Chapter XXI--The Acceptable Year of the Lord. If I may be pardoned for
referring again to the same book, I assumed, in The Golden Book of
Springfield, Illinois, that the Acceptable Year of the Lord would come
for my city beginning November 1, 2018, and that up to that time, amid
much of joy, there would also be much of thwarting and tribulation. But
in the beginning of that mystic November, the Soul of My City, named
Avanel, would become as much a part of the city as Pallas Athena was
Athens, and indeed I wrote into the book much of the spirit of the
photoplay outlined, pages 147 through 150. But in The Golden Book I
changed the lady the city worshipped from a golden image into a living,
breathing young girl, descendant of that great American, Daniel Boone,
and her name, obviously, Avanel Boone. With her tribe she incarnates all
the mystic ideals of the Boones of Kentucky.
All this but a prelude to saying that I have just passed through the city
of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is a Santa Fe full of the glory of the New
Architecture of which I have spoken, and the issuing of a book of cowboy
songs collected, and many of them written, by N. Howard Thorp, a citizen
of Santa Fe, and thrilling with the issuing of a book of poems about the
Glory of New Mexico. This book is called Red Earth. It is by Alice Corbin
Henderson. And Santa Fe is full of the glory of a magnificent State
Capitol that is an art gallery of the whole southwest, and the glories of
the studio of William Penhallow Henderson, who has painted our New Arabia
more splendidly than it was ever painted before, with the real character
thereof, and no theatricals. This is just the kind of a town I hoped for
when I wrote my first draft of The Art of the Moving Picture. Here now is
literature and art. When they become one art as of old in Egypt, we will
have New Mexico Hieroglyphics from the Hendersons and their kind, and
their surrounding Indian pupils, a basis for the American Motion Picture
more acceptable, and more patriotic, and more organic for us than the
Egyptian.
And I come the same month to Denver, and find a New Art Museum projected,
which I hope has much indeed to do with the Acceptable Year of the Lord,
when films as vital as the Santa Fe songs and pictures and architecture
can be made, and in common spirit with them, in this New Arabia. George
W. Eggers, the director of the newly projected Denver Art Museum, assures
me that a photoplay policy can be formulated, amid the problems of such
an all around undertaking as building a great Art Museum in Denver. He
expects to give the photoplay the attention a new art deserves,
especially when it affects almost every person in the whole country. So I
prophesy Denver to be the Museum and Art-school capital of New Arabia, as
Santa Fe is the artistic, architectural, and song capital at this hour.
And I hope it may become the motion picture capital of America from the
standpoint of pure art, not manufacture.
What do I mean by New Arabia?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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