SXSW 2024 Report
In the middle of Austin on the first weekend of SXSW, a line forms on a backstreet between two office buildings empty for the weekend. This is the primary access line for the biggest movie venue, the Paramount Theatre, which is completely on the other side of the block. The next show doesn't start for two hours, but there are already 30 people in line, which looks like a lot more when people are giving each other ample room to spread out and sit down.
Another SXSW volunteer, a photographer, is next to me in line and he's struggling with a decision to stay in line now and go hungry, or risk coming back to a place in line where he won't get in (the Paramount Theatre seats 1,000), but I offer to hold his place in line so he can run back to his AirBnB. He returns grateful with a flask full of whiskey to share, and we settle in to enjoy some of the most perfect evening weather Austin has had in 2024.
We meet our neighbors in line, a software engineer from San Francisco, whose company paid his way to come to the tech-side of the conference where nearly half of the panels during the week have been about Artificial Intelligence, and his Chinese-born actress girlfriend. He is here because we are about to see the world premiere of the new Netflix show based on his favorite book, the award-winning Chinese science fiction novel by Liu Cixin. She is here because it is the only show downtown tonight. The music festival hasn't started yet, and the other film venues require you to take a (slow) shuttle a few miles away, so unless you want to go to a party in a hotel room sponsored by a tech company featuring bad music and overly sweet drinks, this is it.
We regale our out-of-town guests with stories of how much Austin has changed in just ten years, and how it had changed even more from the ten years before that, like a snake changing its skin. But just then, we are stopped by a gaunt young man with face tattoos.
He tells us - all in one burst like a scripted speech - that he wants us to know that Jesus loves us. He doesn't ask for anything in return and turns to proselytize to the rest of the people in line, but our gregarious photographer friend stops him and says, "Hey! Can I ask? What happened that brought you around to Jesus?"
A huge smile comes over his face, and he tells us "I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior when I was on psychedelics."
This is not the answer we were expecting.
"Yeah, I used to be on LSD a lot, and he filled my heart with love. I'm not on LSD anymore though."
After we thank him for telling us his story, we turn to look at each other, and I say, "Well, maybe Austin hasn't changed that much...!"
SXSW spreads and spills outside of downtown over an ungainly and unwalkable area, encompassing a haphazard jumble of things that don't seem to go together, having drifted apart under an increasingly large and diverse array of curators and outside influences. Browsing the panels and speakers at the Convention Center at any moment in 2024, you'd find an array of sweeping statements about the future of AI, and at least one talk about the health benefits of (as-yet illegal) psychedelic drugs. A musician bemoaned to me that the conference had very few worthwhile panels about navigating the ever-changing music industry.
The music festival itself is not a place where you will see very many of your favorite headlining bands, consisting mostly of local and international artists playing shows all day hoping to get seen by someone in the industry. The film festival consists of a number of buzzworthy world premieres - non-franchise Hollywood fare trying to boost its potential audience - brushing up against bizarre indie experiments, middling music documentaries, and a growing slate of gory "midnighters" for horror fans. Locals with $130 wristbands stand scowling in line for hours, often unable to get in when any badge holder can skip them in line.
SXSW is a place where any badge holder - mainly tech industry people whose companies' fork up $1,000+ per badge, bu also the army of volunteers who keep the festival running and get their badge for free - can try the latest VR experiences, get their photo taken on the Iron Throne, and be wined and dined by brands like Porsche and Tide. And SXSW is a place where the Tide lounge can become the cool place to hang out with free drinks and hangout games, and the Porsche lounge can be a waste of time with weak drinks and empty promises of food.
What supposedly ties SXSW together is the celebration of creating things. Standup comedy and cooking are becoming a growing part of the festival. The sense of this identity has been lost in the festival's need for large corporate sponsors to support its growing size. Sponsors which this year included U.S defense contractors, companies who build the weapons currently being used against both Russia and the defenseless hospitals and refugee camps in Gaza. Many musicians, notably the entirety of a large contingent from Ireland, came all the way to Austin and then cancelled their SXSW shows. Arguably, this didn't hurt the festival; the bands still played "unofficial" shows in Austin. Badgeholders did not go empty-handed.
Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird
2023, USA, d. Nicolas Jack Davies, 2h7m, ***
With a large music festival, it makes sense that the film festival should have a sizeable sidebar of films about music-making, mostly documentaries. In my experience, when a festival has a particular theme to fill, they will place more value on content than quality. Which is not to say that the many music documentaries here are low quality, but there are a lot of middle-of-the-road docs that offer valuable content without revolutionizing the craft. I was drawn to this doc because the subjects were big when I was in college and then I never heard much from them after; Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala are two hyper-creative musicians from Texas who embody the unbounded creative DIY spirit that SXSW is meant to celebrate.
Omar and Cedric grew up in El Paso as close-bonded childhood friends as you'll ever see. Early on, when they started touring the country with no money and their instruments in the back of a beat-up, old station wagon, they made a promise to each other: if their careers ever threatened their friendship, they would walk away and stay friends. The band was At the Drive-In, and it would soon explode into a cult '90s alt-punk phenomenon where raucous audiences dangerously crowded the stage, attracting unsavory factions they didn't always agree with politically.
And so, just as they were poised to become a national headlining act, with a contract that could make them rich, they just walked away. They had to escape toxic personalities within the band, and studio demands which were creatively stifling their music.
Subsequently they formed The Mars Volta, which became an even bigger phenomenon, their unique & fully bilingual blend of prog metal and Latin rhythms appealing to a huge, underserved Latin-American audience. But after the death of one of their bandmates, Cedric turned to Scientology for help with his mental health, and the band disintegrated again.
The story of Cedric turning to Scientology, the wedge it drove between him and his closest friends, and his eventual redemption from it, seems like story enough for its own movie, but frustratingly it is only covered in fairly broad strokes here. It's possible they pulled punches to prevent legal attention from the famously litigious church. But it's just as likely that the filmmakers didn't want the story of one of the "brothers" to take over.
The film is a little bit daring stylistically: it draws from a vast treasure trove of Omar's own home videos, short films, and concert footage, and the documentary mimics the footage's lo-fi VHS aesthetic that befits the musicians' DIY origins. The narration by Omar and Cedric is personal and personable. They are down-to-earth and not self-aggrandizing (except that the end of the film inevitably feels like an advertisement for the reunion of The Mars Volta). It works against the film as a "music documentary", because it fails to describe their musical prowess or explain how influential and impactful either of their bands have become.
Ultimately, Omar & Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird is a treasure trove for fans who would finally like to get a glimpse into their heroes' guarded private lives, but would not be a useful primer to their music to newcomers.
Secret Mall Apartment
2024, USA, d. Jeremy Workman, 1h 31m, ****1/2
In the '90s, Providence, Rhode Island had a vibrant scene of mixed-media artists and musicians, many of whom lived cheaply as collectives in repurposed warehouses from over a century ago. That all changed when the city's council decided to "revitalize" the region by tearing the crumbling buildings down to erect a monument more befitting the twentieth century's "march of progress": a shopping mall. The proposed 5-story mega mall would be a major destination, able to attract the consumer economy from neighboring towns (and states). The result was a facade that towered over the city center like a curtain wall, a fortress which strikingly had no pedestrian access on the poorer side of town that it loomed over.
Enter artist Michael Townsend who watched the construction shoot up over him every day for years on the remains of his former home. And he noticed that the curved facade wasted conspicuous amounts of space around the rectangular rooms built within for future stores. After the mall's opening, he led his artist collective friends to venture into the off-limits maintenance access hallways undetected. And they soon found an entire room-sized area with no purpose, no traffic, and no security. Since Providence decreed that the mall be built with the purpose of better "utilization" of the land inside the city, they slyly decided to "utilize" the unused space inside the mall. They were soon smuggling furniture in, and a TV and a Playstation; they hung out there, they spent nights there. They went undetected by mall employees for four years.
I won't spoil anything that happened next, as the details of this hidden "art project" deserve to be experienced as presented in this film. The artists involved documented their work with a pocket-sized early digital consumer camera. The highlights of over 20 hours of footage form the core of the documentary, and are no less engrossing for being recorded in the dismal resolution of 240p. Most of the artists involved have remained anonymous for the last twenty years for fear of legal retaliation, but all have come forward to be a part of this film, and each has a different interpretation of what their project meant.
On top of all of this, the collectives' public facing work - in a medium they called "tape art" - is equally amazing: so simple but ingenious, so inclusive and generous, disposable (literally) but immediately impactful to the general public in a way that most art isn't.
This speaks to the deeper identity of Secret Mall Apartment's star, Michael Townsend, who lives his life for art, and the universality of artistic expression. He has a magical ability to encourage anyone he encounters to be an artist for at least a moment, and the documentary conveys all of this to its audience, an inspiration to anyone who views it. It was the kind of creatively-inspiring experience that SXSW always aspires to celebrate.