Salon.com > Andrew Nelson

Showdown in Marfa

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 23:29:00 +0000

The light of the West Texas sky streams through big plate-glass windows and illuminates Jason Willaford and his wife, Rea, sipping freshly ground coffee in the Marfa Book Co. The slim and attractive couple, who met in Los Angeles, moved to Marfa last summer to open Galleri Urbane, a boutique specializing, like so much of the town, in contemporary art. So far, their experience has been wonderful. "Marfa's a lot more sophisticated than most places," Willaford says. "When someone here sets out to do something, they do it nice. That's why people like it here -- no Wal-Marts."

When Tony Trento imagines Marfa, his voice, thickly upholstered with his native Long Island, N.Y., accent, grows excited. "Marfa needs more retail stores and affordable houses," says the developer, who owns the American Plume and Fancy Feather Co., based in Marfa, which crafts boas and masks from turkey feathers and sells them to exotic dancers and Las Vegas showgirls. "There could be a truck stop, a McDonald's, or maybe," he says, contemplating something truly special, "a Wal-Mart."

Democrats stage a Lone Star revolt

Thu, 15 May 2003 19:21:00 +0000

As U.S. Special Forces scour Iraq for Baath Party poohbahs, Lone Star State Republicans are gunning for their own political outlaws. They've even published a card deck illustrated with the portraits of the evildoers.

Their quarry? Fugitive Democratic legislators, without whom the Republicans can't rule Texas. The Dems are on the lam in order to derail a congressional redistricting plan widely credited to U.S. House Majority Leader Tom "The Hammer" DeLay, the former Houston exterminator who's now one of the most powerful and relentless politicians in Washington.

Hogtied for the moment, and still well short of victory, angry Republican legislators have taken to calling their colleagues the "Chicken D's" for leaving Austin. New GOP Gov. Rick Perry unsuccessfully dispatched state troopers to find the wayward pols, arrest them, and drag them back across the border. DeLay, calling the Democrats "cowards," investigated putting federal agents on their tails. If so, FBI agents would stop hunting al-Qaida and instead try to smoke out security threats hailing from San Antonio, Fort Worth and El Paso, instead.

Home Front: Life during wartime

Tue, 08 Apr 2003 08:45:00 +0000

Alpine, Texas, population 5,786, is a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the nearest frappuccino, and support for the president and the troops is strong. Texans make up 18 percent of the U.S. Army, so many residents have family and friends in the military. On Holland Avenue, Alpine's main street, a huge American flag has replaced the Lone Star State banner at Pam and Ken Clouse's Cowboys 'n Cadillacs gift emporium. Jan Smith, who records the conversations heard at her quilting club for the weekly "Alpine Avalanche", concluded her March 27 column by asking God to "bless America and those who protect her."

But even here, in the straight-shooting Republican ranch lands of West Texas, the peace movement has found purchase -- on Holland Avenue across from the Amtrak station. Every Friday at 12:15 p.m. for the past four weeks, anywhere from six to a dozen people assemble in a parking lot. For a half hour they stand in front of lunch-hour traffic holding signs painted with slogans such as "NO WAR KNOW PEACE" "A JUST CAUSE NOT A JUST WAR" and "JUSTICE NOT JUST U.S." There's a plastic beer pitcher filled with origami peace cranes and miniature peace poles -- seven-inch-tall cedar pegs with peace messages in several languages.

The Holiday Inn sign

Mon, 29 Apr 2002 20:00:00 +0000

The American South likes to sequester its vice, tucking away temptation on barge-casinos or inside the lap-dance palaces out on the strip leading to the airport. As for roadside attractions, there's nothing that gets the blood racing like a motor court on the other side of the state line. As a Tennessee debutante of my acquaintance once explained, "Mississippi motels are where Memphis goes to sin." Could anything be more wicked than Magic Fingers and rates by the hour?

Apparently not in the Bible Belt. Yet it was a Memphis company named Holiday Inn that became a global brand by polishing the roadside hostel's image as a place where one got a good night's sleep and not a right good rogering. The company's mission was embodied by its "Great Sign," a glowing, exploding supernova of light and neon built to draw drivers off the highway and into its rooms while spelling out the purity of both its ideals and its bed sheets.

"Holiday Inn's sign was a prop in a play," says Andrew Wood, professor of communication studies at San Jose State University and an authority on motel history. "It communicated the playfulness, fantasy and optimism of the American roadside. And it meant safety for the [traveling] middle class."

Wilma Mankiller

Tue, 20 Nov 2001 20:00:00 +0000

San Francisco transformed many people living there during the 1960s. Its shabby, lunch-pail-toting neighborhoods became crucibles for a society recasting its values. The fire eventually caught a shy housewife and mother in her 20s named Mrs. Hugo Olaya and alchemized her into Wilma Pearl Mankiller, a symbol of both feminism and Native American self-determination.

In 1985 Mankiller, now 57, became the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, the 220,000-member Native American tribe based in Tahlequah, Okla., to which she belongs. She did it not only by overcoming the usual barriers set against Native Americans, but also by vaulting the chauvinistic hurdles imposed by her fellow Cherokees, who had never been led by a woman.

Once chief, Mankiller took the traditional "women's issues" of education and health care and made them tribal priorities. She raised $20 million to build a much-needed infrastructure for schools and other projects, including an $8 million job-training center. The largest Cherokee health clinic was started under her tenure in Stilwell, Okla., and is now named in her honor. Mankiller also sought to reunite the Eastern Cherokee, a group based in North Carolina, with the larger Western division.

Dread comes to Pottery Barn

Thu, 11 Oct 2001 19:00:00 +0000

South of San Francisco's Market Street, in a loft building pockmarked with the empty offices of dead dot-com companies, six professionals cluster around a conference table. They're young, stylish, urbane and, now, afraid.

Since Sept. 11, many Americans are spinning scenarios formerly left to airport-lounge novels and pyromaniacal film directors: collapsed bridges, cities in chaos, families overcome in the street by terrible and silent plague. Fears of terrorist reprisals have only grown since Sunday, when the United States and Britain began bombing Afghanistan and health officials uncovered a second case of anthrax in Lantana, Fla. For former masters and mistresses of the American universe, the news over the last month has been profoundly unsettling. Dread has come to Pottery Barn.

"I'm worried," admits Joan, 40, who works in San Francisco's financial district. Like the rest of the group, the legal aide doesn't want to supply her last name. "The government's not telling us everything," she says. "Anyone who thinks they're hearing everything is fooling themselves."

Jayne Mansfield: The brand called two

Mon, 06 Aug 2001 19:00:00 +0000

In 1967, several months before actress Jayne Mansfield drove into a cloud of insecticide to meet her destiny, a London newspaper took the full measure of the movie star and found her breasts to be 2 inches larger than the 44 inches she was then claiming for them.

"Ooh!" she squealed in delight. "I'm a big girl now!"

Her reaction, absurd, even pathetic to the post-feminist ear, was pure Mansfield. More than 40 years before consultant guru Tom Peters spoke of the free-agent movement and business magazine Fast Company wrote of the "The Brand Called You," Vera Jane Palmer of Dallas had grasped self-promotion's essential points to fashion herself into the hottest dish in the Cold War. From 1955 until the early '60s, Mansfield reigned as Hollywood's gaudiest, boldest D-cupped B-grade actress. "The working man's Monroe,"they called her. Her enormous breasts and baby doll voice embodied the '50s American male's fantasy of female sexuality: curvaceous, flirtatious and grateful for a man's -- any man's -- attention. Shipped stacked and stupid guaranteed or your money back. (For the record, Mansfield advertised her I.Q. as 163, but such intellectual pretensions were a nonstarter. Even she admitted her public couldn't care less. "They're more interested in 40-21-35," she said.)