Canned quirkiness, Texas style.

I like Austin more now. I think the mind-set’s still the same. The campus alone takes care of that: We’ve got 50,000 young people; a certain percentage of them are gonna be cool. As we say, the only thing wrong with Austin is that it’s surrounded by Texas. — Richard Linklater

As a member of so-called Generation X, I have witnessed in my time the marketing of consumer-ready zeitgeist. I emerged into adulthood right around the time of Seattle’s ascendancy. Grunge, which to me sounded like simplified metal, was pronounced the music of a generation and heralded the end of the hair-rock–synth-pop duopoly.

But a funny thing happened on the way to cultural hegemony: Grunge, with all of its appurtenances, poses and attitude, became the very thing it’s devotees were reputed to despise. Payless Shoes soon began to carry pleather versions of Doc Martens. Hollywood soon began releasing twentysomething rom-coms wrapped in flannel and tuned to the key of angst. Confronted with such saturation of the cultural milieu, angry young refuseniks found themselves in the awkward position of having to refuse the very tokens of their refusal. When Beverly Hills 90210‘s troubled star Shannen Dougherty states in an interview that she intends to start an all-girl version of Pearl Jam, you know something has gone terribly wrong.

Of course, how disturbed you were by the bandwagon effect was largely determined by when you jumped on the bandwagon yourself. I tried to cultivate a taste for the label-sanctioned antiheroes, but my heart just wasn’t in it. At the tender young age of twenty I was in the grips of nostalgia for an even younger, tenderer age — my mid teens, when I had been involved in a past-its-prime punk scene that to me had in spades the very authenticity grunge’s impresarios so eagerly sought. Recordings of important bands from this earlier scene were typically issued by obscure labels on 33 1/3-sized discs that you had to play at 45 rpm, and which came in baggily shrink-wrapped jackets. Mall record shops typically never carried them. You had to instead search them out in tiny stores usually situated amidst urban postindustrial blight.

No, I never invested terribly heavily in the “Seattle sound,” though I eventually developed an affinity for the quirkier lo-fi fellow travelers of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice and Chains et al. I was particularly fond of bands like Pavement, Silver Jews, Sebadoh, and Superchunk — outfits that were slightly more subdued, and that preferred ironic ellipsis over drone. I suppose these bands spoke to some deep-seated sensibility in someone like me, a bookish, insecure guy who relished richly layered irony.

My devotion to this second strain of 90s Gen-X music perhaps explains why to me  Austin, Texas was more iconic a city than Seattle, Washington. This impression took hold of me upon first seeing Richard Linklater’s Slacker on Bravo one night very late while I was visiting family in Arizona. If William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is, as Thackeray himself put it, a novel without a hero, Linklater’s Slacker is a film without one. The film drifts from subject to subject, each discovered in medias res. Thus the viewer is given fragmentary glimpses into the muted lives of Austin’s disaffected habitues — a sort of Last Year at Marienbad without the French snazz.

If Boomers were nostalgic for what happened twenty years before, Gen-Xers, word on the street had it, were nostalgic for what happened twenty-four hours before.

In Slacker postcollegiates encounter crazies and conspiracy theorists, buskers and deadbeats. The carnivalesque of all this is anything but riotous, however. Conversation is king, and much of it is a wonder to hear. Indeed the meandering style of the film struck me as utterly appropriate, given the way of life it set out to depict. Perhaps it’s not entirely fair, then, to claim that Slacker lacks a hero. Its hero is the city of Austin itself, a place that has gathered unto its bosom a motley assembly uneasy with the prospect of joining the rat race. As one character in the film puts it: “Look at me! I may live badly. But at least I don’t have to work to do it.” There was a kind of shabby romance to the film’s many characters, and fashion sense pointedly took a backseat to preoccupations with Dostoevsky or with what really went on in Dealey Plaza.

The experience of viewing Slacker has remained with me these many years, even as I witnessed the film get wound into the gears of the Culture Industry, which, predictably, trumpeted it as a Gen-X Easy Rider. I began to see debased, dumbed-down versions of the characters in Slacker in sitcoms and soda commercials. Irony became a master trope of marketing. Soon being a disaffected young adult required equipment, demanded a whole lifestyle semiotic cribbed from a makeshift thrift-store aesthetic but retailed at a premium (How else can you explain the existence of Urban Outfitters?). Raging against the machine only served to nourish the machine as we 90s twentysomethings were consecrated to a generational profile that launched a thousand a publishing careers. Self-styled experts told what we valued, how we worked, what we ate, what we drank, what we wished for, what we shrank from, how we loved, how we fought. The one luxury afforded Baby Boomers is that they became the Woodstock Generation only after the fact. They thus enjoyed a period of abeyance before they were submitted to the regimes of commodified remembrance. If Boomers were nostalgic for what happened twenty years before, Gen-Xers, word on the street had it, were nostalgic for what happened twenty-four hours before.

Certain family obligations called me to Dallas, Texas recently. I found time to make a side trip to Austin. I went expecting Richard Linklater. What I found was Richard Florida. Austin of 2010 is a veritable creative-class habitat. The unassuming vista of Slacker has been kicked into neo-urban high gear. You’d never know there was a recession on. In Austin they’re building like crazy — sexy, sleek, space-agey edifices, dazzling in their unblemished, spanking newness.

Austin-tation: the former slacktopia's hipster-friendly makeover.

Yet the majority of these new buildings, I came to discover, are either purely residential or mixed use. Austin’s building boom appears to be the result of speculation in real estate. Commanding the skyline are many high-rise condominiums of the sort that sport those obnoxiously redundant monikers indicating the development’s bland, focus-grouped name and the street on which or body of water near which it’s situated — “The Arbor on Leon,” “The Estates at Town Lake” — monikers intended to conjure the air of exclusivity needed to justify every unit’s high asking price.

If the slogan before was “Keep Austin Weird,” a more fitting slogan now would be “Keep Austin Wired.”

Admittedly, Austin is doing many things right, like trying to eliminate the car-dependency that plagues other western cities. Bike lanes abound, and a complex transit system integrates light rail with buses that seem to run every three minutes. A green belt girdles the western edge of the city, continuing to where Lady Bird Lake divides downtown from south Austin. Yet there was something disappointing about this college-town-cum-mini-metropolis. It’s as if the faction behind that “Keep Austin Weird” campaign had failed in its mission, or at least had been forced to accept a crippling compromise: Keep Austin weird, surely, but not so weird as to spook potential investors. I detected a déracinée air about the place, a sort of calculated, sanitized funkiness that had replaced the more downmarket bohemiana prevalent in Linklater’s Slacker. This sense became only more palpable when I discovered that one location for a scene in the film was now a Quizno’s, another a Starbucks.

Austin is mentioned frequently in economist Richard Florida’s 2008 book, Who’s Your City? And indeed you see Florida’s basic ideas imprinted on the city at every turn. At one point in Who’s Your City? Florida reproduces a portion of an e-mail sent him by British social psychologist Peter Jason Rentfrow. “In a place like Austin,” Rentfrow writes,

where the norm is to be open and creative, it’s not enough to drink coffee and beer, to smoke American Spirit cigarettes, and listen to Miles Davis. If you’re truly open and creative, and desire to be seen as such, it’s important to demonstrate this by adopting preferences and habits that are not the norm. After all, being creative and innovative means being unconventional.

The bitter irony of Rentfrow’s claim is, of course, that in a creative-class enclave like Austin being unconventional is the conventional means by which you you achieve success or notoriety. For the creative class, work begins at home. The assiduous cultivation of the right look, the conspicuous consumption of the right sort of tunes, beer, or smokes become more than just the way you indulge your vanity; they are necessary props for individual advancement. Lifestyle as résumé. Scopic economy the only economy.

Yes, the Austin I visited bore little resemblance to the Austin I saw in Slacker. Vestiges of the old Austin (Austin 1.0?) remain, but they’ve been more or less hemmed in by legions of cookie-cutter off-campus student apartment buildings. The total effect has certainly altered the city’s character. If the slogan before was “Keep Austin Weird,” a more fitting slogan now would be “Keep Austin Wired.” It’s a city that is certainly attempting to peer further over the temporal horizon than many others. In a very real way, Austin reflects the larger cultural trend which developed as the temporal odometer rolled over into the 00s: tragically hip Gen-Xers surrendered the spotlight to merely tragic Gen-Y hipsters, who attenuated the formers’ ethic of refusal into a look and a lifestyle. Attending merely to the form of what Hipster Runoff‘s incomparable Carles terms “alt,” creative-class Gen-Yers are indeed enviably equipped for the new paradigm radiating from every truss and beam of Austin’s new construction — canned quirkiness, Texas style.

Anton would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at generationbubble [at] gmail [dot] com.

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