Remember, if you’re in Accordion City tonight, one of the events tonight is Online Rights Canada’s Balanced Meal, a counter to Sam Bulte’s fundraiser, which is taking place in the same building.
I’ll be there, with digital camera and accordion.
For more information on this event, see yesterday’s posting.
I know that I brought this fact up in the previous entry, but I thought it bore repeating in its own entry.
What $250 bought in 1987: In November 1987, for the cost of $250, The Cowboy Junkies recorded The Trinity Session at the Church of the Holy Trinity, using only a single microphone and the church’s acoustics. It would give the Junkies international renown and many music critics would call it one of the best albums of 1988.
What $250 will buy you in 2006: A plate of food at a sellout politician’s fundraising dinner, a live performance by one Cowboy Junkie and an opportunity to pee in the karma pool.
Those of you who weren’t teenagers in the 1980s may not remember the image to the right. Back then, the technology that the entertainment industry feared was good old magnetic tape. The industrial-entertainment complex’s movie arm was fighting the Betamax; MPAA capo Jack Valenti famously testified before Congress that “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American
public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone”. In the end, Hollywood discovered that the new rental market opened by videotape technology was a gold mine.
Meanwhile, the music industry was fighting the tape battle on two fronts: home taping on analog cassettes whose fidelity would be considered laughable today, and the possible threat of DAT — digital audio tape. They insisted that the mix tapes that I made for girls I like were threatening the livelihoods of Depeche Mode and The Smiths, while they were running ads in musicians’ magazines screaming that DAT was the devil. Before I became the Accordion Guy, I was a synth guy, and I remember reading two-page centrefold ads in Keyboard magazine with large headlines that read “Don’t let them do DAT!”
As with videotapes, we know what happened with audiotape: home taping did not destroy the music industry, which grew in leaps and bounds as the music scene grew. While DAT as a medium never made it big in the consumer market, the underlying technology — digital music — did.
The fundraiser for Sam Bulte being held tonight at the Drake Hotel will feature a performance by Margo Timmins. You may remember her band, The Cowboy Junkies, best known for their album, The Trinity Session. Recorded on a single microphone in the Church of the Holy Trinity for $250 (ironically, that’s the per-plate price of admission to the fundraising dinner at which Margo is performing tonight), this album was originally released on a small label and got its buzz based on word-of-mouth and thousands of mix tapes that teenagers — myself included — made for each other.I remember making mix tapes for girls I liked back at Crazy Go Nuts University. Like any guy who’d begun to figure out women even a little bit, I knew to include Sweet Jane from The Trinity Session on those tapes. I’d be willing to bet that the real marketing for The Trinity Session wasn’t done by the record company, but by tens of thousands of people like me, making mix tapes as a form of courting and for make-out mood music. Therein lies the irony of Ms. Timmins performing at tonight’s fundraiser: the viral marketing that made her big back then (and that’s also helping pull them out of the “where are they now?” file) is precisely the sort of thing that the people backing this fundraiser are trying to kill with the help of Ms. Bulte.
Here’s another goodie — Mixed Messages, a comic from the old dot-com era site Breakup Girl. Breakup Girl was an romantic advice-dispensing superhero, and in this adventure, she helps a guy tap the power of the mix tape.
One of the webcomics I enjoy is Sam Logan’s Sam and Fuzzy, which could be described as “the adventures of a lovable loser and a short, psychotic bear”. The author recommends that new readers start reading from the January 3rd, 2005 strip; I think that you can start as early as late 2003, which is when I felt the comic really started hitting its stride. You might also want to check out the readers’ guide.
The first appearance of Future Fuzzy. Click to see the comic at full size.
Some of my favourite Sam and Fuzzy strips are the ones featuring
“Future Fuzzy”, a future version of Fuzzy who arrives in a flash of
light from 24 hours in the future to warn Fuzzy of impending doom. The warnings are usually worthless, but amusing.
Click the comic to see it at full size.
In the comic, there’s a convention that people from the future wear sombreros with little pompons that dangle from the brim. Even the future version of “Roger”, a decapitated head whom Fuzzy considers a friend and advisor, wears such a hat:
Click the comic to see it at full size.
The “future hat” seemed familiar to me. I’d seen such a hat associated with a time travel story before, but couldn’t put my finger on where. It’s been bugging me for about year now.
Last night, I was flipping through some old X-Men comics, when I stumbled across this image from X-Men Annual #14, from 1990. Get a load of Rachel Summers’ hat!
Rachel Summers, for those of you not familiar with the X-Men comics of the mid-80s to early 1990s, is the daughter of Scott “Cyclops” Summers and Jean Grey from an alternate future timeline.
The future from whence Rachel comes is a dystopian one, where mutants are hunted down and either killed or put into concentration camps. Rachel has been sent back from the future to do what she can to prevent it from happening, and to warn the present-day X-Men.
So that’s where I’d seen the “future hat” before. It all makes sense now.
Geek mystery solved!
…is the Macleans piece, Wrath of the Bloggers, which features quotes from Cory Doctorow, Michael Geist and yours truly. Right now, 15% of this weblog’s incoming traffic is coming from there.
In the same hotel as the one where Sam Bulte’s $250-a-plate fundraiser — er, celebration — is being held, Online Rights Canada will be holding a Balanced Meal where the talk will be about “why MPs shouldn’t take cash from the industries they regulate”, the way Sam Bulte is.
The fun runs from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Drake Hotel’s corner cafe (the Drake is at 1150 Queen Street West, two blocks east of Dufferin). Online Rights Canada says that the Cafe’s macaroni and cheese is tasty; I will also vouch for their “Notorious B.U.R.G.” hamburger. Check out their menu [PDF].
A couple of things to note about the Balanced Meal:
on how you should vote in the coming election. Partisan raconteurs need
not apply.
Be there — I will, and with accordion, even!
Now, despite clearly
labelling the event as a fundraiser on her own website,
she’s arguing it isn’t a fundraiser at all. Instead, in response to
the question “How can we count on you to carry on. . . impartially when
you are taking money from special interest groups?”, the Star reports
that Bulte responded:
“They are not hosting a fundraiser for me. It’s a celebration of my support for the arts community.”
We should all be so lucky to have celebrations where each guest forks over $250. If each of you cheapskates who attended my birthday party had done that, I’d be entering this blog entry in a zignone wool suit from Harry Rosen.
Since what Sam says has often proven to be at variance with what she does, I decided to be empirical and go take a look at her site. Here’s a screen capture of her site as of 10:45 a.m. this morning:
I see the word “FUNDRAISER” in capitals, clear as day. How ’bout you?
I downloaded the invitation, which I’ve put here for your reference [80K PDF], in case someone at her campaign gets smart (unlikely) and replaces it. Here’s what the top of the first page looks like:
I believe that phrases “cordially invite you to an artists’ and creators’ fundraiser for Sam Bulte” and “All funds raised will go to Sam’s re-election campaign” strongly suggest that this “celebration” is indeed a fundraiser. If you’re still not convinced, there’s the note at the bottom of the first page that reads:
Tax receipt will be issued for the eligible portion of the cost
You can hand out tax receipts for “celebrations”? I should’ve handed some out at my legendary hot tub party!
Finally, there’s this legal statement on the second page of the invitation:
Please note the new contribution limits as at January 1, 2004: Individuals may contribute up to a total of $5,000 in a calendar year to a registered party and its registered associations; candidates and nomination contestants. Corporations and trade unions may contribute up to a total of $1,000 in a calendar year to the registered electoral district associations; candidates; and nomination contestants. Crown corporations and corporations that receive 50% or more of their funding from the federal government will not be able to make any contributions.
It’s a fundraiser, all right. What kind of idiots does she take us for?
