IT’S common cause that the first desire one has on hitting the Grahamstown Festival is to get the hell out of there. Nervous breakdowns also tend to happen with alarming regularity. No one knows why. But most of us tend to stifle the onset of culture-phobia, don thermal underwear and join the heterogeneous hordes on the march, in search of the definitive cultural experience.
After a while, we all look, feel and sound the same — clogging the cafes, hogging the roads, snogging each other into a stupor, and enacting the various rites needed for survival in the cultural cesspool.
And, year after year, it becomes apparent how much has changed. And how little. The festival is still big, only bigger. The pasta is to die for; the curry should come with a warning label. And the critics are more poisonous than the curry.
Oh yeah, and the hippies are back — grubby as always, only grubbier — to bestow their blessings on the “beautiful people” living in the surrounding townships where 80% unemployment is the order of the day.
Last year, the stockbrokers-turned-New-Age-Apaches came to pay their respects. This year, the tepees have been replaced by a technicolour dream tent in the Village Green. It is inhabited by every spiritual smoker this side of the cosmos and a cheerleading squad of nubile, blonde teen-somethings who resemble Swedish surftroopers.
The Rastas from Afrika and Rustlers from the Valley have also come to engage in some prophesy and profit, but mainly to participate in the obligatory zol jol — a march organised to lobby for the legalisation of dagga. And they certainly add thunder to the equally obligatory annual Christian sermon on the mount, with its denunciation of Satan, sin and other skin-sensitive issues.
Then there are the nightly oblivion-inducing raves in the Power Station, scrupulously choreographed, from the stalls punting techno-gear and smart drinks to the dumb drugs and brain-dead music pounding life into frozen bodies against a chill factor of -20 degrees (on a windless night).
It is here, and at the various dens of insobriety winking and flashing throughout Grahamstown, that the most endearing, albeit transient, memories are made. After all, apart from the one-stop culture- shop experience, what would a festival be without fore- and post-performance play?
To this end, the Settlers’ Bar offers a crackling fire to ignite hormonal sparks. And while the era of the Vic seems to have ended — these days the pub is run by heavies with a predilection for turning student heads into frizbees — a purple cocoon called the Cosmic Cafe has risen in its wake.
And, of course, there’s still PJ’s — the high- school hall with a view which doubles as a Waterfront-style watering hole and so-so-Soho jazz den in one. Not to mention iCue, an Internet cafe in the Rhodes Journalism Department, catering to festival veterans and other state-of-the-art nostalgists who croon about the good ol’ days while their hands soar into cyberspace. For a virtual moment, contradictions blur, looks linger and Grahamstown becomes the centre of the cosmos.
But the most enduring (if not endearing) memories are of the “beach days”. Well, that’s how it sounded at first, courtesy of someone resembling a tepee- cross-abominable snowman who had come to Grahamstown armed with a home-made “sun machine” (I kid you not) … Only after using a toothpick to crush the icicles hanging like projectiles from my ears did I realise that the phrase is really “bitch days” and that it refers not only to the favourite pastime of those suffering from an ailment commonly referred to as “festivalitis”, but also to the weather. More biting than Robert Kirby and almost as bitter … It’s another illustration of cultural refrigeration, in the most literal sense of the term.