Today England plays Algeria, so it is fitting for all hooligans to find a neighborhood pub as if we were in Bristol or London supporting the Red Lions, the nickname of the English national team.  Of the bars in Santa Fe, Second St. Brewery resembles the closest thing we have to an European style pub, complete with mutton-chopped bartenders, its own selection of brews and a colorful cast of regulars.

Around the bar were the murmurs and discussions of the US-Slovenia game, in which our Yanks came back from a 0-2 deficit to tie the game and then took the lead on a beautiful set play, only to have the goal disallowed by the referee. The tie could mean that the US will be ousted from advancing to the round of 16, big disappointment for a team that many thought had a chance to go far in the tournament.

However, all bets are not off.

“You saw the heart our boys have when they came back in that game,”  one bearded gent said in between sips of a decadent frothy stout.  “I hope England ties or loses so we can have a chance to move on.”

I was in total agreement, although the US is often considered the lame duck of the World Cup and do not have the fanbase or allure of other teams, today’s game showed that we have something to prove.

As we sat around the pub throwing back pints of cold microbrews and chicken wings, Algeria played steady and came away with a 0-0 tie. While the fog-eatin’ English sulked away in shame looking more like spayed kitties than their lion nickname, a gleam of hope shown from the old bargoers’ eyes; the dream of America’s World Cup lives on.  With a belly full of high-end pub grub and a wide variety of beers—get the sampler— I was content with both the fare and the warm companionship of fellow bargoers.

My content was replaced with anxiety and excitement looking at the bracket later that day. Group C is completely open now and all four teams have the potential to advance.  This cup is getting exciting, get over to Second Street soon to watch the action, eat good food, drink quality beer and cheer on America’s side, we really need the support!

Second St. Brewery Overall Score: 7/10 Golden Boots

This will be an ongoing blog series with a new entry or two every week about a different restaurant or bar to watch the action.  If you have any suggestions for Santa Fe world cup venues by all means e-mail us at culture@sfreporter.com and put “world cup” as the subject.

Lenka Novakova's installation is among the many video art pieces featured in Currents 2010.

By: Chloé Davis

People need an escape from reality that moves and breaths, an escape they can hear and that will suck them in then hypnotize them. This is where Currents 2010 comes in. Currents 2010 is a prototype for a hopefully annual event called The Santa Fe Video Art and New Media Festival. Currents 2010 focuses on many of the same things as Site Santa Fe’s The Dissolve, another exhibit of video art and new media work (12-5 pm, Sunday June 20, SITE Santa Fe,1606 Paseo De Peralta, 989-1199). In fact, The Dissolve is one of the biggest sponsors for Currents 2010 and they happen concurrently.“What we want to do is make a first-class new-media event yearly. New Mexico has a great deal of talent, and we want to make [New Mexico] a premier center for video art and new media work,” Frank Ragano, producer of the event, tells SFR. It’s true, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Flame Schon and David Stout, who moved to Danton, Texas at the end of summer 2009 but will be returning to Santa Fe for this show, will be showing their work in Currents 2010.

The producers of the event (Frank Ragano and Mariannah Amster) in the future hope that their event will become more citywide. They would like to see it hop from venue to venue and always include both the local community and artists from around the world.

“Our events are always free to the public, It makes it easier for every one to become aware of the fairly new art form. We are already making plans with The Boys and Girls Club for them to make trips to the show,” Ragano continues. Getting youth involved is an important part of Currents 2010; it features video art by teens from high schools around northern New Mexico. Youth are a big part of the event, but certainly not the only part.

Schon is a well established artist in the world of video art. Schon’s work is known for its psychedelic and abstract quality. She would not go into too much detail about the installation for the sake of keeping it a secret, only to be reviled on the opening night of the show. Her installation was one of many being to be built on at El Museo Cultural Tuesday afternoon by the artists with the assistance of friends and students.

“It’s a translucent chamber of sorts,” Schon tells SFR of her installation. “I want it to be something deep that people can sink into,” she says.

It took many people to start setting up Schon’s installation today and will again tomorrow. However, two days is nothing. She has been working on this installation for roughly four months. “I had to be in the right mind-set to work on [the installation]. I used things to distract myself when I was not in that mind-set but knew I should be working,” she says.

If you are already a fan of video art and new media, or completely new to new media and video art it is worth at least swinging by to see what everyone involved has been working to for many months.

By Caroline K Gorman

The Ghost of Milagro Creek
By Melanie Sumner

The Ghost of Milagro Creek made its way to me with a Post-it note across the front that read “important local writer.” It struck me that all writers are important to wherever it is they can be considered “local.” Community pride wants to boast that one of our own has made it and personal vainglory wants the satisfaction of knowing all the common details about someone who has succeeded. And then there’s always the simple delight inherent in recognizing familiar places in the pages of books.

So there are many good, respectable reasons for considering an author to be important merely because of origin. However, the interesting thing about this “important local writer” is that Melanie Sumner isn’t. She lived in New Mexico for three years, from 1998 to 2001. And then she moved away. But she is happy to borrow Taos’ colorful atmosphere as a setting for her book.

Unfortunately, the type of book which Sumner wrote depends very greatly on her status as a genuine local author. It is a crime novel with a tired premise involving a love triangle, childhood friends and murder. This book depends heavily on setting and characters in order to be interesting. The setting is “the barrio in Taos,”and the narrator is Ignacia, a Jicarillo Apache who is necessarily considered “a witch” by her neighbors, and two boys, Mister and Tomas. Regarding setting—well, I’ll leave that to people who are actually local to Taos to decide.

As for the characters, they are passable. Certainly the voice of Ignacia is strong, even if her character as a “witch” is a little stale. Unfortunately, a gimmick early on mars the narrator’s voice; Ignacia dies and proceeds to narrate for a few chapters. After that, Ignacia’s voice becomes difficult to discern, though she is in theory still narrating. Maybe the problem is that after narrating from within a coffin, not much else can be interesting.

The Ghost of Milagro Creek is certainly readable, as long as you don’t get stuck on details like the insertion of random Spanish words. (The author says she met a “tree-cutter from Belize” in Rome who helped her insert some Spanish words. She selects the words in as thoughtful a manner as someone adding pepper to a dish in an attempt to spice it up.) I believe one of the  Hispanicized words was “des.” In my many years living on the border, I have yet to hear someone say “des” when the two words on either side were in English.

But back to readability: It’s readable. The timeline is a little all confusing in the beginning, but it straightens out. As the story of a passion and a crime, it is interesting. Unfortunately, the constant presence of distractions makes it difficult to focus on the plot. For example, the center of the love triangle is described as wearing ‘high heels, tight bell-bottoms, and some sort of a bra for a shirt.” (p.1-2). When I read this, I thought the scene was taking place in the 70s, although apparently it’s  1995. This jolted me a little out of the narrative flow; I had to go back a confirm what the year actually was. Little things like this, including slang that was presumably supposed to be representative of the 1995 barrio scene,  just made me either cringe or question my own sense of space and time.

However, the sentences that aren’t dialogue demonstrate very clearly that Sumner has been well-trained. The grammar is never painful, and there is a love of combining details about the corrosion of man-made things with facets of the New Mexico landscape. She is mercifully short and simple with the grand emotions of the characters. And there is always the joy of seeing places which you know intimately, but which are unknown to the wider world, appear in print.

Felonious Groove Foundation will be performing at Block Party

4–9 pm Wednesday, June 16
Corner of Marcy & Otero streets

Summer is great. Everybody knows this. But sometimes the late sunsets can make the day drag on, trapping one between the end of work and the end of the day. Fortunately, there is a fun solution: The Santa Fe Reporter Block Party!

Join us to celebrate the release of Summer Guide 2010 and get your party on!

Mingle with all your fellow Santa Feans at the profusion of fasinating booths: Big Sky Learning, the Green Party of Santa Fe, Warehouse 21, SpaNomad, and so many many more. Or, if you’d rather, just listen to some great music: La Junta plays ‘Southwest funk hop,’ the Rev. Karol King Kong brings the funk, Venus Bogardus plays post-punk and the Felonious Groove Foundation plays their own funk. Food is provided by Backroad Pizza, Cowgirl BBQ, ECCO and Second Street brewery. Plus there’s a performance by the Santa Fe Spirit All Star cheerleaders!

There’s no excuse for a boring summer day when there are block parties to go to!

Whoa, it’s like the the Eyedropper’s house, except that instead of coming from above, our “bad neighbor” signs point from the houses to the left and right, as well as from across the street.

This is possibly the most effective way to destroy a business. The second, which this business also claims, is German food. I give this place two months to live.

More after the JUMP!

“Rehydrate with alcohol”—this shit would so not fly in Santa Fe.

The Eyedropper is particularly fond of altering signs/posters/etc. to make them better. She also likes it when they’re changed to say something mostly incomprehensible.

Santa Fe, don’t take this from that other SF city. Send your MORE AWESOME submissions to culture [at] sfreporter.com, subject “eyedropper.”

Thusly, with nigh overpowering nostalgia fueling me, I took in the recent Lou Barlow (of said bands) show on the Cowgirl patio. First off, I was feeling pretty impressed that Barlow was playing such a small venue, but it seems that Santa Fe is getting bigger shows like this more often. Plus, I’m willing to bet Barlow is one of those super-cool and down to earth musicians who subtly rules the land while keeping his head.

I arrived a tad early to check out Sarah Jaffe (myspace.com/sjaffe) open the show. In the days leading up to the concert, I’d heard nothing but good things about the Texas singer-songwriter, and Jaffe started strong with a beautiful voice and a quiet and subtly sad sound. Instantly, I realized there was something familiar about her, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Sarah Jaffe folkin' it up

Jaffe’s cellist and keyboardist added complexity to the simple guitar work, but I was going mad trying to figure out where I had heard this before. Then it hit me: I’ve sat in my room listening to Cat Power and Feist too ,and whether or not she realizes it, Jaffe emulates these musicians quite closely. Though Jaffe’s voice is solid, it sounds almost exactly like Leslie Fesit, a fact that kind of pissed me off. Now, I’m not saying that she was bad or anything, but it was just nothing I haven’t heard before. Jaffe’s strength is in her voice and not guitar playing. At times, this seemed to put undue pressure on her band, and a cursory glance at the crowd proved that I was pretty much the only person bored by the performance. It makes sense, though. Those unfamiliar with indie folk/country are bound to be impressed by an artist with such obvious-and worthy-influences. I suppose Jaffe makes a good transition for those interested in getting into these types of music, but I don’t see her having much lasting power in a genre already jam-packed with too many faceless acts that sound exactly the same.

Jaffe wound up her set, and you could feel the excitement in the crowd; a real live rock ‘n’ roll legend was about to play! Lou Barlow set up, and played a goofy song about getting punched in the nose for his soundcheck. Even the soundcheck was awesome.  ”Just go ahead and shout out what you wanna hear, and I’ll probably play it,” He announced. Song titles started flying around the patio, including one lady who yelled, “Play Natural One! Could you play that?” Barlow kind of laughed and replied, “Well, I can, just not right now.”

Everyone was paying super-close attention to Barlow

After a few solo acoustic tunes from 2009’s Goodnight Unkown, the crowd belonged to Barlow. His guitar work seems so natural, but is actually fairly complex and interesting. I was surprised at how much I liked his voice. Not because I thought he sucked or anything, but I don’t think I had ever noted how good it was before. It was soft and restrained, yet powerful and beautiful. Every now and then he seemed to summon an almost Nick Drake-like quality.

The acoustic stuff was great and all, but the show really got moving when Barlow called his band, the missingmen, up to perform. “These guys are Mike Watt’s band,” He told us. This resulted in a “HOLY SHIT!” moment for me. Mike Watt is punk rock royalty, so I figured these dudes must be for real.

the missingmen ruled it

I’ve seen a handful of shows on the Cowgirl patio, but by far, this was the loudest. Barlow and crew rocked so hard and so loud, that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t shut down. Word on the street is that the patio is utilized so infrequently because of noise ordinance bullshit, but for those who were there, you know that this showwouldn’t have worked inside.

Barlow switched back and forth from guitar and bass duty, and even the songs without bass sounded remarkably full. the missingmen proved to be real pros, never missing a note but appearing totally relaxed and effortless. Everyone was freaking out, myself included. I made a mental note to pick up Goodnight Unknown the very next chance I got. I am not even exaggerating when I say that Lou Barlow and the missingmen was one of the top five best shows I’ve ever seen in Santa Fe. The perfect weather on the patio helped with what I can only describe as a magical (gross) evening. Every song in Barlow’s canon was good. Every song. Think about that for a second-how many times have you seen a show in which every single song was good? I’d bet almost never.  It was just past midnight when Barlow switched back to his acoustic guitar for a few more solo tunes and I made my way home. It becomes more and more clear that Santa Fe is finally getting the shows we’ve deserved for years. The show renewed my faith and love of music, and i slipped into a deep sleep with my ears still ringing.

Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter
Tom Bissell (Pantheon Books; June, 2010)
Review by Adam Perry

For most children of the ’80s, it’s impossible to forget the sound of Super Mario’s head boinging off of coin-manifesting bricks, the “ooouugh” sound of Tecmo Bowl players running into each other, or any of the innumerable early lo-fi Nintendo effects permanently stamped on our brains.

Many of us spent hundreds of hours competing against the computer, and our parents’ patience, in epic action-adventure games—and against friends and siblings in aggressive sports and fighting games; at this point, presumably none among us understands exactly what that incredible amount of time and energy did to our minds and bodies. Still, I presume you, too, can feel pretty good knowing that your childhood video-game habit didn’t progress into playing Grand Theft Auto for 30 hours straight while binging on cocaine as an adult.

Tom Bissell, a Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning author of Chasing the Sea and The Father of All Things, wasn’t so lucky.

Bissell is a writing professor at Portland State University and has written for Harper’s and The New Yorker; his curious rise to literary prominence has seen him traverse penning fake DVD commentaries to detailing his experience as the son of a Vietnam veteran. All the while, Bissell has never beaten his virtually life-long addiction to video games, which has been so feverish in the past few years that Bissell missed then-President-elect Obama’s November, 2008 acceptance speech because he couldn’t stop playing Fallout 3. He’s eagerly fallen in love with every gaming system from the original Nintendo to the Xbox 360, and believes that video games represent modern culture’s creative evolution from the novel form.  In short, he’s hooked.

In the just-released Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, his fifth book, Bissell describes the “unprecedented inventiveness” of early games such as Super Mario Bros, noting that “in film and literature, such surrealistic fantasy typically occurs at the outer edge of experimentalism.” Enthusiastically walking us through every inch of his favorite recent titles, he passionately delineates the video game’s startling and, for gamers like Bissell, endlessly fascinating and engaging evolution from staring-contests like Pong to the all-consuming (and morally reprehensible) “open world” mayhem of Grand Theft Auto.

For Bissell, the real mark of “absolutely brilliant” modern games such as Grand Theft Auto and the horror-filled Resident Evil series is that they are ontological exercises in which, as the human participant, “you get control and are controlled.”

“Games are patently aware of you and have a physical dimension unlike any other form of entertainment,” Bissell writes. “Even though you may be granted lunar influence over a game’s narrative tides, the fact that there is any narrative at all reminds you that a presiding intelligence exists within the game along with you, and it is this sensation that invites the otherwise unworkable comparisons between games and other forms of narrative art.”

That’s an intricate and interesting realization, but there aren’t a lot of people, especially in America, with time and savings enough to literally play video games from dusk till dawn every day of the week in order to come to it. Sadly, there are millions of people who would join Bissell in relishing the time when, while playing Grand Theft Auto IV, he joyfully “sniped the pilot of a zooming-by news chopper while standing on [a] building and watched it whirlingly plunge down into the street and explode.” He sincerely called this one of his “fondest memories,” along with running over a man repeatedly with a truck while playing the same game.

Obviously Bissell wouldn’t be boasting about these things if he’d done them in real life—he’d probably be on death row—but the zeal and humor with which he mentions these high-points are disturbing, particularly as the passages they were included in came directly after Bissell’s moral defense of Grand Theft Auto and his lauding of the video game’s recent “turn toward message.”

Sure, “the shock of the new”—a tangible sensory experience Bissell says can “knock loose the familiar critical vocabularies”—has been a profound part of modern culture since there was modern culture. And, sadly, the Western turn away from remaining creative or talking openly about philosophical and spiritual issues after childhood has made experiences such as killing zombies in Resident Evil or wandering curiously through Zelda unmistakable rites of passage. However, as with the internet, the astounding (and regularly exponential) technological expansion of video games does not necessarily imply the advancement of the human mind or experience. And definitely not human connection.

In Santa Fe last weekend, an old San Francisco friend named Matt Dillon—who is now a religious studies PhD candidate at Rice—stayed with my family and I. On the subject of games such as World of Warcraft, in which participants create a character and sustain an ongoing battle-filled life inside the video game as that character, my friend claimed that there is little difference between playing these bloody new games and past generations reading about carnage in books by Homer and Tolkein. In these spiritually empty times, we must derive meaningful excitement and emotional progress from anything at our disposal, he said; and that’s an argument I can understand but not accept.

Consciously choosing to engage destructive behavior, even under the assumption that it’s OK to do zoom in with a sniper rifle and blow the head off a helicopter pilot if it’s only a video-game helicopter pilot, is a far cry from reading about Perseus’ beheading of Medusa.

The legendary characters of classic literature did not always behave in manners that would be acceptable in real life: They often murdered and betrayed, and they systematically abused women. But to witness such behavior from fictional characters, readers don’t make the poor choices for them. In games like the hugely popular Grand Theft Auto series and many others, players are given often-horrid missions—which invariably involve killing—but, in most cases, end up taking advantage of the off-the-clock “open world” modes that allow one to spend idle hours shooting pedestrians in the head, driving drunk and/or picking up prostitutes.

In Extra Lives, Tom Bissell hails the video game as the first medium in which consumers of a narrative are alive inside that narrative, able to control a character inside a story that controls that character’s ultimate possibilities. It can be astoundingly fun to spend an idle hour inside these make-believe spaces, where there are no real-world consequences beyond, say, unemployment and obesity. But it’s hard not to wonder: If the modern make-believe world we choose to inhabit is simply detritus, and life may well be no more than a narrative we tell ourselves, which is the world where our actions don’t count?

By Intern Drew Lenihan

Meet Dale Ball

9-11 am
Sierra del Norte Trailhead (off Hyde Park Road)

2-4 pm at Cerro Gordo Parking lot and Trailhead (off Upper Canyon Road)
Sunday, June 13

As Santa Feans, we often complain about the rising numbers of tourists and the change to our social and physical landscape, as  hotel companies and outside designers and builders bring in new styles of architecture and foreign aesthetics to our Southwestern town (the inside of Hotel St. Francis, for instance).  While it is sometimes hard to take our eyes off the sores that plague our town such as the Santa Fe Arcade, if we turn to our hills, the beauty that initially captivated us about Santa Fe is reaffirmed.  If we are motivated enough, we can hike up several of said hills at a special event next weekend.

Something we are quick to overlook is the hard work of the Santa Fe Conservation Trust.  Looking away from downtown, we see there are many hills not marked  by multimillion dollar homes, but  instead by numerous beaten paths. For may of these, we can thank the Santa Fe Conservation Trust.

Since its creation in 1994, SFCT has protected over 33,000 acres of land in the Santa Fe area and has created a network of miles of hiking trails through our foothills and forests, according to its website.  One of the most complex networks of trails through Atalaya, Picacho, and the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is the Dale Ball Trails, named for the visionary himself who carried the project from concept to construction.  At 86 years old Dale is still excited to show us the way through the mountains one more time as we celebrate his legacy.

Alan Ball, Dale Ball’s son, calls the trails “one of the most important quality of life improvements” in Santa Fe in recent history.  Appropriately, it  is time for us to show our gratitude to Mr. Ball by simply taking a hike with him on the trails he has bestowed upon our community.  Get your boots, sunscreen and safari hat and join us at the trailhead June 13.

Soccer City in Johannesburg, the theater for the final

It’s the most wonderful time in four years.  This Friday, the world will stop whatever it is doing, gather around the TV and cheer on 32 countries for this summer’s World Cup in South Africa.  Being the main patrons of culture in this town, SFR is not missing out on the fast-paced action; we are looking for a place to watch since we can’t be in South Africa ourselves.  For the next month we will be on a quest to find Santa Fe’s best venue to enjoy some grub and world-class soccer.

Not only is this World Cup historical because of its first-ever location on the African continent, but it will also serve as a background to many global political conflicts being played out in the world’s game.  Who can forget the past symbolic victories of Senegal over Old World colonizer France, Iran’s victory over the US during the Gulf War or Argentina winning the final over England only a few years after the Falkland Islands conflict?  These legendary games reaffirm that this sport is so much more than just athletic competition.

For most of the world, soccer is much more than mere sport; it is a source of national pride and a theater with a cast of colorful characters as well as many unique stories and dramas.  While many people around the world will be scrambling to find a radio or TV to tune into the cup, we here in Santa Fe have many options and can choose from a long list of different venues, fare and drink.

Which is why I have made it my quest as an SFR intern to find the best place in Santa Fe to watch the World Cup. This will be an ongoing blog series with a new entry or two every week about a different restaurant or bar to watch the action.  If you have any suggestions for Santa Fe world cup venues by all means e-mail us at culture@sfreporter.com and put “world cup” as the subject.  Kickoff starts this Friday when host South Africa plays Mexico at 8:00 am Mountain Time. My prediction? How do you say spoiler in Spanish?

La Mission
Directed by Peter Bratt
With Benjamin Bratt, Erika Alexander and Jeremy Ray Valdez
Rated R
Showing in Santa Fe at UA DeVargas (562 North Guadalupe) beginning June 11
(Q-and-A with director Peter Bratt and Santa Fe-native La Mission co-star Jeremy Ray Valdez on Saturday, June 12 at 7:30 pm. $10)

Review by Adam Perry (mppedro@gmail.com)

Prior to a few days ago, the 2000 film-version of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys was the only major motion picture I’d watched that was not only filmed in a city, but a neighborhood where I’ve lived. Seeing Michael Douglas booze it up in on-screen in Pittsburgh, where I grew up, to the sounds of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen was cool, but checking out the jarring new movie La Mission—shot in San Francisco’s culturally rich Mission District, where I lived from 2002-2008—was far more rewarding.

La Mission wasn’t based on an acclaimed novel, but the film’s heartfelt drama and realistic depiction of a gritty, harsh-reality-filled neighborhood are seriously penetrating on a level that the majority of recent urban-set movies don’t reach. Directed by Peter Bratt and starring his brother Benjamin, La Mission—alternately funny, sad, thought-provoking and romantic—poignantly touches on sociological and economical subjects while utilizing San Francisco as a colorful backdrop.

“You can take the man out of the Mission, but you can’t take the Mission out of the man,” one of lead-character Che’s (Bratt) homeboys in La Mission says during a low-rider jaunt through North Beach after Che expresses concern about his teenage son, Jesse (Santa Fe-native Jeremy Ray Valdez), who is soon leaving for UCLA. A recovering alcoholic and ex-con, Che wants the best for his son but worries that the young Mission High senior will disown his father and his father’s friends’ lifestyle and traditions once he moves to LA.

In a series of events reminiscent of a similar Sopranos story-line, La Mission takes a sharp and emotional turn when tatted-up tough-guy Che discovers that his son’s excuses for repeatedly not showing up to hang out with his father’s buddies (the “Mission Boyz”) are lies. In truth, Jesse is sleeping with an upper-class white guy and even dancing shirtless at a gay club in the Castro district, which is just a few blocks from the Mission District but might as well be on Mars.

A confused Che beats and disowns his son, later accepting Jesse’s homosexuality on the condition that he never mentions it again. Even after Jesse is shot and critically wounded by a homophobic young Mission thug, Che still violently asks his son to make a choice between an openly gay life and a life without a father.

For Mission District veterans, La Mission is at least partially a big-screen replay of phenomena we’ve seen first-hand—gentrification, hate crimes and battles over rising rents, just to name a few—but the Bratt brothers’ competent expression of such serious, and far too common, stories is remarkable. Especially if you haven’t lived in the Mission, La Mission is a “must see” movie if such a thing exists. It’s just hard to get over how much it makes me miss the vibrant neighborhood’s beautiful parks and peerless taquerías.