Thursday, March 18th, 2010...5:06 pm
Inlog.org blogging live from SXSW 2010 Part 3
On the verge of the madness.
Started out today (Tuesday) with lunch at Freddies (as recommended), together with Erwin Blom and Gert-Jan, hosts of the Posterous blog I’m also writing this for. A bit later, Sander Kerkhof joined. Erwin and Gert-Jan were here in Austin for the Interactive part of SXSW, Sander came over to cover SXSW for Het Parool. Heard some cool stories about the seminars (and the enormous amount of them), and some interesting new developments. Noticed that their badges had a QR code on them. If you scan that one with your phone, you automatically add this persons information to your address book. Whitty technique. ……. told me a story about a dude who tattood a QR code on his arm. If you scan it, it changes in a dog, walking over the arm. Now that’s a cool tattoo. After lunch, off to the registration desk, to pick up my badge.
The cool thing about the compact city centre of Austin is, that you bump into people you know quiet fast. Monday I already ran into some friends from Eindhoven, today I ran into Marco Roelofs, singer of Dutch punkband The Heideroosjes, and here as a journalist for Fret magazine. We had a chat, and decided to go to the Lemmy (of Motorhead fame) Q&A together, later on during the day.
The girls from Capsule, an organization from Birmingham, England, were organizing a Q&A with Lemmy of Motorhead, to celebrate the launch of the movie “Lemmy” and the start of the “Home of Metal” archives, an initiative that promotes Birmingham’s heritage as birth place of metal in Europe, with bands as Black Sabbath, Godflesh, Led Zeppelin and Napalm Death all hailing from there. Cool initiative, if I may say. The Brittish government put in quiet a bit of money to organize all sorts of stuff like this at SXSW. Cool thing too, is that they hire an organization like Capsule to promote and produce the whole thing, instead of trying to do it themselves, without any knowledge of what they are talking about. It works both ways, this way. Capsule gets a great opportunity to promote themselves abroad, and broaden their network, and the whole thing gets done by people who know what they are talking about and who have passion for the thing.
The whole Q&A was pretty funny. Lemmy is an extremely whitty guy, who had the interviewer cornered after 3 questions or so. Question: “What’s the worst hangover you ever had?” Answer: “To have an hangover, you gotta stop drinking…”. Question: “What was it like working for Jimmy Hendrix?” Answer: “He was stoned all the time…..and so was I. Also, he was an extremely egalitarian guy. When he got his hands on 10 pills, he’d pop me 3, and take 7 himself. I thought that was a nice thing of him…”…..and so on, and so on.
After the Q&A, Sander, Marco and me went to a network diner from the Rotterdam media commission, organized by the commissioner of Film and the commissioner of Radio and Music. There sole job is to get cultural organizations in Rotterdam noticed on an international level. They are a sort of Independent semi-government organization. Once again (besides The Hague, I don’t think any city can top that) a city that puts a lot of money and effort in promoting their cultural means abroad. Rotterdam sees it as a focus of their political policy. Are you paying attention, Tilburg politicians?
Anyways, the company was nice, the beers were good to, and had a good talk about politics, short term political gain and cooporation and co-creation in the cultural sector. Almost felt like home again. This is what we spend most of our time on at the Incubate HQ. The diner was in a really a-typical, fancy schmancy restaurant called Maria Maria or something. We got a shitload of taco’s and tortilla’s. Pretty ok, but not nearly as good as anything I ate before here in Austin. “Cracker food”, my friend Shawn would say….(cracker being the white equivalent of nigger, basically dumb douchebag whiteguys). So, too bad about the food, but the whole thing was really nice and usefull.
Went to the Motorhead show at Stubb’s right after the diner, to find out it already started 45 minutes ago, when I arrived. Too bad…not gonna spend 36 dollars on 25 minutes of Motorhead. Seen ‘m a million times in Tilburg already. Hung outside Stubb’s for the rest of the set, to listen to it. You could hear it perfectly well. The played 1 of my favorites, “Going to Brazil” and of course “Killed by death” and “Ace of Spades”. After that, I went to the Red Eyed Fly, where a free pre-SXSW party was going on, with all sorts of cool bands.
Drive Like Maria (from the Netherlands / Belgium) managed to get on the bill, which is really cool for them. They played a decent set, and the crowd liked it. It will never become my favorite band, but they really are a solid act nowadays. After that, the mighty Broken Teeth played on the outside stage. Jason McMaster, former singer of Watchtower is the frontman of this AC/DC and Rose Tattoo influenced band. They really gave a high energy kick ass rock and roll show. I really need a band again myself, when seeing this. McMaster did a perfect Brian Johnson imitation, both vocal wise as stage-presence wise. Couldn’t be bothered too much though, the show was fucking amazing.
After Broken Teeth, local heroes Honky were on, with Jeff Pinkus of the Butthole Surfers on bass. They left a really good impression last year, but unfortunately, they weren’t repeating that this year. It was good, really good (Bobby Landgraf is a kick ass guitar player), but not outstanding. And the special guest wasn’t all that spectacular either…., but it was entertaining enough to have a couple of beers over. After that, peddled my was back to the house with my fixed gear bike. Those things really work well here on the long straight stretches of concrete, but I have to get used to not really having brakes….
Oh, and one last advice on a somewhat food related thing: Hot Sauce. If you are into hot sauce, and then I don’t mean that whimpy asian chili stuff, but strong Mexican or American pepper sauce, go to a little store called Tears of Joy. It’s on 6th, east of Red River. Tears of Joy is a shop that specializes in hot sauce, and have an own brand of it too. It’s really delicious stuff, they got several dozens of hot sauces to pick from. I got a little tour in the kitchen, where they were preparing the green hot sauce, based on tomatillo’s, a sort of green tomato, where the owner was flaming the shit out of with a blow torch, to give ‘m some more flavor. Really interesting process of how it’s made. The guys there can tell you all about it. Also, notice the little vile of chili oil on the counter. You can’t touch it, since it will burn through your skin. How’s that for hot sauce….
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