I washed my face this morning in the Rio Grande. Last week, I washed my face in Manhattan tap water. But the rio... if you could imagine it... There is a hot spring which wells up from the ground and pours into the ruined foundation of an old bathhouse. Slippery green algae and warm water; with bamboo shoots rising up, waving in the wind, bright blue sky- and the Rio Grande there, la frontera. You could walk across this creek in ten paces without even getting your knees wet. The splendid, lush beauty of it makes the whole idea of the border even more remote and absurd...
But before I tell you about la frontera, I will tell you about Manhattan, and about Marfa, Texas, which is the bridge between the two.
...came up the New Jersey Turnpike from Baltimore on the Chinatown bus, and Manhattan in the dark gray morning looking all evil and CRUNK. I do not know the etymology of "crunk" (suspect it comes from "the ATL") but it should have been a New York word, that morning, the word just perfect for that old dingy city in the Jersey factorysmog...
And a word about the Double Happy bus. Who could not love the Double Happy bus? B-more to NYC in just over 3 hours, comfortable, not filled with the Greyhound crackheads, and just $35. This may seem an irrelevant detail, but it's at the core of this little narrative: when the established institutions don't serve you (the blasted Greyhound)- you may turn to the alternative networks that immigrants have created (the Double Happy bus).
I could see Manhattan clearly from the windows of the Double Happy, but once I set foot on 34th street, I was enraptured for a moment in the spell. The spell that is New York- the spell that says, You can have it. Or, more sinisterly, you can be it. The girl with the tight denim jeans tucked into the high boots. The fashion whirlwind. You can be that girl. It is the New York spell and it is the spell that New York has exported to all corners of the globe-- and somehow-- they bought it-- I understand the allure of the spell, but come on. Nobody can make enough money to afford to live that lifestyle, especially not in New York City. Though millions are willing to sell their lives to try... This is what got me about walking around the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, a couple of years later... wandering the glossy financial buildings that were still standing... It wasn't an attack on "America." It was an attack on the spell, this entity, this seductive financial-fashion-materialistic thing that has New York in its clutches. And people in the middle of this country-- people who that spell is never going to touch, people who have no chance or even knowledge of that glossy New York life-- they reacted as if they themselves had been injured, as if it harmed them somehow. Can you figure that?
Crossed over into Brooklyn, a few guys breakdancing & turning handsprings all the way down the subway car, and that was the true magic of New York-- went to an art opening in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn, where the artist Eliza Newman-Saul was holding a panel discussion an being an amateur materialist. They were talking about the gallery space. It had used to be a boiler building and now it was an art gallery. This story of utilitarian buildings being transformed into indulgent spaces fascinates me. The New York art world is so indulgent. It's a very high form of play that I enjoy, to a point....
Two notes from this art experience. First, someone said, "What keeps us all in New York is the possibility of something happening." That, too, is the spell: New York whispers that something will happen, that whisper always in your ear; if you want something to happen you better go to New York.
Second, the idea of curation-- they had taken this boiler building and curated it. Anything can be curated; in fact, many things require it. An adobe house, or a straw bale house, requires maintenance-- more than your drywall-thing-- you could take this to the level of curation. The American mindset seems to be rather anti-curation... except in Marfa, Texas... but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
After the Brooklyn gallery, the day raged on, and that night I danced at Mehanata, the Bulgarian Bar. Sweet peppers stuffed with heavy feta cheese and mint-vodka-cider and world-fusion-gypsy-latin-hip-hop music-- but the best part was the traditional dancers, one man did this whirling bright-costumed dance and it felt real, theater for the love of it and not ethnic eye-candy... The flavor. I love New York for its flavors, like the mysterious breakfast I picked up from a Korean bakery the next morning...
...there is another point of arrival, that mystic river I was bathing in...
"You haven't been crossing the river, have you?" (Stern look.)
everywhere, contraband... The possibility of it Lurking... This forbidden unknown charging the entire landscape. About five minutes after I took the picture below (I wanted to cross the river just to be rebellious) an SUV pulled up... on the Mexican side... thought it must be border patrol, but maybe it was just a cowboy. Or maybe the Mexicans patrol the border too, to keep us from coming in...hey, who knows, right? to us, it's a border, to them, la frontera, the frontier... do you see the difference?
solo voy con mi pena
*
Alone I go with my sorrow
-- Manu Chao, "Clandestino"
And they've got that border pretty much locked down. Not that it's hard to cross the border, mind you: I mean, just look at the crick. Wading across isn't the problem.
"No sir." I might have been exercising my fundamental human right to bathe nude in beautiful rivers, but I didn't cross the river.
"We had reports of an SUV trying to cross, and you've got mud on your truck."
They always make you feel like you've done something wrong.
Like their gaze could transform you into a narcotrafficker...
sola va mi condena
correr es mi destino
para burlar la ley
perdido en el corazon
de la grande babylon
me dicen el clandestino
por no llevar papel
Alone goes my sentence
To run is my destiny
To escape the law
Lost in the heart of the great Babylon
They call me
clandestine
For not having any papers
No, the problem is what you do with the vast expanse of Chihuauan desert; how to evade the radar surveillance blimps; how to actually make it up north... because every road is locked down.
Between this world and the glossy New York spell lies a town called Marfa. It lies there not so much geographically as psychically, a way station on an invisible translucent highway from entryway to entryway... Marfa, Population 2,121. It is known for its Mystery Lights.
Nobody can explain these floating lights, viewed from the desert some 10 miles outside Marfa. It's that kind of a town... the whole area, from Alpine to Big Bend and west, is enchanted, but let's stick to Marfa.
I'd always dreamed of a town... where a group of people takes over a vacant small-town and brings life to the shuttered buildings of main street... (see An American Journey). In Marfa, they've come close to doing this. Many of the buildings downtown have been well cared-for, turned into Good places... there's a bookstore, a coffee-roasters with organic coffee, a juice bar, many art galleries... the entire town seems curated, by a handful of artists.
How did Marfa escape being another middle-of-the-country ghost-town? An artist from New York City, Donald Judd, bought an old fort here in the 1970s and made it an artists' refuge; his legacy lives on in the Chinati Foundation, which brings artists from all over the world to intern. (I would also say that his minimalist legacy lives on in the entire town, which has a decidedly minimalist feel).
Gentrification. There's a fair case for it. Are the New York artists running the Marfa natives out of town? Let me tell you about my encounter at the Pizza Foundation. The Pizza Foundation is a converted garage, where one can get spinach salads with blue cheese and the most fabulous pizza on the planet, lovingly prepared as a work of art with toppings tastefully arranged. I was dining there and a couple who had recently moved from New York offered to share the wine they had brought with me. How do I explain this... They were really excited about making Marfa their new home. They had just bought this land, etc, it was a very provocative move for them-- And there was a sense of excitement about slumming it out in Texas; I'm sure that they were collecting stories to tell their friends back in New York, in that world. But I think that they were genuinely searching for something... trying to escape that New York art world and all its pretension... and so it was charming to see them so delighted with the idea of interacting with real people. Even though they maintained this sense of being more important than everyone... they were trying to eradicate that sense...
Will Marfa make the New Yorkers human, or will the New Yorkers destroy Marfa? I'm not pessimistic about this one. You know why? Geography. there's no interstate here. You have to mean it to be all the way out here... Terlingua, the mining-ghosttown community taken over by artists, even better... Study Butte, now that's authentic. But Marfa, I have a hopeful feeling about. Alongside the art galleries (and maybe because of them), this Marfa still exists-- the old Marfa of watertowers ago.
Can the two realities exist side-by-side? Yes, if you love & curate & cherish the history of the place. Gentrification, if done well & done respectfully, doesn't have to be a bad thing... unlike many Texas towns, Marfa actually has an economy, and life. It doesn't stop being authentic. As long as teenagers can still gossip over pizza and babies cry and people fuck and get sick and fall in love-- it doesn't stop being authentic.
About thirty miles from Marfa, along the desert-highway near the almost-ghosttown of Valentine, this:
Speaking of authenticity, let's contrast Marfa with a place down the road called Lajitas. I say "place", because as a park ranger at Big Bend ironically pointed out to me, Lajitas "can not be considered a community in any sense of the word." I knew about Lajitas from a "hotel industry" magazine I perused when I was living at the Marriott... Lajitas is a resort where they offer condos, too, it's this whole luxury martini deal-- brand-new, just-planned, with spas and golf courses and a fake downtown... "Lajitas, the Ultimate Hideout"-- The thing about Lajitas is that it's in the middle of nowhere. They built an airport there just so rich people could get there. And: it's empty. Completely deserted. Nobody's interested.
Simulation is so out. New Yorkers want authentic. Everybody wants authentic. Gogol Bordello is authentic. Manu Chao. The border. Flavor is twenty-first century. Especially la frontera flavor-- clandestino, contrabando-- Will they figure out a way to commodify it? They can't. It's too big. It's in demand. Shiny gypsy-sequined handbags in the malls are only a surface-feature of this hunger for reality, for spice, the romanticizing of the other blossomed into a lust for the real-- it's happening on the airwaves, the burned CDs passed from friend to friend, fuck globally-- welcome to the future.
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