The City Different
I’ve always been a fan of this place. Years ago when I was on Instagram my handle was “a_life_different”, an alteration of the city’s sobriquet, “The City Different”. La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís, commonly known as Santa Fe, was founded in the time of the Spanish conquistadors and is the 3rd-oldest city in the US. This province of New Spain is another one of those few gems that among the sprawling American empire of apartment buildings and McDonald’s and Chevron stations, feels stuck in time. On empty streets where most bars close at 11pm, one can see the starry sky over quaint pueblo architecture of downtown where lights are sparse. It all looks so quiet, but she rewards you if you look closely.
Petroglyphs etched into the wall around the time of first contact. Perhaps it was recorded after first contact, and the death face in the top-right is a depiction of the metal-clad conquistadors, casting a pall over their life of lizards and star-watching.
White-lined Sphinx moth at feeding time among the flowers, just outside the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi . These curious moths match the hummingbird in size and flight pattern, and hover over flowers and slide their tongue down into their pistols to lap up nectar. One really, really strange thought kept occurring to me as I jumped around trying to photograph them - they look juicy. It’s been a very long time since I’ve felt the urge to eat a bug, but these are absolutely giant and I’m sure they’re full of sweet nectar. I wouldn’t expect Ben & Jerry’s exactly, but they’ve gotta be gushing with sugar. I’m sure birds think the same thing, which is why these moths only emerge from their roosts around dusk and hence the high ISO setting to compensate for the low light, which creates extra grain in the image. I can compensate with post processing software, but dialing it up too far creates a waxy effect.
I don’t know what the high-water mark of this trip has been because there are so many contenders. The Burning of Zozobra comes to mind, which is the marquee event where an enormous marionette effigy who represents gloom is burned. Or, perhaps it was the cabaret where flamenco performers danced passionately to the staccato of Spanish guitar, stomping the wooden floor when the songs climaxed and the other clapped in rhythm with the singer. Or perhaps it was walking the halls of the Institute of American Indian Arts and peeking into the classrooms, where many of the best and brightest students from all nations - Athabaskan, Tlingit, Crow and others, were sitting in front of easels or listening to lectures or sculpting. For years I’ve wanted to study here… do you think they’d say anything if I just took a seat next to them? But what is most striking to me is how each and every one without fail says hello as we pass by. And they weren’t friendly just at IAIA, but the whole town was like that and no place more so than the grungy Matador, where one swinger found me in the red room and had me feel her tits and gave me her tongue. Wearing a suit in that basement I got to be somebody. It didn’t bother me that her husband was sitting across the room from us and she waved at him after we made out, but what was bad etiquette was letting my date sit alone, so we made our way to the dance floor. The 6ft blonde gringo girl stood out like a llama in a dachshund rodeo, but no one paid us any attention. It was inconspicuous bliss amid the Latino dance music, and that is the nature of this place. For a moment your life is aligned and you walk alongside pure enchantment, then it returns to what is normal as it builds up to the next climax, like 60,000 people watching Zozobra burn before dispersing into the vast dark and the adobe city becomes quiet again, building up to the next climax.