ACL Part 1

Nothing in the world smells anything like it. The inharmonious amalgam of sweat, pot, beer, sunscreen and more pot, hits each of the sixty-plus thousand noses in attendance at the annual Austin City Limits Music Festival with a surprisingly pleasant punch, and leaves each anxiously waiting for next year, when they can smell it again.

It's now Sunday night(actually Monday morning), and we feel like we do each year after the festival. We're exhausted and sun burned, our lower backs are screaming, our collective feet throbbing, we stink to high heavens, our ears are ringing, we've got that prevailing uughhh feeling thanks to copious amounts of mind altering substances, and yet we feel fantastic...it's the best weekend of the year, no doubt.

Yes the music is wonderful; there's a terrific combination of established stars, niche performers with cult followings, and up-and-comers, but it's the entire music festival vibe that gets us going. First off, there's an inordinate amount of good-looking women dressed in very little (the silver-lining to the dark cloud that is the blistering Texas heat), and how can anything with this many hotties be anything short of awesome. But eye candy aside, we love the culture. Soft-sided coolers full of trail mix and bottled water, flags collected from vacations of yore waving high in the sky so parties remain in-tact, middle-aged accountants and school librarians dancing like maniacs, too-cool-for-school teenagers making certain their bandannas look just so, and of course the ironic t-shirts.

In a bohemian city such as Austin, interesting/funny/trying-too-hard t-shirts are pretty much the norm, but during ACL Fest it's like convention week. In the three days, it's not uncommon to hear, well over 800 times, "Dude, that's an awesome shirt...where'd you get it?" We spotted this year's best around 3:00pm today -- a lanky man on the wrong side of 50 with a lot more salt on his dome than pepper, was sporting a black shirt with the, now immortal, phrase "Sluts Love Me" printed in simple block white. Honorable mention to the guy with the white t-shirt with a naked Abe Vigoda screened on the front. Thankfully the man parts were blurred.

Musically we witnessed some incredible performances this weekend and we'll give a quick review of our favorites sometime tomorrow. Perhaps you haven't heard of a few of the acts, and next time they're in your area you'll check em out, and have as much fun doing so as we did.

Side note: Maybe another reason for our overwhelming feeling of goodwill towards men this weekend was because we saw hundreds of Obama shirts, buttons, stickers, etc. and not one single sight of the name McCain. We'll give the handful of Ron Paul Revolution folks a pass...they're so cute.