notes from the field

I watched an 85-year old woman begin to weep at her doorstep yesterday. I knocked on her door to ask her to sign a petition to get Houston on the ballot. She told me that she liked his opponent, but that she would sign anyway. She looked forward to learning more.

I didn't adhere to the golden canvassing rule I tell everyone I train-- I didn't keep it short and sweet. I wanted to talk to her. She carried the lonely air of wisdom that many elderly people have-- that many of us young refuse to acknowledge or respect.

I asked her, What issues are important to you? What would you like to change about Santa Fe?

She told me about the drainage problems on her road. She referenced the nearby military cemetery, and how it was quickly filling. She told me that her grandsons are about my age, and that they don't listen to her when she tells them that they're not going to have the future or the comfort in their lives that she had. They don't hear her when she says my generation is dying, and it's up to you.

That's when she started to weep, and that's when my canvassing partner appeared. She bid me farewell.

Moments like these are the real essence of politics. How the sincere conversations between people about their lives and what is wrong in the world get transmuted into the circus we typically see depicted as American politics is as profound a question as how to achieve the philosopher's stone.

After the canvassing there is usually an event to attend. It typically involves people and circulation. Every year that you do this work, you find it easier to seamlessly introduce yourself to complete strangers and get them to discuss the issues and ideas that are most important to them.

Never come straight home from a campaign event, or else you will be seeped in the omnipresence of the energy of every hand you shook, and all the things you have to do and think about and say. If the event was particularly profound, the moments are brazen memories you can't exile from your mind.

Early drinks or late dinners are always wise.

a few photos of letters to the art world

photo credit, alexis brown. rest of the beautiful aha album is here


photo credit- my shitty-ass blackberry

photo credit-- mix- rest of their album is here


more soon...

HOUSTON JOHANSEN ANNOUNCES CITY COUNCIL CANDIDACY IN DISTRICT 1

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Contact: Alysha Shaw
505.795.8096
houstonjohansen2012@gmail.com
http://www.twitter.com/HoustonforSF
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Houston-Johansen-for-City-Council/138702216226635
Coming soon: http://www.houstonforsantafe.com

HOUSTON JOHANSEN ANNOUNCES CITY COUNCIL CANDIDACY IN DISTRICT 1
Johansen Challenges 17-Year Incumbent Patti Bushee, Offers New Ideas and Proactive Participation in Politics

SANTA FE-- Santa Fe native and lifelong city resident, Houston Johansen announced his candidacy for City Council in District 1 on Tuesday, offering a new perspective on politics and a plan for increased civic participation and responsibility.

Johansen (age 25) is especially concerned about the lack of opportunity for young people in Santa Fe, and wants to focus on building an economy that restores opportunity for working families and addresses the mis-trust in elected officials.

“I want to be the next City Councilor in District One. Santa Fe is the only home I know. I love Santa Fe, but I think we can do better,” Johansen said. “I hope to raise some important issues in this race – such as: where are the economic opportunities for young people? Why do young people flee the city to find jobs? And how can we do better by working families?”

Johansen will spend the coming weeks talking to voters, listening to their concerns, issues, and experiences living in Santa Fe. The campaign will periodically host public forums online and in-person that provide unprecedented venues for Santa Feans to publicly express their concerns during an election cycle. Constituents' issues will form a significant part of the campaign and its platform.

“I’m going to do this the old-fashioned way – listen to the concern of voters in my district and share my ideas about how to make Santa Fe better. Basically, I’m going to work really hard and talk to every voter I can. A lot of candidates make the rounds and chalk up constituent visits, but the lessons learned and the concerns confided in that process seem to vanish after election day. Again, I think we can do better. ” Johansen said.

With this voter feedback, Houston will release his campaign platform in the coming weeks.

Houston was raised in Santa Fe, and attended Rio Grande Elementary and Santa Fe Preparatory schools. At the age of 19 he opened One World Coffee, a fair trade, sustainable, education-oriented coffee house. One World gave young people hands-on experience running a business, helping to inspire a generation to think creatively about their ability to affect change in the world. After stepping down as manager, Houston left Santa Fe to pursue a degree in political science at Creighton University in Omaha, NE. During that time Houston interned for Governor Richardson’s top water policy advisor, Bill Hume. He also worked to raise money for Creighton’s scholarship funds and worked on President Obama’s Omaha campaign.

Johansen is the son of Carl Johansen and Mary Lattimore, long time residents of Santa Fe. His father is a well-known local artist who taught Johansen the power of art, and the importance of creativity. Houston's mother raised him in a house that is completely off-the-grid, which helped him develop a deep passion for sustainability and innovation. Together they taught him early on that if you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to find a good job and be a part of something bigger.

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city worker classes

Last week city workers taught each other classes in tin working, paper flower making, and dancing during their lunch hour. This is a little bit of the documentation. I was inspired to organize the classes, as part of a multi-layered strategy to intervene in city workers' work days. The unhappiness and stress people have at their jobs from filling multiple positions in city offices is one of the most challenging hurdles for me to break through in my residency at city hall.

There are other projects in progress, but it'll probably be a little while before I share any of that documentation.

performance is the oldest art form in the world

Performance is the oldest art form in the world. The act of moving, the act of speaking, the act of growing food, the act of hunting, the act of cutting vegetables, the act of communicating, the act of surviving, the act of staring at a fire and the stars for hours on end while you move and drum and sing, the act of Facebook posts, the act of knowing you're on camera, the act of writing an email, the act of holding a conversation, the act of putting a paintbrush on a canvas, the act of going to work every weekday at 9 AM, the act of leaving work at 5PM and everything in between we do to make our bread, the act of drinking beer, the act of smoking cigarettes, the act of smiling, the act of frowning, the act of ignorance, the act of sincerity, the act of being a woman, the act of being a man, the act of teaching, the act of going to church, the act of acting our age, the act of walking, the act of falling in love, the act of typing these words, the act of building a career, the act of being a student, the act of being who we are-- all define our experiences, our identities, and our creative output in the world. We create our own worlds in our performances.

rereading diane arbus

my roommate had a 25th birthday, and we had a barbecue this weekend to celebrate. towards the late night dwindling end of the event, we were sitting in our living room, and one of our friends mentioned something about nudist camps. the book, diane arbus an aperture monograph was within arm's reach on my bookshelf, and i pulled it out, because arbus had quite a penchant for photographing nudist camps, among other fringe communities.

i looked through the book seriously for the first time in i don't know how long. this book was the main textbook in a freshman writing seminar i took in undergrad called "off the map." in the class, we linked diane arbus' work to the jungian concept of individuation, and did a lot of reading, writing, and discussing around it.

picking up the book compelled me to reread its opening essay. it's a slightly rambling, but edited compilation of things arbus wrote and said in interviews before she died, and i'm posting it here in full after the jump, in case you'd like to read it. if you're not familiar with arbus' photography, you can see quite a bit of it here.

a tale of two city halls

greetings from the land of heat and fire,

I returned to Santa Fe last week and was slightly shocked that it hadn't rained since I left for Portland a month before. Days and days of rain and glowing semi-overcast-skies and electrically green vegetation and ground that is always semi-wet will make New Mexico seem shockingly brown and dry and hot for the first time in 6 years. Arizona is burning right now and the air quality in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and other parts of New Mexico, and even Colorado, is suffering because of it. We can smell the smoke from a couple hundred miles away. And the fire danger all around us is huge.

And I'm sunburned.

This Friday I begin my residency at Santa Fe City Hall. I will spend all day of every Friday of this summer at City Hall. I will even have an office, because the City has no money to hire new employees when old ones leave, and there is more office space available than usual these days.

Last Friday, I met with the Mayor and was introduced to some of the City employees I will be working with. There were varying levels of excitement about the prospect of a summer "artist in residence at City Hall." My introduction and pitch of my presence there varied from person to person, and their responses of excitement weren't proportional to how well I delivered it, or at least that's how I took it. I think some people are just thrilled with the idea or the concept of an artist working with them at City Hall, without any justifying details, and I'm pretty sure one or two people looked at me with skepticism for the same exact reasons.

I'll be updating this blog each week with a few details specific to the residency's week-by-week process.

Touring the Santa Fe City Hall a little bit, and talking with the people who work there, oddly, or appropriately reminded me of the weekly visitations me and my grandpa used to take to Passaic, New Jersey's City Hall. I remember eating the formative bagels of my youth in the City Clerk's office. It's only recently that I actually understand what a City Clerk does. Grandpa worked for the City for more than 2 decades, and finished his career as the head of Passaic's Department of Code Enforcement, the department that deals with zoning, building inspection, the enforcement of all building/development codes, and probably other things lost with time. Grandpa retired in the early 1980s, and the department doesn't appear to exist as such anymore.

This moment of connection between the two City Halls became part of a constellation of thoughts around home and roots and Passaic that have been brewing in the back of my mind, and they're going to form into some kind of long-term project that involves constructing a history of that place from 1922 to 2022.

I've been thinking a lot about history, and who gets to construct its narratives, and how there's probably more truth in a fucking magical realism fiction than there is in an average, mediocre history book that lots of high schoolers read. I'd like to attempt to construct history with people, and acknowledge it as something different than the absolute narratives that are presented to us by the empowered in our cultures. Could history be accepted as something as imperfect as memory, more human than textbooks and archives, motivated by emotion and experience, told in different voices by people who usually get excluded from the annuls and cannons of what we are accustomed to calling "history?"

This idea was sealed for me when I started doing research this evening. (I can already tell that this project is going to become an obsession.) I had a long conversation with my mom about Passaic history. I was most struck by the discovery that my great grandparents met on the street that my grandfather was born on, which was the street that I went to elementary school on, which was the street that my family owned a restaurant on for more than 50 years-- here are the roots and continuity I've been seeking.

But the punchline found me when I started to do Google searches about Passaic in general and about my family: I couldn't find any trace of my family's long-running, but long-gone restaurant, or my grandfather's history, or the various local news items that define a lot of my perception of Passaic. All of these items are pre-internet, and it's a little freaky to me that you can Google my name and find all kinds of useless shit I'd prefer the world didn't see, and yet these meaningful, significant moments, institutions, and people are gone to the world of the internet, which is where history-seeking increasingly occurs.

This absence of history is like some weird form of cultural Alzheimers to me. Passaic is more than the fastest growing city in New Jersey, more than the site of the first Communist-led strike in the US, more than what Robert Smithson said it was, more than "the birthplace of TV," more than the shithole people think it is as they drive by on the Parkway, more than gang violence, more than pollution, more than abandoned industry, more than demographic data, more than anything you can find on the internet, and I only know it through 12 years of experience that ended more than a decade ago.

So, I'm fucking committed to this. You heard it here. I'm going to get knee deep in some archives, and basements, and attics, and tea dates and coffee dates and beer dates in Passaic at the end of the summer, and presumably for a while to come just to research this. I'm looking forward to receiving old photographs of the city and photocopies of the books of newspaper clippings that my grandpa kept.

There's something terrifying to me about the idea of tangible artifacts and human histories being lost to migration and the primacy of the internet, which is so ephemeral and unnatural that we can't even touch, smell, or taste it. My moment of searching the internet for real, meaningful history I know of and bore witness to, and finding nothing just crystallized for me how false our assumptions of the internet's essential usefulness and breadth of knowledge really can be.

Instead of ranting more, I'm going to offer readers of this blog the opportunity to allow me to create a portrait of you based on your downloaded facebook information. If you're interested, email me.

I'm also hopefully going to start a very exciting tourist venture this summer, but more on that later.