Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer 2008 | Page 101

Becoming Texas 97 and economic endeavor. Indeed, this city’s positing of itself as the central point of a fusion of regional Texas identities demonstrates that its citizens have sought to create a place that illustrates Doreen Massey’s notion of place as not an “inward looking enclosure,” but “a subset of the interactions which constitute space, a local articulation within the wider whole.”17 This fusion of Texas identity surfaces in the rapidly growing popular music scene in San Angelo. Blaine’s Pub, a local bar, has become a center for Texas music, a subcategory of country music that defines itself as an alternative to Nashville country music, since the pub opened 10 years ago. Texas acts, such as Pat Green and Cooder Graw, find the San Angelo crowd invigoratingly focused on their (Texan) vibe.18 The latest, even more explicitly Texan music venue and business is the Texas Coffee Company, a state-themed high-end cafe that features casual early evening concerts of Texas acoustic acts as well as gourmet coffee, tea, etc. This place’s logo, which is modeled after the famous Luckenbach, Texas (a tiny Hill Country town) logo, puts its identity squarely in a Texan context, and has been a factor in this cafe’s unusually dramatic success for a business of this type in its first three years of operation.19 Perhaps the best example of commercial popular culture to consider in this context is the San Angelo-based pickled okra producer, Talk o’ Texas Pickled Okra, the largest okra pickling company in the world. The Southwestern cowboy imagery on the label clashes symbolically with the distinctly Southern associations of okra, but the use of Texas in the product’s name provides the magnetic force holding the two poles together.20 And even more significantly, the initial S