“Modern houses, like airports, are extensions of each other; they do not vary much from one place to another. (The house) is not a response to its place, but rather to the affluence and social status of its owner. The industrial conquistador…He is everywhere or nowhere.” Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 1977 First you see pink ribbons marking protected trees. They’re followed by tiny colored flags for property lines, gas lines, electric. Then the temporary fence, the bulldozer, the dumpster, and finally erasure. The new homes stand out in their whiteness. Their absence of color. Sugar cubes with a cordoned off front yard and gates that lock.  Marking change in real time conjures all sorts of conflicting feelings, more eloquently expressed by Austin sage Lawrence Wright. In any city whose identity is changing, it can be hard to avoid the sense that a golden age has slipped away. Newcomers to Austin fall prey to this nostalgia almost instantly—and, with a longtime resident like me, the symptoms can become comically acute. But the feeling is more like watching someone you love become someone you didn’t expect. It doesn’t mean that you’re not still in love—just that complexity has entered the relationship. Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2023. When you show up everywhere, are you really rooted anywhere?  My wife Kristin was born here, and we started our life together about the same time Richard Linklater was making Slacker. When we re-watch I’m always struck by how empty — how open — Austin was. Artists could create because they had space, and that live and let live looseness defined our city and fed the funkiness that’s now being squeezed out. We looked around at one of the city’s new hot spots and realized the crowd and the scene could be anywhere — the same stores we see in Miami’s Design District and at The Grove in LA are now scattered up and down South Congress.  It carries its own form of homogeny.   I discuss all this with another old head, Abe Zimmerman. Zimmerman arrived in 1968 from Houston, went to law school, and started out as a criminal defense lawyer. He migrated into real estate and business, investing over the years in institutions ranging from Threadgill’s to Book People, Katz’s Deli to Hotel San Jose. Zimmerman and his partners were the most prominent developers of a stretch of South Congress known as SOCO, some of the priciest dirt in Austin. Their story, their legend, is literally part of the landscape. “In 1999, when South Congress was in a state of neglect and disrepair, local businessmen Abe Zimmerman and Stan Biderman purchased this building and began their extensive renovations on South Congress, which later included the 04, Penn Field and the Hotel San Jose. They named the building SoCo Center and the area SoCo partially because they were trying to create a new identity for the area, but primarily because those letters were available from an old sign they recycled.” The plaque’s all that’s left of the original building, now home to international luxury brands ranging from Le Labo to Ganni. Kristin and I walk the development with Abe and his wife Evonne, a power in her own right.  Abe pulls out his phone.  “One of those new bars named a drink after me, a friend texted the picture.” He pulls on a joint.  Then a staccato burst of sentences, between puffs.  “No one even called me, no one asked.”  “Not that I care, but had they asked I would have told them my drink is a margarita.”   “That’s my go-to, what I like.  What I make.” “Who comes up with this stuff?”  “It’s money people out of New York.” “Think we met the guy once.” “Talked briefly on a sidewalk.”  “He had nice shoes.” A Tesla engineer from California moved into our neighborhood. Last July, he decided to re-sod the entire yard, water restrictions be damned, with the temperature stuck at 100. The grass died. It struck me that he simply assumed the landscape could be shaped to his liking without ever slowing down to contemplate what it takes for something to thrive in our soil. Never once asked the question, which gives rise to another: HOW DO WE SPEAK WITH THE SAME TONGUE? Elon Musk is almost too easy a target — the trucks, the politics, the jaw-dropping tone deaf take on who we are and what we need.  Instead of supporting established institutions, he’s trying to create his own, intent on redefining our city. Never mind that Musk almost singlehandedly transformed his flagship brand from a symbol of forward-thinking virtue to shorthand for a**hole. A couple weeks ago, Kristin couldn’t resist hitting back after yet another wackadoodle post. What Elon heard: “outstandingly or amazingly good or impressive.”  What she meant: “ affected by physical or mental illness.” So, Elon, bless your heart.  We’ll pray for you. Those who were born here know what I mean, those who live here should.* I ping former colleague Bill Minutaglio, and it turns out he’s been thinking about this as well, the tense interplay between creativity and capital.  Excerpted from our exchange: “Austin is on its way to becoming the fully realized dream of the most creative high-tech folks in the world - basically a Tokyo 3.0 with driverless cars and Elon Musk's underground highways — the true Silicon Valley utopia they couldn't will into existence in California because of too many regulations, and because Cali is so expensive. The poignant struggle is how Austin can hang onto its old identity while adopting a new one.” This is not so much a lament as a recognition that once again we’re reinventing ourselves.  People told me I’d just missed the renaissance when I arrived in 1981, that developers killed the cool by tearing down the Armadillo World Headquarters.  An older friend says he was told the same thing when he came to town the decade before, about a different club. A younger one notes the demise of Liberty Lunch in the 90s. And so forth. The upshot being that while buildings come and go, the spirit’s still here, always here. Happy Heat will continue to search for the groove, the notes in this new Austin that still ring true. “We need places that we accept as influences upon us. We need what other ages would have called sacred groves. Only if we know how the land was can we tell how it is. To know, in the true sense, is to see.”  Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 1977 *Texan church lady lingo decoded: Bless his heart = he’s a jackass. I’ll pray for you = Go f*ck yourself. Next week….a look at sacred ground on the drag, and how it changed the West Mall forever. On we go. Alan Berg, Publisher Adapted and updated from Austin Chronicles, Happy Heat Vol. 1, 2022. How are we doing? We want to hear from you. Take this quick survey and help us make Happy Heat better. Go see something, tell us about it, we’ll share more stories next week. Let’s build something together. We’d be forever grateful for your help, and an easy way to do so is by subscribing to the Happy Heat Substack. What comes in goes right back out in artist commissions and live shows. To which you’ll get to come! For the first 100 subscribers, we are offering 20% off forever. Get 20% off forever