As recently as two years ago, it's a safe bet that most people in Austin still weren't aware of the phenomenon that is Formula One Racing. When it was announced that an F1 course would be built in one of the more rustic (to put it politely) corners of the...

Yesterday, good news arrived for Chemical Brothers fans, with the announcement that its full-length concert film, Don't Think, will be released to DVD on both sides of the pond -- available to American fans on April 10.

However, this wasn't the typical DVD release announcement -- it...

While the name, Fun Fun Fun Festival, seems just a little tongue-in-cheek in its exuberance, there's still something about the first day of a multi-day music festival, in Austin, in postcard-perfect weather, with still unsullied grounds and still relatively rested fans traipsing along the landscape, that at the very least...

James Braly introduces his latest show by letting the audience not only know that they might be a bit conscious about their "desire to laugh at another man's life." But, rather than have them shy away from that, he invites them to enjoy themselves and embrace that feeling. Given the...

Ernie Cline is living the dream.

Albeit, it's a dream in which Wil Wheaton reads your audio book, you effectively become prom king of Comic-Con 2011, and one of the biggest thrills in getting published is (as you tell your blog readers) getting to re-enact the...

Last week, a somewhat remarkable thing happened: Throughout Boston and Cambridge, people stood in lines outside venues, sometimes for more than an hour, and sometimes even in the rain, to go see poetry. And not just any poetry: poetry created by a mix of spoken word practitioners -- some known...

At this point in SXSW's evolution as a music festival, the only way you could adequately report on every day's show offering is to gather a hundred rock critics (literally a hundred), give them assignments and rations and canteens, send them out early enough to wait in line at all...

Assuming that the world needs more soaring, sing-along melodies that align themselves into anthems for a subset of music fans -- let's say, for sake of argument, the same subset that welcomed Kings Of Leon's Only By the Night -- the arrival of Cold War Kids' Mine Is Yours earlier...

First of all, let's dispel the misconception (which should be thoroughly dispelled by now) that SXSW Interactive is the domain of stereotypical nerds in the Bill Gates/Lambda Lambda Lambda mold.

And interactive parties aren't exclusively card-swapping, venture capital-seeking affairs, either -- one peek at the #techkaraoke hashtag on...

At SXSW Interactive, you're occasionally going to run into this profile: 22-year-old CEO of company, dropped out of Princeton after a year, has given himself the title "Chief Ninja." And, yes, those of us whose corporate backgrounds include pre-Zuckerbergian strata have to resist the urge to eyeroll when faced with...

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm pretty much the target market for what the South By Southwest Interactive Conference has had to offer in years past. While I'm certainly not naïve about its status as a conference in which people are trying to network in the hopes...

It's been a little over a week now since Arcade Fire -- an earnest, joyous, unassuming Canadian indie band who release their albums on an earnest, joyous, unassuming American indie label (Chapel Hill, N.C.-based Merge) -- won an Album of the Year Grammy for The Suburbs.

In retrospect, the competition...

This past Friday night, at an extremely sold-out Austin Music Hall, Gregg Gillis (better known by his nom de DJ, Girl Talk) presided over a two-hour dance party (as part of his current national tour) that could have easily gone twice that long without the gathered throng -- starting with...

In retrospect, Black Swan is a simpler, more obvious, and more telegraphed movie than it first seems. The heroine dying at the end of the movie is really no surprise, after all -- it's not only a classic and tragic Hollywood ending, but it's an ending that mirrors Swan Lake,...

So far, I've spent Thanksgiving indulging in two holiday traditions. The first is the annual making of the Southwestern Cornbread Stuffing, which I will take to my in-laws' house so they can again eye it suspiciously. The second is the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC. I know it's on...

The day after the 2008 Elections, I made a point of listening to Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Trust me, it's not something that I do regularly, but I felt it necessary, given the self-congratulatory banter of my lefty friends, to check and see what the defeated side was thinking in...

The Austin City Limits Music Festival, since its launch in 2002, has made a case for being the best music festival in the nation. Starting on Friday -- a Friday that has pretty much become an unofficial city holiday -- and ending on Sunday, ACL brings around 70,000 people to...

Say what you will about Bristol Palin -- and people have said plenty since we collectively became aware of her -- but she's clearly a better dancer than David Hasselhoff or Michael Bolton. And, as was revealed last night -- according to the confounding algorithm that is the Dancing With...