Is Harwood Halloween Ready for New Costume?
By Jonathan Schwartz
A&F Writer

The enduring image with which Harwood Halloween left me was a fight between two male students, both identically clad in half-priced pre-packaged pimp outfits complete with green fur and zebra lining. Seemingly instigated only by some undergraduate imperative to start shit where there is shit to be started, this particular brawl seemed to encapsulate everything that the event is meant to be: colorful, passionate and wholly surreal.

The fight was also two more things: brief and mostly silent. I had hoped to see an elongated exhibition of martial skill complete with some stereotyped kung-fu yells; what I got was clumsy punches and a quick move by campus security to separate the combatants. This too, unfortunately, proves an appropriate metaphor for the party, whose length and music inevitably fail to live up to expectations. When the highly-touted headlining band plays roughly four songs for an hour before being ushered off the stage, there is bound to be a sense of letdown. My feelings on this subject were echoed by Nick Smith ’03 who “didn’t remember the band at all.”

As continuing students will note, an early ending to Harwood Halloween festivities has been a feature of the party that dates back several years. What senior can forget the brilliant 20-minute fantasia that Digital Underground put on, unable even to eek out their signature “Humpty Dance”? Students counting on the group’s irresistible homage to sexual intercourse for the fruition of their own drunken hook-ups went home frustrated and belligerent.

Let’s be truthful with ourselves. The band has become completely irrelevant. Spending the money necessary to lure a mid-caliber group to our friendly confines (described with utmost sarcasm by The Vandals as “the Super-Bowl of small college venues”) seems a little ridiculous when the aggregate stage time over the last four years likely fails to equal that of Beck and the Flaming Lips’ appearance at Big Bridges.

It’s not like the cover band we get for Smiley 80’s correlates to an inferior party because its artistic integrity is compromised. The band is an excuse we use to cast off our postmodern hyper-ironies, play dress-up and, with the frequent aid of liberal pre-parties, sacrifice our prodigious inhibitions at the altar of good old-fashioned fun. When the excuse, however, becomes the same thing that ends the party ahead of schedule, it might be time to evaluate its job performance.

To this end, I propose one possible remedy to the party catastrophe surrounding the band’s early exit: the old bait-and-switch. We advertise for something the kids are into like, I dunno, Nirvana or something, lock everyone inside, and laugh when the assembled mob is too drunk to tell the difference between the headliners and whatever pop, alt-pop or hip-pop group we replace them with.

What are we left with? Some local band that comes on the cheap, won’t complain and provides the assembled freaks with ample cause to sway gently and tap their toes should they feel the urge. Honestly, the caging of 1,500 drunk, costumed undergraduates and friends are the point here, not the 50-plus minutes of innocuous hip-hop. Take away the name band, and you still have the potential for riots, frenzies, hilarious, incompetent fights and ill-advised romantic liaisons.

This “plan,” has met with mixed support from the student body. Said Lindsay Balangee ’03, “There should be monkeys in there too. Lots of monkeys. We can still drink, right?”

Yes, the plan is full of practical, ethical, legal and moral holes. Yes, people come for the music. Few of the 5-C students would turn out for a concert featuring some unknown Upland residents, no matter how rich the Inland Empire’s independent music scene is. The point, however, is that renting a recognizable group for under an hour is a poor use of our funds. This is not meant to be an indictment of CCLA, whose labors make countless hours of enjoyment possible and who do everything under the sun to make Harwood Halloween a success, but rather a statement of what seems obvious: when you’re as drunk as most people are as Harwood Halloween, music becomes less relevant, memories become a blur, and the quality of writing can suffer for weeks after.