Statesman > XL Blogs > Archives > 2005 > January > 03 > Entry
The Austin conundrum
Austin is a little city that thinks it’s a big city, even though it holds dearest the things that make it a little city, many of which are precisely the things that pivot my head east and west and beyond for a city that really is big — big in density, people, flavors, style, sophistication — not just in attitude, that overcompensating pride endemic to vainglorious Texas.
Austin, face it, is 90 percent strip-mall suburbs half-enclosed by bumps that pass for hills and a heat that bears down for so much of the year so hard, you wish you were anywhere but here.
It is a conundrum, this town. At least for me. I detest the heat but relish the air-conditioned bliss of the Paramount Theatre during the summer film series. Downtown is a Shrinky-Dink version of an urban center, but at least you can find metered parking with relative ease. There are far too many charity runs and walks and marathons clogging the avenues, yet they show the community’s tight weave.
The clamoring Cult of the Longhorns will always be a scary and atavistic embarrassment to this wimp, who likens the grunting, chest-beating, open-mouth, fingers-in-your-face convulsions of fans to the noxious knee-jerk patriotism of misplaced military passion. But I will tell you: As much as I didn’t care about the outcome of the Rose Bowl (I secretly hoped “we” would lose), I shared the surge of excitement watching that ball clear the goal posts.
New Year’s Eve offered the good side of Austin’s small-city vibe — a clutch of arty, drinky people in a casually swank setting just blocks from my SoCo dwelling. Filmmakers, musicians and gallery types — “future someones,” my friend noted — cluttered the courtyard at the Hotel San José, which held a cover-charge party that was sold out.
For $30 you got two bands, a spread of empanadas and the privilege of standing inside the would-be exclusive San José, which thinks quite highly of itself and all its bare-concrete Zen-ishness. At midnight, as Li’l Cap’n Travis played their miraculous harmonic grooves, there was “complimentary” champagne and kisses, which were even more complimentary than the bubbly if you could wangle one or five.
A band of boys who want terribly to be rock stars called Sound Team played first, and they weren’t bad in that derivative-of-10-bands way (think Tears for Fears, Joy Division, etc.). The members toss around a willed raffish air, suggesting they aspire to be roguish girl-bait like the Strokes, the Hives or the Scabs (eeww).
The party was fine, a place to sip and stand. I was with friends, the weather was unbeatable and I threw Sativa’s glow necklace into the hotel’s pool. That was a good moment.
Earlier that day, I spent the last bright, T-shirty day of 2004 at Jo’s. I was reading until Dawn and Margaret showed up and ruined it. We saw a skinny puppy with ringworm and a dog that looked like a man in a dog suit.
I last read “The Sun Also Rises” in 1987, and that’s what I was reading over the weekend. It’s an evocative book. For about 12 minutes while lost in its pages, I reconsidered my Japanese vacation plans, gripped by the sudden passion to return to Paris or Spain, hang out in cafés, write and drink all day long. Then I remembered how much I like health insurance.
Hemingway, you know, has that way of whittling it to the concrete essentials, as in: “In the morning it was bright, and they were sprinkling the streets of the town, and we all had breakfast in a café. Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river.”
Oddly, that sounds more than a little like Austin. Perhaps not a bulging metropolis, it too is a nice town, very clean, on a big river. Yes.
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