you make me happy when skies are gray
What is this that I’m watching exactly? – Yea, we’ve seen a lot this weekend.
HONK! Fest. The best weekend in Boston, hands up (what can we possibly accomplish with our hands down?). The only minus – my neighborhood of Davis Square will indefinitely have a standing stink of patchouli.
When I first encountered this year’s festival I was immediately overcome with emotion (I do believe that my hellish hangover and numerous vomits just 30 min prior might have aided to the tears beginning to collect).
- Look! Anarchists! Everywhere! What a glorious display of every color of the rainbow accented with black. The sea of shining brass, enormous drums, well used high school marching band costumes with tattooed arms where the sleeves have been ripped off, stilts, hula-hoops, jugglers, animal ears/tails, and dread-locked hair under their incredible hats. The only weekend that you can see a person walking down the street with underwear on over their pants playing a trumpet and not run the other way. The activist marching band aesthetic, so sexy… Oh, and the steam punk!
Could you believe it? The exact group of people constantly accused of never being able to organize was able to create this (free) magical, fun for the whole family weekend, plus added events in other cities?! Anti-capitalism realized; the positivity was tangible, the creativity was boundless. Yea, that’ll bring tears to my social libertarian eyes.
The agelessness permeated the event. Children, with their eyes wide, stuck in the kind of pure, paralyzing awe that only innocent eyes can create. Elderly folks tapping their feet and nodding their head within the limits of their walkers. And the grown-up weirdos found somewhere in between dressed like a carnival, displaying to everyone how alive they feel from the sound of the bass drum played by their comrades – I’ll tell you one thing, it makes me much less fearful of aging.
The final night of the festival, a nearly five hour concert at the Somerville theater where every band at HONK! played again. The audience never sitting, the bands never stopping, the energy never faltering. It was beyond a fantastic spectacle. Bands from as far as Italy, two of them in fact, each with their own slightly different purpose exploding in waves of screeching horns and tapping drums.
Magical, indeed.
