A Tale of Two Tracks

I attended Love Parade over the weekend. Overall it was a great time, though there were a few bumps along the way. Those bumps are somewhat humorous, so I'll talk about them before I get onto the real subject.

This weekend trip was made so that I could attend two parties – the free, day-time Love Parade festival and the expensive ($40 presale for me, probably $60 at the door), night-time after party. I was at the free party for pretty much the entire time. When it ended I headed out with a group of friends for dinner. Somehow getting dinner took 3.5 hours, which I attribute to the following factors: (1) driving around and trying to find parking in San Francisco on a Saturday night; (2) going out to dinner with a group of people whom had not paid $40+ for a ticket to a party that they were missing while getting dinner. On top of that I managed to lock the keys to our car in the trunk, so we had to wait another hour, adding up to 4.5 hours of missed-after-party time. And when we finally got into the party, the closing DJs were both trance DJs, which I really wasn't in the mood for. Granted, Marcus Shultz and Ferry Corsten are fairly ridiculous trance DJs, but I'm the guy that saw Tiesto live and left for the backroom after an hour. (I think Seb Fontaine was DJing the backroom. Heh. Seb Fontaine in the backroom. Gotta love Ibiza clubs). So, the after-party was basically a dud for me. Fortunately, I had such a great time at the day party that it didn't matter that much (which I'll get to in a moment).

The second bump came the "morning" after (whereby morning I mean early-afternoon), when we were trying to organize our group to get some food. It was 2:00 when we finally started talking about getting food. After the experience of getting food from the previous night I wasn't too keen on getting food as a group because I figured it would take a long time. My math went like this: Leave the house at 2:30, probably won't get to the restaurant until 3:30, will take 1.5-2 hours to go through the entire process of eating, meaning we wouldn't get out of San Francisco until after 5:00, putting us back in Pasadena around 11 and me back in Santa Monica at midnight. No, that was pretty much unacceptable, considering I was planning on getting up at 7am Monday morning. So, I voiced my concern, saying I wanted to be out of San Francisco before 4 (if not before 3 or 3:30). The response: "Oh, ok, we'll be fast." What happened: Got out of the house at 3:00, took ass-forever to get to the restaurant (got there at 4:00 by following our San Francisco host. I've only been to San Fran a couple of times and I swear I could have got to the restaurant in 30 minutes), and took 1.5 hours to eat, ultimately starting our drive home at 5:30, getting back to Pasadena at 11:30, and finally getting back to Santa Monica at 12:30. Bah. Exactly what I did not want to happen. Whatever though. In the end it doesn't really matter.

So now on to the positive part of the trip. At the day party I got to see Bad Boy Bill, Carl Cox, and DJ Dan, back-to-back-to-back. On word – ridiculous. Now, Carl Cox pretty much spins exclusively tech-house, so I wasn't surprised to hear him spin that. I was surprised, however, to hear Bad Boy Bill and DJ Dan spin a bunch of tech-house, as both typically tend more towards vocal/funky/"real musical instrument" house. Bill mentioned that San Fran is really into tech house, so I guess they were playing for their location. Anyway, the sets were amazing. DJ Dan's was probably the best of his that I've seen live. However, my experience hearing these sets was probably a bit different than most of the other people in the crowd. For example, here's how I reacted to the last five tracks in Bad Boy Bill's set:

• Track 1: Hell yeah, I know this track, it's awesome.
• Track 2: Oh shit, I have this track!
• Track 3: Oh shit, I have this track too!!
• Track 4: Oh my god, this track is ridiculous, and I have it as well!!!
• Track 5: Aaahhh!!! This track is on my wish list, and it's ridiculous too!!!

I've been really into house music for about two years now, yet only once have I heard a live set for which I could identify even a large minority of the tracks (fyi, that was the DJ Rap Valentine's Day party – best Q party ever, one of the best overall too). I heard probably eight tracks in Bad Boy Bill's set, and among them I had three, wanted a fourth, and knew two other (which I really liked, but not enough to buy for my vinyl collection). As a beginning bedroom DJ, it's tough to describe the feeling I got from Bad Boy Bill's set. Basically it was me thinking, "Damn, I have the same taste in tracks as BBB. Awesome!" But wait – it gets better. Two of the tracks that BBB played were tracks that I had bought without hearing them in any DJ live sets or recorded sets. Why am I mentioning this? Well, I would estimate that 75% of the tracks I own I picked up because I heard another DJ playing them. In a sense, those tracks were "DJ-proofed" and thus "safe" to pick up, i.e. "DJ whoever played this track, so it's gotta be good." For my last 20 vinyl purchases, a good number of them have been tracks that I heard for the first time on the website I get my vinyls from (dancerecords.com, in case you're wondering), so you could view those purchases as "riskier" in that I'm relying solely on my own musical taste to pick good tracks. I should note that I personally don't consider relying on my own musical taste to be a risk, as I believe I have an impeccable taste for house music, but at the same time it's nice to have that belief reaffirmed every so often.

One of said tracks that Bad Boy Bill played was a Steve Angello and Sebastian Ingrosso remix. Sebastian Ingrosso is one of the artists that consistently produces tracks I like. (some of the other artists consistently produce tracks I like are Laurent Wolf, JJ Flores & Steve Smooth, Thick Dick/E-Funk/E-smoove (aliases), H.C.C.R., Hatiras, and Josh Wink, to name a few). He favors a fuzzy-tech sound layered with multiple percussion tracks which I really like. I'll get back to him later. The second track was "Backbeat" by Macca, which is actually one of Hatiras's aliases. This track is awesome. It's a track that I heard online and immediately thought "I have to get this." It's a great peak-hour house track, i.e. one you would use to get the dance floor jumping. Sure enough, BBB threw it on and the crowd went nuts. Awesome.

About an hour or so later DJ Dan was on, and he threw on Backbeat as well. Talk about a DJ-proofed track – two of the biggest house DJs in the US (if not the world) played the same track less than two hours apart at the same party. Hell yes. So I'm listening to DJ Dan play through the track, and as he starts mixing out of it I can faintly hear the incoming track. This was my thought process during the transition: "Hmm, that incoming track sounds kinda familiar. Wait… that wouldn't happen to be Sebastian Ingrosso's "Get It Back" would it? (super-recognizable part of the intro comes in) Oh shit, it is "Get It Back!" Yeah!!! This track is awesome!" Let me give you a little background on Get It Back. Get It Back is exactly the kind of tech-house I like – catchy repeating hook, fuzzy tech sound, tribal-style percussion, and incredible breakdowns and builds. However, it really is kind of a niche track in that it won't immediately appeal to most people. Backbeat, by comparison, is exactly the kind of track that will appeal to most people, so it didn't really surprise me to hear it played at Love Parade (though hearing it twice did surprise me). If you had asked me before Love Parade which non-DJ-proofed track would I most want to hear played at a party it would have been Get It Back. So, as you can probably imagine, hearing my favorite DJ, DJ Dan, DJ-proof it for me was an amazing experience. Then, to top it all off, DJ Dan did an amazing transition: In the 1-minute breakdown in the middle of Get It Back he mixed in a spoken-word acapella (probably from some movie. I didn't recognize it) for the entire breakdown, and on top of that mixed in an acapella from Backbeat for the last 15 seconds of the breakdown. What made that transition so cool was that I knew both of the tracks being used and thus was able to recognize exactly what he was doing. Awesome. Damn, I love house music. And DJ Dan is still, by far, my favorite DJ.

The latest 9/11

I thought I’d do a little 9/11 reflection.

For starters, I’m curious as to how many people actually realized that 9/11 was coming around. Granted, everything related to hurricane Katrina has monopolized the headlines for the last two weeks, so it’s somewhat understandable for 9/11 to get pushed onto page two.

“9/11? That’s sooo four years ago.”

I’ve got a little 9/11 story to share. On the one year anniversary I was finishing up my first internship at Microsoft. It was during my last week there, when I spent every-other night in my office because I no longer had my summer apartment (because Kutta and Andy had left the week before). If you’re wondering I spent the other half of the nights at my mom’s house. I would have spent all of the nights at my mom’s house except that it was nearly a 90-minute bus commute each way, and I only felt up to making one of those trips each day. Anyway, the night of 9/10/02 was spent in my office, and I remember this because remember staying up most of the night, working while waiting for that first, “We’ve been attacked again,” headline to flash up on CNN. Obviously that headline never came. What’s surprising to me now is how likely I thought the possibility was at the time. If I had to put a percentage figure on my mindset, I’d estimate I thought there was a 25%-50% chance we’d get attacked again. Now, we can argue about how well educated I was about the situation (or, more correctly, how uneducated I was), but the real point of the matter is that that was what I believed at the time, and I have a feeling that a large, large number of others felt the same way.

Now, fast-forward to the present day. Not even five years later 9/11 has passed with minimal fan-fare. Yeah, it’s mostly because Katrina is the latest disaster flavor of the week, but I’m not sure if that necessarily comforts me any more than the media focusing on the anniversary of 9/11. On one hand, I’m glad to see that America has cooled their jets about the threat of terrorism and, for the most part, gone back to their normal lives. Example: Apparently there was a threat on Los Angeles (where I live, of course) for 9/11 this year which I didn’t hear about until today (9/12). And it’s not like I’m particularly cut off from the media either. On top of being an internet news junkie, I constantly listen to talk radio (as any of my past roommates can attest to), so you would think that I would have heard about the threat. Granted, authorities are all but calling it bogus, but just a year ago even a fake threat would put at least the area threatened on orange alert (or whatever that ridiculous color-coded system is). Not this year. So, it’s nice that people have calmed down some.

On the other hand, I tend to think the reason people have calmed down is less because they’ve learned how to live with the threat of terrorism (i.e. “if there’s nothing I can do (or am willing to do) about it, I might as well put together some emergency kits and go on living like I did before) and more because they’ve begun to ignore it in favor of other hot-button issues. To me that just says that the people of the U.S. can be lead by whomever can best get at certain motivating emotions, and I’m not sure how much I like that…

A blind leap of faith made clearer

Man, it's been a while. This last month has been hectic. I thought I'd been through a delivery crunch before, but this last one was the real deal. I was lucky enough to have two weekend vacations, one up to Seattle, the other with my college boys to the Grand Canyon and Vegas, in the middle of it all, and other than those I worked every day from July 25^th to last Friday. I know, that's kind of like saying "it was sunny every day last month except for the five days when it rained," but the point is I worked a lot over the last six weeks, and thus I haven't posted. Gah. Gotta get better at this consistency thing. Anyway, on to the meat of the post.

One of the favorite topics of discussion when my college buddies and I get together is "where do we see ourselves in the future?" Usually this is specific to our careers, though it also gets into hobbies as well as potential families. Of those three areas, I'd say the future of my career is the one that's most up in the air at this time. That may seem surprising to those who've heard me talk about my five year plan, my financial goals, the potential for starting a business of my own etc., so I'll expound a bit.

First, my hobbies. It may seem unnecessary to make plans for the futures of your hobbies, but I'm of the opinion that if you really want to make the most of what you do with your spare time you've got to plan. On a similar note, if you want to become good at something you do, you've got to plan as well. Case in point: I started playing the guitar in 9^th grade and never really got anywhere with it because I had no focus with it. My greatest improvements came during my high school and college guitar classes (which were a smaller percentage of the eight years which I played the guitar), and the rest of the time I pretty much just pretended to be Billy Corgan (high school) or Jimmy Page (college). I played for eight years, but my ability was more along the lines of one to two years of regular practice. Of course, it's worthwhile to consider the fact that while I enjoyed playing the guitar, I didn't LOVE playing the guitar. Contrastingly, I LOVE spinning. I can't get enough of it. My practice time is usually between four and ten hours each week, which is considerable given that my weekly guitar practice time was often counted in minutes, not hours. What's more, I enjoy spinning so much that (most times) I don't have to force myself to practice. I actually want to practice. That's a new thing for me. The only other hobby I can remember really wanting to practice was ultimate frisbee in high school (NOT college). This might go without saying, but it's pretty cool when you find a hobby that you can enjoy on that level. I haven't had one of those in a while. (well, some might say there was one in college, but I've pretty much put a stop to that). Even the dancing I started during senior year didn't reach that level. Yeah, I enjoyed the perks, but was largely unwilling to put up with the frustrations of practice. That's not the case with spinning, and I think that's a sign that I've stumbled upon a keeper of a hobby. Now, given how much I enjoy spinning as well as my desire to be good (and, mark my words, I'm going to be better than good. Give me a few years, and I believe I will be extraordinary. As those of us in the know understand, beliefs are empowering…), I think it's worthwhile to set goals to achieve. Without going into details I'll say that I've got the short term fairly planned out and a general idea for where I want to be going long term.
After spinning, I've got a few other hobbies that I plan on keeping up. I love exercising (mostly the looking great part of it), and I've got plans to keep that going. I kinda had plans to run the LA Marathon next year, but I'm going to put that off for a year. I know I need to get my marathon done soon as I don't know how much longer my body will be capable of completing a marathon. Back in high school I set the goal of "26.2 miles before 26.2 years," which pretty much gives me two more years and some change (yikes!), so I figure next summer I'll start seriously looking at running the 2007 LA Marathon. After exercising I've got learning to Tango (which should be greatly catalyzed by living with Tara this year), picking up ultimate again, hitting various LA clubs regularly (namely boom boxx and monday night social), and finally the generally category of continuing my education (which pretty much means keeping my mind fresh by always learning new things).
The interesting thing about hobbies as that they're paradoxically "purely in-the-moment" and "purely long term" activities at the same time, as you tend to do them to enjoy the present, yet the true benefits of hobbies are the long term gains that come from them. I'm starting to think that the true measure of a person is what they do with their "hobby time" since there are no (immediate) consequences to not being productive with your time. With work you may have to take on a crappy job just to pay your bills, and if you don't then there are definite consequences. However, once you've got your basic necessities taken care of you don't have to do anything further if you don't want to. You can sit in front of the TV for all of your remaining waking hours and seemingly suffer no consequences (well, other than brain rot, poor health, and the potential to have the great epiphany of "holy crap, I haven't done anything but watch TV for my entire life!" at the age of 40). Anyway, each person's personal time is theirs to do what they want with. I think I've got some nice things lined up for myself.

Second, my future family. This is actually an easy one. I'm a firm believer that under no circumstances should I start a family until my late 20s, preferably not until my early 30s. The age at which to start a family seems to favorite topic of debate among my friends, and I seem to hold the most absolute opinion on the matter: "Under no circumstances, even if you find the fabled 'perfect girl,' do you enter into a long-term relationship before the age of 28." In case you're wondering, this statement is specific to me, and I pick the age of 28 because it coincides closely with me completing five full years of working (or at least five full years of post-college experience). The logic behind that is simple: I believe I need at least five unfettered years to get my career going, and I believe that entering into a long term relationship can in no way net benefit my career. That's not to say it's not ok to date and keep casual relationships. However, my 20s are my years, my SINGLE years, and if I assume (which I am) that I'm going to get married and raise a family I will never again have the chance to be truly single every again. Why ditch that opportunity? It's similar to the idea that you can never be a young kid again. The harsh reality of life is that you grow up. How many of us really understood what we had when we were kids? None of us, of course, because at that age you can't possibly understand what it's NOT like to be a kid. How ironic is it that when you're a kid all you want is to be older, and then when you're old you look back on your younger days as "the golden years"? On a related note, there's gotta be an age at which your young self and old self meet and you achieve a temporary state of nirvana. My answer – your college years after you turn 21. Hell yeah. :-P Anyway, I'll concede that I pretty much have NO idea what it's like to be married, but given the percentage of husbands that refer to their spouses as "the ol' ball and chain" I'm going to step out on a limb and guess that there are a good number of aspects of single life that we won't fully appreciate until we're married and are parents. Actually, I take that back. There is at least one person who is truly enjoying the freedoms of single life: me. I'm fiercely independent, and I love that (in a sense) I can do whatever I want because I have nobody depending on me, that I'm responsible to myself and nobody else. Now, I'm not a complete loner, as my year living alone has shown me (and I'm quite happy that I'll be sharing a residence with a great friend for the next year), but I do appreciate the beauties of independence that I believe will only be available to me during the next few years of my life. So, as far as planning my family goes, that's pretty much on the back burner for now.

So now we get to my career. Here's the one-sentence summary of my five year plan: "Work for NE for five years, cash in your options, and start your own business." Huh. No hand-waving there at all. First of all, the option of working with NE for five years is by no means guaranteed, as I was so coldly shown earlier this year. I'm pretty sure I've got another year guaranteed, and then we'll see what happens with our product. The options part is, again, by no means guaranteed and is pretty much in the same boat as the five year employment option. However, those two parts seem like a piece of cake compared to the last part: Start my own business. Ok, that's a nice idea. How? My current answer: I have no fucking idea. No kidding. I have no idea how that part is going to go. At this point I feel like the stereotypical guy that thinks "I want to be rich" and then can't think past that (which, actually, is essentially what I'm thinking). My own business? Based around what? What role(s) do I play? What industry? Will I know enough in five years to actually attempt such a feat? Aaahhh!!!!!

I'm going to step back in time about five months to my trip to Argentina during which Tara and I talked about pretty much everything we possibly could, so of course we talked about our futures. Tara's about to go through the grad school application process, which I don't envy at all. Even if I had her amazing qualifications I wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole. There's a reason I jumped out of academia and got a job instead. Ok, actually two. I'd rather earn over the next four (or more) years than pay, and I don't want to leave my future in the hands of admissions officer who will receive thousands of applications and give mine maybe an hour of thought if I'm lucky. I much prefer being able to interview in-person and have a chance to demonstrate why I'm better than all of the other job applicants (which I am, but that doesn't necessarily come across on paper. Hmm, did I mention that beliefs are empowering?). Anyway, during this specific talk with Tara (which, if I remember correctly occurred during our walk to Southfest, which was the ridiculous Sasha and Digweed party that we went to) I laid out my five year plan to her, and apparently did so with massive amounts of confidence and assuredness because when I was done she made some comment like, "well, you seem to have it all figured out." What's ironic is that that couldn't be further from the truth. In truth, I actually have NONE of it figured out. Instead I have this vague idea of what I need to be doing and in many ways feel that every step forward I take is nothing more than a blind leap of faith based on said vague idea. And then, over the past two weeks, I think I figured something out.

One of my favorite theories of life is that it is impossible to make a correct decision, and that instead you can only hope to make the best decision you possibly can. For example: Last week I volunteered to pick up a friend. The friend could have easily taken the bus, but I thought the best decision was to pick that friend up. During the pick-up I was rear-ended by another driver while waiting at a stop-light. Thankfully the damage was no more than a couple of scratches on my bumper – the real cost of the accident was the hour I had to spend exchanging information and talking with my insurance company. Looking back, the correct decision would have been to not pick up the friend. However, correct decisions only exist after-the-fact, and I still believe the best decision at the time was to pick up the friend.

A second favorite theory of life is to do what you love, and do it well. This one somewhat assumes that you have an innate desire to be great. Up until the last year I pretty much assumed that at some level everybody had the desire to be great, largely because I have it and, of course, everybody is exactly like me. However, as I started to open up a bit and pay more attention to how others think I started to notice that some people had other desires (such as the desire to buy shoes (ding)) that far outweighed the desire to be great to the point that it was non-existent.

What I figured out consisted of a hybrid of the two above theories applied towards starting a business. "What do you love?" The time-tested answer to that is graphics/simulation/A.I. The other possible answer at this point is spinning, but I'm not about to bet my future on my DJing abilities, especially considering I've only been doing it for 6+ months. My interest in simulation goes back to the mid-90s when I read about physics engines being developed for 3D games for the "next generation" systems (all of which have been effectively retired now). Graphics is an obvious partner to that one. A.I. came a bit later, in college I think, as a tangent from simulation. So, given that I have the ability to "do these well," what is the correct decision(s) to make as far as working towards starting a business is concerned? Once again: no fucking idea. Now, what is the best possible decision(s) to make with regards to starting a business? Aha! I can answer that one! At a high level, the answer is to "prepare myself for when the opportunity presents itself." How do I prepare? Part 1: Learn all I can in the academic areas that I would like my future business to draw from. Part 2: Learn all I can about business, hopefully a good amount from the executives at NE. And above all of this, trust myself in knowing that if I continue to make the best possible decision, good things will happen (or, as I prefer to succinctly put it, 'trust it'), because if you KNOW that you're good, the you know that good things will happen. Did I mention that beliefs are empowering?

P.S. While I've had this topic in mind for a while now (as you can probably tell by the length of it), this post was written with a certain friend in mind who's now facing a much more immediate scary future, and whom I know, even if she doesn't (yet), is going to be just fine. :-)