MARINA ZURKOW
Jan 16. It often smells bad when I am driving around. You can’t edit out the yellow grass, or the black mesquite (and its distribution now away from the draws, so that it dots most of the landscape), or the skies, or the oil pads, or the tanks, or the smells, or the invasive plants….
Elena Glasberg wrote this in an email to me today: I wish I were in such blighted yet open places. The deserts are the ruins before time. Lovely. Jan 15. Drove another big circle: Midland, Stiles, Big Lake, Iraan, McCamey, Crane, Odessa. Big Lake was scary. The gas station filled with roustabouts getting lunch, felt…
Jan 14. Met with an independent oil man for coffee. He was so kind and so generous with his time I wish we had focused more on HOW he sees as a geologist. How he gets a mental picture-map of rocks that delineate both time and space. And how he gambles as an oil man….
Jan 12. Sea change coming north to Midland. The land flattens, and if you aren’t careful you’ll say it all looks the same, and empty. Yellow grass. Blue sky. Black mesquite trees (shrub-sized) that look charred against the grasses. All these dinosaurs of equipment lying around too. And corrugated metal sheds. Midland is all business….
Jan 10. Erika and Dahr said they felt like living in this part of the desert often felt like living at the bottom of the ocean, and it’s so true. An ancient sea whose waters rubbed mountains down to soft and toothless nubs. Surprising reefs and volcanic moments you only find of you take the…
Jan 09 Spent much of the day at The Chinati Foundation , on the grand tour. The work feels…not exactly off-the-grid (despite being off the grid), but definitely not on the grid, either. It’s a pilgrimage site, a more stubborn, wilder, but gentried cousin of DIA Beacon. Chinati is a dynamic testimonial to Judd’s persistent,…
Well I left the beef fat and downstream petro behind, and took a plane to Midland TX. The earth looks scraped clean – and it kind of is, at least in patches (scraped and then bored down down through strata of hard and soft, old and older. Lots of oil pump jacks – the term…
I am in TX — in Houston for the week. It is balmy. Jan 04 I flew from NY in an extra legroom three-seat row, next to two enormous men (one wide, one tall). Aisle man pushed into middle man, leaving me a minuscule (standard) patch of space next to the window. The aisle guy…