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The Once and Future Austin

By Spencer Parsons | March 24, 2008

Writer and filmmaker Spencer Parsons takes a walk through Slacker-ville, noticing how much has changed and imagining what might still be.

Former filmmaker hang-out The Fingerhut
is now occupied by a Quiznos

They used to call it "The Fingerhut," or the "Ollie Trout House," and for a while it was home to a hive of Austin filmmakers. Now it's a Quiznos, after a few years in the guise of a Johnny Rockets and another few as a Mark Pi's Express, if I remember correctly. To me it was the Slacker house, recognizable for the pointing finger painted on its side, the place where the guy in an Army tee-shirt goes after he runs over his mom near the beginning of the movie. I was surprised to find it on a walk to work days after I moved here, but disappointed that it appeared abandoned and in the kind of disrepair you would expect had it been recently associated with a real life vehicular homicide rather than one in a movie. So something had to be done with it.

At that time, people spoke wistfully of the recent loss of Les Amis, notorious as the University of Texas neighborhood's best place to get a $3 lunch, spend all afternoon shooting the shit, then stick around to prove punk not dead well into the night. Among its appearances in Slacker is the one at a sidewalk café where Charles Gunning memorably tells a pair of young documentarians, "To all those workers out there: every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death!" But of course the place wasn't important because it had been in a movie; it had been in a movie because it was important. The cheap beans and rice, the free refills of coffee, the ornery staff more likely to sit down and add a cigarette to your conversation than actually serve food, it all fed the culture that inspired the film. It did a lot more for the lives of a relative few in Austin's artistic, political, crackpot and homeless scenes than it would for the relative many who would see its shadow in a cinema. Try to contain your surprise when I tell you that where Les Amis once stood is now Starbucks.

Starbucks' $3 coffees have replaced Les
Amis' $3 lunches

Move to Austin, and you're likely to hear from people that you just missed it. Upon arrival, I took the laments for what had just been snuffed out more seriously than I do now, not because I've discovered the complaint to be untrue or found peace with the ultimate franchising of America, but ironically because I now so often find myself telling newcomers the same thing. Austin was way better before this legendary club closed, or that dollar cinema with Bollywood Fridays lost its lease to CVS, and of course it was better before all the fucking condos. Not that there isn't much to be missed, but on the whole, the city's been good at holding onto its identity, and whenever I travel to other American cities, I find that, for instance, our Starbucks saturation appears to remain at a national low.

But as the poor cousin of the major cities in Texas, Austin has always been a little scruffy and lacking in the infrastructure to protect too many of its modest treasures, so loss is part of the identity, and please allow us our ongoing love affair with five minutes ago. I haven't had occasion to ask director Richard Linklater whether an explicit agenda behind Slacker was to capture an Austin that was disappearing before his eyes, to get documentary proof of what he'd be telling newcomers that they missed. I doubt it, but I also think it's not for nothing that the film ends by throwing the camera off a cliff.

I would like to be able to tell you in this space to seek out the new equivalent of Les Amis, but there isn't one. The hole that it left is part of what made it special. So you really did miss it, and so did I, but it's not the end of the world, and what about now? Speaking only for myself and my own agenda as a filmmaker, I do work with an eye firmly fixed on setting the action in meaningful spots worth promoting or preserving in a film, so consider this a location scout.

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Former filmmaker hang-out The Fingerhut
is now occupied by a Quiznos

Starbucks' $3 coffees have replaced Les
Amis' $3 lunches

Casino El Camino is one
of 6th Street's worthwhile
joints

Bars in Austin make for good subject matter, as in Eagle Pennell's warm and shambling ur-Austin indie, The Whole Shootin' Match. And perhaps more importantly, they're often essential aids to the development process, as with, say, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and too many others to name. Among drinking establishments, those on 6th street dominate the usual guidebook attention in this department, and maybe if you had a special relationship with the cast of Real World Austin, crawling from the Dizzy Rooster to the Chuggin' Monkey is for you, but with few exceptions, most are pretty colorless. Among the exceptions is Lovejoys, which features some excellent microbrews and a modest library consisting mostly of paperbacks from the late seventies. It's not a bar where people drink and read alone, but maybe the books encourage conversation, and you can always read a few pages of mid-career Vonnegut or Barth while you wait for friends to arrive. Brad Neely (creator of viral hits Babycakes, Professor Brothers, and George Washington) claims it was where he and a couple friends hatched the idea for his delirious Harry Potter hijacking, Wizard People, Dear Readers, and sure, it could have happened in other Austin bars, but I gotta say it was a lot more likely at Lovejoys. Also along 6th street, Casino El Camino offers oppressive darkness, great burgers, and TVs playing Russ Meyer's idea of sports, while the Roller Derby teams you might have seen in Bob Ray's documentary Hell on Wheels congregate just around the corner at Beer Land on Red River.

But let me argue in favor of heading north to the Carousel Lounge, a circus-themed beer and set-ups bar with a dance floor surrounded by murals of acrobats, pink elephants, and dancing bears, as welcoming to Texas Swing as to a Brian Eno Hoot Nite. Rumor has it that Quentin Tarantino was turned down for shooting part of Death Proof at the Carousel, and ended up at Texas Chili Parlor instead. At least that was the word when we shot a scene for my own feature there, and I'd claim bragging rights if we hadn't ultimately cut it out. But I guess I bragged by mentioning it.

As to places where filmmakers congregate, the Moose Lodge has gained a number of members from Austin's filmmaking community (documentarian Heather Courtney, cinematographer Lee Daniel, and actor John Merriman, among others) and has become a go-to place for wrap parties. Yeah, the Moose Lodge, and that's not just a clever name of some retro-kitsch hipster theme bar, but the real deal and Austin's best place to enjoy $2 Lone Stars, $3 Frito pie, and a wall of Moose Lodge member photos dating back to the 1930s. To the west is Donn's Depot, a piano bar sprung from the collision of an old station and a bunch of train cars, where Donn can actually be found performing with his house band, The Station Masters every Tuesday and Friday. Students and senior citizens mingle on the dance floor, making it a great place for people watching or keeping your script meeting in perspective.

Up on north loop Monkey Wrench Books has become a center for activism in Austin and a hub progressive and anarchist documentary screening and production. And while Austin's East Side has long been the wrong side of IH35, in recent years it has become the right side to look for young, crazy, and go-for-broke art galleries—Art Palace, Mass Gallery, Okay Mountain, and the Donkey Show, among others. These are your go-to sites for cardboard zeppelins, excavations of obscure gay porn, or photos of an inflatable sinking Titanic printed on pillowcases. Now while some venues are sure to stick around—though probably moving on from their makeshift roots in former garages and converted teardowns—others will come and go, floating through momentary scenes and building communities and launching careers. And other organizations, like Austin Museum of Digital Art, don't even have a fixed space, putting on gallery shows and performances in—wait for it—bars. So probably a good idea to catch the scene now so you can tell others too bad they'd missed it.

Now for all you filmmakers out there: remember that every bit of real estate you experience is a piece of your own life. Even Quiznos (whether or not it used to be a place where they shot a movie). So the franchises may not be good places to come together as a scene, and certainly they're not where you want to spend money, but like it or not, they are our reality. It's our responsibility to find the human moments in them that we shouldn't miss, or those spaces really have been taken away from us. Think of the Fingerhut or Les Amis, and take them back.