Liberty don’t live here anymore

This post is a farewell ode to a perfect bar in a crooked house in a Texas city.

The Liberty Bar, a San Antonio icon, is known as much for the building it occupied for 25 years as it is for generous pours and mouth-watering food. But as of June, Liberty doesn’t live in a crooked house anymore. The bar still serves great cocktails and cuisine — just in a new location three miles away.

Thankfully, Scott and I got to experience the charm of the original Liberty Bar a couple of months before the big move.

The Liberty Bar’s old shell lists like a drunk. Viewed from the front, it leans left at its middle and right at its roofline, sort of like the letter “S”. The house was built in the 1890s and later crippled by flood damage and slapdash additions. Its interior walls tilt forward and its floors roll like wooden waves. The house looks like something out of a nursery rhyme or Tim Burton movie.

Ironically, the Liberty Bar did not relocate because the old house is about to fall down, but because a new landlord raised the rent. That’s sad. I can’t imagine a better tenant for the place.

Located a stone’s throw from an I-35 freeway overpass, the old Liberty Bar was a regulars kind of joint. I’m sure it remains so. It is rumored to be a fave of Tommy Lee Jones. We found Liberty Bar thanks to a tip from Scott’s former boss, a native Texan who is a fan of fine local food and knows a thing or two about San Antonio. (We are forever in debt to travel-savvy friends who help transform our whirlwind itineraries into 24-hour masterpieces.)

The Liberty Bar we experienced had plenty of character. It creaked and groaned. While sitting at the bar, I felt like the place could come crumbling down on our heads at anytime. And this was after only two drinks. Who knows how much the walls might have swayed after another couple of rounds?

The bar was quiet on the Saturday we visited. The bartender found the emptiness curious but not troubling. He chatted with us about worthwhile places to visit in San Antonio, and, like most bartenders, he know the ins and outs of cheap dining and drinking. Behind us, tubes of neon light framed each large window, adding a rosy blush to the ornate wood of the bar and the liquor bottles arranged neatly behind it. The entire room glowed red.

It must be noted that Scott and I ordered only a couple rounds of whiskey and an appetizer, therefore I can’t begin to rave about the cuisine with any real authority. But I can only imagine the wild-boar sausage or quail with green mole would make anyone love the Liberty Bar. Just typing the names of those featured menu items makes me drool.

One bite of the goat cheese appetizer sucked me into the Liberty Bar fan club — and to think I almost passed on it in favor of the grilled poblanos. But good fortune seated me next to Steve Collins, a fine-art photographer who lives at the bar — literally. His apartment occupies the upstairs floor of the old building. (Brave man.) Collins is a Liberty Bar menu expert, and he wasn’t shy about second-guessing my order. I took his advice and thanked him profusely after the dish arrived.

Served on a small plate, it’s a generous portion of local Texas goat cheese whipped with cream cheese, garlic and chile morita (a smoked and dried red jalapeno pepper), and then formed into a cake. The magic lives in the sauce, which is made from melted piloncillo (Mexican dark brown sugar) and heavy whipping cream combined with three peppers: chile morita, chipotle and ancho. You spread the whole glorious mixture over grilled bread.

It is sweet and salty. It is spicy and creamy. It’s ridiculously rich. The dish isn’t beautiful, but its flavor might make you shed a tear of joy.

If you visit San Antonio, find Liberty Bar and give the goat cheese a try. Just don’t make the mistake of driving down Josephine looking for the lopsided building by the freeway. Instead, make your way to South Alamo Street and keep your eye out for a two-story former convent that’s boldly painted salmon pink. You can’t miss it.

The Liberty Bar might not be crooked anymore, but I suspect the food and drink are still straight-up awesome.

—Jill

August 10, 2010 | Jill | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Sounds better in the song

One of the beauties of unhurried road-tripping is that some days, when you don’t know where to go, you can spread out your atlas like a Ouija board and let the tip of your finger find its way to your next destination. Maybe you gravitate to a place because its name is strange or it exists in a polygon of shaded green on the map. Maybe you’re drawn to a city because it figured prominently in a book you’ve read, or you remember it as the hometown of a favorite athlete or actor.

Or, in the case of Luckenbach, Texas, maybe you pick your next stop because it is the title of a classic country song.

“Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” was a No. 1 hit for Waylon Jennings in the summer of 1977. It’s a song that slides easily into your mind and then, like a sleepy drunk at last call, refuses to leave. I began humming its chorus immediately after spotting Luckenbach on the map, a faint blip southwest of Fredericksburg and nearly smack-dab in the center of the Lone Star State.

We took our sweet Texas time driving to Luckenbach from Marfa. We stopped at a ramshackle roadside attraction in Fort Davis that claims (believably) to house the largest exhibit of live rattlesnakes in the world. And we checked out a spring-fed swimming pool at Balmorhea State Park that’s 25 feet deep and has aquatic critters swimming in it. (The Balmorhea pool is yet one more fascinating attraction we’ve encountered that was built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. I’m thinking of ordering a bumper sticker that reads “God Bless the CCC.”)

By the time we pulled into the Armadillo Farm Campground in Luckenbach, the sun had set and our bellies were groaning. Gay, the friendly proprietor of Armadillo Farm, suggested a secluded campsite where the dogs could roam and told us the best bet for food at the late hour was the Luckenbach dance hall, just across the pasture.

Now is probably a good time to explain that Luckenbach isn’t actually a proper town. When Waylon Jennings sings, “Let’s go to Luckenbach, Texas,” what he’s referring to is the old dance hall. Little else exists in Luckenbach, other than a post office, general store and saloon — all three of which are housed in a small wooden building that looks like it was preserved from the set of Gunsmoke.

Local legend holds that a larger-than-life Texan (is that redundant?) named Hondo Crouch was thirsting for a beer while driving through Luckenbach in the early 1970s. He stopped for a drink at the saloon, but it was closed. It was also for sale — along with the general store and dancehall — and Crouch decided to buy the whole town. Another account suggests Crouch purchased Luckenbach after seeing an advertisement in an Austin newspaper that read “Town For Sale — Population 3.”

I don’t know how tall those tales are, but the Texas State Historical Association confirms that Crouch — a humorist, writer and All-American swimmer at the University of Texas — bought Luckenbach in 1971. He then proclaimed himself mayor and installed a single parking meter.

Crouch took advantage of the town’s status as a municipality to govern it as he saw fit. The historical association writes that Crouch “declared Luckenbach ‘a free state … of mind’ and successfully turned the small community into a foil of the nearby ‘Texas White House’ — Lyndon Johnson’s place down the Pedernales River at the LBJ Ranch.”

Crouch died in 1976, a year before Jennings’ hit song forever burned Luckenbach into popular music’s hide. But Texans who love outlaw country will tell you the place was put on the musical map in 1973, when Jerry Jeff Walker recorded his album Viva Terlingua at the dance hall. And Texans who love state history will tell you Luckenbach almost ascended to worldwide fame in 1865, when the local schoolmaster tested a flying machine 17 years before the Wright Brothers’ successful flight in Kitty Hawk, N.C.

Alas, the schoolmaster crashed.

That schoolmaster might have been the first person to crash in Luckenbach, but he was definitely not the last. The Armadillo Farm Campground actually advertises itself as a “secure place to ‘sleep it off’ after over-indulging at the latest concert event over at the Luckenbach Town Dance Hall.” Thanks to Jerry Jeff and Waylon — and countless other country musicians cut from the same ragged cloth — the dance hall has a reputation for hard drinking and caterwauling. (If you read “dance hall” and envision a grand room with chandeliers, please take note that Texas dance halls are built for two-stepping and swigging beer. For a layman’s introduction to them, check out this NPR story.)

I must admit that Jill and I found our Friday-night visit to Luckenbach pretty tame. A middle-aged songstress performed a set of mostly covers, and the audience in the half-full hall applauded politely at the end of each number. A few folks two-stepped, but most simply sat at long tables drinking bottled beer and munching on snacks.

A hot dog and BBQ pork sandwich satisfied my and Jill’s hunger, but we were surprised to find the bar only served beer — no whiskey. Did Waylon and Willie and the boys really come down here and not drink whiskey? Say it ain’t so.

Underwhelmed, we walked the dogs back to the campground, where we noticed the communal campfire was ringed by several people — two of whom wore cowboy hats and held guitars across their laps. We were encouraged. I found a stump to sit on, and Jill fetched the flask.

Fittingly, the first campfire song we heard in full was “Luckenbach, Texas.” In the firelight it was hard to gauge the age of the fellow playing it, but his voice — raspy and fragile — suggested he was at least 70. We learned he lived just over the hill and was an Armadillo Farm regular. I suspect he had performed “Luckenbach, Texas” a thousand times since 1977, and the arrival of Jill and me prompted what was probably his third or fourth rendition of the night. His arrangement included changing the lyric “firm-feelin’ women” to “firm-breasted women.” I silently wondered how long it had been since he’d felt a firm breast. Probably years. But one can never underestimate the sex appeal of a six-string and a cowboy hat.

The other guitarist, who I’ll call Slim, was a bandy rooster of a man who sported the standard boot-scooting uniform: wide-brimmed hat, Wrangler jeans, pressed Western shirt, colossal belt buckle. He was 6 feet tall but couldn’t have weighed more than 140 pounds soaked in Shiner Bock. When he wasn’t singing, a grin never left his face, but you could only spot it in his eyes and facial creases due to the presence of a mustache that would make Sam Elliott blush.

Slim at first seemed fabulously drunk: He spoke and sang with a lisp, and when he rose from his seat he teetered forward and backward, as though his spindly legs could not support the weight of his hat and mustache. But in apologizing for the quality of his picking and singing, Slim revealed (with a grin) that he had recently recovered from his sixth stroke. He then began strumming the first chords to an old Mickey Newberry song called “Sweet Memories.”

I would like to tell you the campfire cowboys at Armadillo Farm were wonderful musicians and interesting company, and that Jill and I passed our flask and listened to their crooning deep into the night. I would like to tell you they knew the Townes Van Zandt song I requested and that I joined in during the chorus. I would like to tell you we weren’t sitting next to a guy wearing a plush flamingo hat who implored the cowboys to favor him with a rendition of “Margaritaville.”

But I’d be embellishing our Texas tale.

In truth, the guitar pickers weren’t very good and I kept waiting, in vain, for our Luckenbach experience to feel authentic. When the old fella broke into “Luckenbach, Texas” yet again, Jill and I said our polite goodbyes and walked the dogs toward camp. Still, we sang the chorus all the way back to the tent, and it danced in my head for hours as I lay on my back, sleeplessly staring at a Hill Country sky heavy with stars.

But that ain’t a bad thing. It really is a hell of a song.
      

      
— Scott

August 5, 2010 | Scott | Tags: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Taken with a Texas teepee

Jill and I follow the girl in the wispy cotton dress and dirty cowboy boots across the grounds of El Cosmico, our footsteps lifting puffs of dust and crunching snarls of gray grass. We walk past a woman with unshaven armpits doing yoga in the paltry shade of a mesquite tree. She sits cross-legged atop a purple mat, seemingly oblivious to both our presence and the rumble of a one-ton pickup truck motoring northward on Highway 67.

I silently wonder what the rancher behind the truck’s wheel must think of El Cosmico — this quasi-campground, quasi-commune scattered across 18 acres of West Texas nothingness, where ladies contort their bodies beneath mesquite branches and guests pay good money to bathe outdoors in old tubs. It must beat anything he ever saw.

I just hope the old boy doesn’t pull over and ask why I’m about to fork out 75 bucks a night to sleep in a teepee. Because, at the moment, an explanation eludes me.

Jill had been talking about El Cosmico for months and miles. She saw an article about the place in ReadyMade Magazine and was intoxicated by the photographs of empty landscapes and old trailers. Initially, I was skeptical about the idea of paying extra dollars to sleep in an old camper when we owned a perfectly good tent, but our stay in a vintage trailer in Patagonia, Ariz., softened my stance. So when we drove through Marfa — a windswept town 400 miles west of Austin and 200 southeast of Juarez, Mexico — and sighted El Cosmico’s red neon sign, I shared at least a smidgen of Jill’s giddiness.

Asking someone who has stayed at El Cosmico to describe it is a little like asking a proudly eclectic musician what genre of music his band plays. Don’t expect a straight answer. El Cosmico is not a motel, but you sleep there. It’s not a campground, but you can pitch a tent there. It’s essentially a scattering of refurbished trailers, modernized yurts, safari-style box tents and one teepee.

El Cosmico is the brainchild of Liz Lambert, a former lawyer who almost single-handedly turned Austin’s once seedy South Congress neighborhood into the hipster–friendly “SoCo” district. She is also the creative force behind two boutique hotels in that area — Hotel San Jose and Hotel Saint Cecilia — as well as the Hotel Havana in San Antonio. (She is not, however, the Liz Lambert who violently yanked the ponytail of a collegiate soccer foe to became a YouTube legend.)

Lambert said she envisioned El Cosmico as a “community space that fosters and agitates artistic and intellectual exchange.” She might be disappointed to learn that the fellow guests we encountered there were a pretty cloistered bunch. There was the young Canadian couple with a penchant for skinny jeans, billowy scarves and furtive glances. There was the precocious teenager who had apparently convinced her parents it would be a grand idea to vacation in a 1953 Vagabond trailer next door to the Marfa Border Patrol station. And there was the group of bicyclists, en route to Key West from San Diego, who upon arrival summarily ate, showered and collapsed in their tents.

None of those folks collaborated artistically with us (or the dogs) during our stay at El Cosmico. But we did enjoy lengthy intellectual exchanges with the groundskeeper, a fascinating man who claimed to have lived three years on the shores of the Rio Grande before winding up in a Mexican prison. When I mentioned this story to the property manager, Sarah (the  girl in the cotton dress and cowboy boots), she was incredulous. “I’ve told him to not talk to the guests,” she said, brightly. “Half of what he says is complete bullshit.”

Sarah herself seems like a straight shooter. After all, she convinced us to choose the teepee over of one of the vintage trailers, which proved one of our wisest decisions of the trip so far.

The El Cosmico teepee is a replica of an authentic Sioux dwelling. It is big — 22 feet in diameter and nearly 20 feet tall — and furnished with a futon bed, four floor pillows and two stool/tables made from recycled tires. Cowhides cover the ground, and a 55-gallon fire cauldron sits in the center of the room. (A Duraflame log and firewood are provided.) A well-hidden extension cord carries electricity into the teepee (something the Plains Indians would have relished, I’m sure, had they brandished iPhones in need of recharging), and a lamp shrouded by a bell-shaped wicker shade hangs over the bed. The shade casts disco-ball-like light against the tent walls — a nice touch — but no nighttime glow beats the fire’s flickering flames.

We wasted no time lighting a fire and plugging in our portable speakers. We fell asleep with mesquite smoke and Sade’s voice wafting through the teepee’s vented ceiling toward the Texas stars.

I’m not sure staying in a tricked-out teepee counts as camping. But even when I’m not camping, I like to feel like I am, and El Cosmico granted me that desire.

Nearly every vacation I took as a boy entailed camping. Year after year, the campgrounds remained the same — Fall Creek Falls and Cades Cove in Tennessee, the Myrtle Beach Trav-L-Park in South Carolina — but my family’s accommodations kept evolving. We began in a 1978 Ford F-150 pickup truck with a fiberglass camper top; my parents slept atop a piece of foam in the truckbed, and I slept crossways above them on a piece of plywood. Later my parents moved into to a canvas Coleman tent, and I moved down to the big foam in the truck. Next came an Apache pop-up camper, then a bigger Apache pop-up camper, both of which had tiny sinks and stoves and fridges. Finally, the coup de gras: a 21-foot Coachman trailer that belonged to my granddad; it had a shower and a microwave, even curtains.

The teepee, though, was a quantum leap for me. It is the most sublime form of camping I have ever experienced. I would go so far to say my night with Jill in the teepee, warmed and illuminated by fire, sleeping beneath a Bolivian wool blanket, the dogs curled up at our side, made for the most memorable accommodations of our trip — and maybe my entire life.

(Jill and I also tried out one of El Cosmico’s yurt-like “eco shacks” — with their white fabric walls and bamboo floors — but after two nights in the teepee it was like relocating to the camel-tender’s tent from the sultan’s quarters. The yurts are groovy, but they lack panache.)

Aside from the teepee, my favorite thing about El Cosmico is its bathhouse. At many campgrounds, bathhouses are cesspools of dread. They tend to be dank and dirty, besmirched by puddles of other people’s shower runoff and strands of other people’s body hair. Cobwebs span nearly every right angle, and all manner of critters — spiders, beetles, roaches, frogs, lizards, slugs — creep across tile floors.

Not so the bathhouse at El Cosmico. It’s an open-air structure with concrete floors, exposed plumbing and truncated walls of slatted wood. Sunlight (or moonlight, depending) seeps through the wood slats, and the West Texas wind keeps everything relatively fresh and dry. Unisex bathroom stalls and showers — separated by canvas-and-rope privacy curtains — might make overly prudish persons feel awkward, but I enjoyed the invigorating sensation of showering outdoors. (Jill was less enamored of the facilities but still agreed to the idea of building an open-air shower in our backyard when we return home to Phoenix.)

The teepee and bathhouse compensate for El Cosmico’s imperfections, which are not few. There is little shade, thorny goatheads cover the grounds (that sucked for the dogs), and none of the trailers is equipped with air conditioning.

And the lifelong camper in me questions some of designers’ logic, wondering things like, “They ran a water line to that trailer, so why not extend it 30 feet and put a spigot near the teepee?” Or, “Why put a tub in the bathhouse? Who wants to use a communal bathtub?” Or, “I’m cool with the outdoor kitchen being way out yonder, but a picnic table or two would be nice over here.”

But El Cosmico is still in its infancy — it opened in November 2009 — and I’m sure the kinks will be worked out soon enough. The place probably will never win over hotel snobs who blanche at the idea of showering in a bathhouse or salty campers who balk at spending $125 to stay in a 60-year old travel trailer, but it’s a hoot for everyone in between.

Still, if the folks who run El Cosmico want to alter the personal cosmos of every traveler who periodically longs to sleep somewhere besides his or her own bed, I can bolster their business plan with three simple words of advice: Build. More. Teepees.

Those suckers are heaven on Earth.

— Scott

July 29, 2010 | Scott | Tags: , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Why is a cow standing behind that Prada store?

There I am, on the side of a two-lane highway in rural West Texas — sweaty, dirty, hair in a bun. I can smell my feet, and I’m standing up. Yet, improbably, I’m looking into the windows of a Prada store.

It’s a small, square building with awnings that bear the Prada name. Inside, the fine handbags and shoes the Italian fashion label is famous for are neatly displayed.

But this roadside boutique isn’t really a boutique at all — it’s an art installation completed in 2005 by Scandinavian artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. It’s called “Prada Marfa” — even though it’s not quite in Marfa, Texas, but 35 miles down the road in Valentine.

I first learned about Prada Marfa through the images of Allison V. Smith, a Texas-based photographer who documented Marfa before it was cool to document Marfa. I fell in love with her perfect square photos, especially the one of the stucco and adobe structure on the side of the road.

As we drove along Highway 90, I knew the installation was nearby, but I didn’t know exactly where. This allowed me to experience Prada Marfa as I assume its creators intended — snapping my head around as we drove past at 80 miles per hour, then turning the car around to take a closer look.

The artsy town of Marfa is one of the destinations I’ve most wanted to see, and (much to Scott’s grumbling dismay), I rushed us through the Guadalupe Mountains to get to it.

Prada Marfa obviously doesn’t belong in this flat landscape of pastures, train tracks and tumble weeds. The building’s windows are large, the awnings are crisp, and lights illuminate the designer goods after nightfall. The artists who created this bizarre installation plan to let it slowly disintegrate into the natural landscape. Barring a twister, the building could stand for a millennium, outlasting even Prada itself. (In case you’re wondering, Prada Marfa has not escaped vandals. Three days after its completion thieves made off with 14 right-footed shoes and six handbags. The graffiti has since been painted over and the store “restocked.”)

In my current life as a road tripper, I have no need for high heels or luxury fashions. I think about the $750 price tag for a pair of Prada shoes, and I calculate that it equates to two week’s worth of accommodations, meals and gas. There are no designer shoes back in my closet in Phoenix, either, and I only know one person who actually owns Pradas. But that’s not to say I wouldn’t love a pair — they’re beautiful.

Once, while picking through the cluttered shoe aisles at Nordstrom’s Last Chance, I actually got to touch a pair of Pradas. They were black pumps, precariously resting at the top of the size 7 rack. I think I may have gasped. I tried them on and took a few steps, admiring the shoes’ beauty below the frayed hem of my Gap jeans. They were marked down to $295 from $900. I put them back on the rack.

I’m not one of those people who scoffs at the extravagancies of high fashion. I respect it. In my most recent job, I photographed fashion. I drew inspiration from the incredibly stylish women I worked with, all of whom treated their ensembles like works of art. To me, that’s what high fashion is — art. That’s why I think Prada Marfa so smart.

Preserved inside this little stucco building on a straight-as-an-arrow highway in West Texas, these gorgeous goods are more apt to be admired than coveted. There are no price tags, no shoppers, no trappings of materialism. The doors don’t open — for anybody. You can’t pick up a pair of heels and say, “I would never pay that for a pair of shoes,” and you can’t judge someone who would. These Pradas are still out of reach — but they’re out of reach the way a Michelangelo painting is out of reach. The concept of “buying power” has been rendered powerless.

I’ll never attain Prada shoes, but at least I finally have a photograph of Prada Marfa. My photo is not as good as Allison V. Smith’s, but it’s a memory and a feeling and a piece of art all rolled into one, and those are the things I really covet.

—Jill

July 27, 2010 | Jill | Tags: , , , , , , | 4 Comments »
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