If you’re reading this blog you probably know that Dan Berkman proposed…and I said yes. 

The Scene Of The Crime, Hotel Paisano - Marfa, Texas

That’s Mrs.Kaplan-Berkman to y’all!

me:…and then we’re going to Marfa Texas.

someone: Martha?

me:No, Maaarffffffa

someone: and it’s where?

me: deepest darkest West Texas

someone: so where’s Dallas again?

me: it’s not near anything, including Dallas

someone:and you’re going because?

me: because a town in the middle of nowhere surrounded by deserts, mesas and minimal art sounds awesome

someone: and it’s called Martha?

Marfa isn’t for everyone.  There’s a review on Tripadvisor.com of the Chinati foundaiton(a museum outside of town) that is basically a rant about how boring and terrible this whole minimal art thing is and blah blah blah.  Look, this is a town of two thousand people and it’s closer to San Diego than Houston.  Driving here takes seven hours from Austin and there are not a lot of cars on the highway.  Maybe I’ve read to many Cormac McCarthy novels but this is beautiful country.  We drove through so many places that looked and felt the same during our trip.  Suburban Texarkana looks a lot like Suburban Fort Worth looks a lot like suburban Nashville etc..I don’t take a bleak and dystopian view of these places(it’s a question or land use policy rather than corporate greed or government conspiracy)but the way all of these places get constructed produces a landscape with few differences, even across thousands of miles.

West Texas looks and feels completely different from those places.  The inroads made by modernity in the form of gas stations and supermarkets stand out from the old newspaper and utility buildings, the town halls and hotels that have stood, often empty and patient, for the better part of a century. I’m not romanticizing this place.  It exists at the intersection of a lot of complex forces, not all of them positive: the oil boom, the railroad boom, the subsequent busts, the transformation of america from a rural agrarian society to an urban one.  We waited in line at a convenience store behind ten or fifteen Mexican day laboreres just off from work buying forties and snacks.  I hardly think that they find their life on the lonely plains of rural Texas romantic.  But the sun is different here, the sky is the bluest you can imagine and the desert goes for miles filled with cactus and scrub brush.  And in that desolation there is something fascinating, a placelessness, a welcome disorientation.  This is truly nowhere which also means that it could be anywhere.  Perhaps I am looking for the long since closed frontier.  Perhaps there really is something magical in the famous Marfa Mystery Lights.  Who knows.

And the art is wonderful.  There are giant Donald Judd sculptures in the desert and you can touch and climb and walk around them.  We took both tours, morning and afternoon, at the Chinati Foundation which is the organization in charge of this part of Judd’s estate.  The tours are great because you don’t get a lot of information.  It’s a little like having somone read those little cards next to paintings at a museum. Name, materials, date.  You get to just look, think and take pictures.  The foundation’s laid back approach and amazing collection stands apart from the Judd Foundation’s tour of their namesake’s studio and home.  The Judd foundation seems to be a on a mission to take Judd’s work as seriously and obsessively as Judd apparently did, and they’re doing a great job.  Taking the tour of the living quarters and studio one is confronted over and over again with the unfotunate conflation of the man  and the work.  A collection of cassete tapes sits on a trunk and has obviously not been moved since Judd obsessively organized them before he died, a library is maintained exactly the way it was including the placement of every single volume.  You cannot take any picture or touch ANYTHING.  One gets the sense that this is not so much as museum as it is a tomb.   I understand that he is a seminal artist but that doesn’t mean that having his children live with the kind of spare uncomfortable furniture and spaces that he preferred was anything short of cruel.

And I LIKE the work.  I really do.  It’s minimal and precise and well built.  But can we stop speaking with such revereance about the way some of the spaces are concevied.  The architecture here really ought to be thought of as rudimentary and gimmicky.  There are tons of plan tricks and proportions that are impossible to detect while actually occupying the space.  Some square footage adds up to other square footage but you’d never know from looking because doing shit like that in plan is so dumb you’d get laughed out of the room in any  architecture school.  It’s the kind of stuff that you learn NOT to do.  And it’s frusturating to listen to tour guides speak with such reverance about such an easy trick.  We don’t experience space in plan.  Are you in a room right now? Can you tell me how big it is? How many square feet?  Probably not with any certainty because our brains just don’t process space like that.  Plans are abstractions of the physical form.  Getting caught up in the plan something that happens to home renovators and amateur architects like Judd.

Even with all that, we still had an amazing time.  We ate the best Pizza I’ve had west of the Mississippi(it was so good we went twice), we went to the darkest observatory in the US and saw Saturn through a telescope and we drove through some of the most desolate beautiful country I’ve ever seen.  I took about three hundred pictures which I must go through before posting and about a dozen polaroids(thanks Ben!) that I’ll be putting up as soon as we get back.  I really liked this place and am sad that we have to leave it today.

It’s Saturday night at midnight and I’m unable to sleep.  The West Texas air smells amazing and there are visible stars in the sky.  I miss those simple things living in brooklyn.  Dan and I drove (yet again when I say “Dan and I drove” what I’m really saying is “I drove”) from Austin to Marfa yesterday.  The drive was beautiful.  Imagine the highway from No Country for Old Men, that is the terrain we drove through.  I did end up in a gas station bathroom with four nuns, true story.  The only thing entertaining that happened was me giggling.

We checked into the Hotel Paisano.  It’s straight out of a movie, literally.  The film Giant with Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean was filmed here.   It feels as if it’s stuck in time.  In fact, all of Marfa feels that way.  As Dan keeps saying, ‘it’s an alternate universe’.  Since Donald Judd moved here and started making work in the 60’s This small town in West Texas, population 2000  has become a Mecca for Artists.  We dropped our bags and headed out to McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains for a star party.  We learned about constellations and stars that were millions of light years away.  The whole experience was incredible.   Today we took tours of the Chinati Foundation and Judd’s studio and home.  It was a long hot day.  We called it a night with a dip in the pool, some delicious pizza (from  the chef of Il Forno in Providence), a bottle of red wine and a fire on porch off our room.  Marfa, Texas, it’s a magical place.  Try it, you’ll like it, I promise.

But on our visit to Austin I wanted to go the mecca of texas barbecue, Lockhart.  It’s here that three different barbecue restaurants practice their craft.  We only went to two: Smitty’s Market and Kreuz Market.  That’s all we could eat.  Smitty’s was first.  THe rooms where the meat is cooked look like they haven’t changed or been cleaned in fifty years.  Everything has a layer of black smoke.  You order your meat in one room where a carver cuts what you order and gives to a casheir to be weighed and paid for.  There are no concessions to modernity.  The cash register is a million years old and the meat is served on butcher paper with the corners folded up.  The utensils of choice is the plastic knife and your fingers.

The brisket was just incredible.  Smokey and tender and melt in your mouth good.  Sauce is pretty much out of the question but there is a hot sauce which I didn’t use.  This meat does not need sauce.  There’s tons of flavor from the beef and from the smoke.  Leesy and I finished off a quarter pound of brisket and a sausage.  The sausages(85% beef 15% pork) are fantastic with a nice crispy, but not dry, casing.  Overeall, this was some of the best barbecue I’ve ever had.  The beans were terrible and the cole slaw was nothing special but I guess if you do one thing this well, you can skip the sides.

Next up, Kreuz Market.  There was some kind of feud that pushed some of the family members behind Smitty’s to open Kreuz Market.  I neither know nor care what happened.  All I know is that I hope more barbecue restaurants can multiply this way.  Kreuz’s feels like a charicature of a barbecue restaurant.  It’s big, modern, full of modern conveinces like the ability to open a “tab” at the meat counter and close it out when you get your drinks/sides.  The lean brisket we ordered was pretty flavorful but it didn’t have that great smokiness and slightly charred flavor of Smitty’s.  I’d say it was good, almost great, but in Lockhart that doesn’t really count.

Porfirio's Breakfast Tacos

If you’re planning a visit to austin I recomend the following routine:

• Step 1: Wake up and asses what kind of breakfast tacos you want.  Giant and greasy?  Small and flavorful? The Don Juan?  This decision is key.  Make the wrong choice and you’ll be staring down the business end of a giant pile of eggs and potatoes and it will not be pretty.
• Step 2: Arrive at breakfast taco venue and asses the menu.  Chorizo and Egg?  Check?  Homemade salsa? Check.  Are beans an option?  What is the price for additional meats/toppings if they are available?  My personal preference is to see most tacos listed without cheese.  I don’t like cheese and I think that less good places use it as a cheap way to add flavor and fat.  If you’re eating a great chorizo and egg taco you don’t need crappy shredded cheese to hold it together, that’s what the grease is for.
• Step 3: Eat it you moron! I’m  a big fan of applying to much salsa and also eating the tacos while they are still waaay too hot.  I think if you’re not sweating at the end you’re doing it wrong.
• Step 4: Go get some good iced coffee.  Clementine on Manor is good.  We went to Jo’s on South Congress this morning and I think crushed ice is not the best choice for iced coffee.  The ratio of frozen water to cold coffee is just too great. Also, too many hipsters.  Consuming a cold caffeinated beverage prevents the sun from turning your brain into mush.
• It should be noted that I am an amateur in the breakfast taco arena and all of the above tips are not to be taken too seriously.  After all, breakfast tacos are amazing and just thinking about them makes we want one right now at 11:30pm.

Today my breakfast taco spot of choice was Porfirios.  After Mi Madre’s I wanted to go a more greasy spoon kind of joint.  My first breakfast taco experience involved a disused caboose on blocks so  I’m always looking to recapture that decrepit greasy spoon quality.  And I should say, Porfirios rocks.  The mascot of this little joint is an angry bulked up jalapeno.  This makes more sense when you realize that the green salsa you’ve been given is almost entirely chopped jalapenos and packs a serious wallop.  But the chorizo and egg taco was so good, with the sweat inducing salsa, that I don’t have a picture of one because I ate it before I even thought about taking a picture. I cannot say enough good things about these breakfast tacos.

The only other breakfast tacos we sampled were from Juanitas.  Juanitas is downtowtown and in a caboose on blocks. When I went there four years ago it was called Taco Loco but I think the owner is the same and it certainly still has the same ramshackle charm as before.  The tacos were almost as good as I remember them.  Small, compact and full of greasy flavor they’re not as big as MiMadre’s or as flavorful as Porfirio’s but they’re easily some of the best breakfast food I’ve ever eaten.

If someone with some time and more resources is reading this, please bring breakfast tacos to NYC.  If the city can have a Korean hot dog truck, we can  handle breakfast tacos.  I can’t wait four more years to eat these again.

Somewhere in Central PA my father is feeling a disturbance, a mild disappointment in his youngest (favorite) child.  I have failed him. He taught me to navigate with my taste buds  and now my tastes buds are saying ‘no more’ (in the same creepy voice the GPS uses).

It’s our second day in Texas and every meal has consisted of tacos. Thus far I’ve sampled Pork Tacos, Red Snapper Tacos, Vegetarian Tacos, Breakfast Tacos, Fried Avocado Tacos and Beef Tacos.  I’m done, my body can’t take it anymore.  Never in my life have I experienced this before.  I had to look away while Dan ate tacos for dinner.  I needed vegetables.  I went straight to Whole Foods and filled my tray with spinach salad and tofu.  I didn’t even dress the salad.  It was the best spinach I have ever tasted.   Tomorrow we’re off to Lockhart, TX for barbecue.  We’ll see how I fare.

Paco and John Mexican Diner, Fort Worth, TX

HERE!

Thanks Accuweather.com! I didn’t know you guys were following our trip.   Do you know how hot it is in Austin?  Well today it was one bajillion degrees.  If you don’t beleive me you can ask the people bursting into flames on the sidewalk because the sun is an inch from their heads.   My weather widget says that the high in NYC is going to be 77º tomorrow.  HA!  As this diagram shows, that is not summer. Summer is not  in New York, summer is Texas and someone must have peed in summer’s cornflakes because summer is pissssssed.

Because it was so fraking hot today we went to Barton Springs Pool.  This is a giant naturally fed spring that the city dammed up and turned into a huge concrete swimming pool.  The contents are about 68º all year which is perfect for dealing with days like today.  The water is  painfully cold and feels ike swimming in a giant meat locker.   There are few things more fun than jumping in the icy water and then heading to a grassy hill to relax in the shade.  This process, repeated for a few hours makes you forget that you are being baked like a shrinky-dink.

After we couldn’t  pretend to relax anymore we went to the South Austin Trailer Park and Eatery for some Torchy’s Tacos.  I know that this is not considered authentic since the trailer park theme, which consists of several hipster food trucks and trailers and some picnic tables,  is sort of a Disneyland version of the taco truck experience.  But they’re good.  Really good, and even better if you’re from New York and wouldn’t know a good taco if it hit you in the face.  I had a pork and a beef taco washed down with a Mexican Coke.  Delicious.

For desert we headed to the parking lot down the street to get some chocolaty treats from Holy Cacao which along with Izzoz Tacos is operating in a mini food court in a parking lot directly adjacent to the above mentioned South Austin Trailer Park and Eatery.   Two words people: Cake Shake.  Cake(your choice) + ice cream(you choice) + blender = awesome.  I can’t overstate how good this thing was.  As described by the woman who owns and operates Holy Cacao the inspiration for this beverage came from the bottom of a bowl of cake and ice cream.  I can only imagine that even she thought she might be crazy when she put that first piece of cake in the blender.  Crazy like a fox.  Creamy and sweet with little cake bits that add some nice texture but don’t overwhelm, I drank it all down before we  got back to the house. Delicious.

I realize that I didn’t mention the breakfast tacos we had today at Mi Madre’s.  They were great.  The breakfast taco remains one of my favorite foods but there’s not too much to say about the zen like simplicity of this breakfast treat. Think of the east coast staple, the egg sandwich, and then imagine that it tastes good.  Then add some fresh salsa and a homemade tortilla. Consume and repeat until full.

Or Towed?

I need to recommend the Holiday Inn Express in Mount Pleasant Texas.  You will not find a better hotel room for miles.   Really.  Which is to say that we are now in Texas.  And what did we do first?  We went to the Audie Murphy and Cotton Museum in Greeville, Texas of course.  Leesy saw the words cotton and museum on a sign by the side of the road and took the next exit.  Nothing says Texas like having a single museum dedicated to both cash crops and war heroes.  Would you like an authentic Nazi German soldier’s helmet with your cotton gin display?  Right this way.

Then we were off to Fort Worth for some museuming.  We didn’t stop in Dallas.  The point of this trip isn’t to have some kind of big city experience.  I didn’t sit in the passenger seat for 1,500 miles so we could see that yes, even below the mason dixon line, the buildings are tall and set close together.  I’ll take your word for it.  So we headed to Fort Worth to see the Kimball Art Museum by Lou Kahn, the new Fort Worth Modern by Tadao Ando, and the Cowgirl Hall of Fame and Museum.  I’ll put the pictures on flickr later, but the Kimball is a seminal work.  I have not been in a lot buildings that are better considered and more honestly made than this one.  Simple arches(not so simple actually, all are post-tensioned) span well scaled galleries and a clever system of baffles and skylights allow in just the right amount of bright Texas sun. Also, they let you take pictures inside.  How cool is that.  Note to NYC museums:  please let me take pictures.  I’m not trying t make my own glossy art books filled with orangish blurry photos of famous works of art.  I promise.  The Fort Worth Modern Art Museum was also first rate as architecture and as a museum.  Even though the initial scale of the thing is overwhelming(in Texas even the parking lots are e-freaking-normous), there are plenty of moments of intimacy and interaction with well curated exhibitions.  Well done Fort Worth.

Before we saw the art however, we ate some of the best tacos anywhere  at Paco and John’s Mexican Diner.  I didn’t really know where to go in FW and many guides recommended old burger places or some kind of steak or cow  themed restaurant but a few people on Chowhound and Yelp really liked this upscale taqueria in a converted gas station.  I can’t say enough good things about these tacos.  I’ve eaten tacos every meal since then and I still would spend another three hours in a car just to have these again.  I’m not sure Leesy would drive me there…again.

Speaking of food, if you are in central Texas, you must stop at the Czech Stop in West,TX on I-35.  Texas is apparently filled with Czech and Eastern European enclaves(that’s part of the backstory of great Texas Barbecue) and West has apparently decided to cash in.  There’s the Czech Inn, and a Czech festival and  a truck stop that serves Kolaches, savory rolls with meat or cheese filling. Like a Chinese bun only, you know, Czech and in Texas.  An entire meal in a little sweet roll, they’re great for eating on the road. There are sweet Kolaches as well with jam and cream cheese that we didn’t try and they sold some peanut brittle that you could use to kill a man that we decided against as well.

And now we are in Austin at Caren’s house enjoying for the first time an actual real home, no check out times and the convenience of Mi Madre’s around the corner  for breakfast tacos.  More posts to follow on Tacos, chillaxing and texas.

Response A: “That city is full of sinful wicked creatures and if I wasn’t so scared that you were plannign to sacrafice me to your heathen god  right now I’d make the sign of the cross and command the devil to leave y’alls unholy bodies.   But the statue of liberty is really nice” The most offensive version of this came from the woman who worked at one of Loretta Lynn’s gift shops after we bought, what I can only describe, as the single most racist toothpick holder in the western hemisphere.

Response B: “My daugher lives there…In Brooklyn…You don’t say.”

A few pork barbecue highlights:

• Best hushpuppies:  Lexington Barbeque, Lexington, NC
• Best pulled pork sandwich:  M&M Catering, Knoxville, TN
• Best rack of ribs:  Germantown Commissary, Germantown, TN
• Best decor and overall experience:  Germantown Commissary, Germantown, TN
• Best slogan:  ”so good yull slap yo mama”  Germantown Commissary, Germantown, TN
• Place I felt most likely to be shot:  Craig’s Bar-B-Q, De Valls Bluff, AR
• Best sauce:  A&R Bar-B-Q, Memphis, TM
• Most disgusting thing I attempted to eat:  Fried Pie
• Most random food experience thus far:  Kolaches (sweet bread stuffed with sausage), Czech Stop, West, TX

We’re in Texas now where beef  barbecue is king.  Off to enjoy the 100 degree weather.  No regrets yet, but if you don’t see me when i get back, it’s because I’m at the gym.

A&R Bar-B-Que - Memphis, TN

Germantown Commissary - Memphis, TN

Czech Stop - West, TX