july 15 2000
people, i've found--and this isn't meant to be anything but gleanings from a limited sample--like flaws. i know joe harvey does, because he told me so. steve, too. people love reading accounts of me staying or doing absolutely mindless things. messy antics, as kay would say. i'm convinced that it's instinctual attraction to the frailty of the ego. well, it's either that or people just like the fact that i say and do things that are stupider than anything they ever could conceive of doing. as long as it's not a constant thing (the humiliations), i don't mind them. vicissitudes, from the latin vicissitudinare, meaning "to ride a roller coaster very very fast until you go crazy from all the lead that gets into your water from the aqueducts and set fire to your own city." which just goes to show that every time you think you've finally reached some unassailable level of cool, you go and do something that reveals that deceptive plateau of confidence to be a spike--a spike that precedes a dizzying plummet into some sort of ridiculous behavior that constitutes mild humiliation. at least it's humiliation by your own hand, though, and not something like being pantsed by your father at age 8 in a holiday inn swimming pool (which happened) or having pig's blood dumped on your by jeering classmates (which happened, but not to me. unless i'm sissy spacek. and if that's the case, then i want someone to let me know, because i should not have a beard.). and, lest my pops think differently, i'm not bitter about the pantsing. the fact that i can only achieve emotional fulfillment by skulking around children's playgrounds without pants? totally unrelated.
i bring this up (the small humiliations, not my recreational activities), obviously, because such a spike is fresh in my mind. not literally, because i'd probably have a good bit of trouble controlling my saliva production, let alone retaining the higher cognitive processes required to translate thought into keystroke. also, i've frankly been a little disappointed by his last few outings. girl 6 might have been a good idea, but watching theresa randle explore the fineries of the madonna/whore dyad doesn't a movie make. i haven't seen summer of sam, so i can't speak on that with any authority, but he's a knicks fan who's heavy-handed with the low-angle shots, which is already two strikes against him. wow, that was a damn fine rambler. anyway. such a conceptual spike is proverbially fresh in my mind because i was impaled upon it last night. no, not like that, you degenerates. and as much as i'm tempted to erase this entire paragraph, i'll leave it as evidence of yet another small humiliation. also, i apologize for its very existence.
see, i came up to the berkshires this weekend for a monster truck jamboree. not for the monster truck part of it, because it's on monday and i have to go back to work, but for the jamboree part, because there's an enormous pot-luck dinner tonight involving a great many people i'm fond of. of whom i'm fond. (a quick note regarding dangling prepositions. kay hates to do it, but since it's awkward to totally restructure sentences to avoid such a pitfall, she instead adds an object to the end of the sentence so the preposition doesn't dangle. this object is invariably "poop." if i were her, i'd say "...people who i'm fond of poop." no, it doesn't make sense. besides, i'm a genteel lad of noble lineage. kind of.) so i came up for the weekend, and last night there was a birthday party held at a bar at which some younger kids i knew were djing. i hadn't seen them in a long time, but i heard from a reliable source that one of them was a big fan of atmos (my group), so i brought up as a little treat two brand-spankin' new promotional copies of our upcoming release (plug alert: vinyl only, out early september, check your nearest record store for it. if they don't have it, demand they stock it!). we step in the bar, and i give the kid the records, we build for a bit, then he asks if i want to get on the turntables for a while. the answer, of course, is "hells yes," so we arrange things for later on and i rejoin the friends i rolled in with. house music plays for an ungodly amount of time, and the mood in the bar begins to change towards people wanting to dance to hip-hop, so the other dj gets on and warms things up with some various enticing cuts of flavor, but people aren't really dancing.
now, if you've djed (not as a scratch-and-cut turntablist battle dj, but a blend-mix party dj) for enough years, you learn to gauge mood with a not-totally embarrassing modicum of consistency. were you in possession of such a gauge and you were in the spot last night, you would have realized that people didn't want to hear underground bangers--they wanted to be able to sing along with choruses, to dance and get happy. nothing wrong with that, especially at a party. if you've ever been in a roomful of people dancing and the dj dropped the perfect beat, teased them with the intro, you know what i mean. if a song's on and you hear the opening carnival wah-wah of "bonita applebaum," you know what it does. it just, and pardon my breathlessness here, it just brings things to a whole other level. transcendant. point is, my fingers started itching because no one was dancing, and i knew they wanted to, and i knew i could make them. so the headphones finally got passed.
oh, lord. old remix of fugees' "nappy heads" ("oh, mona lisa, could i get a date on fri-day-ay-ay, and if you're busy i wouldn't mind takin' saturday-ay-ay..."), and people start trickling back onto the floor. keith murray's "most beautifullest thing in the world," and the smiles start breaking out. biggie's "big poppa," common's "6th sense," and they're on the verge. it's that moment, and i wouldn't trade that feeling for the world, knowing they're about to flip for real. pull out the record, match the beat, wait for the biggie track to hit the last chorus. and when the kids on the floor are still singing along with the hook, they hear that mouth-made rhythmic kung-fu sound effect that kicks off "oh my god" come in, and that's it. for real, all she wrote. hands in the air, and everyone loses all pretense. there's a literal ecstasy that dancing brings, when the social barometer disappears and that whole one-nation-under-a-groove george clinton lysergic-love shit actually comes into play. and it happened. i milked it, of course, seeing as how i'm purely ego-driven, calling out part of the chorus and having everyone shout out the rest. mmm, antiphony. then the other kid played one of my songs, which made it all the better. people got loose, and didn't even know that the mc was standing in the corner, nodding his head and smiling. true gratification.
that was the spike. then everyone went back to kay's and i put on a white elastic headband and did a totally unprovoked and obnoxious bit of prop comedy revolving around childbirth. really, just went a bit too far. plummeting, plummeting...small humiliation at my own hands. and there'd be a much more detailed account of it, but i seem to have dwelled on the spike's escalation for too long. maybe everyone does that. can you blame us?
to recap: skulking around children's playgrounds without pants. people who i'm fond of poop. thank you.
p.
and yo. my full-on venture kneejerk.net is up and running, though not nearly full. go and getcha read on. for me.
props to darkcounter.com
and sitemeter