on sxsw

bleedee blah blah
19 March 2001

I love Austin. I love the city. I love where everything is located. I love the people in it. I love sxsw time especially.

This year, however, I'm glad I was going to visit friends, because the actual festival part of it was a bit depressing. Everyone's been fired, so there were no real parties or people hanging out like previous years, and it seemed a bit empty. Even the panels were like, "I used to have a job and lots of money and then blah blah happened with the blee dee blah and now I'm homeless. Thanks."

So, thankfully there were friends in from out of town and plenty of people to hang out with and lots of good movies to see. The first thing we saw was a collection of short films. Now, usually in a short films collection almost all of them are ass and like, two will be good. This was an entire collection of smart, funny, moving pieces. Two of them won awards for the festival. Allison's friend Dan's short film (which won awards at Sundance) took another honorable mention here. The best was a short film called "Helicopter," and it was just beautiful. Everyone was crying.

So, lots of films ended up being sold out and by Saturday evening we learned that we could actually see movies by pushing the Bad Dog's good name, so we all ended up stuck in the worst movie ever. Bartleby. Man, being a Crispin Glover fan can sometimes be incredibly painful. The movie was so bad that we've created a verb. If you think you're going to something cool so you end up pushing yourself into a good position so you don't miss any of the fun and it ends up being horrible and now you're stuck because you lobbied yourself into your place in the room-- you've been Bartlebied.

The only thing that helped was going to Casino El Camino afterwards to spend an hour taking turns pretending to be Ozzy playing Trivial Pursuit.

We saw my friends' comedy troupe that night and met up with Wing, Kim, Omar and Rebecca. Then everyone went to the Bad Dog again.

I don't really want to do a blow-by-blow on the week, but it was a great time. There were lots of people there that I wanted to see, I saw some really good movies, drove around my favorite places in Austin, got to eat at Kerbey and Trudy's, had Mexican Martinis, ran through a rainstorm without getting hit by lightning, learned that I do a wicked Michelle impression, talked to Michelle's Mom on the phone, stayed up incredibly late, got to see almost everyone I wanted to and laughed so hard my face hurt.

My panel didn't suck, my friends' panels didn't suck, we all didn't suck. I passed out Squishy t-shirts (I'm thinking later this week they'll be on sale, kids. Steal your parents' credit cards now). I ate good food. I had coffee. I laughed and laughed.

Oh, and I had to do a performance at the Austin Music Hall. Because it wouldn't be a trip home without a strange performance. The Austin Music Awards are like the prom of Austin and every year people freak out and fill this concert hall to listen to bands and see awards. It's on Austin public television like, ALL THE TIME. So, this year for some reason, they thought a comedy troupe would fit right in. I spent the evening backstage with my friends and troupmates waiting to go onstage. We were there in case something went wrong and they needed filler. Fortunately, the show went fine. But they still had five minutes set aside for us. So, Joseph and I went onstage in front of a couple thousand people and did our singing sketch. The four hundred or so that listened apparently liked it quite a bit. It didn't suck and people said it was good. So, if you're flipping through Austin television late at night and you hear me singing some Jewel, let me know. Let me know if I look like a big scary monster, would you? Because it's mortifying for me to think that I'm going to be on heavy rotation on channel eight.

"south by so what?"