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    Party Weird: Festivals & Fringe Gatherings of Austin
    Party Weird: Festivals & Fringe Gatherings of Austin
    Party Weird: Festivals & Fringe Gatherings of Austin
    Ebook215 pages1 hour

    Party Weird: Festivals & Fringe Gatherings of Austin

    By Howie Richey

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    About this ebook

    In 1839, Texas officials toasted their new capital of Austin, and its citizens never ran out of excuses for revelry. Austinites celebrate their homegrown and vibrant culture, renowned and innovative music, street life and collective quirkiness with pride. While world-class events now call the city home, in a culture that eschews conformity at every turn, Austin's underground social gatherings are what truly earn it bragging rights. Discover the grass-roots origins of the enigmatic eccentricity that has drawn people from all corners of Texas and now from the whole world. Feel the beat of drum circles at Eeyore's Birthday Party in April, sling puns at the annual O. Henry Pun-Off or share a meal with strangers at the monthly Perpetual Potluck Picnic--or Jim O's, as the locals say. Author Howie Richey explores the offbeat, exuberant culture and history of the city that started with a party that just didn't stop.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateNov 4, 2014
    ISBN9781625851826
    Party Weird: Festivals & Fringe Gatherings of Austin
    Author

    Howie Richey

    Howie Richey is the owner of Texpert Tours in Austin and a founding member and past president of the Austin Tour Guide Association. Richey has authored blogs, promotional materials, calendars, procedural manuals, plot summaries, legislation and radio scripts, and his writing has appeared in the Austin Examiner and Austin Magazine. With his formal background in Texas geography and forty-plus years as an Austin resident, Richey is widely known by locals as the "Texas Back Roads Scholar."?

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      Book preview

      Party Weird - Howie Richey

      celebration!

      INTRODUCTION

      For anyone driving north on Interstate 35 from points south, one of the best introductory views of the city of Austin happens at the curve under the Riverside Drive overpass. There, for a brief few thousand feet, the highway runs north and slightly west before another curve shifts the road northeast again. Like going through a magic gateway, you see this City of Dreams stretching before you as you cross the Colorado River. In 1971, the town was home to some 263,000 souls. In those days, the round tower of the Holiday Inn on your left might have struck you as a bit unusual. Any such inkling of novelty, however, would only grow as the city’s spirit captivated you.

      If you came into town on this same route once a decade, you’d see dramatic differences in the skyline. Those changes would seem to accelerate after 2001 and proceed exponentially by 2011 and into 2014. Whereas the capitol building and the University of Texas tower were the dominant structures for more than forty years, now other edifices reign supreme. Joseph Campbell remarked that the tallest buildings in a city indicated the most important concerns to that populace.¹ In the Middle Ages, the church stood the highest; during the eighteenth century Enlightenment, tallest was the government center. In the late 1900s, banks dominated. In Austin today, condos peer down on everything else.

      All these signs point to tremendous growth in the Austin metropolitan area. Like other midsized cities in America experiencing rapid expansion, this place is grappling with the loss of former stability and innocence, in a sense. Longtime residents worry about the city losing its soul and character. What’s special and unique about this city, and how can Austin’s very essence remain intact? In how we play comes a partial answer.

      This book aims to give background and meaning to known and unknown activities in one of the world’s best cities for entertaining. Austin, Texas, is renowned for many things, such as live music, a strong economy, amazing art, unique heritage, outstanding educational facilities and beautiful environs. It also is home to world-class events like Formula One, South by Southwest (SXSW) and Austin City Limits. Similarly well known beyond its borders is Austin’s vibrant underground social scene, which expresses itself in frequent soirées both public and private, monthly and annual. This book catalogues those obscure, outlandish happenings with interviews, photos and specific traditions of each affair. The focus is on the countercultural strata that inform Austin’s progressive weirdness. I will more explicitly attempt to define party and show its relation to a festival or concert. As well, there will be a section on extinct sprees. For broader context, you will learn how this town’s celebratory spirit evolved.

      Here’s the specific meaning of party as used in this book. For our purposes, parties possess all or most of these elements:

         An invitation, which could include art, a poster or an ad

         A guest or mailing list

         A reason, occasion or theme with related ambiance

         Costumes, decorations, colors

         A place or venue, recurring or mobile

         Food, drink, other

         An activity or entertainment

         Music, dancing

         A progression or schedule²

      The word party comes from part. By definition, a party is a specific set of people, not just everyone or anyone. That segment of folks is usually invited—not compelled—to attend. A party is a social time, not one to work or accomplish anything, per se, although being sociable can convey benefits after the party’s over. A festival is like a party, only bigger and longer lasting. I like to think of a festival as a series of related, small key groups nested inside a larger event.

      Let me tell you just how amazing our parties are. To do that, I’ll tell you how amazing this city is, identify the types of people it attracts and then show how amazing gatherings can’t help but develop here. To assist our thinking, here’s a ready word to learn and use: topophilia. It means a strong sense of place, which often becomes mixed with an impression of cultural identity among certain peoples and a love of certain aspects of such a place.³ Austinites possess this awareness in spades. We trumpet social innovation. Here, we celebrate ourselves, one another and this locale. In Austin, you need a separate calendar just for social activities.

      But what do you mean by weird?

      To fully grok Austin’s unique strangeness, it’s best to start this story with some pure history. As every Texas schoolchild knows,⁴ the Lone Star flag flew over a sovereign republic for nearly a decade, from 1836 to 1845. The republic’s capital moved several times during the first few years of independence but seemed fairly settled in Houston City during the term of the first president, Sam Houston. However, by Texas law, Houston the man could not succeed himself. It was the idea of Texas’s second president, Mirabeau B. Lamar, to move the seat of government to a place closer to the new nation’s center. As vice president in 1838, Lamar had visited the then-tiny village (in truth, merely several log cabins) of Waterloo to hunt buffalo. Like so many who were to come, Lamar totally fell in love with the surroundings: hills to the west, a fine river running through, timber, fresh springs and abundant wildlife. Under Lamar’s influence, the Texas Congress voted to found a new capital city named for Stephen F. Austin, the Anglo Father of Texas who had pioneered American immigration to the area during Mexican rule in the 1820s. Austin the city is special not only because it’s one of only three towns in the world built to be the capital of a republic {Name the other two.⁵}, but also because its location was chosen on pure aesthetics more than practicality.⁶

      Austin’s ever-changing skyline appeared this way in May 2014. Author’s collection.

      Carving a new capital at what many considered the edge of the known universe began in early February 1839. By October 17 of that year, enough crude structures were in place along freshly cleared dirt pathways to welcome the Texas government. A long parade of wagons full of elected officials, staff, furniture and boxes full of papers snaked its way into the baby city from points east on the newly christened Pecan Street and stopped at Congress Avenue. There, at Bullock’s hotel, itself a cluster of rustic log buildings, the guests and original citizens held a triumphant dinner. No fewer than thirty-nine toasts were raised to the new capital.

      We’ve been raising our glasses to this place ever since. The town began with a party, and it never ended.

      Now dig this: Items enclosed in {braces} are trivia questions answered in the Notes.

      A NOTE ON SUBSTANCES

      When ingested, certain chemicals tend to alter human perception and behavior. Social situations often include social lubricants. Caffeine, for instance, enhances sharp thinking and conversation. Alcohol, for another, relaxes the muscles and suppresses inhibitions. Though by definition both are drugs, they’re legal and generally civilly acceptable. A third substance, cannabis, is ubiquitously available and its use widely observed, but it is illegal almost everywhere. While official strictures are slowly changing worldwide, reefer is still against the law in Texas. However, certain parts of the state interpret the statutes somewhat more liberally. Austin and Houston are places where a police officer holds the option of issuing a citation to, but not arresting, someone found in possession of two ounces or fewer of pot.⁷

      It would be completely inaccurate for any publication to deny that the inhalation of smoldering ganja happens at parties or festivals in a happy city such as Austin. It would be just as wrong to believe that the herb hasn’t made a difference in the creative energy here, opening modes of thinking and imaginations to heights not previously possible. Austin’s freewheeling, rebellious reputation insists that the Willie Nelson, laid-back atmosphere is the rule here rather than the exception. The joke used to be that there was a two-joint minimum just to get inside the city limits. With inflation these days, it’s probably three.

      This disclaimer means to acknowledge the prevalence of Mary Jane, to recognize its influence but to neither encourage nor defend its acquaintance. Now that we’re straight on that, we can move on.

      1

      1890S

      Here we look into the past at events that helped cement Austin’s reputation as a partying mecca.

      Before modern people invented the term party animal, Austin had its share of active celebrants. Throughout the city’s existence, newcomers and residents found plenty of social activities in which to mingle and participate. Around town were several beer gardens, most founded by Germans and other Europeans: Scholz, Pressler’s, Turner, Jacoby’s and Buass. These were family-centered establishments that often brewed their own beer and provided musical entertainment. Hyde Park, one of the city’s first official suburbs, featured a small lake for pleasure boating, a bandstand for concerts and a racetrack for wagering. {Which Austin street recalls that last place?⁸}

      Let’s go way back to a time out of mind. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, two individuals called Austin home and contributed to the festive atmosphere in artistic ways. They were William Sidney Porter and Elisabet Ney. The former gets but a brief summary shortly and a big spread later, but the woman deserves great accolades now.

      One of the city’s first prominent residents to live in an unconventional manner was Elisabet Ney, a beautiful and charming woman of Westphalian birth who was a prominent female sculptor in her German homeland during a time when few women were able to devote their lives to art. With sheer talent and innate curiosity, she achieved unusual success creating stone statues of European philosophers, musicians, literati and royalty. Married to Scots physician and scientist Edmund Montgomery in 1863, she and her life partner investigated down-to-earth living and romantic ideals. For Edmund’s health, the pair moved to the United States in 1871, living first in Georgia in a kind of

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