It's Tuesday night and I'm in my room at the Omni Hotel in Austin, TX. Day five of my six day trip to Austin for South by Southwest is coming to an end and since I don't have to be up early tomorrow for any panels, I figured I would write about my time at the conference really quickly before going to bed.
I arrived here Friday morning and immediately headed out to eat lunch with my old boss, Yossi, who has now moved on to work at fotolog. We hopped in his rental car and drove out to Luling, TX where I was introduced to real barbecue. The ribs at City Market in Luling were an eye opening experience. Walking into the smoke room inside the restaurant and having a guy throw some ribs and brisket on a big piece of butcher paper with a couple slices of white bread on the side was a major wtf moment. Luckily I wasn't burdened with the task of grabbing the paper by the ends and carrying the food to the table without spilling all the food everywhere. Tasting the ribs for the first time was a major omfg moment. It was incredibly tender and smoky. I had barbecue at three other places throughout the trip and they were all incredibly good as well but nothing like City Market.
Oh yeah, the people in City Market were real Texas sized gigantic if you know what I mean. Yossi and I were easily the thinnest people there. While I'm on the topic of things in Texas being gigantic, I'd like to mention that the medium drink I got at Whataburger was about the size of a supersized drink at McDonalds in Seattle or New York. It was absolutely ridiculous.
Another foodie religious experience was the Mexican food here. Aside from the taco truck near Andrew's apartment in Bellingham, I've never had Mexican food this good. Taco Xpress and Las Manitas were the real standouts.
One last thing before I get to SXSW, I had the opportunity to go to two honky tonks here and it was surprisingly enjoyable. It was the sort of thing that I thought only existed in movies but walking in there and seeing people in cowboy hats and boots dancing was awesome.
Through experiences such as visiting the honky tonks and receiving gargantuan medium drinks, lots of stereotypes about Texas were confirmed for me. Luckily, the trip long joke about the threat of a local shooting one of us cityfolk with a shotgun was proven wrong. Everybody was quite nice, we were in Austin after all.
More stereotypes were confirmed at the interactive festival at SXSW. I had been sent by work to learn about the future of video on the internet and also things like Javascript, Ruby on Rails, and AJAX. Really exciting stuff. The conference ran from Saturday through Tuesday and consisted of one hour panels starting at 10am and running until 6pm. They ranged from completely useless to brilliant resulting in an uneven but ultimately very satisfying and enjoyable experience.
Throughout the conference I was surrounded by people way smarter than me and it was a great learning experience. When my coworker who was sent with me, Baldur, managed to drag me out to some of the industry parties I ended up meeting people whose books I had read while learning web design and many other people whose books I'll be picking up once I'm back in New York. It was incredibly exciting in the geekiest of ways.
Biggest geeky moment: freaking out and hitting Baldur to get his attention when Will Wright walked past us. For the record, he looked very upset and appeared to have a broken arm.
As my geeky moment can attest, there is a bit of a cult of personality in the internet geek world, as with any world really. That was one of the annoying things about the conference but definitely not the most annoying.
Top prize for obnoxiousness goes to all the self righteous video bloggers at SXSW. They all seem to think that what they're doing is somehow subversive. That they're taking down the man, that video blogging is some sort of statement against the government, TV, and Hollywood. VIDEOBLOGGING IS NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR TV OR MOVIES! It's just another choice and a pretty shitty one too considering the quality of the work being put online right now. Videoblogging is technologically exciting but artistically sorely lacking. From what I've seen so far even the best videoblogs are poorly shot and poorly edited. And really, as a film lover, I don't even like watching things on a 32' TV, watching stuff in a small window on a computer monitor kills me. They all think that Just because they're independent and "not letting the man tell us what to say!" what they do is good.
Independent filmmakers aren't given a lot of leeway when it comes to the guidelines by which we judge their craftsmenship so I don't think videobloggers should be cut any slack either. They're not revolutionaries or artists, they're just geeks with video cameras until they prove otherwise. Rant over, the handful of people who read this now probably think I'm a huge asshole. Yeehaw.
For the record: Ask a Ninja kicks ass and is hilarious.
Anyway, outside of interactive (which I've only begun to scratch the surface of) I have managed to see one film so far. It was a film called Blackbird and it was just okay. It's about two homeless people who cross paths but don't notice at the beginning of the movie then later meet and fall in love, blah blah blah, *yawn*.
Now, I'm not yawning because it was boring, that was a food coma induced yawn. Food coma as a result of seeing the movie at the greatest theater on earth, The Alamo Drafthouse where I enjoyed the movie with a pizza called "The Raging Bull" and a basket of cheese fries. If you read Ain't it Cool News you've heard of this place and yes, it's as great as they say it is. I can't really place my finger on what exactly makes it so great because there are other theaters that show great movies or serve food during movies but The Alamo Drafthouse just seemed to do everything perfectly. Just sitting there in the seat before the movie even started was one of those really really happy moments that you sometimes have where everything just seems right with the world (of course we all know that to be completely wrong so it's a good thing more of these theaters don't exist, otherwise the world would go straight to hell (faster than it already is)).
Speaking of Ain't It Cool News. Harry, the guy who runs the site, passed me his way to the Robert Rodriguez panel, "Grindhouse 101." Harry's a pretty big guy, I'm just going to leave it at that. This also reminds me about the panel itself. The Grindhouse panel was one of the film panels I went to when there were no important interactive ones to attend. Robert Rodriguez is very entertaining and for anybody who knows my taste in film Grindhouse is not quite "right up my alley" but maybe right up one of the main arterials. It's a guilty pleasure and from what he showed us it looks like it's going to be a really fun movie.
Aside from his own film, he showed us a fake grindhouse trailer made by Eli Roth that was really dumb/hilarious/shocking. Ask me in person and I can describe it for you sometime.
Anyway, there's much more to say and maybe some pictures to post later. I'll do all that when I get back to Brooklyn, for now I need to get some sleep because I've been sitting here writing this for over an hour now. Goodnight.
p.s. Twitter.com. It's so hot right now. You heard it here first... and maybe last... but everyone here seems to think it's the next big thing.
