4 ms·
I'm from Austin, but I haven't live there since I moved away for college. This attitude, that Austin is destined to become a "megacity" or that Austin is now sh
by ravitation 9y ago
I'm from Austin, but I haven't live there since I moved away for college. This attitude, that Austin is destined to become a "megacity" or that Austin is now showing signs of "inauthenticity", is both amusing and somewhat disgusting to me.
Austin, to me, was never about "[Keeping] Austin Weird" (a slogan born from a marketing campaign, not some organic cultural movement, in 2000), or about its "flourishing musical subculture". Austin is and will always be, I think, simply home to me. The author's obsession with these, to be honest, relatively meaningless aspects of Austin's national (or international) image strikes me as the most inauthentic thing about people that call themselves Austinites.
Where true authenticity is found in the mourning of the inevitable transformation of cities is when a city's ability to be home is lost. When people are displaced from areas that mean more to them than some hip music venue, or the place where I met Willie Nelson. Give me a break.
- fhood 9y agoIt is funny how people always seem to represent this as the entire city going down in flames. Sometimes cities grow. It happens. But the hole in the wall bars and auto shops and whatever don't stop existing, they just change neighborhoods. People just don't like it when familiar things change. They never have, and they probably never will.
- handbanana 9y agoI don't have anything to add other than I hear a lot of people from Austin/that live in Austin refer to it as the "best city in the world" - or something similar. It's a great city, but far from the best