Pre-festivities festivals and the quest for balance

The opposite of late-night study with a coffee plunger and a cat for company is open skies, crazy dancing, cold beer, happy people and a drumbeat.  Creek-swimming and pensive chats over cups of chai also don’t go astray.   

So what is a burnt-out student to do but take herself to a music festival? Or two.  One for each exam, she justifies, not excessive at all. Equilibrium requires it.  And it could have very easily been three if I had been sufficiently organised to get tickets to Meredith or sold my firstborn to join themfolks about to trek north for the superlative Woodford.

My chosen two were the three-day Folk Rhythm and Life festival in Eldorado, and the one-day Meredith spinoff Carpark Festival in Chinatown. They were very different and I’m not going to hide the fact that I far preferred the former.  The Carpark Festival had bigger acts (Sons and Daughters, The Kills and the Avalanches, although they didn’t really play anything special, just chucked on records and let their friends dance on the stage) but it lacked that escapist hedonistic merriment that, to me, maketh a good music festival.  You would have thought that everyone being crammed into a stinking hot carpark would have created some sense of togetherness through adversity but it just didn’t take off. 

And they were charging $5.50 for a VB (which for my English readers is a nasty nasty beer that makes urine smell like Chanel). Either the organisers were just sadists (there are perfectly acceptable beers available for the same price), or they were doing the Vice Magazine-esque (anti)-reasoning thing, i.e. “VB is a ‘don’t’.  If we say VB is a ‘do’, this differentiates us from the masses.  We are inherently different from the masses because we are painfully trendy Vice people.  Therefore, we will drink VB and of course the masses will want to follow us. Let them drink VB!”.  Similarly, the only food being sold on a stinking hot Melbourne afternoon was Polish sausages, casseroles and donuts. ?!?!?

Not wishing to partake in their culinary irony, we got passouts and went to the Lounge on Swanston Street for a jug instead, pausing on the way for spanokopitas from the Greek bakery on Lonsdale Street, and didn’t return until the sun and the filler acts had died down.

The Folk Rhythm and Life Festival, however, was bloody marvellous.  The music was great but there was no one particular act that I was going to be heartbroken about if a swim in the creek went longer than planned.  That said, my highlights were probably Those Bloody McKennas, Skin, Sophie Koh and Pablo Discobar.

The beer was good and fairly priced (Carlton, Guinness or Cascade), especially since N and I worked on the bar the first night and were given a weekend’s worth of drink cards for our efforts. It was too warm to eat much during the day but when the sun went down, I feasted on homemade samousas with tamarind chutney (which I sang the praises of to everyone who would listen until they sold out and I had to find another food sources), buttery cobs of corn, chai, a slice of a puckery rhubarb meringue cake, organic apricots and carrots, and a not-very-organic white bread bacon sandwich at 3am on Saturday night.

Bacon, beer, bass and a bit of a boogie: a recipe for balance.

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[Dissertation Writing]

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