Weenietowne

FROM September 25, 2006

"You looked so cool DJing last night," Mo told me the next morning, sitting in the director's chair in the kitchen. "You kept sticking out your butt and doing this" [makes hoochie-coochie motion with hands and shoulders]

Mo missed the Portland vinyl years, when my signature move was cleaning the dust off a record by rubbing it in a circular motion on my ass -- the mp3 has really minimalized the choreography of playing albums. I learned this Saturday night at Matt's birthday dinner, which eventually ballooned into a full-blown rager. At some point between the two, I began fiddling with the iTunes, and suddenly I was "DJing" or rather, selecting songs and trying to approximate a fader by fussing with its volume. Many of the party'sattendees were past and present Cooper Union students, well versed in the ways of MOP, Shawnna and Beyonce, though who would have thought that Whitetown's "I Could Never be Your Woman" was such an indubitable Cooper party jam. But very few partygoers responded to "Chicken Noodle Soup." In fact, the only fellows who openly enjoyed it were the 17-year-old boys who showed up from around the way, and were begging me all night to play Jim Jones before they "had to leave" (read: curfew). "Does this party get any wilder?" one of them asked me and I said, I don't know, what do you mean by wild and the kid said, "You know, like girls getting naked."

No, I told him, that was not going to happen.

What did happen was the inevitable "boy intimidated by my music knowledge and hovering over me telling me how to do my job." He came up on me, feathers cocked, and started informing me I should play something "really hard." He said this during my Clipse "Zen" /Dre "Chevy Ridin High" fucking gangster music rock block, two of the hardest, hardest rap insta-classics to be released in the past two years. I mean, the fuck? I was too nice to tell him to go away and, wondering exactly what qualified as hard to his apparently refined ears, stupidly, I was like, "Something hard? What did you have in mind?"

Mike Jones, "Flossin."

Ha, ha. I queued it so he would go away, which he did, and I began talking to his roommate, an aspiring producer slash film editor and much nicer "friend of Ayres" who assuaged the pain. "Don't worry," the roommate told me. "We argue about music all the time."

Hard Dude returned when I did not play "Flossin" after a time. "Where is 'Flossin'?" he asked, and I responded, "It has the wrong tempo for this group of songs, and anyway, Mike Jones sucks my ass so I'm not playing it." And the chorus of fucking "Flossin'" is "MY ALBUM! MY ALBUM!" Get real, player.

This, of course, began the pissing contest.

"What the fuck? Mike Jones doesn't suck. Who do you think is the best rapper right now?"

Oh honey, you do not even want to get into it with me. "Right now? Pusha T. Lil Wayne."

"No. No way. The best rapper is Vik Vaughn."

"Who?" I pretended like I was Mike Jones. MF Doom, dickweed.

"Vik Vaughn. Look it up on the internet when you get home," he leveled, satisfied with himself, and pleased that he was indeed more knowledgable about music than I am.

Dear boys of the world who are feeling yourselves yet feel intimidated by smart women even when they are fake-DJing on iTUNES and try to make us feel stupid in kind, do not worry: we really cannot tell your wiener size just by examining your hands, and we weren't looking anyway.