Bloody Mary. Those two words were music to my ears – cliche appropriate due to the ringing also in my ears by now – Saturday at 12 at La Feria with KD. Anxious to head back downtown, we met everyone out at Red7. Again, with some amazing luck, we made it in the door right before the 2 hour line planted itself there for the rest of the afternoon. Words I also loved hearing, in response to “Who are we here to see?”: “It’s the David Cross showcase.” Perfect.

We saw the bands Deerhunter, The Ponys, The Black Lips, and The Walkmen. We got to see David Cross perform, as well as Brain Posehn and (I think, but may have to edit this list later) Bob Odenkirk, Zack Galifianakis, and the girl that does the news on SNL that isn’t Tina Fey.

Here’s David Cross. I saw him listening and performing, my friends E and P took a pic with him (I’m so jealous!):

I really like the music that Deerhunter played, but I felt awful that I could not take my eyes off the lead singer. “The skinniest man on the face of the Earth,” claim the MySpacers. “He suffers from Marfan syndrome, try not to insult him,” others retort. The 1 in 5,000 Americans affected are typically tall, thin, and at risk of heart problems. Source(s): MySpace, March of Dimes, pitchforkmedia.com.

The Ponys were decent, The Black Lips better, and The Walkmen, whom I’ve seen before, couldn’t really project fully enough the perfect way the vocals and the vintage instruments compliment each other. Outside seemed to be tough, and with 800 bands and all that equipment, I’m sure the sound guys were toast.

I did get to have my photo taken with Brian Posehn:

All that work drinking and rocking made us hungry. We went for sushi

And got a ‘boatload’:

Here’s one more Frost Bank Tower pic:

From there we were headed to a party that ended up being canceled, so we re-routed our group to Firehouse, to see DJ Chicken George.

It wasn’t like we forgot about St. Patrick’s Day either, there was plenty of that everywhere.

That about wrapped it up. We made it out each day, and now it is time to relax. We’ll all be going through party and drink withdrawals, and missing live music. I think it is safe to say that SXSW has been one of the best things I’ve finally been able to experience. It opened my eyes to so much new music to listen to, so much to think about, and so many new friends that I’m still in overload. I didn’t leave the house today, and it’s going to be tough to get back on schedule.

It’s cute that we all make jokes about the mad influx of hipsters, but our city has to embrace this week, this party we throw. It’s that good.

You can’t handle this. What a week it’s been already. Last night started out perfect. I made it in time to KD’s to see the end of the big Duke upset. We rounded up the crew, bigger and better with friends in town for the shows, and headed out to this party. On the way, we managed to go in two wrong entrances, the first of which scored is free stuff, no complaints. Finally we found the right gate.

How do we miss this:

if this is right next to it?

There was also a MOON BOUNCE, in case you missed that on the flyer. I didn’t get a good picture, but if you don’t know what they look like you had a horrible childhood.

There were astronauts.

Dancing astronauts.

There was free wine. Chairs. Fun music. We heard Kanye West’s DJ friend. We ran into what I’m guessing made our group total 20 people. I shut my phone off. That may be the smartest thing I’ve done yet. This is us smiling, phone free:

(we were doin’ ‘uconn’ in that last one, my other CT friend and I)

This is a picture to make snippy mad about having her drinking issues keeping her from meeting us out, she might like monkeys a little bit, and there were some:

After all the wine and music we could take in one place, JC, KD and I headed out to the Pure Volume party. There were more (free!) drinks, enough to get us all dancing, shouting and screaming.

And I’m really having a good time meeting strangers and taking pictures. Look how excited they were to meet us:

The Pure Volume party was an after hours party. They kept the liquor flowing until KD realized she had to be up in a few hours and we made our way back to the car. We may never know what happened at 3:15 that night, but something must have broken, they let us out of the hotel garage without paying. That’s right it was (free!) parking. To go with our (free!) drinks. How can you beat that?

The music report lacks a little substance, but we saw the bands on the flyer, some DJs, nothing that stood out to me. Maybe we’ll work on that tomorrow…

This is where the going gets tricky my friends. With the music portion of – I forgot to tell you we refer to this as ‘Southby’ – in full force, we are doing things like, ugh, waiting in lines. It was a whole new scene last night.

We started the night at our first ‘your name has to be on the list’ party, at a big warehouse, put on by Fader and Stereogum. We were on the list. Woo. We got to see this really great band called Lo Fi Fnk, which was three very, very young boys which I am relatively sure were from Sweden, maybe? They had all kinds of fun musical electronic equipment. As a direct contrast, right afterwards the Meat Puppets performed. I didn’t know I knew them, but recognized some songs. It was decent. They did have more (free!) drinks, but that didn’t tempt me. It was early. Aren’t these young guys cute?

When they shut a party down, it closes in 30 seconds, so they ran everyone out. Perhaps in the time it took us to get to our car, and make our foray over to east Austin to make a run at the iheartcomix party, everyone else must’ve flown. It was a little bit crowded. As in, we could stand in line with no promise of getting in, or we could find another party. What would you do? So we found another party. I can’t tell you how I got in, where we were, or whether or not we were technically supposed to be…but maybe this looks familiar.

White tent, red lights, could it be…*gasp*

Right. So, that was the band Illinois. Here’s a better picture, that guy was pretty cute:

Rounding out the night we heard The Annuals, which I’m not sure if their ability to play 800 instruments makes up for their odd comments and dull tunes, but they’re pretty popular so what do I know. Also there was Holy F**k, which was more of a DJ set even though it was all instruments, pretty cool.

Well, that about wraps it up, and I have to admit, although I’m only posting about Southby this week all in order, no interruptions, I’m working on much much more, and – I can’t lie…

watching basketball.