In 2014 or thereabouts, I flew to El Paso with a guitar and drove another three hours to a West Texas town called Marfa.
Weird little town, Marfa. A cross between cowboy town and an art colony, sixty miles from the Mexican border. Accessible only by a state highway flecked with deserted motels and gas stations displaying last century's rusting signage. James Dean’s Giant was filmed there, and the town itself was named after a Jules Verne novel set in Siberia.
I wanted to carve out a chunk of isolated time in an isolated place to do something creative, but I figured I could never get into an exclusive place like Yaddo. So I rolled my own poor-man's retreat funded by Southwest points and a few dollars I got from BMI. Flew to the high desert with a mic and my notebooks.
When I rolled into Marfa at midnight, the trailer park was deserted like the rest of town. The neons made it look like a honkytonk an hour after last call. Lights on, no people. A scene that songs like Song of the Siren and Wicked Game seemed written for. There seemed to be more cats than people and the few I did see were wrapped around the shoulders in Mexican serape blankets. Everything smelled like spent campfires and burning palo santos incense.
Fortunately for me, I enjoy my own company.
I slept in a pink trailer called Little Pinky. The place was cramped, but did the trick for a single occupant with no unnecessary needs. The shower was outside and homemade, built next to a wooden outhouse where I'd spend the first minutes of every freezing February morning. Days were a pattern of waking up with the sun, coffee and breakfast, writing, walk up the highway for lunch at the taco trucks only open for two hours twice a day, three days a week. I wrote by night on a table lit by votive candles. Went back up the highway for a roadhouse dinner, then a cigar on the deck.
Marfa seemed like a place JC Autobody would live and die. Tweaker country. Sometimes I spent an afternoon walking up the lost highway, talking to myself through a cigar in my lips. Waiting for something from the cosmic mystery of the Trans-Pecos desert and the Marfa Lights. The Chinati Foundation sat at the edge of town, a ghostly former military base and German POW camp turned into a massive empty art installation. At night, the galleries filled up with Marfa’s art folk who appeared from their hidden studios like vampires as the town seemed to undergo a shift change from the ranch hands.
But my real comfort was the little makeshift studio I'd installed in the cramped bosom of Little Pinky. A guitar, keyboard and a stack of notebooks. What I’d started in the little house in Yorktown became a thing. A real boy. It didn’t have an application process of submitting previous works and professional references. I just went to carve out a space. Unplug and detox from real life's dopamine routine and come back slightly more organized than when I left, whether I walked away with a Big Idea or not.
It could be in Marfa. It could be on a farm in Iowa. A cabin on a mosquito-infested outer island of South Carolina. A tent in my backyard. The retreat was the point. The emptiness, the harnessing of scattered attention was the point. The studio wasn't a place, it was a Zen sesshin. A deliberate attempt to quiet the world and dip into the cosmic mystery across the plains. It would follow me wherever I'd go.
Photos by me:
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What I’m reading: 45 (Bill Drummond)
What I'm listening to: It's Grim Up North - JAMS
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