At the northwest corner of Guadalupe Blvd. and 21st Street in Austin, Texas, the building that had housed the Sound Exchange record store until about 20 years ago, and the buildings to the north of it (excluding the gay church) on Guadalupe, are going to be demolished. The developers have started with the former Sound Exchange building, but are retaining the square brick portion of the southern wall that bears the "Hi, How Are You?" mural painted in 1993 by Daniel Johnston. No disrespect to Daniel, but I'd prefer that they take that with the rest of the mess. On one hand, I'm sick of seeing cool old stuff being replaced with stupid new stuff, but on the other, I can't stand the hypocrisy of appropriating signifiers of the past for the sake of lame, superficial conciliation with the history that is being demolished.
This is a prime example of authentrification – a portmanteau of "authenticate" and "gentrification" meaning the appropriation of elements that represent the area’s past, repurposing them as a design scheme, often for the sake of inducing some false cultural cred in the public's mind. Although Austin's nice to look at, I'm tired of looking at it – but, ironically, I'm just as tired of watching it disappear. However, if someone's going to come in and re-develop an entire block, wiping-out its little corner of local history, they should just take the whole motherfucker with it and not pretend to care about any cultural legacy whatsoever. Don't toss the locals a morsel of some vestige or another of it just to seem cool.
