Farfariello

Eduardo Migliaccio (sometimes known as Edoardo or Edward) was an actor, impressionist, and impersonator in the Italian-American immigrant community in the United States in the earliest years of the 20th century. Born in Cava dei Terreni, in the province of Salerno near Naples, on 15 April 1882 (the precise year is in dispute and may have been as early as 1880), Migliaccio came to America between 1895 and 1898. In Little Italy’s caffè-concerto, restaurants offering entertainments, Migliaccio created the machietta coloniale, character sketches combining verse, prose, and song, satirizing the immigrant experience. Around 1900, he created his signature character, Farfariello, the greenhorn who “turned the tables on the ethnic stereotype,” and he became nationally known by that stage name. Using dialect and immigrant types, Migliaccio, some of whose repertoire of comic Neapolitan songs were recorded by RCA Victor, became one of the most popular figures in Italian-American theater.

Migliaccio began his entertainment career in his native Italy as a singer of Neapolitan comedy and folk songs. After studying design and the so-called plastic arts such as carving and sculpture at the Istituto di Belli Arti in Naples, he began observing the macchiettista Nicolo Maldacea, who would become a model for the character Farfariello, at the Teatro Nuovo in that city. A macchietta is a skit or comic scene lampooning a recognizable character type, written in verse, often set to music, containing double-entendres and with spoken passages in prose. Machiettista is usually translated as ‘impressionist,’ but that’s an oversimplification: like their American and British counterparts in vaudeville and music halls, macchiettisti were actors, singers, dancers, mimes, clowns, and social commentators. Closer to our own lifetimes, you might think of former vaudevillians who transferred to television in the Golden Age: Sid Caesar, Red Skelton, Groucho Marx, or, in the next generations, Carol Burnett; today, the closest we can come would be Martin Short, Tracy Ullman, or the casts of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In or Saturday Night Live. (It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Chico Marx modeled his comic persona after some macchiettista’s caricature. After all, not only were the Marxes vaudevillians themselves, but they came out the Jewish counterpart of the same immigrant theater tradition in New York City of the same era.) Many, like Migliaccio, were also writers, composers, and lyricists as they often created their own material. We’ll see that Migliaccio was much more even than that.

The Migliaccios of Italy were wealthy, but lost $50,000 in a mine fraud after they emigrated to America. As was often common, Migliaccio’s father came across before the rest of the family. He became an officer in the Banca Sandolo in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, where Migliaccio joined him when he arrived here just before the turn of the century. The would-be entertainer held many short-lived jobs before devoting himself to the stage, including manual laborer, presser in a garment sweatshop, and letter-writer for the illiterate clients of his father’s bank. This gave the young man insight into the feelings, thoughts, and desires of the immigrant Italian-American laborers who’d become the base of his audience and introduced him to a variety of roles in the Italian-American community from which he’d draw his material and characters. Dissatisfied with the position in Hazleton, he left Pennsylvania for another job at the Banca Avallone on Mulberry Street in New York City’s Little Italy.

The first record of Migliaccio as a stage performer in New York City appeared in 1900 as a member of the Antonio Maiori Company in, of all vehicles, Hamlet. (I have no evidence of the role he played—perhaps one of the comic parts like the gravedigger or Polonius.) This seems to have been Migliaccio’s only attempt at serious drama. The young performer, however, may have started his U.S. career around 1898, appearing in the cafés-chantants or caffè-concerto of New York’s Italian immigrant community. These were restaurants, bars, or music halls in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and West Hoboken, New Jersey, in the 1890s and early 1900s that offered entertainment along with food and drink—sort of like a downscale precursor of the modern-day night club. (Actually, I think of it as a kind of prototype of what the Caffe Cino, the granddaddy of Off-Off-Broadway theaters, was like when it first started. It may not entirely be coincidental that Joe Cino was Italian-American himself and could conceivably have had caffè-concerto—sometimes also called caffè-cantanti—in mind when he launched his coffeehouse.) Much of the entertainment in the earliest days was amateur, just as Migliaccio was. Like many such endeavors, though, both the venues and the performers transformed into professionals and their influence spread across immigrant America. Almost every ethnic group had its own forms of this popular entertainment and wherever there were émigré communities—San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle—caffè-concerto popped up, and so did the performers, local and, soon, national figures who toured. Perhaps surprisingly, the audiences for these performances, clearly created for spectators from the same parts of the world as the entertainers, began to include non-immigrant Americans at major theaters like the Palace on Broadway where Migliaccio performed in English.

In the caffè-concerto, such as the Villa Vittorio Emmanuele III on Mulberry Street near Canal in New York’s Little Italy where the macchiettista appeared early in his U.S. career, Migliaccio sang Italian folk songs, ballads, and Neapolitan comedy songs, and he performed the macchiette he’d seen back in Naples. It was here that Migliaccio invented the variation that became known as the machietta coloniale, the immigrant American version of the sketch comedy back in the old country, caricaturing local figures and the Italian-American experience and dialects. He limned the “archetype of the poor southern Italian immigrant” in the Little Italies of New York and other U.S. cities: the street vendor, the rag-picker, the organ-grinder. A common character was the cafone, a buffoon who adopted American clothes, mannerisms, and slang, and yet wasn’t any more American than the newest arrival from Naples. Migliaccio portrayed the greenhorn “who murdered the English language as well as the Italian” and played a “hero as well as a clown, exposing the weaknesses of the wealthier, more prosperous people . . . and somehow, triumphing over them.” Impersonating both male and female characters (he was well-known for performing in drag), Migliaccio also lampooned famous Italian and Italian-American figures such as his friend Enrico Caruso (with whom he’d record for RCA after he became famous) and soprano Luisa Tetrazzini. It was the character of the “quick-witted greenhorn with his own set of cultural values, thus turning the tables on the ethnic stereotype” that became Migliaccio’s beloved signature stage persona: Farfariello.

While he was still in Naples, the young entertainer introduced a comic love song, “Femmene-Fe!” (“Women”), and it became so popular with the audiences of the city’s music halls that when he was on the streets, people would point him out as the populizer of the song whose refrain eventually gave him his stage name. Farfariello literally means “little butterfly,” but it carries the connotation of a man who flits from woman to woman—that is, a “little devil.” Often compared to Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Farfariello derived his humor from the abuse of language along with an element of social satire. The routines included shrewd commentary on the class structure in Italy and Italo-America. The character “served as a mirror—satirically distorted but a mirror nonetheless—in which the Italian immigrants could see the reflection of their own recent struggle, sufferings and triumphs.” Farfariello’s audiences “laughed themselves sick,” according to Giuseppi Cautela in the American Mercury. “And after they got through laughing, it made them think.” So popular was Migliaccio that another successful caffè-concerto entertainer in Little Italy, Antonietta Pisanelli Alessandro, took him as her partner for her act in which they sang duets. Then in 1905, Alessandro moved her little troupe to San Francisco, where she nearly singlehandedly started the local Italian-immigrant theater. It was at her theater on Little Italy’s Mulberry Street that Farfariello made his début as a character.

I don’t know how long Farfariello remained with Alessandro, with whose company he toured on and off, but I imagine he eventually outgrew the ensemble. Apparently he returned east to Little Italy, the place with which he was most identified, around 1917 or ’18. Migliaccio conceived, wrote, and performed his own sketches (his brother Ernesto composed some of his music and often led the orchestra at Farfariello’s performances) and except for that one, brief stint with the Maiori troupe, he never did regular dramas. He used the “new Italian-American dialect,” sometimes called “Italglish,” composed not just of Italian but of a dialect of the Neapolitan vernacular seasoned with Americanisms and local slang. (No one from the streets of Naples, for instance, would ever understand expressions like barra for ‘bar’ or visco for ‘whiskey.’ Denizens of Little Italy used fait for ‘fight’ but also for ‘punch’—as in chiaver nu fait, ‘give a punch’ and nato fait, ‘another punch.’) Though photos show that some of Farfariello’s characters (including some of the women) were very realistic in appearance, his make-up and costumes were often exaggerated, deliberately styled to provoke laughter with masks and prostheses. Migliaccio taught himself wig- and mask-making, installing a workshop in his home, and even devised a quick-change technique by constructing each costume as one unit with snaps in back. He meticulously practiced every gesture, step, line, and inflection before a mirror. In a half-hour performance, Farfariello did six or more macchiette, using grimaces, gestures, and pantomime. Alternating the satirical and the tragicomic in his routines, Farfariello depicted the bewilderment of the immigrant.

Photographer and music critic Carl Van Vechten, considered an accurate chronicler of the culture of his times, assessed Migliaccio’s material and approach:

Satiric verse, I say, but never offensive. Benevolent good-humour is the keynote of his impersonations and even his models laugh at the caricatures of themselves. Farfariello completely transforms his appearance for his several roles. Every detail of his costume is studied, stockings, shoes, neckties, and hats included. His face goes through an alembic; a new nose is added or a pair of shaggy eyebrows, or a complete mask. Each of his characters has a distinct walk, a distinct use of the hands, and his hands are marvellous in their expressiveness. Because scarcely one of his men and women speaks Italian Farfariello has found it necessary to learn at least five dialects. In the past twenty years he tells me that he has "created" (as he writes his own songs, invents his own disguises and gestures this word can be legitimately applied to his interpretations) over a thousand of these characters and at the present time he has a repertory of two hundred and fifty. You will find it difficult, indeed, not to meet new people each time you see him.

A description of Farfariello’s one and only film appearance gives an idea of his repertoire. All of the characters were part of Farfariello’s stage act, though the cinema set-up was clearly invented for the movie. Showing up as himself at an audition for a New York film producer, Farfariello sings several of his famous Neapolitan songs. The impresario, who doesn’t recognize Farfariello, rejects him, so the performer returns disguised as Mademoiselle Fifi, a flashy sciantosa, a cabaret singer. Rejected again, the impressionist comes back dressed as an armed rackettiere, a mafioso, who brags about his protection racket. Turned away again, Farfariello finally comes in as a slightly drunk cafone, who after 30 years in America has refused to learn a word of English. The bumpkin tries to sing “O Sole Mio,” a sentimental paean to his native Naples. Farfariello then delivers one of his most famous routines, “’A lengua ’taliana,” a witty speech in the “Italglish” of the southern Italian immigrant praising the Italian language and the Neapolitan dialect in comparison to the inadequacies of English. In the end, informing the producer that he was the one portraying all those people, Farfariello gets the part. The camera zooms in and Farfariello addresses the audience directly, saying, “Aggiuffatt a ’merica”—the macchiettista’s catchphrase—“I made it in America.”

After seeing Farfariello on stage on the Bowery in lower Manhattan in 1918, Van Vechten provided a first-hand observation:

A man and woman have just finished singing a duet from The Count of Luxemburg and have left the stage. Now, without a second's pause, a deft but coatless stage attendant slips past the proscenium arch and changes the placard of announcement on the easel. The new placard contains a single word:

FARFARIELLO

Violent applause sweeps over the playhouse . . . . Then . . . the orchestra strikes up a tripping tune and Farfariello appears in evening clothes. He walks to the footlights and announces his first song, Femmene-Fe, a trifle about women, with a pretty refrain which he sings with a pleasant baritone voice. This unexpectedly commonplace beginning is one of the subtleties of Farfariello's art. The song over, he leaves the stage; the applause is perfunctory; the crowd knows that it must allow its idol time to prepare himself for his first impersonation. . . . The orchestra stops playing. Chatter simmers up through the smoky atmosphere . . . . But the hubbub dies away as the orchestra begins a new tune. A transformed Farfariello enters; from hair to shoes he is a French concert-hall singer of the type familiar at Coney Island. He has transfigured his eyes; his nose is new; gesture, voice, all his powers, physical and mental, are moulded in a new metal. He shrieks his vapid ditty in raucous falsetto; he flicks his spangled skirt ; he winks at the orchestra leader and shakes his buttocks; his bosom has become an enormous jelly. . . . Again he has gone but soon the figure of an Italian patriot appears, a large florid person with heavy hair and moustaches. Across his chest, over his shoulder, and ending in a sash at his hip, he wears the tricolour of Italy. Farfariello paints the man in action: he is for ever marching in parades (the moment when he falls out of step always arouses a hot chill of appreciation in me!); he is for ever making speeches at banquets; he is for ever shouting, Viva Italia! Like all good caricatures this is not only a comment on the thing itself, it is the thing itself. And as this portrait is essentially provincial it thereby passes easily into the universal apprehension. We all know this man in some guise or other. . . . Farfariello goes on, singing, acting, impersonating. . . . Perhaps next he becomes a bersagliere, perhaps a Spanish dancer, perhaps a funeral director, or a night-watchman, or an Italian nurse-girl. . . . He may sing Pasquale Basciamento, Rosalina, Patsy, Quanno Spusaie Francisco, or 'O Richiamato, but always at the end he is the iceman. The applause grows wilder and wilder, the shouts more thunderous, as his half-hour dwindles away, and sooner or later, mingled with the bravos are cries of "Iceman! Iceman!" this iceman who sings folk-songs of his native land to amuse his customers, who forget their empty ice-boxes while they listen to him. Of all Farfariello's numbers this is the most popular and perhaps deservedly so for to his Italians it suggests both home and the adopted country.

As a conclusion, the writer summed up Farfariello’s attraction for his audiences:

His appeal is made directly to the very people he characterizes or caricatures. Almost every one of his types is present in his audiences every night, and they have some appreciation for the care he devotes to his impersonations, the reverence he feels for his art. His reward is complete understanding, a wave of personal feeling that destroys the barrier of the footlights. It is a reward which is bestowed on few interpreters.

Farfariello was a great success and spawned many imitators, though Migliaccio was known universally throughout the Italian émigré community across the country as “Il Re dei Macchiettisti”—“The King of the Impressionists.” Critics and audiences alike said that he “approached brilliancy in his insight and penetration of the heart of a character.” In 1917-18, Migliaccio organized his own operetta company and toured the U.S.; in 1919, he toured Chicago and California. In 1932, Farfariello appeared in that sole film, Attore cinematografico, a 15-minute short directed by Bruno Valetty for the Roman Film Corporation of New York City. Often known by its English title, The Movie Actor, it was, as I noted, based on Farfariello’s vaudeville routine. The New York Times reported that the short was “an excellent vehicle in which Farfariello (Cav. E. Migliaccio) . . . gives a series of impersonations with laughter-provoking songs and dialogue.” In 1936 he toured Italy and, starting in 1937, during the heyday of Italian radio in the United States, he appeared on programs performing his routines and singing his repertoire of comic songs, many of which had been recorded, as I said, on 78’s by RCA Victor during the ’teens and early ’20s. In 1940, four years after his tour of Italy when war in Europe and Mussolini’s Fascists’ controlling the old country put pressure on American Italians to break ties with the motherland, King Victor Emmanuel III knighted Migliaccio as a Cavaliere del Ordine della Corona d’Italia, citing his efforts to keep the émigré community in the United States connected to Italy. (He was often referred to in the newspapers—like the New York Times review above—and programs and on handbills and posters as Cav. Eduardo Migliaccio—Sir Eduardo Migliaccio.)

On 27 March 1946, Eduardo Migliaccio, who then lived in Brooklyn, died of cancer in a Manhattan hospital. Depending on when his actual birth date was, he was between 63 and 65 years old. At the time of his death, he was believed to have accumulated over 600 macchiette. His like was never seen again on the Italian-American music hall stage, despite the attempts of many successors to imitate him. (Riccardo Migliaccio, grandson of Farfariello, performs today with a troupe that recreates some of the macchiette of his grandfather’s day.) Emelise Aleandri, who’s written extensively about the Italian immigrant theater in this country, asserts: “What is left is the memory of the smiling man behind the big noses, funny costumes, and crazy wigs who found such an endearing way to make his compatriots, strangers in a strange land, feel at home.”

“Don't Sit Back – Push Back”

By Paul Molloy

[The article below appeared in Allegro, the publication of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, in April 2011. As readers of ROT will know, I have a long-standing and fierce interest in the support of the arts in U.S. society, both governmental and private. No great society has existed without giving tangible support to its artists and the art they create. It doesn’t have to be money, of course, but that is ultimately the measure by which we gauge the status of any community endeavor. It’s also the necessary foundation of almost any other kind of public support, including art in education (teachers and equipment cost money), accessible venues (even park land requires funds to keep up and maintain), or publicity (newspaper ads and TV commercials, along with posters and mailings to keep audiences informed, have a financial cost as well). When a government, whether local, state, or federal, takes stands in opposition to art, artists, or any component in the complex network in which art functions, the repercussions eventually reach the spectator-consumer—you and me. The results of that opposition, even just neglect, can take years and even decades to reverse. When that happens, we as a society, a culture, suffer and generations can be deprived of the important consequences of accessible art, art education, and the free expression of ideas. Paul Molloy, Political Director of Local 802, speaking for the musicians union, makes important points in “Don’t Sit Back”; I urge you all to give it serious thought. ~Rick]

'Disaster capitalism' and its impact on arts and education

The union busting in Wisconsin brought out thousands of protestors. Many are waking up to how bad things have gotten.

How did we get to a place where vilifying teachers, the arts and working families has become an accepted economic strategy to "restore our country’s financial health"?

It didn’t happen overnight. The attacks on organized labor, the arts and teachers are part of a scheme that’s been decades in the making – a political strategy that sees the government as a facilitator for corporate profit above all else.

It goes like this:

• Manufacture a financial crisis by taking the common wealth (your tax dollars) and redistributing it upward in the form of tax cuts for the very wealthy.
• Then, revenue that ordinarily pays for things like public education, first responders, social safety nets and food, water, air and other environmental protections is now in the bank accounts of people and entities with no incentive to invest in new businesses or jobs. (Why? Because the government is handing them wealth for free.)

In fact, over the past three decades, these policies created a society where the 400 wealthiest people in the country control more capital than the other 150 million-plus U.S. citizens combined.

The road from there to here

How was this possible? After three decades of sheer repetition in the media, the general public bought into the idea that if you give large tax cuts to the wealthy, they will use them to create jobs, prosperity and a healthy economy for all. There’s just one problem: it’s not true.

• Big tax cuts passed in 1921 and 1925 didn’t help the economy. In fact, wages stagnated, and in 1929 the stock market crashed and gave us the Great Depression.
• After the 1981 tax cut was passed, the U.S. experienced a recession that lasted nearly two years.
• Three years after the big tax cuts of 1987, growth slumped, giving us the recession in 1991.
• The years from 2001 and 2008 saw some of the slowest economic growth in decades.
• Despite tax cuts in 2001, 2003 and a tax rebate in 2008, the U.S. economy lost 4.5 million jobs between 2007 and January 2009.

In 2008, the economy sank into the worst recession since the Great Depression. At the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, 25 percent of all American children lived in poverty, official rates of unemployment hovered around 10 percent, but were more like 25 percent for young people and over 30 percent in some minority communities.

When the country is in financial dire straits, it creates opportunities for ideological politicians to use the crisis to go after organizations and segments of the workforce with which they disagree politically in the name of budget balancing.

The attack on public sector unions in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan is one such example. Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, only in office since January 2011, declared a $177 million shortfall in the state budget and that painful cuts were necessary.

When public sector unions willingly stepped up to the plate to do their part, Governor Walker insisted they give up some of their collective bargaining rights.

What the governor did not disclose is that when in office just under two weeks, he and his allies in the legislature gave away $117 million in tax breaks to corporations. Neither the collective bargaining rights Walker sought to eliminate nor the public unions had anything to do with Wisconsin’s budget gap.

What’s lost on ideologues like Governor Walker is that economists will tell you that a good way to get out of debt is to increase jobs and GDP.

This too seems lost on the leadership in the House of Representatives. Promises of job-creating legislation during the 2010 election cycle have been shelved in favor of more ideological initiatives.

Three months into the 112th Congress, they have created zero jobs.

(By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office reports that the 111th Congress, two months in, created or saved 3.3 million jobs).

However, the current House majority did vote to eliminate funding for National Public Radio (and with it, critical infrastructure for disseminating AMBER Alerts, which have successfully recovered 532 abducted children).

Cutting through to the marrow

Maintaining this state of emergency mentality allows ideological politicians to insist on deep cuts in taxpayer- funded programs unrelated to the court system, the banking system, defense or commerce.

What does this mean for public schools?

• The phony arguments for improving public education that gave birth to the "teach to the test" model will only intensify and worsen.
• When funds are cut from education budgets, existing problems are compounded.
• Meal programs for the disadvantaged are cut, classroom sizes increase while the number of qualified teachers needed to address the needs of all students decreases.

To add insult to injury, teachers – particularly the most experienced and longest serving among us – will continue to be blamed by many politicians and talking heads in the media for the effects that poverty, hunger, abuse and lopsided distribution of resources have on student performance.

These attacks are currently being used to strip teacher seniority rights, divert public money to charter schools that foster a two-tiered, second-class citizenship system for special needs and second language children and to undercut living wages for teachers.

In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg wants to transfer $139 million in public funds to charter schools next year and cut $207 million from public schools.

As I said in last month’s Allegro, one might be inclined to think that the emergent model of education in the U.S. is to provide just enough training to supply employers (that benefit exponentially from these tax cuts) with a continuous source of cheap, unskilled and low-skilled labor.

Attacking the arts

The offensive against the arts occurs on multiple fronts. During the culture wars of the 1980’s, certain religious groups and their political allies in congress assailed certain federally funded works of art as indecent, blasphemous or subversive.

Calls for "decency" and "moral values" – litmus tests for works of art that received public funding – buzzed throughout Capitol Hill.

When the NEA came up for a five-year budget review in 1989, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms introduced an appropriation bill to ban the funding of what he considered "obscene" art.

His bill failed, but the compromise has had a chilling effect on federal funding of free speech and artistic expression ever since.

It required the NEA to adopt obscenity guidelines established in 1973 by the Supreme Court.

While Congress couldn’t directly deny grants to artists whose work it considered obscene, the NEA had to from that point forward.

However, Congress does have the authority to defund the NEA, and depending on which party controls both chambers, threatens to do so in the name of decency, family values and fiscal prudency.

As part of the temporary budget bill passed the first week of March, the House of Representatives voted to cut $43 million in funding for the NEA and kill the Arts in Education programs at the U.S. Department of Education.

(Incidentally, the greatest beneficiaries of this program are New York State schoolchildren.)

In addition, the House also voted to cut significant funding for the National Writing Project ($25.6 million), Reading is Fundamental ($24.8 million), Teach for America ($18 million), National Board for Professional Teaching Standards ($10.7 million), New Leaders for New Schools ($5 million) and many other important arts education programs.

In addition to attacking arts and arts funding from a cultural point of view, anti-intellectualism, a centuries old, divisive propaganda tool which shuns individual expression and independent thought, is deployed to generate hostility and mistrust toward artists and teachers for political gain.

The argument goes like this. Education and expertise are regarded as the arrogant and snobbish products of an elite and privileged upbringing and are therefore out of sync with mainstream American values and the "just folks, wanna-have-a-beer-with" personas we seek to hold office and make major decisions.

As a result, those with backgrounds in the arts, sciences, philosophy or literature are to be regarded with suspicion and contempt (as are their supporters in office and other places of influence).

By delegitimizing these fields, their respective workforces and the skills necessary to work in them, it becomes "acceptable" to cut funding for higher education, despite what people like our president and governor say about helping our kids become more competitive in the workplace through a leaner, more efficient education system.

Since 2008, 43 states have enacted drastic cuts in higher education, making it more difficult for kids from poor and middle class families to get the quality education they need to succeed in life.

In New York, Gov. Cuomo wants to cut aid to State colleges by 10 percent. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett wants to cut funding for state colleges and universities by nearly 50 percent.

Don't sit back: push back

Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein coined the phrase "disaster capitalism" to describe "this phenomenon of seizing disasters to push through this radical brand of capitalism . . ." She maintains that such public policies "only work if we don’t know about them."

The general public is slowly beginning to wake up to the extreme ideological overreach witnessed in recent weeks.

Protesters took to the state capitals in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan to protest their respective governors’ threats to public sector unions and working families.

Demonstrations continue nationwide in favor of collective bargaining rights and balanced tax policies that benefit all Americans, not just 400 of them.

In a show of solidarity, Local 802 members took to the streets and joined with other unions in demonstrations at New York City Hall and the Statehouse in Trenton, New Jersey.

As for our industry, I’ve said it again and again. Unless we are willing to settle for a dystopian society devoid of curiosity beyond which mall has better curly fries, we cannot sit idly by and allow these deep, harmful cuts in arts and education.

As long we ignore cynical, reverse-Robin Hood public policies that steal from the poor to give to the rich, we can expect more cuts in arts and education spending, more attacks on organized labor and even larger transfers of wealth from the vast majority of the public to a select and powerful few.

If you’re ready to fight, we need you. Please contact my office at Pmolloy@Local802afm.org or (212) 245-4802, ext. 176.

Taos & Taos Pueblo: History

[Welcome to part two of my discussion of the town of Taos and the nearby Indian pueblo that predates it. (If you haven’t read part one, which gives some background and sets the scene for this exploration, I recommend going back to my last ROT post and catching up first.) This section mostly covers the history of the area, both the Indian people through colonial times and the modern town in the 20th century. If you consider the history as I’ve outlined it, you’ll get an inkling of why so many different people, from the Pueblo Indians themselves to the artists and writers centuries later to the hippies of the 1960s, were attracted to this area of the country and why some people have fought so fiercely to hold on to it and the life they made there.]

Spain conquered the territory of Nueva México between 1540 and 1542 when Francisco Vázquez de Coronado took a huge force north to find the legendary Seven Golden Cities of Cibola. The first Spanish governor of New Mexico, Juan de Oñate, was appointed in 1598. The Spanish remained in control of New Mexico until 1821, when Mexico wrested its independence from its mother country and took command of Nueva España and all its North American territories. Texas broke away in 1836 to become an independent state allied to the United States, and after the Mexican-American War, the U.S. took the territories of Arizona, New Mexico, California, and part of Colorado as booty in 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The residents of the Taos Valley, Indian, Spanish, and Anglo, shifted ostensive allegiance with each change of administration. Many things changed with each shift, as you might imagine, often not for the best for one party or another.

When the Spanish first settled in Taos, relations with the native Indians were friendly for the most part. Pueblos aren’t generally hostile and their society is built on accommodation and appeasement, not aggressiveness and competition. They’re also not acquisitive so territorial conquest isn’t part of their epistemology. Land isn’t a commodity to be owned in any case, so sharing it with others, as long as everyone leaves everyone else alone to live their lives as they see fit, is not a problem. The Pueblos had been sharing the land for centuries with each other, the Hopi and the Navajo, and, less easily, the Apache. But as the Spanish grew more numerous and the reach of the Inquisition spread to New Spain, the Taos Indians felt threatened and oppressed as missionaries, looking for converts, meddled in the Indians’ religious affairs and the colonial leaders demanded tribute and slave labor. Indian men were locked up or whipped for breaking the Spaniards’ laws and forced conversions became the rule. By 1640, the tensions had grown to the boiling point and the Taos natives revolted, killing the priest and several settlers. The Indians left the pueblo for 21 years, until they were persuaded to return by the new governor, López de Mendizábal.

The situation only got worse. Punishment for infractions was brutal and arbitrary and when 40 men were hanged for refusing to abandon their native religion, Taos Pueblo became the center of a rebellion organized by Popé, a medicine man from San Juan Pueblo hiding in Taos. Popé quietly traveled from village to village, and on 10 August 1680, all the pueblos rose up in the Pueblo Revolt. The Indians killed almost 500 settlers and 21 priests in the churches the Spaniards had imposed on the villages. They tore down the churches, destroying the records of the settlements, and every Indian who’d been forcibly baptized was bathed with amole, a ritual cleanser made from yucca plants, to remove the stain of Spanish corruption. The Spanish invaders retreated back to Mexico and for a time, Nueva México and the Four Corners area was once more free of its colonial masters after 82 years. The Spanish abandoned Pueblo territory for a dozen years.

The Spanish reinvaded New Mexico in 1692, but the Pueblos remained restive, striking at the invaders from the mountains, until 1696 when Governor Diego de Vargas defeated the Indians at Taos Canyon. The Pueblos disarmed and moved back to their villages. In the 18th century, the Spanish governors of New Spain and New Mexico executed many royal land grants that carved up the territory into large tracts controlled by powerful Spanish families and soldiers rewarded for service to the Spanish Crown. The conditions for both settlers and Indians in New Mexico and Taos remained mostly unchanged into the 19th century. In 1821, Mexico won independence from Spain and gained control of all of New Spain including New Mexico; the people of Taos, however, felt little change in the far-northern outpost of the new nation. Until the opening of the Santa Fe Trail in 1826, that is.

The Santa Fe Trail was an early-19th-century version of an Interstate Highway, stretching from Missouri to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Even though New Mexico and most of the West was part of Mexico, Americans took advantage of the relatively easy route (for the day, mind you) and came to New Mexico in droves to benefit from the open land, fertile soil, and untapped opportunity; one early such traveler was 16-year-old Christopher Carson, known since childhood as “Kit,” who became a prominent and famous Taoseño. (In 1835, those same kinds of American settlers had become a powerful force in the Mexican territory of Tejas and declared the territory independent of Mexico. A revolution, including the famous Battle of the Alamo in 1836, eventually established the Republic of Texas.) By the 1830s, though, Mexican rule had reached Taos and in 1837, the alcalde (mayor) of Don Fernando de Taos was arrested and imprisoned by the Mexican government for taking a bribe to release a relative from jail. Everyone in town took up arms and on 3 August, with some Indian allies, freed the alcalde, launching the Revolt of 1837 (also called the Chimayó Rebellion). Albino Pérez, the regional governor, hearing of the uprising, headed north from Santa Fe on 9 August. When Pérez’s force met the rebels en route, his militia abandoned him and joined the insurrectionists. Pérez returned to Santa Fe for safety but fled the city with a few loyal soldiers. Pérez was intercepted by a band of Indians who killed and beheaded him; the northern rebels sent his head back to the capital. The norteños selected José Gonzales, a Taos Indian, as governor.

Gonzales’s government was no more popular than its predecessor, committing many outrages, mostly outside Gonzales’s control, and a counterrevolution ensued. Upon defeating the forces of the rebel government, the counterrevolutionaries under Manuel Armijo, a prominent soldier and politician, arrested Gonzales. The former governor and others were given amnesty, but after a month the revolt resurged and Armijo, appointed governor of New Mexico in January 1838, marched north to quell the new uprising. This time, on 23 January 1838, he executed four of the original rebels, including the alcalde of Taos who had been the catalyst for the revolt. He marched on Gonzales’s forces and the former governor fled, only to be captured and publicly executed in the plaza of Santa Cruz. Armijo remained in office until the United States Army took over the territory at the start of the Mexican-American War.

After the United States occupied New Mexico at the start of the Mexican War, the pueblo staged the Taos Rebellion in 1847. On 19 January 1847, a mob of Mexicans and Indian allies broke into Governor Charles Bent’s home in Taos, shot him with arrows, and scalped him in front of his family while he was still alive. The insurrectionists killed Brent, the sheriff, the circuit attorney, and the brothers-in-law of Bent and Kit Carson in front of the women, including Carson’s wife, and children. The next day, a larger rebel force murdered seven men at Arroyo Hondo and shot eight traders passing through the village of Mora. The American response followed quickly: Colonel Sterling Price, the military governor of the territory, marched north from Santa Fe with 300 men and routed the larger but untrained rebel force. Fifteen hundred revolutionaries took refuge in Taos Pueblo, barricading themselves behind the thick adobe walls of the Mission San Gerónimo. Colonel Price stormed the pueblo walls with axes and ladders and the Americans bombarded the church with howitzer fire and breached a hole in the wall through which Price continued to fire, killing about 150 of the rebels with rifle fire as they fled. The U.S. force captured some 400 insurrectionists in hand-to-hand combat at a loss of about seven American soldiers. In the aftermath, 28 of the rebels were tried for murder and treason and hanged in Taos. There were a few more skirmishes after the Siege of Taos, but after they were put down, the New Mexicans and Indians ceased armed rebellion.

In 1922, Taos Pueblo was a leader in forming the All Pueblo Council, aimed at defeating the Fall-Bursum bill, passed by the U.S. Senate to transfer the title of pueblo lands to American squatters living on them before 1902. The bill, requested in 1921 by President Warren G. Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, and proposed by Senator Holm O. Bursum of New Mexico, was defeated in the House of Representatives with the help of several sympathetic Anglo organizations. In 1926, when governmental pressure was exerted to break pueblo ceremonialism, the entire Taos Tribal Council went to jail for defying an order forbidding the Taos Indians from keeping their sons out of school for kiva initiation. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs had informed the Taos council that their religion made the boys “half animals” and prohibited them from staying out of school for initiation rites. The members of the council refused to comply and were jailed for violating the religious-crimes law. They were released by a federal court under public pressure.

Out of these conflicts evolved the Blue Lake Controversy of 1933. In 1906, the United States Government had seized tens of thousands of acres in which the Taos Indians had hunted and worshipped for centuries. By executive order, President Theodore Roosevelt placed 130,000 acres of Taos landscape, including Blue Lake, 25 miles north of town at an altitude of 11,000 feet up Mount Taos (Wheeler Peak), into Carson National Forest, under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service. Decades later, in an attempt to secure property rights for Anglo residents of Taos, the U.S. Congress negotiated with the Taos Pueblo, whose Spanish land-grant title to the land had been recognized by the U.S. Government, to purchase the land on which the town of Taos sits. The pueblo council rejected the proposal because they preferred secure rights to their sacred Blue Lake, referred to as the Indians’ “cathedral.” Despite Congress’s efforts, the Taos Council refused to sign the land deal and finally Congress agreed to exchange the Taos land for secure rights to the Blue Lake area. The Taos Indians relinquished payment of $142,000, but got what they wanted: undisputed access to the home of the kachinas, the sipapu, the source of all their blessings. (Many Native Americans believe that the sipapu is where souls emerge from beneath the Earth at birth and where they return to the spirit realm after death. Arguably the most sacred site in Indian theology, it is also the gateway to the home of the gods and where prayers must go to reach them. Each tribe and pueblo has its own sipapu; Blue Lake is the Taos Indians' traditional place of emergence.)

The Blue Lake dispute was not finally resolved until 15 December 1970, however, when President Richard Nixon signed Public Law 91-550, the Blue Lake Wilderness Protection Act. Sentiments in Taos County were divided when that bill was before Congress, according to the weekly Taos News: the Taos Town Council supported the bill; the Taos County Commission opposed it, citing concern for the water rights in the Rio Pueblo de Taos Watershed, the only source of domestic water for the pueblo and the town. There is evidence that the president’s final decision was influenced by a special viewing of a documentary, made during the San Gerónimo Festival period of 1969 and aired in November 1970 on NET (the predecessor of PBS) as the penultimate episode of Our Vanishing Wilderness, an eight-part ecology series. The film, The Water Is So Clear that a Blind Man Could See, made by Shelly and Mary Louise Grossman and their collaborator, John N. Hamlet, focused on the environmentalism of the Taos Indians. “Our ancestors came out of Blue Lake, long ago,” said an elderly Indian trying to explain the significance of the legislative action. “Blue Lake nourishes everything. It is the source of our wisdom, of our life. . . . Do you understand?”

Again, in 1936, Taos incited a revolt against the dominance of pueblo affairs by the influence of a woman Indian agent; and still again, in 1949, it rebelled against demands for a new ‘democratic’ government to supplant the old council, a system of elders and heredity. In an outgrowth of the 1948 extension of the right to vote to Native Americans, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior, supervised plebiscites in all pueblos to decide if the old council system should be supplanted by an elected pueblo government. Most pueblos voted to change their systems, but the ultra-conservative Taos Pueblo sent the BIA representative away, though the pressure to change the system remained strong both from within the pueblo, split between the younger residents and the older ones, and from outside. Nonetheless, the pueblo is still governed the old-fashioned way: a governor, responsible for civil and business affairs within the pueblo and relations with the Anglo world, and a war chief, in charge of safeguarding the mountains and Indian lands beyond the village walls, are appointed annually by the Tribal Council, made up of about 50 male elders. None are elected democratically.

The Taos area experienced other upheavals unassociated with the Native American population of the territory. There are still Latino and Chicano families in Taos County who trace their lineage back to the original Spanish settlers and whose land is part of old Spanish land grants going back to the 16th and 17th centuries. For them, this wasn’t the southwest—it was El Norte, the North. These norteño families, many of whom speak no English or very little (and even then, only begrudgingly), have lived in the valleys of northern New Mexico since long before Anglos came there in any numbers, when the Santa Fe Trail opened the way. Many of the present-day norteños live on the very same land that their ancestors from New Spain and later Mexico had defended against raiding Comanches. These residents of the secluded Taos Valley, which resisted assimilation into the dominant culture even by the Latino settlers—there’s just something in the water up there!—adamantly kept their traditions and Spanish/Mexican culture. Though some, especially the later generations, learned English, they maintained their fluency in Spanish even after the region became part of the United States. They don’t speak standard Spanish, however, or even contemporary Mexican Spanish, but a backwoods norteño dialect full of archaisms, colloquialisms, and contractions. Some of the villages look like towns the current residents’ ancestors might have inhabited in Renaissance Spain. These families have roots that predate the Declaration of Independence, going back to when there were no people living in the valley other than Indians. And this doesn’t even take into consideration that the Spanish settlers, unlike the English to the east, frequently intermarried with the Indian people among whom they lived so that the forbears of these northern New Mexicans include the native peoples who settled the Taos Valley centuries earlier.

Now, New Mexico’s a territory that has generally respected its Hispanic inhabitants. The upstart Anglos may have gained economic and political dominance, and prejudices and biases continue to exist, but the descendants of the norteños are among the region’s “first families,” with members in high political office, business and professional leadership, artistic prominence, and importance all across the middle class of local society. Over the decades, however, when New Mexico was a territory of the United States (1846-1912), Anglo land speculators, assisted by Chicano allies, corrupt officials, and biased courts, surreptitiously wrested title of the grant lands from the norteños, effectively stealing the legacy of their forbears without their even realizing it until it was too late. Eventually, the grantees sued, but their lawyer asked only that the court restore the title to their homes and the land they farmed; control of the remaining 21,000 acres of common land, grazing and forest land amounting to up to 90% of the grant, was retained by the Anglos who sold it for a profit. Whereas Congress eventually acted in behalf of the Taos Indians in the Blue Lake matter, the U.S. courts didn’t uphold the rights of these unworldly Latino citizens, guaranteed in 1848 by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, acting instead as an instrument of their victimization. On 5 June 1967, the resentment and anger broke out into violence in neighboring Rio Arriba County when a band of Chicanos led by Reies Lopez Tijerina, a Tejano and one-time evangelical preacher, protested the repression by police and political officials of the land-grant heirs’ attempts to press their claims and tried to make a citizen’s arrest of a local district attorney in the county seat, Tierra Amarilla. The plan went wrong and several town officials were wounded, two were kidnapped, and the National Guard—complete with tanks—occupied the town while police conducted an indiscriminate round-up of Chicano residents. This incident became known as the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid. (Though acquitted in a state trial before a sympathetic Hispanic jury, Reies was retried on federal charges in Las Cruces, transferred from Albuquerque, before an all-Anglo jury hostile to Mexicans. Reies ended up sentenced to prison time and eventually moved to Mexico in the 1990s.)

Artists were drawn to the Taos Valley in a "passive invasion” beginning in the late 19th century, in part because it had remained isolated. It is remote enough from the rest of civilization that, as one recent photographer resident remarked, the mountains keep the critics far enough away that no effort is needed to avoid hearing them. This influx of newcomers into Taos was made up of artists such as Ernest L. Blumenschein and Bert Geer Phillips who arrived in 1898 and helped establish an art colony in Taos. They were studying painting in Paris when painter Joseph Henry Sharp, considered the “spiritual father” of the Taos art scene, advised them to “paint the west before it is gone.” Sharp had come to New Mexico and visited pueblos, though not Taos, in 1883, becoming the first artist to visit the territory. Blumenschein and Phillips were on a sketching trip from Colorado to Mexico when a wheel on their surrey broke and Blumenschein carried it on horseback to the nearest village for repair. That village was Taos and when the painter saw it, he knew he’d found his home. The Taos artists, who enlivened Taos, captured a way of life that was quickly disappearing and their paintings are now valued for both their artistry and their depiction of the old days of Taos. Taos evolved into a world-renowned art colony due to its mix of beauty, mountain light, culture, and tradition. The avant-garde intellectuals and artists who recognized Taos's charm included painter Georgia O'Keeffe, photographers Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and writers D. H. Lawrence and Frank Waters. They were all to one degree or another a part of the salon of Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy East Coast heiress who married Tony Luhan, a Taos Pueblo Indian, and built a home known as Las Palomas, a well-known Taos landmark. Today, Taos is still an active art center, both for working artists, many of whom maintain studios in and around the town, and galleries all over the county that sell their work. Many of the artists are themselves Native American, both from Taos Pueblo and other nearby tribes and from as far away as Colorado and California. In fact, art is something of a local industry, drawing visitors to Taos both for art tourism and serious collecting. (In Santa Fe, just 70 miles south of Taos, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts exhibits Indian artists and the Institute of American Indian Arts there trains artists from Native American cultures from all over North America.)

From the mid-1960s through the end of the decade, Taos Valley was invaded by another kind of newcomer: hippies. Thousands of flower children from the East and West Coasts, fleeing the “middle-class values” of bourgeois families, moved to the area, establishing or joining communes, or settling into individual crash-pads and, consequently, buying up property. With names like the Five Star Farm, Morningstar, the Reality Construction Company, New Buffalo, Lorien, Lila, the Tree Frog Farm, the Hog Farm, The Family, and so forth, some of these experiments in communal living and subsistence farming were financed by rich guys whose wealth was generated by the profits of large corporations. The newcomers didn’t always ingratiate themselves to the locals: they arrived not knowing the ground rules or the culture, they flouted the conventions of society, they often brought cash into the largely poor territory to buy up land. The freaks, as they were often called by both themselves and others, lived without running water or electricity in places so remote they could only bring in their supplies on foot or horseback. The newcomers offended the locals by bathing, laundering diapers, and washing pots and pans in streams and culverts where families downstream got their drinking and cooking water. Hippies, having responded to the rumors of “free land,” were overburdening the arid, desert soil that barely provided meager subsistence to the people who had been living there for generations (and who, as we’ve seen, had already suffered the theft of their land by larcenous speculators—who, like the hippies, were Anglos). Commune leaders were desperately spreading the word that new arrivals were no longer welcome. Locals complained about the conditions in which the commune dwellers lived and their apparent disregard for other residents, invoking “[p]eople who didn’t know how to dig a hole . . . shitting in the river, spreading amoebic dysentery.”

By the 1970s, the animosity had grown so bad that The New Mexico Review and Legislative Journal, a leftist monthly publication, reported, “The vibrations in Taos are bad,” and cited signs visible in shops and on vans around the county: “DESTROY THE HIPPIES” and “HELP KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL, TAKE A HIPPIE TO A CARWASH”; “every fourth or fifth pickup truck” bore a gun rack holding “a rifle or two” and an “AMERICA, LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT” bumper sticker. Local restaurants announced that they “reserve the right” not to serve anyone deemed a “health menace” and stores and public agencies distributed a right-wing, red-baiting, mimeographed “venom sheet” titled SPOTlight (from the Society for the Protection of Taos) that was rabidly anti-commune. The city of Taos had canceled its long-held summer fiesta because, as the arch-conservative Taos News reported, the residents did not want to encourage a greater influx of hippies. The Taoseños responded to “the hippie problem” with “police harassment, vigilante action, intimidation, violence.” The New Mexico Review reported, for instance, that the state’s General Construction Board had planned a “red tag” raid on Taos-area communes to designate structures that did not meet building codes. The Taos school board “officially” labeled hippies “this cancerous epidemic” and the courts were routinely harsher with longhaired defendants than with native residents or tourists with money and the locals, of both ethnicities, harbored the same sentiment. Vigilante gangs, many made up of Anglo high school boys spurred on by parents, teachers, Taos News editorials and letters, and even the Chamber of Commerce, patrolled Taos County. Said one local: “The thing to do is just shoot every goddam longhair”—even if that action callously eliminated a few desirable writers and artists (not to mention traditionally longhaired Indians). “It doesn’t matter. Just shoot every guy with long hair.”

1970 began with what was locally known as “the Hippie-Chicano War,” a campaign of vandalism and even violence directed against the communards largely orchestrated by the Anglo power structure; there were many violent incidents, including bombings, shootings, and assaults, between the local residents of both Anglo and Hispanic blood and the longhaired newcomers. Calling the town “provincial,” the unidentified Review reporter (whom I believe was novelist John Nichols) alleged that “there’s nothing that quite wakes up the good citizens of the town like shooting or beating a stranger.” Though both Anglos and Chicanos resented the immigration of these outsiders, for many of the same reasons—the new arrivals’ life styles and behavior (especially their hygiene and sanitation practices), their drug use, and their acquisition of local land and real estate—the Chicanos began to see that their attention to the hippies and other newcomers was being encouraged and manipulated by and for the benefit of the Anglos—the descendants of the crooks who’d stolen their land the first time around.

By the end of the decade, though, most of the communes had run into financial problems, exacerbated by stricter regulations of building codes and sanitations laws, and individual hippies found the reality of living off the land harder and less romantic than the notion seemed in San Francisco or upstate New York. Some communes were simply evicted from their subsidized land. A few of the communes continued, but the flood of newcomers subsided and eventually halted, with a number of the former flower children staying on as, simply, new New Mexicans—as protective of the land as any of their predecessors. The Taos artist colony still thrives and is an integral part of the region’s culture, but the hippie invasion, which generated such an upheaval in the isolated little valley, has pretty much disappeared. The period is preserved, however, in numerous contemporaneous books and one remarkable amateur film, made by The Family commune in December 1969 or January 1970. Entitled Peace, Love, 2 Hours—Taos, 1970, the documentary was never released publicly, either commercially or underground, and the film isn’t listed in any catalogue or index of independent or documentary movies.

Today, Taos County is New Mexico’s third largest county and one of the poorest in the state which is 45th in per capita income in the United States. Taos, however, is a center of tourism and recreation, making the contrast stark. The ’60s mindset is still in evidence, embraced by the art community, and a certain freedom of personal expression in appearance and behavior prevails. Taos has over 20 sites on the National Register of Historic Places, including both Taos and Picurís Pueblos and the Downtown Historic District of the modern town, so there’s much of interest for the sightseer and the history or archeology buff. The Pueblo is open to visitors most days except when there’s a tribal ritual to which outsiders aren’t invited. (Cameras are permitted except during religious ceremonies like San Gerónimo, but the pueblo charges a small fee, as it does for admission, and the pueblo closes for about ten weeks in the late winter and early spring.) The ski slopes and the casino both bring in large numbers of entertainment-seekers and the art center and hundreds of galleries and studios attract art tourists and serious collectors both. The Taos Art Museum, at the Fechin House north of the town plaza, is a little gem that’s devoted to the art of Taos’s past, focusing on the early 20th century. It houses some 300 works by 50 Taos artists. (There’s also a University of New Mexico art museum, the Harwood Museum of Art, in town. Both museums charge admission; the studios, open to visitors at the pleasure of the artist, and galleries do not.) If you’re a culture vulture like I am, you can easily spend several days poking around the galleries, shops, and historic sites of Taos—and never go near the casino, ski slopes, or hiking trails!

The climate and weather, not to mention the natural beauty of the environment, of Taos County makes the town and its environs pleasant all year round. Summer daytime temperatures can get very high, but there’s little rainfall and evenings, even on the hottest days, are cool. Summer activities include hiking and camping, fishing, mountain biking, rock climbing, rafting, horseback riding, and many other outdoor pastimes. Two thirds of the Carson National Forest is in neighboring Rio Arriba County, but one third, including Wheeler Peak, is in Taos County. (If you enjoy outdoor pursuits, you could die happy here. The scenery alone could knock you out.) Taos is 1½ hour’s drive north of Santa Fe, 2½ hours northeast of Albuquerque, and 1½ hours northeast of Los Alamos.

[A few words about . . . well, words. In particular, some of the ones I used above. This article is especially loaded with words from Spanish and Indian vocabularies, some of which don’t translate exactly and carry connotations that we don’t necessarily spot readily. On the simplest level, many of the Indian words have various spellings because none of the American Indian languages had written forms until Western anthropologists invented them for the purposes of transcribing native vocabularies and creating dictionaries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Looking the words up will be hard unless you know that there are different ways to write most of them. Sipapu, for instance, can be spelled shipap, shipapu, shipapulima, or shipapuyna; and chiffonetti is also written chiffoneti, chiffoneta, and other variations (not to mention other, completely different words referring to the same figures in other Indian languages). Anglo, which I said means anyone who isn’t Hispanic or Indian, can refer to someone of German or even African-American heritage. In some contexts it can be a synonym for white or American, but not always. The word’s not inherently insulting or derogatory, but in the right circumstances is can have a pejorative edge, like gringo (a world I didn’t use in this article, but which is part of the same milieu), a polysemous word as it is used among the Chicanos of the Taos County mountains. Depending on its context, it can be endearing, factually descriptive, or insulting.

[Among the other words denoting the various cultural groups which I mentioned in “Taos & Taos Pueblo,” Chicano refers to people specifically of Mexican background—whether they have immigrated to the United States after 1821 (or 1846), or came here with the original Spanish colonists in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. A Tejano (or Tejana) is a Latino person whose family came from Texas when it was still part of New Spain or Mexico, before the Republic of Texas was declared in 1836. (There’s a regional demonym for Texans who are descended from the Americans who established the republic, which only existed from 1836 until 1845, when Texas became the 28th state of the Union. Citizens of the modern state are Texans; citizens of the Republic of Texas are known locally as Texians.) Norteños, as I used it in the article, is a name only for those New Mexican Latinos who migrated from central Mexico in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries to the northernmost territories of New Mexico like Taos County. It shouldn’t be confused with Norte Americanos, which simply means anyone from the United States and Canada—the former British (or Franco-British) colonies of North America. Someone is a Norte Americano whether he comes from New England, Florida, Arizona, Ontario, Alaska, or the Yukon. A norteño only comes from the northern New Mexico counties and traces his ancestry back to the Spanish settlers. He can’t be from Santa Fe, Albuquerque, or Gallup, and he or is forbears can’t have moved into the state after, say, 1846. It’s also pretty much a local appellation, probably meaningless beyond northern New Mexico.

[Finally, pueblo can be a confusing word because it can mean three different (though related) things. (The word is Spanish for ‘people’ or ‘town.’) Capitalized, Pueblo means the group of Indians, sometimes called Puebloans, from the desert southwest who dwell in the adobe villages like the one I’ve described here. It can also be part of the name of a specific Indian village, such as Taos Pueblo or Picurís Pueblo. Uncapitalized, pueblo refers to the village itself. One last word on this topic: I use both Native American and Indian in “Taos & Taos Pueblo.” Basically, I did that for variety, but while I was in New Mexico, many of the Indians I met there were very clear that they actually preferred that name to Native American, despite common wisdom and political correctness. It’s the name they all grew up with and it has more context than the neutral, artificial Native American. Indian may have been a name given by mistake, a white man’s appellation that bears no relation to the names Indian peoples use for themselves, but Native American can mean any non-European, native people from Inuit and Aleuts to Hawaiians and Samoans as well as American Indians. At least Indian refers explicitly to their own distinct group of people.]

Taos & Taos Pueblo: Background

[On 4 May, I published a profile of writer Frank Waters, who lived in and wrote about Taos, New Mexico. One of his most passionate subjects was the Taos Pueblo and its people; Waters’s masterpiece novel, The Man Who Killed the Deer (1942), is set in and around the pueblo. In the mid-1990s, I was writing about Leonardo Shapiro, a New York stage director who lived near Taos at the turn of the ’60s and then returned there to retire and, unhappily, die. In May 2002, I took a trip around New Mexico and spent time in Taos and visited the pueblo. It’s little wonder that a writer like Waters, a painter like Georgia O’Keefe, or a theater artist like Shapiro would settle in Taos, which has become a writers’ and artists’ center, as the area has stunning landscape and is chock full of history and the clashes or overlaps of cultures as old as America itself. After writing the Waters profile, I decided to write about Taos and Taos Pueblo, too. I hope you’ll agree that it’s a fascinating subject.

[Because of the complexity of this subject, even in the cursory way I’ve covered it for ROT, I’ve had to split the article into two parts. In part one below, I’ll discuss the geography of the area, the layout of the Indian pueblo, and some of its ceremonial events. As much detail as I’ve provided here, I can assure you that I’ve only scratched the surface. The Taos Pueblo, the Taos Indians, and their culture are intricate and complex and even the little they allow outsiders to see and understand could fill a book. In fact, it has—many, many books: you already know about Frank Waters’s writing, and in “Frank Waters,” I listed some of the other non-fiction works that discuss the Taos and Pueblo people. That short list is just the tip of the iceberg: there are plenty more where they came from, believe me! If “Taos & Taos Pueblo” whets your appetite, go spelunking in the stacks of any decent library. There’s a lot of information on the ‘Net, too, of course, but the old books, from the turn of the century through, say, the 1970s, are the best. It was all still such a surprise to everyone, such a wonderful gift. We got blasé after a few decades.]

Taos is one of the longest continuously inhabited places in North America, possibly the longest (there’s a debate with Acoma Pueblo), but the Spanish town, once known as Don Fernando de Taos, dates from around 1615 when the Conquistadores defeated the Pueblo Indians in northern New Spain, including present-day New Mexico. (The Spanish settlers, however, lived within the Indian pueblo until 1795, when they moved to Don Fernando de Taos, the site of the modern town.) The name Taos means "place of red willows" in the Tiwa language spoken by the Taos Indians. (The 19 pueblos in New Mexico are each a separate tribe and don’t all speak the same language. There are five distinct Pueblo languages, including Zuni, spoken only by the members of that pueblo.)

Modern Taos, incorporated only in 1934, is 130 miles northwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city, and 70 miles north of Santa Fe, the state capital. It’s the seat of Taos County, right in the center of New Mexico’s northern border with Colorado, and sits at an altitude of just under 7,000 feet. Wheeler Peak in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the highest point in the state at 13,161 feet, is 10 miles north of the town; known as Taos Mountain until 1950—and still called that locally—it is sacred to the Taos Indians and located within the reservation lands. (Today the mountains, a southern branch of the Rockies, are home to a ski resort, Taos Ski Valley, begun in 1956, and the Indian-run Taos Mountain Casino, opened in 1997.) The population of Taos in 2000 was 4,700 spread out over about 5½ square miles. Today, the town and the valley are home to three cultures, Anglo (a regional term that designates anyone who’s neither Hispanic nor Indian), Spanish/Mexican, and Native American, and though there are political and social tensions among the groups, some of which have broken out into violence from time to time, the valley’s culture is a combination of all three heritages.

The Taos Valley holds attractions for many who come only to visit or pass through, both today and in decades past. (A few who stayed, following the Ancestral Pueblo People in the 3rd millennium BCE, include the Navajos and Apaches in the 13th century CE, the Spanish in the 16th century, the Mexicans in the 1820s, the Americans in the 1830s, artists from around the world in the 1890s, writers in the 1920s, and hippies in the 1960s.) The land is semi-arid and the soil, paved with a thin layer of pebbles left behind by erosion, is a fine, pewter-hued clay that gets slimy in the rain but dries brittle. As if nature had always intended this place to be a contradiction or a paradox, it is both mountain country and desert; it has bright sun that can heat up the day—the mountains aren’t high enough to shade the floor of the valley, which runs generally east to west—but the nights can be bitter cold. The lands are watered by little rivers, tributaries of the Rio Grande whose sources are in the sacred Sangre de Cristos, which can run icy and clear, lined with aspens, junipers, pines, and cottonwoods (los álamos in Spanish). All along the valleys are unique geologic formations, abundant wildlife, and dazzling scenery and short distances away, the red dirt of the desert and the table-top mesas (like the one atop which Acoma Pueblo sits, 365 feet above the desert floor) seem like a moonscape. Photographer William Davis was drawn to its beauty—“a result,” he believed, “of a rare combination of mystical and human elements.” As writer John Nichols—who lived in Taos and wrote extensively about the area—said of Taos Mountain (Wheeler Peak), which physically, emotionally, and psychologically dominates the town, the pueblo, and all the villages of the valley: It “casts spells” to keep people from leaving and lure back those who try. It’s a region that remained an isolated frontier for three centuries, becoming almost a distinct nation unto itself, surrounded by round hillocks to the south and rocky crags to the west where the Rio Grande River Gorge drops down hundreds of vertical feet.

Though the Taos Indians have a long oral history, they don’t reveal it to outsiders for religious reasons. (Taos Pueblo is among the most traditional and conservative Indian communities in the country; the people have resisted assimilation on almost every level for centuries.) What we believe about the history of the area and the village comes from anthropology and archeology by Western scholars and experts. There is evidence of human presence going back over 12,000 years and of agriculture as early as 3000 BCE. By 200 CE, pit dwellings were constructed and early permanent village life had begun. (There are excavated remains of some Ancestral Pueblo dwellings from as early as 1150 CE at Bandelier National Monument near Los Alamos. Ancestral Pueblo People is the currently preferred term for what anthropologists used to call Anasazi, a Navajo word which the Pueblo people dislike because it means ‘ancient enemy.’) Settled around 900 CE, the Taos Valley saw the first large, multi-storied adobe structures around the first millennium. By the dawn of the 14th century, the village of Taos had appeared.

The pueblo, the northern- and easternmost of the existing ancient Indian villages, has been occupied in its current location for centuries (except for brief periods of abandonment during the colonial era, as we’ll see), but the present structures are, of course, not so old. The village is continuously being rebuilt as the adobe—sun-dried bricks made of mud mixed with straw—is constantly restored and new houses replace old ones. The exterior of the adobe walls, usually several feet thick, are regularly replastered with thick layers of mud and the interior walls are carefully coated with thin washes of white earth to keep them clean and bright. The five-story houses are actually many individual homes, built side-by-side like row houses, with common walls but without connecting doorways between the dwellings. (In ancient times, there were no doors or windows at ground level; entry was made through the roof, reached by ladders that could be drawn up for protection. The pueblos were often targets of marauding Apaches as well as Comanches and other tribes from the northern plains.) The roofs of the dwellings, covered with packed dirt for coolness, are supported by large timbers; smaller pieces of wood are placed side-by-side on top of the timbers.

Two buildings, considered to be the oldest continuously inhabited structures in the United States, are believed to date from the mid-16th century: Hlauuma (north house) and Hlaukwima (south house). Taos Pueblo is divided into moieties or halves, each with its own kiva, the ritual chamber, and kiva traditions. The north side is inhabited by the Winter People and the south side by the Summer People. There is a traditional rivalry between the two sides, which is openly played out in the foot races held each 3 May (Santa Cruz Dance), the beginning of the planting season, and again on 30 September (San Gerónimo Day), the end of the harvest.

About 150 people live within Taos Pueblo itself, with another 1,900 on pueblo land (the reservation), approximately 99,000 acres surrounding the village. There are other Taos Indians who live in the American towns nearby and still more who live far away and return for ceremonial events and celebrations. Today the village itself, however, is largely a ceremonial and tourist site. Indians return for religious ceremonies or during tourist season when the houses around the central plaza are used as shops for art and various local crafts such as silver jewelry, some pottery (though the most important Pueblo pottery center is San Ildefonso Pueblo, the home of the late Maria Martinez) and, because Taos Indians were traditionally superb hunters, products made from skins such as moccasins, pouches, and drums. Modern Taos has become an important art center and many Taos Indians are painters and printmakers who combine Western and Indian motifs and techniques into striking art. They maintain permanent galleries in town but in tourist season, they operate small galleries in the pueblo. (On my visit to the pueblo, I met a printmaker who ran a gallery from his mother’s house in the village during the tourist season. His main residence and studio was in Hollywood, Florida, where his family lived while he was in Taos.)

There’s one building within the pueblo that’s alien to the village’s Native American past. As in every Indian village in what was once New Spain, Taos Pueblo has a Catholic church. Spanish colonial practice was to establish a misión in each village, dedicated to a patron saint for the pueblo which would then bear its name, while the priests who accompanied the Conquistadores went about forcibly converting the Indians. The church in Taos, Mission San Gerónimo (St. Jerome), was originally built in 1619 by Indian slave labor. The Church of San Gerónimo de Taos (the pueblo’s full Spanish name) remained until the first Indian revolt against their colonial masters (which I’ll cover briefly in part two); a second chapel replaced the original one until the U.S. Army destroyed it during the Mexican-American War. The present church dates from 1850. The curious thing about the Pueblo Indians and Western religions is that, despite the early resistance and the general refusal of tribes like the Taos Indians to assimilate, they coexist. As prominent in the village as the Catholic church are the pueblo’s kivas, the native “churches,” the center of the Pueblo religious practices. The Indians see no contradiction between their adopted Catholicism (90% of Taos Pueblo’s population is Catholic) and their traditional beliefs. “Yes, most of us are Catholic,” explained one modern Taos Indian. “But that is not in conflict with our older Indian religion. We worship life—the water, the trees, all growing things. We could make room for a newborn Child who came into the world to teach us. We regard every man as an individual brother.” Indeed, when the Spanish friars arrived in New Mexico to convert the Indians, they found the Pueblos intransigent. The Indian ceremonials the priests found when they got there remained, simply redressed in Catholic garb. The Pueblos celebrated the saints’ days on the dates specified by the church, and the ceremonies began with a mass and other Catholic observances—but the celebrations themselves, the dances, prayers, rituals, were conducted just as they had been before the Conquistadores arrived in 1540. The pueblo’s most important celebration, for example, is the Festival of San Gerónimo on 29 and 30 September, a combination of traditional rites and ceremonial events and Catholic practices. All 19 New Mexico pueblos have a similar arrangement: for instance, nearby Picurís Pueblo (San Lorenzo de Picurís) celebrates San Lorenzo Day on 10 August.

Despite this apparent cultural palimpsest, Taos Pueblo is one of the most conservative places in North America. As I’ve noted, the Taos Indians resist assimilation even today. Within the village itself, old ways are enshrined. Taos Pueblo houses are owned by the women while the land is owned by the men. Most Indians speak unaccented English and have Anglo names (for generations past, both were Spanish), but among themselves they use the unwritten Tiwa language and retain Indian names which signify their reverence for the Earth and nature. There are no motor vehicles within the pueblo borders. No modern technology is permitted in the village, though homes on the reservation lands surrounding the pueblo may have modern conveniences and pueblo members who live in town or elsewhere may do as they please. (I visited one family’s home on the reservation, a small ranch-style house with a modern kitchen run off of propane tanks outside, vents for central heating, electric lighting, a TV in the living room, a pick-up truck parked out front, and a satellite dish on the roof. I didn’t see a computer, but the family made and sold jewelry and the little labels for the business included an address for a website, so I assume there’s a computer in the house somewhere.) No one in the pueblo has a TV, radio, telephone, computer, plumbing, or electricity. When visitors come for a festival such as San Gerónimo, no cameras, cell phones, tablets, or iPods are permitted; no one may photograph or record the ceremonies which, even though they may seem like little more than a carnival, are religious rites for the Taos Pueblos. Even note-taking and sketching are prohibited: one artist who attended pueblo events often said he made sketches from memory afterwards, but out of deference to “my friends here,” he wouldn’t exhibit or publish them.

Indian children may go to church and attend Anglo schools if their parents wish, but boys will all be initiated into the appropriate kiva when the time comes. Every part of Pueblo life—the arts, crafts, commerce, social structure, and religion—is intertwined and all tribe members participate in the ceremonials and rites that have been part of their people’s lives, virtually unchanged, since perhaps long before the Ottoman Empire or the Hundred Years’ War. Frank Waters, the Taos-area writer who depicted Indian life in both fiction and non-fiction books, wrote in his masterpiece, The Man Who Killed the Deer, about Martiniano, a young Pueblo man, educated in Western ways and taught to live in the modern world, who finds himself conflicted when he returns to the pueblo and must discover a way to reconcile the two cultures so that he can benefit from what both offer. (Other pueblos are not necessarily as traditional as Taos, though several are. Acoma Pueblo, for instance, also maintains many of the old traditions, including female ownership of the houses. Zuni is also very traditional, and it was the constant breaches of proper behavior, including photo-taking and recording, that resulted in the Zunis’ forbidding outsiders from attending the Shalako ceremony.)

San Gerónimo Day is 30 September, but Taos Pueblo’s celebration begins on the 29th with, as with all similar Pueblo festivals, a mass in the pueblo church. No one finds it incongruous that the Catholic priest blesses the Indian ceremonies that will follow, many of which have roots in the native religion that the Catholic Church would never recognize. Parts of the celebration are religious, or at least spiritual, and other parts are pure entertainment—a common mix among Pueblo ceremonials (and, I believe, those of most Native Americans). The Pueblo Indians have a rich dramatic expression—poetry, myth and history, song, dance, and even magic tricks and clowning—embedded in the ceremonials by which their religion is given external manifestation.

At about 7:30 the morning after the vespers service, shortly after sunup, the traditional foot race between the north and south kivas is run on a course extending east to west, symbolizing the celestial paths of the sun and moon. The two teams number perhaps as many as 50 on each side, ranging from boys, who do most of the running, to men of all ages, who urge the young runners on and help them recover when they’ve completed their legs of the race. The teams assemble at each end of the track, parallel to the little Pueblo River that bisects the village and worn down by decades of use to a level below the surrounding fields, the north kiva team on the north side and the south kiva runners on the south side. Behind the start is a sort of reviewing stand for pueblo dignitaries, but beside the Indian bigwigs also sit an array of santos, hand-carved wooden statues of St. Jerome and other Catholic saints carried from the church. Above them is a large cross made from branches.

The men run in relays, one runner from each kiva starting in the east like the rising sun runs westward about a half a mile where he touches the arm of another runner who returns to the east, and so forth until the winning relay team is declared. No outsider knows the real rules of the foot race; they’re kept a pueblo secret like most rituals, learned in kiva instruction. In 1935 Mabel Dodge Luhan described a race that, like all Pueblo ceremonials, looked virtually the same then as it did centuries before and as it does today: “Teeth bared, heads back, they tear along the track lightly but with incredible swiftness, and they are giving back to earth and sun what they have received.” Despite the crisp September morning, the runners are naked except for a loincloth and a belt of bells. (Spirits are attracted to ringing bells in Pueblo lore.) Most runners race barefoot over the stony, uneven ground to show their disdain for pain. On their chests and backs are painted two diagonal white stripes and their lower arms and upper legs are also painted white; their upper arms and lower legs are painted black with a white band around their ankles. Some runners also use red and yellow paint. They wear eagle feathers in their hair, worn in braids, and pasted wherever their bodies are painted white.

The purpose of the ceremonial race is to assure the sun and the moon sufficient power to make their daily journeys for another year—and to secure long life for the heavenly bodies, the runners, and the village. As one Taos native explained it: “The foot races are literally a race for life. We believe that long ago the world ended when the Sun God fell to the earth at the north end of the race track, plunging the world into total darkness. The foot races are run to draw power and strength from the sun to enable us to survive as a tribe.” Athleticism isn’t the point, of course, and winning isn’t a matter of one kiva team defeating the other; that kind of competitiveness is not an Indian virtue. My friend Leo Shapiro recounted his response to witnessing the race: “It just totally knocked me out. They were racing not against each other. It didn’t matter who won. But they really were racing.” Frank Waters put it this way: “Running not to win from one another, but extending all their strength to the sun for his new race, that once again he might return it to them, the creative power to carry the tribe forward another year.” The winner is the village, the tribe, who benefit from the strength and devotion displayed by their best young men. A well-run race is good for everyone.

Before the Spanish arrived and the Catholic church essentially coöpted the festival, it had been a trade fair at which the Taos Indians hosted their neighbors, including the Apaches, Utes, Hopis, and Navajos, so the afternoon is filled with an arts and crafts fair which includes numerous vendors of food, Indian, Mexican, and American. Today, aside from the Taoseños and Anglo tourists, Indians come from as far away as the Great Plains. Since this is a feast day, friends and family are invited to the villagers’ homes at the end of the day for a meal of red and green chilies, corn, frybread (a traditional Native American flat bread made from deep-fried dough), bread baked in a horno (the beehive-shaped outdoor adobe oven that is essentially the Indians’ traditional kitchen), and other traditional native dishes; also on the menu might be cross-over dishes like “Navajo tacos” (green chilies, beans, cheese, tomato, and lettuce wrapped in frybread), deer-meat chili, pozole soup (pre-Columbian Mexican soup of hominy, or nuxtamal, with meat—usually pork, chicken, or turkey—pork rinds, chili peppers, and seasonings), and cornbread (yes, that cornbread).

At about 4 p.m., chiffonetti (“delight-makers”) or Black Eye clowns, one of the few groups in Pueblo life who must be members of a specific, religious clan, gather around a 50-foot-tall, greased pole in the middle of the pueblo plaza, topped with harvest foods such as corn, apples, melons, and squash, a sack containing a variety of fresh-baked breads and groceries, and a slaughtered deer or sheep. The Black Eyes’ bodies, clad only in a breechcloth and moccasins, are horizontally striped black and white to represent the spirits of the dead, and their unmasked faces are painted white with black circles around the eyes and mouths. They wear their hair parted in the middle and twisted up on either side of their heads like two horns, topped with corn-husk florets. The chiffonetti also wear evergreen branches in their belts or in a bandoleer, or hold them in their hands. Thus encumbered, the chiffonetti, must climb the greased pole, the trunk of an entire pine tree, too wide at its base to reach around and tapering to a point at the pinnacle, and retrieve the food. It’s not so easy to accomplish, a real feat of will and strength. The first to the top then lowers the goods to his brothers below who distribute them to all the villagers. When the climber makes it to the top, he entertains the other villagers gathered below and on the flat rooftops to cheer him on, with jokes and teasing; his fellow Black Eyes join in amusing the crowd with horseplay, acrobatics, and magic tricks. The impromptu entertainment might include mimicking the spectators, Indian, Chicano, or Anglo; acting out local gossip; and even mocking the Catholic ceremonies. Nothing is sacred, for the chiffonetti aren’t afraid of anything, and they gleefully make fun of their own tribe and their village neighbors along with the outsiders—but all with obvious good humor and sense of fun; though some of the fun is pointed and trenchant, no bitterness, insult, or hurt is overtly intended. The victorious Black Eye slides back down the pole, greeted with whoops and cheers from below, and there’s a brief dance in the plaza. Eventually, the pole is chopped down; once climbed, it can never be climbed again.

If no clown gets to the top and gets the prize down, the Pueblos believe the next year will be bad for the village. There’s an oft-told story of one disastrous San Lorenzo Festival at nearby Picurís, which follows the same rituals as Taos, when no young man was strong and agile enough to climb the pole and the pueblo nearly vanished. As Frank Waters concluded his account of the story: “But there is no power left in Picurís, no good medicine, no strong thoughts.” (Picurís is even today the smallest and poorest of the 19 New Mexico pueblos and the tale’s considered a cautionary one.) Leo Shapiro explained that this is more than just a spiritual belief: “[I]t makes perfect sense, if you live out there, that if everybody is just sort of so out of shape that nobody’s gonna get up the pole, then it’s a pretty good predictor of the fact that they’re not gonna make it. So it’s not an abstraction.”

[Please come back in a few days to read about the history of the area and some of the cultural history of both the modern town and the Indian village. I won’t preview it here, but I’ll tell you that the area in and around Taos has an action-packed and surprising history.]

It’s Not Real – It’s Art

When I recently wrote my performance report on Red (4 March on ROT), the revival of the John Logan Tony-winner about painter Mark Rothko and his assistant, Ken, that I saw in Washington in February, I added a short coda about a column written by New York Times art reviewer Roberta Smith called “What’s True in Art Studios and Onstage.” I’d originally considered appending a longer statement on Smith’s article, but as it had little to do with the performance of Red in Washington—or anywhere, really—I decided to reserve it and present it as a separate article on ROT. The column, published on 5 April 2010, four days after Red had opened on Broadway, is about the play itself and, more broadly, about the nature of theater and art. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I get a little exercised here because this really bothers me, and the source is shocking.

Smith, an art reporter for the Times since 1986, writes that she was put off because the stage world of Red “clashed so violently with my memories of the studio visits I experienced in the two decades after the action of the play.” (The play’s set in 1958-59, so Smith’s alluding to a period up to the late ’70s.) As a consequence, Smith says that at times she wished “my seat had an ejection lever.” What disturbed Smith most, she explains, was “the noise, speed and off notes” of the script; in her experience over decades of involvement with art and artists as a student, a museum intern and employee, and an art journalist, the opportunities she had for examining art and coming to understand it “were quiet, slow, often awkward experiences,” not the fast-paced and verbal exchanges Logan imagined for the stage Rothko and Ken. While Smith conceded that for the theater it’s necessary to speed up and condense time, she still insisted that “the studio, not the play, was the thing for me.” The play came most alive for her, Smith writes, “whenever the actors stopped talking and turned to the business of moving the big (surprisingly convincing) ‘Rothkos’ around, preparing stretchers and canvases, mixing colors.” The “magic” of the play came when the “wordless choreography of the wheeling, turning canvases brought back the ephemeral intimacy of one artist’s inner sanctum 50 years on, verifying the often profound accuracy of silence.”

Let’s look at Smith’s criticism. What she’s objecting to is that the world of Logan’s play doesn’t line up with her own real-world experience. It’s too fast and loud, she says. First, let me note that Smith never says she visited Rothko’s studio—or ever met the painter herself; she acknowledges that her understanding of Rothko’s “worldview” comes from the James E. B. Breslin 1993 bio, Mark Rothko: A Biography (the same one which Logan read and which Edward Gero, the actor I saw play Rothko in Washington, said he used as a resource as well). So, assuming that every artist works differently (like people in nearly every other profession), there’s no reason to believe that Logan’s imagination is any less truthful than Smith’s assumptions. (As a side comment here, I want to note also that Logan didn’t just invent the environment of an artist’s workspace out of whole cloth; he knew painters in Los Angeles and went to their studios to learn how they worked, “getting into the studio, getting paint under my fingernails.”) Second, when Smith visited an artist, she was changing the dynamic of the workspace to one of observation and scrutiny—the Heisenberg principle at work. What an artist does when a journalist-cum-museum representative is present isn’t necessarily the same as he does when he’s working alone or in the company of an assistant whom he trusts or takes for granted. Third, what Smith saw as apparently unnecessary “noise” in the play isn’t really conversation. What the stage characters of Rothko and Ken are voicing for us to hear are the thoughts Smith suggests were going through the minds of those seeing the art in the studios, speaking aloud so we can hear—because complete silence, despite some experiments, doesn’t work so well in theater—what the characters would otherwise keep to themselves. Because Red is a drama, which implies a level of conflict, those thoughts are expressed as dialogue because a series of related monologues would be frankly boring on stage.

Fourth, of course, is the fact that Logan never pretended that he’s presenting a slice of Rothko’s actual life in Red. He says quite frankly that he isn’t: “[T]his was the way to explore the themes I thought were interesting, which really didn't have much to do with Mark Rothko. It had more to do with my feelings about art and theatre and mentors and fathers. Mark Rothko became the vessel for things I wanted to explore." Ken, the young assistant, isn’t a real person or even a composite but a completely fictional character Logan invented for the play. If someone wants to see a true-to-life portrayal of the workings of some artist’s studio, the theater is probably not the place to go. Try a documentary: there are many, including one remarkable film of Rothko’s contemporary and fellow Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock, at work on his famous drip paintings. With all Smith’s experience of the art world, I’m shocked that she’d have gone into a theater to see a play and expected real life to unfold on the stage. And was disappointed—no “disturbed,” she says—that her world isn’t reflected in the play.

The bigger problem, as I see it, is that there apparently are people like Smith who apparently don’t get that art and life aren’t the same. Back on 15 December 1974, for example, there was another Times article, “Psychoanalyst Says Nay to ‘Equus’” by Dr. Sanford Gifford, taking Peter Shaffer’s play to task for inaccuracies in its portrayal of Martin Dysart's practices. Gifford declares that “the play paints a picture of the psychoanalytic process that demands a professional response.” He complains that “Shaffer presents us with a fictitious piece of psychopathology.” After describing the play’s conceit, Gifford asserts, “As the play’s imagery becomes murkier and more portentous, however, and the clever theatrical devices multiply, we begin to suspect that we, the spectators, are being tricked by the playwright.” Gifford calls all this “a spurious air of importance” and adds, “Perhaps in Shaffer’s skillful mixture of truth, banality and pretension there is something for us all, for doctor and patient alike, something that gratifies our universal fantasies about our therapists (and most psychiatrists were once patients).” Gifford, a Harvard Medical School faculty member, goes on to list what he sees as three “fantasies” in Equus, two of which he labels “familiar wishes, entertaining or tedious according to taste.” The first is the wish to ask the therapist personal questions so that, in Shaffer’s play, we learn that Dysart is ”unhappy, weak and fallible, like everyone else.” Second is the “familiar” desire to be “our therapist’s favorite child, his only patient, or at least his most interesting one.”

Gifford saves his greatest disapproval for what he sees as “the principal ‘message’ that Shaffer seems to have written out for us most explicitly”: that “psychopathology and the creative imagination are inseparable.” The psychoanalyst believes that Shaffer is perpetuating the notion that creativity and madness are connected in a “version of the mad artist theme” because “insanity was the price paid by the artist, in a kind of Faustian bargain, for the use of his creative powers.” In Equus, Gifford asserts, Shaffer presents the “delusional world” of Alan Strang, “a half-illiterate stable boy” as “itself a work of art.” The doctor points out that Alan isn’t an artist, but that the play treats his ”productions” as worthy of “respect, even reverence” because without Alan’s “psychotic rituals he would remain a mere village yokel capable of nothing more creative than watching TV.” Shaffer’s point, Gifford declares, “is that if we give up our symptoms, we lose our imaginative powers and must accept a bleak, plastic ‘normality,’ without color or passion.” This concept, the psychoanalyst insists, is “a pernicious fallacy” because “many of us—the ordinary and untalented as well as the artistic and creative—use just this fallacy to avoid treatment or to justify holding on to our symptoms.”

The author of the column offers that Shaffer “may know better than to believe” what he’s presented in the play, but that the playwright’s “chosen to exploit its theatrical effectiveness, or allowed himself to be carried away by his own bravura as a dramatic technician.” In that case, Gifford asserts, “we feel all the more ‘manipulated’ by the play.” Plays like Equus, he continues, “leave us feeling cheated, that we have been promised some significant glimpse of the truth and left with a bogus or trivial message.” The psychoanalyst refers to “the remarkably little compassion we feel for either the psychiatrist or his patient.” He adds, “Even as we leave the theater we have forgotten them both as human beings, suggesting . . . that we have been forcibly and mechanically ‘entertained’ rather than enlightened.” Gifford concludes his commentary by remonstrating that “surely we are entitled to a higher grade of banality from a playwright as accomplished and psychologically knowledgeable as Peter Shaffer.”

Confronting Gifford’s complaints, we may see that they’re a little harder to disarm than were Smith’s. If, in fact, Shaffer had been intent on presenting a treatment of psychiatry in action, a real-life portrait of a psychotherapist and a patient at work, Gifford might even have a valid argument, assuming that the play is wrong on the facts and the truth as the columnist says it is. (I’ll defer to Gifford on this issue, since I don’t have the expertise to dispute him. I’ll add, though, that Shaffer called on “a distinguished child psychiatrist” for advice in his work.) The question is, however, whether Shaffer, or any playwright—or artist in any medium, for that matter—should be held accountable for the factual details of his creations when compared to actual practitioners in some profession or other. (I wonder if there are bank robbers and burglars who object to the way their TV and film counterparts practice their dirty work.) The cornerstone of Gifford’s position on Equus and of my counterargument is the psychoanalyst’s assertion that Shaffer’s presenting the idea that insanity and creativity are linked or that “madness is the price of genius,” as Gifford phrases it. That’s not the play I saw (or read). Yes, Dysart debates with himself whether or not to treat Alan. But what’s at stake for Dysart isn’t Alan’s sanity versus his “creativity”—his passion, really, is the way Shaffer puts it—but Dysart’s own peace of mind, his integrity. Like Antonio Salieri in Shaffer’s other hit play, Amadeus, Dysart’s in fundamental doubt. His dilemma is that he can “cure” Alan—he does cure Alan: “I’ll heal the rash on his body. I’ll erase the welts cut into his mind by flying manes”—but it’s the consequences of the “cure” that make Dysart question his purpose: “When that’s done, I’ll set him on a nice mini-scooter and send him puttering off into the Normal world . . . . I doubt, however, with much passion! . . . Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.”

A few years after I saw Equus, I came across a situation that reflects the play’s theme in microcosm. I adopted a year-old dog, a beautiful, loving, and playful mixed breed. A couple of weeks after I brought him home, I discovered that he hated other dogs and became almost uncontrollably hostile when he was around them. I was taking the dog through obedience training at the time and I approached the trainer with the problem and she took my dog home with her for a weekend to diagnose it. When the trainer returned the dog to me, she explained the alternatives: she could make him manageable and controllable but he’d still have behavior problems around other dogs, or she could render him docile and calm, though he’d have no personality left. Now, I don’t mean to equate Shaffer’s characters with a dog and his trainer, but the situations are similar enough, the dilemma is parallel enough to help me understand what Shaffer’s writing about. Do I make the dog compliant enough to live quietly in society, but without passion, or do I allow him his passion but leave him with self-control problems? That’s precisely the question Dysart faces with Alan. And as with me and my dog analogy, the consequences of the answer are Dysart’s, not Alan’s.

Gifford is wrong about the play’s point: it’s not Alan who’s mind is in jeopardy—it’s Dysart’s soul. Equus isn’t about whether Alan Strang must sacrifice his passion for normalcy—but whether Martin Dysart can keep on making that God-like decision with impunity. See, the play’s not only not about psychiatry, it’s not about Alan, either. It’s about Dysart who’s having a secular crisis of faith (another parallel this play has with Amadeus). In the last scene, the doctor says, “Essentially I cannot know what I do—yet I do essential things. Irreversible, terminal things. I stand in the dark with a pick in my hand, striking at heads!”

Gifford engages in some writing tactics that aren’t very even-handed, on top of the erroneous argument he makes. First, he does something that always aggravates me when reviewers do it: he speaks throughout his article of “we” and “us,” as if he knew what was in the minds of all the other spectators in the theater. Unless psychoanalysis has made some advances of which I’m unaware, he can’t possibly. For instance, he avers that “we feel” little compassion for Dysart and Alan. Well, I, for one, felt immense compassion for Dysart; Equus had a profound effect on me after I saw it. I sympathized with Alan, but Dysart’s crisis tore me up and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks afterward. (For years I wanted to play Dysart in that show.) Gifford can speak for himself and say what he felt and thought, but he can’t attribute his notions to anyone else. If he conducted a survey, then he must say so; otherwise, he’s assuming knowledge he can’t have.

In addition to that rhetorical fault, Gifford never uses the characters’ names in his column. It’s a way of diminishing them so that they don’t take on the dimensions of individuals: they have no names, so they can’t be people. Therefore we can’t attribute to them human characteristics and personalities. If they take on human dimensions, as Shaffer clearly intended—that’s what playwrights do—then we can see them as individuals not as whole classes of people. Dr. Dysart is one man, one doctor—not all psychiatrists or, worse, psychiatry the profession. Gifford goes further, though. He uses many loaded words, like “murky,” “spurious,” “pretension,” “Faustian,” and “pernicious,” to poison the well. He chooses words to describe Alan and Dysart that denigrate them, words Shaffer doesn’t use in the play. He calls Alan a “yokel,” “half-illiterate,” and a “stable boy”—all ways of dismissing him so we won’t empathize with him. The fact that Alan doesn’t read—though it’s not necessarily true that he can’t—and that he does work part time in a stable doesn’t alter the reality that this is diction intended to demean Alan so we won’t care about him as Dysart is supposed to have.

Gifford also writes of Alan’s “creativity,” styling the boy as an artist and calling his life a work of art, though that’s not how Shaffer characterizes his character. Though the dramatist has Dysart speak of the boy’s passion, Gifford seems to want to be sure we see the play’s psychiatrist as aggrandizing Alan, puffing up his significance, portraying him as a martyr. Shaffer doesn’t do that: he presents Alan as a boy trying to recapture his freedom to “gallop,” to live life with fervor. Here, Gifford writes of Alan’s “perverse passion for horses,” but it’s not his feelings for horses that Dysart envies; it’s the boy’s passion for living. And it’s not Alan’s passion that’s at the center of Equus; it’s Dysart’s. Gifford sets Alan up as a straw man so he can knock him down and appear to weaken Shaffer’s point. These tactics are why I said that Gifford’s objections are harder to dispute than Smith’s: she’s far more honest in her statements than Gifford is. Then, she’s a reporter—he’s a headshrinker. And he has the temerity to object to Shaffer’s having Dysart confess to using tricks!

Art and life aren’t supposed to be the same. Realism, the art style that is still the form of most Western theater, isn’t reality. Art may reflect life or be informed by reality, but it isn’t a replication of real life. Hell, if it were, we wouldn’t need artists at all. We’d only need a bunch of photocopiers and those Star Trek-type replicators and holodecks. Technicians would do the job. The result wouldn’t be art, of course, it’d be programming. Now, there are a lot of things about which someone can complain and criticize in a piece of art, including that it’s factually incorrect (though that one may be misguided, too, as Gifford’s objections to Equus suggest—though I don’t advocate outright lying, of course) or that the reality on which it comments isn’t worth the effort, or that it’s ineffective and meaningless, and so on. But I reject that it’s even legitimate to criticize an artwork because it’s not like reality. As if to make my point for me, Gabe McKinley, author of CQ/CX (see my report on ROT, 9 March), a fact-based play that recently ran at the Atlantic Theater Company, stated: “It’s important to remember that as a playwright, sometimes getting away from the facts, you actually get closer to the truth. . . . It’s not a historical document; it’s a play.” Playwright Logan didn’t want to recreate Rothko’s studio or the life that went on in it. He had something he wanted to say about relationships—specifically father-son relationships—and he found the character of Mark Rothko as he gleaned it, both from the painter’s art and from his biography, an apt vehicle through which to make his point. Shaffer wasn’t writing about the practice of psychiatry but the dilemma faced by one man when confronted by one situation. As in Amadeus, Shaffer’s looking at a crisis of the soul, a professional doubt so deep that it effects one person’s very being. The writers’ scripts aren’t reality—but they’re informed by reality and they make comments on reality. Reality as the playwrights see it and understand it—but that’s why they’re artists, not reporters or documentarists. There’s a difference, hard to define perhaps, between photography that’s intended to record and preserve and photography that’s art.

Maybe there’s an insoluble difficulty when practitioners in a field see plays about their profession. Not only do they know too much, sort of like jurors with special knowledge not shared by their fellow panelists, but they may suffer from tunnel vision. They may see the play as about the profession, and lose sight of the fact that the playwright is writing about the people. When I see plays (or movies and TV shows) about theater and acting, I spot all the inaccuracies and misrepresentations—a friend and I have been sharing some objections about the current series Smash which is about actors, singers, dancers, directors, producers, writers, and composers—but of course, those are seldom the point of the drama. Plays like The Royal Family, Light Up the Sky, Noises Off, A Life in the Theater, or The Dresser aren’t really about theater: they’re about the characters, their conflicts, and their interrelationships. Red isn’t about painting and Equus isn’t about psychotherapy. Since I think both plays are magnificent theater pieces, I can’t help but feel that Roberta Smith and Sanford Gifford, and others like them, have missed something wonderful because they misdirected their focus.

Reading Smith’s and Gifford’s columns, I couldn’t help wonder what someone with a reality fetish must make of Shakespeare’s plays. Even if you overlook 20th- and 21st-century knowledge and just focus on what folks in 16th- and 17th-century England would have known, his plays are chock full of breaches of reality. The Bard fudged a lot of what were even then known as facts to make dramatic points. The great Realist playwright, Henrik Ibsen, has all kinds of untruths in his plays. He believed, for instance, that moral transgressions will have physical repercussions—a bad life will give you cancer, say. He also believed that a child can inherit his father’s syphilis. No? Well, that dispenses with Doll House, Ghosts, and The Master Builder. Smith admits to having been “an art critic for longer than she cares to recall who before that held various small-time jobs around the art world.” How would she react, I wonder, if some dancer or choreographer wrote a criticism of one of Degas's paintings because it wasn't an accurate portrayal of a dance studio or a ballet class? Ridiculous! It's art, I’d imagine she’d cry, not real life! Precisely. QED.