The Beths, SUSU, magic, and the loss of a job I didn't really like (or did I)
The Beths, SUSU, magic, and the loss of a job I didn't really like (or did I)
Night 1 of SXSW aka best night of my life
On sneaking into SXSW shows and getting broken up with by your employer
“I think KUTX just said The Beths are playing tonight at Scoot Inn,” my husband texted me from work. Service hadn’t begun at the restaurant yet, so he was still relatively free to communicate. “Just something to consider.”
I’d cleared my schedule for the next 8 days preemptively, hoping to make space for any and all SXSW music events that might materialize. This is my first SXSW in…seven years? And my first since moving back to my hometown.
As a teen and college student I squandered my spring breaks in little rooms on crowded, blocked-off streets with names of rivers—Red River, Nueces, Colorado, Trinity—and their numbered cross-streets. Oh, and Congress, of course—and in the later years, Rainey. Some of the most serendipitous moments of my life have happened in those theaters, bars, hotel patios, museum courtyards, parking lots, and churches. South By Southwest taught me how to be a better version of myself: a version who knew that something good was always just around the corner, a version who treated closed doors like a puzzle to be unlocked. Like a private joke with the universe. For a week each year, I was an invisible VIP, sneaking into showcases, falling in love with every act I saw, finally finding the kind of belonging in the environment that I know I was made for.
I haven’t quite known my place in the world lately. A job I really liked laid me off unceremoniously a little over a month ago, three days before cutting me off of benefits. I haven’t *not* known my next career step since 2016, when we moved to Portland without a plan. I’ve had the luxury of a spouse’s income, so thankfully I’ve had a little mental space to figure out my next move, but that hasn’t necessarily made the choice any clearer. I thought maybe I wanted to go freelance for a while—I’m so burned out on corporations chewing me up, and the idea of not having to answer to anyone but myself has enchanted me. But how much easier would it really be? A few botched meetings and projects this last week pulled back the curtain on my fantasy of carefree self-employment. I’ve been interviewing for a full-time role, too, and suddenly the prospect of going back to full-time flipped from loathesome to reassuring.
But beyond even self-employment versus others-employment, my career questions have been spiraling into the void. SEO, my field, is going to change—but will it be beyond recognition? I’m always drawing little lines in the sand about what I want to specialize in, kinds of companies I’m willing to work for, gigs I’m okay with slogging through, renegotiating what does and doesn’t feel like selling my soul. How long can I keep walking this wire? Plus, the startup tech world—not the whole of my career purview, but much of it—seems to be going to shit. What the fuck am I doing? How do I make sure the last six years of my career don’t go to waste, and the next few decades of it (and my life/financial goals along with them) don’t vanish into thin air?
Mid-January, right before I got laid off, I got on a music discovery kick, scouring Best of 2022 playlists, and one of the albums I fell in love with was New Zealand act The Beths’ Expert In A Dying Field. It starts with the title track, wistful guitar notes over buzzing chords filling me with warm sadness every time I hear it. Elizabeth Stokes’ honey-sweet voice breezes in, “Can we erase our history? Is it as easy as this?” Turns out, the answers to those questions are no, and no. The song’s tension builds in the chorus as she asks, with backing echoes from the other band members, “How does it feel? To be an expert in a dying field? And how do you know that it’s over when you can’t let go?”
My job isn’t my passion, but it’s a lot of my life. I crafted my path to this recent job with so much thought, with so much care, and I never would have chosen to jump ship. It really was kind of like a mediocre marriage. I wasn’t happy (who’s happy at work?). But I also was. Not having to work has been intensely euphoric. But it’s also been…like…really sad. My past job, the culmination of all my work since 2017, was great, it sucked, it made me feel like shit all the time and I never admitted how utterly miserable it made me because I really did love it so much. Like the end of the chorus says, “You can’t let go, you can’t stop, can’t rewind / Love is learned over time / ‘Til you’re an expert in a dying field.” Expert has been my breakup-with-my-job album as I attempt to figure out my place in my industry, in this perfect little house and neighborhood, in my new-old city, in a world that seems anything but magical. As I’ve attempted to parse out what it means that I’m both relieved and heartbroken that my career has been disassembled.
The mild late-afternoon breeze whipped in and out of my window as I cruised down 35 with The Beths on the stereo. The show was sold out, but I was going to try anyway. I fought the urge to turn the attempt into a metaphor: if I could somehow get into this show, the Magic was still alive, I was where I was supposed to be, etc. No, I knew it was just a show. OR… it wasn’t. Sometimes I think a key to contentment is picking and choosing where we ascribe significance. If I got into the show, it would be fate, I reasoned with myself. If I didn’t, it’d be just another mid-sized concert at an ordinary venue and lord knows there will be plenty more of those.
Nobody standing out front reselling tickets… Not a good sign. Maybe sneaking in wouldn’t be as hard as I’d thought? This wasn’t Stubbs, after all. I mosied around the side of the Historic Scoot Inn, scouting for vulnerabilities. One side door, with a security guard sitting directly inside—I could see him through the fence slats. Another one a little further down… No handle, but unlocked. I gingerly pulled it open from the bottom and peered inside.
Two security personnel were chatting cheerily. For a millisecond, I thought maybe they didn’t see me, or perhaps didn’t care. Then their eyes swung around to me and their brows furrowed. One thing I know how to do is play off a situation like this: “Uhh, is this an entrance?” I wheedled. “No,” the closer one insisted, stepping toward me in an assertion of authority. “You’re gonna want to go back, all the way around out there, to the box office.” “Oh… Okay, so sorry!” I said in my practiced faux-clueless voice. In my first few years of SXSW attendance, I’d have maybe tried to make something up about being with the band, but my clothes were too ordinary, my wrists too band-less, my neck too badge-less for such an attempt. Besides, I’m not THAT good at lying.
I sat out front on the curb, watching dumb lame normies, who had paid for their tickets like chumps, line up to see The Beths. Better call it a wrap, I thought. It wasn’t meant to be. No need to sweat it.
I started walking. Up on East 6th, women’s vocals blared over a rock band. Enticing. The night was far from over, and my rare festival-related delusion told me there were still extraordinary things in the hours ahead. I strolled into Volstead.
No free alcohol. Damn. Well, I thought, let’s grab an overpriced margarita and check out this act; they sound fantastic. Two women commanded the stage, side by side, in front of a drummer, guitarist, and bassist. Both of them wore unbuttoned red plaid flannels over old-timey lacey briefs (no pants), with belts and bikinis made of string and lined with tiny brown cowboy hats. They were as beautiful as angels, with voices to match, belting over power chords.
“I popped a titty!” Left Angel confessed after the song. They went on to jointly explain the homemade cowboy hat paraphernalia, with the caveat that more titties WOULD be inevitably making themselves known during the next song. Sure enough, after the flannels came off, it was just a moment before the tiny cowboy hats’ effectiveness was spent. I mean, what chance did they have? The girls were flailing, dancing, bending backwards and howling, running down into the crowd and holding people’s faces close to theirs. The crowd was a little stodgy, and what a shame—it’s not every day you see a performance as purely fun and electric as this band’s, whose name is SUSU. Magic.
I was drunk after three drinks. I started to slow down, decided to make my way back to my car and think up a plan to get food, and then get home. Everything at SXSW works out the way it’s meant to, I mused to myself. One door closes, another one opens. I had tried not to couch too much meaning in this night, but it had happened anyway: Austin, this week, this festival, had proven itself to me there on East Sixth, where I waltzed into a bar and found my new favorite band. What more could I want out of the week? I was content.
My slow, tipsy brain registered a familiar song wafting up the street. A club playing the radio? No, I realized: it was The Beths the next block up. Something came over me, and without thinking about it even a little bit, I walked up to that back door and pried it open by the bottom edge again. This time, no security guards, just music washing over me. I walked right in.