The Weird and the Banal

But this strategy of defense brings to mind the slogan Keep Austin Weird , which has since been repurposed for Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and other formerly groovy towns. These calls are sad because they fail the second they are uttered. When you are forced to demand the preservation of the weird, the shark hath jumped.

This dialectic is muddy from the get-go, of course. It’s a version of the more familiar hipster trap: over time, the marginal labor of the bohemian experimentalist and taste-maker is swallowed up by the smug cartoon of the in-the-know consumer clone. But the near inevitability of this process also suggests that the first hipster was already part of... See more