Sunday, March 12, 2000

Leaping Lizards!



Meanwhile, a line of eager partiers with red clown-noses attached to their faces was forming down the block to gain entrance to the Frog Design party. Their third year in a row of putting on the most outlandish party for SXSW, they outdid themselves this year. Two floors of techno-music interspersed with Latin and Polka bands playing traditional songs. The offices had been transformed to rival Coney Island's freak show in their appropriated titled "Circus of the Bizarre" and the horned-fully tattooed "Enigma" impressed and grossed us out as he put increasingly larger and longer knives into his body, starting with a Swiss Army knife into his nose and ending with….well, I better not say! An electrifying performance followed as a woman hung onto a neon "cow-ring" tube that she held into a spinning Tesla-machine (http://www.parascope.com/en/0996/tesla5.htm). Nick West, advanced technology director of Monkey Media, and I chatted about new developments in our lives and companies. John Halcyon Styn came appropriately attired and amused friends and acquaintances with his hair now done in two antennae-like pigtails. Cotton candy, popcorn and peanuts kept some freaks at bay, but others milled around between the slightly saner netnauts like Peter Merholz (peterme.com), Bill Holloway (consultant) and Mark Rolston (Frog Design).