Texas Day 6 - Marfa, Mattie, and Making My Way Through Texas
Today started with a praline I had bought the day before at Mi Tierra Bakery. I didn't have the room for any more food last night but it was an excellent way to begin this day. Pralines are really big in the southwest (both in terms of size and popularity), but I'd never seen them outside of chocolates before setting out on this trip, and this was by far the prettiest one I'd seen yet so I knew it was time to finally taste one of these bad boys. The praline paste is made through some magical process that involves boiling nuts and sugar (in this case I believe it was mainly walnuts). The sweet sticky stuff is then poured over more nuts for some texture, and the end result is an amazing little confection. It was sort of like a mix between a toffee and a maple candy, and I wish I had tried one sooner!
After treating my sweet tooth, I still needed a slightly stronger fuel than sugar so I got my caffeine fix at a place called Electric Coffee. They had the word "Electric" written in neon behind the counter, so you knew the name was legitimate. They had very good coffee which I very much needed, because today was going to be a long fay of driving across a big chunk of Texas for the next 8 hours. I was going up to Midland, Texas to see my good friend and former roommate, Mattie. She works for Chevron up there, and it's a nice little town, but in between San Antonio and Midland there's a lot of ground to cover.
Driving through hours and hours of Texas was fascinating. It was like a microcosm of everything I'd seen so far, with totally new landscapes around every bend. Rolling mountains, desserts, forests, I saw it all.
My first stop once hitting the road was to stop at a liquor store in Mountain Home called Grape and Grain Liquors. Today happened to be St. Patrick's day, so I wasn't about to disrespect my Irish ancestors by showing up to Mattie's without any fine local stouts. I loved the small town vibe of the liquor store, because the owner's daughter was just sitting on the counter when I walked in. I'm not used to seeing young children in liquor stores, but it made the place feel oddly homely as opposed to the alternating supermarket or grimy liquor store aesthetics I'm used to. The homeyness continued as the owner helped me pick out the best beer for my buck. I went with the Local Legend Sweet Stout by Deep Ellum Brewing, and every purchase came with a free wine chiller and tongs so I got to bring Mattie a much belated house warming present to go with the St. Paddy's Day Beer.
For lunch I went to a place called City Sweets and Eats in a town at the junction of two state highways fittingly called, Junction. I went for more of the eats than the sweets because I still had some praline stuck to the roof of my mouth. It was a great classic roadside diner, complete with wonderfully corny pun signage on the walls that I'm only a little embarrassed to have laughed at. I got some more coffee and the chicken tendies and fries, which came with some excellent white gravy that elevated things beyond your normal fast food fare. It was a good greasy dose of Americana.
The one major detour I made on the way to Midland was to the town of Marfa. Marfa seems to be what happens when you give a bunch of artists and hippies free reign over a small ranching town in West Texas. The town has less than 2000 people, but (at least) three art galleries and an organic supermarket. It was totally bizarre, but also really cozy. Naturally I loved it.
The main draw for me personally was a museum called the Chinati Foundation. The museum which occupies the campus of a former Army fort was founded by artist David Judd and specializes in large scale minimalist contemporary art pieces that in some way interact with their environment. That might sound fairly wishy washy and esoteric, but because of Marfa's unique location in the middle of nowhere that ample space allows the artists to really let their imaginations run wild, and the results are nothing short of astounding.
Most of the collection is only available to be seen through a guided tour. Unfortunately I had just missed the last one of the day because I had already been on the road for about 5 and half hours at this point. Luckily there were a few pieces available for self guided touring. Because of their size, "touring" does seem to be the more operative word than "viewing" when it comes to describing the artwork. I started with Donald Judd's first piece created especially for this museum entitled 15 Untitled Works in Concrete. As the name suggests, the piece consists of 15 sets of Concrete blocks arranged in different ways. The blocks all have the same volumetric dimensions but they all vary in which sides are filled in and which ones are left open. This is the kind of abstract art that doesn't usually do it for me, but then I remembered that the pieces were intended to interact with the environment so I took a few steps back and realized that the different arrangements created sort of optical illusions with the empty field, sunlight, and big ol' Texas sky. Sometimes the pieces served to frame the natural world and sometimes they served to block out. The idea of using such minimal shapes to do something as big as put a frame around the sky is so inventive and whimsical that I couldn't help but fall in love. Being concrete the pieces are also incredibly durable so you can completely interact with them. Getting up close, I also realized that they don't just alter the visual landscape but also the sonic one as the different shapes create different echoing sounds depending on the passing wind and whether or not traveling idiots just start yelling into them. It wasn't a particularly windy day but there was a whole lot of the latter.
Trying to capture the full scope of all fifteen arrangements from either end (close to a mile from end to end) was nearly impossible for my poor little cell phone camera, but I think my photos capture a teeny bit of just how jaw dropping it is to see such a strange piece of art literally stretched to the horizon. I would have loved to see the look on the first local to just drive by one day, see a massive stone obelisk, and then have to wonder if an artist had moved in or a weird new cult.
One more added bonus of the art being outdoors was that you also got to see some of the furrier art lovers.
A similar exhibit, also by Judd, was in a former ammunitions shed and featured 100 blocks made of reflective mill aluminum with the different shapes catching and reflecting light across the cavernous warehouse. I couldn't go in because it was part of the guided tour, but you could still get a good peek through the glass windows.
The next bit of art that was available for public viewing was an untitled piece by Robert Irwin that occupied the space of a former Army hospital. At first glance the piece might seem like a regular house situated in the middle of a residential strip, but it was actually built entirely as a free standing interactive art piece intended to play with perceptions of light. The C-shaped house structure is made of three long thin corridors with windows allowing different amounts of natural light in. Of the two long side corridors, one is very open with lots of light seeping in and the other is almost entirely dark with the windows barely allowing anything through. In the middle connecting corridor, the light and the dark switch at the halfway point and the effect of such dramatic contrast is truly startling. I really loved that such surreal optical illusions occurred in such a mundane domestic setting, which really added to the surprise of it all. The two side corridors were also divided along the middle by a long strip of plastic-like material that further added to the illusion. In the light corridor the middle strip was almost entirely opaque, but in dark corridor it was totally transparent. This created a cool effect of complicating the simple duality of light and dark, by making the lighter corridor actually harder to see through than the darker one. The whole thing really kept you on your toes, and the attention to detail of the whole building and even the pavement being designed by one guy around this same theme was an astounding feat of both creativity and craftsmanship.
There wasn't any photography allowed inside the house so I couldn't actually capture that magical walk from total lightness to total darkness, but luckily Irwin's eye for detail was so precise that even the stucco-like material used on the exterior was divided between light and dark in a way that is almost imperceptible when you first look at the house as a whole, but becomes quite drastic when you see the point where the two halves actually meet.
In the middle of the house's courtyard was a big stack of different shaped pieces of wood seemingly organized at random. This added this big element of natural chaos right in the center of the highly organized man-made structure. It's a nice little cherry on top, of this impressive bit of creativity. I wish I could have seen the rest of the museum, because I really loved that these artists were allowed this much space to just realize their grandest most wild artistic visions. It's the kind of thing you just can't accomplish in a regular museum, just on a purely logistical level. Even if a more traditional museum had the space for it, these pieces depend so much and so beautifully on the interplay of the art and natural light that seeing them inside another building would really be taking away a big part of what makes them special. The museum was sort of like Marfa as a whole, spacious, wacky, but hard not to love.
After the Chinati Foundation, I went to another small art gallery/ quirky retail shop called The Wrong Store, because that's the kind of name I'm gonna check out no matter what. The Wrong Store was exactly the right store for me because it was located inside of an old stone church and positively filled with bizarre trinkets, accessories, and clothing that were perfectly irreverent of the architecture. The store's main goal is to show off whatever the local artists are up to, including lots of intricate and bizarre sculptures, beautiful photographs of the local scenery, books of poems, and music. They're also really well known for their stylish blue jeans, which are made by Levi's but they call 'em Marfa jeans so i guess that still counts? Because it was as much a store as a gallery, I felt like I wasn't supposed to take pictures of the things inside but I think the ceramic skulls and the big wooden money sign juxtaposed against the old church building give you a pretty good sense of the creativity and wry humor on display.
I did also want to highlight my favorite artist from the Wrong Store even if I didn't take any pictures inside. The artist is a guy named Camp Bosworth (short for Campbell, not Summer Camp) and he made these really incredible pop art sculptures of totally mundane things. Naturally, given my past Dairy Queen experience, his wooden sculptures of soft serve cones hit me on a real strong emotional level, so I had to share.
From there, I bid a fond farewell to beautiful, quirky Marfa, and drove about 40 minutes to the next town (for real) of Alpine. Like Junction, Alpine was fittingly named as it is a very cute li'l mountain town, like if all of Aspen was just one long street. I desperately needed to stop in Alpine for coffee, because despite being utterly hipster in every other way, all of the coffeeshops in Marfa closed right at 5. I went to a place called Plaine Coffee, which is actually part of small West Texas chain called Tumbleweed Laundry. The name is not a cutesy hipster misnomer, every store actually is a real functioning laundromat, but they pride themselves in also offering refreshing craft coffee. It's a very weird business model (unsurprisingly the first Tumbleweed, Frama Coffee, was in Marfa), but surprisingly hip. It actually makes a ton of sense, that if people are going to be sitting around waiting for laundry anyway you might as well give them a cool spot to hang out, chat, and drink coffee, and then you the business get them to pay you for two things! Pretty crafty, but I like their style. I can't speak for their laundering abilities, but the coffee was hands down the best I've ever gotten at a laundromat. It was even pretty darn tasty by regular coffeeshop standards too.
With that final push of caffeine, I was able to make it the the rest of the way to Midland. Along the way though, I did have to stop at a gas station that might just about be the loneliest looking place I've ever seen. It looks like it came right from a 60s counterculture movie about the decline of innocence.
When I did get to Midland, I met up with Mattie at a Mexican Restaurant called On The Border, because nothing says St. Patrick's Day like Margaritas! We did get Margs, and I got a burrito bowl, but, while everything was very good, the company far eclipsed the food. Mattie was one of the very first friends I made in college, because she was in my section of the band. Our dorms were also close to one another so we hit it off early on bt making sure each other got back home okay after band parties (not that we would ever be drinking as freshman, oh ho that would be ridiculous), and we ended up looking out for each other for the next four years as well. Mattie was also the conductor of the Band, while I was the social chair so we had an important bond of me causing mischief and her keeping everything running smoothly. I think we had something really special, because those two things should be at odds with each other, but we both knew that we needed each other because I couldn't be too stern and she couldn't be too lax in our own jobs so we'd each fill in where the other person left off for a harmonious whole. We also had the help of three other senior staff members (the band is totally student run which is very cool), and everyone did tons and tons of work so I don't want to act like we did everything (especially not me, since I was the clown of the group), just that we had a really unique dynamic within that group that would occasionally cause us to butt heads, but ultimately it made us even stronger friends. This was the first time I'd gotten to see her since graduation, so we had a ton of catching up to do, and it was so so nice. It's always such an amazing feeling to reunite with someone who's been separated by both time and geography and feel like you're picking up exactly where you last left off. Oh man, it's amazing how much band gossip you can miss out on when you're traveling all over creation!
After dinner, we went back to her apartment to drink my St. Paddy's Day stouts. I got to meet her guinea pigs (Mattie used to show prize guinea pigs back in Michigan), we did lots more catching up and reminiscing, we got just the right amount of tipsy as the Irish intended., and I fell asleep on her very comfy couch. It was a hell of a long drive to get there, but it couldn't have been more worth it to see my friend.
Favorite Random Sightings: Fickle Pickle; Texas Land Man; Outerspace Treasure Chest (just a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the Front window); Caryville State Hospital: Infuse Your Life with Laughter (I love the sentiment but maybe not the most appropriate hospital motto); Elegant Elephant; Vintage Antiques and Snazzy Things
Regional Observations: There's truly an unbelievable amount of open space in Texas. In most states I've been to, big fields would generally be for cattle, but I'd say around Texas it's about 50/50 horses and cows.
Albums Listened To: Reality Has Become SKA by Rude Bones (solid Japanese ska band I saw open for the Bosstones); The Reality of My Surroundings by Fishbone (a wild energetic collection of songs that marked a big jump forward in the band's maturity tackling much more serious thematic territory without sacrificing any of their goofy sense of humor); Rebirth by Jimmy Cliff (came out in 2012 when Jimmy was 64, and yet he didn't lose any of his vocal range which is just nuts); Record Store Day 7" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes; Record Store Day 7" by the Horrible Crowes; Record Store Day 7" by Titus Andronicus (I was very lucky to grow up in a place that still had cool record stores, they're certainly a dying breed); .red by Mel Washington; Red of Tooth and Claw by Murder by Death (I like their Johnny Cash/murder ballad-y stuff much better than their pop punk); Redlight by the Slackers (an incredible second album, exactly the opposite of a sophomore slump); Reel Big Fish Greatest Hits by Reel Big Fish (just their cover of Give It To Me); Reggae Hit LA by The Aggrolites (a fun and funky album, with a truly terribly boring bonus track)
People's Favorite Jokes:
I didn't really see enough people today, and I forgot to ask the ones I did see so here's one from the internet:
Why can you never trust an atom? Because they make up everything
Songs of the Day:
Such a big voice, he was one of my favorite live acts I’ve ever seen because a lot of influential old timers play it humble, but not Jimmy. He just came out and said, “I am a living legend”
that bassline hooks me every time
A very murdery ballad
One of my favorites, a really lovely album closer about fathers and sons featuring some very silly banter in the middle
