December 2008

Even if you’re not a jazz musician or even a jazz fan, you might still get some mileage from the advice that legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk gave to jazz saxophonist Steve Lacy. Lacy took down some notes, which appear below:

Here’s a transcript of the notes:

1. MONK’S ADVICE (1960)

• Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time.
• Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head, when you play.
• Stop playing all those weird notes (that bullshit), play the melody!
• Make the drummer sound good.
• Discrimination is important.
• You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?
• ALL REET!
• Always know….(MONK)
• It must be always night, otherwise they wouldn’t need the lights.
• Let’s lift the band stand!!
• I want to avoid the hecklers.
• Don’t play the piano part, I’m playing that. Don’t listen to me. I’m supposed to be accompanying you!
• The inside of the tune (the bridge) is the part that makes the outside sound good.
• Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. What you don’t play can be more important that what you do.
• A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.
• Stay in shape! Sometimes a musician waits for a gig, and when it comes, he’s out of shape and can’t make it.
• When you’re swinging, swing some more.
• (What should we wear tonight? Sharp as possible!)
• Always leave them wanting more.
• Don’t sound anybody for a gig, just be on the scene. These pieces were written so as to have something to play and get cats interested enough to come to rehearsal.
• You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (To a drummer who didn’t want to solo)
• Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.
• They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along and spoil it.

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Here’s a great clip from the documentary Before the Music Dies in which saxophonist Branford Marsalis tells us what he really thinks about students today:

Here’s my transcript of the video:

What I’ve learned from my students is that students today are completely full of shit.

That is what I’ve learned from my students. Much like the generation before them, the only thing they are really interested in is you telling them how right they are and how good they are.

That is the same mentality that basically forces Harvard to give out B’s to people that don’t deserve them out of the fear that they’ll go to other school that will give them B’s, and those schools will make the money.

We live in a country that seems to be in this massive state of delusion, where the idea of what you are is more important than you actually being that. And it actually works just as long as everybody’s winking at the same time. If one person stops winking, you just beat the crap out of that person, and they either starting winking or go somewhere else.

My students – all they want to hear how good they are and how talented they are. Most of them aren’t really willing to work to the degree to live up to that.

Don’t dismiss this as just a statement about jazz or even about music. I see the attitude of Marsalis’ students everywhere.

The trailer for Before the Music Dies is really intriguing. I’m going to have to watch it:

[Thanks to Pete Forde's entry in Rethink for the video.]

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This BBC headline/photo pairing is priceless:

Alas, they’ve since changed the photo for the story, which is a crying shame. It was fun while it lasted.

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First of all, to all my Jewish friends and relatives, Happy Chanukah! In honour of the eight-day holiday, here are a few Chanukah-related tidbits.

Pictured above is Matisyahu, the musician who mashes up his Orthodox Judaism with reggae, at his concert on Sunday, the first night of Chanukah. The Rastas – and hence reggae culture — borrows heavily from Judaism,  so it was only natural that someone would borrow in the opposite direction. There’s more in this New York Times story.

Photo from BlogTO.

See the frying pan in the photo above? They’re latkes, which are potato pancakes. The story of Chanukah involves lamp oil miraculously lasting much longer than it should have, so the holiday tradition is to eat fried food – and what’s better than fried potatoes?

While I was aware of competitive hot dog eating, I was unaware of competitive latke eating until I saw this link in BlogTO to a story about a citizen of Accordion City winning one. Bodybuilder “Furious” Pete Czerwinski won by eating 46 latkes – seven pounds in all – in 8 minutes at the National Potato Latke Eating Championship in Grove Lake, New York.

And finally, a gift idea: Cool Jew: The Ultimate Guide for Every Member of the Tribe, which I gave The Missus for Chanukah this year. My favourite bit so far is the comparison between Jewish and Goyish things, especially the last item:

Happy Chanukah!

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For your enjoyment, here’s Master Thespian (and former schoolmate) Keanu Reeves showing his versatility through his 2.5 facial expressions, as seen in his many films:

Photo montage courtesy of Turbanhead via Miss Fipi Lele.
Click the montage to see it at full size.

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Photo by Axel Bührmann.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

By now, you’ve probably read at least one article about how the credit crunch has affected people’s gift-buying this holiday season. The one that stuck in my head is Sorry, kids, Santa’s tightening his belt, which appeared in The Globe and Mail a couple of weeks ago.

Here are the opening paragraphs from the article:

Fat tears rolled down Logan Roberts’s face when his mom said Santa was cutting back on gifts this year.

The 10-year-old desperately wanted an iPod, his mother says, and he asked Santa to slip one under the tree to save his parents from buying one.

“He said, ‘Christmas is my only chance to ask Santa to buy it instead of you,’” says Mindy Roberts, a 40-year-old mother of three.

“My kids just think it’s the greatest because Santa gives [gifts] for free so that if they ask for them for Christmas, then it doesn’t impact me. It’s really very cute.”

I was under the impression that kids by the age of 10 had figured out the real story behind Santa Claus, either through their parents, via logic, their friends, accidentally stumbling into a hidden cache of presents or in a particular case that ended in a suspension, a teacher. I think this would be especially true in the age of the internet –  I’d wager that child safety content filters are focused on adult content and not searches for phrases like “Is Santa real?”.

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“Warm welcome and friendly atmosphere?” I’d hate to see their idea of what “great service” is…

Photo by "DD TV".
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

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The houses on Gothic Avenue this morning.
Click the photo to see it at a larger size.

Yes, Accordion City is going to face two consecutive large snowstorms this weekend – the one that’s been happening all morning and another one on Sunday – but to call it “Snowmageddon” is the sort of thing that only a wuss who didn’t make the cut for Dalhousie University’s Quidditch Club would do.

It’s one thing for local TV news to use the term “Snowmageddon”, and I was quite surprised that the National Post – a paper whose origins are in the rugged Canadian West – would play along, but for Environment Canada to join in the hype game is pretty sad. They released a bulletin that contained the phrase “Could this be snow-mageddon?”

(Perhaps not as bad, but still annoying, was the innumerate statement made by an Environment Canada meterologist in this article about Wednesday’s, today’s and Sundays storms: “Things come in threes,” he said. Dude, if you wait long enough, things always come in threes.)

I’m with Torontoist on this one:

It looks like Environment Canada has come to its collective senses; the term (and explanation of its use) is missing from the current version of the statement. In other news, two storms are expected to bring some wind and snow—perhaps even a lot of snow—to Toronto and much of southern Ontario tomorrow and Sunday. You may have trouble driving, the TTC may be a little slow, and your neighbour probably won’t plough his walk. Snow-mageddon? Sounds more like plain old winter to us.

Besides, it looks like a Christmas card out there!

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I know that parodies of Successories’ motivational posters are old hat, but the facial expressions on this one are priceless:

Poster courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

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HoHoTO wasn’t your last opportunity to have a fun night out on the town and help the food bank. Carson T. Foster, Accordion City’s Undisputed King of Karaoke is hosting Karaoke for Kans this Saturday at the legendary lovely dive known to all as Sneaky Dee’s (431 College Street, at the southeast corner of College and Bathurst) this Saturday.

Carson will be bringing his legendary “Kickass Karaoke” library to Sneaky Dee’s; you can check out a reasonably recent list of his songs here. The fun starts at 9 p.m. and admission is either one of:

• 3 cans of non-perishable food
• Pay what you can

with all proceeds going to the food bank. With the hard times this year, I suspect that the demand on the food bank will be pretty high this year. If you haven’t yet made a donation to any of our local food banks, this is your chance!

It should be good fun for a good cause; I can’t guarantee anything about the quality of the singing.

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I saw this on the subway the other day and had to get a photo:

It’s also called the "Involuntary Celibacy Club".

Of its “more than 120 clubs and societies”, why did Dalhousie – a school with a great reputation and one of the “Canadian Ivies” – choose to highlight this one?

As a founding member of the Star Trek club at Crazy Go Nuts University, I do not say this lightly: this looks like a club for losers. Unless it’s for a dare in which you stand to make some decent coin, do no join this club. You will never wash away the stench of “loser”. You’d be better off joining the Furry Club or starting cuddle parties – that’s how low on the Geek Hierarchy I think the Quidditch club is.

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Never let it be said that Accordion City’s nerd, media and PR community can’t throw a good party and raise a lot of money for a good cause! Last night, the HoHoTO party (T.O. is local shorthand for “Toronto, Ontario”) took place at the Mod Club in Accordion City’s funky College West neighbourhood. Although the party was put together in a matter of days and relied largely on Twitter for promotion, the event was run as if it had been planned months in advance, sold out in a week (over 600 tickets!) and raised over CAD$20,000 for the Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank.

Here’s what the dance floor looked like when the event was at its peak. Not bad for a Monday night during the Christmas season:

Being nerds, they couldn’t resist setting up a program that displayed Twitter messages about the event on the club’s giant screens. A good number of people used their mobile phones to post to Twitter, and we also got a number of greetings from people who couldn’t make it but wanted to send us their best:

The organizers even managed to get some custom-made vinyl tops for all the club’s tables that showed the HoHoTO logo and the names of all the sponsors:

Everybody dressed up for the event, but Pete Forde gets bonus points for breaking out the white suit, sassy T-shirt and old-school Polaroid camera:

We got a special video greeting from Mayor David Miller, who thanked the organizers for their efforts and their ability to get the whole thing together so quickly, and the rest of us for raising so much money that the event was one of the food bank’s most successful fundraisers this year.

The music was excellent, and we have DJs Duarte Da Silva and Ryan Taylor to thank. They took requests the old-fashioned way, but they were also monitoring Twitter for requests – you could send them a request by posting a message tagged #hohotodj. You’ve got to love the 21st century!

In addition to the attendees who were generous not only with their admission money but also their raffle ticket purchases, credit has to go to the sponsors and for their generous (and swift!) support:

• White Label Sponsors:
  • Agoracom
  • Fused Network
  • Grupo Unaio na Capoeira
  • MaRS
  • Microsoft
  • teehan+lax
  • up time software
  • RedFlagDeals
  • The Death of Alice Blue
• Red Label Sponsors
  • Hyndman Law
  • idee Inc.
  • MCC Planners Inc.
  • mesh Conference
  • Molson
  • Sequentia Environics
  • viigo
• Green Label Sponsors
  • apolitic
  • Bar Skins
  • brainpark
  • Cello Products Inc.
  • CommandN
  • CommunityLend
  • echo communications
  • echo consultants
  • EmbarkOnIt
  • eventbrite
  • Facebook Cookbook
  • Freshbooks
  • Fair Trade Jewellery Co.
  • Microsoft Advertising
  • Mindjet
  • Mischief Media
  • nexj media
  • Rypple
  • StartupNorth
  • Say Yeah!
  • The Blog Studio
  • Unspace
  • Varicent
  • VizThink

The event wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the volunteer squad, who counted my wife, The Ginger Ninja, among their number. Thanks for your time and effort!

I had a blast, and I suspect that most of the crowd did as well. My thanks to everyone who took part in HoHoTO, from the organizers to the attendees, for a job well done, a party well thrown and all the funds raised for those less fortunate than us.

Shall we do this again next year? I certainly hope so.

Links

• The HoHoTO official site
• News Release: GTA Geeks Gather to Give Generously
• The Globe and Mail: Twitter and “Flash Crowds” For Good
• Masthead Online: The Power of Twitter in Toronto
• Twitter posts tagged “HoHoTO”
• The HoHoTO Flickr photo pool
• Flickr photos tagged “HoHoTO”

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Two versions of Igor Kenk: The Manson-like scruffy man we often saw, and the cleaned-up-for-court version we became acquainted with.

Igor Kenk – Accordion City’s most notorious bike thief, possessor of a name worthy of a James Bond villain and all-round human colostomy bag – just doesn’t know when to quit. Yesterday afternoon, he had three charges added to his already impressive collection, but instead of bike theft or drug charges, these newest ones are for assault.

For well over a decade, Igor was the principal figure in Toronto cyclist demonology. His shady bicycle shop at the corner of Queen and Strachan was the first place you’d visit immediately after discovering that your bike was stolen. The odds were good that you’d find your missing bike sitting in his inventory, a hodgepodge rat’s-nest collection of bikes that he somehow managed jam into the small confines of his store.

After years of managing to somehow keep charges from sticking to his slimy hide, Igor’s activities were finally curtailed this summer when a “sting” operation successfully caught him in the act. The ensuing investigation turned up almost 3,000 bikes stored in a dozen locations across the city – in his shop as well as in a number of rented garages – as well as some drugs. As a result, he amassed 58 charges.

The Toronto Star explains how he got three new ones yesterday:

A 50-year-old Toronto man faces three charges after he swung a metal pipe at two people this afternoon.

The suspect was trying to remove property from a home on Dufferin St. and Wallace Ave. when the homeowners tried to stop him.

"He says it was his (property), and the owners are saying it was theirs," said Det. Hoffmeyer of Toronto police.

The suspect swung a metal pipe at the homeowners. No injuries were reported. The suspect drove away after the confrontation.

Police say the victims and suspect are not related.

An hour later, Igor Kenk was arrested and charged with assault with a weapon and two counts of assault.

According to the article, Igor’s supposed to be under house arrest and isn’t allowed to step outside unless he’s accompanied by one of his three sureties, who’d collectively posted CAD$15,000 in bail for him. Those three people may have been Igor’s last friends in the city, and after this stunt, he might not have them to lean on.

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