"Slacker" revisited

Just re-watched Richard Linklater's "Slacker" (1990), his debut film that brought him to national attention (and flashed me back to Austin during that exact time). Here's my review for Netflix:

Eternal ode to a long-departed Austin era. I lived through it, and, to answer some reviewers' questions: Yes, there really was a subculture of thrift-store-dressed grad students/post-grads/hipsters/nutcases that hung out and lived around the campus area and spent their days and nights discussing conspiracy theories and Sartre and Smurfs in cafes in between browsing in book/record stores and walking to the nearest indie/foreign film theater (there used to be 4 theaters either on or within a half-mile of campus). Every place depicted in the film (except maybe the Continental Club) is long gone now, most closed by the end of the '90s. It would be funny (and probably impossible) to try to do a 2022 version, featuring perhaps a Starbucks where each person at a table poked furiously at the device in their hands while ignoring everyone next to them; today, people have transferred their obsessions to the online world, though many of the obsessions (intrusive media, intrusive government) remain the same. A compelling, original, often frightening film---the lackluster lives depicted are stultifying and mostly sad; and sometimes it's better NOT to know exactly what your fellow humans are thinking, especially at such close range!  

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What I didn't mention in the review (Netflix limits you): I could SMELL Linklater's Austin scenes. Shot maybe in late April or May or June? Austin has a certain smell during those times (along with a certain soundtrack that includes doves at dawn and sunset). The cracked sidewalks and weed-infested empty lots in the middle of the city also flashed me back. I don't know if this type of "talkative hipster" still exists, though. Where would they go to actually TALK instead of just posting something online? And I know that the homeless hanging around on the Drag (Guadalupe St, bordering the campus) certainly aren't called "dragworms" any more. (Post-1990s, the few aged dragworms left over from the '60s who hung out on the Drag morphed into multitudes of heroin/crack-addicted young people. What was once an interesting anomaly is now a scourge---but you can't call them that.)

p.s. The anarchist old man shopping with his daughter in the film was my first philosophy professor in the fall of 1983: Louis Mackey, who taught "God and Man."

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While I lived AMONG the slackers of that time---I was a regular at their cafes and bookstores and record stores and movie theaters---I was too mentally aggressive and judgmental to be OF them. I liked my physical surroundings of that time a lot, and am nostalgic for them. But I do not miss the low-life pretentious people. I was interested but very unhappy during that time. Whereas today... I supposed I'm not so interested but more internally content.