Category: Uncategorized

January 20th, 2009 by sandyadmin

St. Francis Around Town:
A Vision of Simplicity for the City Different
By Gregory Pleshaw

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace
Where there is hatred – Let me show Love
Where there is injury – Pardon
Where there is doubt – Faith
Where there is despair – Hope
Where there is darkness – Light
And where there is sadness – Joy

– a prayer of St. Francis

In 1610, when Don Pedro de Peralta founded the city of Santa Fe under the direction of the Viceroy of Spain, he gave it an official name – “La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís”, or “The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi.” This lengthy moniker, (perhaps the longest for a U.S. city) would forever forge an inseparable bond between Santa Fe and its patron saint.

Historically, St. Francis presents a fascinating picture. Born in 1182 to a wealthy merchant in Assisi, Italy, he was christened Giovanni di Bernadone in honor of St. John the Baptist by his mother, who hoped he would become a man of the Church. His father, Pietro di Bernadone, would hear nothing of that and re-named the child Franceso, and hoped he would also become a merchant.

For a time, he chose neither. It may surprise some to learn that St. Francis spent his youth and early adulthood living as a troubadour, a carefree poet to whom street brawls and pleasures of the flesh were presumably not unknown. In 1201 he joined the military and spent a year as a captive, but it wasn’t until 1205 on an expedition to Spoleto that he had a strange vision that led him to abandon his carefree ways and begin to care for lepers in Assisi.

But his true conversion to the Church came in 1206, when he had a mystical vision of Jesus Christ in the Church of San Damiano. There, an Icon of the Crucifixion came alive and said to him three times, “Francis, Francis, go and repair my house which, as you can see, is falling into ruins”. Francesco took this literally, and attempted to repair various churches in the region, but eventually he came to realize that the vision intended him to repair the figurative House of the Lord and take his place within it. Soon afterwards, in 1209, Francesco founded the Order of Friars Minor, otherwise known as the Franciscans, which dedicated themselves to poverty & the Gospels. After a lifetime of service to the Lord, Francesco died in 1226 and was declared a Saint in 1228.

Monsignor Jerome is no stranger to both the living and the mythical St. Francis. A Catholic priest who serves as the rector for St. Francis Cathedral-Basilica, the Monsignor was born a 13th generation New Mexican and he has proudly served his Church and his community in the Santa Fe archdiocese since his ordination 33 years ago. Entering seminary at the age of 13, the Monsignor has had plenty of time to reflect on the historic life of St. Francis, and he believes that St. Francis has a lot to offer modern Santa Fe, both Catholics and its more secular citizens.

“St. Francis is everybody’s saint,” said the Monsignor. “You don’t have to be a Catholic to profit from the life and lessons of St. Francis. He typifies simplicity and poverty in following the life of Christ. Though he was a wealthy man and was raised in privilege, he ultimately turned his back on all of that to live as the Christ. He made following Christ seem so simple, and by living the simple life he offered a message that is true today. For God does not find us by running an obstacle course through our possessions. In this time of the economy as bad as it is, we need to recall St. Francis and remember how he lived to get closer to God and to follow his example.”

Today, St. Francis’ Annual Feast Day falls on October 4th, and it is on this day that the priests in the Cathedral will take the time to bless pets. For in addition to his other many deeds as a man of the Lord, St. Francis is also strongly associated in the public mind with being the patron saint of animals. Monsignor Jerome also had insight into this perception and why it is so prevalent an association for casual followers of St. Francis.

“There are three reasons why St. Francis is associated with animals,” said the Monsignor. “The first is because he believed that all god’s creatures – including the animals – glowed with the power of God’s love. The second is that, when he first began to preach, he wouldn’t always be successful preaching to people. So he would preach to the animals instead, and the stories tell us that animals would stop what they were doing and listen. And the third reason has to do with a Wolf in Gubbio who was eating the people. St. Francis went to meet with the wolf and made a deal with him that if the people fed the Wolf, the Wolf would stop eating the people.”

That ability to “talk” to the animals led to the strong associations that people have with St. Francis as close to the animals, and it is that very Wolf – or at least a vision of it – that appears alongside St. Francis in the prominent bronze statue of the Saint that stands in front of the Cathedral today.

Today, the visage of St. Francis can be seen in various locations around the City Different, including in front of two of our most important buildings, namely, City Hall on Marcy Street and the St. Francis Basillica on Cathedral Place. But his likeness is not limited to there, as this list/side-bar will show:

1) The St. Francis-Basilica Cathedral, (downtown, 213 Cathedral Place) features a bronze statue of St. Francis accompanied by a wolf in front of the church, as well as frenetic looking bronze with wings that could be called the “Dancing St. Francis.” There is also a white stone statue of St. Francis on the southerly side of the building facing westward, and inside the Church, behind the altar and set within the wall, is an 18th century bulto of St. Francis complete with blue vestaments.

2) In front of Santa Fe City Hall (downtown, 200 Lincoln Avenue) features a diminutive bronze statue of St. Francis along with some squirrels. San Francisco de Asis, Andrea Bacigalupa, 1980. Bronze.

3) Inside the New Mexico Museum of Art (downtown, 107 W. Palace Avenue) there are two works of art that depict St. Francis. A) In the St. Francis Auditorium, there are a series of murals that depict St. Francis. B) In the St. Francis Sculpture Garden, there’s also a statue of St. Francis.

4) St. Francis Cathedral School (downtown, 275 E. Alameda Street) there are two works of art that depict St. Francis. One is a mural on the outside of the school which features St. Francis surrounded by little children. On the inside is a series of murals that line the walls of this now defunct school. The interior murals cannot currently be viewed by the public.

5) In the Adam Gabriel Armijo Park (aka “the Cerro Gordo Park,” east side, 1402 Cerro Gordo Street) there is an old style folk-statue of St. Francisco surrounded by small animals. Originally rendered in wood, this piece is bronzed but maintains an earthy quality to it. St. Francis, Ben and Pete Ortega, 1997. Bronze.

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January 18th, 2009 by sandyadmin

Men’s Indoor Soccer League
By Gregory Pleshaw

On your average Sunday morning at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center, the facilities are all a’bustle with activity. On the ice skating rink, skaters glide across the ice with grace and aplomb, while in the swimming pool, youngsters good-naturedly fight for their time on the water slide while adults do graceful laps up and down the length of the pool. Upstairs, spinners spin and treadmillers walk and run. And in the gymnasium at the end of the downstairs corridor, the Men’s Indoor Soccer League is busy sliding across the floor in their running shoes, chasing a fluorescent green ball with the objective of guiding it into a goal on either side of the hard-wood “field.”

“The League consists of twenty teams of between 5-10 men each,” said Greg Fernandez, GCCC’s Program Supervisor, in charge of the Men’s League. “Games are held from 8:30am – 3:30pm every Sunday, and generally between 6-7 games are played during that time.”

In the League, players age range between 18-40, with some exceptions, with many of the teams having played together for between 5 and 10 years. Unlike other league play, where an individual player can join and expect to be suited up with a team, the Men’s Indoor Soccer League requires that teams join the League as a complete team. Thus, many of the players on a team have known each other for quite some time. The cost for a team to play in the League is $400 for the season, which includes 10 games as well as a tournament at the end of the season.

The origination of the game of soccer is shrouded in the mysteries of history. FIFA, the governing body for the game of “association football” which is the formal name of the game, (as opposed to “gridiron football” which is the formal name given to the game played during the Super Bowl) claims that a kind of soccer may have been found to have been played during the 2nd and 3rd century BC in China. Be that as it may, the first attempt to codify the rules of the game came in 1863 in England.

Today, soccer, (or football, as it is known in most of the rest of the world outside the United States) is a team sport played between two teams of eleven players and it is played all over the world. Unlike “gridiron football” which consists of players holding the ball with their hands and running it down the field, “association football” (soccer) players use only their feet to move the ball down the field. (Only the goalie can touch the ball with their hands.)

Indoor soccer differs only slightly from its outdoor predecessor. It has two teams of five players each as opposed to eleven, and game play consists of 2 20 minute halfs with a 3-minute half-time between them. (Official play calls for 4 15-minute quarters.) There is NO slide tackling allowed, because the surface of the playing field (either concrete or hardwood) could mean a player sustaining a serious injury. There is also no offside rule in indoor soccer, which owes itself to the small surface area of play.

The dimensions of the field at the Chavez Center measures 112 X 75, about half the size of the official size of 200’ X 85’ as determined by the USA Indoor Soccer Association. This owes itself to the fact that the gymnasium has been partitioned into two sections, one for Indoor Soccer and the other for basketball on this particular Sunday. Indoor Soccer has been a popular offering at the GCCC since 2003.

On the particular Sunday, two teams are battling it out on the hardwood surface. The Internationals are a group from the Pojoaque High School Varsity team, who decided they would band together and try their hand at the Adult League for the winter months.

“We just want to get ready for next season,” said the Internationals team captain Hector Caldera. “The League gives us an excellent way to practice and get ready for next year. Plus, we all love to play soccer and this gives us a great way to spend our Sunday mornings.”

It should come as a surprise to no one that soccer’s international appeal means that it attracts many new arrivals to Santa Fe and the United States in general. The opposing team for the day were called the Ojo Caliente Zapatecas, all of whom hail from that particular part of Mexico.

“This is our first season to play here,” said Ojo Caliente Zapatecas captain Cesar Bernal. “We were champions in the 2nd division at the Las Campanas tournament.”

Bernal said that all of the men on the team had known each other since childhood in Mexico, and that most had been here for between 8-10 years.

“We’ve all been friends since we were children,” he said. “When I was in Mexico, I studied to be a coach, but here many of us are waiters at Gabriel or Geronimo’s, though two of our number go to UNM to study to become teachers.”

Final score for the game: 3-0, Zapatecas over the Internationals. But there’s always next week – or then, there’s always the tournament.

On your average Sunday, crowd turnouts for the game are somewhat sparse, consisting primarily of girlfriends and relatives. But according to Fernandez, all that changes during the Tournament part of the season, when the bleachers are packed with family and other well-wishers who come to cheer their athletes on to victory.

“Soccer is a very popular game in Santa Fe,” said Fernandez. “The number of people who show up for the tournaments is just phenomenal.”

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January 9th, 2009 by sandyadmin

Adult Hockey is Alive and Sliding at Genoveva Chavez Center
By Gregory Pleshaw

Back in the bad old days, when I grew up in Santa Fe, there were no ice skating rinks. There may have been one in Los Alamos, come to think of it, but despite the cold of our winters, ice skating seemed a pursuit for those willing to hike to Lake Catherine in the winter time, (brrrrrrrr!) and ice hockey was something reserved for folks back east or something.

All that’s looking different these days, as the Genoveva Chavez ice rink courses into its eighth active season as a rink. Nowadays, kids can literally grow up on skates on the storied ice of the rink, which is rumored by some who spend a lot of time on it, to be “the best ice surface in the whole state.”

That boast actually comes from Marc Martin, 49, who is currently skidding across the ice in a blue jersey, armed with full pads and a hockey stick, which he wields artfully. After 45 years on the ice, he ought to. Martin smiles and skates right at me, standing nervously in the pen where the skaters sit, then without warning, leaps over the wall separating ice from pen and sits down next to me. He is barely winded from what looked like a real workout out there on the ice, and he smiles and flips up his helmet and waits expectantly for me to ask another question.

The 49-year-old Martin is an officially designated “Old-Timer.” That’s the term of utmost respect passed onto those skaters who have some experience with skating and hockey and are at least forty years of age. Like a lot of old-timers, Martin is originally from Canada, but as he puts it, even among non-Canadians, the key word for old-timers is “transplant.”

“Not a lot of people grew up here skating,” said Martin, who in addition to skating with the Old-Timers every Sunday night is also a Captain in the “A” League of the Adult Hockey League as well as a Santa Fe Youth Hockey Volunteer Coach. “But that’s changing now, thanks to the rink at Genoveva Chavez. There’s a well-run program here and a lot of great hockey is played.”

When Martin chose to move to New Mexico, he made it a requirement that wherever he moved to had to have a rink that he could play on. He researched Santa Fe and found the Chavez Center and has been skating here ever since.

“The ice is good, the people are friendly, and the program is well-run,” he said. “Thomas Fagan [the Ice Arena Manager] and Tom Miller [the Skating Coordinator] are both doing an excellent job making sure that we have good ice, a good program and good times.”

A Crash Course in Hockey (Be Careful Not to Hurt Yourself)

Hockey, for folks like me that might not know right off what it’s all about, is a game that is played on ice skates with a long stick and a round disk of rubber known as a puck. The object of the game is to get the puck into one of two goals set up on opposite sides of the playing field, in this case an ice rink. Hockey’s gentle glides and swooping curves can be somewhat deceiving when it comes to the grueling work-out that your average player endures out there on the ice. With play broken into three periods of thirty minutes a piece, hockey can be an incredible workout for even the most casual player – and face it, this is hockey – there’s just no such thing as a casual player.

“It’s a lot like soccer on ice,” said Bill Kerr, a “C-League” player from Jemez Springs who’s been skating for seven years, playing hockey for the past two. “I’ve just come to find that even if you’re not very good at it, you work hard and it’s easy to become addicted to it.”

Throughout the Adult Leagues, players of all skill ranges can be found. “A-League”, on which Martin plays, is the most advanced, while “C-League” is for beginners like Kerr and others, who get together every Thursday night from 7:15-10:15pm to hash out their moves and get a taste (hopefully not literally) of the ice. This year, a new league was added – “B-League” to accommodate those players who aren’t quite beginners but aren’t ready for the big time of “A-League”. Each league has four teams each with a total of about 140 players in all.

Lacking the seasoned grace of the Old-Timers, players skidding across the ice during “C-League” play have their movements punctuated by the occasional fall or the stray missed pass. But the game is still marked by smooth cuts and turns across the ice as white jerseys battle black ones in their weekly Thursday night games. Beginning at 7:15, on this night the Eagles battled the Fliers, followed by a second game where the Thunderbirds battled the Chiefs.

“Each League has four teams and on their League night, all four teams will play each other for a total of three hours of hockey,” said Tom Miller, Skating Coordinator for the Center.

Unlike the Old-Timers, which currently features only men on the ice, (though it’s important to point out that there are no gender restrictions for Old-Timers or the Adult League in general) “C-League” play is definitely co-ed, with the long hair of women players poking out from beneath their helmets. Two of these women even brave the force of a hurtling puck to play goalie.

Tying up her hair with a bandana just before heading out to the ice to play goalie for the Fliers, Anastasia Gower pauses for a minute to adjust the massive pads that encase her body from upper thighs all the way to feet. A transplant who moved to Santa Fe from faraway New Zealand, Gower grew up playing field hockey for over fifteen years with six of those years spent as a goalie. So it just made sense that when she suited up this year for the first time to play ice hockey with “C-League”, her position would be that of goalie.

“I had been on ice skates just a few times when I started this season,” she said. “In New Zealand, it is very expensive to play on ice, but I already have the skills of handling a stick and understand how to be a goalie.”

Nearby, her colleague Camille “Lulu” Konwin is similarly suiting up for her time on the ice, serving the other team. Konwin is a relative rarity in the world of the Adult Hockey League in that she is a native of Santa Fe. She credits her five older brothers, four of whom play hockey, with encouraging her to pick up the sport. Currently, Konwin plays for “C-League” and she’s also on the Capital High girls’ varsity hockey team.

“Honestly, what I like best is all the hitting and the excitement,” said the feisty seventeen-year-old. “There’s something cool about the thrill of the possibility that you might break a bone.”

Nearby, “C-League” Captain Christopher Doyle hoists a bag full of gear, the boyish features of his face smiling through the metal grate that protects that face from a flying puck or stick. Originally from St. Paul, Minnesota, Doyle moved to Santa Fe four years ago and has participated in the program since his arrival, coaching less seasoned players and helping them get better at life on the ice.

“Many of the players come here for the first time are coming to hockey late in life,” said Doyle. “They’ve always had a dream of playing hockey and I like to work with them to help them make that dream a reality. It’s just exciting to see people become better skaters and better players.”

Back on the ice, in Jersey #2 is Rodney Pryor, team captain for the Thunderbirds, which tonight is playing the Chiefs. A genetic technologist for Genzyme Genetics, Pryor serves the League with some distinction, both as a captain and a coach. Pryor grew up playing on frozen ponds in his native Rushville, Illinois just outside Chicago. He moved to New Mexico and attended NMSU before settling in Santa Fe eight years ago. And he’s also among several players who enjoy the beauty of a parent-child relationship on the ice, playing in “C-League” with his sixteen-year-old daughter Nykke. His eleven-year-old daughter Haley also plays in the Youth League.

“It’s a beautiful thing,” said Pryor, motioning towards Nykke, a fresh faced girl in braces who has just stepped off the ice after an hour and a half eager to play in the next game. “It gives us something to talk about and something to do together. Hockey requires a certain kind of commitment that is different from other sports, and the people who go in for hockey are good folks who are stand-up people. This is an excellent environment for my kids to be growing up in.”

The Genoveva Chavez Center offers many opportunities for people to use their ice rink for hockey, recreation and just plain fun. These include public skating from 6am – 4pm daily, as well as various youth and adult hockey practices, scrimmages, and games throughout your average week. They also offer skating and hockey lessons for children of all ages – including adults who’ve never skated, so don’t think you’re off the hook if it’s never been your thing. You can also find more information on the Center website at http://www.gccommunitycenter.com, and if you think you want to play hockey, call Tom Miller at 505-955-4031.

“Hockey in Santa Fe is its own little subculture,” said Pryor. “There are some great players out here but there’s always room for more.”

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December 9th, 2008 by sandyadmin

Recently, local filmmaker and CCA Cinematheque Director Jason Silverman and friends were awarded a grant from the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Fund for a documentary about the life and work of the Senegalese filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembene. Silverman and I chatted via email about his film and the impact that the award will have on his production.

Gregoryp™: What about this particular subject, filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembene, that intrigued you enough to make an entire film about him?

Jason Silverman: One, Ousmane Sembene is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever studied (he died last year and I never met him). He was a completely self-taught man, having been kicked out of school in the sixth grade. He fought in World War II, became a dockworker in France and then a leading activist and labor leader, taught himself to write, published three successful novels in France and then, on the day that Senegal declared its independence from France, returned home, hoping to tell stories that would galvanize and liberate Africa. And that’s what he did, for the next 40 years. Doing that meant taking a radical, daring leap. Knowing that his intended audience was largely illiterate, Sembene decided to become a filmmaker. The first African filmmaker. That’s ballsy.

He trained in Moscow and in 1962 brought home the first African-owned movie camera. He used it to direct several award-winning shorts and then, in 1966, the first African feature, which won a major award in France. And his subsequent career was incredible: doing battle with the post-colonial and African powers-that-were, raising his own money, making truly magnificent works, no matter what it took. Just in terms of his creation, he’s one of the greatest artists of the past 50 years, and he worked with a level of dedication and political commitment that is unmatched, as far as I can tell, in contemporary culture-making. So his personal story is mind-boggling, worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. I couldn’t pass up trying to tell it …

Two, Sembene’s biographer, Samba Gadjigo, is himself a great man, and I was eager to work with him. We had together programmed the CCA’s African Effect festival for three years. He knew about my film production background (I produced two feature films in the 1990s) and asked to help him do something with the 30 hours of footage he had shot of Sembene. We decided on the spot — this was about 10 months ago — to make a film together. The opportunity to work with him was one I had to seize.

Three, I believe that our commodity culture is an extraordinarily corrosive force. We are shopping ourselves to death. I believe the engine behind this culture is modern storytelling, created by the profit-driven corporate-owned media machinery. I mean, the WTC is bombed, and these people who have the megaphone are telling us to shop. That flies in the face of the function of storytelling through the millennia.

Fortunately, we do have a vibrant alternative media, a media that asks us to think, to connect with reality, to be bigger than our consumer profile. Promoting and creating this kind of media is as important work as anything we can do in this culture. It’s something I’ve tried to do throughout my career, with the Taos Talking Picture Festival, with CCA and with my writing and consulting work (though I’ll admit to my sell-out moments).

Sembene was to my mind the very greatest member of this (unaffiliated) resistance movement. He was the greatest independent filmmaker and the greatest media activist who ever lived. He saw that the images and stories Africans were seeing and hearing and reading were literally killing their culture, and so he dedicated his every ounce of strength — and he was an incredibly strong man — over the course of a remarkable period of time to creating a new storytelling mode for Africans, one that was forward-looking yet respectful of tradition, deep yet funny, steeped in the real but not afraid to venture into the dreamlike and surreal. Africa’s still swamped with the same sort of mind-numbing media as the rest of the world, but Sembene, at least, showed that alternatives are possible.

This film’s intent is to connect an emerging generation of engaged African and African Diaspora youth with the gospel of Sembene. New Mexico’s not our target audience, but if we do our job well, I think his story will be of interest to just about anyone who thinks about the power of storytelling and the necessities of cultural preservation.

gregoryp™: How many other people are involved in your film?

Jason Silverman: We’ve got a small crew — the director, Samba Gadjigo, our associate producer and director of photography, Filip Celander and our business manager, Lacey Adams. A wonderful Senegalese novelist and screenwriter, Boubacar Boris Diop, is helping us with the writing. We are getting lots of help from Anna Celander and Javier Hernandez, and a great filmmaker Ed Radtke has also been really valuable to us, along with the local non-profit Little Globe. Probably most importantly, we’ve got a large and quickly growing family of consultants, advisors, helpers, donors, supporters, which is what it really takes to get a film like this done.

gregoryp(tm): What is the impact of the grant likely to be on your film?

Jason Silverman: The grant encourages us to work all the harder. It brings us into the Sundance family, where we are connected with other filmmakers and funders. And it’s a sign that there are people outside of our circle that are eager to see this film. It’s a major boost for us.

gregoryp™: Your official title locally is Cinematheque Director at the Center for Contemporary Arts. How do you possibly have time to make movies too?

Jason Silverman: Living in Santa Fe hones one’s skills at career multitasking. I deeply believe in this project and I’m finding that this level of commitment feeds and informs my curating and writing work, too.

gregoryp™: You visited Senegal to do this movie. How long were you there and what were the logistics like?

Jason Silverman: We went with a small crew for 12 days, and it was amazing. We hopped off the plane in Dakar and went to work, starting on an ambitious list of interviews. We went to Sembene’s birthplace, in the south of Senegal, and then built a screening — using a portable projector, screen, DVD player and a generator — of Sembene’s final film, Moolaade, in a Bambara village. It was my first trip to Africa, but our director, Samba Gadjigo, is something of a superstar there, and he made it all go remarkably smoothly. He even (almost) convinced us that pigeon, when appropriately barbecued, is a delicacy.

– A collaboration between Jason Silverman & Gregory Pleshaw

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December 6th, 2008 by sandyadmin

What began as the desire for the perfect sound led this artist to create whole new instruments from electronic circuitry.

Inside Gregory Lomayesva’s bedroom recording studio, a large flat paneled monitor dominates one end of the room, but it’s what on the screen that really captures your attention. It’s a computer model of a printed circuit board (PCB) that contains dozens of connections that when routed together make up an emulation of something called a Teletronix LA2A, a legendary audio compressor from the 1960s that has been out of production for over twenty years. The original device can still be found on Ebay – for around $6,000 – but if you really want one and you’ve got the moxie to string it all together, Lomayesva’s company Drip Electronics will be happy to sell you one over the Internet for about $90 – some assembly required.

Lomayesva sits nearby in a chair, fingering the real McCoy- a printed circuit board that he designed and could quickly become an audio compressor – and holding it out towards me.

“Look at it,” he said, tracing his fingers along the connections. “One thing people like about my boards is that they have a certain aesthetic quality to them that other board manufacturers can’t touch.”

And indeed, a Lomayesva circuit board is a beautiful thing to behold, even for those of us who don’t spend a lot of time looking at such things. Heavy green fiberglass borders an elegant patchwork of electronic connections that lead to the spots where the various components – vacuum tubes, resistors, transformers, capacitors and diodes – will be soldered into the board to make the connections complete. Once it’s all assembled, the finished product will live in a box where the circuit board and all gathered parts will be tucked safely away, hidden from view but still doing an important job.

But it still begs the question – why does anyone need an audio compressor from the 1960s? And what on earth made Gregory Lomayesva – better known as a woodworking artist and painter with representation by Ursa Gallery and with his art works at home in a handful of museums and with hundreds of collectors – work tirelessly for the past five years to make this circuit board into the collector’s item it has become?

“What makes an LA2A a desired item for an audiophile is that it contains vacuum tubes as part of its sound processing,” said Lomayesva. “Tube sound has a certain tonal resonance that some people really desire. There’s a whole subculture of people who want these tube amp sounds.”

And Lomayesva has figured out a way to tap into this subculture and create a fledgling business by “cloning” out-of-date gear to printed circuit boards and selling them to audio enthusiasts via the Internet. Since 2006, this artist-turned-science geek has sold over a thousand circuit boards at around $90 a piece, creating a nascent cottage industry based on an obsession with sound – and circuitry.

For Lomayesva, the genesis of this grand project began simply enough, when he was producing an album for his band Micah Sky, back in 2003. Micah Sky was a synth-driven project with a solo female lead singer and its production required a lot of fiddling in the studio.

“I was working on the Micah Sky project and I wanted the sound that can only come from vintage gear,” he said. “Briefly, I had enough budget to work on my album at Stepbridge Studios, who has some of the originals of this gear, but I ran out of that money pretty fast. So really, the reason that I wanted to do this in the first place was that I couldn’t afford the original gear, so why not build some of my own?”

Scott Cadenasso, a Santa Fe-based sound engineer, agreed with some of the basic premises that Lomayesva had about the LA2A.

“It’s got good sound,” Cadenasso said of the LA2A. “You have to figure it like this – these things haven’t been made in thirty years or more, so you can see why people would want to make their own or buy a kit that would let them do that.”

The primary piece of gear that Lomayesva needed for completing his recording project was a good compressor. A compressor is a device which “compresses” the dynamic range of a given piece of music. Audiophiles talk about how a compressor can also add “warmth” to a track, particular a compressor that is from the old-line school of analogue compressors.

Searching on the Internet, Lomayesva found a book on how to make your own LA2A compressor. That particular build involved a process called point-to-point wiring, which required the builder, in this case Lomayesva, to wire and solder each circuit – in this case, over 800 in all. It was not an easy project, according to Lomayesva, and somewhere along the line, he discovered that the more modern way to build the perfect compressor was through circuit board design, which is done with computer programs.

“It literally took years to build the LA2A, between three and four anyway,” said Lomayesva. “What started as some casual dabbling turned into a major obsession. At first, I just wanted to build one for myself – then it seemed like it be cooler to have ten of them, for recording vocals, bass, guitar, and what have you. And if I wanted to have multiples the only way to go was to design a circuit board, because once I had the design perfected, I could literally print them off one at a time.”

Inquiring through the Internet, he discovered the perfect program for making his circuit board design – the Pro-Tel, a $14K program that had a hand in designing the Mars Rover. Typical of guerilla programmers and hackers everywhere, Lomayesva got a hold of a bootleg copy of the software, taught himself the basics and set to work designing his circuit board. As Lomayesva puts it, it took years to build the LA2A, including learning the software, which was supposed to do the schematic of connecting the dots for him.

“It looked awful,” said Lomayesva of the build that result with the program. Ever concerned with the aesthetics of the “look” of the board, he decided to set out to do what many people might consider the impossible – he wired all 800 connections using nothing more than his mouse and a pile of printed schematics.

With a completed design in hand, Lomayesva then printed it to paper and used his skills as a silk-screener to hand-“print” the design directly to the copper plates on top of the circuit boards, using acrylic paint as a resist to hand-etch the design to the board. The first ten silk-screens didn’t work, and while this process satisfied the artist in him, he eventually discovered that you could send the computer file off to a circuit board printing house and get the boards printed in bulk.

He finally released the LA2A circuit board compressor in 2006 to wide critical acclaim on the Prodigy Pro Tools and other audiophile websites. He included a 200-page manual for putting the board together, as well as a comprehensive list of all the additional parts that would be needed to construct the board and make it work as an audio compressor.

To date, Lomayesva has sold almost 1000 boards at $90 a piece. Since his first release, Lomayesva has gone on to “clone” two additional boards, both of them for use as microphone pre-amplifiers. The first of these, the V72, was released earlier this year, again to wide acclaim on hobbyist and audiophile websites, and that release actually led Lomayesva to his latest project.

“I was contacted by a customer who told me that he had a product on his wish list and he asked me if I could build it,” he said. “I told him I’d do it if I could find the schematics, and he produced them for me.”

The product in question, known in the Drip Electronics world as the “forty-seven,” is actually a clone of the Redd.47 microphone pre-amplifier. This is a device that is well sought-after but can’t even be found on E-Bay, though its celebrity factor is well-known, particularly since it was part of the original gear found at the Beatles Abbey Road Studios. This plus the supposed “warmth” and “bigness” (words used to describe the sound of a Redd.47 and other tube devices) of the sound makes it almost certain that, at least in the tiny and interesting world of audiophiles, Lomayesva and Drip Electronics just might have a hit on their hands.

“I’d never give up the art,” said Lomayesva. “But if my electronics company could take off…that’d really be something. Designing a circuit board is like writing a book – every time I turn around there’s more money in my PayPal account for something I already worked on, already finished. And it’s not like the artistry has gone away…it’s just been combined with science for something that’s a blend of the two.”

A blend, perhaps, that has some really big and warm sound to it.

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June 6th, 2008 by sandyadmin

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 12, 2008
Contact: Andrew Stone, Big Stone Phone
(505) 345-4800
http://www.stone.com
Andrew@stone.com

BIG STONE PHONE RELEASES TWO NEW APPLICATIONS FOR THE iPHONE
Applications Offer Fun & Practicality for iPhone Users

Big Stone Phone is proud to announce the release of two brand new applications for the
iPhone. Each application makes use of the iPhone’s internal still camera, but with
differing intentions – one app, Talking Pictures, has many practical applications, while another, called iGraffiti, is just pure fun.

Talking Pictures offers the user to take a picture and add a voice note for later playback. Think of it as “sonic captioning,” allowing users to “make notes” without using a keypad or stylus to enter words. The software has many practical applications, as developer Stone pointed out.

“We designed it for working professionals such as doctors, police officers, real estate
agents and any profession where people need to take visual notes in a hands-free way,”
said Stone. iGraffiti lets users take a picture and then paint on it using the tip of the finger on the iPhone’s touch screen. Users can adjust brush stroke and width, and can choose from a 48-color “crayon” palette picker for their paint colors. Making use of the iPhone’s motion features, users can shake the iPhone once to delete the last action, and shake twice to start from the beginning. Users can also pull images from the web for manipulation with iGraffiti.

“We’ve been having a lot of fun with this one,” said Stone. “Finished images can be
used as Contact photos or as Wallpaper or can be shared with the iGraffiti community
over the web.”

Big Stone Phone is the result of a collaboration between two well-known Apple
developers, Andrew Stone & Jeff Biggus. Mr. Stone is the founder of Stone Design of
Albuquerque, makers of the Stone Works Creative Suite that bundles together 17 creative
applications for the Mac OS X. The Suite includes Create, a page layout program,
iMaginator, an image manipulation program, and Videator, a video manipulation
program along with more than a dozen others. Mr. Biggus is a Chicago-based
programmer who runs the popular HyperJeff OS X website for Mac users and developers.

“Developing for the iPhone is so much fun,” said Stone. “It’s a new frontier. Part of the fun comes from knowing that there are tons of other developers out there trying to make great software for this incredible device. We’re just one of hundreds if not thousands of groups out there trying to make something great.”

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May 17th, 2008 by sandyadmin

I think it’s entirely possible that there are only two reasonable reactions to Meow Wolf’s latest collaborative installation piece “Biome Neuro Norb.” And that is that you’ll either love it or hate it. Either way, the show is bound to provoke a strong reaction – and that’s precisely what the show’s sixteen talented artists had in mind when they built it.

“As we were building it, we fantasized about people walking through the door and having uncontrollable fits of prolonged vomiting,” said organizer Vince Kadlubek.

My personal reaction? Spontaneous bursts of laughter at everything I saw.

These staggeringly creative kids have built an environment that feels a lot like the set of a ‘70s sci-fi movie, complete with caves you can crawl around in, miles and miles of mylar tubes, alien heads hanging from the ceiling, and a master control panel in the center of the room that lets you the viewer interact with spinning tops, a wild soundtrack, lights and various things that go bing. The walls of this little space have been obliterated by foam insulation-forms that wind around and cover the ceiling completely.

In all, the space presents a total piece, but there are sections you can pull out for further examination. “The Clean Room” is just that – the most uncluttered section of the space with white walls and mylar tubes and strange contraptions. There are the aforementioned caves where you can go inside and relax on mylar couches and stare at cool stop animation movies. There’s a day-glo orange accented forest, as well as a little office area with ancient family photographs of a family that belongs to no one in particular.

To find materials for this endevour, our intrepid artists journeyed into the depths of the local Salvation Army dumpster and made a visit or two to the venerable Black Hole of Los Alamos. Whatever they found, they used, or so it seems – you can make out all kinds of debris and detritus in the many installations that fill this space to bursting.

Above all, this show reminds me of one of those wacky roadside attractions where some kook labors for decades to build some outrageous shrine to some totally made up deity. An art opening where they served absinthe rather than white wine and no one talked about their stocks. This is one of those shows that you Absolutely Cannot Miss. Who knows? You might HATE it. But I didn’t. I loved it so much that laughter still haunts my mind whenever I think about.

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November 27th, 2007 by sandyadmin

The Native American Rights Foundation, (NARF) located in Boulder, Colorado, announced the winners of its competition for Young Native Artists for its Modern Day Warrior show last week. Thirty-nine artists from thirty-four tribes made the final cut, including X number of artists from New Mexico. They are:

NARF also selected three Modern Day Warrior “Best-in-Show” artists, including NMAN alumni and Navajo artist Monty Singer, who won for his piece “Old Fears, New Rituals” shown above. Singer is also showing a piece (shown below) at the IAIA Museum’s “War Paint” show, which opened two weeks ago to local and international acclaim.

NARF is a non-profit organization that provides legal representation and technical assistance to Native tribes, individuals and organizations in order to provide equal access to the justice system for Native Americans. This show is their 2nd Annual and is a fund-raising event for the organization. The show will be held November 10th in Boulder.

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November 20th, 2007 by sandyadmin

Somewhere back in the mid-1990s, I found myself living in the back office of the Offsite arts space, located in the DMZ in Santa Fe. Offsite at that time was in its first incarnation in a former auto body shop, a big shotgun space with concrete floor and one little room that housed by Mac LC2 with a dial-up connection. The roof of the office was where I slept, in a little loft area on a futon.

It was here that the Waxaktun Space Station project touched down one bright weekend when a bunch of counter-cultural luminaries from Santa Fe and Taos took the place over and proceeded to cover the concrete with sod to make for a comfy dance floor. Art critic Dean Balsamo, media critic Antonio LopezReign of Toads publisher Kyle Silfer and Spiros Antonopolous, DJ and founder of the Souljerky Whirling Infinity Research Labs were among the co-conspirators. As Antonopoulus said at the time, “We’re here to create an intersection point for making the aliens among us feel at home.”

Whether the point of the project was to bring the aliens in from the cold or bring out the aliens within us all was never made clear, but it was one wacky party, that’s for sure. Few of the folks present, (other than Balsamo, who was definitely from another planet) were wackier or more out there than Spiros – but who could’ve imagined that half a lifetime I would find myself in New York City witnessing him – and his company, now simply known as SoulJerky – receiving their first big round of funding for what is becoming a rapidly evolving yoga lifestyle and media company?

Yes, Virginia – EVOLUTION happens. What began as a rave production company in the nineties is now something “completely different.” One thing that hasn’t changed is that Spiros is still dedicated to creating intersections to allow interesting things to happen, and SoulJerky is certainly no exception. Arriving in New York City six years ago with his partner Erin Flynn to become a full-time professional DJ, Spiros took some yoga classes and found that the pull towards the lifestyle of yoga was more magnetic than the one towards being a DJ.

Souljerky.com, which at the time was just a blog, began to be used as a vehicle for some of Spiros yoga-inspired projects, which included TeaStall, where he dished out Chai Tea for New York yogis at six o’clock in the morning, every morning, as well as various yoga-related fashion, writing and travel projects. One memorable project had Spiros pre-selling 108 t-shirts for $108 a piece, then taking the shirts to India where they were blessed by wandering saddhus.

Today, Souljerky is a number of existing and planned projects all centering around the yoga lifestyle. While the blog is still the most visible and consistent aspect of the company, plans include yoga videos, an aruvedic cooking show, food products such as homemade ghee and chai mixes, and other wacky that I think are probably not for public consumption at this time, but which would certainly strike you as ambitious and fun. Also undisclosed is the amount of funding that the company has received – but let’s just say they’ve got a fairly swank office a couple blocks from Canal Street in SoHo.

“What we did back in the day was to try to make the process of life more fun,” said Spiros. “This isn’t much different, except we’re not partying now. But we’re still living in the madness of being alive – only this time around, we’re being a bit more contemplative and hopefully more engaged with ourselves and the world.

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November 12th, 2007 by sandyadmin


“I Will Not Make Anymore Boring Art.”

– by John Baldessari (now housed at the Whitney Museum)

 

So the other night I went to the Whitney. It was Friday night to be precise, and much to my surprise I arrived there and found a line snaking around the block. It was pay what you can night, but I still paid $5. The Whitney wasn’t nearly as massive as I expected it to be – sure, there are five floors, but it just wasn’t that huge compared to its reputation but I digress.

I was there to see the Kara Walker exhibition, which was so great I almost left in disgust. Not really disgust so much as a sense of being totally overwhelmed with these wild cross-hatches of brutal honesty and over-the-edge irony. It was completely intense, this show, beginning from the moment you get off the elevator and see a stylized silhouette cut-out of a black girl sucking off a white boy. And then there was the cartoon of the black slave girls who take over the plantation and gang-rape the plantation owners with broom sticks. I felt like I’d actually seen that before, either at IAIA or Site Santa Fe, but familiarity didn’t make it any less difficult to watch. I did leave, eventually, driven out by this strange sense of shame after watching this school tour of black teenage girls – say 18-24 year-olds – walk around and react to the show. It was just *odd*, the whole damn thing.

There were safer things to see elsewhere. I really dug Mark Bradford‘s stuff on the first floor. I guess the deal is that this guy roams around his neighborhood pulling flyers off posts and walls and then manipulates them on these giant canvasses. I liked the way they looked and I was especially pleased once I knew what he was doing – I kinda like the way people will map out physical terrain by taking pieces of it home and playing with it. I like that kinda thing because it makes me think it would be something I might do, or could imagine myself doing if I actually managed to play around with visual art things. It’s kinda like collage without any clear context but texture, but I dug that pretty well.

I was heading upstairs for the modernism stuff, (which turned out to include a few de Koonings I hadn’t seen before and a terribly compelling Hopper that I adored but not much else) when the elevator door opened on a lower floor at the “Two Years” exhibition, which showed off the museum’s acquisitions from the past two years. From the corner of my eye I could see across two rooms a drawing of a horse that reminded me of a Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and I hopped off the elevator to satisfy my curiosity. Bam! Wouldn’t you know it? QTS Smith’s “War is Heck” soon filled my view. I guess I saw it at the UNM show a couple of years ago. She is, of course, a New Mexico artist and quite a fine one at that.

Right next door to her painting was a video installation, (only Nauman gets away with calling a television with a VCR attached an “installation”) that I actually recognized also, a Bruce Nauman from the late ’80s called “Green Horses.” Nauman. His content is so easy to understand. Why he’s in all these important collections with what seems to be such uninteresting stuff is the real puzzling mystery. However, he too is a New Mexico artist, as was his producer for this bit, Juliet Myers, (now a curator at Site Santa Fe) and Visulka Studios is in Santa Fe, of course. I sat and watched the whole thing about ten times (it’s about a minute long) and was pleased to have some place to sit.

Food, drink, & transportation

With the notable exception of $50 I spent on a pair of shoes (I walked into a store and a woman told me my Converse hi-tops were UGLY and I wasn’t allowed to leave unless I bought new shoes) and $15 I spent on a gift for my mom, every last dime I’ve spent since I’ve been in NYC has been on food, drink, and transportation, with the bulk of it being on food and drink. I’d like to say I’ve had all kinds of crazy expensive meals, but the fact is that I’ve been eating A LOT of pizza. Lots and lots.

It’s easy and its everywhere. Just today for lunch I had two slices of pizza – one was a slice of pizza rustica margherita, which means that there’s whole patches of sauce showing without any cheese on it, and the cheese in this case was freakin’ fresh mozarella. The crust was paper-thin on this puppy, and the basil was fresh full-leaf pieces. $2 at a place called L’Asso on Elizabeth and Lafayette. Nearby was a place called Pomodoro – home of the vodka slice. Vodka sauce is basically a hyped-up marina with (yes) added vodka and a little pureed action to make it shocking pink. It was heavenly ($3.25) and included one of the special aspects of really nifty slices of pizza – the crunchy crust that also seems to magically melt in your mouth. I can’t explain it, I really can’t.

There’s so much to see and do here – you just have to pick what’s do-able. Below is a picture of the legendary Store Where Rice Pudding is King. I’ve included a picture because after all this pizza, it was enough just to have found the place. Going inside is something I’ll have to do the next time I’m here…

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