Party Music

I get quite stressed putting a playlist together for a party. I try to guess how the evening will unfold and plan the tunes with pace and volume in mind. In my mind, the bulk of the guests will arrive fairly promptly and immediately the house and garden is filled with the gentle hubbub of intelligent conversation, clinking wine glasses and compliments on the hors d’oeuvres. The music is upbeat but not too intrusive. Over the next hour the remaining guests arrive, nicely topping up the energy levels and keeping the job of mingling interesting and varied. The music settles into a chilled but happy groove. A few hours pass and the alcohol is starting to take effect. A couple of the younger, more attractive guests are having a little dance in the kitchen as they help to refresh drinks and pass out the snacks. The music has a slightly dancey vibe but in a cool way - nothing too pumping. As the evening wears on and people settle down into the spots they will be spending the rest of the party in, casually flirting with whoever is nearest, the music settles back into the chilled but interesting vibe. From here on in it will pretty much carry on like that until people start drifting home. If you end up with somebody who just won’t bloody leave then it is useful to have an extended version of any song by Timmy Mallet to hand.

Things rarely work out this way but I think it’s a good starting point. Since I caught the Apple virus a year or two ago (my bank balance is still undergoing treatment for shock) I can now control what’s being played from the iPhone in the field, as it were. Last minute adjustments (like skipping the ill-advised Britney Spears tune purely thrown in because that sexy new girlfriend of a mate is coming and you’d heard she gets all freaky to Toxic…) can be made with the minimum of fuss and embarrassment to all. Fortunately this all seems to work ok unless you temporarily misplace your iPhone and discover the next day that somebody has been on your Facebook and posted something to the effect of “ is a big gaylord”. I think the music should underscore the vibe of the evening, rather than dominate it (call me old fashioned if you will but I don’t see the point in music being so loud that the only way you can communicate with your fellow party-goer is by smoke signals - on the plus side it does negate the necessity to dance because by simply standing near a speaker you can be vibrated rhythmically giving the appearance of relaxed and individualistic grooving), and I tend to put a fairly chilled list together with just a few less mellow tracks dropped in at certain points.

This tactic seems to work. I’ve had a couple of compliments on the music choices and recently one friend asked me to make a playlist for her party. I was overwhelmed with fear and self doubt at this point. I mean, I am prepared to attempt to dictate a mood for my own shindig but I have no idea what somebody else wishes their party to descend into. And what if one of her guests should make a snide comment about the music choice? My incredibly fragile ego would suffer a severe, nay irreparable, bruising and I would withdraw into my shell quicker than a snail who’s just been picked up by my perma-hungry 16th month old boy because, for some reason, he likes the way they crunch. I’ve offered to fry them in butter and a little garlic but he just says, “Car… nng nng nng…” and dribbles on my shoe.

You may think I’m overreacting. You’d be right, of course - I make up for my lack of genuine life skills by being facetious and dramatic, but I do honestly think that the music played at a party is important and it should be a reflection of the hosts personality. It’s no good just slapping some tunes together that you think are currently fashionable… By the time the party comes around you will sound hopelessly inadequate and out of date, even if it’s later the same day. Trendy stuff tends to have a shelf life shorter than a shelf my dad put up.

Of course not everybody can be as cosmopolitan, metrosexual, groovy, funky, hip, virile, dashing, cultured and with-it as me. Oh no. I know quite a few people, as has been mentioned in previous blogs, that still think the pinnacle of party music is to put a Now That’s What I Call Seedy Exploitation And Appealing To The Lowest Common Denominator Volume 436 in their compact disc playing machine, crank the Bose up to 11 and steadfastly refuse to acknowledge their lack of cool as they gyrate ineffectually around the living room trying to recapture what they mistakenly think is their lost youth when in actual fact their youthful selves were just as hideously uncool albeit even less self-aware.

If you are one of those people who don’t really care for music - who don’t have the time or inclination to dig beyond the scab infested mouldering turd pile of popular culture to discover the real musical gems out there - then it might be worth asking a friend to put a playlist together. Just don’t ask me. I’ll go white, start sweating and have to go for a lie down.

P.S. I couldn’t let the Bose reference pass without some sort of whinge. These things sell for a fortune and provide the listener with lack of high frequency definition, lack of low frequency control and the appearance of a fan heater from 1978. For half the price Richer Sounds will sell you an amp and speakers that will first urinate all over any Bose system and then set about it with a mallet until it less resembles a fan heater and more resembles a pile of sand and broken promises. Ok so they are compact devices suitable for a kitchen maybe where their only purpose is to distract you from the petit mort that is washing up, but as your main stereo..? I’d rather saw off my own moustache than be forced to listen to one… Lots of love, Mike.

My Summer Holiday

I’m not a fan of holidays. Hang on, let me start again. I love being on holiday. My kind of holiday is where I get to wake up late, stay up late, write music, play games, watch films, ignore the phone, eat and drink whatever I fancy… My preferred destination for all these activities is my house. I have several reasons for this:

1) I’m already there. Travelling sucks. Lots of people say they “love travelling”. I don’t believe them. I think they mean they love arriving. Who on earth in their right mind likes travelling? Public transport is full of the public. Cars have to travel on roads full of people in other cars, most of whom shouldn’t be left in charge of something so dangerous and erratic. A large portion of them shouldn’t really be left in charge of anything more dangerous than a blunt crayon. Planes are completely mental flying cans piloted by people who exist mainly on a diet of caffeine and meaningless sex - this goes double for budget airlines who have pilots who are expected to fly in more directions in a day than your average blue-bottle after a mistimed swat. Bus and train stations are centres of excellence for lost souls, stress-junkies, people in suits who hate their own families and urine. Airports are mankind’s equivalent of Limbo only with worse seating - carefully designed to be so depressingly awful that any destination you arrive at after spending time in one seems like heaven.

2) All my stuff is there. I spend a lot of time working to buy things I enjoy. Why, during my small amounts of free time, would I choose to leave these things unguarded and go and sit on a beach somewhere hot with only a book and heat rash for company?

3) I have access to the internet. I know that most hotels have wi-fi these days but public wi-fi is a strange and mysterious beast available only to those rare few who have comprehended the payment method and gained hold of the Secret Word.

4) My own bed. Lots of people say how they love their own bed and I’m no different - despite suffering from disappointing pillow syndrome. I rarely sleep very well in hotels and I feel bad if I happen to impart a stain - even an innocent one. Plus I can’t resist room service and I always forget how expensive it is. And should you feel the need to sample some adult entertainment, you won’t be able to concentrate on it because part of your brain keeps reminding you that at some point you will have to face the check-out girl who will loudly read out your bill for you so that anyone in earshot can be sure that you enjoyed Catholic Flanges 7 just after you emptied the mini-bar and had a gin-cry.

I’ve been to quite a few places over the years and I’ve seen a lot of lovely things but the effort and cost involved in seeing these things doesn’t seem to tally with the pleasure gained in actually being somewhere versus, say, seeing it on the telly or in one of those large coffee table books that become so popular in times of recession. You may call me a miserable git if you like but I appreciate the spectacle of a carefully timed well shot image. I don’t enjoy being a sweaty tourist herded into a popular attraction so I can stare at a nice landscape or building from exactly the same point as fifteen other sweaty people (all on a coach trip from Bolton, 36% of them are called Irene) all snapping merrily away on their camera phones so they can bore their friends senseless when they return home… “Look, here’s another one of me and Tarquin at the orphanage. It was so moving. One of the children was made entirely of scabs and tears. It was so upsetting I could barely manage half my squid and champagne dinner aboard the yacht that evening…”

I get seriously twitchy if I’m away from my broadband connection for more than a day or two. I have no interest in reliving the glory days of the Empire by strutting around Africa taking endless snaps of bored grey animals hiding in a bush. If I want to see amazing animals I will watch a David Attenborough programme with all the benefits of their slow-mo macro camera’s, patient research and surround sound. I don’t want to sit on a beach. At all. I don’t see the point in courting skin cancer, parasailing or pedalling around in a small plastic boat of dubious seaworthiness. I think the sea is probably best left to the fish. You can’t drink it and everything about it seems designed to kill you in a variety of horrible ways.

Some of my problems with holidays may be down to getting travel sick when moving around in anything other than a pair of Converse. Some of it may be down to the enormous expense involved. Whenever I see such a large amount of money disappearing out of my bank account it makes me feel ill unless a couple of days later a nice new shiny piece of equipment is delivered. Also I don’t speak any other languages and this just makes me feel, in a typically British fashion, nervous and apologetic which is not conducive to relaxation. On top of this I am a total control freak so the thought of being driven or flown around by somebody else doesn’t sit well with me. The only exception to this is short taxi journeys where the only other option is walking or using public transport.

I realise I’m massively in the minority here. My long suffering partner despairs of my attitude to going on holiday. We’ve been abroad together a few times and I invariably get ill after exuberantly attempting a local delicacy in a pathetic attempt to fit in. We seem to have reached an uneasy agreement on the subject. She now goes on holiday with her mum to somewhere hot, foreign and sandy and at some other point in the year we will go on holiday to somewhere within driving distance of home just in case the batteries in my macbook go flat.

Apple Versus Microsoft

Now bear with me here… This is slightly geeky. I went on a tech forum recently to try and find out why a PC server firewall was blocking attempts from a Mac to use a certain file transfer protocol (told you). It was a long and complicated and fairly dull forum with various IT literate people talking about ports and clients and unix and so on… Halfway down this very useful but interminably dull thread was a comment from a “Mac Head” who said, "Don't use Microsoft shitty firewall. Use one frm Apple cos it will be loadz better NEway”. And this made my heart sink and my eyes wither and my balls retract and my knees ache and my teeth grind. People like this guy are the main reason that all my PC using friends tut and roll their eyes when I tell them about doing some work on a Mac. And my Mac friends tut and look down their noses when I tell them I have to use a PC.

It's really quite simple. If you're one of the aforementioned forum mangling people then read the following and see if you can keep up, you fudge brained goit.

PC's are multi-purpose systems designed and built with the sole purpose of total flexibility, ease of upgrade, ease of modification. This flexibility is why they are used for cutting edge scientific systems, cutting edge graphics systems (Avatar or any other big SFX movie? PC.), complex network administration, etc. Unfortunately this flexibility is also why they crash on a far more regular basis - as mentioned in a previous blog, the main issue with PC’s is crappy Microsoft software - not the machine itself. But it does mean that software and components are plentiful and cheap. It does mean that you can get a screwdriver out and prod it until it works. It does mean that anyone with a soldering iron can create hardware optimised for a specific task without having to go round to Steve Jobs house and kiss his i-Willy. I believe it's what is known as a horizontal business model and it is the main reason for the success and versatility of the platform. It does also mean that lots of people mod their machines and you can't buy a decent case for your hardware anymore - they all have stupid plastic flaps, swooshes, blue lights and little plastic windows on the side so you can marvel at your CPU fan spinning as you try in earnest to repress the part of your brain that is screaming at you to go outside and get a girlfriend.

Mac's are part of a vertical business model. Apple design the hardware and the software and they nobble it so that you can't easily get in and overclock the CPU or take it apart and swap some tiny circuit board for another tiny circuit board (I'm not saying you can't do this, it just isn't easy). They want to protect the "user experience" so they make them look nice, perform nice and behave in a fairly predictable fashion. The upshot of this is that if you buy a Mac to do a specific job (music, film editing, print media) then you can be pretty sure that when you turn it on, it will make that little noise that WALL-E makes and a minute or two later you are getting on with your work. Oh sure, you can crash a Mac. You can get plenty of freeware software for it - although not nearly as much as for the PC. You can even play games on it - although I wouldn't really recommend it. PC's are still better for that because you can tweak them to run games better. Mac's are improving in this area but are still years behind. I've got a couple of PC's. I use one for games and internet stuff. I use the other one for image editing and animation. I've also got a couple of Mac's. I've got a Mac Pro that is set up solely for music. It's connected to a network but internet access is disabled - unless I specifically turn it on to get an update. There are no games on it, no photo's, no iTunes, no funny bits of software that make pretty photo collages out of phone pics. It does one job and it does it very well. Far better than any PC I've used for the task. The other Mac is the little thing I'm writing this on. It's great for word processing, internet stuff, a few basic Steam games, basic image and video editing but that's about it. I know I can do other stuff on it if I want but I don't see the point. You buy a tool for a specific job. You don't buy a hammer and then use it to varnish a wardrobe. You don’t buy a chainsaw and use it to assemble a flatpack dining table. Unless you've got a vital bit of your brain missing, that is.

The simple fact is that Mac's are (these days) much better than PC heads will believe and PC's are much better than Mac heads will believe but they are both very different beasts - better at different things and they do it in different ways. Like a bike and a car are different. Like men and women are different. Like horses and pigeons are different...

Anyway, a PC is a toaster and a Mac is a kettle. You don't make toast in a kettle. Get over it.

Old Age

People tell me, as I drag myself screaming hysterically towards the end of my thirties, that 40 is the new 30. The people who tell me this are invariably over 40, whilst the people just turning 30 laugh directly into my face at the very thought of this. Now, I’ve got friends in the approximate age range of 20-55 and this doesn’t seem like a problem. I’ve got more younger friends than older ones because a lot of people, as they get to 40 and beyond, suddenly turn into the most tedious forms of life imaginable - having lengthy conversations about the latest Toyota warranty or the benefits of the A12 over the B1844. I went to a “party” a short while ago that was infested with these types. Half of the evening was spent discussing the different types of sofa on offer at the local retail park (probably best to use the A162 because that way you manage to bypass the lights at Lower Shittingdon and… blah blah blah) and the rest of the evening was spent hiding out in the bathroom looking for a suitably sharp object with which to slice my own face off.

How do you end up like these people? Is it built in at birth? Are some people pre-destined to evolve into middle class zombies? Is there a Tedium gene (other than Simmons - Ha!)? Is there a cure?

Worse still, is it going to happen to me? I’ve spent a good proportion of my life in what could most ridiculously be described as a quasi-bohemian stupor. Strange jobs, weird people, parties, music, depravity and generally high levels of grinning ignorance. I don’t consider this to be a waste. I think I’ve done pretty well so far. No major organs have packed up yet. I still have all my limbs. I’m surrounded by nice toys and people I love. I don’t have an intimate knowledge of local traffic patterns. I couldn’t care less about guttering or the local Rotary. I rarely think about those horrible sensible things that so many people seem to obsess about on a daily basis - y’know, mortgages, insurance renewal dates, bills, gentle crime drama’s starring ageing actors who used to be good but now phone their performances in via bored but wealthy agents.

I have had to think a little bit more about looking after myself since parts of me started to creak in damp weather but this is a small price to pay for all the countless floors I’ve passed out on over the years. I have a reasonable working knowledge of mortgages and tax but only to the extent that I know I have a decent deal and I don’t stare at Halifax adverts with a pen and notepad feverishly working out if I could save 12p a month by switching to them.

But I still enjoy gaming, music, drinks down the pub with mates, parties, violent films, filth, boobies, new technologies and all the other wonders our world outside the dull magnolia living room of everyday life has to offer. I still buy songs with swearing in them. I know about most modern genre’s of music - even if I think half of them are tedious wank-fests by show-off producers shoving their various mental disorders in your face. Listening to these is like being chased around a shopping mall by a demented goat whilst beating yourself about the head with a fruit salad. It quickly gets repetitive and you wonder why you’re still doing it since the goat is the only one having any fun. If you see what I mean…

I’m sure I’ll have to look after myself a bit more and slow down a little at some point. Maybe cut back a bit on the vodka and late nights. Maybe eat less sausages. Maybe… But if I ever start talking to you about B roads, traffic calming measures, David Jason’s wonderful new detective series or the fabulously low rates on offer at the Bank of Capitalist Bastardry then you have my permission to punch me in the face. Really hard.

Signs that you’re getting old include:

Walking into a room, forgetting why you’re there and then forgetting how to get back out of the room again

Tutting whenever you hear anything about Chris Moyles or Lady Gaga

Not understanding the latest clothing fad and then telling people at length about not understanding it

Repeating yourself

Repeating yourself (sorry)

Apologising for bumping into inanimate objects

Finding 18 year old girls deeply annoying

Breaking wind and not laughing

Producing enough bodily hair to embarrass a reasonably large yak

On the plus side:

You stop thinking about sex all the time

You begin to appreciate expensive marmalade

You’re much less likely to go out and pull and therefore less likely to get caught shagging by your partner

You’re no longer expected to listen to Radio 1

You can join a wine club without being faintly embarrassed

You’ll soon be dead