Full interactive and music conference and festival reports now appearing on the sxsw link above, cats and kittens. Get 'em while they're HOT!

WARNING!

I am about to write about something that may have you up in arms, demanding my head on a silver platter, or just plain upset with me. I feel it is in Cloudwrangler's best interest to go ahead and say it anyway, for a lot of reasons. I recently told someone important that the only way to approach blogging was to "Write without fear", and I firmly believe it. Also, controversy is good PR. A simple boycott of me could lead to millions of hits on my site, and really it's all about feeding my ego, right? Right.

This morning, while doing laundry in the shadiest laundromat in Austin, I parked next to a Spanish language video rental store, carrying a variety of Mexican films that I had never heard of. On the front door of the shop there was a poster for a "film" called, "El Jefe de la Frontera" It had a rather large Mexican man with a bad goatee, a black cowboy hat, and some sort of assault rifle standing over a rather well bosomed dusky Latin "maiden" and a corpse or two. I was ready to offer the store owner as much as $100 for it, until Kevin dubbed it, and the other films like it also advertised with boobs and guns, a "Taco Western". I could hardly stop laughing, thank goodness I don't drink milk.

Recently, the local news said over 1 million people will be traveling thorugh Austin in March. That number is so insane I can barely get my noodle around it, and my noodle is pretty well developed. (I am talking about my brain, you sicko's) Anyway, that same day while listening to NPR I heard a "writer" named Heather Havrilesky reading an essay she had written about grudgingly becoming a Californian. It was so flat I could have poured syrup on it and eaten it. As a proud Texan, I was struck dumb by a lot of the things that seem quintessentially Austin that this young woman seemed to think were exclusively Californian. Brown Rice. Granola. Eastern philosophy. Granted we're more likely to discuss Buddhist thought over a cold Lone Star than chi tea (whatever the hell that is), but still. Austin is hands down the greatest place on Earth. At least, that's what I thought at the time. Soon, however, I got to thinking about all the places in our great little Nation, er, I mean, State that I have lived and visited, and how wonderful they all can be. I wanted to stomp on her poorly written tripe with one heel of my black pointy toed boots. I wanted to drag her out to West Texas, where the Earth and the Sky are sometimes one and the same, where Wind is a constant and a state of mind, where cactus and pumpjacks live side by side with cattlemen and great beer. Then, we'd be off by helicopter, over where the buffalo roam to where the Cowboys and J.R. Ewing play. Dallas, Texas, whose pretentia may never be in absentia, but was a damn fine place to grow up. Or Houston, the largest city in the Nation, oops did it again, State. Home of the Astros, where men who walk among the stars call when the "have a problem". Mostly, though, I'd bring her here, deep in the heart of Texas, a stones throw from the Alamo, where music and art and technology and love all seem to have come together at the right place in the right time.

Speaking of Austin, check out the SXSW section above for a running acount of the festivities from the festivals preemminent volunteer. That would be me, by the way.