by Micah Magee

My bike has been stolen, so I'm walking home, passing house after house. Neighborhood streets lay empty and quiet, residents are locked in with their air conditioning. I'm alone with the passing cars and the blue flickers reflecting off living room walls and I'm wondering why I'm the only one out and where all the noise went in this neighborhood and blaming it (naturally) on the general trend between people to develop intimacy through mediated experience instead of direct interaction.

Like our traditional first date: picked up in the pickup, small safe glances across the expanse of the front seat, small talk on safe subjects, sailing through the concrete, on our way to a bad romantic comedy. Eating afterward, cleanly, without cooking. Repeating dialogue, laughing. As conversation develops, discovering a strong shared nostalgia for Scooby Doo. The possibility of a second date at her house, drinking beer and watching syndicated reruns. The vague hope that the event signifies the End of Loneliness, a budding romance framed by the psychological afterglow of the story on the screen.

We often become acquainted vicariously through careful observation of reactions to second-hand experiences. When the subsequent dialogue lends itself to shared explorations and discoveries beyond previous individual understanding, this can be an entirely sound basis for a friendship. It depends on your relationship to what you're watching. Most of us are not actively involved in the creation of our entertainment, but buy it from other people. And as always, this is where things become troubling.

To appeal to a broader base, the most successful stories told in the mainstream fall within simplified experience, clouding instead of expanding the metaphors available for understanding life, contaminating the foundations of interpersonal relationships. This is not likely to be rectified by commercial culture itself, as alienation promotes a psychological reliance on collective commercial memory which can be very profitable. The continued exponential success of media giants depends to an extent upon the systematic breakdown of local community structures, beginning at the base level of personal intimacy which, as an engagement that generates no revenue and perpetuates itself, competes directly with corporate entertainment.

Alternatives exist. Networks of people live here in town, working to dismantle the hold of commercial culture on everyday life and rebuild an active community that understands itself without the haze of corporate filters. They live here in town; they are not underground, just under-represented. They need your help. This section of Austin Downtown Arts deals with efforts to reassert cultural autonomy in our community, from guerrilla theater to non-profit news distribution, building a healthy alternative to the first date and (hopefully) getting some self-produced noise back in the neighborhood.

Words have to happen between people before they can happen on the street.