I was talking to a friend when some folks I didn’t know dropped by to visit. In the course of the conversation, one of them noted that South by Southwest was not far off. “Twenty-seven days,” I quickly responded. They looked at me a bit oddly, as though troubled by my over-obsessing. Addressing this confusion, I pointed out that I worked for SXSW, and, beginning in February, we have general staff meetings on Saturdays. At those meetings, Roland Swenson announces how many days remain until the event starts, so that’s why I knew the exact number.
By the time you read this, there will be 22 days or less left until SXSW begins. There was a time when, by this time of the year, I would have already been writing about SXSW for weeks. Back then, it filled our lives in unimaginable ways. The time involved in working on it has not lessened at all; it has only increased over the years. Still, as all three aspects of SXSW – Music, Interactive, and Film – have taken on lives of their own, for me at least, the intensity levels have shifted.
It’s odd, now that both SXSW and the Chronicle have been around for decades: People seem to treat them as though, instead of being created by a lot of people working very hard, they are of nature – of earthen formations that have always been there, shaped by weather and time. They are conceived of as geologically defined, as though they were a rock, a tree, a mountain.
Sometimes I read our blogs, where folks admonish us and question whether we really get it, and think about how the event is changing and if it’s enough, keeping in mind all our different obligations to the various constituencies. We started talking about SXSW 08 long before SXSW 07 even began. During the event, the entire staff’s first priority is to focus on getting things right, treating people well, and making sure all the different aspects of the event run smoothly. All along the way, however, they are also all focused on what is working and what isn’t, what can be added and what needs to be reinvented. Discussions begin then, in the midst of the chaos and exploding plastic inevitable of it all. Constantly, we are all focused on evaluating, considering, and improving.
Right after SXSW 07 ends, discussions will begin in earnest, with many sessions devoted to examining every aspect of the events. But someone banging out a blog in 10 minutes certainly has a perspective we don’t, which is always worth considering.
Early on in the first days of the Chronicle, a group of Austin writers invited Nick Barbaro and me to a ranch south of town. Turned out they wanted to grill us, to figure out whether we were serious enough about this publication. At the time, our lives were imploding into the vortex of the Chronicle, so there was almost nothing else left to them, but still they really wanted to vet us. I was trying to be accommodating, as I’m slow to react to outrageousness that is so extreme as to be beyond insulting. Nick, on the other hand, was torn between his genuine, deep desire to murder all of them and an even more profound bloodlust to do me in for making him come to this meeting. If they issued us a report card, we’ve still never seen it.
Elsewhere in the Chronicle is an explanation of the circumstances under which SXSW wristbands will be sold and how to find out where and when that will happen. Some of the blog outrage of last year was over the fact that we sold only a limited number of wristbands. Now, obviously, we could have sold many, many more and raked in the money. The reality is that we spend an enormous amount of time considering capacity and how different bills will draw. We try as best we can to calculate the overall attendance flow. Over the past few years, we have continually cut back the number of wristbands that are made available in order to ensure their value. Sure, a wristband might not get you in to the hottest acts, especially if they’ve insisted on playing a smaller club. Given that there are nearly 70 stages, however, at any time there are 50 or more SXSW venues that you can essentially waltz into with a wristband.
But I do protest too much and not nearly enough. Like jazz, SXSW “jes grew” while we were napping and trying to find our way back to that ranch.
Neither Nick nor I ever, even in our wildest and most extraordinary dreams, imagined what SXSW has grown into over the years. But I’d bet anything that, even if he wasn’t clear on the exact shape SXSW would end up being or the actual specifics of all the different details, SXSW Managing Director Roland Swenson got it from early on. More than any of the rest of us, he had the grand idea of it in his head almost all along. Sometimes Swenson would blast full speed ahead, expecting us to follow. Other times, knowing our many peculiarities, he would feed us radically new ideas a bit at a time until we were finally so surrounded by the molten flow there was no chance to do anything but go forward in the direction he pointed.
I love SXSW. Make any joke you want, any nasty jibe or cutting joke. It’s my favorite time of the year. SXSW is imagined Austin, music Disneyland Austin, and Austin fantastic, but it is always organically of this town, and none of the SXSW staff ever forgets or loses sight of that fact. As Austin was, as it is, and as it will be, so is SXSW. It is not a foreign event or an invented idea. SXSW views creativity, champions culture, presents music, encourages ideas, celebrates dialogue, approaches new media, and shows films almost exactly as this town always has – only, perhaps, multiplied and magnified.
Yes, there is an insanity to the staff’s lives and lifestyles during the event, an unrelenting enthusiasm driving an unswerving focus, heavily spiced by a weariness that has come to be atmospheric without ever being a recognized handicap or considered hindrance. A damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead lunacy grips us early on, as details are minutely observed without sight of the big picture ever being lost. It is pagan and sophisticated, natural and from some place most of us haven’t been in a very long time.
The other night, I watched Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, as I have so many times before. This is Sam Peckinpah’s most demented masterpiece, a film that early on slips the restraints of logic and the grasp of real life as it madly soars toward a goal so perverse one tries not to fully grasp it. The film is not only nearly insane for the most part, but leaves that ground only to go so far beyond it as to seem to be in a different language, one not of this Earth. It is about futile, brutal, and deadly quests, which is how Peckinpah viewed his life and career. He felt beaten by Hollywood, felt that somehow, when all was said and done, he had lost the creative wars that he had unrelentingly fought throughout his career. The film is a passionate, irrational drive toward an impossible goal; it is a ballet of the obscene danced to the poetry of those who would be mad. The first sentence of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, as I remember it, is, “Once you have given up hope, all else follows with dead certainty even in the midst of chaos.” Nothing follows with dead certainty in the world Peckinpah has Warren Oates drive through in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia from the very beginning – not even chaos.
I regularly watch the film in the weeks before SXSW to remind myself of the tactile sensations and hallucinogenic properties of the world into which we are about to enter. 
This article appears in February 16 • 2007.