New Year is a funny thing. Not funny ha ha, but funny odd. Funny uncomfortable, for me? It’s funny in what it’s meant to mean. It’s funny in how you are meant to remember it. Sometimes I feel like I have out grown New Years Eve, will I get a second wind? Sometimes I get disheartened, I think of it like Christmas and Easter and the myriad of Public Holidays which now seem to represent some welcome respite as opposed to the celebration of anything in particular, and perhaps that is a good thing, but maybe they need a change of name? Not “Good Friday”, I still think that one works.
In thinking about NYE’10 (did you like my anagram?, it makes me feel lazy), what is it that I want? Last year was rambunctious are you meant to compare? Mohammad Asif the Pakistani opening bowler made an appearance so I remember that. In many ways the issue was that too much pressure was placed on the players, my genial protagonists were out matched and outnumbered. Too much was left to chance. I celebrate myself as a specialist, which means I’m incapable to do anything but what I like doing, and secondly it means I like to let those who know what they are doing do what they do. I don’t plumb or fiddle with electrics, I don’t make wine or write music and I certainly don’t organise New Year’s Parties.
So this year, to sign on the dotted line at the end of the first decade of the 2nd millennium since JC was given his first pair of sandals, I am giving myself over to the Rhythm and the Vines and I’m into it. Why? Well, I’ve been convinced. This wouldn’t be my natural play… Gisborne… not quite Gibraltar, 20,000 people over three days at an outdoor festival… not quite the room capacity of 40 at Alinea in Chicago. I have been convinced firstly, that the Gisborne offers that unique blend of quaint Nuw Zuelund that can only wash the soul, and mine is pungent. And then place me in a pretty vineyard with anything that reeks of French Synth-Electro-Disco-Pop like Justice or Pharrel and N.E.R.D who reek of Louis Vuitton, which means I’ve got my own little Bacchanal in Gizzy… bro.
I know what you are thinking – once this wimpy queen finds out the camp grounds aren’t “Glamp” grounds and that you have to pitch your own tent and serve your own room temperature Perrier “he’ll be fuckin’ out of there”. Well touché bitches, I have reserved myself a 5 Star abode at Portside so as to only have to take short and inspired dips into reality between moving myself to the Rhythm and my other piquant destinations which I have preselected as being my tourist spots of folly. These include a booking for wine tasting at Miltons Winery, because if you haven’t done your homework, Gisborne is in fact one of New Zealand’s largest grape growing areas, and I like grapes, particularly those crushed fermented and served from a glass bottle. Because I want to feel like a proper tourist I have also given myself allotted time for a coastal walk, probably Te Kuri Farm with its Gisborne overlook, or the spectacular Te Reinga Falls or even a cheeky picnic at Waihiere, I can be swayed and arranged. I guess you could say I should play golf but that as you might know, with my poor sportsmanship and easy of temper, would ruin my walk and lose my newly created peaceful outlook on life, so I will concentrate on the drinking, eating, sitting, looking aspect of the nature… can’t beat it, join it.
This is all just a delightful precursor to the main event, Rhythm and Vines 2010. All tripping the light fantastic aside, along with its gyrating and precocious friends drunk and debauched, I don’t think it is the music alone that I’m into. I think what I need, what I want is atmosphere, people around me of similar mind and momentum. I need a semblance of civility, that rubs shoulders with an outrageousness that gives over to therapeutic thumping of an amplifier too close to the rattling marbles in my skull. I don’t want to be 18 again, but I do want to be sweaty, hairy and happy this New Years so I’m into Rhythm and Vines even though I think Rhythm is as impossible to spell as the word necessary.
