Marfa Syndrome

In the kind of twist that is the reason why this blog exists, Bradford Cox, frontperson of Deerhunter and sufferer of Marfan Syndrome (unlike me who is a sufferer of Deerhunter and...that's it), recorded his band's latest album in Marfa, Texas, a town that's like the town in No Country For Old Men if the serial killer was Terry Gross. Don't worry. It's just as boring and predictable--the album, as well as the town--as you'd expect. But imagine going to a gentrified bowl of dried oatmeal for inspiration. Crazy. Bradford Cox is truly the Ben Lerner of rock or something. You think I'm kidding?

 

Here's an article about how people who have lied in Marfa for decades, long before it became a mecca for the fashionably wealth artistic set, are getting fucked by the fashion. In the above video, the Deerhunters treat the town like the poverty tourists they've always been.

Fortunes changed for Marfa, and adobe, when the sculptor Donald Judd arrived in the 1970s and turned its empty expanses into something of a vast outdoor studio. Marfa came to signify something within the art world, people from far reaches traveled to the desert to see it, and the prices of things began to reflect the cities they came from.

Here's another quote from the NYT article.

Marfa, with fewer than 2,000 full-time residents, doesn’t have a mechanic, but it has a public radio station, and the Marfa Book Company carries an art section that rivals niche bookstores in New York. It’s a town that feeds on its pointed self-awareness: a greasy spoon called “Bad Hombres,” owned by the town’s justice of the peace, stop signs spray-painted to read “Stop Talking.”  

Actually, feeding on its pointed self-awareness might also be the best description of Deerhunter ever written.