With Austin’s SXSW 2008 now a memory, perhaps it’s appropriate that Spencer Parsons’ essay on the changing topography of the city itself has just gone up at the FilmInFocus site. The critic, professor and filmmaker (his feature I’ll Come Running, starring Melonie Diaz, should appear on the festival circuit this year) pens an ode to the places the city has lost since Rick Linklater’s Slacker memorialized a whole stretch of its countercultural topography. And despite the inherent whiff of nostalgia, Parsons finds much to like in Austin today while writing more broadly about the ways artists appropriate and create from within their hometowns.

Here’s a graph:

I would like to be able to tell you in this space to seek out the new equivalent of Les Amis, but there isn’t one. The hole that it left is part of what made it special. So you really did miss it, and so did I, but it’s not the end of the world, and what about now? Speaking only for myself and my own agenda as a filmmaker, I do work with an eye firmly fixed on setting the action in meaningful spots worth promoting or preserving in a film, so consider this a location scout.