And if you liked the video, then ho-lee buckets you need to check out the comments.  Just grade A internet flame-warrin right there folks.  Textbook.

Sorry about that to anyone who actually cared.  The only time I could write anything was once I made it back to my hotel room, and by that time I had been day-drinking for 10 hours, my feet planed flat by lugging around a 60 pound camera bag all day long.  To recap, here is a list of the non-work bands I (think I) saw at South By Southwest this year in Austin.

Thursday:

Collections of Colonies of Bees – awesome

jj – needs to do more than just sing over her ipod

SALEM – WHAT?

Holy Fuck – fucking amazing.  Most bands should just consult these guys before becoming bands.

Glitch Mob (!) – always great to see edIT doing his “conducting the crowd” dance.

Friday:

Metric – pretty great.  gorgeous lead singer, sounded so much better than the first time I saw them.

MUSE – thanks to the almighty Miles for that one

Tobacco – At the Anticon showcase, with all the requisite weirdness.  Sounded like if Glitch Mob made beats for Sole or something…the people I was with didn’t really like it.

The Very Best – Who were…the very best, even though I had diabetes and the shakes by then.

Saturday:

Fucked Up – Dude never wears a shirt, and thats cool.

Andrew WK – For the first time since Drew and I saw him at The Quest a billion years ago.  He was just as amazing as ever, opening up for Gwar, who I didn’t get to stick around for as it was freezing.  Best thing I saw the whole time though.

Vivi Brown – By accident.  She was playing the Perez Hilton party, which I somehow, for some reason ended up at, wearing an artist badge.  I left after 20 minutes to watch some comedy.  She was actually really impressive though.  Kind of a swing/soul/gnarls barkley type of vibe.

Black Cobra – Metal!!  Even if I only got to see one metal band, I was glad it was those guys, who I had never heard of.  Kind of an updated thrash sound…I think…  all I could really hear was Lone Star sloshing around my brain at that point.  I also ran into MetalSucks Ben for a minute, who is the fucking man.  He introduced me to a friend of his who worked at Relapse Records, which is where 15 year old me has wanted to work his entire life.  15 year old me hates 27 year old me.

DJ Quik – Second best thing I saw.  He brought out Bone Thugs to do a few songs, which was even more amazing.  Bizzie was conspicuously absent, probably somewhere knife-fighting with the public school system or something.

So yeah, all that happened.  I spent my entire time in Austin drunk and eating mexican food, bratwurst, hot dogs, barbecue, basically whatever was in front of my face.  I almost shit my pants 3 times.  Thats 3 times more than my lifetime average.  I spent my mornings shooting our bands, and my nights running around like a fool trying to cram as much music in as possible.  My feet have never hurt more in my entire life.  I’ve never been offered more swag in my  entire life.  Most every drink or meal was free thanks to the same people who gave out the swag.  Swag littered the streets – by Saturday there were cases of energy drinks and CD samplers strewn all over the streets.  Our bands are great.  Its fantastic to hang out with the new bands who still appreciate their position and don’t take it for granted.  I spent a ton of money at Flatstock, the big poster convention there, and at Third Man Records, the store set up by Jack White of the White Stripes.  Every dollar I spent there was spent on something great and extremely limited.  I tried for three days to get a bacon bloody mary, only to be thwarted by high demand and diminishing supply.  When I finally tasted it, there was no bacon-infused vodka and my body was violently rejecting alcohol, so it was underwhelming.  I ached when I went to bed, and ached when I woke up.  Chairs were sacred spaces and I would have shanked someone for a seat on more than one occasion.

It was awesome.  I hope I can go back next year.

I’m in LA now, working out of our offices in Beverly Hills.  Its great to be working again, maintaining some normalcy.  After this I’m going to Vegas.

Today was much better.  Spent most of the day following around the guys from New Politics, who are, for lack of a better word..new.  They sound like Rage Against The Machine working with Dinosaur Jr…

We filmed a bunch of hilarity with the guys (seriously sweet guys) then i ditched the camera rig at a co-workers hotel room and hit up The Mohawk to see Collections of Colonies of Bees, SALEM, jj, and Holy Fuck.  COCOB and Holy Fuck were fan-fuckin-tastic, the rest… not so much.

Then it was Street Sweeper Social Club, who I wrote a terrible review about in Metropop.  They were better live, but the best part was that edIT and glitch mob were playing after them.  After talking to the crew from Warner (also, amazing fuckin guys) I got to enjoy edIT and two other dudes.

I loved not having a camera attached to my face today.  These are the worst blog updates ever.

Also, this is the best thing i’ve seen in the last 45 minutes.

So I’m at South By Southwest (or Douce by Douchewest, as one of my bosses calls it), for the first time ever.  To put it quickly (I need to get to bed …like now), South by Southwest is like spring break for the music industry.  Bands, panels, day-drinking, the whole nine.

I’m here to shoot bands for my labels – RCA, Jive, Columbia, Epic.  Today I schlepped a hundred pound camera around on a mad dash to find HDV tapes, barely making it to my only real assignment – a handshake party for the RCA artists and college marketing kids.  After some drunken interviews with our artists, we headed to a showcase, featuring the very same artists we interviewed.

Showcase was a total debacle.  They billed it as a hip-hop show…kind of, with our guys setting things up for a late night BUN B (the living half of the legendary UGK) performance.  Needless to say, the timing of the show COMPLETELY fell apart (as hip-hop shows are wont to do…they cal it “hip hop time” in the biz), and our guys didn’t go on until the crowd started chanting for Bun B to take the stage.  So our guys got booed offstage while their management almost got into fistfights over the situation backstage.  The boo-ing actually made them play harder though, so I commend them for it.  But Bun B was in motherfucking DALLAS the whole time, so no one would have seen him play, no matter how hard they booed.

Anyway, it was a weird day, and I’m looking forward to having things more planned out tomorrow.  Today was a mess, tomorrow will be better.  Also, Jordan (my label contact) and I got approached by a guy, appropo of nothing, who wanted to talk about how much he hated Brett Favre for switching to the Vikings.  He showed us his poorly sketched Packers tattoo and demanded that we film him ranting.  He was so pissed off and so huge that I was certain he was going to beat my ass for being from Minnesota.  He actually turned out to be really cool…and he demanded that I post his rant online so he can “blow it up on facebook”.  So…that will happen soon.

See y’allz tomorrow.

Post apocalyptic movies are a weird breed.  More often than not, they end up being a production designer’s wet dream.  Style ends up overshadowing any kind of substance, which really sucks because post apocalyptic films look SO awesome, what with all the dirt and grime and slapped together technology.  For every awesome spiked set of shoulder pads, there should be a compelling character wearing them.  But this is usually not the case.  They usually end up as hollow, awesome looking shells of films.  For every Mad Max, Road Warrior, Blade Runner and Escape From New York, there is a Tank Girl, a Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and an Escape From LA.

Hardware though, is definitely one of the good ones.   It follows the path of a destroyed robot corpse, from a minefield in the wasteland, into the hands of a radiation-poisoned soldier named Moe (played by Dylan McDermott), who buys the corpse (from a guy who looks exactly like Al Jorgensen) for his artist girlfriend to use in one of her sculptures.  The story takes place in an unnamed post apocalyptic city that was definitely shot on the cheap (the establishing shots are all of an old refinery), but it works, as McDermott and his Astronaut buddy pick through the decaying city, get a ride in a boat-cab driven by Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister (who makes them listen to “Ace of Spades” in the cab!), while a radio DJ named Angry Bob (played by Iggy Pop) shouts about the mounting death tolls in an unseen war, and his “industrial dick”.  Though we don’t see much of the city (due to a ridiculously low budget), director Richard Stanley makes it work and definitely gives the feel of a complete world surrounding what is really a very small story.

After the robot is in the hands of his girl, she gets inspired, and (in an awesome montage set to Ministry’s “Stigmata” and footage of Gwar playing/people being massacred) finishes one of her sculptures, with the robot skull as the centerpiece.  Then she has crazy sex with Moe (the crazy sex scene.  required if you made a horror/sci fi movie in the late 80’s/90’s) while a freaky peeping tom pervert looks on through his crazy Predator-filtered infrared telescope.  That’s another thing I loved about this movie, all the wild color filters Richard Stanley applied in shooting.  Sure they all looked VERY 90’s, but they also worked to complete the “world” of the movie, as if we all had to revert to some dated, thrown together video technology in the wake of the apocalypse.  It gave the world a real “feel”, that I still think about and want to return to.  Brazil and shit.

Then Moe gets a frantic call from a friend who discovers that the robot is actually a highly advanced government killing machine, designed to control the population, capable of rebuilding itself and being generally bad-ass.  He heads out to meet his buddy and get more info, and the movies picks up steam, with the robot slowly rebuilding itself and terrorizing his girlfriend, while Moe struggles to get back to her.  That’s another great thing about this movie, is that the male isn’t necessarily the hero, and the “female victim” (another 80’s/90’s horror/sci-fi movie staple) has to do most of the smart thinking and robot-fighting.

Then, this scene happens.  The robot’s first kill (horror/sci-fi movie staple number three) shows up in a strange form, as the freaky (really freaky) herpe-lipped pervert who has been spying on Moe’s girlfriend for her entire life.  He comes over because he was pissed that she closed the shades…and well…this happens.  This guy is an amazing actor, alternating between freaky as hell and funny, whoever he is.  Awesome death scene ensues.  NSFW.

I won’t spoil much more, but it escalates after that into a film about bigger concepts, and that’s where it unravels, but only slightly.  The fact that Moe is gone and his girl is fighting this murderous robot alone opens up some questions about their relationship, and his eventual return for his “Hero Moment” devolves into an extremely bugged-out (but effective) vision quest that ends in a kind of Last Temptation of Christ/martyr freakout (seriously) – complete with fractals, flashbacks, and acid imagery.  In short, it gets WEIRD, but where the cheese comes through and the music gets a little too dramatic and the concepts get a little too high-minded, the awesome look of the movie and wild cinematography jump in to save it.

I loved it.  I really did.  I didn’t love it so much for the story, but like I said, for the world it created around the story, and for the ways it messed with the genre formula.  Its not traditional, and it definitely kept me guessing the whole time.  Which is HUGE for a movie of its breed, that could have easily been another post-apocalyptic visual thing with a lacking story and a predictable ending.  Nope, it took all the best parts of the genre and fucked with them, creating a totally satisfying experience.

8 year old me would have FLIPPED SHIT over this.  I wouldn’t have understood much of the last 30 minutes (also, its BARELY 90 MINUTES!  I love when movies don’t abuse your attention span), but it probably would have really stuck with me, causing me to go out and tell everyone I knew at daycare about it.  Which means that I haven’t changed much, because here I am, 27 years old, deeply affected by this movie, and telling everyone I know about it…

…and that is awesome.

Up next, Popcorn.

This time, since I’ve been doing a lot of video junk lately, we shot a video in two parts called Optronics.  There is absolutely no rhyme or reason here.  I was either drunk/half asleep or hungover during the editing process, and I think it PERFECTLY captures the madness of the evening.  Part two is on the way.  For now, enjoy part one.  Ben makes music as Oceans In Space.  Check out Oceans in Space on myspace here. And for Gods sake, don’t take this seriously.  We didn’t.