Covering Music, Film and Pop Culture
Earlier this week I was lucky enough to go to the Austin City Limits TV taping of The Black Angels. This is the second time this year that I’ve seen the band, as I was lucky enough to see them at Austin Psych Fest.
At the taping I ran into two older friends of mine, who are grown-up enough to have hippie friends from hippie times.
Thousands of people from all over the world gather in Austin, Texas each March for the South By Southwest Music Conference and Festival. They come back for Austin Psych Fest in the late spring,...
When I heard the Flaming Lips were playing a SXSW show at Auditorium Shores, I couldn’t help think about the last time that the Flaming Lips played a large show in Austin.
Back in 2010, I was working on a column about people with disabilities at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. I ran across Wayne Coyne, the lead singer of the Flaming Lips in the festival’s media area. He was waiting for an interview with MTV, I was trying to stay in the shade so I didn’t melt.
Of all the artists playing the 2012 Austin City Limits Music Festival, Abby Torres, 16 and Carla Pantoja 16, may be the only performers who managed to squeeze in a marching band competition that October weekend.
Torres and Pantoja are members of the Lanier High School band who also study music via Anthropos Arts, an Austin-based non-profit providing music lessons to dedicated young performers from at risk backgrounds. The project’s supporters include musician Esperanza Spalding, who popped by the Anthropos booth at ACL to pose for pictures after her Friday afternoon show.
Once upon a time (in the early 1990’s) a dude I was smitten with took me to see a band called Uncle Tupelo at Liberty Lunch in Austin, Texas. My date was always broke...
On the Friday afternoon of the Austin City Limits Music Festival, I met Marina, 19, a sophomore political science student at Texas A&M International University in Laredo. The day before, she had taken an...
Twin Shadow is one of the acts that I’ll totally be seeing at the Austin City Limits Music Festival, 2011
Riga graffiti. It’s strange the impact that South By Southwest can have on our lives, in ways that sometimes go far beyond the music. View of Riga. In 2006, I did a story for...
I had an unexpected realization during the Flaming Lips set at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. Watching the Oklahoma-based band closing their show with “Do You Realize??” I discovered tears steaming down my...
This is the tale of two bands. One’s country. The other, rock ‘n’ roll. Both are from Austin and both played ACL Fest on Saturday. The sultry heat made Zilker Park feel like a...
