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Keep Austin Weird

The Hon Paradox and the Grail of Weird

By | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 2 Comments

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.

On second thought, let's not go to Bawlmer. It is a silly place.

On second thought, let’s not go to Bawlmer. It is a silly place. (Image credit: pauls95blazer,)

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.

The Failure of Hipster Trickle Down Theory

By | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 4 Comments

Let me start with a disclaimer. I shop local and I believe more people should ditch the big box retailers to support the independent local businesses in their community. I believe in buying local not only because it has a greater positive impact on the economy but because it’s a better experience. I love the used book owner who saves books on the circus for me because he knows I love to find rare books on that topic for gifts for my father. I love one business owner who grabbed me out of the street to sample the latest beer he got in. I adore the quirk, the experiences, the people that you will never find without small, locally owned, independent businesses.

With that off my chest I begin part two of my examination of the Keep Austin Weird campaign and the way Baltimore has led me to examine it with three guiding questions:

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

In my last post I looked at the narrow definition of weird celebrated in the “Keep Weird” campaigns. This post will pick up on that thread to look at the effect of that definition.

“Keep Weird” campaigns generally focus on main streets full of small boutique businesses teaming with the young eccentrics. They promote the idea that by keeping these weird places alive the city will thrive. To me, this idea sounds similar to Richard Florida’s failed promise of the creative class. Florida promoted what I’ll call the “Hipster Trickle Down Theory.” Basically in order to save a dying city, you should make it look cool so that you can attract young, college-educated, professionals to your city.

The idea that the hipsters flocking to Detroit, Philadelphia, and even our fair city of Baltimore will bring a new economic renewal has two serious flaws. The first is that like most immigrants, these new residents often form pockets of people just like them, impacting those of their kind more than the city’s natives. This influx generally results in a new suburb, only this time it is in the city limits.

Again, it is this narrow definition of weird that is the downfall of this campaign. “Keep Weird” campaigns often do not recognize wide array of restaurants, stores, and other local businesses found in non-white areas. This specific variety of weird excludes a large part of the urban population. I think it is not a coincidence that the two largest “Weird” campaigns reside in cities with smaller African American populations than the national average. Austin comes in at 8.8 percent and Portland at 6 percent compared to a national average of 12.8%. Instead of being the symbol of inclusivity they claim to be, these campaigns generally celebrate an exclusive vision of what it means to be “Weird.” It is no surprise then that their economic benefits often fail to “trickle down” to the rest of the city.

The second flaw is the economic potential of the creative class and the small businesses they adore currently are not able to replace the powerhouses of industry that came before. While these small local businesses are important (see disclaimer above) they generally represent a small portion of the overall economic ecosystem. Currently what are really keeping those places weird are the businesses that pay people enough to patronize local businesses. Look at any rust belt town and you’ll see that when your industry dies, your local businesses tend to die with it.

Just because a business is local doesn’t mean it has what it takes to succeed. I think we need to stop encouraging people to pay a premium to patronize poor business models. What we should really focus on is how we can provide training, advice, and resources for business owners so that they can compete. One of the reported successes of the Keep Austin Weird campaign was that it stopped a Borders from opening by a local record and book store. I’m about to say what could be interpreted as a terrible capitalist-pig Scroogian statement here (see disclaimer above): if Keep Austin Weird was so wildly successful wouldn’t the local record and bookstore be able to compete against Borders since loyal Austin residents would obviously chose the local store over the corporate entity? If we want local businesses to succeed, I think we need to start talking about why local stores can’t compete and how we can help them beat out the competition.

The businesses on Main Street will not replace the jobs at the steel mill anytime soon. We need a grander vision of the new economy and I think we need to expand from simply “buy local” to growing sustainable and people-friendly local businesses. There are some local markets that businesses can take advantage of. Take Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland which puts people back to work laundering for the city’s remaining economic powerhouses: the hospitals and universities. However, if we are seeking to beat the corporate behemoths, Austin, Portland, or Baltimore can’t do it alone. We need local businesses that are going to employ more than mom and pop and oftentimes that means selling beyond our city borders. To avoid being hypocritical (although I know hipsters love that state of being), that also means we also need to buy beyond our borders. There’s nothing wrong with this. Given the quality of Maryland wine, I want things produced outside of my community and my guess is you do too.

So I return to the beginning. How do we keep the weird shopkeepers I love in business, celebrate weird beyond Main Street, and strengthen our weird economy?  Well folks, tune in next time for my third and final installment that offers a vision for a better way to celebrate weird in our cities.

Weird Before It Was Cool

By | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 3 Comments

A few weeks ago, ChangeEngine challenged us to come up with a tagline for Baltimore. The one I chose was a spin on the Keep Austin Weird campaign:

20130520-091118.jpg

Keep Austin Weird is a slogan created by Red Wassenich and adopted by the Austin Independent Business Alliance to promote local business in Austin, Texas. It has been seen as a huge success in celebrating the city’s tolerance, innovation, and local flavor. The campaign has spawned hundreds of knock-offs including Keep Portland Weird, Keep Ashville Weird, and even the small town in Virginia where I am currently writing this has a Keep Staunton Weird campaign.

While I love the celebration of quirk, seeing the campaign through the lens of Baltimore brings some interesting questions to light that I am going to explore in a three part series. Over the next weeks I will look at the Keep Austin Weird campaign and ask three key questions:

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

The first question hit me when I was reading Lindsey Davis’ blog this week on “Embracing the Noise.” Often times the “Keep Weird” campaigns focus on businesses or festivals that define the city but in reality some of our favorite things about our locale is the people you find on the streets. The “Oh Baltimore” moments people have shared this past week with ChangeEngine show a side of Baltimore often not embraced by people who try to brand our city, but nevertheless are one of the reasons we stay.

This brings me to my first question: who gets to define weird? One of the criticism of the Keep Portland Weird campaign is that it only celebrates the young Portlandia generation and not the original residents of the Oregon town. Most campaigns generally only celebrate brick and mortar local businesses, excluding hustlers like the amazing makeshift market that appears daily on the corner of 25th and North. Keep Weird campaigns tend to focus on gentrified areas where local businesses thrive and problems are kept at bay.

We often deny that weird can sometimes be uncomfortable. The man who shouts at you for no apparent reason, the group of loiterers who mingle at the bus stop on the corner, the person who asks you for money every time you leave the grocery store are all part of the city too but rarely are they symbols of any Keep Weird campaign. This is why I love guest blogger Devan Southerland’s love note to Lexington Market. When you watch the lost tourist souls, bravely venturing from the Inner Harbor, their wide eyes desperately trying to get a Findley’s crab cake, you realize like tourists in every city they fail to see what truly makes this city incredible. It is not the crab cake that defines Baltimore, it is the people you have to weave through to get there.

In Baltimore everyone defines our city. It reminds me of a line from “Good Morning Baltimore” in John Waters’ Hairspray:

There’s the flasher who lives next door
There’s the bum on his bar room stool
They wish me luck as I go to school.”

It seems like Baltimore has always been defined by its more seedy elements. After all, our most famous resident died in a gutter. The most popular TV show about the city is The Wire putting the city’s problems and complexities in full view. This is why most people outside of the city give me a skeptical look when I describe the city as magical. On the surface Baltimore doesn’t seems like the king of weird. We have nothing to compare to South by Southwest, we’re not the live music capital of the world, we don’t have a robust local business scene, and while growing everyday our population of hipsters has not yet sufficiently taken over the city to turn it into the next weird colony.

What we do have is a redefinition of weird that is more than a celebration of gentrified funkiness. Our “Oh Baltimore” can be simultaneously uncomfortable and endearing. It is a city where “the sketchy” part of town is only two blocks away from “the nice” part of town and no one can hide from our city’s problems. As with most major cities we have our divisions and deep rooted problems, yet unlike most cities our grit is what makes us iconic. Our weird is what unites us. It doesn’t solely reside in AVAM or MICA or Hampden, it is on every corner, it relaxes on stoops, it dies in gutters, it lives in bustling markets. That’s because Baltimore was weird before it was cool and we’ll be weird long after.