some ideas for santa fe city hall artist's residency

A few of the ideas that I pitched to the Mayor a few weeks ago

• Perform an on-going project of writing songs for city employees and elected officials

• Set up a tarot reading/advice table outside of city council meetings

• Establish a “City Hall Welcoming Booth” at the main entrance of City Hall. Offer guides, maps, and materials produced from products of conversations with city employees and other observations. Brochures can include city council agendas, photographs of city employees complete with interviews and job descriptions, etc. Provide information on scheduled guided tours...

• Offer scheduled guided tours of City Hall to unfamiliar constituencies
  

• Instigate a public project involving signs, taking non-traffic-necessary signs, replacing them with more meaningful and useful messages to be determined

• Obtain video documentation of city council meetings from the past 10 years (or however far back they go). Remix them into an informational music video about how to participate in local government

• Research former Mayoral candidates of the past 10-20 years. Make an entertaining children's book out of the products of that research. Give it to the city clerk, if appropriate.

• Get a group of high school government students to perform a mock city council in city council chambers. Require that participants attend 2 or more city council meetings in advance and interview one councilor. Document the entire proceeding with the official cameras they use in real meetings, and compare performances.

• Institute trade-a-day-with-a-city-employee-day.

• Institute trade-a-day-with-an-elected-official-day.

• Find a way to perform an audit in a friendly and interesting way

• Write a letter to every person who publicly bad-mouths the city or city employees correcting them, based on my experiences and observations. Make a book of the correspondences

• Host artist-in-residence office hours at least once a week in which employees can sit down and talk about whatever they want to, as well as offer ideas and feedback. Attempt to execute every artistic request within reason and boundaries

• Read the 20-some-odd zoning overlays that exist in Santa Fe and make interpretive drawings of them

• Create a public line-up of free classes, lectures, and events presented by city employees on subjects that are personally meaningful to them

• Start city vs. county vs. state government sporting matches

• Produce a how-to-participate-in-local-government manual for citizens

• Curate a cumulative art show inside City Hall at the end of residency, featuring project documentation, city employee work, and educational materials. Get the Mayor and City Councilors to have an open constituent day, where anyone who wants to talk to them about anything can.

the search for community

I'm in the process of transcribing hours of interviews with 5 American musicians and folk dancers who play and dance to Balkan folk music. We still have at least 4 more conversations to document, and the process so far has been very energizing and fascinating. Below is one answer from New Mexican folk dancer, anthropologist, and historian, Amy Mills:

Alysha: What roles do you think Balkan folk music and dance have in America, just in the context of capitalist, kind of alienated, antisocial...

Amy: Well, I was just thinking about this earlier today. This stuff isn't really-- I mean ultimately whether people do Balkan music or dance is really irrelevant to everybody except the people who already do it. But in the big picture, I think everybody needs something like this, and I don't really care what color they are, or race or background, or ethnicity-- everybody needs a sense of community, because I think the community gives people a sense of responsibility to one another. If you don't have a sense of responsibility to other people then, you know, why not screw up the environment completely, why not rob people on the street, why not give bonuses to people on Wall Street for screwing over the rest of the country. Why would you care about anybody, if you didn't have a sense of responsibility?

Now our society has, in the United States, especially white people's society, has gotten to the point where people aren't as engaged with various communities, because we move a lot, because a lot of us don't go to church anymore-- I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it was a community-- up to the individual-- but it was a community that gave you a sense of responsibility. We have had this idea for a long time of the “melting pot.” Well, when you had the melting pot, if you gave up everything that gave you a sense of being a Scandinavian American or a Mexican American, then what did you have left as a sense of community?

So we're at this point I think in the United States, where a lot of people, really really crave community. They crave human closeness. The internet is not going to provide all of that. You can't hug the internet. You can't laugh with the internet, and you can't look at its eyes, and you can't hold its hand and do a dance, and you don't have as much of a strong sense of responsibility to the people on the internet. There are lots of studies that have said that. Just look at the flame wars. That will tell you pretty much how that happens for most people. It does have some value, but you can't replace a sense of community, face-to-face community.

And so, I think that what the Balkan community does, or communities, is it provides that for some people. I think Americans are at this point-- a lot of Americans anyway.-- where the only way they're going to find a sense of community is by choosing that for themselves. Which is a pretty big burden. “Oh my god, I have to choose my own sense of identity-- everything is up for grabs.” That's a lot of pressure.

But finding a community actually limits the amount of choices that you tend to make or have to make, and it actually turns out that it makes people happier. Not unlimited, and not totally limited. Community gives you that sense of responsibility, it gives you limited choices, and it gives you people that you can relate to. And I think that the depression that we fight with in the United States to a greater and greater extent is partly derived from too many choices. Too much pressure to make the perfect choice, and not having a sense of community and other people around to listen to you, to smile at you, to give you feedback, and to support you, and you need it. I think what we're doing is a tiny piece of that for our particular group of people. I think that needs to happen all over the United States, in whatever realms people are going to choose, and whatever realms they're born into.

So, I have a very small vision on this one. [laughs] But I do know that this particular community is not the answer for everybody. I like people to see it in the first place so they can make that choice.

the tall tree has no shade

I attended the first half of a Balkan vocal workshop given by Eva Primack and Aurelia Shrenker, before our weekly Skype class today. Eva and Aurelia are the amazing women behind æ (Ash). They taught us a meditative Bosnian song, Visoko Drvo Lad Nema. The lyrics and translation are as follows:

Visoko drvo lad nema
Široko polje kraj nema

Široko polje kraj nema
Sitno kamenje broj nema

Sitno kamenje broj nema
Duboka voda dno nema

Duboka voda dno nema
Ubava moma rod nema


The tall tree has no shade
The wide field has no end

The wide field has no end
The small pebbles have no count

The small pebbles have no count
The deep water has no bottom

The deep water has no bottom
The beautiful girl has no kin


Here is a recording of Eva singing it in our workshop:



Eva learned the song as a child from Mirjana Lausevic, the author of Balkan Fascination. She talked a little bit about Mirjana, after we had learned the song:

avenue east

You'll meet us all during Open Engagement. Tomorrow we have our first gig as part of a long evening of Balkan and Middle Eastern music and folk dancing at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. We're looking forward to an audience of Turkish, Bulgarian, and American folk dancers who will lead folk dances in the crowd. I'll share any video documentation I have from tomorrow.

leisure reading

enchanting political consultations

Photos: Brandon Soder. Comment Cards: Participants at the New Mexico State Legislature in the last week of its session. Coming soon: some sort of description of the past, present, and future.