The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou lives on a short list of stories I turn to when I need to feel like everything is going to be okay. That’s a feeling I always have when I visit Iceland. So naturally, the two go together in my head.
ByGD
The Scenery Never Changes
I grew up in a family that was quite fond of archaic and colloquial proverbs like
If you’re not the lead dog, the scenery never changes.
I try to avoid such phrases now, but sometimes they still hold value. Like the much-adapted opening lines of Pride and Prejudice, I’d like to riff on this particular cliche to make it a little more relevant to my situation.
If you’re not in the front row, the stage is a black hoody.
This photo is nice, because I took it at a Meshuggah show. So at least I can tell where I was at the time. Because at this show, like every other show in which I didn’t fight my way to the front of the pit, a black hoody was all I saw of the show.
ByGD
Live from Reykjavik – Iceland Airwaves at Home
My first trip to Iceland was for the Iceland Airwaves Festival in 2012. It was a lifechanging experience for me for many reasons. It also seemed like a pretty kid-friendly festival, so I came home fully intending to come back another year with my family. And although I’ve made it back to Iceland many times, once with kids in tow, I’ve never managed to catch another Airwaves. During the pandemic lockdown, I realized that my oldest only has one more year of high school, which seems like a deadline for all sorts of family things. I swore to myself that the next time it’s safe to go to Airwaves, I’m taking the whole family no matter what else may be going on. A few days later I saw that Airwaves had gone online with a two-day virtual Live from Reykjavik mini-festival.
ByGD
Off Venue
The first time I went to the Eistnaflug music festival in East Iceland, the main stage was was in the town’s only music venue, and the “off venue” was an abandoned fish factory on the waterfront powered by extension cords. The next time I made it to Eistnaflug, the festival had grown a lot, and the main stage had been moved to the high school gym – the only building in town big enough to hold all the ticket-holders. The old venue was now the second stage, and the old fish factory had been torn down.
But there was still an off-venue stage. It was this platform set up in a gravel parking lot. There was no schedule and I never found out who any of the bands were that played it. With a hill behind and the fjord in front, I never really heard what they sounded like either. But it perfectly captures the Icelandic “Yeah, obstacles. Whatever, just do it,” approach.
ByGD
EistnaWho?
For a few years, I was pretty obsessive about keeping a record of every band I saw perform. I tried to get at least a couple decent shots of every set at every show and festival I attended, and saved details in the metadata of my photos.
I started doing that partly to become a better writer and blogger, and partly because I was old enough to realize that I could no longer remember all the great music I saw when I was young. You know, “What was the name of that band we saw at that club that doesn’t exist anymore the time when X happened?”
But I guess I forgot the second reason and at some point decided that the documentarian approach was keeping me from fully experiencing the moment. So when I went to Eistnaflug in 2016, I didn’t take as many pictures and I didn’t take notes at all. When I got home, I didn’t spend weeks cataloging images. I just used my new energy to hop right back on the pitching treadmill.
Now I have dozens of photos of bands I can’t identify because I only saw them once at festival four years ago, half a world away when I’d probably been awake for 18 hours and seen 12 other bands that day and had beer instead of meals.