Sunset Lofts plan finally sunsets

Chamber Music Sedona has at last announced its 2026-27 season, during which it will join the Sedona and Flagstaff symphonies in their delightful emphasis on Beethoven this year. Chad Hoopes, Arnaud Sussmann, Milena Pajaro de Stadt, and Nick Canellakis will play a Beethoven string quartet at the opening concert on November 27, along with selections from Dvorak and Samuel Barber. The January 10 show will present Rupert Boyd on guitar and Laura Metcalf on cello, and on February 13, Jonathan Biss will bring no fewer than three Beethoven sonatas to town. The March 14 programme will feature the Kavafian-Wiley-Polonsky Trio, and the final concert on April 4 will see Canellakis joined by five students from the Curtis Institute to play Schumann, Brahms, and Dohnanyi. Tickets will be on sale shortly.

Clarkdale’s Concerts in the Park return tomorrow with Outside the Line playing oldies and Motown, followed by Come Back Buddy with more of the 1950s on August 15. The Wild Flagstaff Music Festival will be running all day on August 8 at Charly’s Pub, and for a very different sort of musical weekend, the Met Live encore of The Merry Widow shows tomorrow morning at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre.

Even as classicist Emily Wilson is catching flack for having supposedly contributed to Hollywood’s spoiling of the Odyssey, she is quietly ravaging the result of the Americans’ meddling in the London Review of Books. “Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely,” Wilson sniffs. “It is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants.” Calypso has been reduced to “an unpaid therapist, soothing the soul of the bedraggled, PTSD-ridden Odysseus with drugs, and graciously listening to his disjointed tale of woe.” Odysseus and Penelope “have no chemistry and nothing in common.” Wilson then puts her finger on the source of the problem—that for Hollywood, there’s nothing special about this or any other story; it’s merely the foundation for another formulaic spectacle: “At the end of the film, a character sets out to ‘sail beyond the sunset’ and I almost expected everyone to break into Elvish.” Devastatingly, she ties the film’s enervation to the filmmaker’s lack of imagination. “Zeus’ law is portrayed as being crucially important, and yet there is no Zeus. Nolan’s vision of the world is not quite big enough to include either real gods or real people who might be different from us.”

There is no room in this maximalist film for anything as charmingly mundane and small-scale as Nausicaa’s laundry and her girlish fantasies about a husband. Damon’s grizzled Odysseus is neither a master storyteller nor a flirt...Damon’s Odysseus isn’t complicated or wily or artful...Odysseus also seems to lack technological intelligence (polymēchania)...[A] muddled subplot is foisted on the film in order to make Nolan’s relentlessly didactic point about the contemporary Anglophone world: that the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values “we” hold most dear. Nolan’s other major addition to Homer’s narrative is the repeated reference to threats to “our civilisation” from “the sea peoples”—a now debunked 19th-century theory about maritime tribes who were thought to have attacked Egypt around 1200 BCE and to have also been responsible for the roughly coeval collapse of Mycenaean Greek culture.

“I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script,” Wilson notes before expressing hope that, awful as it is, the popular success of the film might “persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments.”

Oh, and The Guardian has produced a delicious graph of the Odyssey’s body count that might as well have the same title as the National Theatre’s Shakespeare poster: “Everybody Dies.”

Over at Arts Journal, historian and former Brooklyn Philharmonic executive director Joseph Horowitz has some interesting reflections not just on the decline of American orchestras in recent decades but on the paradoxical nature of how, even though the concert orchestra has been more of an American than a European tradition, it has been sustained by regular infusions of European talent and the cross-pollination of European performing practice:

Performance history is actually susceptible to study...I happen to know a former Metropolitan Opera violinist. He was in the pit for many performances ineffectively led by Valery Gergiev. I once asked him: “Have you ever heard Gergiev conduct his own Mariinski Orchestra? They play in New York all the time.” He had not. So he did—and it proved instructive. So would be Ettore Panizza’s 1938 Otello.

Again we see the same lack of interest in some supposed artistic professionals that apparently characterizes the maker of the Odyssey.

City staff’s final song-and-dance routine for their new housing strategy took place on Wednesday afternoon at Community Library Sedona. The draft strategy is now available on the city’s website for public comment—but only until next Wednesday, August 5. Staff will need a full month to try to water down and submerge the public’s comments before presenting the whole mess to council in September.

“Please be candid and honest,” community undevelopment director Comrade Allender told the audience. “If something we’re recommending isn’t the best idea, tell us what is.” Well, now, that should be extraordinarily easy. Not that they’ll listen.

“We intend to actually implement everything that’s in that balanced housing strategy,” Allender promised before launching into a series of contradictory statements. He described the draft strategy as being based both on Sedona’s needs and what was important to the community. In any community in the United States, one of the priorities most important to the vast majority, by a factor of eleven to one, is owning a home. The draft strategy proposes no effective steps to increase home ownership in Sedona, particularly by workers with families. Allender also admitted that building requirements must reflect community character rather than need alone, which is not consistent with the city’s ongoing resistance to Sedona residents’ preference for single-family homes.

Instead, Allender’s presentation subtly emphasized staff and council’s insistence that they are ready to allow almost any kind of group housing units in preference to freestanding, individually-owned homes. Allender repeated staff’s new proposal of aiming to build 775 “units” in ten years, 221 of which, he reminded his listeners, are currently in development. All of those units in development are apartments or townhomes, and primarily rental apartments, which indicates what city staff’s idea of “balance” in housing actually is. The breakdown of those units, moreover, includes proposed new construction of up to 300 “units” for working households as opposed to 175 “units” for seniors. The proposal is an outright bribe to the elderly to get them to consent to what’s actually needed in this town by suggesting that their power will be minimally diluted by an incursion of nasty young things.

“We heard ‘no more than two stories’ because people told us that,” Allender attempted to reassure listeners, and promised the repeal of the useless DIGAH guidelines, which pushed developers to add density and height. He then disingenuously added, “We are recommending that every single zoning category allow duplexes and triplexes by right….if we aren’t smart enough to do it first, the state will do it for us….what we’re suggesting is get in front of it.” In other words, staff’s previous priorities are not going away but are merely being reframed as a kinder, gentler push for density.

Allender called for the creation of “measurable objectives” to gauge staff’s progress and ended up setting none apart from throwing out pie-in-the-sky numerical goals. “Neighborhood infill” was brushed aside with no specific recommendations as to which codes or how many codes should be repealed to make infill construction feasible. “Commercial redevelopment” involved vague proposals for tearing down and rebuilding Uptown as two stories throughout with housing on top of businesses, which ignores the joint reality that businesses are fleeing Uptown and that there already exist plenty of buildings in Uptown—including many former homes—suitable for easy reconversion to housing without requiring reconstruction. Allender admitted staff’s procedures and policies create problems for builders, then gleefully explained that his proposed solution to bureaucracy is—more bureaucracy in the form of a four-layer hierarchical plan he didn’t even have time to explain in full to attendees.

“We have to think of all of these other facets that really build this sense of community,” Allender commented at one point during the evening. The community does, yes; city staff don’t. “This is not your job,” as one surveyed resident said with such elegant finality years ago.

Again the audience was reminded that one of city staff’s newly-identified housing “gaps” is individuals who earn between $50,000 and $200,000 a year, reflecting how the city bureaucracy has already driven many of the people earning normal wages out of town entirely and that such normal workers and their needs no longer even warrant particular consideration. Conveniently, few Sedona workers earn enough to make it into that salary bracket—but almost all city staffers now do. Reminds me of one of those occasions on which Christopher Fox Graham’s need to be the smartest person in the room overpowered his need to suck up to city staff and he decided to be candid:

Somehow the city is still hiring more and more administrators to run programs with marginal community benefit. The higher fees will make short-term rentals more likely, not less. High development fees will transform Sedona from a financially diverse community into one where only the uber-wealthy can afford to pay to play, leading to old homes being torn down to build McMansions…This cynical, cyclical feedback loop will strip away Sedona’s less valuable homes on increasingly expensive parcels one by one until Sedona is nothing but gated communities locking out Sedona’s workforce, who will have moved to surrounding communities. In a few years, council won’t have to worry about pesky biennial campaign demands for “workforce housing,” because Sedona won’t be home to any workers who can afford the astronomical rents…No, councilman, you and your six colleagues aren’t “trying to prevent housing”—you are preventing housing.

Comrade Williamson had emerged from her cave for the occasion and was in fine fettle, with her own peculiar brand of schizophrenia on full display. At one point she jumped in to demand tree planting “to sort of re-forest the area” as part of the strategy—when the Sedona area has an unprecedentedly high tree density already and actually requires thinning to reduce the likelihood of fires. When an audience member wanted to confirm whether individual owners would still be able to do what they wanted with their land if the city had earmarked it for another use, Williamson sniffed disdainfully in the background, “No one has earmarked for anything.” Oh, really? Go talk to James Spindleman and Soo Young Kim, who have been very clear that city staff have been telling them for almost a decade that their property “will” become apartments and that they won’t even be allowed to keep their home. Sure, the city has limited power to actually enforce such threats, but when city staff are making such statements repeatedly, their behavior has the ability to intimidate private property owners into making concessions the latter would not otherwise accept.

Williamson’s moment of lucidity came at the start of the meeting, when she was overheard, in one of those instances of blinding honesty that occasionally afflict her, to admit that before the retirees and developers came to Sedona, back when it was a farming and arts community, “it was all affordable housing.” Correct. Back when you could get your own land and build your own house on it with no outside interference, out of what materials you wanted, to the size that you needed and your resources could accommodate, all of Sedona was affordable housing. That kind of affordable housing, of course, is nowhere contemplated in this so-called strategy city staff have produced.

The session saw a subtly strengthened emphasis on property acquisition by the city as part of the future plan, signaling how desperate staff are to force the construction of the kind of housing that staff rather than residents want. The Madole-Rigby House and its ten acres, incidentally, was one of the two properties that Allender identified as parcels that he would like to have the city take off the private market—“covet” was the word he used. When asked if the city planned to purchase available single-family lots, presumably in order to put duplexes and triplexes on them, Allender vacillated. “As it relates to infill lots, I think the answer’s going to be, it depends. I realize that’s a horrible answer…we may end up buying a couple.”

With regard to properties the city already owns, Allender confirmed that the sun has now set on the existing Sunset Lofts proposal and the property will be offered to developers once again under a single RFP in combination with the 2411 SR 89A property in the hopes of arousing more interest, with guidelines to move the distribution of apartment sizes away from studios and one-bedroom units. “The only problem with those two sites is they’re small, so we can’t do a lot with them,” Allender argued. One begs to differ. The potential for creatively-designed communities on those two sites is enormous. He also indicated that he plans to request funding to begin planning development of the Dells in the fiscal year 2028 budget and continued to defend Villas on Shelby, claiming that the majority of tenants so far have been Sedona employees—without providing the total number of tenants who have moved in so far.

At one point Allender repeated the absurd claim that Sedona has “between seventy-five and eighty-five” infill lots of an acre or less available for development. That number is so low as to be an obvious lie. As realtor Reginald Owens stated in a letter to the editor years ago, he had actually counted all of the available lots in town, and there were more than one thousand of them—not seventy-five. We’ve been hearing from staff for years that Sedona is 80-something percent built up. If the figure is 86 percent, and there’s 6,800 or so houses in Sedona now, then there are roughly 1,360 unbuilt lots in town—not seventy-five. If the figure is 87.5 percent, then there are about 970 unbuilt lots—not seventy-five. The suggestion that Sedona has only seventy-five single-family lots left is an outrageous falsehood easily refuted by anyone who is capable of looking at Google Maps. Furthermore, many of those empty lots are of such a size that if it were not for LDC 2.6B, they could be further subdivided for the construction of multiple small homes, dramatically lowering the cost of home ownership for workers. As for the claim that some of these properties are unsuitable for construction, sure, they won’t work for a 2,000-square-foot plastic stucco McMansion with two-car garage and ten-foot ceilings, but they’ll work just fine for a 200-square-foot cottage perched at a crazy but endearing angle.

“It’s gonna be expensive. Period,” Allender said. No, it won’t be once you get that wasteful attitude out of the way. Sub-$100,000 home ownership will be a perfectly attainable reality in Sedona once staff and their purposefully obstructive codes are removed. That’s what’s so dishonest when Allender and others talk about code reform. They wrote these codes on purpose to block the creation of new housing, so the idea that they’ll repeal parts of the codes to allow the construction of new housing is absurd. Repeal and reform serves the public—but it doesn’t serve a bureaucracy that has to constantly invent more work for itself out of thin air.

Flipping through the emails exchanged between city staff and fellow traveler Linda Martinez over the last few years tells us a good deal more about how insidiously Martinez has been working to influence housing policy in Sedona. Apparently her desperate interest to force the creation of apartments in Sedona, and particularly her urge to create a for-profit development on church land, are undiminished, because just last month, she and her husband were once again pushing the idea of redeveloping the St. John Vianney property commercially as apartments to Comrade Allender.

An October 2023 email reveals where the idea for the defeated apartment plan at St. John Vianney came from, and it was none other than the unlamented Shannon Boone: “I suggested we work together with a partner to develop that portion of the site with affordable housing. If they sell the land outright with no restrictions, they may be less likely to get approval of the zoning change for their lodging units, and it might make it harder to get affordable housing there,” Boone wrote to Martinez, echoing city staff’s carrot-and-stick approach to its deed restriction program: promise a concession in return for giving up some of your rights. The Boone-Martinez connection was sufficiently strong that when the city was interviewing for a new housing coordinator in August 2022, Martinez was included on the interview team by Boone even though she held no official role with the city.

In May 2023, Martinez was busy pitching to city mismanager Comrade Osburn a plan by chamber board president Mike Wise to turn the Bank of America building into twelve units of apartments, or twenty-four units if the city were to allow him to rebuild the structure as a two-story apartment building. “I’m trying not to get too excited,” Martinez gushed.

From time to time, Martinez has pushed for outright government intervention in the market, as in June 2022, when she proposed that the city pay the sewer bills for property owners who rented units preferentially to locals. Perhaps her biggest pitch for the diversion of public funds to the city’s state housing agenda, however, came in April 2023, when she thought her group might be able to snatch the half-percent bed tax increase away from the Chamber:

Now that the Chamber is separating from the city, I was thinking of a good use for the .5% bed tax. Can we use it to help fund the shuttle so we can use the shuttle money for buying deed restrictions? If we get a cap, which I think we will in a few years, we can buy down our STR stock…I would hate to see that money not used toward housing.

Osburn promptly shot that idea down by pointing out that city staff intended to create their own tourism program and would be spending all of that money and more, and definitely not on housing, thank you very much.

The most surreal passages in Martinez’s complaints to city staff can be found in her laments following the publication of the Cultural Park survey results this April. “Why was no attempt made to hear from our 80 percent of workers who live outside Sedona regarding their opinions? Do those who support our city and many who want to live here, not matter?” Martinez demanded. She seems remarkably clueless about how voting works. In any event, why should the opinion of someone who doesn’t live in Sedona be considered when making decisions for Sedona? Is she saying the city should be designed not for those who currently live here but in anticipation for those who might want to live here? Apparently, which gives us some idea of how desperate she is to create a reason for new apartment construction.

Martinez then demanded, “Why only property owners? You limited it to those who either have lived here a long time or can afford to buy homes.” First, that statement was flat-out wrong and a deliberate misrepresentation on her part, because she knew better. The survey was sent to all registered voters, regardless of property ownership, or at least it was supposed to be; many residents didn’t receive one.

Second, it’s amazing that Martinez should suddenly have discovered the limitation that she and her fellow well-heeled retirees, “who either have lived here a long time or can afford to buy homes,” have themselves created. “Why did so few young people participate in the survey?” Martinez wanted to know. Because she and others like her have squeezed them out of Sedona. Sell your oversized houses to young working families and then they’ll be able to participate in these surveys. Or get the NIMBY codes you’ve created to protect your property values out of the way and let them build homes. In all of the words I’ve read written by Linda Martinez over the years, I’ve never once seen her express interest in repealing the building codes in order to ensure that Sedona’s property owners become more diversified. The performative hypocrisy of Democrats who are already snug in their nests with their litter accumulating around them is revolting. Let us not forget that this is the same woman who thinks it’s impossible for private employers to pay $40 an hour but accepts that it’s perfectly natural for city staff to get paid $60 an hour.

Browsing through city correspondence has also revealed more of staff’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering with regard to their plans to destroy the Cultural Park with zero public input. An August 30, 2022 exchange between Osburn and Dickey included this statement from Osburn: “I just had meetings on Friday and yesterday and it does look like we will most likely be moving forward, probably by end of year, on the purchase of the Cultural Park.” Really? How would she know? There had been no meetings of council or the public thus far to decide on that. A few months later, Comrade Browne would send out an email to department heads, apparently on her own authority, declaring that the amphitheater would not be reopened. Ignoring the public was the plan all along.

A timely word on community is necessary here, given Martinez’s comments. There seems to be some confusion that those who live in Sedona without contributing to the functioning of its society and economy as employees, volunteers, or active members of society, or that those who are employed in Sedona without living in Sedona, can be or are part of the Sedona community. A community is traditionally defined as requiring not only regular interaction among its members but also co-location of its members; those who fail to meet one of the two criteria do not meet the minimum standards to be considered members of a community. In Sedona’s case, there are perhaps three thousand people or so, at a generous estimate, who meet these criteria. Furthermore, adding a third common criterion of traditional community, shared cultural values, reduces that number still further while also complicating the picture, as Sedona’s traditional cultural values have gradually been eroded by newcomers who may meet the first two criteria without the third.

The Sedona paramilitary and city staff are spending our tax dollars, among other things, on creating a database of those they identify as “sovereign citizens”—and have been doing so since at least June 2022. City records indicate that Sedona cops and code enforcement bureaucrats select individuals whom they decide display “sovereign citizen ideations,” without actually having either a formal definition or a legal definition of what might objectively constitute such an “ideation,” and have these ad-hoc designations entered into SPD’s logs and other city records. They then create lists of individuals associated with the individuals whom they have already designated as suspect and keep a special lookout for the associates as well as the suspects, as well as staking out any addresses associated with these individuals. This is exactly what Comrade Finchem was proposing that the state of Arizona do using spycams, but it seems that Sedona’s already doing it the hard way in tribute to Joe McCarthy, the Soviet Union’s greatest advocate in America.

In yet another demonstration of how emotionally fragile and divorced from practical skills and reality today’s college students and their administrators are, especially in New York, Cornell University has now banned the processing of game in communal kitchens after two students used the kitchen in their dorm to butcher a bear they had harvested last September and their neopagan dormmates turned the perfectly normal incident into a social media uproar. If that weren’t insane enough, the dorm where the butchering occurred bears the name of Ganędagǫ: Hall, diacritical marks and all, the name of the Cayuga people in the Cayuga language. (It is one of the marvelous ironies of humanity that peoples are most often known not by the name they call themselves, but by the name their neighbors call them—which is always accompanied by them calling their neighbors “barbarians.”) Could we have asked for a better demonstration of the shallow performativeness of the self-described progressives? Add this one to the list of traditional cultural practices banned in spaces nominally “acknowledging” the primacy of traditional cultures.

The mental weakness of the offended Cornell students was readily apparent in that their complaints openly admitted the legality of the hunt and the butchering; they simply found it unacceptable. They demanded that authority figures intervene by force to prevent them from having their snowflake feelings hurt, and they were validated by those authorities, who doubtless welcomed the excuse to grab more power. Already weaklings, these students will continue growing up, if they are in fact capable of further growth, into even bigger weaklings who can be relied upon to cower and freeze in the event of any social challenge. People like this are liabilities to human society. They have neither the emotional capacity to understand and accept normal actions nor the depth of experience necessary to carry out basic survival actions, whether those be growing food, harvesting an animal, putting a roof over their own heads, or even working a day-to-day job in an urban-industrial society. The greater irony here is that this nonsense is occurring at an institution which is supposedly an institution of education—and any normal education would include an education in the facts of life as the basis for everything else. These cosseted Cornellians are getting no such thing.

Over at The European Correspondent, someone had the idea to analyze the colors of all 3,500 couches featured in Ikea catalogues from 1960 to 2021, and the results provide further confirmation of the observation that our social world is slowly being drained of color. In the 1960s, greens and blues predominated, with splashes of reds and oranges, but the 1970s and 1980s saw the disappearance of colors in favor of browns and beiges, and by the 2000s, the tans in turn were being further diluted with whites and grays. The shift in furniture hues parallels a similarly documented decline in the prevalence of vibrant car colors; the replacement of rich reds, oranges, yellows, and golds used in everyday objects with blacks, grays, and cool blues over the last two centuries; and the reduction in the number of long-wavelength colors (red, orange, yellow) used in movie posters over the course of the last century, in which purple, blue, and black have become increasingly prominent.

The dystopian trope of universal grayness and blandness is not really a trope. It’s a fact, and it’s part of the sociobiology of urban-industrial coercive cultures. As societies evolve to become increasingly tyrannical and production-oriented, their social institutions evolve to cut out potential sources of stimulation that could motivate their wage slaves to resist economic exploitation and political abuse: exposure to sunlight, contact with the natural world, leisure time, high-quality food, sex, stimulating plants, music, dance—and color. Exposure to bright and diverse colors activates the brain’s dopamine network, part of the monoamine neurotransmitter system that underpins cognition, creativity, and ethical social behavior, including self-responsibility and a preference for freedom. Draining the world of color literally means draining humans of the physical ability and initiative to resist tyranny. Again we have cause to consider Daniel Lord Smail’s matchless summary of how and why this process occurs: “Political elites could not have been aware of the precise physiological consequences of their actions and behaviors. Instead, political behaviors converged on these solutions because this is how power was most effectively maintained.”

On the bright side, challenges provoke responses, as we previously discussed with regard to the proliferation of drones in warfare, and with regard to color choices, a revival of bright colors and vivid patterns might be coming our way as a practical response to the surveillance state. Turns out that there is now a movement towards creating “adversarial clothing” that uses loud patterns to confuse computer facial recognition systems, recalling the principles behind the dazzle camouflage patterns that proved successful at confusing submarine commanders during World War I. It’s ridiculous we should have to go to such lengths, but at least there are possible solutions in the offing.

Meanwhile, down south...

In an inspiring lesson for Sedona residents, Florida retiree Carl Gunn, age 77, is leading St. Petersburg’s protests against the city’s Flock spycams by sitting down and taking direct action against the surveillance state. Every Saturday, Gunn sets up a lawn chair next to the Flock spycam in his neighborhood and raises his pool skimmer to obscure the camera’s field of view. As a special extra, he tapes a sign reading “Down with Flock cameras” to the skimmer. Now there’s a real American hero: someone giving his own time to do something for the greater good of the community in opposition to government.

“This is just another thing to take our information and to spy on us,” Gunn stated. “I have a constitutional right to my privacy. I’m a law-abiding citizen, and I don’t need anyone sticking their nose in my business. And if they do, I’m going to chop it off.”

Imagine what would happen if five or six thousand people around the country, out of the tens of millions of the wealthy and retired and leisured, got off their asses—or onto their asses—and posted themselves in front of these spycams. The whole system would be shut down, legally and by direct democratic action. Or, in Sedona’s case, just imagine what a few dozen of these retirees who whine their heads off about STRs could accomplish if they actually got out and started systematically protesting in front of those STRs they pretend to hate so much.