We’re headed to San Antonio today. First time we’ve ever come out this way – but unfortunately I don’t have any particularly strong association with the area, so I’m not terribly excited about it. Just a new town – which means we don’t KNOW anyone. Well, the next two nights will see us endeavour to change that up. One of the nights should probably have been an open mic night, but the two places that got back to me both have similar names and I think I hadn’t really registered that I’d booked two nights out here until a little late in the game.
Driving through Texas, it’s hard to remember all the negative connotations to the place that we as East Coast Blue State Liberals have. Yeah, there are a lot of churches, but though they’re bigger out here (holy crap, Megachurches that could crush whole urban MALLS back home), we’ll see far fewer today than I’d see driving through Baltimore from my house to Teavolve. Broken-down windmills dot the vast plains around us as we flip through radio stations that reflect far MORE diversity than what we’d hear at home. Back in the DC / Baltimore area we might have a couple of Spanish-language channels, conservative talk radio, liberal talk radio, sports, sports, sports, the omnipresent classic rock station, not-so-classic rock stations, innumerable “pop” channels that cater to lowest-common-denominators… a hip hop station that maybe has an evening Go Go show… more than you get cruising around Saint Louis (though the success of community radio stations out there like KDHX make up for a multitude of sins), better variety even than driving around New York City – but much to my surprise Texas has all of the above PLUS a couple of really interesting Asian stations. A couple of days ago, driving down I-35 into Dallas we picked up on a very cool Indian station and it occurred to me that I’d NEVER in all my Life listened to DJs with an Indian accent…lawyer commercials, food advertisements, all with that distinctive lilt… today as we head out of Houston we stumble across an Afro-beat station where the DJs talk intelligently about the Ghanaian pop scene and listen till it goes out of range.
Houston is a town of stunning community art projects and even increasingly-corporate-owned Austin has a devotion to murals and music that shames almost any other metropolis in the country.
Eh – big cities are big cities and they are intrinsically more-diverse than the ranches and farms and forests and quail hatcheries (just passed a quail hatchery) that cover the grounds between them but as I read about the anti-immigrant rallies and the 14 year-old Muslim that was just arrested for making a clock and the gun culture and the Love for Dubya and the Reagan Romanticism – it’s spectacularly easy for people who haven’t explored Texas to just write the place off as a sprawl of backward hinterland hicks. You couldn’t be further from the truth.
