Hot Desert Summer
On Lawrence of Arabia, global warming, Donald Judd, Marfa, and the 20th Century.
Good morning.
My girlfriend and I moved from New York to Austin at the end of March. We moved for a lot of reasons and this post isn’t really about that.
This entire summer has been a climate disaster. I’m not sure we quite comprehend what we’re living through. I mean we obviously understand what is happening, but because what is happening is so large and happening in different ways all over the world it's hard to fully, truly, viscerally understand. This year, nearly every place on the planet is experiencing extreme and destructive weather—record temperatures, floods, fires, unusual hurricanes, hurricanes that make fires catastrophic—and yet as that happens, we continue on through our summers, working, swimming, traveling, waiting for school to start.
In Austin, we’ve had a streak of 43 days over 100 degrees. I’d been in Austin for parts of the summer before so I wasn’t ignorant to the fact that the summers are hot. And, to be honest, I’m already kind of used to the heat.
But, according to local sources and, well, science, this summer is hotter than normal. For me, that’s the strangest part of these past few months: Here, we’ve been living within one bubble of extreme heat, but we have air conditioning and there aren’t catastrophic fires or floods happening around us so it’s all kind of fine. We aren’t Phoenix and we aren’t Maui and we aren’t Montpelier. But we gaze out still, from days that reach 105 or 106 degrees at five o’clock, to summers (for me, mainly to New York and the Northeast) that are not as hot, not as extreme. I don’t quite know how to explain what that means or how exactly that makes me feel, but that is how I’ve experienced this summer.
Because it's been so hot, I’ve been thinking a lot about the desert and about heat and about how you survive in the sun. Not in any serious way. It’s not like I’m looking up ways to actually survive in extreme heat or if you get stranded in the desert or anything like that. I suppose I should, but I’m just a regular person and generally kind of dim and naive.
I started thinking about the desert, really, because I watched Lawrence of Arabia for the first time earlier this year. I then watched it a second time, in a movie theater, at the start of the summer. As so many before me have said, it is a movie that you don’t really ever forget.
The first time I watched it was in February. I was alone in my apartment in Brooklyn. My girlfriend was traveling. I teed it up on HBO Max (this was way back when Max was only HBO Max) and sat in front of a dark screen while orchestral music played. I cursed my TV for not working and shut it off. I turned it back on and the screen was still dark and the music was still playing. So I cursed my Roku and reset it. This was an almost four hour movie I needed to watch and I wanted to get to it. I tried again—same result. This time I cursed HBO Max (when it comes to streaming content there is always someone to curse) and said, fine, I’ll buy it if I have to.
So I went to Apple, bought it, started it and the same thing happened. This time, I had to consult the experts: Google. And Google told me that Lawrence of Arabia starts with a dark screen and orchestral music as an “overture” to the film. I felt stupid, but, if I have one redeeming quality, it's that I don’t count pennies when it comes to getting access to a piece of popular culture that I need to see right now.
My issues understanding how to watch Lawrence of Arabia are more interesting than my impressions, which were mainly focused on how colorful and clear and vivid the sky and the sand looked, how good the dialogue was, how strong the theme of institutions over individual was (and how it reminded me of The Wire, natch), how great the performances were, and, of course, how much Peter O’Toole glides through scenes. It is one of the best, if not the best, movies of all time. Not much else needs to be said about it by a 37-year-old man.
The second time I watched Lawrence of Arabia this year was in June at the Paramount Theater in Austin with my girlfriend and her younger sister. On that particular day, the high reached 103 degrees. The theater, though, was frigid with air conditioning and we packed into old, folding theater seats to watch the movie, including an intermission. Obviously, it looks amazing on a big screen. After the film was over, my girlfriend and her sister pointed out that there was not even a minor female character in the movie.
It may just be the nature of our modern work culture, but I hardly ever find myself marching on a seemingly endless plain of hard-packed, white sand under an unforgiving sun—the kind of sun that will kill you—the way Lawrence and his uncertain allies do during a crucial part of the film.
But sometimes I walk across the parking lot to 24 Hour Fitness or get into the car with groceries after a trip to Central Market, the heat of the seat belt buckle grazing and singeing the hair on my arm, and think about Lawrence, Sherif Ali, and the misguided Gasim trekking across the Nefud Desert.
Lawrence of Arabia is the kind of movie or book where the characters are both real and more real than real. When I say real, I don’t mean historically accurate. I mean that the characters, their motivations, the way they speak, the way they move, the decisions they make, all seem real. But because what they are doing is happening on such a large and heightened scale, because the stakes higher, they feel mythic.
So, I will have fleeting glimpses of Lawrence and Sherif Ali sitting on cloth at night in a desert camp. When I go for an evening walk in the cool of seven o’clock (99 or 100 degrees vs. 105 or 106) and take conservative drinks from my Hydro Flask, I feel what Lawrence must have felt sipping from a canteen. And when I ill-advisedly do errands during the middle of the day on a slow Friday and return home with a thousand-yard stare on my face, I understand how Lawrence felt at the end of his journey across the Sinai Desert, right before he made it to the Suez Canal.
Austin is not the Arabian Peninsula. Neither is West Texas, but it feels a good deal closer.
I’ve watched Lawrence of Arabia twice and I’ve been to West Texas twice. The second time was earlier this month. Each time I’ve been to West Texas I’ve stayed one night in Marathon and multiple nights in Marfa.
Technically, both Marathon and Marfa are in the Chihuahuan Desert. To my untrained and inexperienced eye, the Chihuahuan Desert looks very little like the locations in Jordan and Morocco that Lawrence of Arabia was shot. However, I think it does bear some resemblance to the locations in Spain that appear in Lawrence of Arabia. There is something slightly Mediterranean about Central and West Texas. The town Marathon was named for its resemblance to the landscape around the city of the same name in Greece.
The way that desert towns seem to disappear terrifies me. Marathon especially is like this. There is a town and then, all of a sudden, there isn’t. There is just nothing and then the Glass Mountains. During my recent trip there I went to the Gage Hotel Gardens, which were lush and green amid brown, drying death in the 104 degree sun. I felt like Lawrence and Sherif Ali at an oasis in the middle of the desert.
Marfa disappears as well, but a little more gradually. That’s only because it has been built up more, becoming a tourist spot thanks to the work and legacy of Donald Judd. If you don’t know about Marfa, there’s plenty you can read about it. But the summary is that it was a normal desert town and then Donald Judd bought several rundown air hangers and barracks from the United States military. He turned them into places for him and his family to live, moved there as a full-time resident in 1977 and began to exhibit his artwork as well as work by other artists. Now it is a destination for art lovers and creative types.
Thinking too hard about Donald Judd makes me kind of sad. Or if not sad then a little melancholy. On this visit we took a tour of The Block, which is where Judd’s residence was. I walked around his library. Because I worked at Artsy for six years I knew names on the shelf I had no business knowing: Lee Ufan, Nam June Paik, David Rabinowitch, Bruce Naumann. And I thought about a guy like Judd being in the military, falling in love with West Texas, and then coming to Marfa and buying military buildings. I thought of him in New York in the 1960s—the way the city was, the artists he worked among, the way the world seemed then. I looked at the rooms his children lived in, dated and faded stickers on the windows of their wooden doors, stuck in the 1980s.
Donald Judd died in 1994. He died in Manhattan. He is a figure of the 20th Century. The names on his book shelves, the way the books look, the type on their covers and spines, their subjects like Japanese spoons, all seemed like a construct, something I could hold in my hand and look at like an ornament: a creative life in the 20th century. Judd’s life, the life his life represents to me, seemed to be both entirely wide ranging and also less accessible, less free and open than a life today. It was a world where you could write a letter to The New Yorker asking for a job with no credentials and maybe get it (most likely if you were a man) but also where same sex marriage wasn’t legal. It was a world where people smoked cigarettes all the time without caring about the repercussions, but also didn’t breathlessly follow news across the globe every hour—sitting in a chair and only listening to music was a completely fulfilling thing to do. The 20th century has been over for more than 20 years and will remain over forever.
T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, and Donald Judd are both figures of the 20th century. It was in that century that the British Empire receded, the Hapsbergs were finished, and the United States rose to world power. It was in that century that the world became aware of the dangers humans presented to the planet they inhabited.
Now, we cross our fingers and grit our teeth through each summer. Judd and Lawrence made their names and legacies in the desert. I don’t know what will happen to the rest of us in it.
I know they say it’s the hottest, but I really haven’t noticed a difference. Clearly, it doesn’t actually matter for most Americans that it’s hotter... also, people still think climate change isn’t real, so... good luck to us all.