There

On the train from Austin to Deming…

Austin was the classic disaster, gig-wise. If I had $5 for every time someone said to us “Have you ever played Austin? Oh you ought to, its the ‘Live Music Capital of America'”, by which surely they mean the world because who would have more live music than the old USA, huh, really?

And then they tell us about how cool Austin is and all the great bars and bands and technology nuggets and what ever else it is that they fell in love with, but its never the beltways, its never the huge commute or the high rents or the gentrified neighborhoods, unless of course they got in cheap and then its just a growth opportunity, not a displacement of the native car-jackers.

Austin is legend, is the nirvana for the upwardly scrabbling set, the strivers and makers and doers, and make-doers, it isn’t Houston with it’s dirty oil, (silicon is clean and lilly white, and leaves not a ring around the tub of the Gulf, but a factory somewhere in Malaysia where the jobs bring up the standard of living) not Dallas, the fantasy boomtown rooted in selling: clothes, oil riches fantasy, the future of America for the needs of the powerful.

But Austin, oh Austin, Oh mecca of Texas Culture. We step off the train into a storm, building for hours, for miles across the train sliced landscape, and just as we alight the first fat tears slap the torn plastic bag sheathing covering our train attendant, as he hurries us toward the concrete awning of the small block station. It’s tucked in behind a deserted building crumbling away, and though you can see the high rise condos and mid rise townhouse blocks with street level retail, we don’t know Austin, so it just looks like a dinky station adjoining typical rail right of way disintegration.

As the sky opened up we pull our little wheeled lives behind us to huddle with the rest of the passengers waiting for a bag,  watching the rain and lightning soaking and streaking the city, washing away the boredom of another spring, and promising a summer of heat and sun, and providing a contrast against which the bright burning Texas sun can be judged.

I will not bore you with the tedious details of Lesbian Movie night other than to say “Read Cheryl’s Blog Post” and say that if there is anyone trend watching in some mid-American slackwater town, just wondering what to put in to their crumbling retail building, that will be on the cresting edge of a wave of hipster popularity and assured riches, it is this: Fresh Young Coconuts. In fact the flapping vinyl sign in front of Sorry Charlie’s proclaimed exactly that, and I thought it must be another featured band. So even if you’re just looking for a good band name…

Austin is this though: convinced. Austinites feel their centrality to the consciousness of America, they know their are the beating pulse of the aorta, the fat artery pounding with new: new music, new art, new craft, new technology, new ideas that  will flow outward through the cultural circulatory system until it hits the tiny capillaries of small town America, only to be robbed of the last atoms of air and turn back to the center, depleted and ready for another hip hit of oxygenated trendiness.

Here’s the rub: so often they are right. Our good friends in Austin are all these elements. They really do hand make books, or hand craft houses, or social network to a dizzying degree. They really are doing things that are hardly possible in a place where there isn’t the value place on craft and art, and technology. And the food really is great, and there really is a lot of music, and they really can broadcast every moment of their lives to be vicariously enjoyed by the masses. You really can make and do stuff there that wouldn’t find much acceptance in the crossroads you grew up in.

As we get back on the train and head across the rest of Texas we go through these little towns along the tracks: Sanderson, Alpine, El Paso; and these towns are selling their past, the right middle, the way things were and should be again, and then you see the point of it all:  Austin isn’ only the silliness and drek that froths up to the top of internet driven trends, but the deep underlying adventurous spirit that will create a lasting meme or a revolutionizing idea, or a gadget that really can change the world.

So go Longhorns. Keep mixing it up, keep trying and striving to create, mix, revolutionize. Keep pumping those hare-brained schemes and future institutions out of your heart, onto the beltway, into the exurbs and satellites, and finally into the sub-consciousness of the rest of us where all the work and wackiness and chances and impossible dreams will, a few years from now, be accepted by the rest of us as, well, normal.

zac