Austin: Weirdly Mediocre? by Rev Jim

 AUSTIN: WEIRDLY MEDIOCRE?Austin City Limit

   I’ve never given much thought to Austin’s supposed weirdness. I’ve been here so long I think it’s one of those “forest for the trees” type situations with me. For example, I always figured the late Leslie Cochran was supposed to be the poster boy/girl for the Keep Austin Weird crowd but before Leslie pedaled into town there was Crazy Carl Hickerson-Bull and before Carl there was Max Nofziger.

Leslie Cochran

Leslie Cochran

Or were they the other way around? Maybe I need a weirdness chronometer of some sort……But either way it never really occurred to me to put any kind of gauge on our collective wackiness, seemed pointless. Einstein posited long ago that all observations are relative to the person doing the observing, and I am way too entrenched to be a judge of it all. But when asked about such things my answer is always that every few years the state of Texas shakes itself a few times and all the nuts fall into the center. Kind of like cleaning the seeds out of your pot, not that I’ve ever performed any such operation.

     But a friend recently pointed out an entry on a blog that did pose that very question. The blog post, “Austin, Texas: Not Weird Just Mediocre “http://alicia-prague-blog.com/2013/03/23/austin-texas-not-weird-just-mediocre/, is by a gal who apparently spent a few months here in our town and just didn’t find it up to snuff. I’ve read the bit a few times, see some fairly valid points, see other stuff that is just laughably off the mark. So I thought I would go through it and add an old timer’s viewpoint. And I’ll let others decide if my opinions are weird, mediocre or just my usual crap.
      Soooo…. probably best to start off with the points I can at least sorta pass on, starting with mass transit. And yeah, it sucks. We’re Texans, we drive our own selves to places any time that we can, and I don’t think that buses will ever be any more than a last resort for us. If you’ve lost your license or can’t afford a car then you ride the bus, pretty much everyone else drives. There is an old adage around town that goes back to Jesse Sublett that says “The only organized crime in Austin is the bus system“. That line is decades old but it’s still basically true (though I do think the “organized” part is a bit of a stretch). Cap Metro is many, many things but organized has never been one of them. But to give them their due I do need to add my personal experiences in here, and they have been almost totally positive. I commuted by bus from my home to a downtown office from 2006 until 2011 and never had a single problem that I can remember. The cost of passes tripled during that time and the Old # 7 was sometimes overcrowded but it was mainly overcrowded with UT coeds so I really didn’t mind. The author also makes some claims that simply aren’t true, there are for instance signs at most bus stops showing the schedules and stops, just not at all.cap metro 2
     Then there’s the weather, here the author says she was “lied to”. I have no idea who was telling her lies, but maps generally don’t lie and maybe she should have checked one before coming here. That’s us down there near the southern US border, not all that far north of the Coahuila desert. heatA brief glance would have told her that we’re not somewhere to do a lot of sledding and we’re not known for cool, crisp autumn nights. We don’t have winter here, we have a few days of spring, a couple of days of autumn and the rest is all summer, and it is all humid as hell. Global warming might be part of it but mainly it’s just geography ol’ top, so you might need to find a cooler spot somewhere.
   And apparently the lies just kept coming! She was also deceived about the cost of living here, another bit that I won’t argue about. It’s damn expensive to live here, too damn expensive. And it’s a dirty shame, if for no other reason than it makes it hard for artists of any stripe to survive here and that is something we will all pay the price for someday. So I don’t want to make many jokes about that aspect, but I do want to point out that if we were the hellhole that she goes on to describe then no one would be willing to pay that price. And yet the hordes still arrive daily.
   The next lie that she was subjected to though is just so laughable that I’ve decided somebody somewhere was enjoying her gullibility and seeing what they might get past her, that being the subject of fashion. And the idea that we are somehow “fashion forward” and have “great style“. I pretty much fell off my chair just typing that. Who in the hell is telling her this stuff? We have no fashion sense, no fashion is our fashion. My fashion choices come every morning when I survey the litter of t-shirts and jeans strewn across my floor and decide whether to go with music or motorcycles as my theme, such things are important to a fashion maven like me. The author says this is embracing mediocrity, I say its making my own decisions, being a slave to fashion is still being a slave. As to all her problems with wearing burnt orange I will say this; in Austin football is king, and the king has proclaimed all shall wear his color!fashion pic
And from there we step off into the abyss of the things that I do take very seriously indeed, food and music. The sustenance of body and soul, the very things that brought and keep me in this hot, expensive, slovenly town. So let’s begin with the food…..and she starts off with a blast at Tex-Mex. Blasphemy! Vile calumny! All made the more ridiculous with her statement that “I grew up in California so I know Mexican food .” Sorry nomad, what you know is California food, whole different animal. My guess here is that she kept wondering where the sour cream and black olives were (hint: try Taco Bell). arandas 2Then there is a crack about how queso here is just melted Velveeta. Good lord, where did this girl eat while she was here? It reminds me of someone who goes to Chesapeake Bay, eats at Red Lobster and then complains about how seafood in Maryland just isn’t as expected. Then comes the amazingly insane statement that the food in Houston is “100 times better”. There may be 100 times as much food to eat in Houston, that is one obese city, but exponentially better is just ludicrous. I think the “tell” in this is her statement that it’s the pricier places in Austin that are worthwhile. My experiences for almost 40 years have been exactly the opposite. It’s the working class eateries that make Austin food what it is. Places like Taqueria Arandas, arandasTamale House, Kim Phung and Evangeline Café have food that I will take over the high dollar places anytime, whether here or in that gastronomic heaven that is known as Houston.kim phung
    Which, finally, brings us down to the music… This is a music mag, right? So I need to get this one right….. Her biggest claim on this seems to hinge on the idea that there are only a handful of “really good “musicians here. The rest are apparently just coasting by enjoying the fact that bars will hire them no matter what. For that observation I’m going to go into dinosaur mode and reflect back on 37 years of seeing live shows in Austin and say “Yeah, that’s sometimes true “. Every now and then I’ll hit a club and there will be some collection of clowns on stage who apparently couldn’t be bothered to practice or even be sure what songs they are going to play. But those times are so few, and the percentage so infinitely small, that they are hardly worth mentioning. Much less worth tearing down an entire musical scene over. And evolution does work around here, those kinds of nitwits aren’t welcomed back for long due to the very fact that there are so many actual “really good “musicians here.

Robert Plant

Robert Plant

People come here from all over the world to try and make it in the music business, and I’m not referring to that industry schmooze fest that is SXSW. Record companies send their newly signed acts here to live and develop their stage chops before sending them out on the road and established acts come here looking for players who can actually climb up on stage and perform for a crowd. And legends move here because they appreciate the talent pool and the variety of venues to play in. I‘m not sure if Ms. Vagabond got to hear Ian McLagan while she was here, or that new bloke in town that goes by the name of Robert Plant, but those guys obviously didn’t come here to enjoy the weather, or the mass transit system. They could have moved anywhere in the world but chose our little burgh instead.

Ian McLagan

Ian McLagan

And Ian McLagan has written extensively about just how he made that choice, it was far from accidental. Add Shawn Colvin into the mix, along with Ray Benson, the Vaughan brothers, Carolyn Wonderland and of course our number one icon Willie Nelson and you start to see a pattern. None of those folks are originally from here, they came here for the music scene, and they have been here for years now. So if Austin is suffering from a “big fish, tiny pond” syndrome I’d have to point out that’s a list of killer whales there, and there ain’t no pond big enough to hold ‘em.

Shawn Colvin

Shawn Colvin

    In wrapping up her diatribe the author makes the statement “This city has a lack of class, culture, respect, and style. It is long overdue a makeover “. There is also a mention that we are pretty full of ourselves. I have no quarrel with that last part. I have heard us called by others “The most self-congratulatory town on Earth” and that sounds about right. And I’ll always take pride in that. I think that very few people live in Austin by accident, we live here because we love it. Despite the heat and the traffic and high cost of living there is still that old “City of the Violet Crown” that O. Henry moved to a century ago. We’ve changed, we’ve evolved and we’ve seen the outside world change around us. So Austin doesn’t do those trendy “makeovers”, we’re changing oh so subtly before your eyes always. But it’s like the hour hand of the clock, you’ll never see us actually move. Yet underneath it all we’re still the old town of Waterloo, the freaky crazy place where artists and oddballs from all over the world can gather and not feel out of place. About the only thing we can’t stand here are shallow whiny little….. Oh wait! Where did she go?Willie-Nelson 3
                                                                                           Rev Jim

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