30
The Performance Community
The Peñasco Theatre builds community on the High Road
Appears in the Santa Fe Reporter
From the street-side of The Peñasco Theatre, where a folksy mural tells of people building their community together, the theatre’s owner Alessandra Ogren walks me to the north side of the building where a new mural by Rebeka Tarín and Amaryllis de Jesus Moleski offers a meta-response to images on the front, mixing folk iconography with urban-contemporary references.
SFR’s The Skinny gives me a farewell mention and a photo.
23
Is That a…Hey, What is That?
SITE Santa Fe asks if you really know what you think you know
Appears in the Santa Fe Reporter
SITE Santa Fe embarks on quite possibly its most ambitions venture since its founding for More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness, a collaborative biennial with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Open July-January 2013 at SITE before heading over to MIA, the exhibition features more than 25 international and up-and-coming artists, including Ai Weiwei, Seung Woo Back, Zoe Beloff, Cao Fei, Thomas Demand, Mark Dion, Sharon Lockhart, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Vik Muniz, Eve Sussman, Mary Temple and Yes Men, among many others. With many of the pieces in production (even as you read), SITE curator Irene Hofmann takes a few minutes to tell us what to expect. Then you have to decide if she’s fo real.
23
Post-Industrial Discourse
Ghosts in Armour brings focus to collaborative artistic practice
Appears in the Santa Fe Reporter
This column is a plea for the art communities of Santa Fe to begin a dialogue that furthers artistic practice—which naturally includes conversations about the notion of artistic practice and our understanding of community—inspired by a one-week exhibition at Santa Fe Complex.
16
Love Rocks
Musical reintroduces the anarchist Emma Goldman
Appears in The Santa Fe Reporter
Love & Emma Goldman: A Rock Opera is about the enduring human voice. The original production by Sarah-Jane Moody and Jeremy Bleich (aka the experimental pop duo GoGoSnapRadio) is also about taking action for one’s beliefs. It’s about violence, justice, freedom and love. It’s about Emma Goldman, the turn-of-the-century anarchist who spoke up, was deported and disappeared into history.
16
Reclaiming “Regional Theater”
Despite what you may have heard, Santa Fe is a theater town
Appears in The Santa Fe Manual
The visual arts cast a long shadow over other art forms in Santa Fe, but then, theater companies in small towns and minor metropolises across the country have become accustomed to coming in behind other art houses. The general feeling is that if it ain’t New York, it ain’t theater. Moreover, theater has a reputation for being as highbrow as opera in some circles, and it can hardly compete with the realism (read: lack of imagination) of television and popular film, nor the “price point,” to borrow a term from retail sales (the comparison is deliberate).
15
Ambition, Corruption and War
No, we’re not talking US imperialism; this is the 2012 opera season.
Appears in The Santa Fe Manual
An easy way into opera for the engaged, but not so familiar, is through the libretto—that’s the script in English.
Opera fans like to say that the story of The Ring, for instance, is timeless—not to mention repeated in The Lord of the Rings, despite Tolkien’s insistence to the contrary.
More specifically, however, they point to certain themes from Old World fairly tales and royal histories as reflected in modern headlines. This world is no stranger to ambition, corruption, usurpation and war, they say, nor to the hope of love conquering all—though opera tends to be tragic (ie lovers win ideological/moral battles while losing lives).
9
Meta Observations
The Difference Between Intended and Unintended Interventions
Appears in the Santa Fe Reporter
I’m stuck on the words “human interventions in landscape” accompanying Nancy Holt’s early photographic series, “Western Graveyards.” The collection of dilapidated and overgrown burial sites, photographed in 1968, occupies a corner of the exhibition Nancy Holt: Sightlines at the Santa Fe Art Institute.
7
Home at Last
The Darcys crawl out of recording hell with the help of Steely Dan
Appears in Magnet Magazine No. 84
So, The Darcys. They spend a year rescuing their self-titled second album from the trash to finally release it for free last October, and afterward their adventurous Canadian label, Arts & Crafts, is like, “Cool, let’s do another album, but relax for a minute.” So what does the Toronto quartet do with the holy blessings of encouragement and time? The Darcys record a cover of Steely Dan’s entire 1978 album Aja. “We got a little stir crazy [between albums],” bandleader Wes Marskell tells Magnet from his home in Toronto. “Without Aja, we may not have continued on.”
2
Extremely Well-Read and Incredibly Amused
SFR’s Incomplete and totally biased guide to summer reading
The book chooses the reader. I believe this; however, I also believe that the reader has an obligation to make himself available to the book.
Listen: Years ago, I stopped taking advice on reading material. First, every reader has his own tastes; second, some readers just aren’t very discerning—they’ll read anything; and finally, RIYL only applies to people who want to read books like the ones they’ve read. Moreover, as a literature and creative writing student, I struggled to split my time between the assigned texts and the books that interested me, and the required readings only interested me after they ceased to be assignments. Maybe I’m coming off as contrarian—as someone who just doesn’t like being told what to do—but really, I’m just a slow reader, and I only absorb materials out of personal interest rather than obligation.
