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"  The Austin, Texas-based SXSW, which began as a music fest 24 years ago, has expanded mightily into three simultaneous March festivals: music, film, and interactive. Austin, the state capital and home of the 50,000-student University of Texas, is a vibrant city, at once mellow and rowdy, funky and sleek, showcasing the new West as well as the old, and while it has more than a million and a half inhabitants, the fest was so ubiquitous it often seemed as if every third person on the street was sporting a laminated badge. I&amp;#039;ve done jury duty at lots of film festivals but I&amp;#039;ve never been to one as buoyant and exhilarating as SXSW. Some highlights:  * Upon arrival, a hungry colleague and fest vet staying in the same hotel hustled me off to Guero&amp;#039;s, the airy, laidback home of primo Tex-Mex cooking, which I&amp;#039;ve been missing ever since Miracle Grill got rent-rocketed out of New York. It didn&amp;#039;t disappoint, and neither did our other stop, Allens Boots, just up the street. Picture a large, down-home, barnlike structure filled with unimaginable numbers of cowboy boots, used and new, plain and jaw-droppingly fancy\u2014many more, surely, than there are cowboys and cowgirls to wear them. I helplessly beelined for all the red ones, but with the tax man looming like a movie monster in the very near future, begged my friend to drag me away from a pair of (sob!) size 9 crimson lizard-skin beauties. And they were almost affordable.  * Sixth Street: Janet Pierson, the film festival&amp;#039;s funny, modest, and much loved producer and programmer, introduced the eight competition features at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz. The Ritz serves seriously tasty burgers and other food, to be eaten on long, shallow tables while watching the movie. But as sybaritic as that is, getting there every day was half the fun. Sixth Street is Austin&amp;#039;s main music drag, and during the festival, it made New Orleans&amp;#039; Bourbon Street seem sedate. Blues shouters, R&amp;amp;amp;B, rock and roll, alt.country, alt.everything\u2014you name it, they had it, blasting live out of every other porch, balcony, and wide-open door, all afternoon and deep into the night. My favorite on-screen act was the silver-haired Missouri English teacher and folklorist Meredith Sisco. In Winter&amp;#039;s Bone, the Sundance grand prizewinner that opens in June and showed out of competition at SXSW, Sisco sings &amp;quot;Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies&amp;quot; in a low alto so pure and strong it gives you shivers. Asked to sing again at a festival breakfast for women filmmakers, she politely transfixed us with the song&amp;#039;s first verse, then tucked into her Eggs Benedict before they got cold.  * A celebrity panel, which would have been mobbed anywhere else but drew a mostly new-media audience at SXSW, featured Saturday Night Live&amp;#039;s Kristen Wiig, Will Forte, and Jorma Taccone as well as Val Kilmer and Ryan Phillippe, all of whom are involved in Macgruber, a new, very broad action comedy (Kilmer&amp;#039;s villain is named Dieter von Cunth). Looking movie star glamorous, Wiig seemed quiet, but not Kilmer, who&amp;#039;s as funny in life as he was as Gay Perry in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang. Teasing the audience, he did his best to stir things up: In the Q and A, a woman noted that people had taken to posting parodies of the most famous YouTube videos, then asked the panelists if they would spoof the &amp;quot;Surprise Kitty&amp;quot; video while she recorded it with her smartphone. (For anyone who managed to miss it, the video, which at last count had 30 million views, features a teenage girl tickling her kitten&amp;#039;s tummy over and over to the adorably raised paws and wide-eyed delight of her pet.) The SNLers looked stymied until Taccone, offering to play the kitty, flung up his hands and let out a coo\u2014at which point, Kilmer and the rest of the group pulled him off his chair and pretended to stomp him to death.  * SXSW is considered the home of mumblecore, casually hip microbudget indies that started coming out in the mid aughts. These films felt like direct descendents of Slacker, a meandering Austin-set movie made for $23,000 by Richard Linklater (Before Sunset, Me and Orson Welles) that set off a great buzz in 1991, three years before the film festival started. This year&amp;#039;s competition movies all had modest budgets, too, but you couldn&amp;#039;t tell that on the screen, whether in Phillip the Fossil, an acute exploration of youthful machismo and its discontents with a great lead performance by Bryan Hasenfus, or the audience winner, a fraternity-set thriller called Brotherhood, which looked downright commercial and may well prove to be. But what I felt most strongly at SXSW was a heady sense of being present at the burgeoning of a brand new round of exciting young film talent. For my fellow jurors, actor Josh Leonard and Variety editor and critic Peter DeBruge, and I, that feeling was embodied to near perfection in Tiny Furniture, a wonderfully droll coming-of-age comedy with subtle emotional undercurrents that detonate little pangs\u2014even when you&amp;#039;re laughing yourself silly. Written, directed, and starring the 23-year old Lena Dunham, who also cast her mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, and her sister Grace, the movie is the most auspicious of beginnings. SXSW&amp;#039;s motto is &amp;quot;Tomorrow Happens Here.&amp;quot; Turns out they mean it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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