who's listening?

i got quite excited last friday afternoon (not for any rude reasons i hasten to add)

the city view apartment complex where we are staying has an intranet which connects every apartment - having noticed when i first went into iTunes here that a number of other people were sharing their iTunes library on the local network, my ego took me over and i started sharing half of my library (i looked at the kind of music that was out there already and, being first and foremost an educator, decided that these poor people needed some further education)

unfortunately for the first week or two when i viewed the users list nobody was connected, much to k.'s relief as he thought it would slow our connection down - so after a while i forgot all about it - then on friday afternoon as i was about to reboot the computer, it indicated that 4 users were connected to my iTunes library - so somewhere around here there are people making use of the 10,524 tracks i chose to share - i got quite excited and phoned k. who responded in his usual way whenever i get worked up over inconsequentialities (is that actually a real word?) by asking what we were going to eat for dinner that evening

i think this eagerness to share my music with everyone stems from the fact that i was an amateur dj for eleven years - from january 1985 to december 1995 (a few days before i left my home for a 9 year stay in singapore) i did a regular friday night stint in a student bar which would start at about 8.30pm and would frequently go on until 3 or 4 am as the successive generations of student pissheads who ran the establishment weren't fussy about licencing hours, the bar being located in a field at the back of the college buildings out of view and earshot of any surburban dwellings - in the early nineties i expanded my range by buying my own equipment and getting more 'gigs', my last one being in december 1995 where i grooved at leeds united football club's bar at my friend s.'s aunt's birthday - thank goodness for s.'s camper van and the M1

for me dj-ing was a great social compromise - i liked going out to clubs and discos, and i have liked listening and dancing (and singing- but that's another story) to music ever since mid-seventies school discos, where along with all my flared-trousered classmates, i would bop up and down to the bay city rollers and the wombles - the problem is that i don't like socialising for too long - i go through phases when i do and longer ones when i'm an anti-social git - standing behind a turntable console was a way of having a night out where most of the mixing you had to do was between two pieces of seven-inch vinyl - you got to control the night by playing music, most of which you liked - you had the challenge of getting people up and dancing - you got drinks brought to you by the bar staff without having to queue up and pay - you could invite your friends up to talk to you for a while - you could put a long mix on from an segued lp and go off and have a dance when you felt like it - and, on a couple of memorable occasions, you could duck down and hide behind a bank of speakers, record boxes and turntables when there was a fight involving a number of drunken essex boys armed with beer glasses and fruit knives - you also had the privelege of doing birthday parties and wedding receptions for all your friends, which, i think, is a great gift and beats a set of cutlery or a magimix any day

of course, if i'd discovered vitamin pills in the early nineties, instead of playing loud pounding house music for others who already had, it might have been a very different story - as jarvis cocker observed in 'sorted for e's and wizz,' i might have been standing in a field in hampshire at six o'clock in the morning, losing an important part of my brain whilst waiting for a spaceship to land....

so i'm not quite sure if this desire to share my musical tastes, even in this networked iTunes anonymous fashion, with others is because i like the idea of pleasing people or whether i have to occasionally satiate a continuing egotistical streak that over the years has caused me to make a public spectacle of myself in a variety of ways...