Ok…so technically we’re doing Austin…but I do love me some alliteration.

As I type this I’m sitting in Dallas Fort Worth airport enroute to the fabulous SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. I’ll be in Austin covering the festivities on both the film and music sides of things for the week and I’m completely overwhelmed by all that there is to see and do. Luckily I’ll have my cohort, Doc Channel Creative Director Josh Blasingame as a wing man. On the film side of things alone it’s going to be impossible to catch everything I want to see. Between the Rock Docs retrospective and the premieres of new films by Docmakers Mike Mills, Steven Kijak, and Doug Pray (to name just three) it’s going to be a very busy week for your old pal Chris.

We aren’t the only ones who get to take part in the fun, though. Josh and I will be documenting our entire Austin journey and there’ll most certainly be all sorts of fun stuff for you fine folks to check out both on www.documentarychannel.com and the channel for daily updates (podcasts, film reviews, assorted wackiness). Our first SXSW edition Podcast should be available for your downloading pleasure soon. It features music by The Black Lips and Blonde Redhead (who’ll if you’re lucky enough to attend the festival will be among the scads of great bands playing) and an exclusive pre-festival interview with filmmaker Matt Robison who produced “Silver Jew” a doc about poet/musician/genius David Berman and his band The Silver Jews. Matt and his Co-filmmaker Indiewire blogger Michael Tully followed Berman and crew on their first ever tour and were even lucky enough to capture their performances in Tel-Aviv so the film will certainly be one to add to your must-see list if you find yourself in Austin.

On the late night side of things, If you’ll be attending the film portion of SXSW at all I encourage you to hit-up one of the incredibly well chosen midnight series films. As a horror fan there are a lot of cool flicks to choose from that will certainly be getting a bit more press as the year progresses and I’m personally greatly looking forward to catching “The Signal” an indie-horror picture that made a few waves at this year’s Sundance festival and has already gotten a distribution deal through Magnolia (the same folks who gave us last years Oscar nominated Jesus Camp).

Josh and I will be getting ourselves into all sorts of trouble at SXSW and we strongly encourage you to say hello if you’re a doc-fan or even if you just wanna shoot the shat about records or movies. We’ll be throwing all kinds of cool coverage up on www.documentarychannel.com these next few days so keep your eyes on the site.