Haukur’s 1st Editorial!
Yes, this is my inaugural editorial as editor of the Reykjavík Grapevine – this very magazine! Fancy that!

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all of my predecessors for making this publication what it is today: Valur Gunnarsson, Bart Cameron, Sveinn Birkir Björnsson – I am lucky stand on your shoulders, and I hope I can live up to the ginormous standards you have set. And Birkir: thank you for your guidance and company over the past couple of years. It has been a pleasure and an honour to work with you, and I hope to do it again. Thanks, y’all!

So. Now. A mission statement:
As editor of the Reykjavík Grapevine, I promise you reader types out there to do my very best to keep it an honest, truthful, empathetic, vigilant, insightful, humorous, tumultuous, alert, informative, dumb, punk-rock, reflective, DIY, understanding, gimmicky, unprejudiced, rebellious, senior, scathing, agile, dumb, multi-layered, rocking, witty, reliable, informative, snarky, defensive, political, cultured, kick-ass, clever, trite, true, corrosive, insubordinate, shameful, reliable, youthful, sXe, HxC and THC read. At the very least an honest one, one that strives to reflect the community it springs from and the multitude of perspective that make it.

This is a goal.

If I for some reason fail you, we still have a great design team, so you can enjoy the colourful pictures and top-notch layout if nothing else.

So there you go. No changes to the Grapevine are planned as of yet, save for maybe updating our web site a tad more often (but if you’ve got any good ideas lying around, please drop us a line so we can take credit for ‘em).

As for this issue, I hope it speaks for itself. We wanted to make a year-end issue, an attempt to give an overview of all of the wonderful and interesting and neither-wonderful-nor-interesting stuff that went on in 2008 into a single, thirty-two page volume. And we thought the best way to accomplish this was to get the community we serve to reflect on itself. So check out what our councils have to say, and check out what the assembly of 33 has to offer. They are us and we are he as you are me and we are all together and so on and so forth.

ALSO you must turn to page 14 RIGHT AWAY to check out what our resident comics, Hugleikur Dagsson and Lóa Hjálmtýsdóttir turned out when we asked them to make us a version of “Áramótaskaup” (FYI, “Áramótaskaup” is a humorous television program broadcast on Icelandic State TV every New Year’s Eve, where the national comic elite reflect on the previous year’s goings-on). It is hilarious!

Happy New Ears, y’all!
HSM