Luv Doc Recommends: Salute to Linklater

You might have already planned on spending Friday night bending the bill of your gimme cap into a cool-looking, taco-shaped, frat-boy curve in anticipation of the big Pat Green concert at Auditorium Shores on the Fourth. Touché. What Fourth of July would be complete without drunken white dudes making a lot of noise? That’s pretty much how this country got started in the first place. Usurious taxation notwithstanding, it’s an important point that our founding brothers chose to dump tea in Boston Harbor in protest rather than, say, whiskey. Most likely they used up all of the whiskey before they even got to the harbor – something that might explain the hastily thrown together Indian costumes (another small yet significant footnote in the long history of racial insensitivity by young drunken white males – more currently manifested as offensively themed frat parties). Important also is the fact that our founding brothers seem to have had the luxury to stay up late bitching about taxes and putting together Indian costumes and whatnot when a hundred years earlier at that same hour they would have already collapsed from exhaustion and starvation in some drafty lean-to in Jamestown. Make no mistake, this land was hewn from the hard work and genocidal greed of our Puritan forefathers, but the republic itself, its government and underlying philosophy, was thrown together rather optimistically by their bourgeois, free-thinking, soft-palmed progeny. Nothing wrong with hard work, to be sure, but a lot of really great ideas seem to come from leisure time – sitting around under apple trees, staring at ant colonies – you name it. Hey, the Magna Carta wasn’t written by muleskinners. Who knows? The next great philosophical treatise of the new millennium might well be assembled by a bunch of trust fund kids sitting in their boxer shorts sharing a water bong. It could be that some of those deep thinkers will be at the Pat Green concert on Sunday, but a more likely bet is that they’ll be at the Paramount Friday night for the Salute to Linklater, a double feature consisting of two of director Rick Linklater’s finest films, Slacker and Dazed and Confused. Early in the Nineties, Linklater established himself as the foremost authority on Austin’s slacker culture by creating a film whose narrative wanders, as do its actors, rather aimlessly through various philosophical and geographical locales. In the course of following these discussions, the camera provides a running travelogue of Austin people and places of the era: Les Amis, Quackenbush’s, Sound Exchange, Half Price Books – places where no doubt many of the discussions in the film might have actually taken place. Some of these places still exist, some don’t, but for neophytes still trying to get a handle on the rapidly fading Austin aesthetic, Slacker is an invaluable historical document. Dazed and Confused, Linklater’s bigger-budget follow-up to Slacker, employs a similar style, following a spindly freshman through the last night of the school year in small town Texas. Like Slacker, the kids in Dazed don’t seem to have much to do except drive around getting drunk and stoned, albeit with a really kickass soundtrack. What makes Dazed and Confused so mesmerizing is how well Linklater nails the culture and spirit of ’76, the nation’s bicentennial, which was sort of a slacker celebration anyway when you think about it. More than a decade later, you can celebrate both of these films for a really slacker price: $6.75. That leaves plenty of money for beer and bottle rockets, doesn’t it?