Editors' Note: The opinions and ideas expressed in The Accidental Gentrifist are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook or beliefs of anyone else in the Ist network. ...Especially those who just bought badges.

[Wherein I eulogize someone whom I've never met (and who is, by many reliable accounts, still alive).]

For me, the most intriguing aspect of Louis Black's journalistic presence has not been the words he has generated himself, but rather words that have risen against him—the missives and letters and verbal salvos launched weekly (and often weakly) over the cinder block walls of the AusChron castle.

And make no mistake: Mr. Black has many, many, many detractors. Sometimes it seems as if the number of his meta-enemies is disproportionate even to the number of attackers one usually attracts when rising to his level of prominence and publicity. With all the music and magic and film he brings to town, I've often wondered why this should be.

Here, for example, is local teddy bear Alex Jones on just how Mr. Black is complicit in the NWO's objective of exterminating 80% of humanity:

Well, I wasn't going to go that far.

This wonderment all started several months ago, when fellow Austinist contributor TrueCraig and myself mused long on Mr. Black and (what must be) the fairly miasmatic nature of the world around him, and the differences, it would seem, between his stated perception and, say, how a reasonable person might perceive the same set of stimuli. True is of course more than welcome to chime in, but my own recollection of the automatic given that Mr. Black is not in fact a reasonable person is a result stemming from no direct fault of his own. Louis Black was just taking care of business, as it were. The forces that carved him into what he is were primarily external.

They were us.

See, we ultimately decided—or maybe Craig did and I just blindly accepted it—that Mr. Black was born into a paper world. As Big Pappa at the Austin Chronicle, he could choose to simply not publish any of the many envelopes in the 'Letters to the Editor' pile (which is, let's face it, understandable)—but he could also choose to not even open the motherfuckers. An acceptable option in a world where, if one ventures to make their voice public (be it for fun or profit), there is an acute paucity of praise. There are, approximately, two tons of bile waiting on your doorstep for every teacup of honey trickled into your ear.

But then something changed. Call a Boom, call it Progress, call it Artificial Selection, but Mr. Black's paper world ended as he knew it. It didn't take Walter Benjamin to see it coming, and it didn't take Johannes Gutenberg to explain the ramifications: The internet finished the job started by Xerox—words were not only made inexpensive, but manifold virtual venues—the monstrous evolution of the glorious soap box—sprung up overnight.

Mr. Black's world went soft. He could no longer protect himself by simply censoring opposing, derisive voices in his own publication. There was really nothing to be done about the countless pot-shots aimed at him from online news & opinion sources ...such as ourselves. Sure, the Chron supposedly has some kind of policy giving priority to negative letters over back-slapping, but there's no way in hell they'd run some of the venom that gets flung at SXSW and Mr. Black in particular. Especially if said venom intimates back-room deals with the city, or attacks the thin veneer of 'safety' as an relevant issue for shutting down the benevolently parasitic parties that crop up after hours during the festival. The mire is only made more ugly when your business partners pop up in faux-news pieces written by sympathetic writers (...and when they laud the relationship of safety and their public image... and then also mention, you know, proprietary rights).

But Mr. Black, as the editor of a marginally competitive weekly (the purviews of the two papers are so diametrically opposed, they can't really be seen as competitive, even when they have drastically different responses to big news items) cannot take the same route. His own soap box is his column, which, as I earlier intimated, I only read week-old and in hindsight, when one of my friends informs me they've slipped in a coded (and sometimes snide) letter of protest, often under an assumed name (more for fun than fear that Black will come skulking into their homes and cut their throats as they sleep).

But really, Mr. Black is not above crushing the competition. He is not necessarily opposed to pissing on your parade. To his credit, he won't even pretend it's rain.

Oh Yes, he'll affirm: It's my piss.

I began reading Black's words after his asinine "Mea Culpa" in the wake of the 2007 Sx party crack-down. Using the same back-handed tactics the Chron usually reports about when said antics go down in Washington or our own capitol (in the same insincere, perfunctorily liberal 'Here they go again' tone), SXSW staffers allegedly 'leaked' a list of non-Sx-endorsed parties, who were—prepare for a shock—left out of the loop for new permit requirements. And yet several SXSW mouthpieces maintained that the reason they acted was the principle of safety ...when they knew full well where the parties were (obviously) and didn't seem too willing to help them get up to code before the fact. Together, Sx and the AFD could have easily gotten everyone safe and up to code... but, really—where's the money in that?

While facetiously admitting complicity and collusion with municipal departments, Black offers the following, supposedly assuming the intentional version of a Freudian slip will serve to shift absurdity from his shoulders to his detractors: "I am a malicious son of a bitch, and I'm very proud of myself." Um... if you only used this kind of irony once in awhile, it might be funny. Maybe. But you use it all the motherfucking time. I'm not saying you are in fact a son of a bitch, Mr. Black. But it's pretty clear you don't care who thinks you are.

Quote: "One of the things I've affirmed, as I expected, is that I'm pretty much a villain – a role I was born to play."

It took awhile before I could read his column again. In reference to more recent missives, my main impression takes the form of a question: Does he always quote so much? Billy Joe Shaver, Tim Buckley, Sam Fuller. Why are these words, like pawns, moved into a defensive position around the Black Queen? As a new-ish reader, it strikes me kinda like the Devil quoting Dylan. Or, alternatively, that Black has had so much vitriol heaped upon him and his organization, that he no longer really gives a shit, and if he can quote something he likes rather than go through the whole argument one more time, well fuck it—he'll just do that.

Our friend from Teaneck, NJ is, more or less, from my father's generation. The same generation who warned themselves not to trust anyone over thirty. Well, a lot of those people indeed turned thirty. We call it the 80's. ...When a bunch of people who deem adults untrustworthy eventually become adults, it apparently makes it perfectly Okay for them to act like the scoundrels they warned themselves against. It is, after all, what they expected. Part of this seems to include acting like a corporate jerk-off, while shamelessly doing so under the banner of rock and roll.

Black's semi-ironic 'poor me' bullshit has to end. He's been facetiously touting Sx's perceived ills for so long, his tongue must be bleeding. His support of Daniel Johnston, the Austin Chronicle, the exposure new acts can get through SXSW—these are good things. I am eternally grateful to Black and Sx for turning me onto bands I might never have seen otherwise—acts like Land of Talk and Swearing at Motorists come quickly to mind. But these good things will readily fall over the edge if they aren't decisively de-collated from the bads.

In the end, my only issue isn't with Black himself, it's his banner. Everyone who's ever been either a performer in a show, or the producer of one, knows that the best event producers aren't artists—and they're definitely not musicians—they're business people. Which is why it chapped my hide when he recently paraphrased Jonathan Richman: "I'm in love with rock & roll. I have been for a long time! And I'll be out all night!"

While Mr. Black is no doubt emotionally shielded by such complaints, I cannot express how offensive I find this. Why? Well, first a quick confession: Despite this column's opening, I have actually met Louis Black. Not that he talked to me. I was leaning against a wall, outside a Red River bar, weighing my odds of hailing a cab amid the Sx tempest. I'd been chatting with the Sx door girl, when suddenly this sweaty old man who looked like Bukowski's little brother shuffled up in a wrinkled guayabera holding a bulging bank bag, escorted by a uniformed Austin police officer. He grabbed the cash from the till, hastily checked the girls' people counter, and then shuffled off to the next honey pot.

I was awed that Big Man collected the door money. That a head of the organization, one that depended upon the hard work of volunteers, would personally ensure the take. Then it occurred to me: at the height of Sx, when so many high-profile shows and parties were just hitting their climax, one could easily discern the priorities of the festival's organizers, simply by pin-pointing the location of their most public face. And that place was, apparently, collecting the cash.

And that's when I learned the true meaning of SXSW.