You know how some days you find yourself shopping with fancy people in Soho or cute hipsters in Williamsburg or maybe one night you look up and you're at Star Shoes in L.A. with Kirsten Dunst and Jake Gyllenhaal, and basically it all just makes you feel like the chubbiest, most K-Mart shopping girl in class? Well, when you first get to SXSW in Austin, you feel on top of the world, like a genius and a Heather all rolled into one.
It's obvious enough that indie rock hipsters generally look like total shit in the daylight. It's a nighttime look—the dyed black, unwashed hair, contrast stitching on unwashed jeans, ill-advised experiments with socks and heels (listen, ladies, it looks cute in the magazines, but only 1 in 500 of you can pull it off), black-rimmed eyes, failed attempts to bring back thrifted Z. Cavarrichis—all of it gains a veneer of coolness in a cavernous and smoky dark bar. On Sixth Street, in broad daylight, it just looks tired and dirty.
And so it was upon our arrival in Austin on Friday; we walked around, our very fresh-facedness turning into some sort of counter-culture statement amongst the free-range hipsters crowded outside Stubbs' Barbecue trying to crash the Spin Magazine party to see The Hives. All right, Ed and I were part of that unsuccessful crowd; but at least as we left that disaster I got to see my boyfriends Nicholaus and Pelle up close and personal as they were ferried into the venue. A mere few thousand beers later, after checking out old friends American Analog Set for the millionth time, and stumbling back to the Hilton to meet back up with Lauren (whose media badge got her right the fuck in to Stubbs) and Roger, one might think we were beginning to resemble what only a few hours before we ridiculed.
The Austin Hilton during SXSW: So many industry-types in their mid-30s wearing sunglasses inside, so little time. To make fun of them properly.
Room service hamburgers perked our haggard asses right up, and we headed back out, sure that we were still cooler than all these cool kids crowding the streets. Checked in at some bar to see the fairly crappy band Film School—all right, really crappy, they drove Lauren and I back out onto the streets—and upon our exodus walked by Art Alexakis who looked at us, wagged his cigar, and aggressively wished we'd recognize him. At this point, Lauren and my craving for a ride on a pedi-cab was becoming a sort of obsession.
We round Friday night out by seeing The Features and The Killers and Kinski at various venues and also by having to engage in awkward hugs with our husband's ex-girlfriend. Um, hi? Kinski is awesome but pretty much blows my ears out. Though we were aiming to see The Constantines after Kinski, someone gets serious 411 on some party where Johnny Knoxville and Drea DeMatteo are in attendance, and decides that this random combo of celebrity needs to be witnessed. I do not agree and go home to the hotel with Lauren.
Ed and Roger finally stumble home at some point, giggling like a couple of 7-year-old girls playing doctor with each other.
Saturday began promisingly with a late lunch at Trudy's. Two words: The Swirl. Not a sex move, but a swirly delicious margarita, that they let you take away in a to-go cup. Well maybe they don't exactly let you, but if you sneak your margarita into one under the table, nobody's gonna bug you about it. The Swirl buzz gets us over to see The Unicorns at Club DeVille. The music is incredible, but one of the lead singers looks like a fetus. And that's all I want to say about that. In front of me during that show are two incredibly average-looking girls with a nattily-dressed gay man. They were all like "Omigod! Look at us and our GAY friend! At a rock show! Gasp!" They were singing the words so aggressively it was obvious that their "cool" gay friend from work had convinced them to come to the show earlier in the week and had burned them copies of the album to get ready for it. And then they learned all the words. To sing them at the show. So WE would know that THEY knew what the fetus was singing about.
Lauren coins the phrase of the weekend, "I'm starting to get tired of dirtbags" and so we take a break back at the Hilton for dinner. Personally, I'm starting to love the scene at the Hilton. It's so euro-Rock.
Lauren and I attempt to see the Old 97s, for old time's sake, and are totally unsuccessful. And by unsuccessful I mean hoodwinked into thinking the jerkwads setting up on stage for 45 minutes (are you tuning all the guitars in Texas?) are doing so for our boyfriend, Rhett. Nope, some tiny chick gets up there and starts crooning away. It's Patti Griffin, and no offense to her fans, but she's no Rhett Miller. We get in a pedi-cab, undergo an entirely uncontrollable fit of laughter at being driven around town by a bike, and make our way over to some other bar to bide time until its the acceptable hour of 2 a.m. to go to the Vice Magazine party. We're just trying to maintain at this point.
Ahh, the Vice Magazine party. So much ironic 80s style, so little time. It's obviously being held on the East side of Austin—you know the "bad" part of town, cuz the people at the show aren't trust fund kids from Williamsburg or L.A. or anything. We basically stand around in the dirt for 4 hours, bouncing from the dance party inside—which starts out promising with some serious DMX and Van Halen but devolves into time-card-punching 80s standards—to the live music outside. The Stills are playing, and are their I-can't-articulate-anything-specifically-wrong-with-them-but-they're-still-pretty-boring selves. David Cross and Johnny Knoxville are there (old buddies from Men In Black II, obviously), and Roger has a long-ass conversation with David Cross, not one minute of which he will remember in the morning. I just stand next to each of them for a while, and consider my fame whoring done.
But the beer's free, and we're not complaining. Ed sees lots of old friends from Austin—some doing great, some totally strung out—and we run into a bunch of Chicago friends, as well. Which is, in the end, why rock and roll is great.
Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, we stumble out of the party (for Roger this is a literal statement, and some strange girl's boobs bear witness to his stumbling), and it being in a "bad" part of town and all, there aren't any cabs to be found. So we follow the long line of refugees ahead of us back to the Hilton which looms over us, so close yet so far. It's a long walk. We don't walk real straight. Where are our goats and tractors? We walk under I-35. There are bats screeching above us. We walk on a bridge over a babbling brook—still babbling in the midst of all this urban debauchery—and finally we realize: we are the dirtbags now.
So we get to our room, order room service and eat our chicken fingers and fries in bed, crumbs falling down our tank tops between our boobs. We are the dirtbags. After we're done with the chicken fingers, we barely shove the plate onto the nightstand before passing out. We are the dirtbags.
And goddamned if it doesn't feel good.
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