Today I felt like I knew what I was doing there. Kind of.
The day started with gifts. I'm not sure what I did to deserve them but my birthday was last week and I didn't get any gifts so maybe this was like a Karmic Makeover. Here's one of the gifts, a toy with a big head and one eye, potentially the result of a summer of Lowlands festivals.
And this is a girl who spent all of the last day in the campsite toilets feeling utterly sick. So today she was taking it easy, we had a nice conversation and then she came back with this little guardian angel, who is now permanently installed as a kind of guard for the front door.
And this is Jessie, the kiwi guy who is an old school friend of Josh's (yes I know what is the likelyhood and how incredibly common is that and aren't kiwis all one degree of separation anyway) who showed us some kiwi hospitality last night. You don't quite see his black eye and black toenails here though, apparently once we'd had enough he just keep right on dancing.
Now excuse me if I'm wrong, but I think this is Suzan and her sister who stayed and talked for a while and just yesterday wrote to me on this website to say hello. So you see, even though these worlds we create for ourselves are a contrivance, they inform our lives and go with us into the future as every experience does. Actually I know this is weird but there were three sets of sisters that I spoke to that day so I will use my scatter-gun approach to show a picture of them all...
Ok, maybe this isn't funny to anyone else, but I'll show you anyway. This is technically a house party and it all started with my new Bontempi (that's a shittier version of a Casiotone presumably of Italian origin). It started out as a jam and ended in a full scale party hit sensation. Who said you can't have a one-man house party...? The video is the song that just kind of wrote itself, I'm sorry I have forgotten the names of the singers but they did a great job of lyric-writing and general ambiance-setting. Today Lowlands, tomorrow the hit sensation of Ibiza 2010.
Here's the video - hit play on the bottom left corner. I left the Arabic version off in case it was just getting a bit culturally inappropriate - what am I thinking?!
And yes, this really is another one of those band shots that is totally uninteresting to anyone who wasn't there. But speaking as one who was there to Gang Gang Dance... WOW.
I think possibly I am giving a rose-tinted version of Lowlands, but that is because my experience in house really was like that but of course that is not the whole story. That night we stayed in a tent with the other 20 thousand or so tents with a physical rocking of the tent walls to the deep sub-base from one of the stages nearby. The next morning we cleared out and it struck me what a materialistic world we live in and that even though experiences like this festival were about ambience and collectivity, it was managed (quite brilliantly though I must say) by a slick consumer machine that was really like every other consumer machine. We live in an age of incredible consumer excess, we all wear new new clothes, we throw away plastic things used once, we buy a new tent because someone in village somewhere is prepared to package it for next to nothing, we have more choice than any other age of human, we have access, wealth, privilege... it's a double edged sword isn't it. I had a great weekend, don't get me wrong. I came away on kind of high. I'm glad I've been to a festival like this. I'm very happy to have been there in my own home.
