I love summer holidays. I can think of few things I enjoy more than getting my crew together on a hazy, hot Independence or Memorial Day afternoon to drink a few beers, have a few laughs and slowly spit-roast a wild pig with an apple in its mouth over a gigantic fire.
Non-summer holidays are an entirely different and worse story. Here's a list of most of the major non-summer holidays. Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.: freezing. Washington's birthday: boring. Columbus Day: racist. Thanksgiving: gluttonous. Kwanukkahmas: too secular. Halloween: too pagan. See a pattern? Unless a holiday falls between the months of May and September, it's either entirely too cold to celebrate, or it isn't worth celebrating.
This is true in all cases except New Year's Eve, which is definitely my favorite holiday that doesn't involve a wild pig. Not only does New Year's give us a chance to take stock of our year and lay out our detailed master plan for how we plan to one-up ourselves next year, but it also challenges us to put together a celebration festive enough to both bookend an entire year and jumpstart another one. Since the alternative to properly raging on New Year's is having one year come to a whimpering end and another year start with a pathetic fizzle, you all but have to go all out on this holiday.
This is, in part, why, from my short list of three potential gala weekends, I've chosen to go to Chicago to see Future Rock, Daedelus and Eliot Lipp for New Year's. While certainly loud, rowdy and grandiose enough to be appropriate for NYE, the light, beer-soaked bro-fest of My Morning Jacket at Madison Square Garden isn't exactly where I want to be when the ball drops. Four nights of STS9 (and their after-parties) in Atlanta is more like it, but I've done that two of the last three years and, frankly, I can't keep up with that level of raging anymore. I have a sensitive system — don't mock me.
At this stage in my life, an intimate night, rich with all kinds of beats from live house to Italian disco to sweaty electro-funk and back a few times, is just about what the doctor ordered. Granted, Chicago is one of the least hospitable NYE locales in the world that is both south of Whitehorse, Yukon and north of Somalia. But since it's only slightly across the Mississippi River from my native St. Louis, I figure that by saving some money on travel costs, I can devote more resources to obtaining the proper ruckus suit to wear whilst enjoying some of the smartest, most rousing music heard anywhere in the country.
While the up-tempo electronica and high-energy live instrumentation of headliners Future Rock is certainly a draw, I'm much more excited to see what Eliot Lipp and Daedelus do. Though they are two of today's most exciting producers, their reputations as consistently elite performers occasionally overshadow their producer credentials, though for different reasons. With his futuristic take on booty-kickin' B-boy sounds, Lipp's music just screams, "PARTY TO THIS." Though his music is slightly more experimental, Daedelus' years of performance experience and his keen awareness of crowds' tastes make him no less of a sight to behold.
The music will be fantastic, but, ultimately, I trust these performers to recognize what is at stake for a New Year's party and to step up their games, which is why I'll be where they are for '09. The simultaneous ending and beginning of years is an important event, and, for the sakes of both closure and momentum, it absolutely needs to be done right. Otherwise, it's back to counting the days until pig season.
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Mikey Goralnik is a senior majoring in American studies. He can be reached at Michael.Goralnik@tufts.edu.
