The Incredible Blog

The night I cleared Ringler’s Pub

There used to be a DJ acquaintance of mine who lived in Portland and went by the name of DJ Miranda. I first met him DJing one of the few parties at Nick and Mark’s on Haight St. that I didn’t DJ, five years back or so. We ended up doing a few parties there together after that point. Eventually DJ Miranda got a regular gig DJing at Ringler’s Pub every Saturday night. He had been doing the gig for quite some time, and when he needed to take a week off, he asked me to fill in for him. Having DJed several house parties with me he felt that he could trust me to play the ’80s and hip-hop party favorites that the crowd there subsisted on. However, he wanted to make absolutely sure that I was prepared to play exactly what the crowd there expected, so he even invited me over to his record den (quite impressive in size) to play for me the crowd’s favorites. I remember him singling out the Madonna
“Like a Virgin” 12″, Cindi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, Zapp’s “More Bounce to the Ounce,” Tupac’s “California Love,” and probably a Dr. Dre song off of the Chronic, among others. Miranda knew how fussy and particular his crowd was, and he wanted to make sure I would get it absolutely right. Having played for plenty of lowest common denominator crowds, I didn’t see myself as having any problem playing for the regular attendees at Ringler’s Pub.

The night of the gig Anjali accompanied me as a roadie, and I set up in the pub while it was still light. Since it was just a sitting crowd, and much older than I expected, plenty of white-haired attendees and stuff, I started out with an assorted downtempo set, mixing in Arabic instrumentals and Sidestepper, and other things as is my wont. I was being sensitive to the “mainstream,” “normal” makeup of the patrons, and wasn’t trying to do anything too aggressive or unusual. I knew I was going to have to go super-mainstream for the dancing portion of the evening, but since it was early and everyone was sitting I figured I had a little more leeway to play things a little off the beaten track. The crowd seemed like such a sit-down crowd, that it took me a while before I started playing more uptempo material. Everyone stayed far from the small dance floor, but at one point a young woman approached me to ask what I was playing when I put on Special Ed’s “I Got It Made.” Eventually I realized that enough time had passed that I had better go for broke in terms of getting people on the dance floor if it was ever going to happen.

I got a handful of girls and a few guys onto the floor when I started playing some more obvious dance songs. So many years have passed, I don’t know exactly what I played, but I imagine I played Cindi Lauper’s “She Bop,” Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance,” maybe some Missy? I remember playing primarily a girly set for the girls. The dancing probably lasted for a half hour or so, (Anjali claims it was an hour) with only a small group of dancers that Anjali noticed paired up into heterosexual couplings before all exiting the floor. Now, I was trying to get people to dance. I wasn’t trying to be perverse, avant-garde, or experimental. Yet I still sensed that the staff and the crowd at Ringler’s were not feeling what I was doing. At all. Despite my efforts. At one point I had to use the loo and Anjali played a song while I stepped out, a very fast, aggressive electro-bhangra song by RDB which was far more edgy and outside of the mainstream American norm from anything I had played all night. I was trying to blend in. Leave it to Anjali to play something really progressive and startling, despite the environment. I was afraid of pissing off the staff too much, and Anjali proved herself the true artist and obviously didn’t give a shit about kowtowing to the taste of the normals. More power to her.

Hours before I was to be done a seemingly frustrated bar manager explained to me that I needed to go upstairs to get paid. I didn’t see how he thought I was going to continue DJing and also go upstairs and get paid. As it was Anjali was with me, but she didn’t have any experience DJing mainstream schlock, and as my trip to the bathroom proved, she was hardly going to tone down her avant-garde tendencies for Ringler’s, so I was still committed to DJing, and finishing out my shift. If Anjali hadn’t been with me, I absolutely don’t know how I was supposed to get paid, because there was no way I would have left all my music and equipment in the middle of the pub. A while later the bar manager came up to me even more frustrated and annoyed with my check and the announcement that I was done, well before my shift was supposed to be over. Apparently he wanted me to stop what I was doing and get paid and leave, back when he first approached me, but I had no idea. I had the plug pulled on me. I looked around and realized that the few people left in the pub were essentially pressed against the walls at the farthest points away from my speakers, far at the other end of the establishment, and it wasn’t like I was playing that loud. Apparently even when I tried to play my most mainstream lowball set ever, I still managed to alienate this pub of normals. Allison from the Crystal Ballroom came down to apologize to me. As pissed as the bar manager appeared, no one had actually complained to my face at any point, but she must have feared the worst, because not only was she apologetic, but she said I was one of the best DJs in town. Not that I would hold her to that all these years later, though it was really sweet of her to try to make me feel better after what she surmised must have been a pretty brutal night.

After I shut down my sound, the bar staff began to immediately crank AC/DC or something very similar, much louder than my music had been, apparently to cleanse their palate of the awful unfamiliarity of my music. Believe me: I wasn’t trying to be weird, perverse, experimental, or anything. I was honestly trying to please the regular crowd, even if I wasn’t going to play exactly what Miranda had instructed. After all, I’ve played to lots of mainstream crowds at bars, weddings, birthdays, house parties, corporate parties, etc. I honestly believed I could do it my way (or my way of lowballing) and still come out on top. Although I told Miranda later that I knew it didn’t go too well, he never passed on any feedback or uttered a word about my performance. However you better believe that no matter how many vacations he took after that point, I was never asked to be his DJ replacement at Ringler’s Pub ever again.

IK

Ignore the haters. If you enjoyed the first Harold and Kumar movie, they really worked hard to maintain the quality on the sequel. If the sequel drags at all compared to the original it is only because of the political commentary inserted throughout the film, which is highly welcomed by me. At first I thought Neil Patrick Harris’ return was going to be an underwhelming retread, but he really knocked this one out of the park. I’ve never followed any of his work, but his performance in this film is brilliant. Awesome.

My only real complaints about this film are politically-correct ones, which is kind of missing the point for a movie like this. I wish homosexuality wasn’t presented mainly as something gross and based on rape and domination. I appreciate that the movie forces any potential homophobes in the audience to see some cock, but if you are going to have the female actors showing their crotches, I think Kal Penn and John Cho should have to show theirs as well. Not that I really want to see them, but fair is fair. I wish the female characters had more agency, and I would have loved for the actor playing Kumar’s mother to have some lines and not just be a set of pleading eyes. In fact, on the cast page of the official film website they only list male actors. While I am a big fan of miscegenation in all its forms, and I like that as unrealistic as it is, the film has a symbolic scene of rich white upper-crusties applauding Kal Penn kissing an all-American white girl, I would love for there to be more female characters of color in the film. Paula Garcés, who plays Maria in the film, is from Colombia, and that is cool, but she isn’t given much to do besides be a pretty face. There are no female Asian characters, and the only one who even had a name in the prior film is only mentioned off-handedly in this film as having performed a coprophiliac sex act. In a male-centered sex comedy it probably seems stupid to criticize the deficiencies of the female roles, but since there is so much that is so right about the Harold and Kumar movies, I really wish they got it all right. The Jewish characters come off as the most racist and stereotypical, which given that the creators of the movie are Jewish, removes them from criticism in a way. Who would I be to try to take self-hating comedy away from the Jews?

Oh, and I just can’t get down with Bush being portrayed as anything other than evil, hateful, self-righteous scum.

After reading several so-so reviews of the film, I wasn’t expecting much when Anjali and I went to see the movie opening day, but I was very pleasantly surprised. I love that the movie maintains the dream-like surreality of the first. I really appreciate the way Harold and Kumar make their way through a scary, nightmare world of white racial stereotypes. I like the way some ethnic stereotypes are subverted, and the way some aren’t so much reversals, as just bizarre fantasies that are just crazed in their conception. In a future movie I would love for Kumar to meet a white guy that loves yoga, and Krishna, and meditation, and feels that India is like, “so spiritual, Man.” That would be some funny shit.

I wasn’t really disappointed, except for my priorly-stated caveats. I laughed plenty, clapped in appreciation several times, and only wished I could have seen more of the young Harold. His brief, wordless appearance was hysterical. Thumbs up.

IK

Nas is playing the Roseland Theater May 15th, 2008.

Holy shit, did I get tickets to this show at the first available opportunity. Maybe Nas has played Portland before, but if so, I wasn’t paying attention, because I have no memory of this man coming any closer to Portland than the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington several years ago. Stoked.

The Willamette Week did an online interview with The Incredible Kid. Check it out!

3/30/08

Once again I had a D&D game to prepare and a major gig, namely Andaz, in the same weekend competing for my attention. The D&D game was particularly intimidating, as I was introducing a new player (both to our group, and the game entirely) into the fold, and I felt like the last game session I led had been less than satisfying for several of the players, and I really wanted to knock this one out of the park. While I take my performances very seriously, and I listened to a lot of the new bhangra and filmi that Anjali and I picked up in Little India in Artesia, California last week, my creative energies were largely focused on my game and not my gig, because my D&D players are very hard to please, and your average dancer is very easy to please, if you know what they want.

What do I always say about what the dancers want to hear at Andaz? Well, at least going by the requests: the Panjabis want Jazzy B and Lehmber, the filmi-lovers want Dhoom 2 and the like, and the goras want “Mundian To Bach Ke.” Lets look at the complete and unedited request sheet for the night, to see if my expectations were met.

Jazzy B? Yep, there’s “Jazzy B.”

” Lumber Hasnpur” (I’d say they were trying to request Lehmber Hussainpuri.)

“Please Pundjabi Aunti” Very amusing, since this request was directed at Anjali, and she plays 80-100 percent Panjabi songs in her sets. And don’t call her “Aunty.” Not appreciated.

“Miss Poosia (Poojia?)” I’d guess that was a Miss Pooja request. I love Miss Pooja. A big fuck you to all her haters. Wow, a Panjabi request that isn’t for Lehmber or Jazzy B. Quite impressive. It would have been even cooler a year ago when Miss Pooja fever had gripped India.

“Jazzy B” Hmmm, maybe they thought we missed the first request a few lines above it. “Lumber?””Lamber?” (I’d say that was another attempt at a Lehmber Hussainpuri request.) Maybe they thought we missed the first request a few lines above it.

“Miss Poosi/Pooji?” I’d guess that was another Miss Pooja request. Maybe they thought we missed the request a few lines above it.

“Dil Laga” or more correctly “Dil Laga Na” from Dhoom 2 (The only filmi request of the night, and guess what, a request for a song from Dhoom 2. What a surprise.) As much as I play cheezy-azz Bollywood all night long, I still steadfastly refuse to play anything from that putrid soundtrack. There was a gori at the end of the night wishing we would play that and I have to admit to being surprised that even the goris want to hear the soundtrack at this point. I’m all for goris and goras listening to more contemporary Bollywood, I just wish they wouldn’t develop a taste for that soundtrack. Yuck.

“Punjabi MC” Jogi/Mundian to Bach ke”” What do you know, a Panjabi MC request, made slightly novel by the inclusion of “Jogi,” the second single released from the Beware album. Anjali got another request at some point from someone asking her if she was going to play any Panjabi MC, after she and I had both played several of his songs throughout the evening. American listeners who only have access to his Beware album might not realize that his career goes back before 1993 and that Panjabi MC has released 15 albums and EPs since then. The Beware album was cobbled together from material owned by Nachural records, all dating to 1998 and before. Anjali and I often play Panjabi MC tracks from the ten years since then, including his new “Snake Charmer” single that Anjali has been rinsing, and yet apparently if we don’t play “Mundian To Bach Ke,” people think we haven’t been playing Panjabi MC. That song was released in 1998, and while it may never die, I haven’t played it in years, nor do I have any inclination to do so. Anjali will play “Good Morning,” Panjabi MC’s re-version of that track, without the Knight Rider theme sample, and sometimes she will cut back and forth between the two tracks creating a megamix, but really, there are so many other songs I would rather share with the people that come to Andaz, whatever their own wishes might be.

So that’s the sum total of the requests for the evening. Did I call it or what? In fact there probably would have been many more written requests for Lehmber Hussainpuri and Jazzy B, except that when the same two Panjabis came back to repeat their requests ad nauseum, I wasn’t having any of it. Anjali had complained to me during her set that a few Panjabis were making her life miserable, complaining about the tracks she was playing, and making requests for, you guessed it, Jazzy B and Lehmber Hussainpuri. When I saw what I suspected to be the same two guys approach the DJ booth when I started my next set, I was fed up, and for the first time ever, I just kept yelling that they were to go away from the DJ booth, or security would kick them out. They were quite insistent. I had to yell: “You will be kicked out. Security is going to kick you out. Go away!” over and over. They didn’t get it at all. One walked away, and the other remained to mime that he wanted to write a request.

Dude. How many times do you need to misspell Jazzy B and Lehmber on our request sheet? I get it. I got it. You didn’t even need to approach me once and I knew you were out there, wanting to hear Jazzy B and Lehmber. You never need to approach me again, I know you will be lurking somewhere, wanting to hear Jazzy B and Lehmber. Enough!

When Tigerstyle played with us last year they talked proudly of having been able to play a recent gig without once playing a Lehmber song, despite all the requests. Well, Anjali and I don’t avoid Lehmber, in fact, we both play his songs to death. In fact, Anjali had played many Lehmber songs during the set where she was besieged by aggravating requesters requesting Lehmber. Here’s the problem: Lehmber has sung dozens and dozens of songs, and some have been better distributed in North America than others, so no matter how many Lehmber songs we play, if they aren’t ones made available in North America, people don’t know them, aren’t happy, and unfortunately, return to the DJ booth to request Lehmber. Oh boy.

Jazzy B is another matter entirely. “Crown Prince of Bhangra.” Widely loved and adored by Panjabis throughout the diaspora, not many of his songs appeal to gora dancers, of which our dance party has many. There are a few Jazzy B songs that the Panjabis want to hear. Usually slow, slow, slow, slow, dance floor-killers to a mixed crowd, and ones I am sick of playing. Then there are the few crossover tracks that I can play to a mixed crowd, which I am also sick of playing. Meanwhile he has dozens of other songs, that aren’t requested by the Panjabis, and aren’t good for a mixed dance floor, and it was one of these songs that accounted for one of the low points in my performances during the night. I was playing Lehmber’s “Dil” to great effect, and no doubt stupidly, mixed out of it early to a bhangra track by Jazzy B from his Romeo album that no one ever requests, just to try something different. Little did I know that during “Dil” Anjali and Purnima decided to lead a dance circle of goris to share some bhangra moves with them. When I switched up songs they were so unenthused by the Jazzy B track that they actually left the dance circle and I caused both of them to sit down. Way to go Mr. DJ.

My other low point occured after managing to get the stage packed with Panjabi dancers only to do a dedication to the Panjabis, and play Dark MC’s “Dushmani,” and watch the energy level drop significantly from all the songs I had played leading up to that number. Note to self: Don’t dedicate a song to the Panjabis unless you are sure they will go absolutely crazy when it comes on. It just makes the white boy DJ look like a clueless tool.

I had the task of playing the last hour of the night until 3am. The crowd had gotten small enough by this point that everyone took to the stage and it was a Bollywood floor show for the rest of the night. I played Nazia Hassan’s “Disco Deewane” early on in my set and I had a horrified Sardar in my face telling me to take it off. I explained that it was a classic and I gestured to the stage full of Desis (including Anjali) choreographing the song. I understand that early ’80s Bollywood disco is not everyone’s cup of tea, and Anjali has recently pointed out the similar sound that “Disco Deewane” shares with the theme from the Love Boat, but sometimes the DJ is playing for the Sardars, and sometimes he is playing for the girls. And the guys that don’t mind girly songs. Such as myself.

Thank you to everyone who came out to dance. Thank you to the dance crew that kept dancing up until 3am. Thanks to the people who didn’t make annoying requests, and thanks to all the hard-working staff at the Fez. See you next month.

IK

I’ve been working on this post for a looooonng time. With the death of Gary Gygax, I think it is finally time that I wrap this up and post it.

Playing D&D can be a lot more fun than DJing. Yes, The Incredible Kid plays D&D. Dungeons and Dragons. Several times a month, with other players ranging in age from their 30’s to their 50’s. Currently all male, but with several female players over the years as well. None of us live with our mothers. All of us have jobs. And yes, all of us are total geeks on one level or another. No, we do not dress up, or act out our gaming sessions, but for the sake of full disclosure, I did have a distant interest (that never went anywhere) in the Society for Creative Anachronism when I was an adolescent.

For many years now I have wanted to write more about my gaming hobby in my blog, but didn’t want to drop some unsuspected RPG bombs without giving some context. RPGs being so commonly reviled by those who don’t play them, I felt like I wanted to present the life story of my involvement in RPGs, before just dropping random stories here and there. This life story has sat in my drafts and been edited over and over for more than a year. Now you can finally see the results of all my labor. You can also expect more game-related blogging in the future, should the fancy ever strike me.

In 1982 in 6th grade I was introduced to Choose Your Own Adventure books and Dungeons and Dragons. The Choose Your Own Adventure book I first adventured in had a time travel theme. (It was actually not “The Cave of Time,” and not an official Choose Your Own Adventure book, but a copycat publisher.) My first set of choices had me somehow keeping my parents from having me and thus I was never born, and I faded out of existence. Wow. What a headtrip. The head-fuck impact of this experience meant that I proceeded to try nearly all of the combinations of choices before tiring of the book. However, these books became only a minor diversion because there were a (very) finite number of choices one could make, and only a limited number of endings. This is most certainly not the case with my other discovery of that year: Dungeons and Dragons.

It was the Fall of 1982 and I was in the sixth grade at Fairview Elementary in Columbia, Missouri. A giant slumber party was coming up in honor of my friend Adam Holmes’ birthday party. His birthday was around Halloween and a big slumber party was thrown at his amazing lakeside home every year around this time. I had heard that this year we would be playing a game called Dungeons and Dragons at the party. I think my only knowledge of the game at this point came from references in the movie E.T. which had come out the summer before. Somehow I knew to contact Jeff Powell as the guy to go to for information about this game. (It turns out he was going to be the Dungeon Master for our session at the slumber party.) I called him up and asked if he could show me how to play this game, so I had a heads up before the party. He agreed and I biked over to his house one evening and we rolled up a Fighter character. I wandered into the Minotaur’s cave from the Dungeon Module “B2 The Keep on the Borderlands.” The Minotaur killed me. I wanted revenge, and I wanted it right away. We immediately rolled up a new Samurai character for me.

Now the Samurai character class was not a part of Basic D&D or even Advanced Dungeons and Dragons at this point. I know that my friend Adam (who played with Jeff) had a Ninja character as well. I always assumed that Jeff was responsible for the creative addition of these classes, or possibly his older brother, who I knew was a gamer at the time as well. Doing a little research just now I learned that the Ninja character class first debuted in Dragon Magazine #16 which came out in 1978. I haven’t been able to find a reference to the Samurai character class before the publication of the original Oriental Adventures in 1985, but I have a feeling it may very well have appeared in Dragon Magazine well before that as well. So maybe these weren’t spontaneous creations by a sixth grader, but additions from published supplementary materials. Regardless, they added some cool flavor to the game, much appreciated by a ten-year old.

At my insistence we started my new Samurai character right outside the Minotaur’s lair and somehow I managed to kill the Minotaur. I was hooked. At my friend’s slumber party we ventured briefly in dungeon module B4 : The Lost City. The boys got bored of adventuring fairly early and turned their attention to the original Atari game system in the house. I however, couldn’t get enough, and awaited my next chance to play.

I must have conveyed my interest to my parents because for my birthday in December of 1982 I receieved the “red box” Basic D&D set with the famous Erol Otus cover.

 

 

I read the rules booklet incessantly the first week I got it, even waking up feverish in the middle of the night to read it some more, before finally succumbing to sleep. I was completely obsessed. With the same group of boys I played a very unsatisfying game at my friend Yenie’s slumber party where older brothers of our group put us through an adventure that ended up with our characters surrounded by piles of cocaine and lots of naked women. Not my idea of escapist fantasy at the time.

I soon exhausted most of my friends’ interest in playing. While the game was at the height of its general popularity at this time, and all my friends played it, they also had other interests. I would want to spend all afternoon playing it with my friend Adam, for instance, and he would want to go outside and toss a baseball after a bit. Other than playing soccer, I never had any interest in sports.

D&D is designed to be played with 3-6 players or so and a “Dungeon Master” who exists as a referee: the ultimate arbiter of what happens in game play. Throughout my life I was lucky to find even one other person who would be willing to play. There were many times in sixth grade when I played both the player and the DM since there was no one who would play with me. Among others, I created an unorthodox winged character and challenged him with different monsters from the book. Eventually I would rip up the characters from these sessions, since I was “cheating,” and not playing the game the way it is meant to be played.

I resorted to extorting game time out of my little brother. I would do things for him in exchange for hours he owed me to play D&D. Eventually I had him up to days of “owed” D&D time, only to have my mother bail him out and tell me I could get a couple hours one afternoon and then he didn’t owe me any more. I had the most luck getting two subsequent across-the-street neighbors to play, Joey Boer and Terry Brennan. Terry and I especially got into it, spending the whole summer after sixth grade exploring X1: Isle of Dread, taking turns being DM.

When I moved to Portland in the Fall of 1983 I soon discovered the gamers in the neighborhood. They were very clearly on the absolute bottom rung of the social ladder. This was not necessarily a problem; that was always my position as well. Unfortunately they had internalized society’s hatred for them to such an extent that they spent their time together tearing each other down even more, in some sick competition to see who could be on the top of the bottom rung. I may have been lonely and friendless, but I had too much self-respect to want to have any part of this cruel social circle. I figured it was better to be creative and alone than play social pecking order games with society’s rejects. The few times I tried to play with these gamers they were so obsessed with what I saw as mundane strategy and tactics. I wanted to play things heroically and spontaneous, with gusto and verve. Their sessions left me cold and I only played a few times.

I had more luck with roping my younger brother in to play now that we were in a new city and still building social networks. To the extent that I could get anyone to play they were usually my brother’s friends, all many years younger than me. My youngest sister would often want to join in, but unfortunately she was simply too young to be much fun to play with at the time.

At one point several members of my family’s church community grew concerned with my hobby. They felt it was dangerous and satanic. Worried about my excessive devotion to the game, my parents confiscated all of my gaming materials and stashed them in their closet. This only turbo-charged my creativity, and without the special many-sided gaming dice I managed to create several of my own games using the standard six-sided dice scavenged from “normal” games around the house. I came up with several games including Knights of Camelot (which involved a lot of jousting) and Ravaged (a post-apocalyptic sword & fantasy/sci-fi game loosely based on a Thundarr the Barbarian type world.). After nine months or so my parents decided that the threat of D&D had been overblown by their fellow church members and I was allowed all my gaming material back in the Summer. I was thrilled and couldn’t stop talking to my brother about how awesome D&D was. He stoically put up with my blather while not sharing at all in my excitement.

Early on in my interest in D&D I bought a copy of Dragon magazine at the first gaming store I went to in Missouri. The front page had an ad for a D&D-like system called Rolemaster. It sounded like the coolest most complex fantasy game ever. This always stayed in the back of my mind. At some point (in 1985?) my friend Dan Hutt told me about a game called Middle Earth Role Playing set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s world that he had had a lot of fun playing with some friends. I got a copy of the rulebook and loved the additional rules and complexity and the much more graphic combat system filled with blood and specific injuries. This only made me more curious to check out the Rolemaster system since MERP was a simplified version of that system, put out by the same company, Iron Crown Enterprises. I finally got my chance in the Spring of my Freshman year at Wilson High School, where I met a gamer named Robert in my geometry class. Robert had a copy of the Rolemaster set that he was no longer interested in, and he offered to sell it to me.

This roleplaying system was so cool to me. Far more options for characters, and character development. The characters had skills you could develop! At the time Dungeons and Dragons characters had no skills of any kind unless they were a Thief, and then only a few class-specific ones. Rolemaster added combat realism: specific injuries, broken bones, bleeding, unconsciousness. In D&D you were trapped into playing a specific archetype, whereas in Rolemaster a player had far more flexibility to develop exactly the kind of character they wanted. I loved this new system.

For my term paper in my junior year of high school my thesis was on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. I took this project more seriously than any paper I have written before or since, going through five drafts before turning in the paper. I put way more effort into the project than was required. I read a biography and all sorts of critical material. I became enchanted with Tolkien’s idea of “subcreation;” creating within God’s creation, as Tolkien saw it. Some people want to write a book. Or paint a painting. Or design a building. Subcreation was designing an entire world. Every book in that world. Every painting. Every building. All the races. The cultures. The animals. The plants. The geology and geography. The stars. The constellations. The political systems. An endless canvas of creativity.

This took up a lot of my free time in high school, when I wasn’t skateboarding, or drawing comics. I created a crazy-quilt world that included every fantasy setting I’d ever been drawn to, all packed into one world. I created a planet of islands, where each one could have a distinct fantasy feel, so that one island might be like Conan’s Cimmeria, while another might be like 1001 Nights.

At some point in high school I had my friend Sam Morse play a Rolemaster session one afternoon, and he was hooked, saying it was the most fun he had ever had roleplaying. (Sam was responsible for some of my most fun roleplaying experiences in high school. He created and refereed a post-apocalytpic role-playing game we played quite a bit.) With Sam and another player named Scott, I did GM (Game Master, a less D&D specific term) a series of sessions in the latter part of high school. The problem was that they wanted to play more often than I felt prepared to GM a session. I wanted them to have total freedom to do what they pleased. I didn’t want to channel their actions based on what I had prepared. So I felt the need to create everything within hundreds of miles of their position before GMing a session. I would get caught up in wondering what Centaur architecture might look like, or Centaur astronomy, when they just wanted to kill some monsters and do some adventuring. The sessions continued as often as I felt prepared until I left high school. I still thought about gaming occasionally after that point, but doubted that it could still be any fun, or hold any appeal, once I was no longer an adolescent.

I had an insight at one point in my late teens that really affected how I felt about gaming, an activity which had dominated so much of my imagination as a young teenager. I realized that the sort of things that are fun in fantasy gaming were the exact opposite of the things that were desirable in real life. In gaming it is fun to be chased, to be attacked, and attack, to suffer infjuries, to risk your life, to nearly die. In “real life” I thought that nothing would be cooler than going on a date and making out, activities which hardly made for good game play. What did it mean that I spent so much time in a fantasy life imagining things that were the exact opposite of anything that I would really want to have happen to me in reality? And why were the things that were so desirable in reality so incompatible with this fantasy life?

My only gaming experience in college was having some acquaintances in my sophmore year roll up Rolemaster characters once, but we never actually played a single session.

After graduating from college I started working for Powell’s books in the Spring of 1995. At first I stockpiled stacks of MERP and Rolemaster materials that came through the store, thinking that I might some day play again. I ended up putting all of the books back into circulation a few months later, deciding that since I hadn’t played in six years, I probably never would. Too bad. Since the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies came out those books are now worth $20-$100 each, and at the time they were priced between $2.95 and $9.95 a piece. I mention this not because I would want to re-sell them, but because now assembling a complete MERP set would cost many thousands of dollars. MERP extrapolated an incredibly detailed and well-designed game world from Tolkien’s oeuvre, and is deservedly collected by Tolkien role-playing fanatics.

Sixteen years passed in my life without a hint of roleplaying. Eventually I became aware of Powell’s employees who were playing D&D together. I still wasn’t convinced that I was that interested, but I was curious. In the Fall of 2005 it was announced that a new 3.0 D&D game was to commence. I was skeptical, since after having played Rolemaster I didn’t think I could ever go back to a benighted system like D&D again. I decided to give it a chance, and despite still harboring nostalgic feelings for the Rolemaster system, I have continued to play Dungeons and Dragons for the last two and half years. Now playing 3.5 Dungeons and Dragons, I am not in love with the gaming system, but it has certainly corrected many of the flaws of earlier iterations of the game. There is now much more flexibility for developing unique characters, there are actually skills for all of the characters to utilize, and there are feats to make your character specialized. The combat is not as realistic, but at thirty-six year of age, that bloody verisimilitude is not as important as it was at sixteen.

After a few years I felt indebted to the Deacon for doing all of the DMing and so I started up my own campaign, initially a Basic D&D campaign using the system that I had first played back in 1982. Many players these days started with second edition Dungeons and Dragons, and have little experience with the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, much less the Basic system. My thought was that since I was so rusty at Dungeon Mastering, a simple system would make my life easier. Actually, I found the lack of complex rules made things that much more difficult because I was constantly having to make up appropriate results on the spot without any structure to fall back on. More and more we just used third edition rules as the default rules for things that weren’t covered in the Basic system, until in the Spring of 2007, I began DMing a 3.5 D&D campaign that is still going to this day. I am still happily playing in a campaign begun by the Deacon back in 2006.

These games usually fall on Fridays, so I often have a D&D game on Friday, and a DJ gig on Saturday. I am often much more enthusiastic about the game than the DJ performance. I am often much more excited about preparing for a game session, than I am preparing a DJ set. I do not know the majority of the people who show up to dance at my gigs, but I know the people at my gaming table well. I can only guess at what kind of DJ set to prepare for the people who might show up to dance, but I have a very good idea of what kind of game session to design for my players.  DJing can be highly-creative and expressive, but it is rarely as personally satisfying to me as a good game of Dungeons and Dragons.

Here’s to Gary,

IK

Lately I have been noticing a resurgence of DJs promoting themselves as “all vinyl” DJs. I love vinyl. I have many thousands of records. I used to be an “all vinyl” DJ. If it wasn’t for my love of Indian and Latin music, maybe I still would be. For most of the nineties I believed that if something didn’t come out on vinyl it wasn’t good music, and it wasn’t necessary to hear it. (The Boredoms Pop Tatari being a CD-only release during this time made me doubt my convictions slightly.) However, once I got turned on to contemporary Indian and Latin music I realized that for the most part, Indian and Latin music released after the 1980’s was not available on vinyl, and I quickly accepted the necessity of playing CDs if I was going to be playing what I believed to be the really hot shit.

If a DJ advertises that they play “all vinyl,” they are essentially advertising that they either only play music created more than twenty years ago, or only play contemporary music from a limited number of labels in a few genres produced in the US and some Western European countries specifically created for the vinyl DJ market. They might as well advertise “No Asian music, no African music, no Latin music, no Balkan music, no Brazilian music, no Caribbean music (except for Jamaica!) etc., from the last twenty years.” That hardly seems to me like something to brag about. There are some exceptions. There are a handful of reggaeton releases available on vinyl (although these have dried up in recent years), a handful of bhangra releases from five years ago and earlier (mastered so poorly you would have to be desperate to play them), a very few collections of Funk Carioca tunes, and just recently, a cumbia remix 12″, but these are exceptions to a very hard and fast rule. Kuduro vinyl? Current Bollywood vinyl? Middle-Eastern hip-hop vinyl? Chutney Soca vinyl? Dangdut vinyl? Yeah, right.

Even if you only play older music -nothing wrong with that- for decades cassette tapes were far more available and distributed worldwide than vinyl, so even retro DJs are going to have far fewer international options if they limit themselves to vinyl. Cassette DJs would actually have the most extensive international selection available to them. Throughout the world only the rich and middle class could afford vinyl, and only the music desired by the rich and middle class would be produced on vinyl. So only playing vinyl is a classist stance, rejecting all music loved by the international lower and working classes.

Even if you are not an international music DJ, less and less music is available on vinyl these days. Even five years ago hip-hop artists would either only release the single on vinyl, or not release the full length vinyl until many months after the CD had dropped. This would mean that as an “all-vinyl” hip-hop DJ, people might show up at your gig loving a new CD, but for months after the CD release, you would be limited to playing the single, no matter what tracks people liked off the album. A lot of electronic music genres are mostly CD these days as well, or only available as digital downloads. Even if you only play old soul or funk, so many lost tapes and finds from label vaults are being released as CDs these days, and this music never has been, and never will be available on vinyl.

I can see why, in the face of the growing popularity of laptop DJing, that some DJs would want to take a position, and say, “I stand for the original concept of a DJ with a record collection, who manipulates vinyl in order to entertain the people, who cares enough to collect original vinyl records, and not just coded pieces of plastic to cue the mp3 collection on their hard drive.” The advent of mp3 DJing means that now people with “X” number of gigs on their hard drive think they are DJs. Often people will try to impress Anjali or I by listing off how many gigs of music they have on their hard drive. So? Anyone can rip songs from one hard drive to another. It says nothing about your knowledge, love, passion, or experience relating to music. One day you could be listening to the radio, the next you rip all the songs off your friend’s hard drive and all of a sudden you are a “DJ.” Hmmmmm. I’m not convinced.

As much as I fetishize music, and as much as I am down on people thinking that how many gigs of music they have on their hard drive says anything about their abilities as a DJ, I actually don’t think physically owning music is that important either. I think someone’s knowledge and history with music is most important. If you spent your youth growing up listening and dancing to hip-hop, whether you currently physically own any of those hip-hop 12’s or not, I think that is far more valuable to someone’s ability as a DJ then having X number of gigs of hip-hop music on your hard drive, or thousands of hip-hop 12″s you hardly know. Even if you own a million records, it doesn’t mean you listen to them, or have a good knowledge of their contents. You can’t replace experience. Someone with 100 songs at their disposal who knows their material and what they are doing, is going to blow away someone with 1,000,000 songs who has little experience playing for a crowd, and little knowledge of most of what is on their hard drive.

Vinyl is black is beautiful. Some people claim vinyl sounds better than CDs. Yes, I have heard $26,000 turntable set-ups, and yes, the records sounded gorgeous. I love hi-fi turntables and cartridges. If you have a $5000 record needle, records are no doubt the pinnacle of music appreciation. But DJs use spherical needles, not elliptical needles. Elliptical needles give you more information from the record groove, and are the height of high-fidelity. DJ needles are always spherical, because if you move a record back and forth using an elliptical needle, you will destroy your records. So automatically a DJ is only retrieving part of the sound of a record from the groove when they use a spherical DJ needle. On top of that, DJ needles are not hi-fi. They are designed to stay in a groove and not budge, not provide the most gorgeous sound possible.

There is also the matter of feedback, and rumble. Turntable cartridges pick up vibrations well below human hearing, and are notorious for picking up rumble from the bass speakers, and transmitting that grumbling buzz out through the club speakers. I have had far too many bad experiences playing records at a club where they start up an awful rumble that has me turning down the bass, turning down the volume, and losing all the energy in the room because I tried to play vinyl. In my experience no Portland clubs have a truly isolated DJ set up. They all pick up vibrations from the bass speakers, they all create rumble, and they all sound like mud if the bass is up high where I want it. I have rarely had a club vibrating to such an extent that the CDs began mistracking, although it has happened. A little padding under the CD player will work wonders, but I have DJed records on top of pillows, foam, you name it, and still had problems with feedback and skipping needles. I love playing records, but it is often a severe headache in Portland clubs.

My main beef with “all-vinyl” DJs is that they are severely limiting the music they can present to the people, especially limiting the possibility of playing any recent music produced in countries outside the US, or any music not especially produced for the vinyl DJ market, which is micro-infinitesimal. Because the music produced on vinyl today is such a drop in the ocean of all the music created in the world, promoting yourself as an “all-vinyl” DJ tells the world you are more interested in a format than music. I love vinyl, but music comes first, and the music I love the most these days is absolutely not available on vinyl, so that’s why you will normally see me arriving at a gig with suitcases of CDs, and not crates of records.

IK

With M.I.A.s stamp of approval Kuduro just got that much closer to blowing up.  Buraka Som Sistema really captured the fierce Angolan Kuduro vibe in a way their prior productions haven’t.  I was already feeling Puto Prata, and now this new track has me really excited to hear more stuff from Saborosa.  She’s a revelation.

IK

Unlike last month, I didn’t split my pants on stage at Holocene during my performance at Atlas on Saturday. That much is good. I had a triple threat weekend. I had to prepare all of my tax paperwork for my accountant, I had to prepare a Dungeons and Dragons session I was DMing for some friends Friday night, and I had to get ready for Atlas on Saturday. On top of all this, we were fortunate to have our inspirationally-knowledgable and passionate friend Jacques in town from Hawaii, and NYC’s Bulgarian DJ extraordinaire Joro-Boro, who was stranded in Portland for several days when the Balkan Beat Box tour he was supposed to be a part of was canceled because members of the band were held up in immigration in Canada. This meant amazing times and great conversatons, many fabulous meals with friends, and the chance to see Joro play two March Fourth Marching Band after parties at the Crown Room. The only problem with this wonderful situation was that it also meant that there was very little time to work on tax paperwork, much less prepare a stellar D&D session, much less absorb a lot of music for a new and meditated DJ set.

After many, many hours of work the tax paperwork got handed off on time, but I felt woefully unprepared for my D&D game, and I felt completely out of sorts when I took the stage at Holocene to perform my first set. Granted, Anjali had been sick all week, and Saturday I felt like I was coming down with something as well. -Great. How many times do I have to perform while sick at Atlas?

I barely, barely, barely scraped the surface of getting ready for Atlas. As usual I was surrounded at home by hundreds of albums I imagined would make a great part of my set if only I knew them far better than I do. As usual I wished that I spent more time with the music I already know is great, rather than trying to find new and undiscovered gems. As I was onstage at Holocene considering what to play first, I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and how anything I might want to do would go over with the crowd in attendance. The crowd seemed very strange to me. Strange in that many people seemed very “normal” (high heels, little tight black dresses) and not sure what to make of the music at Atlas. E3 played a typically stellar opening set before heading off to DJ a costume ball at Reed College. (Last weekend he made Anjali and I very proud by delivering a brilliant opening set for Cheb I Sabbah at the Hippodrome. Best set of the night, no joke. Go E3!) I had the task of going on after E3, since Anjali was still decompressing from having double-booked herself, arriving at Holocene after DJing an opening set for well-dressed Russian couples at the Chervona show at the Fez Ballroom. I really didn’t know what to play. I’ve developed a habit of opening my sets with a reggaeton number, invariably dropping the tempo precipitiously from what either E3 or Anjali before me have been playing. I don’t see it is an effective or popular strategy, just one that in my DJ perversity, I have adopted. With no better ideas about what to do I said, “Sure, let’s suck all the energy out of the room, drop the tempo by 40bpms, play a long introductory beatless melodramatic vocal and see if anyone wants to stick around to hear my second song.”

I’m on stage. I’m woozy. Sickly. Disoriented. Apparently deranged as well.

From my first song the sound just sounded wrong. It sounded like distorted mud coming out of my stage monitors, and from the horrified looks of people gawking at me from the crowd, I can only imagine how bad it sounded out in front of the club speakers. I was trying to adjust my levels, nothing seemed like it was running that hot, and I thought, “Great. It’s one thing to attempt a totally perverse move of ramping down the energy and the vibe, yet another thing when the song doesn’t sound like anything other than a distorted radio slightly off station. Claudia, the new sound person at Holocene, ran on stage to tell me I did not have the mixer levels set right. I was used to having the mixer running at a certain level from when Tim worked the soundboard at Holocene, and Claudia had it set up with E3 so that we were supposed to be running the levels far lower on the DJ mixer than usual, but I didn’t know that until it was too late, and I had begun my set by frying out the speakers and making sure that my introductory songs sounded like absolute shit. And no doubt LOUD, fried-out, muddy shit at that.

I proved at other editions of Atlas how easy it is to lose the crowd with 180 bpm merengue, and in February I showed that it was even easier to lose the crowd by going on early and quickly alternating 90bpm reggaeton and 180 bpm merengue. “Yay. Let’s try it again.” I gave the crowd at least a few reggaeton numbers before blasting off into merengue hyperspeed territory.Since the manic meren-ton proved so alienating to the general affections and movement of the crowd I decided that hyperspeed Balkan beats would win over the uncoverted. Yeah, right. I watched what had been a full dance floor enjoying E3’s set empty until only a few game couples remained dancing in tandem to the Balkan sounds, while everyone else either fled the room, or hugged the walls. Now I have cleared plenty of dance floors in my time. I have cleared plenty of dance floors at Holocene. But I don’t think I have ever floundered so badly out of the gate, losing 98% if the crowd at the beginning of my set.

11pm.

Not a good time to empty the dance floor at a club on a Saturday night. So what is a sickly, woozy, perverse and unprepared DJ such as myself to do? Why, play more reggaeton! They loved that the first go-around. Uh-huh. Not by a longshot.

Well I do it anyway.

At this point I am melting down onstage in abject humiliation and despair. Anjali comes on stage sensing how badly I am doing. I am doing so badly I suggest she go on, even though I am barely halfway into my set. She goes to get a drink before returning to take over, and by the time she gets back I decide (to her mild consternation) to tough it out. No matter how miserable I was, I knew that if I fled the stage after bombing so atrociously that it would have rippling effects of causing me to doubt myself and descend into weeks of self-loathing and self-abnegation, and if I didn’t turn things around during my set, people would be horrified to see me re-take the stage after Anjali’s set, and no doubt they would flee for the exits.

-As it that doesn’t happen enough already.-

So I tough it out. I keep playing. I play MIA “Boyz” in an attempt to woo the crowd with something they know and Anjali tells me later there was only one girl in the crowd who acted like she knew it. Like I said, weird crowd. I played Swami’s “Electro Jugni” and I played DJ Vix’s “Desi Boliyan,” which was the only straight-up bhangra track I played all night. I finished up with some vintage meren-house with my final song being Proyecto Uno’s meren-house oldie “El Tiburon,” which had been going through my head a lot lately. So, while I’m not claiming to have set the club on fire, I at least regained the dance floor and left the stage with a full crowd dancing; and not after having successfully cleared most of them.

I was so glad I made the decision to stay on stage and keep performing, despite how much I bombed at the beginning. It is so easy for me to drown in a whirlpool of self-hatred if I feel like I didn’t perform well in a set, so it was crucial to my self-esteem to show that I could get people to dance and stay on the dance floor while I am on stage. -That does seem like kind of a fundamental DJ requirement at a dance club, don’t you think?-

Anjali played a very well received set starting off with MIA’s “Big Branch,” which by playing it two nights in a row, Joro forced us to re-evaluate after we were too quick to dismiss it in initial listenings. She played Blaqstarr and Rye Rye favoring musical infatuation over strict Atlas format, a track on the Egyptian riddim, several lesser Sean Paul hits, some bhangra dancehall, and then a long energeteic bhangra set that the dance floor soaked up. Anjali later said she feels like that is all the crowd wants from her despite what else she might want to play. Her last tracks were high-energy Panjabi Drum’n’Bass and 2-step.

“Hey Kid, you didn’t try to nosedive the energy again when you went on, did you? ”

Oh yeah, from the first moments of Johnny Prez’s “Dancing” track with Deevani I could feel the deflation of the crowd as people’s energies dropped. I stuck with reggaeton for awhile, sticking to the uptempo side of the genre (excepting the super-fast bachaton which I am always telling myself I’m going to play and then never do), tracks with a dancehall vibe, Panamanian reggaeton, and an oldie by Tempo. I then play “Habibi Min Zaman” from the new Balkan Beat Box, in honor of their cancelled West Coast tour. I move into Arab-ton from the new Said Mrad “Esmerium. ” A few Middle Eastern house tracks with some thrilling Darbakeh runs that inspired some of the crowd to vocalize in appreciation loud enough that I could hear them over the onstage monitor, and then by birthday request, acoustic-guitar-driven-leisurely-house song “Dildarian” by Amrinder Gill, which seemed to really bring the energy down, which I predicted, but I was being a nice guy. I then get a Desi guy onstage explaining that I have to shout-out his friend whose birthday it is. Seconds later Anjali comes onstage reminding me that it was also almost our friend Jeevan’s birthday. Oh boy, what do I play to dedicate to these girls? Think, think, think. Oh, “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja” should do the trick. I play my mix of the original and MIA’s version and portions of the crowd go crazy, so I realize I did something right for once. Since there is a cluster of Desis going crazy in the front I decide to play a mini-filmi set. “Sajnaji Vari Vari,” Soni de Nakhre” and “Mind-Blowing Mahiya” all stoke this subset of the crowd, and I get stage dancers and all that, so at least I please some people to no end playing filmi hits, even if such a move no doubt alienates others who aren’t feeling the “cheezy” filmi vibe. I then transition into Meren-house, which because of the house beat underpinning no doubt, doesn’t clear the floor like my Dominican selections often do. I did manage to further challenge the crowd by finishing up with several Balkan tracks, which while they didn’t completely decimate the dance floor like in my first set, they certainly thinned out the dancers in the back room. I often feel like we don’t play enough Balkan material at Atlas, and often the crowd is highly appreciative when we do, yet it seemed a constant at this edition of Atlas that the Balkan material had far fewer demonstrative fans than I had hoped.

After I left the stage several people were kind enough to thank me for my set, and offer me compliments, so thanks to those kind souls who let me know that there are some people on earth who are capable of enjoying what I do. Just like February’s Atlas, I played hardly any bhangra all night. Only one straight forward bhangra track, and a few fusion tracks. I knew there were Desis in the house, but I didn’t know there were that many Panjabis until after the show Anjali told me there were a handful of Sardarjis in attendance. If I had any idea, I certainly would have peppered my sets with some hardcore bhangra. I always try to play to different communities if I know they are in attendance at Atlas. It certainly creates a different vibe playing music for people for whom the music speaks of self and not other. My goal since Anjali and I were first playing the Blackbird in 2001 has always been to establish a place where people from many different, backgrounds, cultures, and nations can all delight in each other’s languages and dance together to each other’s music.

Anjali finished up the night with some more Panjabi hip-hop bhangra, and an electro-giddha mini-set, which had the crowd pogoing in appreciation, and when she thought everyone had had enough bhangra, a Balkan set which now that it was after 2am, served as the exit music for people who then missed out on Anjali’s Khaled two-fer, Rachid Taha, and some vintage filmi. Thanks to Jacques, Claudia, everyone at Holocene, and all of you who came out (especially Tracy), even if you didn’t know what to make of anything you saw or heard. Thank you especially to any of you who somehow kept faith in me after my disastrous opening.

IK

Saturday, March 1st consider checking out Atlas resident DJ E3, Cheb I Sabbah, David Starfire, Salar Nader, Riffat Sultana and all the other acts at this event. I would definitely recommend taking advantage of any opportunity to see a Sufi singer in Portland.

Monday March 3rd at the Crystal Ballroom our August 2007 Atlas guest Joro-Boro returns alongside Balkan Beat Box, MarchFourth Marching Band and DJ Global Ruckus. Joro-Boro and DJ Global Ruckus will also be playing an after party at the Crown Room.

It used to be that you could count on Zakir Hussain playing Portland several times a year. Well it feels like many years since he has been up here, so mark Tuesday, April 15th on your calendars. He will be returning with another iteration of his Masters of Percussion troupe, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Be prepared for astounding flights of percussive virtuosity. The clay pot (ghatam) master T.H. Vinayakram is still my favorite.

It is rare that any shows ever hit Portland that Anjali and I have any interest in, so I am excited about going out to have some fun. Hope to see you there.

IK