Earlier this week while driving through Austin I saw an
intriguing sign by the side of the road. It read “UNDERGROUND: Metaphysical VW
repair.” “VW” stands for Volkswagen of course, and a grizzled old hippy with a long
grey beard was standing in front of a shabby garage, waiting for battered old
camper vans to pull up that he might lay his healing hands upon them. Just down
the street was a strip joint, a run-down motel, a Korean shopping center and
the bar where Janis Joplin was discovered forty odd years ago. Yes: I was on the
funky side of town, where poor folk, hippy burnouts and middle class boys and
girls who are temporarily slumming it while harboring dreams of becoming famous
artists do their groovy thing, man.
But, I wondered, what might this “metaphysical VW repair”
entail? Would the grizzled hippy strip naked and join hands with other naked
hippies in a love circle around a crippled VW bug, chanting mantras until it
was fixed? Were homeopathic herbs involved? Would they read from The Avesta, the
holy book of the Zoroastrians? Would the hippy wave a selenite crystal over the
engine, thus imbuing the injured mechanism with cosmic energy?
Or would he just open the hood and tinker about with the same
tools as everybody else, and only once he
was done retreat to the back to listen to The Thirteenth Floor Elevators
(and just maybe inhale on an aromatic cigarette of the sort you roll yourself?)
I suspect the latter. Metaphysical repair is the same kind of repair as any
other kind of repair. Only the branding is different.
And speaking of branding, further down the street I saw a
huge billboard featuring a photograph of a middle-aged white man with dreadlocks.
He looked a bit like the lead singer of the awful heavy metal band Korn and had
an appropriately 90s grunge-style logo: David
Komie- The Attorney That Rocks!
So is Mr. Komie fighting cosmic injustice, or helping
refugees? No, he’s a personal injuries man. If a hippy gets injured at work then,
for a percentage, Komie will sue the ass off the employer. (But what if the
employer is also a hippy? Now that would be a quandary.) In short he’s exactly
the same as every other lawyer, only HE’S GOT DREADLOCKS. A quick Google search revealed that he is also
shopping a reality TV show around. So he wants to be famous too.
Hm, I thought. There’s a pattern developing here in the
Bohemian side of town. The pattern of course was that almost everything was
EXACTLY THE SAME as everywhere else in the city, only with dreadlocks or beards
or tattoos. For instance, not far from Mr. Komie’s poster is an area called North
Loop. Here I once saw a man walking in the street with no shoes- extremely
daring I’m sure you’ll agree. Somebody else had glued Star Wars figures to his
balcony- how subversive!
Anyway the interesting thing about this epicenter of the
alternative lifestyle is that it is completely lacking in radical theaters,
galleries and revolutionary dens, etc. Rather the streets are lined with shops
selling stuff: clothes, groceries, entertainment products, and of course coffee.
Now admittedly the café isn’t called Starbucks, but it’s peddling the same
black stimulant and it’s not any cheaper. “Vintage” stores are filled with items
scavenged from the city’s estate sales and thrift shops, and then via a bit of
verbal magic and effective staging they are rendered 2 to 3 to 4 times as
expensive and sold to middle class liberals instead of poor Hispanics, hillbillies
and old ladies on social security. Bohemians love to turn a profit.
And thus it seems that in contemporary America, the “alternative”
is almost identical to the “mainstream.” Austin is not unique in this regard-
all big cities have Bohemian zones where social life revolves primarily around spending
money on objects and maybe going to the cinema now and then, just as it does in
air-conditioned mega malls across the land. It’s consumerism, only metaphysically
purified by geography and a spot of branding.
But is it purified? I’m not so sure. Could it be that the
same set of desires that spawned the phenomenon of the post-modern taco shack
for artists, not workers, also gave birth to that most bizarre of 21st
century status markers: the “organic vegetable”? Humans have always loved to
set themselves above one another, and this has become increasingly difficult in
an age of plenty. Whereas once upon a time only the rich could afford to eat
meat or take a foreign holiday, now almost everybody can. This causes anxiety
among the privileged who wish to remind others, and themselves, of their elite
status.
Hence the new metaphysics not of VW repair but rather of
consumerism. Via a set of rituals, symbols and incantations the mundane is
transformed, and thus cool people can do essentially the same things and have much
the same stuff as everybody else, but still feel superior.