Enjoy Sexwuh, Everybody!

It’s Hell Week here in Austin, thanks to the South By Southwest Festival and Conference, or SXSW. The proper way to refer to the festival is to pronounce the acronym letters phonetically—Sexwuh. Just trust me on this. What began 23 years ago as a funky little music festival has become a bloated, internationally known multimedia Leviathan at which computer nerds, film geeks and wannabe rock stars can congregate and seriously annoy us locals.

I don’t mean to sound as if I'm disparaging SXSW (say it with me: Sexwuh); the fact is, I wholeheartedly support it. It’s a great place for doing whatever computer nerds do, catching the premiere of mainstream and indie films, and for hearing well-known music acts such as Katy Perry and the Decemberists, as well as little-known acts with appealing names such as Pink Nasty, The Dicks, and Angry Vs. the Bear. It’s also a great place for staying up till 4 a.m., drinking and smoking yourself into a stupor, having sex with random diseased strangers, and leaving your stomach contents on the sidewalk for people to step in the next day. But SXSW is no longer for me personally, because I soooo outgrew that kind of thing, like, three weeks ago.

The festival draws people of all ages and demographics from all over the world. I still might attend the film conference if the whole thing hadn’t gotten so crowded and expensive. In a radio interview the other morning, a young lady visiting from Australia said she planned to drop about four grand just on drinks and entertainment. Crikey, mate! She didn’t say whether her trip was being funded by an AIG bonus.

The one thing I can still afford to enjoy at SXSW is the people watching. I work downtown near the heart of the action, so I get mingle with the masses early in the day before they get too wasted and rowdy. Today I saw a number of young women who’d stuffed their ample flesh into outfits so skimpy and tight it looked as though their heads and/or feet might explode. (I wonder why so many overweight people feel obliged to put their fat on display? I thought society had shamed them into wearing muumuus. If I ever drop enough acid to see God, I’m going to ask him about this.)

Then there are the aging hipsters. Many of them wander around looking bewildered, as if they thought they were going to an Ozzy Osbourne concert but were cruelly transported elsewhere. They really make me sad. People older than I am should not be sporting multi-colored Mohawks and a Moped’s worth of metal in their faces.

Let’s not forget the Emo kids, that pasty-skinned breed of depressed shoe-gazers who wear their hair down over one eye and look as though they just crawled out of their parents’ basement after a five-year psilocybin binge, leaving a trail of tears and terrible poetry in their wake. Each time I see one I want to force-feed him or her a handful of Prozac.

On a fashion note, it seems that fewer and fewer young men are wearing what I call “shants.” I made up that word because I can’t tell whether these garments are long shorts or very short pants. Whatever the case, the waistband is typically worn around the knee area and the hemline ends just above the ankle. It makes the wearer look as though his legs are about 14 inches long, or that he hasn’t bought new pants since the age of six.

Anyway, whatever your cultural taste or choice of attire, you have only two days left to enjoy the festival, which ends Sunday. I encourage you to get out there and spend all your money, because the city of Austin needs the tax revenue from your food and booze expenditures to clean up all the puke and trash you leave behind.

Now get out there and live it up!

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