Mission Mission

If you go to official showcases or corporate-sponsored shows of any kind, this pair will get in your way. They will block your view, and spend all night shouting back and forth at each other about “faggots” and “sluts” and “awesome nachos.”

It’s to be expected. But it gets tiresome quick. Tomorrow I’m only hanging out at Beerland, and maybe some house shows.

Phantogram were cool though.

Yeah, I’m definitely coming back to this place on Sunday after the hubbub’s died down. Get my game on. (Seriously, I brought my paddle, the one I won by trouncing that “World Champion” they brought in for the McSweeney’s ping pong book launch.)

Like, huh?

But I like it.

Yeah, the beer here is different.

I almost lost my mind. The Strokes, playing on basically the eve of their first album in five years or something dropping, playing to a beyond-capacity (thanks to hordes of fence-hoppers) crowd on the shore of Lake Austin, debuting new stuff, debuting reworked versions of old stuff — and then the fireworks.

Here’s some decent video:

[Photo by Steph Etkin]

Hot new look for spring?

I suppose, but I can’t imagine it’s very comfortable in this 85-degree heat. (Jealoussss??)

But seriously, he was serious about this hat. Wore it confidently for minutes upon minutes in this long line to get into the free Strokes show, which was awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUs6F1b62UY

Since last night was Thursday night, they changed the lyric to “Everybody wants to be a star on a Thursday night.” Omg! So thoughtful!

At some point, the frontman paused to say:

I just wanna say, if you have a blog or a twitter and you wanna talk some shit about us, fuck you. I’m gonna find you and kill you.

Sooo, like I said, Smith Westerns rule!

UPDATE: Here’s an actual good video by them, and it even sort of tonally fits with the above quote…

(Thanks, Lizzy!)

Ran into him by the Puma tent. Puma shoes, Puma headband. The tattered pink suspenders are probably Puma too.

San Francisco’s own Sugar & Gold play the Antenna Farm showcase Friday night at SXSW.

It was amazing. The pineapple was chopped up and added right into the tuna salad. Why have I never heard of this before??

I got it at this place, next to the Pitchfork party: