Category → Stumbling
Mix Tape Mixups
“A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention, and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and… oh, there are loads of rules.” – Rob Gordon, High Fidelity
I love mixtapes. Not that anyone makes mixtapes anymore, what with the advent of iPods. Stashed away in my room is a box of Triple J compilations and bootleg live concerts on cassette, complete with the first few seconds missing from the beginning of each track and DJ banter over the end – one of my most treasured possessions – and I still think the ability to make a solid 12 track iPod playlist is a skill sorely lacking in this world of 80 gigabyte music collections, if you even can compare an mp3 filled hard drive to a record collection.
My point is that mixtapes are a lost art. I once went to a party where everyone had to bring a 30 minute playlist, and it was one of the best DJ’d parties I’ve ever been to. Since then I’ve always taken great care to make kicking playlists for each house party we have. Even if they get abandoned or commandeered, at least you have a good start and something to fall back on when someone put Pendulum on repeat then falls into a K-hole.
It was with this in mind that I decided to make a party mix for a Swing Dancing buddy of mine’s housewarming. Being one of the more alternative members of the group I thought I’d go for something a little different and stray away from the traditional big band stuff they mostly dance to. The prettiness of certain female members of this group may also have been of matter. 24 hours later and I had pared several harddrives down to the following dozen songs:
- Do your thing – Basement Jaxx
- Dark hair’d rider – Heavy Trash
- Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on – Jerry Lee Lewis
- Down the line – Johnny Cash
- Johnny B. Goode – Chucky Berry
- I’m waiting for the man – The Velvet Underground
- I am a man of constant sorrow – The Soggy Bottom Boys
- We’ll meet again – Johnny Cash
- On a Christmas day – C. W. Stoneking
- I dig you – Boss Hog
- Chocolate Jesus – Tom Waits
- Constellation prize – Jason Webley
- Candyman – Christina Aguilera
- Start wearing purple – Gogol Bordello
- Rock and roll – Led Zeppelin
- The young crazed peeling – The Distiller
- Lordy lordy – The Distillers
- Push-ka-pee-na pie – Louis Jordan and his Tympani 5
It kicked off with some rock n’ roll, got a little country, then got weird, turned back and rocked the fuck out with a mean groove and finally ended with hilarious kitsch.
A few hours into the party, a suitable crowd had amassed and I figured it was the opportune moment to unleash my brilliant playlist. It did not go off as expected. In fact, a lot of people looked confused by Basement Jaxx’ Do Your Thing. Confusion and later disinterest hit, and I realized that this was not the crowd for my playlist. One partygoer informed me “we don’t dance to rock & roll” as Jerry lee Lewis started.
The party soon dissipated to the kitchen. Finally, the draw card of the mix, the ace in the hole kicked over and I thought all would be saved. Swing buddy and I kicked out some serious jams; Turns out the rest of the Swing world doesn’t think as highly of Christina Aguilera’s reimagining of 40s swing as we did. People went outside. And stopped talking to me, although this may have been due to my incredible staggering drunkenness.
Turns out the Swing Dancing scene doesn’t really get drunk. One partygoer refused a Black Russian, explaining, “I don’t drink, it affects my dancing” – at a party. Go figure. At some point everyone left and I passed out on a mattress on the lounge room floor. When I awoke I went to the kitchen to dredge up some remnants of last nights memories. It appeared I polished off a bottle of Vodka, the best part of a bottle of Gin and half a bottle of 70-proof Kahlua. Looking around I also noticed very little other evidence of drunkery. In fact, as I cleaned up I found little more than a half-dozen beer bottles, a mostly-empty wine bottle and 20-30 softdrink cans.
I somehow got shitfaced drunk with a party of teetotaler Swing dancers, and didn’t notice. Looking back, this is almost definitely a contributing factor – although not the sole one – to the failure of my party mix. A few people at the party actually asked for a burned CD of it, as did a few others who came across it over time.
The moral of the story: No matter how good a mixtape may be, be sure that a belligerently drunk will kill any and all buzz. Oh, and don’t party with people who don’t drink Vodka – no good can come of it.
Six Months of Free Wine, Tiny Soup and Meltdowns
Prelude: As I wrote this article, back in the middle of 2009, Steph and I were a single day away from our three-week holiday from On Dit. We felt more like we were three weeks away from getting committed to some sort of mental institution, quite frankly. The weekend just gone was one of a Pete Doherty proportion meltdown, one that actually kicked me hard enough to re-evaluate how I was going about life arse-over, but that’s what unknown chemicals will do to one’s conscience as you lay in a bed, insides cramping and afflicted with fever-sweats, but that’s another story for another time.
The social life of an editor is a strange one. With deadlines constantly overlapping, nights become long and friends and family are soon left behind in lieu of first of all the business at hand of creating a student publication, and then later for the heady world of red carpet events and after-parties. It is these that truly skew one’s life into a sort of strange caricature of how ‘important’ people live.
As an On Dit editor you begin receiving invitations to various events sch as the Adelaide Big Pond Film Festival opening night, Cabaret Launch Party and so on. You stop paying from tickets to concerts and sporting events, your name perpetually inhabiting door lists, admitted with a mention of credentials and a knowing nod.
Having never been to this sort of thing before, we snapped up our RSVPs and dived in feet first. There’s the fun of getting needless haircuts, dressing up in dapper outfits and the polishing of shoes, and then there is the mingling and schmoozing. The most fun thing about this is that you never really feel like you belong here at first, so it’s all a big game, playing grownups so to speak.
The after-parties themselves were a world like I’d never encountered before. Important old people in dresses, suits and jewellery more expensive than my first car flitted to and fro. They threw back their heads and laughing at inane witticisms, sipping on seemingly bottomless glasses of champagne. Waiters wove their way through the crowd of cackling bourgeois yuppies, carrying trays of tiny, tiny food.
We were proffered shot glasses of a thick green liquid, which I assumed to be some sort of organic liqueur, and threw back what tasted like blended lawn clippings, nearly choking on the tiny prawn floating in the miniature swamp I held in my fingers. The snooty waiter promptly advised me it was chilled cucumber and dill soup. “In a shot glass?” I asked rhetorically, before grabbing another 8 or so and downing them in rapid succession. Food this small you can’t eat fast enough, at least not fast enough to counteract the copious amounts of free alcohol sloshing around one’s stomach, a vile mixture of beer, and wine both red and white, with bubbles and without, the cocktail added to as each sort of free alcohol slowly but surely runs out.
Eventually you meet people you probably shouldn’t ever meet, let alone under the influence of too much drink and too little food.
Through bleary eyes you seen Margaret Pomeranz standing proudly out front, a defiantly cracked laugh issuing from her mouth as a sophisticatedly length cigarette hangs from her lips. You say something inane and slightly slurred and you get a smile, the polite sort a world away from the face you saw upon approach. Her hand feels like the bark of a tree and she says how lovely it was to meet you and she turns away and goes back to laughing uproariously with her friends. You’ve just made an arse of yourself and realize you’re out of your depth, socially. No one else is as drunk as you, knowing that the alcohol is free to spare them of the petty act of exchanging moneys rather than so you can drink to the point of social, if not physical impairment.
You’re not meant to drink all the beer, and all the sparkling shiraz, and the champagne, and the regular shiraz and the chardonnay. Next thing you’re appearing half-cut in the social pages of a dozen Adelaide publications, slamming booze like a frat-boy. That’s what office parties are for. Two days later my house was inhabited by 60+ editors, subbies, student pollies, friends and family members. We drank and danced like we’re meant to, with reckless abandon, $500 woth of advertising-funded alcohol sloshing about in our bellies, full of real food, dancing to real music with real friends, exactly as it should be.
Fuck red carpets. Fuck after-parties. This is how we roll.
How to not, not embarass ones’self.
When I began editing On Dit with Steph and Clare, they began to hear some of my drinking tales and tragic romantic misadventures upon our time bonding together in the office at On Dit. It was quickly decided that I should write a regular column entitled ‘Social Fumblings’, to publish not so just the terrible things I end up doing, but the comically self-deprecating way I manage to spin these tales.
The tale of my shaming of On Dit at the 2009 Express Media Conference begins thus…
The first day of the Student Media Conference was drawing to a close and we were descending on the scrappy remains of the catered ham & cheese sandwiches when Zoe Barrow (the amazing young woman who organized the conference) announced that there was a friend-of-a-friend’s house party that night which we were all invited to. Being somewhat partial to the odd house party I quickly scribbled our contact details down and scarpered off to the nearest Liquor Land Express and purchased the cheapest bottle of nondescript Gin my $100 per diem would fund.
A few G & Ts and Black Russians on the hostel roof and it began to dawn on Clare and Steph, who had never seen me drunk in the flesh, just how rowdy I tend to get on the sauce. Nevertheless they shrugged my slightly increased verbosity off and we sauntered back to our dorm for a nap. Not being very tired, while the girls napped I drank Gin on my top bunk and tried halfheartedly to flirt with the German girl in our room in my very broken German – this has since been dubbed my “C game” (versus “A game”).
Cue several hours later to house party – a small single story cottage just on Brunswick Street. Student types milling about with punch in the kitchen, the few smokers milling outside in the fairy-lit backyard strewn with retro couches and picnic rugs. I sat down with the editors of Vertigo, a Sydney based paper, and soon began to put away G & Ts and Black Russians at a prodigious pace. Slowly, my mind fades to black.
What follows was pieced together from various accounts from my po’ faced co-editors and other Conference panellists, with somewhat good reason for said reactions.
Two-thirds of a bottle of Gin and who knows how many Black Russians down in just under 2 hours and I emerged from house announcing loudly to Steph how ‘some nice people in the kitchen gave me shots!’ Soon I began to swap scarves with Steph. This is a bad sign, scarf-swapping drunk. The last time I was this drunk I woke up with the make-up of a single-mother smeared on my face, narrowly avoiding a fight with a man in a taxi rank on Frome Rd.
Back to Melbourne, two and a bit hours into the party and I am shit-faced drunk, belligerently voicing my opinions on matters that aren’t even being discussed to pretty much anyone in earshot, as I try to pair up my co-editors with any male in sight. ‘This is all you need’ I slur, motioning with my hands to the space between Steph’s head and waist. The decision is made to leave and I am walked out to the street t get a cab. We stop by a MacDonald’s and I demand a cheeseburger and try to walk into traffic to hail a cab. Tully, panellist and former editor of Farrago saves me from being hit by traffic and we taxi is back to our hostel.
My next clear memory is sitting in the communal meal room. Clare, Steph and Tully are engaged in an in depth conversation about something important. I have no idea what they are talking about, being very busy using all of my willpower to not pass out on the table. Everyone is aware of this. I announce that I am going to the toilet, politely refusing any assistance getting there. I get halfway there and fall into the wall and proceed to grind my shoulder along the wall the rest of the way to the toilet. I am very impressed. Steph and Clare are not. I return to the table and announce that I am going to bed, Steph making the executive decision to abandon the conversation and escort me lest I get myself into any more trouble.
Still legless, I swipe my access card through the magnetic reader a dozen or so times before realizing Steph has opened it for me. How I got up on my bunk I have no idea, beyond my ability to pull out some semblance of motor function when necessity dictates.
I wake up in my bed feeling a little foggy-headed but relatively not hung-over. I am naked and all of my earthly possessions are in a mountain in the middle of the room. Steph and Clare look at me with scornful eyes. All I can think is how surprisingly handsomely I’ve managed to pull up. This is because I am still drunk.
Student Media Conference, bless you.