Can we call you 'Archie?'
An interesting weekend if ever there was one. Managed to, once again get only one day away from work, which I think is made even more impressive for the long weekend!
However, since I've got quite a bit to throw out there into the blogs, and who knows how much time I'm actually going to wind up with to do it I should get to the point and stop rambling. So let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.
Friday night I went out with some of Laura's work friends into Jillian's in Boston for a 'work party'. I found this hilarious for the most part, mostly because my bosses would not ever be downing shooters, drinking beers, buying rounds, betting on bowling, and I believe the most correct term would be carousing with their employees. Actually they (or I with my employees. Yes that's right for those who didn't know, someone saw fit to deliver unto me minions to do my bidding) aren't allowed to do these sorts of things here at the family oriented non-profit organization that we are. This was just exactly what we walked into though friday night and they had a grand ol' time of it. After the bowling subsided we headed downstairs to the bar and dance floor to continue the party and everything was all fun times! Except the DJ was aweful.
I feel like I'm not usually one to be judgemental about club music, since it's not really what I choose to listen to on my own and I realize completely that I'm not always up to speed on the latest music or dance crazes. And I tried to be diplomatic about what I was hearing because of these very reasons. It was bad though. And as soon as some of the other people in the club started looking towards the booth scratching their heads in confusion (literally in some cases) I figure out it wasn't my tastes that were the problem, it was this man's execution of his craft that was leaving a lot to be desired.
It's not that he chose bad songs, it's that he didn't actually play any. What would happen is that he'd start with the introductory beat of a song, typically something well known, and overlay it with a beat ripped from another altogether different song. At first this mashup seems to be going pretty well until the melody arrives and makes people sit up and say WTF, where did that come from? It would be an entirely new song being played over the original baseline tune. The first mashup had somehow metamorphosized (and no, it wasn't a subtle mastery of rhythms and tempos that let him flow pieces into each other. Rather it usually came off as someone putting the round peg through the square hole with a sledgehammer. It didn't so much 'work' as 'happen') into something different and completely alien to what we had been trying to dance to in the first place. Now a shifting beat can sometimes keep you on your toes and make for a more dynamic and exciting experience, but he patently refused to allow any sort of dialogue to establish itself between the music playing and those dancing on the floor. Why didn't that happen you might ask? Simply put; the mashups, and since never ONCE was it ever a single song being played I cannot in good faith call them songs, the mashups changed in this manner about every 30 - 40 seconds. I know this because I began timing the durations it became so painful and infuriating. Painful because the transitions were not handled well, and infuriating because if you start playing a song, people get excited about it, and if you change the song 30 seconds into it, you've denied them the satisfaction and pleasure of the experience of that song, or songs in this case. The mashups were also just... strange. One example springs to mind; start off with the rock classic 'Born to be Wild', let two bars of intro play before laying over it the 'Genie in a Bottle' tune, proceed to switching the beat with Avril Lavigne's 'I don't like you're girlfriend' song, allowing Genie in a Bottle to switch to Michael Jacksons 'Bad' which would then become the beat for 'I kissed a girl'. Again, all of that in about 40 seconds.
Repeat ad naseum never using the same song twice. It was just not well done at all, sometimes making people wince as if in real physical discomfort.
No, he wasn't taking requests.
We still had fun of course, the DJ became the source of a kind of pained amusement and general comraderie amongst strangers there as we all determined to have a good time in spite of this fellow doing strange, terrible things to the music.
That was Friday night of course.
Saturday saw me hunting for a new wallet as mine had offically died (it was in three peices...), grabbing a bite to eat with some theater aquaintances of ours, and seeing the show Harvey as performed by Theater To Go. Knowing almost the entire production staff, including three family members (Adam, Katie, and Johnny), the director, and one of the actresses dictated that I would probably end up there anyways but I was really looking forward to this production anyways.
Part of the reason of course is that I'd filled in for Adam as Stage Manager on a night he couldn't make it and was therefor privy to one of the more trying members of the casts antics before hand. The majority however was that I like the show and wanted to see how they'd decided to play it off. Mr. Antics didn't dissapoint me either however (do not EVER let audience see you in costume before, during, or after a show. That was the second rule I ever learned in theater, and that was only the capstone to his hilarity) so it all worked out for my amusement!
I never even got to Sunday on this post did I? And here I have to run along now, so I'll have to update on that. The ex-Primate of the Anglican Church in Canada, the Most Reverend Michael Geoffrey Peers, visited my church this past Sunday and I was invited out to have lunch with the Archbishop afterwards, which was pretty sweet. He teaches in Trinity at U of T where our priest attended, so conversation ranged all over many topics, from good korean hot-pot, the best street meat, and the best Kung-Fu film Friday we'd seen, to what the hell did they put on the R.O.M. anyways? As you can guess. it was fantastic!
posted by Jaecyn @ 6:34 PM
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