OUT & ABOUT: CAFE SOCIETY

United States Art Authority creates campus-area hang-out

The business parters who put together Spiderhouse Cafe, I Luv Video and EcoClean now run a gallery, cabaret and bar at the adjacent United States Art Authority

By Michael Barnes
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Thursday, May 22, 2008

Wherever Conrad Bejarano visits a college town, he reconnoiters the campus area.

"You want that culture," says Bejarano, who, with business partner John Dorgan, has established an enduring concentration of campus social life at Guadalupe and 29th streets.

That adjacent cluster includes the unceremonious, yet always-packed Spiderhouse Cafe, the indie rental fave I Luv Video, the environmental pioneer EcoClean and a newly opened bar, art gallery and performance space known, with appropriate tongue in cheek, as the United States Art Authority.

(Soon, if all goes well, the village will welcome a blues club at the site of the old — technically, the third — Antone's club, says Bejarano.)

The USAA is a typical project for the 25-year-old partnership between Bejarano and Dorgan, which has always identified social trends in advance — sometimes too early. The pair met as teens in El Paso and had studied geology in Mesa, Ariz. and physics in Austin, respectively, but jumped on the home entertainment bandwagon with the Austin-cultured London Video in Dobie Mall in 1985. This, as movie pioneers Richard Linklater and his buds in the nascent Austin Film Society were shuttling on foot among the Varsity, Dobie and Texas Union theaters, soaking up global film culture.

The partners sold that shop for a profit, then opened the first I Luv Video on Slaughter Lane shortly after. They were so confident of its eventual popularity, they dubbed the first I Luv store "No. 56."

Then the pair mixed movies, pizza and beer — years before the Alamo Drafthouse perfected the formula — as part of a delivery service, plagued by, among other things, pre-Internet ordering problems.

"It was kinda like that tamales and fudge stand on the way to Houston," Bejarano says. "The things didn't work together. At least back then."

Though the I Luv chain — at one point nine stores — eventually dwindled to the huge Airport Boulevard location and the one on Guadalupe, the team had already identified another social trend: high-character coffeehouses. They opened super-casual Spiderhouse in 1995 in a bungalow across from student magnet Trudy's Texas Star. The laid-back space, with its extensive patios and comfy inner rooms, branched out into food preparation and has never been short on writers, artists and other bohemians lounging on its many terraces.

At the same time, campus-area bars were dwindling down to a handful, including the Greek-and-graduate Posse, scruffy rockhouse Hole in the Wall, classic pub Crown & Anchor and frat paradise Cain and Abel's, which also expanded into food service. Mix-and-match hang-out Showdown, which replaced punk nirvana Raoul's in the 1980s, recently announced it was leaving its spot on the Drag.

So Bejarano and Dorgan purchased the closed plasma collection center at 29th and Fruth streets, turning it into a special event facility, which they intended to call the Plasma Hall. During the past year or so, the space hosted parties and other special events, including a Haas family fandango (artist brothers to movie star Lukas, who attended) in August called the United States Art Authority. The Happening, which combined music, poetry, visual art and video, was a smash, and the sign remained on the building for the next events, so Bejarano and Dorgan decided to keep it, especially since USAA fit the institutional style of the building.

Today, the blood-red art gallery and intimate cabaret, managed in tandem with the funny folks from Cold Towne comedy troupe, is building a social scene that includes recent migrants from California, Louisiana and Montana (among those I met on recent visits). Many came to Austin for just this sort of culture — hip without being too cool to care, fun-loving without trending to overindulgence. It's already attracted a smattering of gay culture as well, including a recent performance by Los Angeles drag artist Jackie Beat.

"You know you are doing something right when the gay crowd notices," Bejarano says.

This is just the sort of fresh social scene that the XL version of Out & About, subtitled Cafe Society, was created to document. USAA is not a dive. Nor is it a trendy wine bar. It's a campus-area hang-out. And the University of Texas community really needs something like this right now.

Out & About appears in print Tuesdays and Thursdays and is updated frequently at austin360.com/outandabout. mbarnes@statesman.com; 445-3970.