Still going strong. To add to the Austin dislike …
A couple of nights ago, I went to watch the bats emerge from underneath the Congress Street Bridge at sundown. It’s a spectacular sight; the Congress Street Bridge houses the largest urban bat colony in the world.
I drove to the area a couple of hours earlier, walked around for a bit, and grabbed something to eat. The South Congress area (SoCo) was packed with hipsters, the majority with a good portion of their bodies covered in ink. The crushed rock trail along the Colorado river was also packed, with runners that had bodies approaching zero body fat. Many weren’t just jogging, but running. They were competing with serious Lance Armstrong wannabees, decked out in the gear of whatever racing team they were on. It was a beautiful night, clear skies, about a million bats flying overhead, and people are sprinting and racing by without even slowing down to take in this wonderful spectacle of nature.
It was then that I put my finger on the major reason I find Austin to be a city that is often so grating. Austinites are too hardcore. The hipsters aren’t just sad emo kids or even Williamsburg-ish; they’re full-on ironic rockabilly types. (I think this accounts for the obscene number of mid-century vintage stores in town, and businesses with 1950s retro signage and design themes.) When people get tattoos, it’s not going to be a star or Chinese symbol on the ankle, but rather they get full sleeves, chest pieces, neck tats, and other highly visible displays. People that are fitness-oriented don’t just have gym memberships, but also run and/or bike all the time, slap 26.2 stickers on their cars to brag about their marathoning prowess, and collect expensive sneakers and bikes. (Austin has an unreal number of high-end bicycle and runner’s supply stores.) Those into the live music scene live, breathe, eat, sleep and drink music, even if they don’t play it; they’re scenesters of the extreme kind. Austin is a politically liberal city, and those who are left of center are frequently Kool-Aid drinking ideologues; cars covered in bumper stickers promoting left-leaning causes and political candidates are so common as to not be a worthy of pointing out as a living stereotype. (Disclaimer: I’m politically left-leaning, but sometimes I feel I’m just to the right of Glen Beck compared to the drivers of some of the Priuses and Scion XBs I’ve seen. Hipsters LOVE their Scion XBs, I’ve discovered.)
I won’t mention UT and Texas A&M fans whose identities are their alma maters, who cannot have a conversation without mentioning their schools. Especially Aggies. Yeah, I see your ring; you don’t have to drop a Texas A&M reference every three minutes. Worse than Buffalonians. I get it. STFU. (Okay, so I mentioned it.)
No, I’m not saying everybody in Austin and the surrounding suburbs are like this. However, the proportion of those who are is much higher than in any other metropolitan area of comparable size. I shrugged at the uber-outdoorsy types in Denver whose goal in life is to bag every fourteener in the state and acheive a pulse under 50 BPM when biking over Independence Pass, and the uber-mommies in Cleveland whose topics of conversation are limited to parenting and school districts. In Austin, though, it seems like so many more people are uber-something. I find Austinites just aren’t as well-rounded as one might expect in a city with a reputedly well-educated and informed population.
I have a “Keep Austin Weird” sticker on my car. I like weird. Thing is, I don’t let weirdness dominate my life; it’s just something I appreciate in the urban environment that provides some color and makes me smile. When you let one narrow interest define you as a person, what kind of life is that? It’s a life of black and white, with little or no color. Bike, bike, bike, bike, bike. Run, run, run, run, run. Listen to Explosions in the Sky, listen to Venison Whirled, listen to Public Offenders, listen to Scorpion Child, listen to The Lovely Sparrows, but don’t listen to Okkervil River because I heard them on KGSR so they must have sold out, man! Get a tramp stamp, get ironic old school ink, get a chest piece, get a sleeve, get your favorite poem in a spiral around one of your legs. You get the idea.
Other cities have their subcultures, too, just like Austin. However, it seems like there’s overlap to varying degrees among those different subcultures. In Austin, there’s almost no overlap; I think it’s because people are so entrenched into the subcultures they identify with.
