Tim Murphy

Reporter

Tim Murphy is a reporter in MoJo's DC bureau. Last summer he logged 22,000 miles while blogging about his cross-country road trip for Mother Jones. His writing has been featured in Slate and the Washington Monthly. Email him with tips and insights at tmurphy [at] motherjones [dot] com.

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A Sense of Where We Are: New Mexico

—By Tim Murphy

| Fri Sep. 10, 2010 11:31 PM PDT

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The View From My Windshield: Display Purposes Only

—By Tim Murphy

| Thu Sep. 9, 2010 9:09 PM PDT

Obviously: asdasd (Photo: Tim Murphy). Window Shopping: This art installation, just outside the West Texas town of Valentine, is called "Prada Marfa," for reasons that should be obvious. Kind of brilliant, right? Just don't expect to walk out with a new pair of kicks; after an initial rash of vandalism, the items inside, from the Fall 2005 collection, were outfitted with security devices to prevent theft (Photo: Tim Murphy).

"I Thought My Eyes Was Playin' Tricks on Me"

—By Tim Murphy

| Wed Sep. 8, 2010 9:45 AM PDT

Witness: Quick: Find the extraterrestrial life form in this photograph! (Photo: Tim Murphy). Quick: Find the extraterrestrial life form in this photograph! (Photo: Tim Murphy).Marfa, Texas—Long before it became an improbable hub for minimalist architecture, Marfa (population 2,100) was known for its lights—the oft-witnessed, never fully explained multi-colored orbs that hover and dart over the Chinati Mountains at night.

Some say the lights are the result of gases rising out of the Chihuahan desert. Others say they come from Apache campfires or visiting space creatures. In Marathon, about an hour down the road, a man named Eric suggested that the lights come from military helicopters (you can imagine how terrifying that must have been in 1883, when the phenomena was first reported.)

In 2004, a team of students from UT–Dallas conducted a four-day field study to show that the lights might come from automobile traffic reflecting from the state highway, which is totally lame, but, what's the word, plausible?

No one ever pulled off to the side of a highway to watch car headlights, though, so Marfa is sticking firmly behind the "unexplained" aspect of the unexplained phenomenon. At taxpayer expense, Presidio County constructed a viewing platform and visitors center on the outskirts of Marfa, where out-of-towners can throw down a few quarters to try to see the lights at night. It gets brisk traffic: When we stopped by in the early afternoon (before the lights would even be visible) there were at least a half dozen people there, including a few, like Richard Brown of Odessa, who claimed to have actually seen the things.

The View From My Windshield: Hook 'em, Shorthorns

—By Tim Murphy

| Mon Sep. 6, 2010 8:45 PM PDT

Marfa Marfa Marfa: Marfa Shorthorns at Alpine Bucks, 9/3/2010 (Photo: Tim Murphy) Marfa Lights: Marfa Shorthorns at Alpine Bucks (Photo: Tim Murphy).Alpine, Texas—It's a little cliched to say that high school football is kind of a big deal in Texas. There's a book about it. And a TV show. And a movie—two, actually, if you count James Van Der Beek's receding hairline in Varsity Blues. So I'll spare you the exposition on how football budgets dwarf English department budgets (I mean, have you ever read Beowulf?), on how Friday night games can become culture war hot zones, on how everything just means so dang much.

Instead, I'd just like to note three small details:

1.) When Marfa High School's marching band took the field at halftime of "the West Texas Rivalry" at Alpine on Friday night, its drumline consisted entirely of Shorthorns players still in uniform. Which was awesome.

2.) Any time a player went down due to injury, everyone—everyone—in uniform immediately dropped to one knee with an almost martial discipline and stayed like that until the afflicted got back up.

3.) The idea of Frito Pie (in the case of the Alpine High School concession stand, that's "a bag of Fritos smothered in processed nacho cheese") is one of the four or five greatest arguments for health care reform. I'm not sure why President Obama doesn't talk about this more.

Postcard From Woody Guthrie's Hometown

—By Tim Murphy

| Mon Sep. 6, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

Okemah, Oklahoma—It's hard to imagine a quiet town like Okemah spawning a rabble-rousing, labor-loving, leftist. But then, once you walk around for a bit, it's also really hard to imagine Woodrow Wilson Guthrie coming from anywhere else.

The legendary folk singer's childhood home in Okfuskee County sits halfway up a hill ("the hill," if you ask for directions in town), one block south of the public library, roughly equidistant from Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and the surface of the sun (about an hour each way, I think).* If you drove 14,000 miles to see the home of a folk hero, it'd be more than a little dispiriting to discover it'd been turned into a McMansion with a swimming pool for the poodle and quarters for the servants. But don't worry; Woody Guthrie's childhood home is totally the mess you'd hope it'd be.

The house was torn down decades ago, leaving only the stone foundations, and, in true Guthrie fashion, it's been commemorated by a piece of folk art. A woodcarver named Justin Osborn, who lives and works right across the street on a plot cluttered with his creations, carved up an oak in the front yard of the old Guthrie house and made a monument: There's an acoustic guitar carved on top, "This Land is Your Land" in big letters on one side, and "Okemah" carved on the other.