Nov 20 2008
The Weirdness of Austin
Keep Austin Weird is a slogan you’ll see all over Austin. It’s on postcards, in shop windows, and on bumper stickers, not to mention T-shirts, hoodies, caps, and mugs. I’d know idea what it meant when I first visited. To be honest, I thought it was marijuana-related, some kind of organized and visible support for legalization of the drug. To support my theory (which, given that some of the slogan-bearing products were on sale in the official campus store, was admittedly a bit of a stretch), the character on one of the postcards was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette… and the smell of it did waft from a couple of windows as I was rolling around the neighborhoods, and I did see a large group of people on the university steps passing around a pipe: it didn’t seem to be something anyone was hiding. However, Keep Austin Weird had nothing to do with marijuana, nor did it have any relationship to the city’s live music scene (my second guess). It has a far more down-to-Earth meaning, one that I would’ve guessed if I’d just read the fine print.
