SXSW ONDEMAND

South by Southwest (hereafter referred to as SXSW) is a colossal music conference held each March in Austin, Texas. Some twelve hundred acts of every conceivable genre perform in front of eight thousand registered attendees over the course of five days. There are panel discussions, film screenings, trade shows, softball tournaments, barbecues, after-parties, and other events without a name happening at all hours. It’s a given that no single attendant will be able to take in the conference in its entirely (indeed, this seems to be, perversely, part of the point), but judging from the schedule posted at the conference website, it’s also physically impossible for one to see all of one’s favorite bands, as so many are playing simultaneously in clubs throughout the city.

I have never made it to SXSW — either because I didn’t have enough money, or because I’d just started a job and didn’t want to create the sense that I’d be an unreliable worker, or because I’d been working at a job for three years and wanted to make sure that my employers really knew, without a doubt, that they could count on me, or because I was getting fat, or bald, or scared. I’ve always wanted to attend, though — each year, I submit myself to the punishment of reading the schedule of events online, finding that, at the same moment I am squinting through the darkness at a tiny monitor in my night pants, making my way through a bag of stale pretzel rods, LCD Soundsystem is just taking the stage at Elysium. Or, I’ll be editing a PowerPoint presentation at work while Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks discuss Smile. On the one hand, I am outrageously jealous of those lucky eight thousand attendees. SXSW is the ultimate adult nerd’s Disney World, where all one’s independently produced, limited edition, 180-gram red vinyl dreams come true in a single, sustained burst. Then again, there is the actual, physical component — waiting in a single club to see a single band at any other time of year, pressed against the sweat-slick nostalgic T-shirt of a young man with feral, Micky Dolenz hair, or, worse, a porkpie hat, is bad enough. But to travel hundreds of miles to do this again and again, end on end, night after night, seems like a freehand sketch of purgatory.

Maybe I feel this way, though, only because my life has largely been about not doing things, and then finding ways to make the things I don’t do ridiculous or undesirable in order to destroy their seductive power.

There is only one way to find out.

“I am going to create my own SXSW,” I tell my...