SXSW: Girl Fart, cheese graters & snow globes

Let me just say how cool it is that so many people showed up for our party yesterday at a venue with a tiny sign in the middle of a block kind of at the far end of 6th Street that had just opened the day before. Folks, it was a good choice. Highlights: Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond covering Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over” (I vote for a MBD-does-Orbison cover album a la Scarlett Johansson doing Tom Waits-- maybe John C. Reilly can make a guest appearance), Destroyer destroying, Nada Surf making me wonder how I missed them the first time around and vowing not to let them slip by me again, Colour Revlot proving why half the Paste staff is obsessed with them, Delta Spirit and their huge Music Man drum and busted up trash-can lid channeling some crazy backwoods rock, Peter Moren wearing keds and providing the second whodathunk perfect cover the afternoon (Buddy Holly’s “Oh Boy!").

Due to all the excitement, I don’t think we fully explained this “blogger cage” concept. Ironicallly, words cannot fully express the majesty of the blogger cages, so you’ll just have to wait for the photos. I will say that in addition to the two blogger cages there are a number of other fancy Dell laptops scattered around the venue, some of which are suspended from the ceiling by chains (yeah, chains and cages-- I swear this is not an S&M club) and accessible by wireless keyboards stationed on the bar below. This is pretty cool but of course is subject to the requisite abuses of public computers. At one point yesterday I walked by this bank of suspended laptops and realized they were all set to the same MySpace page, which was blaring music just barely audible over the band’s performance below. I’m a total killjoy so I set them all to “mute” but really, Peter Moren does not need to struggle to be heard over the raucous sounds of a band called Girl Fart.

For as much as yesterday’s day party was a major success, last night was kind of disappointing. It was FAILXSW, if you will. I’d been planning for weeks-- WEEKS!-- to go up to Mohawk for the Secretly Canadian/Jagjaguwar/Dead Oceans showcase, parking myself for the duration of the evening. I was especially excited about seeing Bon Iver (who I love), Jens Lekman (also love) and Black Mountain (who I think I might love) back to back to back. Web Warrior Austin was also pumped about this. In fact, I believe the term “weeping with excitement” was used at some point to explain just how much we were looking forward to this evening. However, I made a really unfortunate choice early in the day that totally ruined my whole plan: I wore new shoes. Shoes that seemed like they’d be really comfortable to walk in all day, that would maybe rub a little but certainly wouldn’t, you know, completely eat up my feet like they were lined with cheese graters. Which is pretty much what happened. It probably didn’t help that I walked something like ten blocks to a restaurant supply store first thing in the morning-- a trip that could have easily been made via ‘Dillo, the city’s awesome free shuttle service. But I didn’t know that so I cheese grated my way all over there, only remembering about ‘Dillo once my two banquet-sized polyester table cloths had been purchased and my feet were curling up into hot, painful, be-blistered wads. They were promptly bandaged up upon my return to the venue but after trotting around the party all day they were pretty much footy mush by dinner time. Thought a footwear change at the hotel would help, but by the time I verily jogged up to Mohawk in fear of missing Bon Iver I might as well have been running barefoot through a hot desert of broken glass. And cheese graters.

But such is my love for this fellow Justin Vernon who calls himself Bon Iver. His album For Emma Forever Ago is one of my favorites of the year so far, and the more I hear it the more I’m struck by how extraordinarily beautiful it is. I haven’t read a single thing about him that hasn’t mentioned that he made the album during the winter he spent in his dad’s hunting cabin in Wisconsin, and while that story’s sure to get a little old the more exposure he recieves (and it’s been increasing steadily since the album was released last month) I almost don’t mind because it’s so incredibly relevant. The music is inextricably tied to his life in that very specific place and time, and it feels like a beautiful snow-globe of an album, but last night proved to me that Vernon clearly doesn’t feel these songs are too precious to be kept on ice. For Emma feels just as restrained as it feels cathartic, but at several points last night Vernon spooled into a howling mess, throwing himself up out of the chair he sat in on stage, his voice splintering deep in his throat. He was joined for the set by a drummer and a second guitarist who helped recreate much of the ghosty texture that Vernon himself etched in icy layers on the album. Just like he didn’t realize he’d made an album till he’d left Wisconsin, it’s almost as if he didn’t realize how truly powerful that record was until it hit the rest of the world. Thinking about it now gives me chills, and that’s saying a lot considering I’m still up in this blogger cage at our stuffy venue, and the crowd’s now pouring in for today’s day party.

By the time Bon Iver’s set ended, my inability to keep standing for much longer became increasingly obvious. I didn’t really want to be that girl who passed out during the Jens Lekman set, though I did consider that maybe Jens would then leap down from the stage and revive me and then sweep me off to Kortedala, or at least some midnight taco stand down the street. But I might have even been to dead-tired for that, so I just left Austin to weep with excitement on his own for the rest of the night. Sorry, desk buddy!

Today my feet are fully BandAid-ed up (I feel like a gymnast or a rock climber or maybe just someone who walked like 30 blocks in some stupid-ass uncomfortable shoes yesterday) and things are looking up. Lightspeed Champion’s on stage at the party, wearing a How’s Your News? shirt and an amazing wooly hat that’s unfortunately covering up his even more amazing hair. He’s got a violinist with him so basically I am incapable of loving it.