[PART ONE] "Marfa"

Here in Marfa, Texas with Those Desert Eyes: THO

"Marfa"

by Luke B. Goebel 

“In other words, we need the most powerful telescope, that of a polished utopian consciousness, in order to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness. Namely, the most immediate immediacy, in which the core of self-location and being-here still lies, in which at the same time the whole knot of the world-secret is to be found.” – Ernst Bloch

A once wildly innovative and forward pushing artist, Donald Judd, set the town of Marfa, TX as his private sarcophagus to house his lasting remains—his art—in two armory buildings. The armory buildings and most of the town are protected into perpetuity by immensely wealthy foundations controlled by his estate.

It strikes me as I drive through on this, my seventh visit (I want cred for being a repeat tourist?!!) that Marfa exists to be witnessed. We have, however, mistaken gawking and spectating for witnessing. We have mistaken gawking for experiencing life…maybe it was always like this this? Maybe we the dumb masses always gawked, commentated, but now, now, gawking has become mistaken for interaction.

Gawking is: post a photo of yourself in Marfa—identify with Marfa without investigation. Stay in a spendy hotel/rehabbed trailer boutique hotel. Take lots of selfies. Witnessing Marfa is perhaps viewing the art—thinking of yourself finding a cheap desolate desert landscape with water to inhabit and wondering how to be here now in the world creating something new—feeling the effects of minimalism and minimalist art, transcending and elevating your consciousness as you reflect, expand, open up, inspect yourself with your utopian telescope—whatever you find.

The gawk here is being confused with finding something new—something beyond now—when what is mostly being found and fetishized about Marfa is only beyond now—because it is so far behind now, it is nostalgia found.

 Visitors come to Marfa, perhaps even have an art residency, and think they are discovering a new frontier, but they inhabit a space that has already been sealed. The town of Marfa as tourist spot offers us a unique insight into the new society of the spectacle.

Marfa, Texas offers all the sensations of being in a minimalist artists’ community, a vast liminal space seemingly removed from time—from the now hell of capitalism—(tho) it is a town that’s already past that moment of opportunity, which has been devoured by the professional art world, turned into a destination by commerce with all the tourist trap trappings—the hipster traps! Boutique hotels! Tasty snacks!

Once we engaged, in my lifetime, and sought, actively, the new frontiers, with our eyes dilated, our bodies in full movement (our self-conscious awareness of the effect of our every move, look, angle, still uncharted), our physical being-here-bodies in danger, now we come to spectate, snack, spend, and snapture.

Maybe this is the dominant cultural characteristic of the new now—the snacking, spectating, visiting done by professional-class hipsters who seemingly desperately want out of now, but continue to work in cities, paying exorbitantly climbing rents, fetishizing nostalgia for something before, something else, while remaining plugged into the urban capitalistic infrastructure that drives them to so eagerly embrace nostalgia, outsider culture, throwback and outlaw totems.

Collectively as a culture we read and write about and deride privilege, domination, murder, cops killing people of color, every injustice and atrocity—the news violence—but we remain in the systems that economically are built to support these cycles. What can be done?! What is Utopia?

It may or may not take some privilege to step out of the system, but it surely takes imagination and cooperation and a collective dream to strive for utopia! Marfa was a utopia, but it is an old version of utopia built by a very successful and wealthy man on he and his friends’ art being immortalized…Do we need a new utopia? Where can be the new utopia?

Marfa

Here in Marfa, Texas with those desert eyes. Heard of it? Marfa? Are you over it, yet, dear eye rolling reader? It's my seventh or eighth time. Give me a badge again. I’m the hipster queen! I'm here with my Colt .45 and four typewriters and all my records. No drugs. No booze. Sober. Bored.  All that looms ahead of me (if you skim the magazine write-ups) is the Prada store installation. (The Prada art installation is a hermetically sealed fake Prada store replete with handbags and shoes and PRADA signage standing alone miles from town across the highway from railroad tracks, surrounded by tumble weeds—having no entrance.) OMG. Get it? Do you get it? Mock capitalism. Yolo! But is that enough? To mock and celebrate what consumes us?

In the art town of Marfa today as compared to Judd’s time, it strikes me that Prada is the example…Marfa (same number of letters as PRADA/two A’s/invert the Pr to Ma/ Rah to Ahr /Dah-Fah). It is a perfectly branded aesthetic tailored experience where everything feels just elegant, minimalist, clean... it’s art, real art, and nothing else…on the surface…capitalism and the world of 2015 seemingly just runs off and away like rain on a well lubricated surface—think condoms—but who uses them?!

Also, a dream does live, two open twin wide intersecting streets, side streets of dirt, the border a sniff away, free galleries, a tour each day of Judd’s art holdings, and for this one city, this town, this art paradisio, which only six years ago had houses for sale for 30K (when one could really join in and drop out and settle in) there is almost no 2015, no bullshit, no capitalism spectacle, no war, no torture, no professionalism, no workplace hell no NOW! This is the trick, I think perhaps which drove Judd to MARFA, and which has been enhanced and preserved in amber—it feels outside of “NOW”, outside of late stage capitalism… the town is now a sort of stage, a spectacle for spectator sport a la the art experience.

The hip art world of New York and LA have mixed into a curated art simulation in the expanse of a southwest Texas town which, where I stand, feels so decidedly not Texas, taken over, transformed, refashioned by Donald Judd, famed egomaniac, visionary minimalist, who passed by on railcar on his way to fight in the Korean War at 18, and wrote a postcard home, let’s speed this up (I’m saying this not Judd on his postcard), about the town, who later went to Columbia to study, yawn(me again), art and philosophy, yawn (me again), bought up town and wildly funded/sued for fellowships and made a legacy for himself, an entire village that stands as a museum.  It’s just the land and him and his buddies, their work, and some new galleries. A Palm Springs without the irrigation or the shopping detractions, or anything around for hundreds of miles save some mountainous terrain and an eccentric camel safari far into the mountains toward Mexico. Also, an illuminating of the heavens at night with a phenomenon called The Marfa Lights, desert terrain, something outside of the typical hullabaloo of pure commerce.

CLICK HERE TO READ PART TWO....

Fiction writer Luke B. Goebel is armed with wit and dangerous. He also carries a colt 45 pistol but that's the least of your worries. With an insatiable appetite for the dark, mystical phenomena of the American West, Goebel's writing has found him living for stretches in Marfa, Texas; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; and many more landscapes that nourish his writing. Last year Goebel published his first novel, entitled Fourteen Stories: None of Them Are Yours, which won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction. 

[PART TWO] Marfa: A History Lesson

Here in Marfa, Texas with Those Desert Eyes: THO

"MARFA: A HISTORY LESSON"

by Luke B. Goebel 

Marfa was established first as a water stop for trains heading to Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio. It was named after a character in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, by a wife of a railroad executive who was reading the novel when she encountered the town.

The Marfa population used to be many times larger than it is today. In 1930 the town had 3,909 residents and in the 1940’s the US stationed its Chemical Warfare Brigades in Marfa. During World War II there was an Air Force training base, and also a prisoner camp. The artillery sheds that now house Judd’s famous boxes, which are beautiful polished steel objects that optically fascinate and trick the eyes of the viewer, once held Nazis—200 Nazi German prisoners writing, “God, get us out of here” into the walls, where Judd’s 100 cubes now live. Their Nazi handwriting still etched into the walls… One box for every two Nazis.

Donald Judd was born in Missouri. After the war, he went to College of William and Mary and then transferred to Columbia where he studied philosophy. He began his artistic practice as a painter, later shifting to sculpture, furniture, and medium-large scale installation works. In 1968 Judd, already well established as an artist associated with minimalism, bought a five story cast-iron building on Spring Street in Manhattan, which he made his residence and study. He renovated each floor and installed his own art and the art of others he admired.

By the early seventies, Judd began making trips to Baja California and was drawn once again to the clean, empty desert landscape. By 1971 he had rented a house in Marfa, and later bought a 60,000-acre piece of land.

In 1979, with help from the Dia Art Foundation (which he later sued), Judd acquired a roughly 340-acre plot of desert near Marfa, Texas including abandoned buildings of the former U.S. Army Fort D. A. Russell. Those Nazis Tho! The Chinati Foundation, owned by Judd, opened on the site in 1986 as a non-profit art foundation, dedicated to Judd and his contemporaries. This land still holds a permanent collection of large-scale works by Judd, sculptor John Chamberlain, and annoying light sculptor Dan Flavin. Judd's work in Marfa is housed in those two anal-retentively restored artillery sheds. His office downtown is kept just as he left it, with his will and estate being planned so that not even his pencil can be moved.

"...Truly it is a stumbling upon a Disneyland, save for Walt having said Disneyland is never to be finished and is always evolving, another secret to discover, another phase of techno-capitalism always in store and being effectuated, Marfa remains sealed against the sands of time, in the desert, windswept..."

All this information kills the dream. We go to Marfa to see the wide wide streets, the long arms of the railroad gates, the giant masonic white painted brick and raw brick buildings, the old marquis of the Stardust Motel, the gleaming sweeping minimalism, the Spanish style church, the old courthouse, and all the curated effects of parks alongside the railroad tracks, the Crowley theater, old homes and the vast white block of the Donald Judd Foundation Building with reflecting gold glass windows that when you stare into them on a sunny hot summer desert day make you feel like you could be the mirage.

Without knowing that the town’s effects are controlled by the planning of the Chinati Foundation, we think we have stumbled upon something new—a ruggedly beautiful landscape and a minimalist town, sparse, pristinely arranged buildings and dirt streets, all featuring gems of restaurants, food trucks, hotels, little ravaged deserted foundations of homes, squatters, train hoppers, galleries!

Maybe we go to feel nostalgic—maybe we go to see an aesthetic of minimalism and intentional interaction with the environment—maybe we go because they voted out the police and there’s dirt streets and art.

Did you hear they voted out the cops in Marfa, yadda yadda, yucca, desert beach roses in bloom. Maybe what Marfa really is is a time capsule. The nostalgia that is Marfa, where we go to exalt conceptual art and minimalism, where we feel there is NO 2015, where a nostalgia not only of aesthetic of town but of high art as it once was, is no accident. It is purposeful and planned worship, veneration, ache. This was a planned space Judd spent much of his life creating and setting into perpetuity.

While the art and hipster chic world flocks to Marfa to see something they think, feel, sense is at the final frontier of the West, yearning for something outside, forever WEST, out of reach, out of now, some creative spell, some great flocking, truly it is a stumbling upon a Disneyland, save for Walt having said Disneyland is never to be finished and is always evolving, another secret to discover, another phase of techno-capitalism always in store and being effectuated, Marfa remains sealed against the sands of time, in the desert, windswept, save for the galleries continuing to feature bigger names, the housing costs rising, the popularity increasing, and the streets opening to new hotels, new galleries, new arrivals from NYC and LA buying second and third homes in Marfa. 

CLICK HERE TO READ PART 3...

Fiction writer Luke B. Goebel is armed with wit and dangerous. He also carries a colt 45 pistol but that's the least of your worries. With an insatiable appetite for the dark, mystical phenomena of the American West, Goebel's writing has found him living for stretches in Marfa, Texas; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; and many more landscapes that nourish his writing. Last year Goebel published his first novel, entitled Fourteen Stories: None of Them Are Yours, which won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction. 

[PART THREE] "Present"

Here in Marfa, Texas with Those Desert Eyes: THO

"PRESENT"

by Luke B. Goebel 

I've been living in east Texas for five years and as bad as it is, Austin can kiss my camel toe (moose knuckle), as can Portland, Brooklyn, SF, everywhere you have to work to pay insane rents to go to work and afterwards buy drinks. 

When I came to Texas, a friend told me about the Marfa lights—telling me how they are unexplainable, illegal to go near at risk of federal felony trespassing, how they blink colors as messages to one another. Later, I read the newsprint. El Cosmico. Yeah, yawn. Rent a trailer! How many hipsters does it take to screw in a hotel where James Dean made a movie, which would now be made by James Franco, please, please me, who hasn't? 

New York Times me, hold, please, asshole. Rather: Instagram DM me. Fashion. Magazine aisle. Squats. Tho booty. Caitlyn Jenner who we love, rightly so, as she gives us some hope of our evolution as a society and for other reasons. But…she’s KardAsh. Empire. Gym body-ie me. Oh, but… Is this all too defeated?  

I am in Marfa and again I am speculating—asking what in the Texas’ God’s name is happening with culture, cities, work, the climate, police murder of black people, war, Isis, global warming, and why is everyone just talking about Marfa the way they talk about Portland, Austin, etc.? Have you been to MARFA? Suck any part of anyone! Why is everyone talking like a valley girl hipster fetishizing the new hip locales? Where is the new imagination and drive to find and build something? Do we need to find something new—utopia? Why is everyone spectator-ing? Is this about Instagram? 

Plus, there's a new story in Marfa. What? Why? There's a film festival this time. Ha ha ha ha. Make me choke laughing. Also, James Franco has a Malibu standing on end in a reflecting pool outside Marfa’s Contemporary Gallery, the gallery with its drool over nostalgia font, and okay it isn’t Franco’s sculpture, it’s someone else’s sculpture I thought was Franco’s, since Franco is doing vintage cars standing on end in pits like presidential monuments to the futility of the American movie and art dream—or are they someone else’s statues that he featured in his recent curating gig at Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, with his show: Rebel Without a Cause?

Do I have to make a hard-on dick joke about the cars standing on end in pits? Dick in pussy joke? Dick in ass? Do I have to admit I have a hard-on for James Franco? Who doesn’t? Oh, I don’t. Wait…okay, we all do! I am admitting that I am captivated by the spectacle, in love with a Malibu standing on end in a reflecting pool—but I keep humming the one word: NOSTALGIA.

I am drawn in by the expansive terrain of desert married with the horizon and the wide streets in MARFA that remind me of something beautiful and simply profound about childhood and art.  Truth out in the desert teeters into establishment right to meaningless commerce again; I am teetering with Marfa, a place that offers the invigorating liminal dream state of being outside of NOW HELL and being a place that is rising in fame, and must therefore soon fall and be seen for what it is…nostalgia, art that is really fashion, art chic minimalism, art galleries that are old boy clubs for the establishment artists, as JUDD was, too—his funding came from Dia Art Foundation, which was leaked from an oil baroness.

Why

But, still, why are we drawn in? I wonder.  Why do I keep coming back on every road trip through Texas? Back west in car, truck, RV, now in a Ford towing dolly with car, everything ~ my whole life ~ packed window to wall, nose to heel. Elbow to asshole. EXCUSE ME. I am a consumer paying 178 dollars to stay in a room that was the last room in town. I am complicit and I like the Malibu dick installation. Why? More so I feel an invocation in Marfa, a stepping out of time and society, out of the professional world—a call to make a utopia for myself and invite others to stay, both a physical place like an art colony and a utopia of how I live. My moments of peace in an otherwise tripped out, anxious, and too fast life, are moments of feeling, sensory experience, environment, dream, imagination, slow time spent with self and landscape. Marfa offers each visitor a checkpoint far different from the one waiting on the outskirts of town. Marfa allows each visitor to engage with minimalist art, architecture, and to enter a liminal space of wonder.

Before Marfa bloats, tho, and farts into a reproduction of itself as it's doing rapidly, it's still worth something as cultural moniker, and we will explore further, hold, let's build the elements, and see it a last time. I did insta the best salad of my life here today. And TMZ-me everything here looks like the 50's, 60’s, a few modernist pieces of cultural remains in a sea of minimalist white, and all is analog and real and and and the food truck music is so good being played through an eight track player with a tape cassette adapter with iPod run into the cassette adapter. I’m not being coy. It sounds really good. Also, also, everyone has such cool style rockabilly artist hairgrease skinny black jeans raybans and a dog. Motorcycles, panheads especially, tattoo sleeves, emblems.

I’m not kidding. We all eye each other at the food carts with contempt…we each want to be autonomous in OUR Marfa: We exist in the mirage of timeless throwback, sneaking our salad selfies for instagram and sniffing the nostalgia like hounds, spectating. We are on the artistic frontier! We imagine, and imagine moving into Marfa, working at or even, gasp, owning a food cart. Maybe we just see too many people on our screens—Instagram, Facefuck, and need to take a step into pure living—less people—and celebrate the sum effect of the industrial revolution and technical revolution by experiencing directly how vast we have become, more open, and feel more freedom, less rent, more life spent making a new world instead of slaving for the old ones! Maybe this is just me! A manifesto?

Playing Cowboy

After a food-cart lunch, I drive lost for two hours into the foothills of Mexico before I turn around. I have a gun and want to shoot it off to release my frustrations at being unable, after four years, to get out of Texas and now I am four hours lost still not on track to exit. I can’t go driving off into the cut to shoot with the Honda towing behind me dragging my piles full of teaching blazers, computer monitors, ties! Also, I have no ear protection. Fake ass cowboy!

There's a rock out here on highway 67 on the highway I took the wrong way down that looks like an elephant and is called Elephant Rock. There's a formation called Lincoln's profile. Looks like Abe lying on his back staring up into the chunky pixels of the bluest desert sky nothingness utopia death. The term utopia was invented by Thomas Mann. He combined two linguistic bits that together mean NO PLACE. Okay, I admit I want a NO PLACE. That Marfa was a no place, a dream, a vision, for an artist who found his space to carve out a new world, and I want too to find a place to drop out of cities, the hustle, the evils of our time. I want a place to slow down, unplug from devices, stop comparing myself to everyone, and have a more immediate engagement with time, space, and self. But I must not be the only one!

Why are we so nostalgic for the times before ours? Is this some deep psychic sense that we have no future, can have no dream, living in the current paradigm? Or is it how we identify with the outlaw totems of the past to make a stand now? We do yearn for the past, for physicality and aura of objects, for the sensation Marfa gives us of another time, a pre-global lockdown, a time before the planet seemed doomed, a time before and so on. Hold on!

I'm making notes speaking into my phone about to go through Federal checkpoint and hope they don't find my pistol.

I don't nice chat with the federales but my god that man had the cleanest whitest teeth I've ever seen. Beautiful Mexican-American I told how I ended up in goddamn nowhere and we laughed about it. At the end he asked me, “You are a U.S. citizen, right?” “Yes,” I tell him, “I am part of a U.S. that no longer exists and perhaps never existed.” I am part of the monster and the happiest times of my life I've spent driving through the deserts of the Southwest looking at the great feet of telephone poles and electric wire stretched across the great expanse.

If this next book of mine succeeds, it could very well lead to attacks at home, in the U.S., I dream, delusional.  As I drive, I worry about it leading to domestic terrorism.  

 

"I’m heading to write a book about destroying Los Angeles. About there being no place to go with art to compete with the world of violence but to finally call the game and blow it all up, domestic terrorist kids in America, blowing up the establishment to fill the game with magic. But why?"

I am interested in Marfa because, aside from the spiritual heritage of the land, and the unexplainable phenomenon of the Marfa lights (more on this later), the landscape, I want to find a plot of cheap desert to make art, drop out, leave the society that I can neither endorse nor want to afford—no, it isn’t that…I feel the effects of the current time making me feel something…what is it? BROKE! Hurried! Insecure! Lonely! I also feel the magic of something happening that I trust as a rapid evolution of a huge group of strange human beings who are radicalizing themselves out of old beliefs, trappings, and becoming increasingly psychedelic, free, and strange.

So, what does this all mean?

News 

In Australia today children are joining ISIS from the Internet and attempting to blow things up. Last month in Texas Muslim extremists tried to shoot members of the Muhammad cartoon-drawing contest. My dog is sighing next to me.

Rocks

Rocks get named and renamed. A hundred two hundred two thousand years. Who had seen an elephant in the time of Apaches or Comanche? Abe Lincoln in Mexico!? You can see his goatee and nose. How long does a person get to be alive? Maybe I am just approaching middle age—feeling drawn to the Walden thing of Thoreau or the desert thing of Abbey, but I am feeling how soon the rocks are renamed, the life is over, the body is spent.

In creative writing classes I teach, or used to as I’m driving back to Portland, Oregon having quit the job in Texas, quit academia, quit GOD FORBID QUIT TENURE, early on students write very very short flash fictions that don't go anywhere; no one knows what to say anymore; there's a great crackling of silence across the wires of the dominant collective consciousness. Lots of talk and art about total apocalypse. Little vision for utopia—but on the sides, in the secret caverns, nuggets of wild genius abound! Actually I was non-renewed. Think: getting fired, with an extra year to work.

This reminds me of an installation I saw in Marfa today of record players that say now over and over. I pretend now that I’m not impressed but I was impressed until I thought of how much money is behind the exhibit, how much competition, the politics, the professionalism, the fact that the collective consciousness of now, to me, of condos and commercial spaces, is my enemy.

In Marfa, I’m struggling with a decision. I want my time free from high rent, from professional life, from Portland, Oregon, the city I am from and can’t afford as an artist. I have been planning to drop out and am heading with all my things to write my next book—to a cheap desert in California.

I’m heading to write a book about destroying Los Angeles. About there being no place to go with art to compete with the world of violence but to finally call the game and blow it all up, domestic terrorist kids in America, blowing up the establishment to fill the game with magic. But why? Have I gotten so far out, so bent, so warped? I want aura again. We all do. I want glamour. I want a world that looks like Marfa. I don’t want to see another Ikea as long as I fucking live! I sleep on an Ikea bed! Aghhhh. Actually, I gave it away. I have no bed! My next bed will be Ikea-free! Not Ikea! Probably USED! Hooray! I had a used bed in my early twenties in SF. It had a ghost of an old woman who would wake me up shaking me. I liked her. We slept together.

Turkish 

I met a man with a green card and pink eye—a Turkish fellow—standing out front of the hotel I stayed last night where, yeah, yeah, James Dean made the movie GIANT. Hotel Paisano. Picture the film name in giant lights. When I told him about the job I just left,/been forced out of,/may still be hired back but don't know if I'd ever return, he said, “I would die for a job like that.” Die for a job.

The great depression is upon us only it's a depression of spirit and mind. I surely assured him he would die for a job like that as it would kill him in every way but in terms of the basic functioning of his body and brain. (They will, it turns out, offer the job back. In writing this essay I realize I have to refuse it and I do.)

It's not the teaching that would kill him. It's the forced removal of personalities, artists, and selfhood from the academic corporate hell administration take over. It's the same all over I hear. What do you do? How bad is it? In the academic and professional world today? It's another essay. But the suckers have smeared us all over. But have you been to Marfa? El Cosmico? Sorry Liz Lambert!

The Creeping Garden.

They are showing a film at 10 about microcosms of vegetal action! It's supposed to be the most!

CLICK HERE TO READ PART FOUR

Fiction writer Luke B. Goebel is armed with wit and dangerous. He also carries a colt 45 pistol but that's the least of your worries. With an insatiable appetite for the dark, mystical phenomena of the American West, Goebel's writing has found him living for stretches in Marfa, Texas; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; and many more landscapes that nourish his writing. Last year Goebel published his first novel, entitled Fourteen Stories: None of Them Are Yours, which won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction. 

[PART FOUR] "Marfa Lights"

Here in Marfa, Texas with Those Desert Eyes: THO

"MARFA LIGHTS"

by Luke B. Goebel 

Four years ago or three I went and saw the Marfa lights with a woman whose heritage is predominantly Cherokee. I just ran into her in the street NOW: she's crying facing felony charges for assaulting a county sheriff (they do patrol through town), public drunkenness, and interfering with an officer’s duty.

She got arrested last night and when she wouldn’t let them remove her silver bracelet that is a religious totem, she pushed the officer away and kicked him and was beaten, charged with felony, treated the way people are treated now by police.

The Marfa lights are a phenomenon of lights that fly up into the sky at night outside Marfa, flying toward one another, stretching out in star shapes of golden light, then swimming together in the sky and separating again. No one knows what causes them—google it—there are lots of different ideas. She told me, as we saw them, that her ancestors and people have talked about them and known them since before Abe Lincoln’s nose. They say they are friendly, happy spirits.

She can't quit drinking when she touches it. I quit drinking thirteen years ago. I massage her in the street, talking, hugging her as she cried, sobbed really, one of the 224 locals; my fake emotional support animal gave her some support, and we tried to share what we know from our journeys, which wasn’t much. I mostly just listened to our sweet sweetheart darling who showed me the Marfa lights; we saw them like the Rolling Stones song NO SPARE PARTS in which Mick Jagger country drawls, "I saw the lights in Marfa, I guess it was a scenic route" though to me I always hear, “I guess they were a touch of Grace." Should the world be blown up, Honey?

I am thinking about the climate, California’s drought, the average rent in San Francisco. Is this justifiable yet? Think of that young man with his broken spine in Baltimore—Freddie Carlos Gray Jr. Ferguson. Staten Island. South Carolina. Politics.

A little white butterfly just flew across the desert road. Highway. I'm driving and dictating into my phone. I am spectating. Recording.

Leaf

A close friend of my sister and a man I've spent some time with is dying in a hospital in Portland, Oregon. He has been surviving blood cancer for 20 years.  I am now passing a giant blimp. There is a sign out front NSA or TSA or DHS and it says something about radar surveillance.  The man with blood cancer, Leaf, is about to die. He has a young son who is the kindest soul. Leaf has an open wound in his back that goes to his spine. Yesterday, the hospital tried to discharge him saying that his pain management had been achieved. Just throw him out dying in horrendous pain. They took him off his pain drugs. Subbed them out for cheaper shit. They hadn't given him morphine for two days even though he has a hook up in his arm for an IV because he couldn't get the pills (my phone autocorrects “pills” to “payments” adding its wisdom), down his throat. They've got him doped up on Ativan rather than morphine because it's cheaper and then they tried to send him home.

Out to the side of highway 90, I'm on the right one now, against a mountain side, leaving Marfa, I see a giant espresso cup. It's about 700 yards high. It's not there. A hallucination. I miss hallucinating. The sense you could die at any moment. Leave your body. The unfathomable lasting of each moment far too long at far too much. The brain at 9k rpms. The world needs giant modernist absurdist sculptures against the mountainside more than surveillance blimps. That sense of idealism and giant visionary dream that left the visible popular world long ago.

My sister and friends and my mother and her doctor husband get involved with Leaf’s case. They are able to make it so that he can stay, and eventually be brought to hospice Monday. It is Saturday. We have drones dropping bombs, which right or wrong, just shows that this world has gone insane. So, what does this have to do with Marfa? Have you been to Marfa? What do we like? What feels good?…Marfa looks like a utopia of vastness and imagination and non surveillance and artistic aesthetic—freedom. I do not feel free with a 401k, I have learned, over the past four years.

"At best, perhaps Marfa is a call to action. A reminder not to be only nostalgic, but that there are sacred spaces of landscape that remain....where we can go to roam with our imaginations and work as artists—where we can choose to try our hands and wills at utopia, which is no place, which must fail or fall, but before it does there is a special bond one can have with land and people."

Portland

When I get back to Portland the strangeness will be waiting. My sister, who is graduating from a conceptual art and design program where the graduates, all but her, go directly CHUTES AND LADDERS right into design and or marketing jobs…recently said to me, “I don’t think there’s ever been a place where people are on so many drugs so much of the time.” I am at a bar, no human eyes looking like eyes, the music louder than any human can speak, and I am suddenly the stranger seeing my face disintegrate in the mirror in pixels and visuals, being laughed at when I try to converse with a pair of swingers, poly people, who are high beyond conception, the entire town outside of my poles of grounding. I’m having flashbacks. There is something good happening in Portland amid the overcrowding, the invasion, the destruction of the old town I am from, and a leap being made…by many.

Portland is a strange diode culture that resists nothing, is nothing, fears nothing, welcomes nothing, is as far out in the realm of societal meaninglessness—departure from mores and the new world as anywhere I know. We see Mad Max.

I am an artist who can’t afford my hometown, can’t afford the cities where the hip are consuming, snacktating, and I furthermore see the trap. Too much professionalism, not enough telescoping of consciousness…Why don’t we all drop out, learn to live on less, earn less, live in towns where we populate the landscape and our lives with objects that have aura, where we can slow DOWN? The old Tune in, Turn on, Drop out…maybe it’s time? In cities or deserts.

As for me, in Portland my dog will roll in human shit, come into my family’s place with white carpets, and roll the shit into them. A meter person will give me a 140-dollar ticket for expired registration. I will feel like I’m in that song Ballad of a Thin Man, “Do you, MR JONES.” I will not be able to write, as I never can in Portland. I will spend a lot of time with Leaf and running errands for his stay in hospice. He will look like Jesus covered in tattoos, skinny to the point of extinction, with a halo screwed into his skull so he cannot move his neck or head.

Sitting there next to this friend with the halo screwed into his skull, a man who never took the bait, never bought into professionalism, never became a hipster professional, lived wildly and freely until his untimely end—a psychonaut beautiful soul without fear of not being hip for being sincere—who made a child—who lived on the earth—I have to ask, where is the next frontier?

I admit I am guilty of the spectator life. Visiting. I admit I fetishize old technology, use typewriters, have hundreds of records, only shoot revolvers, want objects that seem to have value, because we value them, because they seem to have aura. I admit I want to have autonomy among the landscape. That I love the desert! OMG, have you seen desert air and vastness? I have found my next place…but…so have others…and it’s the same place. It’s a desert town a lot like Marfa. Less staged…less protected by foundations…but right about to burst into legend…already bursting…30K a house. For me, it’s time to get in, get to work on my own art, and soon, soon, soon enough, it too will be overblown, blown up, on fire, over.

Marfa

At best, perhaps Marfa is a call to action. A reminder not to be only nostalgic, but that there are sacred spaces of landscape that remain, affordable, small scale, where we can go to roam with our imaginations and work as artists—where we can choose to try our hands and wills at utopia, which is no place, which must fail or fall, but before it does there is a special bond one can have with land and people—where we can choose at any time to vote out the cops, though border patrol will come through, or county sheriffs, but more importantly we shall identify with whatever emblems we want in the new world—but why not live them?

When the society we live in forces us backwards with our hearts, into nostalgia, let’s build new utopias with old objects, with new ideas, and escape the rat races of our parents, of the generations that have destroyed, and let’s unhinge our backs from the front that is ruining our entire selves. I want to let go—I want out—I am going, going, and I hope you will visit. Plans are being made.

We anxiously await the chance to invite you. 

Let’s drop out! Whoopie!

“Throw roses into the abyss and say: 'here is my thanks to the monster who didn't succeed in swallowing me alive’.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

FIN

Fiction writer Luke B. Goebel is armed with wit and dangerous. He also carries a colt 45 pistol but that's the least of your worries. With an insatiable appetite for the dark, mystical phenomena of the American West, Goebel's writing has found him living for stretches in Marfa, Texas; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; and many more landscapes that nourish his writing. Last year Goebel published his first novel, entitled Fourteen Stories: None of Them Are Yours, which won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction.