May 16 is really going to suck for the young artistic class of Santa Fe. Not only does the College of Santa Fe celebrate its final graduation as a private school but The Candyman, the only indie music store in town, shuts its doors.

Not only have I spent hundreds of dollars on records at The Candyman over the last few years but I’ve also earned a few bucks working there on the side, doing inventories, ringing up customers, etc. It’s been the kind of place where, on a bad day, I can just hang out.

Things haven’t been going so well for Santa Fe’s only indie record store for some time. Of course all the music pirates have made selling CDs difficult but the store’s vinyl and classical sections helped bring people in the doors. The economy tanking hasn’t helped either but it was the death earlier this year of owner Matthew Schartzman that made going forward nearly impossible.

But, while The Candyman will be selling off its inventory of CDs, DVDs and high end televisions local musicians can be assured that the other half of the business, Strings and Things, is staying strong. Longtime employee Rand Cook is set to take over and, if all goes well, expand the musical instruments part of the shop.

The sale begins on Wednesday and the store closes its doors on May 16.

On Friday the New Mexican published a comprehensive story about the clusterfuck that is Santa Fe’s indie movie house scene.

The gist of the changes are such:

*The Screen may or may not move into the New Mexico Film Museum theater, depending on what happens with CSF and the land on which The Screen currently sits. (When that will be known is still up in the air.)

*The Santa Fe Film Center needs a new home and will be moving into the New Mexico Film Museum theater through at least the end of May and will be closed the week of April 19 for the move.

*The CCA stays where it is (figured we’d toss that one in there to round out the indie theater thing).

The Screen has been through a bit of turmoil since the beginning of the year as it was slated to close in January, was bailed out for a bit before, in February, Governor Richardson stepped in with some state cash to keep the reels rolling.

Some cynics out there are probably thinking something along the lines of, “why do we need this many theaters in town?” Well, first of all, because I don’t want to follow the hordes to the theater to check out the Hannah Montana movie. (Really people, $35 million in one weekend?)

There is, of course, a huge market for mindless escapism and I’m the first to rewatch Mallrats again and again when in a bad mood but generally film is more like a trip to the used bookstore. The medium offers the kind of escapism that good literature fulfills and to see a classic and important film on the big screen is a delight.

In fact, some of my best memories in Santa Fe have been at these indie theaters. There was the 9 am viewing of Drawing Restraint 9 at CCA that made me want to trash Walgreens when I left. The Derrida documentary I went to alone at The Screen three days after moving to Santa Fe and the Iranian film brought to town by the New Mexico Coalition to End the Death Penalty, Daybreak, that reconnected me with my current roommate.

Granted, if we didn’t have these theaters I’d still find the weird movies I spend most of my viewing time watching (thank you Criterion Collection—well, except for The Rock) but if it weren’t for these theaters my absolute love of French New Wave cinema certainly never would have been as solidified as it has been. Breathless is good but it’s Contempt (because I am, apparently, a bitter, bitter woman) that really makes me love Godard.

We’re lucky, living in a town as small as Santa Fe to get the kind of movies that these indie theaters offer. Growing up in a big city we really didn’t have that. Sure, we got the new indie flicks up in Denver but no classics. No Roman Holiday, no Film Noir festivals and certainly no Bergman.

Santa Fe’s cinemas feel more European than American and that’s a good thing. Hell, I’m heading to London for a vacation (I know, Santa Fe won’t be the same for two whole weeks!) and in my research of local movie houses I found myself impressed, not with them but with us. (That’s not to say I won’t be spending a good chunk of my time over there in the dark.) Both the Barbican Theatre and BFI are busting out with screenings of Truffaut’s 400 Blows but it’s BFI that shall steal my heart with it’s New Wave festival and movie/concert combo of Harold and Maude and Lightspeed Champion!

And I thought you could only see movies like this in Santa Fe!

Now that the auto industry and the banks have gotten a big old slice of the bailout pie it’s time for starving artists to get a few veggies in their bowls of rice.

That’s right. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson announced today that nearly $300,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts has been awarded to New Mexico Arts, a division of the state’s Department of Cultural Affairs.

The money has some pretty stringent rules attached to it—so the 58 arts related employees that I can think of who probably need the cash the most, and play probably the most important role in keeping the arts dollars rolling into the state, are ineligible.

The groups that can apply for the money have to be a nonprofit group that has “received a regular arts grant from New Mexico Arts in the last three years…or be a current applicant for FY10 and be in good standing” according to a press release from the governor’s office.

New Mexico Arts has been approved to use $50,000 of the total $297,000 allocation to fill a public art contractor position and for the administrative costs of divvying up the grant applications for the remainder of the allotment.

I still remember the conversation I had the last time I was at the Sleeping Dog Tavern. A friend and I threw back a couple of cold Coors Lights while chatted about Moby Dick and hockey. I remember it well for a couple of reasons. First probably being that it was my birthday and I’d been upstairs at the now closed Steepings tea and coffee shop studying (yes, 26 proved a wild birthday). Second, my Coors-loving, North Dakota-born, grad school buddy was about to move away and, though we’d already said our goodbyes, I hit up the Dog for one more brew before he, like the rest of our posse, took off for greener pastures.

Back in those days, three and a half years ago, you could still smoke and enjoy a beer inside and the Dog was a great place to do that. The little mall bar had TVs, pool tables and was just the little dive hideout in the middle of downtown that our broke, student wallets yearned for.

But that was a long time ago and the Dog, like myself, has changed. A few weeks ago a friend and I hit up The Sleeping Dog (which really no longer should be referred to as the “Dog”) for dinner. I’ve been hearing good things about the upgrade to the menu, which used to consist of typical greasy bar grub, that were made about a year and a half ago but I just never made it over there.

Wow! This place gives The Railyard Restaurant & Saloon a run for its money. Instead of ordering full dinners we dug into the appetizer menu so as to get the most flavor out of our big night out. With plates, and cocktail glasses, filled with goat cheese stuffed peppadew peppers, which are topped with caviar ($7), buffalo and chipotle sausage pinwheels ($7.50), oyster corn dogs ($7.50) and, from the dinner menu, baked lobster mac and cheese ($21) the feast was on.
I’m glad for wine I’d stuck with a light Riesling instead of going for one of the heavy reds I usually drink. The wine was light and crisp and allowed the mix of flavors from the food to stand out.  While everything was quite yummy it was the peppadew peppers that really got me. The sweet red peppers gave a smooth and consistent background to the pops of flavor offered by the caviar while the goat cheese inside the peppers was creamy and just the right amount of tart to make it all melt on the tongue.

While the sausage pinwheels were delicious with or without the sauce they came with the oyster corn dogs were bland and boring until the horseradish and Siracha sauce was added. With that combo though the little kick of spicy made the breaded and fried oysters mouthwateringly tasty.

The only disappointment to the meal was the lobster mac and cheese. It was good, don’t get me wrong, but not worth the 20 bucks and not nearly the standout that everything else was.

The ongoing quest to finish 2666 in a timely fashion rages on! Part Four, “The Part About the Crimes” seems to be, from all the reviews and online banter I’ve read, the hardest for people to finish. I now understand why. More than 300 pages are dedicated to the investigations of numerous murders. These murders are the only thread that ties the rest of the story together so to dive into them is necessary for coherence.

But, there’s something odd about the way they’re explained. I dreaded this part because, while I’ll read the most violent and horrific stuff out there, I was expecting 2666 to make American Psycho to read like a kid’s book. Shockingly, however, Bolaño describes the rape and murder of the women with the distant voice that makes them the everyday occurrences they are in the fictional town of Santa Teresa. This choice makes “Crimes” very difficult to read. Not, by any means, because it’s boring but, instead, because it’s infuriating. Page after page of women raped, murdered, mutilated and abandoned in deserts, dumps and street corners are described with less enthusiasm or emotion than most people use to describe doing their laundry. Add to this a cast of (male) cops given the task of investigating the crimes who show no passion for catching the killers and Bolaño depends on his readers to hate him and his characters.

Oddly, while the found bodies of women read like grocery lists, the jailhouse rape of one of the suspects and the descriptions of a man desecrating churches are perfectly graphic, giving just enough gory imagery to the reader to let the mind fill in the rest of the horrible details.

Bonus Blogging Bolaño: The Part About the Editions

So, as I mentioned, I got my copy of 2666 off the world wide interwebs and, therefore, ended up with a British edition. (The image this week is of the English dust jacket, which I must say I prefer to the American one.) Over the weekend on my weekly bookstore rounds I found that Borders (which I was only at to find the April issue of Wire magazine—which they didn’t have goddamnit) finally got around to stocking a copy of 2666. It’s surprisingly slim compared to mine. But the odd thing is that if you look it up on Amazon here and in the UK the page count is exactly the same. What’s different though, aside from the jacket, is the paper. The Brits over at Picador used a thick, slightly rough, linen-like acid free paper while the Americans from Farrar, Straus and Giroux went with a thin, slick silky paper. Both are gorgeous and this is a book I recommend finding in hardcover. If you happen to find a first edition beware, they’re going for anywhere from $60 to $295 over on ABE Books.