March 24, 2009

Loud music and shitty beer: Over it. You probably also feel the same about lukewarm catered barbecue, nutrition bars, and sickly sweet energy drinks – at least until your plane goes down in the Andes. Then again, offered the choice, you might actually opt for frozen human flesh. Morality aside, it would surely be the healthiest way to go. If you’re thinking you could survive off Red Bull, think again. You might as well just have the other remaining passengers pee in your mouth. At least you’d stay warmer that way, and if you actually do make it out alive, you’ll have a fetish skill that might earn you a little income on the side. Act indignant if you want, but in these hard economic times, it’s good to have a fall-back plan. Hopefully you didn’t spend a lot of money at South by Southwest. You need to stay flush for the lean months ahead. Besides, you’re supposed to leave the heavy spending to the out-of-towners. SXSW rule of thumb: Always let the guy with the bleached highlights and the square-tipped shoes pay for dinner. He wants you to believe he rolls like that even if he lives in the backseat of his leased BMW. It’s OK if you dropped a 10 spot on a CD by some perky Canadian pop band, but if you blew a few large at the Levi’s Fader Fort on jeans that fit really great until the first wash, you’re fucking up SXSW’s economic impact estimates. Besides, Austin deserves a reach-around for the sheer, relentless cacophony of SXSW – all the dueling parking-lot showcases with pegged amps, crashing symbols, and farting, cone blowing bass lines. Your auditory nerve endings are so trashed that you just want to curl up in a little ball in your bedroom all week and listen to Iron and Wine … on low. We’re also due a little payback for the litter of promotional materials: posters, flyers, handbills, stickers, and business cards – a virgin rain forest worth of wasted marketing salted by the sick, desperate sweat of frenetic fame-seekers. It’s a good thing you walked around for three days with that colorful, glossy Japanese music showcase postcard flapping out of your back pocket, otherwise you might have forgotten a week later (when you pulled it out of your Maytag’s filter) that you forgot about that Japanese showcase and went to Kanye West. Listen closely. Somewhere in the Amazon, a Yanomami tribesman is revving up his chainsaw … then again, maybe you’re just having a death metal showcase flashback. It’s a fortunate thing for your central nervous system that Austin isn’t a one-trick pony, artistically speaking. We have musicians, artists, filmmakers, and actors, and the latter three only get on your nerves at cocktail parties, otherwise, they’re pretty quiet. If you want to tone it down a bit this weekend, check out Holy Cross Sucks! at the the Vortex this weekend. Holy Cross Sucks! is an award-winning one-man comedy performed by Austin’s own Rob Nash that explores being in high school in the Eighties. If you made the rounds last week, you know that the Eighties are back in a big way. Exciting times indeed. Don’t worry; If this theatre thing doesn’t work out, the loud music and shitty beer will still be waiting for you.