The Hon Paradox and the Grail of Weird

We come to the last phase of my look at the Keep Austin Weird campaign where I’ve asked three questions:

1. What is your name?
2. What is your quest?
3. What is your favorite color?

No, sorry we were looking at something completely different. Here are the three questions that have guided our quest so far:

1. Who gets to define weird?
2.  Who benefits from weird?
3. How can we celebrate a weird economy?

So, we reach the final chapter where I’ll give a vision for a better way to celebrate weird in our cities. On our epic quest for the holy grail of weird cities, we’re going to be tested by what I’ll call the Hon Paradox.

Baltimore recently celebrated HonFest, a weekend festival dedicated to the “Baltimore Hon,” a caricature of working class women with beehives, outlandish clothing, big horn rimmed glasses, and pronounced accents who “warsh” their clothes with “wooder” in “Bawlmer, Murlan.” Generally Baltimore residents either hate it as a cartoonist charade or enjoy the celebration of an historic Baltimore culture. This controversy was apparent when a friend of mine opened up the Charm City Pandora’s box by daring to ask on Facebook, “Is there anything more Baltimore than HonFest?” “Everything else ever in the history of the place,” a commenter shot back. “Hampden on any other day of the year.” another wrote.

So why is HonFest, which on the surface seems to be the perfect celebration of Baltimore’s quirkiness get so much hate? In this blogger’s opinion the answer is simple: It’s comfortable. If you harken back to my first post in the series you’ll recall that the real separation between the brand of weird celebrated by Keep Austin Weird and our own Baltimore-based weird is that our weird is uncomfortable. It’s found in the gutters, the hustle and bustle of markets, and hawking on corners. True weird dares us to break out of silos as Adam Conway suggested in his blog earlier this week, and experience a culture truly different from our own.

Baltimore Hons were working class women, wives of dock workers. My guess is most of the people who flock to HonFest would feel uncomfortable in any of the haunts frequented by modern-day hons. HonFest has turned into a celebration of a caricature where you can go the entire day without having a conversation with any real working class person from Baltimore. It’s Hon Disneyworld, a commercial enterprise that harnesses Baltimore quirk to sell beehives as quick and easy as Mickey Mouse ears. The whole endeavor has been a successful example of packaging weird and selling it to the general public.

In fact founder Denise Whiting, owner of the Cafe Hon, got into hot water for trademarking “Hon” to use exclusively in her store and restaurant. The controversy over who owns a symbol of a community’s culture reminds me of the Keep Austin Weird campaign. In 2003 Outhouse Designs trademarked “Keep Austin Weird” to use on apparel. The move outraged many people in the community but when asked about the proposal from the community to leave phrase in the public domain, the owner of Outhouse Designs responded it was, ”honorable but a bit idealistic.”

The more popular weird is, the most enticing an opportunity it is for entrepreneurs. Driven by profit, they need to appeal to a larger audience which means they have to make weird appealing by cutting out the uncomfortable and destroying true weird. By celebrating weird we are often inviting outside capitalists to come in and take advantage of the very people we are trying to honor. Welcome to the Hon Paradox.

So how do we defeat these problems with nasty, big, pointy teeth to begin a transformation to a new movement for a new economy that supports the cities we love? Here are five ways I propose we start:

1. Redefine weird to include all communities and cultures. We need to encourage all entrepreneurship that builds our community including hustlers, corner markets, and street vendors. This means rewriting laws to make it easier for these informal businesses to thrive and thinking beyond brick and mortar establishments when we support local business.

2. Start thinking big about being local particularly to employ those displaced by deindustrialization. Our current local economies cannot support those unemployed by the death of automobile and steel industries. We need to start creating large-scale, people-friendly businesses that can put people back to work.

3. Come up with a new standard for ensuring your purchase power benefits people on the ground. Buy local is too narrow. Perhaps some of IFAT‘s Fair Trade Principles might offer us a new direction:

• Capacity Building: is this good helping to build the economies of where it is made and sold or is it holding those economies, workers, or consumers hostage in some way?
•  Payment of a Fair Price: is each person in the process of making and getting this good to me paid a fair price in the local context agreed through dialogue and participation?
• Working Conditions: is each person in the process able to work in a safe and healthy working environment?
• The Environment: is each person in the process of making and getting this good to me using and encouraging better environmental practices and responsible methods of production?

4. Find new ways to traffic in weird where we can make money while helping our community. One way to protect weird is to be the first to capitalize on it. If a local business alliance trademarked Keep Austin Weird instead they may have been able to use profits from merchandise to funnel into loans for new entrepreneurs. In South America you see a lot of new ecotourism industries that are able to capitalize on the influx of travelers with businesses owned, operated, and benefiting native cultures.  HonFest has found a way to market the celebration of weirdness in a market of increasing homogenization. It’s powerful and perhaps we can harness that to support the communities where Hon was born and bread. The paradox is a tricky line to walk but there are ways to bring weird to a larger audience while supporting the original founders and keepers of the culture.

5. Celebrate uncomfortable by going to see weird in the wild. Addressing the Hon Paradox may be the hardest challenge because it stems from the larger public’s unwillingness to be uncomfortable. We have a culture that encourages convenience and safety and we must either change everything to suit current needs or seek to change the culture. We will never break down silos if we don’t start being uncomfortable. We need education programs which expose children to new environments, we need ambassadors willing to explore the foreign lands found right down the block, we need to love and embrace the sketch, the strange, the awkward moments that come from being a fish out of water. We don’t need an annual festival to celebrate a weird culture, but regular pilgrimages outside our own network, neighborhood, and the people we call home. 

To celebrate true weird it requires us to understand the vast human geography of our city, celebrate differences, and voyage outside of our comfort zone. To build a local economy to support our weirdness we need to think inventively about how we harness our assets to create new businesses that harness the market to benefit our communities. Instead of Keep Austin Weird, we need a brand that supports a wider range of weirdness, while celebrating common principles for ensuring that our purchases go to keep our city the strange, incredible, sketchy fantastic mess that is.