Customer Reviews

Keep Austin Weird: A Guide to the Odd Side of Town

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If you're new to Austin, thinking about visiting, or even if you've lived there for a while and are interested in what all the "Keep Austin Weird" fuss is about, this is an essential guide, and a lavishly illustrated one. If you're looking for a synopsis and photographs about the weird/unique things of Austin- you'll find it here- from the Annual Spamarama to eccentric political candidates to the Texas Chili Parlor to Satan's Cheerleaders. To my knowledge, this is the only book on Austin of its kind, and so is an essential resource for those who are thinking about visiting the city or native Austinites who want to learn more about it.

I've been researching Austin for the past few months, and I can't believe it took me this long to come across this book. Not only is it a fabulous guide, it's hilariously written. Kudos to Mr. Wassenich.

I've never been to Austin, but this book kinda makes me want to visit. Someone left it in a breakroom at work, and I'd flip through it when I was microwaving lunch. It amused me so much that I started going to read bits of it when I got really stressed out at work. It worked for me as a stress reliever. Cool, weird, funky book -- and I get the impression Austin is also cool, weird and funky -- all good things to me. :)

Austin in all its glory. A fun introduction in where Austin get's its wierdness and why.

I lived in Austin nearly 30 years ago and enjoyed it; it's changed almost beyond recognition since then and this book has a wealth of pictures which bring back memories but also point up a lot of the hidden things that I missed. And it's fun.

However, the text brings you up short. Memory is frail but I think Ibsen said that politics in art is like a gunshot in the theater. And so it is with this. Austin prides itself on being "transgressive," which is understandable in the young, and the residents, the young ones, are contrarian. It's fun when you're young. And in conservative Texas to be contrarian you need to be a leftist.

Unfortunately all too often in this book you are often brought up by an utterly gratuitous swipe at conservatives. Nothing wrong with that, if you choose the venue. Here, however, while looking at pictures of an old friend, it was like going over to a party at a friend's house and realizing that you were actually at an Amway Party where you realized, with a sinking heart, that someone had misrepresented things to you and there was an attempt to influence you, instead of entertain you. Bait and switch.

The politics per se isn't irritating, but, er, just callow and boilerplate, the sort of thing that you'd hear from a late-night comedian perhaps on the rise on Comedy Central. Here it spoils the flow of the prose and needlessly irritates some readers. There's a time and a place for everything and this is not the place for any politics whatsoever.

The pictures are great.