Happy New Year
I stayed away from anything explosive last night.
Through good karma, my fellow WRIR DJ, Tracy, invited me to join her behind the turntables at Ipanema. After setting up Tracy’s mixer and tables, we ate, then started spinning at 10. The start of Tracy’s set was sparsely attended - 2 or 3 tables of guests and about a half dozen employees. It looked like we’d be playing to a small party, which was fine by us. I switched over around 11ish and suddenly folks came in through the door. I was already nervous - I’ve never DJed in front of a live audience. Also, my vinyl collection is considerably thinner than Tracy’s - I had brought what I hoped was some choice 80’s dance music. However, I survived, turning heads for a couple of tracks and getting some nice compliments from the crowd.
Tracy took over for the countdown - she found a record with a rocket launch countdown, then spun up to one in the morning. Tracy is awesome to watch, gleefully cuing disk after disk. She’s even more fun to listen to. At one, I took over and spun CDs (which was tough since we had portables that beeped) playing a poppier twee set. As we wound down to last call, Tracy and I traded off on the cuts. Ipanema seemed very full from the stroke of midnight until last call, so I hope we did right by Kendra.
While DJing last night, I remembered that I had done a show on WTJU on New Years Eve 1986 - 20 years ago exactly. I had a 2-6 am slot and dutifully drove my blue Dodge Dart down I-64 to my show. At 2am, I wished Easter Island a Happy New Years and started the show with the Talking Head’s “The Great Curve”. I’m sure people were making their way back from parties at that time, but it was awfully quiet in that studio.
So, two decades later, I get to DJ for free food and drink to a small crowd of revelers. That looks like progress to me. And I start another new year with all of my fingers and toes intact.
Guidelines for Profanity in Song Lyrics
Since I’ve been djing at WRIR, I’ve found the task of screening songs for profanity to be pretty daunting. You would think that it’d be easy to find the word “fuck” or “shit” in a three minute long song. However, artists make it unnecessarily hard. So, to help musicians use profanity in a more screener-friendly way, I offer the following advice -
- Cuss and get it over with. Profanity should be introduced into the song as early as possible - if not in the first verse, then early in the chorus. Don’t wait until the third verse, like Freeze the Saints.
- Enunciate clearly. This is a forlorn suggestion in the world of indie rock. However, if bands could just belt out the profanities and go back to mumbling the rest of the lyrics, I’d be okay. That especially goes for those Canadians.
- Please don’t mix down the swearing. Again, I’d point the finger at one of those recent Canadian bands. Don’t swear in the backing vocal track. And if you must, then enunciate.
Lastly, don’t use the word “fucking” just because you can’t think of another trochee for a lyric. Try “tickling”, “giggling” or “hugging”. Now, isn’t that nicer?
Too Many Stolen Apples
I was buying some Yeats at Chop Suey Books when I saw they had a nice first edition of Stolen Apples by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The edition had the original dust cover, so I snatched it up for Chop Suey’s usual reasonable prices. However, when I pulled back the dust cover, I realized that I already had a copy of this from my used-bookstore-shopping days in Charlottesville. So now, I have two copies of Stolen Apples - one for work and one for home. I like looking at the old hardbound spine lodged between my O’Reilly programming books in my cube.
Galaxie 500 and the Cold War
Mark Richardson at Pitchfork had a good column on Galaxie 500 and the Cold War this past week. The 80s started with Hardcore Punk and as much anger as possible against the Reagan administration. By the end of that decade, it was a kind of psychedelic exhaustion. We all just wanted escape from the unreal, growing, conservative state. We saw the drinking age go up. We saw sexual premissiveness vaporize under the blue flame of AIDS. We saw a decline in industrial jobs that continues to this day.
Sadly, I can’t bring myself to stop listening to the latest Akron/Family & Angels of Light CD in order to spin my old vinyl of On Fire and Today.
Signs on the Highway
Driving back from the Black Keys show on Saturday, Michael and I noticed that there are signs every 10th of a mile on Interstate 95. The old mile markers made sense. Now, you drive past a marker every six seconds. Between Fredericksburg and northern Hanover, the signs consist of a larger plate with the miles and a decimal sign underneath. As you enter Hanover, the signs have the interstate 95 medallion along with the mileage. The signs appeared to taper off as we got close to Richmond. Between Fredericksburg and Hanover, we would have passed over 400 signs.
In contrast, I never saw mile markers in Ireland. I could drive for miles on a road and not even know the number of the route, let alone how far we had gone. Of course, in Ireland, any thing on the side of the road posed a hazard on their shoulderless roads.
I can only imagine that Virginia’s corrections department has so many inmates that they need some reason to crank out as many signs as possible.
Be the Head Screw in Prison Tycoon
I was cruising around for budget priced games and found this beautiful member of the “Tycoon” team - Prison Tycoon. At first I thought I was browsing The Onion, but this is actually a game where you run a for-profit prison and incarcerate dangerous felons while under a budget. However, as the copy suggests -
Private prisons have become the new growth industry. You will construct and run an efficient rehabilitation facility with nothing but money on your mind.
Interestingly, the game has gotten very little press only Game Zone bothered to review since it came out this summer. Even then, the review is grimly surreal -
Being able to create your own security force, guard towers, exercise yards, food and punishment areas. That should be a recipe for tons of fun.
Worse still is a reader review from Metacritic -
Just great I love the way black prison guards only beat up white prisoners and visa versa, deathrow, padded cells, and being able to drop bad prisoners and guards into “Hole” cells.
With cheerful settings like amusement parks, zoos and railroads taken, I wonder what options are still available
- Meat Packing Tycoon
- Mega-retailing Tycoon
- Git’mo Commandant
Derek Sunshine Redux - 1988
I was busy “reorganizing” my kitchen yesterday when I found an old C-120 tape of my radio show from the 1980s. For five years, I was DJ at WTJU-FM at the University of Virgina. I used C-120s to tape my afternoon shows, since I could get two of the three hours on one tape. Also, it was easiest to flip the tape during a pre-recorded station ID.
On that tape, recorded in January of 1988, I had an unusually peppy mix including Unrest (pre-Bridette Cross), The Visigoths and Beefeater. I also had at least one track played from a cart. I had forgotten how wonderfully loud the 80’s could be. I need to listen to the whole thing, but if I can get it onto my PC, I’ll probably rebroadcast the show on WRIR in the future.
I had actually thrown out many of the other tapes - before I started DJing again. I’ll have to see if my neighbor still has them.
Most Creative Variable Name
I was chatting with one of the consultants at work who complimented me on a particularly creative variable name. I appreciated the comment; I appreciated even more a chance to share the absuridity of what I do. For writing that has an audience of only a couple of dozen readers ever, some programmers will rail for hours over naming conventions. For me, the odd, non-standard variable name is more like a monk’s marginalia in a manuscript. Programmers spend hours transcribing requirements from their masters’ business-speak Greek into the current Latin of software development - Java. The temptation to draw a picture of an ass in a bishop’s miter is still too great.
And I can’t reveal the variable name since it now is a part of my employer’s sourcecode.
Vinyl Joy - Camberwell Now and 17 Pygmies
I flipped through some old 80’s records that I have and listened to 17 Pygmies and side one of a Camberwell Now lp. I was completely in awe of Jedda By the Sea by 17 Pygmies . It’s a moody, haunting album - part 4AD darkness, part Middle Eastern psychedelia. It only has four tracks with vocals, but they’re’ amazing - especially drummer/vocalist Debbie Spinelli. The record is probably more moody than I’d care for now, but I’m terribly sentimental about it. Hearing that with a half dozen other records in 84-85 is what made me want to be a DJ in college.
Camberwell Now was a later addition to my collection (relatively speaking) and is an odd combination of progessive rock and new wave. The long tracks possess impossible guitar lines, tape manipulation and tightly wound drumming. I only made it through the first side before bed, but it was great to hear again - especially the first track, the Night Shift.
Back to Normalcy
The humongous project is now gone and I’m back to normal. I’m also looking at some ways of updating the site using software (Word Press) rather than doing everything by hand. So far so good, now I just need something to say.
