The Santa Fe Review

Almost as soon as I entered the lobby of the Lensic on Saturday night, I could see that the audience was different from the usual symphony crowd. I spotted Geoffrey West, a physicist and theoretical biologist whose work I wrote about years ago in the New York Times, and Doyne Farmer, who appears in my book Fire in the Mind. There were other scientist friends like Joseph Traub, the Columbia University mathematician. Sandra Blakeslee, fellow science writer and cohost of the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, was in the audience. And during intermission I nearly collided head-on with Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobelist whose exploits I chronicled in Strange Beauty. I don’t think he has ever forgiven me. I felt for a few hours like I was living in a small town.

Science is as much a part of Santa Fe’s soul as music and art. With the Santa Fe Institute and the Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra both turning 25 this year, they had come together to produce Voyages of Discovery in honor of Charles Darwin and Felix Mendelssohn, who happen to have been born 200 years ago.

While waiting for the show to begin, I talked for a minute with Cormac McCarthy, who once advised me that “a semi-colon is simply an excrescence similar to bird lime.” (He had been reading the manuscript of The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments before it went to press.) He has also raised my suspicion of commas. I’d met him in the 1990s at a Santa Fe Institute dinner, and I remember his lamenting the lack of a really good biography of the quantum theorist Paul Dirac. (There is one now: The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo.)

Davis mansion and Santa Fe Institute

Symphony concerts customarily begin with board member and psychotherapist Penelope Penland, her hair radiant as electrified neon, thanking the evening’s underwriter — usually Garrett Thornburg or Eddie and Peaches Gilbert. This time it was Andrew and Sydney Davis. Earlier that day the New Mexican reported that the county had finally finished determining the value of their new home, which looms on a hilltop over the Santa Fe Institute: $20.4 million. County Tax Assessor Domingo Martinez says it’s probably the most expensive house in New Mexico. One can only hope so.

Other than the coincidence of their births, Darwin and Mendelssohn didn’t have much in common. But if you look hard enough you can find connections. Both men went on big boat trips and got very seasick. They came home and produced great works — Origin of the Species and the Scottish Symphony. Only the former is indispensable.

Between renditions of the composer’s work, the actor Jonathan Richards read letters from Darwin. Kirk Ellis, a documentary television producer, filled in for Mendelssohn. David Krakauer, a Santa Fe Institute researcher and impresario, alternated with the orchestra’s conductor, Steven Smith, in providing commentary. Whether or not this all congealed, it was a noble experiment and a good excuse for bringing two different Santa Fes under one roof.

It was snowing after the curtain calls, and music was booming from Evangelo’s across San Francisco Street. Back at home I searched the web for a list of other 1809 birthdays: Abraham Lincoln, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Kit Carson, Edgar Allen Poe. A century later in 1909 Wallace Stegner, Al Capp, Lionel Hampton, Malcolm Lowery, and Vivian Vance were born. Samuel Johnson arrived on earth in 1709 as did Jacques de Vaucanson, famous in some circles for inventing a mechanical duck, an early attempt at artificial life. Maybe they all could be squeezed somehow into a grand finale celebrating Santa Fe’s 400th —  and the human preoccupation with anniversaries that end in zeroes, or at least with a 5.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Last night Channel 13 News in Albuquerque broadcast an embarrassing report about Santa Fe’s Cuarto Centenario. At least it was supposed to be embarrassing. “After pouring [sic] over hundreds of expenditures involving more than $1 million,” Kim Holland reports, “News 13 found gaps in receipts, contracts and reports about what exactly the money was spent on.” The text of her story, So many candles; so few receipts, appears, typos and all, on the station’s website.

Missing receipts are obviously a concern, but Ms. Holland’s examples are petty. It’s hard to get overly exercised about a grand total of $264 in taxpayer money going to ship biscochitos to London. “The city isn’t saying how schmoozing the Brits benefits Santa Fe taxpayers,” she admonishes. A shocking revelation.

	And there was $1,700 for a Spanish delegate dinner. Yet there's
	no record of what the event was for, who was on the guest list or
	what they talked about, and again the city's [sic] isn't saying
	either.

The dinner was presumably connected with the visit this fall of the Spanish prince and princess, which was one of the Cuarto Centenario’s successes.

The only real surprise in her report is that $5,000 went to Carlos Fierro to lobby Congress for funding and to raise donations for the celebration. But as Kiera Hay reports this morning in the Journal, he completed his work well before he was charged with vehicular homicide.

The bottom line is this: of the $1 million Channel 13 investigated, the big controversy is over those biscochitos. The real story about the 400th anniversary is the excessive amount spent on salaries, web hosting, graphic design, and so forth — and those were documented expenses.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Earlier this year at a Santa Fe Symphony benefit dinner at El Farol, I found myself seated next to Maurice Bonal, the liquor license broker, lobbyist, and former city councilman who serves as chairman of Santa Fe 400th Anniversary Inc., the nonprofit corporation charged with organizing the Cuarto Centenario. Somehow the conversation drifted to the city’s more recent past, and I said how much nicer Santa Fe must have been before the massive urban renewal project in the 1960s when the bulldozers scooped out Paseo de Peralta, obliterating Castillo Street and large swaths of Manhattan and Hillside Avenues. With those narrow, winding streets still intact, Santa Fe must have had a more European feel. Mr. Bonal had a more practical take. Driving downtown, he said, was a nightmare.

He seemed like the kind of gung-ho, no-nonsense guy who could make a go of Santa Fe’s 400th birthday party. He gave me his card and an official Cuarto Centenario pin. I assumed, without thinking much about it, that this would be a modest volunteer effort with perhaps a small support staff.

It was startling to learn last month about Mr. Bonal’s grandiose plans. The organization did its best to keep its expenditures secret — a violation of the laws governing nonprofit corporations — but the Reporter ferreted out the numbers. The celebration’s executive director, Libby Dover, who was recruited from Seattle, was making $120,000 a year. She was assisted by a sponsorship manager ($66,000), a community coordinator ($52,000), an executive coordinator ($50,400), an events assistant ($38,400), and a bookkeeper ($30,000).

On top of all that, $4,000 a month was paid to a public-relations company, Ballantines PR, and another $10,000 a month to the Sharpe Alliance, “an integrated brand building, marketing and promotion company” in Beverly Hills, which was supposed to attract corporate sponsors. Santa Fe’s Cuarto Centenario. Brought to You by Taco Bell. An astonishing $2,100 a month was paid to create and maintain a rather ordinary website and between $1,200 and $2,500 a month for “graphic design.”

All this money was committed with the assumption that as much as $10 million would be raised for 16 months of festivities beginning on Labor Day weekend 2009 with President Obama taking the stage at Fort Marcy Park along with President Calderón of Mexico and the king and queen of Spain. There would be PBS documentaries and a $250,000 webcast.

Even in boom times and with an ambitious organizer like Ms. Dover, such extravagant notions were probably doomed from the start. We all know what happened. Having burned through $1.1 million in seed money from the city and an additional half a million from the state and local businesses, we had to settle for a visit by the prince and princess and a downsized festival at the park. With no big donors to foot the bill, the planned mega-celebrations have been drastically scaled back. The organizers have dismissed Ms. Dover and two of her staff and are asking the city for $750,000 in emergency funds to soldier on.

Maybe now we can continue with something less pretentious and more befitting of Santa Fe. A good example is the farolito display proposed by Bill Dupuy and Dan Gerrity of public station KSFR and described this morning in the New Mexican. The city would pay the kids at Warehouse 21 a few thousand dollars to stamp brown paper bags with the 400th anniversary emblem. City workers, as they do every year, would fill the bags with sand and candles and place them around the Plaza. Who needs 400th Anniversary Inc.?

Probably a lot of people are wondering the same thing, which might explain Mr. Bonal’s testy reaction: “There is a copyright issue. Nobody can go out and just pirate [the logo],” he told the New Mexican. “They would have to have a licensing agreement.”

Presumably the price would be less than what he charges for a liquor license.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review