Published May 25, 2009

I’m not gonna lie to you, I’m real nervous when it comes to the Grapevine. I feel we have a big responsibility to a lot of folks out
there, and I constantly worry about letting them down. Here are some groups of people that come to mind:
First and foremost, there’s our readers: we should try and keep them informed of what’s going on (events wise, in the news, in culture, etc.), amuse them while they wait for take-away pizza and provide them with a mass of high-quality paper for arts and crafts projects (speaking of which, didya notice last issue’s delightfully decadent 60 gram paper? The printers were saving the thin stuff for the local newspapers).

 Our writers and photographers: to provide them with the space they deserve, to not mess up their contributions and maybe try and lay them out nice, so people will want to check them out. We pay as much as we can for articles and pictures, and it ain’t a whole lot to be honest.

So you know that our contributors are turning in their pieces out of a sheer and admirable dedication that demands our utmost respect. There’s also events promoters, bands, galleries, artists and pretty much anyone who’s offering up some form of entertainment or happening that deserves our attention. There are a lot of good people doing a lot of great things in town – in the whole of Iceland for that matter – and as we are very interested in promoting and supporting our local culture, we aim to publicize and give space to as many of them as possible. Which isn’t always easy when you’ve got only 32 or 40 pages to work with. Fitting in the articles, the interviews, the schedules and quotes. So we try and we scramble to cram it all in. Try is key here, which is unfortunate, and often leads to heated phone calls or angry letters from previous friends and well-wishers who all of the sudden want to see our bodies impaled on sticks, Cannibal Holocaust-style.

Anyway. Isn’t this here valuable space that could be used to cover some theatre group or something? I guess this is my attempt to explain to friends and family – and my cats – why I stay up all night four days in a row prior to publication and don’t see them for weeks on end. And I’m not the only one; Grapevine is lucky enough to have an army of dedicated and talented folks working at all hours of the day to ensure we make it to print on time, that we deliver some interesting content and that we’ve got ads to pay our salaries and printing costs. Hats off to all you people.

Since I’m hatting off, I might hat off some more. So I’ll off my hat to all of y’all that write or phone (or pester our staff at bars)
with helpful suggestions for improving our paper. Keep ‘em coming. I would also like to hat Yohanna Guðrún for almost winning Eurovision, our new MPs for keeping their priorities straight (ehrm…) and those drunk kids that kept yelling outside our office window last night.

Hats, y’all!