obligatory sxsw name-dropping
By anders pearson 17 Mar 2004
here is the customary, incomplete, randomly ordered list of people i’ve met so far at SXSW:
- molly holzschlag
- steve champeon and heather hesketh
- dave shea
- anitra pavka
- eric meyer
- christopher schmitt
- james craig
- ethan marcotte
- ian lloyd
- wendy chisholm
- matt may
- doug bowman
- anil dash
- simon willison
- scott andrew lepara
- nick bradbury
- tantek
- tanya rabourn
- dinah sanders
- alex bischoff, who seems to have nearly identical taste in music to me
and that’s basically why you go to a conference like SXSW. there were lots of cool panels and events and everything, but mostly it’s all about meeting lots of interesting people and making connections and friends.
i’ve got a badge for the film component of SXSW too but so far lani and i haven’t made it to too many movies. we saw the premier of kevin smith’s new movie “Jersey Girl.” kevin was there himself to introduce the film. he spoke for about 10 minutes before the movie and was absolutely hilarious. the movie, unfortunately, sucked. it was cheesy, predictable, cliché, and generally just not very funny. they really shouldn’t have shown the film and instead just had kevin stand up on stage and talk for 2 hours.
after Jersey Girl, we went to a special early release of <a href=”http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/hellboy/“>Hellboy</a>. Guillermo del Toro was there to introduce the movie and told us that we were basically the first ones ever to see the whole film. he hadn’t even seen the final edit himself yet. del Toro, mike mignola, and ron perlman were there for Q+A after the movie too. Hellboy rocked. there were some minor issues with the plot and some things not really making sense, but overall it was just fantastic. apparently, one of del Toro’s future projects will be a movie based on the HP Lovecraft story ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, which i am now very excited about.
oh, i also had a very brief encounter with <a href=”http://www.wammolovesme.com/“>wammo</a>. i was walking down sixth street coming back from lunch with ethan on monday. we were talking and i wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on around me. i had my <a href=”http://www.asylumstreetspankers.com/“>spankers</a> shirt on. someone walking toward me sort of gave me a punch on the arm and said “hey!” as he passed. i immediately went into psycho new yorker mode, recoiled and instinctively checked to make sure my wallet was still there. when i turned around and looked back at who it was, i saw the long blonde hair and slowly the voice recognition part of my brain began to register and by the time we were a half block away i realized that it had just been wammo trying to be friendly and i was too stupid to figure it out until it was too late.
on the other hand, a bird shat on my head while i waited for a bus today. so i can’t say that the conference has been a 100% success.