Cold Pizza Friday LVII

Imaginary SXSW (or, if you wish, ‘FOMO’)

I scrimped and saved for the plane tickets. I took night jobs. I barely made the cut-off date to register for press credentials. I got x-rayed at the airport (twice!), my flights were delayed, and the portly gentleman seated next to me had a snoring problem like I’ve never heard before. The shoulder strap on my duffel bag broke, but I am here, coming to you live from the Austin, Texas of my imagination! You see, dear friends, every spring this city is home to the biggest and most important annual confluence of music, film, interactive design, and business cards in the entire world ever! South! By! South! West!

I do have business cards, by the way. They’re really cool. I designed them myself because I really think I have a good eye for graphic design stuff and I don’t wanna just hand out something that people will go throw away as soon as I leave their eye line, y’know? Unfortunately, handing them out to people I meet here in Austin is my one and only strategy for ‘getting my name out there.’ See, I have this blog where I write about music. No, wait! Come back! Just hear me out! Okay. So. Like, I know that every hipster schmuck this side of Williamsburg has a music blog these days, but I swear mine is different. I like to think of myself more as a budding ‘critic’ than, like, some kind of Gorilla vs. Bear thing where I’m supposed to know about all the coolest new bands. I’m not into that stuff, y’know? I’m more about the music itself, like how it works and what it means and stuff. Like, I use Tumblr but not like everybody else uses Tumblr, y’know? I just like how many cool, genuine people who love music are on there. The internet’s really the future of all this stuff anyway, right?

So the thing you have to keep in mind about my imaginary SXSW is that it’s a giant freaking mess. Bands come from all over the country—even if they weren’t invited!—to find places to play this week just so they can say they ‘made a huge splash at this year’s SXSW.’ I’m not kidding. There are dudes with guitars (or, if you’re lucky, tambourines and 808s) on every street corner downtown singing their damn hearts out through portable PA systems. If you know someone here with a house, there are six bands playing there right now. If you know of a killer taco stand, they are having the best week of their lives. If you know where to get cheap beer and a seat in an air-conditioned room, you are everybody’s best friend. I mean, Austin during SXSW is this music industry, y’know? The next Animal Collective could be jamming out at the dive bar around the corner. You wouldn’t want to miss out on that, would you?

Oh wait, I think that dude walking down the sidewalk with the sunglasses is in The Strokes. Hang on, I’m gonna go try to talk to him. …Okay I guess he’s not, but he really does look like the bass player, doesn’t he? I mean I totally loved their first two albums even if the newer ones aren’t as good, y’know? Anyway, like I was saying, the bands that we’ll all be talking about a month from now are all here right now, playing to a crowd of twenty people. I mean, what if I’m just chilling at some random show and Bradford Cox or Ryan Schreiber happens to walk in? We could totally just hang out and talk music over some cheap beers. Careers are made that way, y’know? I’m not saying all I wanna do is schmooze with influential people while I’m out here in the Austin of my imagination, but how cool would it be to hang out with someone like that? Just to be there and be part of the action, y’know? I dunno, man, in my mind it was worth all the trouble.

    • Cold Pizza Friday LIII

    Imaginary Bonnaroo

    Man, I hadn’t planned on doing another ‘imaginary festival’ so soon, but then presto!: Bonnaroo announces their lineup this week and it’s time to load up the brain-van with our mental North Face vests and oatmeal-patchouli shampoo we won’t actually use and chug on up to Manchester, Tennessee for some sweltering, muddy…entertainment? While corporate sponsorship and Pacific-Northwest coffee culture collided to outline our fake Sasquatch! experience, Bonnaroo is a different beast altogether. It ends up being a good thing because, frankly, I’ve noticed the same 20 bands popping up at all of these summer festivals and am caught between the rock of repetition and the hard place of stubbornly not wanting to try anything new. Bonnaroo presents an ideal opportunity for novel experiences, since its very purpose is to serve as an anathema to everyday life.

    Going to any festival out in the wilderness will feel like entering another world, but B-roo is the reigning champion of lost netherverses and you should consider carefully the various shades of surreality you will encounter. Given the festival’s deep ‘hippie’ roots, you can expect widespread drug use, but what the folks out rolling/singing in the mud pits don’t realize is that there’s no need for chemical alteration when one takes adequate stock of one’s surroundings. Despite the vehemence with which many will argue, camping is never fun for anyone, ever. You will not sleep well—if at all—and will certainly not bathe, so as the festival rages on and the fog in your brain grows thicker and more noxious, you should find yourself acclimating out of pure numbness to the mixture of dust and sweat (much of it belonging to other people—personal space at these things is a luxury not even the headliners can afford) caked on your skin. Nourishment will also be in short supply (“$8 for a bottle of water?! Screw that!!”), so make sure you over-eat the week before to accrue fat stores on which to survive.

    As exhaustion causes your powers of discernment to drain from your ears and your inhibitions float out the top of your head and burst like bubbles of translucent cotton candy over the course of 4 days (oh Black Moth Super Rainbow, where have you gone?), take the opportunity to exchange the arms-folded yammering of Sasquatch! for some light, incoherent antagonism as a new method of performing your tastes (this tack will ultimately be more familiar to attendees well-versed in online conversations, so that’s a plus).

    Join me at these, where we’ll throw stuff and yell:
    - Arcade Fire (Bring a boombox and play Grammy Award acceptance speech music when Win Butler tries to talk between songs.)
    - The Black Keys
    - My Morning Jacket (Be the two people ruining the interminable jam for everyone else by shouting ‘Freebird!’ It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.)
    - Lil Wayne (Find six other people and paint the letters F-R-E-E-W-E-E-Z-Y on our torsos—then make anagrams.)
    - The Strokes
    - The Decemberists (Stand near the few remaining washed, be-sweatered attendees and concentrate on smelling our worst.)
    - Iron & Wine (“We were into this guy back when he was on Sub Pop! SUB-POP! SUB-POP!”)
    - Gogol Bordello
    - Beirut
    - Girl Talk (“Actually, y’know what? Nevermind. Let’s just go listen to the real Big Boi.”)
    - Big Boi
    - Deerhunter
    - Wiz Khalifa (“Packers! PA-CKERS! PA-CKERS!”)
    - Mavis Staples
    - Loretta Lynn
    - The Walkmen
    - Devotchka (“Boo! Bring on Steve Carrell!”)
    - Sleigh Bells (We whip our hair back and forth! We whip our hair back and forth!)
    - Dam-Funk (If you want to go try to talk to that attractive person you’ve been eyeing, perhaps this is the time.)
    - Junip (When the attractive person you’re been eyeing rejects you, come find me snoring under a tree.)
    - Sharon Van Etten
    - Omar Souleyman
    - Twin Shadow
    - Smith Westerns
    - Man Man (Fashion drums out of garbage and see how long we can play along before we get ejected by security.)

    • Cold Pizza Friday LII

    Imaginary Sasquatch!

    Have you guys been watching “Portlandia” on IFC-slash-the-internet? Lolz for days, I tell ya! It’s so great to finally have my own self-aware generational version of a suburban sitcom, which next week’s CPF column will argue is a fundamental human need right up there with water, shelter, and Angry Birds. The best part is the repressed sense of conflict and the twinge of tension that propels my laughter: the show is funny and well-written and makes all this stereotypically hip Pac-NW stuff look ridiculous, but I myself am way too familiar with bird art and fixed-gear bike jerks and unprofitable bookstores to point any kind of fingers. That joke in the “Dream of the 90s” song about Portland being “where young people go to retire?” I still, in all seriousness, consider that a viable option for the next five years of my life. Sigh.

    Although ‘The Gorge’ where the Sasquatch! Festival takes place is geographically closer to Seattle, these Portland-inspired dynamics play heavily into what I imagine the experience to be (having never been much further north than San Luis Obispo). It’s important to keep in mind that the festival is being funded (‘presented’) by at least two giant commercial entities: Honda, who in spite of manufacturing Earth-gagging motorcars do their best to appeal to young people by having something called a ‘hybrid,’ and Live Nation. In case you’re not familiar, Live Nation is the event-planning equivalent of Ticketmaster, continually striving to prove that the music industry can still generate revenue for anonymous corporate executives. Since a truly ‘conscious’ and ‘alternative’ person would abstain from such an event, it’s important to deflect any potential questions about your own consumer ethics by walking around Sasquatch! openly acknowledging all the corporate sponsorship and lamenting the downfall of ‘artistic integrity’ while rolling your eyes at the Foo Fighters. I’ll be right there with you in my imagination, folding my arms and saying things like, “Yeah, man, the internet’s really revolutionized, like, everything about our lives, y’know?”

    Here are the acts in proximity to which you may imagine finding me:
    - Modest Mouse (near the back in case they start playing ‘new stuff’)
    - The Flaming Lips (aaahhh confetti!)
    - Death From Above 1979 (getting other people’s sweat incidentally flung in my eye)
    - Robyn
    - Ratatat (for two or three songs because, hey, they’re all the same)
    - Wolf Parade (before it’s too late!)
    - Yeasayer (again, near the back in case they start playing ‘new stuff’)
    - Beach House (hopefully after the sun goes down; it’s just not the same without the light show)
    - Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings
    - Deerhunter
    - Sleigh Bells (shouting into my friend’s ear: “I’ve been waiting for this since 2009!”)
    - Major Lazer (“Why is he climbing a ladder?…Oh, gross!”)
    - !!! (more sweat in my eye, but a slightly different mix of body odors)
    - CSS
    - Surfer Blood (“Dude, I heard the new Weezer album totally sucks!”)
    - Gayngs (hooray, nap time!)
    - The Radio Dept.
    - Smith Westerns
    - Twin Shadow
    - Das Racist (“Um, is it okay for me to be listening to this? I feel weirdly guilty.”)
    - Wye Oak (while everyone else takes a nap!)
    - Gold Panda
    - Washed Out (“OMG it’s the ‘Portlandia’ song!”)

    • Imaginary Coachella

    I find myself doing this in my head every year when these festival lineups start being announced, so I figured this year I should actually write it down. I don’t have the money or time to fly to southern California and go to Coachella in April, but it’s still important for me to have a sense of how ‘good’ it is and how I would spend my time if were I able to go. It’s a pathetic exercise, but hey, this is the internet.

    Many factors go into assessing your imaginary festival experience. It’s important to consider not only the performers (though that is paramount), but the location, season, climate, etc. You will not have the willpower to stay awake through a Swell Season set at Coachella because you’ll be too sunburned, tired, and several watery beers deep. Also, they are not a good band. Along with Not-Good Bands, you should also be aware of Headliners (who you might want to see just because they’re Big), Must-Sees, Good Bands, Bands Whose Names You Recognize From Blogs And Wouldn’t Mind Investigating, Bands to Whom You Are Indifferent, and Bands You Actively Dislike. Ratios between all these are factored together—there’s a lot of math, chess ranking algorithms and stuff—and you end up with your qualitative imaginary festival experience, suitable for framing and comparing haughtily to other people’s.

    Sean’s Imaginary Coachella 2011:

    FRIDAY:
    The Black Keys, Robyn, DJ Sasha, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Crystal Castles, Cee Lo Green, Cut Copy, Sleigh Bells, Warpaint, Tame Impala, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Here We Go Magic, The Morning Benders, Glasser, OFWGKTA

    SATURDAY:
    Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, Bright Eyes (*depending on the set list), Erykah Badu, New Pornographers, Gogol Bordello, The Tallest Man on Earth, Cults, The Radio Dept., Lil’ B, Yacht, Wire, The Love Language (*maybe swing by for a few minutes), Gayngs (*if I can sit or lay on a blanket)

    SUNDAY:
    Kanye West, The Strokes, The National, Death From Above 1979 (*newly reunited!), Wiz Khalifa, Best Coast, Lightning Bolt, Yelle, Delorean, Twin Shadow, OFF!, Joy Orbison, Menomena