic journalist Joe Sacco thrilled a half-capacity crowd with slides of his work and a narrative about his travels in Palestine, Croatia, Chechnya and everywhere else where he uses a journalism ethic and style to create comic books documenting life on the ground. I especially missed any notable presence by, um, journalists, as Sacco had incredibly insightful thoughts on the practice and nature of media today, and his ponderings on being a journalist who depends on drawing more than prose to tell his tales were enlightening, to say the least. Sacco's was but one in a series of Slippery Slopes lectures, and the rest of them look almost as good.
DIRTY LYRICS
The Gary Farmer Gallery (131 W. San Francisco St., 988-1171) has turned its enlarged hallway of a space over to Navajo artist Monte Hadley Singer through Nov. 12, and, let's just say, this ain't yer average downtown native artwork. Singer's fetishization of, well, hot chicks, strippers and classic pin-ups has led him to paint them compulsively, and his desire to push his own artistic boundaries and examine the Navajo/Catholic culture he was raised in has led him to include his sassy lassies, and other non-sequiter icons like Sponge Bob Square Pants, within images of Navajo life. The result is raw but alarming, and as capable a pot stirrer as anything. Check it out.
