Remembering the Muse as we approach the Day of the Dead

I wrote this article in 2004, but it still matters, maybe even more now.  Felt like re-posting it today.

REQUIEM FOR THE MUSE

The former Muse Community Arts Center, where I used to have my studio, is fenced and empty, in preparation for her imminent demise.  Like so many arts communities in American cities, we have been evicted by gentrification, real estate development, and urban "development".
I've been told She stood empty some 7 or 8 years ago, the old YMCA building no one, except a few visionaries, wanted any more. I'm not writing about the history of the Muse, or the brave people who founded her, and why. I don't know if they feel saddened, or rewarded for their efforts, or just relieved to have the building sold and done with. I’m also not writing about those who are trying to relocate some part of her essence else where. I just want to remember the life, and death, of an urban Muse.

In those 7 or 8 years, a theatre developed, and classrooms opened. Reasonably priced studios filled with painters, sculptors, alternative healers, and non-profits. An occasional gallery hosted shows of professional artists, aspiring artists, and young people just learning to express their imaginations. Drummers drummed, dancers danced, actors created personae, students came and went with easels in hand. A reiki master and a new age minister held classes on Sundays, along with the Vineyard Church, who also provided donuts and coffee for the homeless as long as they sat through the service. A Buddhist lama taught for a weekend, and people in red and orange robes filled the halls. A month later, the Fetish Ball took over the Muse, and people in leather and tight corsets filled the halls.

Kucinich gave a rally to an enthusiastic crowd, the Gay/Lesbian alliance held their Christmas party, and teenagers in tuxedos and pink chiffon held proms to loud rock and roll music. At 7:00 in the morning shoes were lined up outside the door of a classroom as the morning yoga class stretched and ohm’d. In the afternoon, high school kids made graffiti art in the parking lot, while pottery kilns shimmered their heat in the sun. At 7:00 in the evening, the building vibrated to the studded feet of a flamenco class. The Muse was more, so much more, than a building. She was alive, a celebration of Tucson's diversity, an engine and generator of creativity.

Sometimes residents fought with each other, and artists gossiped in the halls. Dirty dishes in the community kitchen were always a point of contention. Management came and went with various degrees of competency. The owners burned out or left town, utilities were often in danger of being cut off. But the Muse struggled along. Because, for all of it, the Muse was full of love, and human diversity. Her last year found her depressed, like someone with a terminal disease. People began leaving, doors stood open to empty studios, fighting among those who remained was more bitter than it had ever been before. And now the Muse is empty again. Haunted, and awaiting burial.

Who grieves for her? Certainly, I do. The Muse, who hosted so much vitality, who delighted in the sounds and colors of so many, now is abandoned on the corner of 5th and 6th, her parking lot empty, a chain link fence around her to keep out squatters. On her grave, I've been told, condo lofts will rise.

I don't know the the corporate developers that bought her, and I don't care. They represent the forces of gentrification, "real" estate, and unquestioned "economic progress". In Tucson's so-called Historic Arts District they have imminent domain, and as downtown becomes more profitable, artist studios, galleries, and gathering spots, like the Muse, have become increasingly sparse.

I'd like to draw attention to the word "lofts", which used to mean live/work spaces in industrial buildings in places like New York and San Francisco. Artists built lofts above their studios to save space. Why did they live in industrial buildings? Because it was cheap, and because artists need each other’s support and inspiration. I used to live in a famous space in Berkeley called the Warehouse (it's now an architects office with a rather pricey restaurant on the first floor). Live/work "lofts" in the Bay Area now mean highly profitable condos, often in former industrial buildings, that rent for some $2,000.00 a month. By advertising them as “live/work”, developers got around token restrictions the cities of Oakland, or San Francisco, made in recognition of their former use by arts groups. I don't know many innovative artists who can afford that kind of rent, which is one of the reasons why so many left. Hence, many individuals and groups are displaced, cultural creatives in an economy that increasingly does not provide enough resources to flourish.

Artists are marginalized in America. I don't know if this is true elsewhere. Maybe it's easier to be an artist in Rome, or Paris. I’ve spent my life on this continent, and have observed that my peers spend considerable emotional energy trying to justify their endeavor in the face of a popular culture that, essentially, considers them superfluous. A few of my colleagues got famous; some landed jobs that made them middle class. Most of us didn't really care that much; we got by, and the rewards of a creative life were enough. But now, urban life is becoming expensive, even in Tucson. And rural enclaves, like Bisbee, and Sedona, and Jerome, have also become costly.

The land the Muse was on is valuable, because the surrounding area has become interesting. Thanks to the artists, writers, cafes, bookstores, and clubs that have come to inhabit the area. For the past 10 years, people fleeing the cost of living in California are coming to Tucson, and developers are, from my perspective, barely able to contain their glee, by the proliferation of housing developments also blossoming like mushrooms in the surrounding, pristine desert. That most of these are inappropriate for their use of energy and water is another issue.
The city of Tucson says it wants an arts district. And yet it is an irony that as Tucson grows, its downtown cultural center is emptying out. As of this writing (2007), the past two years have seen the loss of the Muse, Orts Dance Space, the Sanjin warehouse, Muse Pottery, Biblio, and now  the Seinfeld building.  The Arts Partnership gallery will be moving in May of 2007, as their building becomes converted to condos. There are empty storefronts and warehouses now, with high rents, that undoubtedly await the advent of a Starbucks, or a Gap, or a Cost Plus. And meanwhile serve as a tax break.

In fact, there are precious few art spaces left in the "Historic Arts District", although where there once were there are gourmet coffee shops opening along with artisan beer restaurants.   Will anyone remember what generated the ambiance and energy that brought people there, other than food?  My question is, what is real value? In my book, the energy the Muse generated is "real value". If the city of Tucson really wants to encourage an arts district, why not give artists, and other social innovators, what they need: space. Inexpensive leases, rent control, protection, and respect for the energy they bring?The Muse was not derelict: it was full of tenants, a well insulated building. The waste of a creative community is a terrible loss to all of us. And I personally find the waste of the building as well is obscene. The roof could have been fixed, the air conditioner renovated. A few professional arts administrators could have been employed to keep it in the black.

Property speculation is intrinsic to our economic value system. But what about community goodwill speculation? Creativity speculation? What equity do the people who inhabited the Muse get for raising the monetary value of a neighborhood by, in essence, raising its energy? Real estate investors that buy up arts areas for gentrification are sometimes beneficial, but more often they are predatory, too often displacing the lively, and vital innovation of these areas with calculated, and expensive, formula. Without any motivation other than profit, they have no concern for the living organism that is a community. They are making money from the unpaid creative energy of people, well, like me.

Recently I learned about a nonprofit in Phoenix called Arizona Citizens for the Arts. The organization is described in it's website as "the charitable arm of Arizona Action for the Arts (that) increases discussion and awareness of the importance and impact of the arts in achieving quality of life, educational excellence and economic health for all Arizonans and Arizona enterprises."

While I am glad such an organization exists, there is also something deeply disturbing to me about the notion that we need charities devoted to convincing Americans that art and creativity is something that can, just maybe, contribute to education and the quality of life. Is it possible it's no longer obvious? And, in the language of profit, I find it very depressing that the arts need to be justified because they can make money, providing "economic health" and accommodating, in some fashion, capital "enterprises".
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What is real value? Can we can no longer justify even the creative impulse, the masterful creation of beauty, and the healing depths of self-expression - unless we are convinced they can make money? What, then is "real value"?
I'd like to affirm that the arts are the soul of any given community, and of any given civilization. They embody the conscience, the aesthetics, the history, and often, the future of an evolving culture. They celebrate what is best in the human experience, our highest aspirations and our complex human diversity.

Farewell to the Muse. You will be missed.

Copyright Lauren Raine 2005
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"Where Have All The Artists Gone?"

Recently I made a trip to a little town in New Mexico that I used to live in, Truth or Consequences, along the Rio Grande, once called New Mexico Hot Springs (how it got its name from the 1950's game show is another story).

When I started visiting there 15 years ago I was drawn to it because it was inexpensive to live there, had a friendly, eccentric community of older artists, mystics, alternative healers, poets, and dreamers, and a main street with little artist run galleries.  The pace was New Mexico slow, which meant, shops tended to be open if they felt like it, and all the food was "slow food", but good when it finally arrived.  There was a juice bar called Little Sprout that featured juice and art on the wall, and a big pink former apartment building with inexpensive studios for artists to rent (I ended up renting one for a season).  My dream was to be a New Mexico artist there, and for one season, until family illness forced my return to Tucson, I was.  I even had a show in a local gallery.

I love hot springs,  finding them sacred places that not only heal, but can open "the doors of perception" in various ways. The hot springs at T or C, once called New Mexico Hot Springs, and by other unknown names by earlier native inhabitants, were considered sacred ground - Apache, Mimbres, various other Pueblo peoples, and wandering Yaqui  could go there to heal without fear of  war.  Geronimo and Cochise went there.

 I also love rivers, and the Rio Grande, a turquoise ribbon in the red-brown expanse also brought me there.  A big draw in T or C  was the River Bend, a hostel ($20.00 a night with  more expensive private rooms with a shared kitchen and common area if desired).  They had a number of pools built over the Rio Grande (some of them were built by volunteers who worked there in exchange for free "rent").  It was a pleasure to go to the pools every day at dawn or sunset,  where you could always be inspired by the view and the interesting people you met while soaking  there.  For example, I remember meeting a German man who was biking across the country while writing a book, various kinds of healers and mystics, travelling writers, poets and artists, a group living in an old style bus who were building straw bale houses, an artist who had some unusual theories about the Pleides,,,,,,,,,,,,the pools, and T or C, were an interesting, friendly haven for travelers, eccentrics, artists, and  visionaries without a lot of financial clout, in other words.

I went back to T or C a few weeks ago, and was dismayed by how much it has changed.  Gone are all of the galleries on main street (except Rio Bravo, which has an endowment), including that of eccentric, big hearted Ruth.   (T or C, like most small American towns, long ago lost the prosperity of its old downtown to Walmart and the big box stores on the outskirts.  But it felt much more impoverished now than it did a decade ago.).  Main street now has a lot more empty storefronts, and the galleries have been replaced with junk stores....it's sad looking.  The big pink artists studios complex is now just another hotel.  The Black Cat Bookstore is still there, and still hosts poetry readings once a week in season, but the Little Sprout is gone.  There are a few of the "old time  health spas" from T or C's era as a place where people went to "take the cure", but many have been converted into much more gentrified hot spring spas that  are expensive and, to me,  resemble gated communities in the midst of some  pretty obvious New Mexico poverty.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment to me is the River Bend.  Because the pools looked out over the Rio Grande, affording a chance to watch the sunset or sunrise on the river, and because its original layout had a large common area, even a campground along the river, it was a real community gathering place.  It began as a hostel, and although it had more expensive rooms (with a common area to cook) it retained two mobile homes with bunkbeds.

When the original owner retired its character completely changed. The mobile homes were hauled off, the building with a common area became private suites, the campgrounds were plowed over and new private casitas built.   It is a gated community indeed now, with big locked artistic metal walls that make any visibility into that once open courtyard impossible.  Rates begin at $85.00 a night and go up from there, no shared anything, and, on a personal note, an unfriendly  staff that looked at me suspiciously when I inquired about renting a pool to soak in for an hour (I had come off the road, and looked rather disheveled no doubt).

They are prosperous,  obviously, and that prosperity is gated away, physically and spiritually, from the rest of the community. The waters remain the same, but the demographics have changed.  Yes, it is the American Dream - if you can make money, make it.  People like me, who  it might be said brought energy and interest to the place in the beginning,  now stand before a hostile staff and an economically barred gate.  No one seems to notice that something, other than generosity and a sense of community, have been lost along the way.  It's just the "way it is", isn't it?  And "old hippies" like me are relics of the past, along with communes and love-ins.



Spa Landia

A friend called the gentrification of  places we remember as small  enclaves for "artists, cultural creatives, mystics, and soulful eccentrics" Spa Land.  Another word for such interesting, colorful, and messy communities of people and places (before they become Spa Land)  might be "innovation", something that is never very profitable in the beginning, especially if you are in the arts.

It may sound unrealistic in our capitalist society, but many of us aging "cultural creatives"  feel cheated.  We can't afford to do our thing anymore.   We're the people who made these places interesting in the first place, raising the energy with our creativity, while real estate agents followed behind with calculators and teal green formulas for making money off  that attractive glow that was developing where  we landed.  We're displaced - not exactly homeless, but studio-less, gallery-less, arts community-less.

People not unlike us brought our studios and food Co-ops and poetry readings and Reiki classes and crystal sculptures  to Sedona (yes, I remember when crystal dealers sat on the side of the road there with card tables, and there was no such thing as a Teal Green MacDonalds, and people made medicine wheels at the entrance to Boynton Canyon, before there was an exclusive tennis resort and all those "keep out" signs)........to T or C, or Bisbee, or  for that matter the Haight Ashbury, Soho, the East Village and the Left Banke. 

I've seen it happen everywhere  since more fortunate times  - watching artists warehouses and galleries and small theatres close down  to become restaurants, expensive "live work" condos, or chain stores.   And sadly, no one seems to notice this particular kind of impoverishment, but impoverishment it is.  It's as if people can't tell the difference between a small theatre hosting local playrights .........and Starbucks.  As Ursula Leguin wrote in one of her novels, "no one can tell the difference any more between the true Azure and blue mud."  

I've also seen the ironic other end of the phenomenon:    empty storefronts  waiting for the high rent that property management people feel is "market price", places that previously were lively generators of energy (like the former Muse Community Arts Center) reduced to disposible    "investment property".  What about "investing" in cultural creativity?

Tucson is a good example - there is literature about Tucson's "art district", but compared to what I remember in the 80's, I don't know where it is.   Art galleries  generally don't make money, especially if they are showing experimental or innovative work, and especially now, when so many small businesses are leaving the planet as Walmart and Monsanto become the new global Monarchy.  Without subsidizing rent for an "arts district" in some way now, or at least having some kind of rent control,  it's just not going to happen.

Cafe Trieste, early 60's, North Beach, San Francisco.  

Artists and their Communities as Cultural Incubators

"Yet part of the reason for our collective ignorance about the critical importance of the arts is because we believe that the innovation in the lab — something we can monetize and quantify — is worlds apart from the experimentation in the studio."  

Sarah Lewis, SALON, "Scientists aren't the only innovators!  We really need Artists"

I've kind of reached an age (66, the age of being a cranky old lady, a dirty job but someone has to do it)  where I have no patience for the "why we need arts" argument, as if the human experience was somehow about making money and science, and  human creativity and expression was entertainment or an elective.  

Rainier Maria Rilke, Van Gogh, Herman Melville, Tesla, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Paul Gaugain, Egon Schiele, Franze Schubert, William Blake, Vermeer, most of the Impressionists, Cezanne, Rothko, Pollock, and most of the Abstract Expressionists and Post Modernists........and so on..........

What does this august lineup of historically extraordinary people so celebrated in the arts and the development of Western civilization share in common?

Cheap rent.  Along with poverty in their time.  

Would there have been an Impressionist Movement if there had not been creative but cheap lodging in Paris, and cafes to hang out in and share their ideas? Would there have been Post-Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, a Rothko and a Jackson Pollock,  if there had not been big cheap spaces to rent in Soho's warehouse district?  Would there have been the Beat Poets, the Summer of Love, the Visionary Arts Movement, and all the accompanying social, spiritual, and even technological innovation that came out of that place and time , if there had not been cheap tenements to rent in Haight Ashbury?

Here's something interesting about displacement, by the way, from Bill Moyers, "When the Rich Took Over Our Neighborhood".

http://billmoyers.com/2015/11/05/when-the-rich-took-over-our-neighborhood/#at_pco=cfd-1.0