back from sxsw & marfa

March 22nd, 2010 • posts i've written

I’m back from my spring break excursion. It went a little something like this: NYC -> Houston -> Austin -> Marfa -> Austin -> Houston -> NYC

Aside from the flights from NYC to Houston and back, I put nearly 1500 miles on the treads of my tires in the ten day span.

SXSW – Admittedly, I spent the first few days of the conference sick in bed which meant I missed quite a few of the keynotes and panels I was looking forward to. Major bummer. But I did get to meet some of my favorite internet friends in real life and have a rather interesting chat. Then Mike and I gave our talk on branded vs unbranded content. A big thanks to everyone that came out, participated, and shared. This is a pretty thorough round-up, if you’re interested. We’ll be putting the deck on slideshare soon and I’ll post the podcast when SXSW makes it available. All in all, I think it went well – our SXSW rep that was handing out comment cards chased us down before we left and said that we were getting really great feedback, so I’m eagerly waiting on getting those from the conference.

Marfa – after the madness in Austin, I took two and a half days to leisurely stroll about Marfa, TX. Marfa is a tiny town of just 2,000 inhabitants in the desert of far west Texas. I’ve been meaning to visit for a few years now and finally took the opportunity to do so – and I plan on making Marfa a frequent respite from here on out.

To say that Marfa is the antithesis of Manhattan is to over simplify the hamlet. True, the town is less than a mile wide, completely open to a sprawling Texas desert, and at night so dark that you can actually observe the Milky Way stripe in the middle of the sky (something that caused an authentic sense of awe to seize me), but the town is also full of urban ex-pats working on modern art projects (the town is almost entirely owned by two arts foundations), while slinging some of the best coffee and pizza I’ve had anywhere in the world (and I’ve lived in Chicago and New York). If you want to know more about Marfa, including where to stay, or what to do, please ask me.

We tend to think of Manhattan like we do the internet – a land of perpetual novelty. While it’s certainly true, I do think I often ignore the perpetual novelty inside my own head, achieved by disconnecting from my manic stimulus/response internet consuming behavior and perching myself on a quiet sunny corner in the middle of nowhere.

A few scatter-shot photos of Marfa below:

Next time I visit, I’m definitely bringing some real camera gear with me. For much better photos, I highly recommend this Marfa flickr group:

Related posts:

1. only you can prevent sxsw suckage
2. 5 themes from sxsw
3. drowning in SXSW panels

Trackback URI.