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On Santa Fe, New Mexico

Patty and I flew to New Mexico on Thursday for the wedding of her nephew, John McNair. That makes me technically his uncle, even though I am only four months older than he is. And Patty is only three years older than him, due to the fact that Patty's father sired children over a period of twenty years, which produced the result that Patty has brothers who were having their own families when she was born, and so ... you get the picture. After a family dinner on Thursday night, we all drove up to Santa Fe on Friday for the larger party.

Santa Fe is saturated with arts and crafts. A lot of it, particularly around the Plaza, is very crap indeed. There are scores of galleries on the Plaza and surrounding side streets, and many of them I have been told sell high quality Western-themed art. I can't really judge, as it's not a genre I like. There is a lot of Western-tradition art - pseudo Impressionism and Abstraction - and I am familiar with that, and almost all of what I've seen in that vein is also very bad. But then we took the bus into the centre from our hotel on Friday and passed the warehouses and galleries that are now part of Site Santa Fe, the recently inaugurated biennial, which I think would be worth returning to see. Then this weekend, today in fact, is the start of Indian Market, which is the largest display of native American arts and crafts in existence. We're going to go down and look around today, where we will be joined supposedly by 100,000 other people.

People complain about Santa Fe being spoiled by tourism and fakery, but despite the caveats mentioned above, it's still a great pleasure to walk around the streets between the reddish adobe buildings, along the arcades with their old wooden pillars and ceilings, and past churches and small homes that are among the oldest structures in the entire United States. It is a very Spanish place, and very native American place, and no amount of mass-produced gew-gaws, Starbucks, or Whole Foods stores can quite manage to efface that completely.

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