South by Southwest Diary: Part Three: The New Yorker 2 P.M.: When the wake-up call comes, I mumble a thank you to the hotel operator and leap out of bed so that I don't fall back asleep. I whip open the blackout curtains and when the daylight hits me it feels like the sun has gone nova. 2:05 P.M.: A band is playing on a paddleboat in the middle of Lady Bird Lake, about two hundred yards away from my window. The wind and the Doppler Effect have combined to remix their sound into something that sounds to me like: "bwuhhh-gup-gup-gup-gup-bwuhhh." 2:30 P.M.: Loud-talking guy walking down the hallway outside my room: ..."years ago, when I worked with Carl Perkins..." 2:45 P.M.: Number of party invitations in my "SXSW" e-mail folder: two hundred and nine. Number of those I have attended: zero. 3:15 P.M.: I am fascinated by Kitty (née Kitty Pryde), whose songs vacillate between suburban teen-age girl confessions (in hip-hop form) and fourth-wall-breaking asides that deconstruct her process. After she walks off the stage, someone standing near me says, "I heard she's really twenty-eight years old." 4 P.M.: There's something compelling about the Youth Lagoon guy's quavery, cartoon-character singing voice. And there's enough going on in his music - which is either Coldplay-plus or Radiohead-minus, depending upon how you feel like scoring it - to keep me interested. But every couple in this room is holding hands and making out. 6:30 P.M.: Hotel bar. Billy Corgan walks in wearing a schlumpy black baseball cap and the sort of fuschia-colored scarf one's grandmother might wear to a mah-jongg tournament. 6:32 P.M.: I take a terrible picture of the back of Billy Corgan's head from across the room. 7:30 P.M.: Driskill Hotel, Victorian Room. Mary Epworth is a Sandy Denny-ish singer/songwriter whose inventive arrangements - moogs, feedbacking guitar, Burundi beats - give British folk-rock a twenty-first-century makeover. She's great. 8:45 P.M.: In a cruddy room hidden in the back of a deafeningly loud party-time bar, Lisa Germano, who deserves a more appropriate venue, baits the crowd by telling them, "It's fitting that you should talk through this." Then she spends several minutes describing the digestive system of a cow. Then I leave. 9 P.M.: A micro-trend I've noticed this year: hip-hop fans at hip-hop shows wearing t-shirts for old-school goth bands. 9:10 P.M.: 6th & Colorado: "Punch me in the stomach for a dollar?" 9:25 P.M.: The girl on the left is officially my favorite person at SXSW. 9:45 P.M.: Getting a pedicab driver to take you to East Austin and getting a New York taxi driver to take you to Brooklyn are basically the same thing. 10 P.M.: I tend to prefer rappers who deviate from the standard template, which is to say I am a RiFF-RaFF fan. His show at the Scoot Inn lasts a scant twenty minutes, but he does manage to work in the verse from his Chief Keef collaboration where he gives a shout-out to chewable antacid tablets. 10:35 P.M.: At Hotel Vegas, Jacco Gardner makes the kind of sweet-and-sour baroque-pop that might have made him famous if it were still 1967. He seems to draw most of his inspiration from the thirty seconds in the middle of "A Day In The Life" where John Lennon goes "aaaaaaaaaah." 11:30 P.M.: Up on the rooftop at Maggie Mae's, the guy on my left is telling his friend about his career plans: "I think my name is gonna be...Traphorn - d.j. Traphorn. 12:10 A.M.: The first thing Brooke Candy says to the audience is, "Can you see my nipples?" She is wearing a pink latex skirt and a see-through mesh top and she already knows the answer to the question. It becomes obvious during the first song - a high-speed encomium to her genitalia - that her vocals are pre-recorded and her lip-synching ability is somewhere between Jessica Simpson and none. No one else seems bothered by this. "That was totally worth ten bucks," says d.j. 12:40 A.M.: Zebra Katz slouches onstage in a gimp mask and delivers a louche, amoral series of dispatches from an effect-free J.G. Ballard universe where sex and death are interchangeable distractions. Katz and his foil, Njena Reddd Foxxx, bicker and taunt one another over slow-motion beeps and squeals, flickering between boredom and rage. It is one of the creepiest and most decadent things I've ever seen in the context of a live music performance. 1:15 A.M.: Palma Violets are the hottest band in England at the moment - lionized by the British music press, beloved by the British listening public. And like virtually all previous hottest bands in England, the American listening public will ignore them. But their songs are great and so is their set - until the part near the end where it collapses into a heap of drunken wreckage. 2:10 A.M.: Back in my hotel room with a bag of pistachios. Read the first and second entries in his SXSW diary.