I’m patching back in after a whirlwind of a week. Last everything and nothing was really short, but hopefully this one makes up for it!
A little known fact about me: I was born in a tiny town outside Nashville. When I talk about being from LA, I’m very careful to only say I was raised here. We moved to LA when I was two and I’ve never been back to Tennessee. I’ve only met a couple people from my parent’s Nashville circle, those who came out to LA by chance and managed to track down our contact info. When my parents lived in Nashville, they made music under the name Watermelon Road (the award for cutest band name ever goes to…). The year before I was born, they attended South by Southwest in Austin and played in a bar on 6th street. The next year, they were asked to go as representatives of the local paper, but by then my mom was pregnant and my due date fell within days of the festival. So they declined the paper’s offer, as my mother says, she’d made other plans she couldn’t get out of.
When two of Chris’ projects got into this year’s SXSW, my parents were over the moon and encouraged me to go see Austin. Chris and I both worked on a short that got into 2020’s SXSW festival. We’d planned to go, but as we all know, that was the March when everything shut down. I was excited to see the town that my young parents had been to, maybe find a feeling of connection with their past lives. There’s so little documentation of their world before me and before my mom got sick, I was hopeful I’d get the spirit of what they’d experienced all those years ago.
As soon as the uber dropped us in the heart of the festival, I realized I probably wouldn’t find a sense of the past. Downtown Austin has exploded into a metropolis very quickly—according to multiple uber drivers the skyline changed dramatically in just 5 years. The domed capitol used to be the tallest building—now it’s dwarfed by soaring glass and metal high rises. With staggering buildings on either side, the streets turn into micro wind tunnels, blowing away napkins, flinging hair and sending posters flying.
The festival itself has morphed along with the city. Tech, music, film, it’s all stomping along the same sidewalk. This funny overlap creates a clash of Coachella vibes and film financier bros. Power casual business colleagues silently walk in herds, pursuing a cocktail between conferences. Once the sun went down, the town flipped into a Vegas/New Orleans kaleidoscope. 6th street, where my parents played in ’92, is now a corridor of neon streaked clubs with strobe lights reaching through the open windows and promoters shouting above the ricocheting bass. Shots for the ladies! Women, in for free! Get in before the line!