Trei YouTuburi

Cork, Ireland, Autumn 2009 —

We had a great time with YouTube last evening, me and my housemates here at the house on Ballyhooly Road.

A Frenchman, a German, an Irish lad and myself, American.

This YouTube is a radical new way of listening to music, and it's when there is a group of people that it's damned entertaining. With a bit of drink and a few smokes, it can be sublime.

I instituted a rule, and I'm not sure how well it held: if you play something, play to whole thing. It's just a guideline, and you kind of need a few. Rules, even — a few, even if you occasionally break the rules.

The most important, to me, no matter who is acting DJ, or who requests what, is that you must have three tabs open. A Romanian refered to this as "trei youtuburi" — three YouTubes.

One tab of YouTube is playing — and if the DJ is any good, a song will always be playing. (That is, with sufficient interest among the listening and requesting crowd — enough ideas about what to play.)

The second tab is queued up.

The third is for looking.

"The fourth," my Romanian friend said, "is in your head."

But last night it wasn't in anybody's head, for long. Everybody was mad to hear something, and we had too many requests to even play them, though we were at it for several hours. Time, indeed, only stoked up the backlog.