Breaking Marfa
Gather ‘round folks and let me take you back to 2007. According to a Marfa resident, that was the year the town broke. Having recently graduated college, I was living in Austin when I learned via MySpace that my favorite band Sonic Youth was going to perform at Chinati Open House (now called Chinati Weekend). I didn’t know anything about Chinati or Marfa but I convinced my friends—Chris, Corina, and Djakangir— to make the trip with me that October. Actually, I think it was an easy sell.
We were young and broke so we decided to camp. Not having GPS, we made a wrong exit that extended our trip by two hours, arriving past midnight in Chris’s Jeep, loaded with water and supplies. Once we hit the edge of town, we parked behind someone’s backyard—thinking a scrubby tree would hide us—set down a tarp, and went to sleep under the stars.
When we woke up, Djakangir and I made eye contact and smiled. Our pillows were slightly damp but the sky was gorgeous. While we were all still in our sleeping bags, the owner of the home we parked next to approached us. She appeared to be pushing 80 and she didn’t care that we were in her backyard. She pulled out a small photo from her wallet of her wearing a coat made of fox fur pelts. She was proud of that coat, and she said was standing next to some folks from Hollywood who filmed a movie in town. It could’ve been No Country for Old Men. She then invited us to come by the farmer’s market where she’d be selling arrowheads later that day. (We did and she didn’t remember us.)
I told Chris and Corina that we should have a competition to see who could make the most friends in Marfa. Corina won because she befriended Johnny Sufficool, “the most photographed man in West Texas,” according to Cooking in Marfa. We were drinking with his buddies when Johnny asked us if we’d like to take a tour of the local galleries in his limousine. How could we resist?
Johnny had a wild laugh and liked to talk. While sitting on a sofa in a gallery, he told me he learned how to make absinthe. He pulled out a jar of the stuff and told me not to take more than three sips. I took exactly three sips and listened to him tell me about how people in Chihuahua were “more human than human.” An hour later, I was losing my lunch.
Marfa had a few cute businesses—a small cafe and a bar or two run by hipsters who immigrated from Houston and Austin—but it was still a podunk town with one stoplight. It was (and still is) a place where you find unlocked bicycles sprinkled across the sidewalks. Anyway, Marfa’s downtown is very flat and Chris thought it would be a good time for me to learn how to drive a stick shift. I was driving so poorly, but what stood out to me was every person who passed us waved at us.
Other tourists who came in for the weekend were camping in the downtown park and on the land where Hotel St. George was ultimately built, near the train tracks. We met a young artist from London outside of a cafe who said he dedicated his life to the color yellow. His trousers, shirt, hat, and even his cigarette pack were yellow. At some point, we heard a train approaching and one of my friends asked if we wanted to get near and feel its vibrations as it went by. Without hesitation, we all stood up, linked arms, and took it in.
That evening, the Chinati Foundation fed over 1,000 people a Tex-Mex meal downtown. There were dozens of tables lined up on the street and folkloric dancers sashaying through the aisles. A guy waiting in line for food next to me kept snapping photos of the scene. “Nobody is going to believe that they fed an entire town!” he said. I don’t remember paying for a meal the entire weekend.
The Sonic Youth show was happening across from the Thunderbird Hotel. Until about a year ago, I thought the show took place in a barn but it was the scaffolding of what would become The Capri. The space filled up… and the sound was so terrible I had to go outside. What I loved about that evening, though, was seeing families from Alpine see what all the fuss was about. While I thought seeing Sonic Youth would be the highlight of our trip, it was yet to come.
We decided to visit The Chinati Foundation collection on the last day of our trip. Somewhere along the way, we learned about a lunch at Donald Judd’s home, Casa Perez. We piled into Chris’s Jeep and rollicked up and down the rocky and windy Pinto Canyon Road, passing several cars that couldn’t make the daunting, 90-minute journey and were forced to turn around. I remember bouncing up and down in the car, my heart beating fast and feeling untethered. Everyone in the car was smiling and laughing. “Do you think our parents ever did stuff like this?” I asked.
Casa Perez is surrounded by the Chinati mountains and not much else. Everything inside the home remained untouched from when Judd left it in the ’90s. His New Mexican pottery, math books, and cassette tapes were all there. Outside the house was food, drink, mariachis, and a group of about two or three dozen mover-and-shakers from LA and New York who worked for companies like Seven7 Jeans. What’s funny is we never once ran into anyone we knew from Austin. Tired from the heat and the whisky we had been drinking, we thought it would be a good idea to nap under a bush. At some point, we heard people taking photos of us. “Look at those cute hipsters under there,” one of them said.
Chris heard that Chinati Hot Springs was nearby. At the time, the owners were selling day passes so we decided to swing by for a soak. The lithium in the water left us so relaxed and euphoric that we didn’t want to go home. “Let’s keep this going and go down to Mexico,” Chris said. I protested, saying I needed to work the next day.
The blissed-out feeling from the springs faded quickly. The entire weekend, captured in just a handful of photos, felt like a sun-soaked dream—and I was bummed to be returning to humid, crowded Austin. For weeks, I wondered if I could live in West Texas but it was just a passing phase. Just months later, we’d be living through the 2008 recession and I would start the next chapter of my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
I didn’t return to Marfa until 2015 and a lot had changed. Blame it on Beyonce’s visit in 2013: Marfa had been discovered. It was a wedding destination, a mini Santa Fe with country cosplay. I even know people who have moved there, including Chris and his wife. But seeing it on the verge of being the Marfa we know today when I was trying to figure out adulthood was something.
Marfa from A to Z
A - Agave Festival
B - Bordo / Big Sandy / Balmorhea State Park / Ballroom Marfa
C - Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center / Capri / Cobra Rock
D - Davis Mountains State Park
E - El Cosmico
F - foundations: Ayn, Chinati, Judd
G - Giant
H - hot springs
I - I Love Dick
J - Judd, Donald
K - kayak Big Bend National Park
L - The Lincoln
M - Margaret’s
N - NPR station 93.5: Marfa Public Radio
P - Prada Marfa
Q - quiet
R - Raba Marfa
S - Skora Marfa / The Sentinel
T - Trans-Pecos Festival of Music and Love
U - pass!
W - Wrong
X - pass!
Z - zones 8a
Down the ’90s Rabbit Hole
I have a sweet spot for the culture that came out in the ’90s. It feels cozy and comfortable because—duh—it was a formative decade for me. It was also a time when my family lived in Muslim countries, which meant the media I ingested came from bootlegged movies and hand-me-down cassettes from friends with cool, older sisters. Mixtapes with indie musicians, tattered teen magazines, and VHS copies of Up in Smoke and Kids were hot commodities.
Living overseas made me feel like an impartial observer of my generation. I always felt like I missed out on the silly Nickelodeon shows, MTV moments, and early Internet chat rooms. To this day, I gravitate to movies and TV shows from the ’90s, compelled to catch up on the ephemera that shaped Alternative Nation. Here are some cool things from the decade that I recently discovered (and rediscovered):
Kim Gordon’s X-Girl fashion line and this bizarre promotional video with Chloë Sevigny
Seventeen magazine’s profile of a young Sofia Copolla
Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho
If I Were a Carpenter (The Carpenters tribute album)
Looks from the Why Bother Generation
