Between the Windshield and the Rearview
Driving in Austin suggests a metaphor: this town always has one eye on the windshield and one on the rearview. Everywhere you look things are being built, while others … Continue reading
An End Both Slow and Urgent: Blackness in Austin
Like many grad students, I always expected a fairly definitive end to Austin, a time when I was called upon to fulfill my life’s work after years of honing my … Continue reading
Memorial Wall
“It started out as something smaller, a Day of the Dead thing,” Henry Gonzalez explains, standing before the Memorial Wall at the South Austin Popular Culture Center on Lamar, “but … Continue reading
Ann Richards and the Future of Austin
When Texas Monthly writer Jan Reid published his well-received biography of Gov. Ann Richards in late 2012, TEOA couldn’t help notice some moving passages about her death in 2006 and legacy. We … Continue reading
Interview with Richard Parker, New York Times
Austin-based writer Richard Parker touched a nerve with his New York Times article about how Lance Armstrong’s rise and fall might reflect what could happen to the city where he … Continue reading
The Mapmaker
Nobody was forced to stay in their neighborhoods. There was no police action or citywide internment. We all just started settling in by our own accord and didn’t notice how … Continue reading
A Conversation With Thor
About halfway through Thor Harris’s A Post Apocalyptic Tale of Friendship (2010), a mutilated and deformed figure hauls a shark-filled aquarium through a desert populated by wilted flora and equally … Continue reading
The Ends of Austins
For some Austin ended when the Armadillo became Threadgill’s South. For others, when S X S W started (or when wristbands began to cost three digits). Or when the warehouse … Continue reading
The End of Austin
What is the End of Austin? It is the beginning of a much-needed conversation about the identity of Austin. Bringing together writers, scholars, and artists from Texas and beyond, TEOA is … Continue reading
The End of Oz-Town
Just before the Austin housing bubble went POP! and Code Compliance hassled the Cathedral of Junk into becoming a permitted structure, the Cathedral’s creator, Vince Hannemann, brought me by his … Continue reading
Morning Assembly
Morning assembly at my daughter’s elementary school was once a ditty of tattooed legs and necklines, skateboards, scooters, tousled hair, everyone holding hands as bodies converged on the cafeteria from a … Continue reading
Photos by Caroline Koebel
Angela Davis and Harriet Tubman street art (and the subsequent absence thereof) on Pedernales between 5th and Santa Rosa, Austin, 78702. November 2012. Caroline Koebel is an Austin-based filmmaker and writer … Continue reading
Moonlight Towers
In 1895, the City of Austin acquired a novel street-lighting system from Detroit consisting of thirty-one 165-foot tower lights. Their cool glow and looming height earned them the popular moniker … Continue reading
End of Austin: West Campus
I’ve been taking photographs of graffiti on and around the University of Texas campus for six years. In that time, I’ve amassed a collection of about 600 photographs, including many … Continue reading
Whiny Austin: A Nonfiction Cartoon
“Austin ain’t what it used to be” is the moldiest cliche under the violet crown, yet Austinites can’t stop talking about how the golden age of “real Austin” disappeared five … Continue reading
I Grew Up in a South Texas Town
I grew up in a South Texas town, a caliche pit of farm equipment yards and suburbs searching for urbs… no core, no history. South Texas stretches across some of the … Continue reading
This Motherfucker Ain’t Got No Teeth
As a gay man re-locating to Austin, TX, Dominique experiences hope and destruction through his efforts to utilize geo-social media applications to make new friends, find lovers, and start dating … Continue reading
Downtown Real Estate and the Music Scene
Imagine two performances from the original cosmic cowboy and outlaw country musician, Willie Nelson. The first takes place in an austere concert hall that holds about 400 hundred people. Nelson … Continue reading
