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9:58 PM CDT posted by Michael Calore
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The Mother Hips on the roof of Cheers Shot Bar, Austin TX
8:07 PM CDT posted by Michael Calore
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Mac DeMarco, post-set at Swan Dive in Austin. Mac and his band played as part of Quebec House, a multi-day showcase of bands from Canada’s weiredest province. No Unibroue on tap and no Habs jerseys, but they were serving poutine.
7:16 PM CDT posted by Brian Raftery
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Just in case you were wondering: It is possible to extinguish a flaming guitar by whipping it repeatedly with your belt.
6:58 PM CDT posted by Michael Calore
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King Loses Crown gets heavy at the Heart of Texas Rock Fest, Austin TX
6:23 PM CDT posted by Angela Watercutter
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This is Kendrick Lamar. He just crushed it at Stubb’s – playing crowd favorites from his underground hit album Section.80 his current massively popular (and amazing) album good kid, m.A.A.d city. (He also wore a fantastic sweatshirt.)
6:18 PM CDT posted by Michael Calore
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Shout Out Louds at the Tumblr party.
We’ve been using Tumblr as the back-end of our SXSW liveblog all week. It’s been a great tool for posting photos and text snippets from our phones and internet-enabled cameras. We are adding functionality to it all the time so it’s only getting better.
Plus I love how meta this is: I’m Tumbling from the Tumblr house!
3:47 PM CDT posted by Brian Raftery
# > “Like, I might as well be listening to Jody Watley.”
— Outraged dude at the SPIN Solange show, clearly unaware that Jody Watley is awesome.
3:01 PM CDT posted by Angela Watercutter
# What happens when you’re a documentary filmmaker and you want to chronicle a person’s life and it’s already been exposed in books, news stories, and even TED talks? You document everything after.
Director Ben Nabors (above left) first met William Kamkwamba (center) in 2007 after the young man had given a talk at TEDGlobal. At 14, Kamkwamba had used strips of PVC pipe, old bicycle parts, blue gum trees, and a book called Using Energy to build a windmill that was able to bring power to his rural village in Malawi and save his family from famine.
His feat – and subsequent TED talk – made him a shining star. Nabors decided to make a seven-minute short about the young inventor and after it did well, the director decided to make a feature about Kamkwamba.
“I got very interested in William and in working with him and committed myself to making a film about the windmill,” Nabors said in an interview with Wired. “Through the course of working on a film about the windmill it became clear to me that the story that I really cared about – that was very interesting to me – was William’s experiences as the result of the windmill.”
Luckily for him, Kamkwamba’s life only got more compelling. In 2009 he co-wrote a book about his windmill with author Bryan Mealer called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. And thanks to the help of TED community and fellows director Tim Rielly (above right), who took Kamkwamba under his wing and features prominently in the documentary, the young man was able to go to school at the prestigious African Leadership Academy and eventually Dartmouth College.
It’s those experiences, and Kamkwamba’s efforts to bring more power and schools to his village in Malawi, that are chronicled in Nabors’ William and the Windmill, which won the grand jury award for best documentary at South By Southwest earlier this week.
The film takes great pains to show just how complicated Kamkwamba’s windmill made his life. His inspiring efforts earned him advancements in education, a book deal that allowed him to help his family financially, and he even garnered a bit of fame. But Kamkwamba is a generally shy and humble person by nature.
“[In the film] I ask him if he considers himself humble, and he says ‘A lot of people tell me that I’m humble, so I guess I’m humble,’” Nabors said. “That line indicates to me this incredible poise he maintains.” So the film also brought a little more attention than he would have liked – and the possibility that he’ll always be known as “the boy with the windmill.”
“I want to share my story with as many people as possible,” Kamkwamba told Wired. “[But] If I’m entering into a conversation with people I don’t want to just be entering into it because I have this story.”
William and the Windmill ends with Kamkwamba beginning his education at Dartmouth, where he’s now a junior majoring in environmental studies and maintaining a “B” average. He’s also been taking classes in economics and engineering and when he graduates – presumably next year – he plans to go back to Malawi to continue his work helping people in rural communities.
For example, he’d like to create an inexpensive and simple planting device that farmers can use to plant crops more efficiently. “Right now what I’m doing is I’m seeing the challenge and seeing the ways how I can address it without complex technology, but simple technology that people can use,” he said.
Ultimately what will come of Kamkwamba after college is something of a mystery. He’s intelligent, energetic, and ambitious, but where he’ll land is still a bit unknown. Yet, for his documentarian, that was the point.
“The film ends for me with this great mystery of ‘Who will William be? Who will be become?’” Nabors said. “I hope that he’s in a position to do whatever he wants.”
2:05 PM CDT posted by Brian Raftery
# Made it to the SPIN party just in time for the tightly wound guitar-jitters of Texas ex-pats Parquet Courts.
1:37 PM CDT posted by Laura Hudson
# > “I’m starting to think that the Daft Punk show is the vaporware of South By Southwest.”
— Wired writer Angela Watercutter, after a much-rumored Daft Punk show failed to materialize
1:33 PM CDT posted by Rob Capps
In the middle of performing his song “Happy” at this year’s SXSW, Robert DeLong pulls out a Microsoft Sidewinder gamepad and bangs out the song’s signature hook on the buttons. He looks a little like — OK, exactly like — a kid trying to enter a cheat code on his Xbox. A-X-B-Y, A-A-X-B-Y.
Instead of extra lives, though, what comes out is poppy synth notes, which bounce across the roughly five other samples DeLong has looping. Despite the speed of the beat, he plays the “code” right every time. For a brief moment, he’s a living example of how much gaming and music have in common: All you have to do is push the right keys at the right moments.
“It’s like playing Street Fighter,” the 27-year-old DeLong says.
12:31 PM CDT posted by Brian Raftery
# Thee Oh Sees’ slash-and-burn psych-rock set was so packed, shut-out fans had no choice but to rattle fences and jump on parked cars for a glimpse.
12:05 PM CDT
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Almost the entire time Snoop is on screen in the new documentary Reincarnated, he’s grinning ear-to-ear. And it’s not just the weed. The man is truly happy.
After years of turmoil and transformation — from Calvin Broadus to the D-O-Double-G, from gangster to pimp — the rapper we all know as Snoop Dogg has now officially been reborn as Snoop Lion, and turned from rapper to reggae singer with a new record (also titled Reincarnated) coming on April 23 and based in Jamaican roots and dancehall music.
The documentary, which opens in select U.S. theaters today, follows Snoop to Jamaica where he sets up in a swank ocean-front studio to record the album, working with a production team headed by Thomas “Diplo” Pentz, to craft beats, write lyrics and sing praises to Jah. The music is great, full of life and positive vibrations, and while those looking for a G-thang may be disappointed, reggae fans will likely approve.
“So far, everybody’s feeling it,” he says. “It’s different, but they’re feeling it. The music is dope, the singing is in pocket, the concept is right. How could you deny what I’m doing? It’s the truth.”
8:55 AM CDT posted by Brian Raftery
# Tegan and Sara work blue at the Austin Music Hall.
5:24 AM CDT posted by Michael Calore
# “I love the way the movie [Reincarnated] is projected: the comedy, the spiritual side, the reality, the truth. The way it’s open, it’s a book. I’m the creator of that book, and to just sit back and watch people read the book, it really pleases me. They laugh at all the right moments; they cry at all the right moments, and they tune in when they need to.”
– Snoop Lion
5:01 AM CDT posted by Michael Calore
# The poster for Zero Charisma, featuring artwork by Jay Shaw.
The D&D-themed indie drama-comedy, which premiered this week, is about a Dungeon Master named Scott who suffers through a series of personal crises. His family is a mess; his friends barely tolerate him, and worst of all, he starts losing control over the long-running RPG campaign he runs when new player — a jaunty hipster named Miles — joins the game and and disrupts the carefully-orchestrated fantasy world where Scott once had control.
The movie was a huge hit here in Austin, where it played to theaters packed with hometown crowds. The filmmakers, Katie Graham and Andrew Matthews, moved to Austin about three years ago because of the vibrant and supportive film scene here.
“We left L.A. to get into film,” Matthews jokes.
4:40 AM CDT posted by Angela Watercutter
Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks is a trailblazer for women in rock. Coming out of the San Francisco scene where Janis Joplin was making a name for herself, Nicks was one of the most iconic female rock singers of the 1970s and beyond. She was also a crusader for women’s rights, and these days she thinks the causes of feminism have lost some ground.
During a far-ranging interview with NPR music critic Ann Powers at SXSW, Nicks talked extensively about her path to joining Fleetwood Mac and how she and the band’s other female singer, Christine McVie, struggled to be recognized in the bro-tastic world of rock.
“I said to Chris … ‘When we walk into the room, we have to walk in with a big attitude, which does not mean a snotty conceited attitude. But we have to flow in like goddesses, because that is how we want to be treated. And we will never not be invited to the party because we are women,’” Nicks said. “It worked.”
But later, when asked about the roles of women in creative fields, Nicks said she believed women had lost a lot of the gains made by feminism in the 1960s and ’70s.
“We fought very hard when I was between 18 and 30. We fought very hard for feminism [and] for women to have their own choice and to be strong and to be fantastic and to do whatever they wanted,” Nicks told the crowd. “What I’m seeing today is a very opposite thing, and I don’t know why and I don’t know how it’s happened, but I see women being really put back in their place. And I hate it.”
Nicks, who performed with Dave Grohl’s Sound City Players, added that her comments weren’t aimed at “you really cool, cute guys out there,” but the loss she sees of the gains by the feminist movement of her generation.
“I think it’s wrong and I don’t know how it happened,” she added. “We’re losing what we fought so hard for and it really bums me out.”
Photo: Kristin Burns, courtesy Warner Bros. Records
1:11 AM CDT posted by Ariel Zambelich
THE SPECIALS PLAYED SXSW (!!!)
Need I say more?
