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part of what allowed someone like Chris Wise to stay in the city. Wise, 31, is the talent booker for the Day for Night music-and-arts festival (which was headlined last year by Nine Inch Nails and took place in a converted post office), a part-time bartender, and the bassist for the neo-Americana band Buxton. He grew up in La Porte, a town 30 minutes east of Houston dominated by petrochemical plants that nearly every high schooler was expected to go work for after graduation. As a kid more interested in film, musical theater, and art, Wise had other plans, but unlike those of pre-
If there’s anything left in the exposed wreckage of tech utopianism, this is it: The damn phones really do help people find one another. vious generations, that didn’t automatically mean heading east or west. “New York or L.A. never really occurred to me,” he said. Instead, he set up in Houston, where energy may rule the roost (nearly every person I met could quote the current price for a barrel of crude oil o≠ the top of their head), but there’s still room for a young man to pursue talent booking/bass playing/bartending while living with two dogs in a one-bedroom apartment near downtown for $600 a month. Handsome and slender, with a sweep of hair in something approaching a pompadour, Wise appears to know literally every person in town, a condition that grew so comically ostentatious during an evening bar crawl that he felt the need to embarrassedly assure me that he hadn’t set up any of our encounters. Echoing many others I’d met, he said that technology has helped Houston’s scene cohere. Until recently, it was simply hard to navigate the far-flung corners of the city, much less gather a crowd. “There was always great food, but it was 30 miles away,” he said. “There were people who wanted to come see shows, but they didn’t want to drive.” Now social networks have brought people of similar interests together; Google Maps help them find places to meet; ride shares let them stay out later getting drunk and then home safe. If there’s anything left in the exposed wreckage of tech utopianism, this is it: The damn phones really do help people find one another.
the frontier looks like Hipster Brigadoon, as in the sprawling compound of a bar in midtown called Axelrad Beer Garden. In the center of the outdoor space is a large tree covered in neon. Around that totem, when Wise and I visited, was arrayed an entire souk: There was an Airstream outfitted with beer taps. Massage tables. Shelves filled with board games. Someone was selling churros from a folding table. At another, a South Asian man o≠ered biryanis. Couples wound their way through, carrying steaming boxes from the adjacent pizzeria. Along one long side, there was a grove of hammocks hanging from steel racks and swaying in the summer breeze, each as heavy as a seed pod A N D, Y ES, S O M E T I M ES
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with a young, beautiful body, sometimes two; if you ever find yourself asking “Where did all these hipsters come from?” look to the fertile Hammock Fields of East Texas. Axelrad’s owner, Adam Brackman, cut his teeth helping out and providing a venue for displaced New Orleans musicians after Hurricane Katrina. The NOLA trumpeter Kermit Ruffins is an Axelrad investor and plays regular gigs there. (Some 250,000 New Orleanians spent time in Houston after that storm; an estimated 40,000 stayed for good—a small population bump but one that can’t have had anything but a happy e≠ect on Houston’s taste for eating, drinking, and going out.) It was open-mic night, and on a large stage near the neon tree, a bearded guy with a guitar sang “Ain’t No Sunshine” while surf videos played on the wall behind him. He was followed by a young black duo. He, with dreads creeping out from under a bucket hat, started rapping in a kind of mumble while she crooned Fill me up / Fill me up / You’ve got to fill me up in a way that made it clear she didn’t mean with gratitude. The performance threatened to wander o≠ course until the “Ain’t No Sunshine” guy reappeared, strumming, behind them, and suddenly it all came together. It was hard not to think of the Su≠ers’ “Gulf Coast Soul” and of Kam Franklin, the band’s mighty-voiced lead singer. Raised in Houston, Franklin got her first gigs by inventing agents and managers: fake old white guys with fake e-mail accounts. “I used ‘Mike’ a lot. Mike seems like a trusty guy but also tough,” she said. In those days, Franklin could easily have borrowed the Bookity Bookity Boudain Man’s hustle T-shirt: Wednesdays and Thursdays, she sang at open mics at R&B clubs on Almeda Road or Emancipation Avenue, joints where you needed to crush covers of Erykah Badu or Chaka Khan or Beyoncé 50 or 60 times with the house band before anybody even thought of asking about original material. “Late Tuesdays, I’d go sing with a country band I used to mess around with,” she said. “Saturdays, I’d go hang with the punk and ska kids. And the rest of the week it would be studio gigs with rappers, if I could get them.” On the road, people still express disbelief that the band is from Houston. “We get, ‘Are y’all from Austin? Are y’all from New Orleans?’ I’m like, ‘No, we’re from H-Town, Texas. Where we’re going to stay.’ ” The Su≠ers’ new album, Everything Here, leads o≠ with a song called “Intro (A Headnod to Houston).” It features Paul Wall rapping over a background of voices singing: It might not be that pretty / But it looks real good to me / It might not be your favorite city / But it’s really got a hold on me. Maybe it’s that sense of defiance that ultimately defines Houston’s cool—the sense that a city where cool isn’t the primary commodity can a≠ord to lie back and let the world come to it, whenever the world catches on. As Matthew Odam’s passenger put it, before closing the car door and taking o≠ toward the Menil’s lawn and into legend: “Houston is cool because Houston doesn’t give a fuck about being cool.”
brett martin is a gq correspondent.
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which took place in May, on Lidingö, a small island in the inner Stockholm archipelago. A hundred spermatologists in one place: You’d think (incorrectly) that the jokes would be good. Skakkebæk had told me I’d be able to find some dissenters to the conclusions of Swan’s meta-analysis there, but what I witnessed instead was the final vanquishing of the few remaining doubters. At the welcome dinner (reindeer and rooster), I met Hagai Levine, the Israeli co-author of the Hebrew University/Mount Sinai meta-analysis. Levine, who is 40, told me we had reasons to worry. “I’m saying that we should hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” he said. “And that is the possibility that we will become extinct. That’s a possibility we must seriously consider. I’m not saying it’s going to happen. I’m not saying it’s likely to happen. I’m not saying that’s the prediction. I’m just saying we should be prepared for such a possibility. That’s all. And we are not.” His session the next morning—“Are Spermatozoa at the Verge of Extinction?”— would be the defining event of the conference: It cast a shadow over all the other talks. At a panel discussion that followed his presentation, Levine continued his argument for addressing the causes of the crisis, saying, “My default, if I don’t know, is that it is up to the manufacturers of chemicals to prove that their chemicals are safe. But I don’t feel like I need any more evidence to take action with chemicals already known to disrupt the endocrine system.”
We can glimpse what our low-sperm-count future might look like. It will be arduous to conceive, and expensive—so expensive that having children may no longer be an option available to all couples. The organizer of the symposium, Lars Björndahl, a Swedish spermatologist who had presented earlier in the morning, urged caution. “I have great respect for epidemiological studies, but we should remember that mathematical correlations don’t prove that there is a causative relation,” he said. Questions from the audience—often taking the form of statements—were much along the same lines: Be careful of a bias toward