Two New Podcast Transcripts: #2 "Charles Angell in the Big Bend" and #3 "Mary Bones on the Lost Colony"

You can listen in to all my podcasts anytime, but I know some of you read at a faster clip than you can listen, so I've been posting the transcripts bit by bit. As of last night, new on the website are two more transcripts of Marfa Mondays podcast interviews, both of which provide excellent introduction to the topic at hand, adventure in the Big Bend and the "lost colony"-- of artists who came to this spectacularly scenic region well before Donald Judd.

Marfa Mondays #2 Charles Angell in the Big Bend

"I just love to be in the river. It's like the best seat in the house for the Big Bend, I think. You can see canyon walls. You see desert. You see riparian zones. There's more wildlife there than anywhere else, and even if it's a really, really hot summer day, you can stay cool." [READ MORE]

Listen now




Marfa Mondays #3 Mary Bones on the Lost Art Colony

"Julius Woeltz is my favorite... He was really known as a fine muralist. I think he painted well over 30 murals in his lifetime. He very much was influenced by Rivera and Orozco. He and his very good friend, Xavier González, spent many summers down in Mexico and Mexico City looking at the muralists..." [READ MORE]

Listen now


There will be more Marfa Mondays podcasts until there are 24. The latest, #17, is Under Sleeping Lion: Lonn Taylor in Fort Davis

Your comments are always welcome.

Avram Dumitrescu, An Artist in Alpine (The Transcript of Marfa Mondays Podcast #4 Now Available)

Transcript now available for 
ye olde podcast #4
Avram Dumitrescu, 
an Artist in Alpine

The Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project proceeds.... as those of you who follow this blog well know, the most recent of the projected 24 podcasts is #17, an interview with Texas historian Lonn Taylor in Fort Davis. 

Meanwhile, I've been working my way back to the beginning, posting transcripts of 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, and now... drumroll.... 4, Avram Dumitrescu, an Artist in Alpine. About his chicken portraits, Dumitrescu says:

"When we moved to Alpine, our landlords had about 30 chickens. Patty and Cindy, they're on the west edge of town...that's where I had my first experience being around chickens, because until then it was just stuff I'd eat. They're basically mini-dinosaurs. Every time I go in, I'm always worried if I fall, and they start pecking me to death like in some horror movie... because they see red, they run to it and attack it. They're very interesting characters, and I think what really made me laugh was Patty and Cindy had named them after characters from "The Sopranos." 


+ Read the complete transcript of this podcast or, better yet, listen in to "Avram Dumitrescu, an Artist in Alpine" (on either podomatic or iTunes, both free).

+ All Marfa Mondays Podcasts (and most transcripts)

+ Your comments are always welcome. The newsletter will go out soon; to opt-in, click here.

New Transcript Just Posted for Marfa Mondays #7 "We Have Seen the Lights: The Marfa Ghost Lights Phenomenon"

The Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project proceeds and, yes, I am writing the book, World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in Far West Texas. 

Last week, podcast #17, an interview with historian Lonn Taylor, went live, and over the past few days I've uploaded several transcripts of older podcasts, including that of podcast #7, "We Have Seen the Lights," about the Marfa Ghost Lights. 

Herewith an excerpt:

FROM THE TRANSCRIPT OF PODCAST #7

"WE HAVE SEEN THE LIGHTS"

When I first visited Marfa in the late 1990s, I made an arrow for the Marfa Lights viewing area, a pullout on the highway between Marfa and the neighboring town of Alpine. About 9 miles out of Marfa, it was just a parking area with, as I recall, a couple of sun-bleached picnic tables. There was an RV parked to one the side and standing on top of one of the picnic tables, a burly man in shorts and a T-shirt, his knees bent like a quarterback about to grab the football. There was no one else there. It was still light out, though the sky had paled and beyond the expanse of Mitchell Flat, the mountains to the south, the Chinatis, loomed a dusky purple. I don't recall that man turning to look at me, but he must have heard my car pull up behind him, for as I opened the door, he pointed toward the mountains and began to shout:

"OH MY GOD... OH MY GOD... OH …. MY… GOD!"

As I set my shoe on the dirt, I saw that it was surrounded by a scattering of something silvery: quarters. I have found many a penny on the sidewalk, and few dimes over the years, but this was several dollars worth of quarters. I gathered them up.

"OH MY GOD!" The man was bellowing. "OH MY GOD!!!"

I would have thought him barking mad except that, I too saw the lights and they were unlike anything I had ever seen.  

[...CONTINUE READING... includes interviews with residents...]

> Listen to the podcast

> Listen to all the Marfa Mondays podcasts

> Your comments are always welcome, and for updates you are very welcome to sign up for my free every-other-monthly-ish newsletter. 

Another Transcript Now Available: Marfa Mondays Podcast #11 Cowboy Songs By Cowboys and an Interview with Michael Stevens

Reposting from my main blog, Madam Mayo:

Still working on the edits for Marfa Mondays Podcast #17, an interview with Texas historian Lonn Taylor; meanwhile, still churning out the transcripts. Available to date:

#16 Tremendous Forms: Paul Chaplo on Finding Composition in the Landscape

#15 Gifts of the Ancient Ones: Greg Williams on the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands

#14 Over Burro Mesa (not a transcript but an article)

#13 Looking at Mexico in New Ways: An Interview with Historian John Tutino

#12 Dallas Baxter: "This Precious Place"

and as of today... drumroll...

#11 Cowboy Songs By Cowboys
and an Interview with Michael Stevens

[Note: If you want to hear the songs, which I highly recommend, it would be a far sight better to listen to the podcast.] 

Excerpt:

C. M. Mayo: We're going to hear some more music in this podcast, but I want to go back for a moment to put all this into some context by sharing with you some of my interview with Michael Stevens, which was recorded in one of the lounges at Sul Ross State University's University Center just before the show. Michael Stevens is the one you heard first in this podcast singing about the Old Double Diamond. My first question was, how did this all get started?

Michael Stevens: Well, it started out as just cowboys getting together. And when it really would happen in the old days, it was just people heard about these guys who get together and talk and BS and tell stories and, you know, that's all they had. It's an oral tradition of just like, seamen. And there is a Fisher Poets Society in Oregon/Washington, somewhere up there. I've forgotten where it is. It's around Siskiyou Pass I think. But it happens right about now. Of course, they did it before we did. The ships were out there long before the cowboys were here and they told stories and sang songs. A lot of those songs and old Scottish and Irish ballads got turned into cowboy songs when the people came over here. Instead of singing about whales in the ocean, or whatever they did, they took that melody— and I believe "Streets of Laredo" is "The Bard of Armagh" or something like that— so it was some old melody that they just changed the words to. They weren't musicians particularly. A lot of times they didn't carry instruments, so a lot of it you'll hear a cappella, a lot of what those guys had—or they took an instrument out and it fell apart. Banjos seemed to last longer than guitars and things like that.

So it's a real old tradition of telling stories and it gets moved to the next person because a lot of those people didn't write, and so what the cowboys picked up on and started and then, at some point a few people, John Lomax and his son, they started recording these songs. Well, there were people before that even that were some of the cowboys that were starting to collect the songs.

The first gathering of this type that I know of was Elko, Nevada. They'd created a folklore center. I never studied the history of that either. If you could get ahold of Joel Nelson he might fill you in a little bit more but you can Google all that. About '85, well, Joel Nelson and his wife at the time, Barney Nelson, who's a teacher here in Ryder, got some really neat books out, they went. They heard about it. Joel's always been into poetry. He reads Robert Service. He reads Pushkin. You know, name it. If he sits down and does "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost with a big mustache and a cowboy hat you think it's the best cowboy poem you ever heard and then he says "Robert Frost" and you can see people go, Oh, that's why it seemed familiar to me! Because it's kind of what cowboys do. You know, they go the other way. If they want to make a lot of money they wouldn't be a cowboy.

So they came back here the next year after Elko and started a little gathering here and I wasn't here at the time. I was in Austin building guitars, but I'd gone from a horse ranch in McKinney to Austin and been in and out of the horse business since I was a little kid.

When I came down here [Alpine], my wife wanted to live here and she was not living anywhere else, and I heard about it. And then a friend of a friend, a girl we'd known in college had married Warren Burnett, the trial lawyer from Odessa and then I met Warren and he one day said— I hadn't gone to the gathering—he said, "You should go meet Buck Ramsey. He's my friend. He's the guy in a wheelchair and if anybody gives you any trouble…" Well, Warren says, "Anybody gives you any shit you tell them," because that's the way Warren was. I don't know if you know anything about Warren. Anyways, so I met Buck Ramsey and played music. Well, it turned out I knew a couple cowboy songs, and I didn't even know they were cowboy songs because I'd been in Berkeley since 1967 and played a lot of music and country music.

C.M. Mayo: Out in California?

Michael Stevens: Yeah. When I hit there I left Fort Worth in '67 and got there in November of '67. I had a cowboy outfit with bell bottoms, embroidered shirts and long hair and they called me The Sheriff. And we played country music. Cody was there. We played the same kind of venues as Commander Cody. Then they said you won't believe who's coming from [??] asleep at the wheel, so I was out there. Then I learned a bunch of folk songs hanging around the Freight and Salvage and those things. Well, it turns out a bunch of them were cowboy songs, and I'd heard a lot of Jack Elliot and all that, well, there's a bunch of cowboy songs stuck in there.

So I got down here and somehow after meeting Buck and playing... So they said, we need some more performers. Would you come and we'll stick you in a session and sing a few songs? And I went, Hey, I like this.

C.M. Mayo: What year was that?

Michael Stevens: That would be about '93 or '94.

C.M. Mayo: You've been coming back every year since?

Michael Stevens: Well, I live here.

C.M. Mayo: So you've come to all the Cowboy Poetry Gatherings?

Michael Stevens: Well, I was on the committee for 16 years and of the 16 years I think I was vice president about three and president for seven, at least. I just retired from the 25th year. This is my first year as a performer as a civilian.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

C.M. Mayo [to listeners]: A little further into the interview Michael Stevens talked about after Berkeley, how he came back to Texas. But then you're going to hear him backtrack and talk some more about his time in Berkeley at the Freight and Salvage. That was, and is, the hub of the folk music scene.

[CONTINUE READING...]

New Transcript Just Posted: "Looking at Mexico in New Ways: An Interview with John Tutino"

Slowly but surely the transcripts from my Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project are going on-line. Now available: 

#13 “Looking at Mexico in New Ways: An Interview with John Tutino."

John Tutino: "We need Mexico as an other. We can't deal with it as an us." But his whole point is that, in fact, US and Mexico are inseparable. It's a knock-your-huaraches-off interview.

> Listen in to the podcast.

TRANSCRIPT

[MUSIC]

C.M. Mayo: Welcome to Marfa Mondays. I’m your host, C.M. Mayo and this is Podcast 13 of a projected 24 podcasts exploring Marfa and the wider Big Bend region, apropos of my book-in-progress about Far West Texas. So far in the series I’ve interviewed people in and around Marfa and also reported on my visits to some very remote and intriguing places in the Big Bend, most recently, interviews with Dallas Baxter, founder of Cenizo Journal; and with luthier and cowboy poet singing some cowboy songs, Michael Stevens; and a visit to Swan House, Simone Swan’s adobe teaching house, inspired by the legacy of Egypt’s greatest architect, Hassan Fathy. I invite you to listen to these podcasts and all the others anytime at my website, cmmayo.com, and through the website, send in your comments. I’m always delighted to hear from listeners. 

[MUSIC]

Now in this podcast I take a big step back to get some perspective— big perspective. Bigger than Texas perspective. Those of you who know Far West Texas know how close Mexico is in every sense. Look at a map and you’ll see, from Marfa it’s only a little more than an hour’s drive to Presidio, which sits on the Rio Grande; cross over and there you are: Mexico. That’s what we’re going to hear about in this interview with John Tutino. 

John Tutino teaches the history of Mexico and the Americas in the History Department and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He’s the author of Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America, which was published by Duke University Press in 2011. Tutino is also the editor of a collection of essays by various historians with the title Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States, and that is available from University of Texas Press. This interview was recorded in his office at Georgetown University. 

[MUSIC]

C.M. Mayo: We have Making a New World and the related anthology Mexico and the Mexicans in the Making of the United States. These are closely related, and they are both nuclear bombs! 

John Tutino: Thank you!

C.M. Mayo: They’re huge paradigm-busting... across from the beginning when we had the expansion of New Spain in the 1500s to modern day immigration. My head is reeling with all this stuff that’s in these two books!

John Tutino: And I will say, you're right, they evolved together. They were a long time coming, decades in the rumination and a decade plus in the focused production. And yeah, I got to the point where I said, “The whole basic big picture of where we thought Mexico fit in the world is somewhere between wrong and mythical. And you can’t change that by chipping away at the edges and saying, look at this little piece.” 

And so I ended up writing Making a New World to just try to say, “New Spain, which is the root of Mexico, was absolutely an pivotal place to the origins of the modern world, modern capitalism, and equally absolutely pivotal to the origins of the United States.” And I was working on one when I figured out the other. 

C.M. Mayo: My sense is that in Anglo-American culture, we’ve always had this idea that, here is American history over here, and here is Mexican history over here, and yes, there was war and there was this and there was that, but you could like put a little bell jar on top of each subject, and what you're saying, and I know is true, is that, no, you have to look at them together. 

John Tutino: Yeah. I will tell you a story. I, years ago, put together a NEH [National Endowment for the Humanties] Summer Seminar for school teachers on the interrelated histories of Mexico and the United States. NEH, the grant proposal group, approved it. They wanted to fund it, but the staff at NEH refused my title, which was “Inseparable Histories: Mexico and the United States.” They said I could teach the seminar— this was in the early ‘90s— not having the primary title “Inseparable Histories,”  and I tactically said, “Well, I want to do the seminar. I’ll negotiate the title.” But that’s the extent that this goes there. 

But I will also add that particularly the argument that New Spain was fundamental to the origins of modern capitalism and that it was, particularly in its north, one of the earliest, most dynamic capitalist places on Earth, is equally challenging a lot of Mexican scholars. 

C.M. Mayo: Oh, yes.

John Tutino: They have sort of bought into a notion, they have been trained in a notion, that Mexico had its base in great Pre-hispanic societies that were destroyed by Spanish colonialism for three centuries, and then there has been a struggle to reconstitute something positive. And boy, there were destructions in early 16^th century, though I argue they’re more disease driven than anything any human could impose. And yes, there have been struggles, but people have... I don’t fully understand, why not glory in the... You know, it’s a typical history, it’s a history of enormous economic dynamism and thus enormous conflict, change, human greatness, human exploitation, human difficulty, but it sort of puts New Spain and Mexico, I believe, at the absolute mainstream of modern history. 

C.M. Mayo: So, in other words is as you call “this enduring presumption” was that capitalism started with England. 

John Tutino: With England. 

C.M. Mayo: And North America, and this is what we’ve been told in school and Adam Smith, and...

John Tutino: It has been the Anglo American gift to the world. 

C.M. Mayo: Would you say gift or plague?

John Tutino: Well, either way. If you ask Anglo Americans, it’s their gift to the world. If you ask people who’ve experienced it without prosperity... And this is part of what I try to do. I think too often we argue that capitalism is easily the most positive thing the world has ever seen or it’s the most dastardly thing the world has ever seen, and I just see capitalism as a dominant historical reality with enormous creativities, positives, productive gains and, linked to it, changing rounds of difficulties, conflicts, human difficulties, exploitations, and we’ve got to quit arguing one against the other. We’ve got to figure out how to maximize one, minimize the other, but as a historian I just want to understand it. 

In terms of that I should emphasize, in terms of taking Anglocentrism away from the study of global capitalism, I have jumped on a bandwagon there. It really came out of Asianists. One part, Andre Gunder Frank who started writing on Latin America years ago, then went to China and wrote a book called ReOrient, and Kenneth Pomeranz, who wrote a book called The Great Divergence, and I will say Gunder Frank was more the cage-rattling ideologue and Pomeranz was more the careful historian. He’s currently, it took 10 years after the book, but he’s now president of the American Historical Association. But the two of them together right around the year 2000 said, in 1600 China was the dominant economy in the world, Western Europe was a minor player and they contended for three centuries, and before 1800 nothing made it certain that Europe was going to rise to dominance and Asia was going to fade. It was a historical give and take, and then some particular things happened around 1800 that shift this. They were debating this and they were all recognizing that silver was pivotal to this world economy.

C.M. Mayo: Right. So China was demanding it—

John Tutino: Was the place demanding...the silver that went to Europe ended up in China.

C.M. Mayo: So this is the silver from Peru and from Mexico. 

John Tutino: Mexico. Scholars show for most of three centuries two-thirds of it passed east to Europe, but ended up passing through the Middle East, South Asia, and ends up in China. A third of it goes directly to Manila and ends up in China.

C.M. Mayo: Through Acapulco on the Nao de China... [Manila Galleon]

John Tutino: Acapulco to Manila. And people always ask, “Why is Manila part of the Spanish empire?” It was a city of Chinese merchants under Spanish sovereignty who traded goods not just from China but from India, Indonesia, and sent them back. Have you ever been to what is now the Museo del Virreinato in Tepotzotlan on the road?

C.M. Mayo: Yes, just north of Mexico City.

John Tutino: North of Mexico City. There are two rooms there of Chinese-Christian-Asian art that were all brought back by the Jesuits because that was their colonial... It is the best way to see the wealth of China that was brought to New Spain by that silver, is to just go through those rooms in Tepotzotlan. 

C.M. Mayo: And this doesn’t fit with the image of Mexico in Anglo-American cultural history or our modern media at all. 

John Tutino: As a backward, exploited, crushed environment that Spanish colonialism just ground to nothing! And one of the ironies is... and we have a hard time thinking about it. So New Spain, I argue, was probably one of the three core regions of early modern capitalism, while Spain, its mother country, was in decline. And we’ve just got to learn to get over the presumption that Spain could be in decline as a European power but New Spain could be just flourishing. 

C.M. Mayo: What I loved about the opening of your book, Making a New World, was you start talking about...to illustrate your points, the individual biographies of several people in the very important city of Querétaro. And as a bit of digression I want to say, I’m an American and I’ve been living in Mexico all these years, and I come back and forth frequently, and it is very rare that anybody in the U.S. has even heard of Querétaro, and yet Querétaro plays a central role in the development of the Mexican economy from almost the very beginning. 

John Tutino: I will note it’s also coming back. It may be the single most dynamic place under the current NAFTA-driven economic revival. And Querétaro really became probably my favorite place in Mexico in the process of writing this book. 

I had been introduced to Mexico as a 17-year-old kid going to San Miguel de Allende and I’d lived for a full year in Mexico City, lots of time in other central Mexico places, most of all in Mexico City, but when I started doing this and started spending between two weeks to a month every year in Querétaro, and the mix of its colonial heritage and its modern dynamism just made it. It isn’t a museum like San Miguel. My apologies to the San Miguel tourist bureau. [Laughs] It’s a real dynamic city but with a wonderful historic arc. 

The argument is that this dynamism is there and that it is charging north.

C.M. Mayo: Well, can we come back just for a minute to those individual biographies in and around Querétaro, part of the Bajío, which includes San Miguel de Allende.

John Tutino: Guanajuato. 

C.M. Mayo: León, Celaya. 

John Tutino: Yes. 

C.M. Mayo: It’s a group of cities north of Mexico City, kind of in the very heart of Mexico. 

John Tutino: It is absolutely the richest agricultural land in Mexico. Historically the richest mines in Mexico were in Guanajuato, and with the mix of those two, Querétaro was the richest trade and industrial city in Querétaro.

C.M. Mayo: Oh, and Zacatecas.

John Tutino: Zacatecas isn’t quite Bajío in Mexican parlance because it’s north, it’s dry, but the Bajío fed it because, precisely, Zacatecas is mining wealth in dry uplands. Where did Zacatecas get its food? So the Bajío is also in a sense sustaining places like Zacatecas.

C.M. Mayo: So when we look at the beginnings of Querétaro and this economic engine that’s going to feed the northward expansion of New Spain, one of the biographies that you talked about was José Sánchez Espinosa. There was another little one in there about an Italian count...

John Tutino: Yes, Colombini. And later in the book there’s huge excerpts from a poem he wrote in honor of Our Lady of Pueblito, the local Otomí virgin who historically and still in many ways centers popular devotions in Querétaro, the way Guadalupe has historically around Mexico City. 

Let me quickly go through my favorite vignette. The first one is Connín. Connín is an Otomí trader, frontiersman. He had traded across the frontier into the land of the Chichimecas. When Spaniards came he claimed to have been a lord; we don’t know if he really was but he was able to mobilize followers with a little bit of army, a little bit of settlement, and he, an Otomí trader or lord with somewhere between dozens and a few hundred Otomí friends, relatives, villagers recruited only a couple of Spanish Franciscan friars, and while literally Spaniards are still trying to conquer Mexico City, they go north and found Querétaro. And so Querétaro is actually an Otomí foundation with Catholic Franciscan sanction under Spanish rule. And for the first 30 years Querétaro is an Otomí city. Other than a priest or two there’s nobody else there. They build the irrigation. They build grist mills. They built the town. They distribute the land. And Connín and his pals take large landed estates for themselves, but they make sure their followers all have these incredibly rich irrigated gardens at the core of the city, and of course, he very quickly... he can’t remain Connín, he’s baptized and he becomes Don Fernando de Tapia. 

C.M. Mayo: And what amazed me about Don Fernando de Tapia is, you give the little biography and one reads along, da-da, da-da, da-da, he did this, he did that, his daughter...

John Tutino: And you think he’s got to be a Spanish conquerer.

C.M. Mayo: He’s got to be a Spanish conquerer and it turns out, no! He’s an Otomí trader who used to be called Connín!

John Tutino: And it is the perfect example of how indigenous people weren’t always broken. They saw opportunity.

C.M. Mayo: It’s a more complex story than what we’re told at a public level. [CONTINUE READING THIS TRANSCRIPT]

> Listen in to this podcast

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Another Transcript Just Posted: Marfa Mondays Podcast #15, an Interview with Greg Williams on the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands

Marfa Mondays Podcast #15 Gifts of the Ancient Ones: Greg Williams on the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands [MUSIC] C.M. Mayo: Welcome to Marfa Mondays Podcast number 15 of a projected 24 podcasts exploring Marfa, Texas and the greater Big Bend region of Far West Texas, apropos of my book-in-progress. I'm your host, C.M. Mayo, and on my webpage, cmmayo.com, you can listen in to all the podcasts anytime for free, and also there you can find out about my several other books. The most recent book is the reason these podcasts have been coming along a little more slowly this year. That book, which is done and now available in paperback and e-book formats, is Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. For those rusty on their Mexican history, Francisco Maderowas the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and he was president of Mexico from 1911 to 1913, so his so-called secret book, which I translated into English, is in many ways quite illuminating. This podcast is of my interview with Greg Williams, executive director of the Rock Art Foundation. It was recorded on August 30, 2014 at Meyers Spring Ranch on the conclusion of a four hour tour of the rock art there and of the restored house of the military commander at Camp Meyers. Meyers Spring is one of a multitude of rock art sites in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, a region around the confluence of the Pecos River and the Rio Grande and extending south into Mexican state of Coahuila— by the way, the native state of none other than Francisco Madero. In this region, to quote Harry J. Shafer in the introduction to his anthology, Painters in Prehistory: Archaeology and Art of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, "Magnificent polychrome, pictographic images, panels, and murals exist that rival any in the world." Meyers Spring, which I toured with the Rock Art Foundation, is on private property a few miles drive from the tiny border town of Dryden, Texas. To quote from the Rock Art Foundation's website, rockart.org, "Meyers Spring is an isolated water hole in the arid lands west of the Pecos. Brilliant red paintings overlook a permanent pool of water sheltered only by a shallow overhang. Although faded remnants of much older pictographs can still be detected, the majority are attributable to Plains Indians who were latecomers to the region." You can view pictures of Meyer Spring and other rock art sites on the website rockart.org, and for more about the rock art I can also recommend the books Painters in Prehistory, edited by Harry J. Shafer, and Rock Art of the Lower Pecosby Carolyn E. Boyd. Before we go to the interview with Greg Williams, executive director of the Rock Art Foundation, an apology for the sound. There's a bit of a roar which would be the very necessary air conditioner. This was recorded in the kitchen of the ranch house so people were coming in and out and there was some target shooting going on from the porch. I managed to edit out most of the shooting, but you'll still hear a few pops. I would like to dedicate this podcast to my friend and neighbor in Tepoztlán, Mexico, Patty Hogan, because Patty, I am so grateful to you for putting me in touch with the Rock Art Foundation. [MUSIC] C.M. Mayo: Most people that I've talked to have never heard of rock art in this area, and yet there's a lot of it, and it's really important. Why is that? Greg Williams: Probably the best way I could explain it is explain to you what happened to me. In 1991 in my business I was trying to have some photography done, and so I looked in the phonebook and I saw a man named Jim Zintgraff who is a well-known San Antonio photographer. I hired Jim, and we went out to a photo shoot, and the conversation kind of waned, and my son and I had been camping in West Texas for years, and so the only thing I really knew about that I thought Jim might be interested in is I brought up West Texas, and it went from there. Jim was the director of the Rock Art Foundation then. Jim passed away eight years ago and I became director following him. But what happened is this gentleman brought me and my wife to West Texas to see things that I had never even known about, and they were the remnants of a past culture, a culture that had existed in the Lower Pecos region of West Texas, which is the confluence of the Pecos and the Rio Grande, for twelve thousand years. I had no idea that people lived out here for that long, And so we wandered around and we looked at the remnants of that culture. We looked at their lifeways, through the floors of these dry rock shelters, and we looked at their language, the stories that they wrote for us on the walls of these shelters, and we didn't know what they meant. You'd have to be in the mind of the artist to find that out, but you could sit and wonder about these folks who lived so long ago here and how hard the life must have been for them, in our context. For them it probably was not quite so difficult at all. They had plenty of food, plenty of water. But what they left behind was remarkable and it's called rock art. It's a book, it's a story. Some of the images out here in West Texas, you can call them the oldest known books in North America. They are thousands of years old and as we look at cultures of people that exist today, the Huichol in northern central Mexico, the Native American populations around the country, and we look at their art, and we look at this four thousand-year-old ancient art that we have here, we begin to see similarities. We see Lower Pecos images in Mayan art, we see it in Aztec art, and by making all those comparisons you can kind of start to believe that you understand what these people have written, and what's in their book that they've left us. That's the mystery. Will we ever know? Probably not. You'd have to be in the mind of the artists, I think, to understand that, but to look at an ancient culture, to look at what they've left behind, to wonder about what you're leaving behind in our modern culture, it seems to me that the things that were left for us so long ago seem to be so much more important than what we're leaving behind today. So that's the mystery that keeps, I think, all [of us] coming out here. We've got 35 people in the Meyer Springs Ranch today and that, what I just verbalized, was the entire reason they came here. They may not realize that, they may not verbalize it in that way, but to come and see a culture that passed so long ago, and to stand in the footsteps that they left, and to look at the book they wrote, and the messages that they left for us... pretty remarkable! And after years you feel that you begin to understand who they are. All of a sudden one day they become alive. You can see them. We just came back from Camp Meyers and that was a much later culture, but you could hear them talking, you can smell them, you know they're there, and you feel that you're one of the very, very lucky few people that realize they're still here, and they're still here in what they left behind and the messages on the rocks, and I feel blessed to be one of the people that can stand there, and stare at that, and wonder, and have some kind of knowledge to what it might mean. That's what it does for me. I hope that makes sense to you. C.M. Mayo: It makes beautiful sense. Kind of two separate things here, one is the rock art that we saw today which had images on top of images- we saw some that were very faint and possibly thousands of years old, and then more recent ones that look like they were painted shortly after the Conquest showing priests, showing a cross, handprints, birds, really a wide variety of images. But then we also saw Camp Meyers, and that was something from the late 19th century, which you restored. Greg Williams: This is 25 years for me out here doing this. And I marvel at what's out here, but the military history, probably because it's not that far behind us, that intrigues me the most, and the life that these people lived here, and how harsh it was, and how gentle our lives are in comparison. I look back and I have great respect for those that came before us, and I look at where we're heading as a culture, and I'm not pleased. And I wish that some of the life values that these people behind us had, that we could adopt those today. Our children aren't, our adults aren't. It's very saddening to me, but to come out here and be a part of a group of people that I admire so much is important. And I learn a lot from that in how I handle my life. And when we bring tours of people out here—and we've done it for over 15,000 people— when we bring people out here that's the message that I try to tell them without using words. If I can show them something that's totally astounding, and show them a better way, things that people did long ago that were much better than what we're doing now, and if you can learn from that, and you can make an impression, I think that's really very important. But I try to do it without words. C.M. Mayo: What specifically do you think was done better in the past that's not being done now? ... CONTINUE READING

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Transcript Now Available for Marfa Mondays Podcast #16: "Tremendous Forms: Paul Chaplo on Finding Composition in the Landscape"

Marfa Mondays 16: "Tremendous Forms: Paul V. Chaplo on Findng Composition in the Landscape"  was posted as podcast (listen in anytime on podomatic or iTunes) back in January, but the transcript has just been posted here.

I'm aiming to post transcripts of all my podcast interviews, both the Marfa Mondays and Conversations with Other Writers (for the latter, so far, transcripts are available for Rose Mary Salum and Sergio Troncoso). Stay tuned for Marfa Mondays 17, an interview recorded in Fort Davis with Texas historian Lonn Taylor.

>Your COMMENTS are always welcome.

Marfa Mondays Podcast #12, Dallas Baxter, Founding Editor of Cenizo Journal, "This Precious Place"

***UPDATE 3/25/2015: TRANSCRIPT NOW AVAILABLE.

A metaphorical asteroid took out the past few months, but (whew) the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project resumes today with podcast #12, an interview with Cenizo Journal's founding editor, Dallas Baxter.

Baxter had just turned over Cenizo Journal to its new owner when I interviewed her last February 2013 in Alpine (about an half hour's drive from Marfa). She had arrived from New York just around the time of 9/11, and as editor of a journal covering the arts and history of the Big Bend / Trans-Pecos region of far West Texas, Baxter has an usually rich experience and perspective. If you wonder how a print publication can make it in this crazy digital age, and what it's like to live in such a remotely beautiful place, listen in. 

There will be 24 podcasts, and the project now extends through 2015.

Listen in to all the podcasts anytime at www.cmmayo.com/marfa

COMMENTS? Always welcome.