Author: Joey deVilla

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The next Kickass Karaoke: Wednesday, March 19th

That’s not this coming Wednesday, but the following one. As usual, it’s at the Bovine Sex Club and hosted by Carson T. Foster, Karaoke Impresario Extraordinaire!

More Kickass Karaoke

Carson has just announced a new bi-weekly Kickass Karaoke at the Rivoli! It takes place every other Sunday, starting Sunday March 16th. It’ll take place in the upstairs pool lounge.

The Rivoli is at 332 Queen Street West, about half a block east of Spadina. This is extremely convenient, as the Rivoli is barely two blocks away from my house.

Fun Rivoli Trivia Fact: Saturday Night Live comedian Mike Myers modelled “Dieter”, the host of Sprockets, after a Rivoli waiter.

Kickass Karaoke CD library stolen

Carson writes:

When I got home after tearing down the sound system [from a special Kickass Karaoke at the Duke of Gloucester on Thursday], I made a huge mistake. Because I was exhausted, I chose to leave some gear in the car.

Can you see where this is goin’?

Yup. My entire catalogue got jacked.

All 180 Karaoke CD+G’s are gone, as well as my megaphone (huh?) among other items. Yes, I am insured, but it will take a little time to sort through the paperwork and rebuild my catalogue and listing books.

I won’t cancel any upcoming gigs. I’m just going to have to cross-rent disks from Charlie Calvo. This will mean that some of the songs in my catalogue simply won’t be there, until I can replace them with the insurance settlement.

I want to apologize to everyone for being so stupid and I hope you’ll bear with me during this difficult period.

Maybe those of us who are regulars should get together and buy him a bunch of karaoke discs for his upcoming March 16th/March 19th shows. CD+G Karaoke discs sell for anywhere from CDN$10 – $20 (there are some decent English rock and pop karaoke discs selling for $10 in Chinatown Centre), and I’m sure that a handful of us could easily provide him with a half-dozen new discs. It’s the least we can do for all the years of fun Wednesday nights that he’s given to us.

Email me if you’re interested in giving our buddy Carson a hand.

A brief gallery of Kickass Karaoke photos

Pictures from February 2003’s Kickass Karaoke

Pictures from August 2002’s Kickass Karaoke

Pictures from July 2002’s Kickass Karaoke

Pictures from June 2002’s Kickass Karaoke

Pictures from March 2002’s Kickass Karaoke

cheese sandwich: (n.) Slang used by weblog writers to describe a weblog entry in which the writer simply catalogs what s/he did that day. Taken from a (probably apocryphal) blog entry that went “Today I ate a cheese sandwich”. In all likeliness, the “cheese” involved was actually “processed cheese food” slices, which are not really cheese in the strictest sense of the word.

Thursday, March 6th, 8:45 a.m.

Damn! I set the alarm clock to 8 p.m. again. They should really work on the user interface of these things. Shower, shave and breakfast will have to be deferred, but at least the habit of laying out the next day’s clothes help to shave off a couple of minutes of fumbling around the closet.

There doesn’t seem to be a dress code at this government office where I’m doing my contract work. “Business casual” is perfectly acceptable. In spite of that, I’ve been erring on the side of new-media-snappy, which in the winter is a dark dress shirt, dark pants, dark blazer. For some odd reason, I chose to dress down a little, opting for one of my dark sweaters with a single raffish horizontal stripe across the chest, the kind you always see in the funkier sections of the department store or on guys in indie rock videos. I have an inordinately large collection of sweaters with these single stripes — some across the chest, some along the sleeves — because I get two from my aunt every year, for my birthday and for Christmas. She seems to always something in one of the Joey-approved colours (black, blue, grey, green or brown) and it always fits. As a result, I haven’t had to buy a sweater in years.

9:15 a.m.

Another failure of civility: the streetcar driver and a surly passenger are having a little standoff. The streetcar driver asked the passenger to show his transfer a little more clearly next time and the passenger responded with mumbled profanities. The driver responded by saying “fine, be that way”, stopped the streetcar, opened the door and asked Surly Passenger to leave. Surly Passenger is staying put in his seat with his arms crossed. I hate rude people, I’ve been working out and Surly Passenger looks a little scrawny; I briefly contemplate pimp-slapping some etiquette into him.

If one of them would kindly blink in this little staring contest, I can get to work and go about the business of giving the Canadian taxpayers real data processing value.

9:30 a.m.

The trip, Surly Passenger standoff notwithstanding, is short: a 10-minute ride north on the Spadina streetcar to Spadina station, 5-minute subway ride east on the Bloor Line to Yonge station, then another 5 minutes on the northbound train to St. Clair station, which is right by the Arthur Meighen Building, which houses the cubicle to which I have been temporarily assigned.

I think this position is about as unbureaucratic as it gets. I was told that I could waltz in as late as 10 a.m. as long as I got in 7.5 hours every day, as stipulated in my contract. I’m usually in between 9:00 and 9:30 so that I can leave early enough to make it down to my gym classes on time. Nothing shall prevent me from lifting barbells in sync with two dozen other people to the tune of Human Leagues Don’t You Want Me Baby.

10:15 p.m.

I’m entering notes about the project in my own little developer diary on my personal laptop for future reference. I think I’ve written elsewhere that making changes to it is like trying to play Jenga while wearing Vaseline-covered mittens.

12:30 p.m.

Lunch with Eldon. Eldon, as I’ve mentioned before, has moved back to Toronto from Vancouver. Over lunch, I detect that homesickness for Vancouver that people from eastern Canada can’t understand. Some ex-Vancouverites miss the spectacular views of the ocean and the mountains. Others miss the sensible way in which west coast coffee shops understand that they have to open well into the wee hours of the morning, if not all the time. Others still decry how expensive Toronto is, but only because they have no idea how much it costs to live in most other places in the world. I’ll admit that we could stand to emulate London Drugs, a Vancouver-based chain that seems to be part drug store, part grocery store, part computer store, and it’s open late.

I like Accordion City. It’s an underrated gem of North America with a lot going for it. It’s got economic might, decent nightlife, more cultures than any other place in North America, lots of really cool nooks and crannies to explore and enough people to make the place really interesting.

I might have one more out-of-the-city move left in me, but it would have to be to some place like New York.

3:30 p.m.

The business logic behind the program I’m working is slowly being revealed to me. I’m finding out the difference between primary and secondary applicants for refugee status, and the recent changes to the law in such matters. My job will be to turn the new legislation into code.

5:15 p.m.

Cute girl with whom I’m seeing an art film tonight calls. She’s downtown and wants to grab dinner before the movie. I’d planned to go home first and shower, shave and change since I rushed out of the house this morning and dressed down. However, I haven’t seen her in a couple of months and figure that my charm can trump a little scruffiness.

More cheese sandwich-y goodness later…

From an article in USA Today (the newspaper for the postliterate) that looks as if it’s there to whip up a little more anti-European hysteria rather than actually say something newsworthy:

During [Vince] Vaughn’s stay in England [for a film shoot], he found himself criticized on all those levels. Like a boxer countering each blow, he shot back with the best responses he could.

Sometimes the complaints left him speechless, like the time he was told ” ‘America had no culture’ by a kid wearing a Kobe Bryant T-shirt and listening to rapper DMX.”

But one incident really stung.

“Man, it was bad,” says the Rat Pack-y star of Swingers. “These girls saw us and were kind of flirting, and they kept asking us if we were American. Finally we said, ‘Yes,’ and they just took off.

“One girl turns and says, ‘We were hoping you were Canadian.’ Canadian? Since when was it cooler to be Canadian?”

[Thanks to BoingBoing for the link]

You want your own separate Muslim homeland? I have two words for you:

START SWIMMING.

Terry Valko, an accordion player from my old stomping ground of Pennsylvania, emailed me the following accordion-related questions and was kind enough to let me answer them here on the blog.

Are you making money at it?

Enough to cover my “going-out” costs for the night. I generally only busk — that is, play on the street for money — on the weekends, and then only after the bars have closed. My favourite spot is outside a late-night pizza place called Amato, which is conveniently located near more than a half dozen bars and clubs. After last call (2 a.m. in the province of Ontario — clubs can remain open, but they can’t serve alcohol), the clubgoers make a bee-line for Amato’s, who have at least a dozen varieties of pizza. They have a large storefront and a large bench out front where people gather and hang out until about 4 a.m.. Walter, the manager, likes having the crowd out front and believes that the busking is good for his business, so he’s more than happy to have me there and always has a free chicken-and-pesto slice for me. In this two-hour window, I can make anywhere from 50 to 150 bucks, depending on the night.

Sometimes there’s a street kid who’s been panhandling all night nearby. I realize that the busking tends to take money away from them, and unlike them, I have a day job to fall back on. I usually give them a cut — $5 to $20 depending on how much I’ve made.

There’s almost always someone who makes a bet — sometimes as much as $20 — that I can’t play a certain song. For some reason, the song is almost always Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, which is actually pretty easy. It’s as if they expect the accordion to self-destruct if you play that combination of notes. Every now and again, a guy will toss me a large bill to play Happy Birthday for his girlfriend.

Is it possible to make more, perhaps if I decided to busk during the day, and for longer periods of time? It’s possible. The best way I can think of would be to busk in the suway system. The Toronto Transit Commission allows only authorized buskers — less than 100 in total — to play in designated areas inside the subway stations. To be authorized, you have to pass the annual audition, typically held in the late summer. I don’t know what the daily average take of a subway busker is, but during the Christmas season at one of the busiest stations, my harp-playing friend John Lavers collected about $1000 in a six-hour shift.

is your playing well-received or more of a novelty?

When I’m playing on the street, I’m usually singing as well. I’m not terribly good at playing complex lines and singing at the same time, so for the most part I’m comping or taking a more stripped-down punkish approach. I’m relying on the novelty to get them hooked — nobody expects to hear Nine Inch Nails or Avril Lavigne on accordion — but the playing and singing to keep them around for a least a few songs.

I always get a great crowd reaction when I play accordion at Kickass Karaoke, and I’ve been doing that for over three years, so they haven’t tired of me yet.

When I back up other people — for example, my housemate Paul or my friend Lindi — I usually don’t sing and can play more complex stuff. I’m told that my playing’s quite good, and I’ve been invited to do session work with a number of bands.

Do you work with a band or mostly solo?

On the street, it’s mostly solo, but I’ve done performances with Jamie Lawless, a guy who plays guitar almost every day on Queen Street. My friend Will McLean wants to do some busking with me this summer, and I’m sure my housemate Paul would like to give it a try as well.

Paul and I do open mike nights, and we’ll probably help our friend Dave Ellul, who hosts an open mike night on Fridays.

For a while, I was playing with Lindi’s band, and I back up any performer who needs an accordion player, even if it’s for only one number.

In the summer of 2000, I had some pretty strange gigs arranged for me by a booking agent named Joa (pronounced Joe-ah). She’d book me to play at these incredibly expensive dance clubs — the kind that charge $20 per person at the door. Sometimes I’d be there to entertain the outside lineup, either playing on the sidewalk or the fire escape overhead. Once, they had me play an “intermission set” while a club switched from mellow lounge music to dance music once the place got crowded. The weirdest gig she ever arrnaged for me was at a club called Money — I was suspended 20 feet above the crowd from a bungee harness, playing I Will Survive along the with DJ.

Oh yeah, and then there was the go-go dancing thing.

How do you handle the bass? With a single-note bass line? Tough to avoid the oom-pah-pah, if you know what i mean.

For the most part, yes. My bass-playing technique is derived from my pedal-playing technique — my first instrument was the organ.

I sometimes do the I-V alternating bass, but not with an oom-pah-pah rhythm. It works well for the bassline during the verses for the Violent Femmes’ Add It Up.

Are you mainly a vocalist?

No, I’m really a keyboard player. I sing passably. I fell into it — on the day when my friend Karl and I first took our accordions out onto the street, he made me sing because he didn’t know the lyrics to any pop tunes. People say that I’ve got a great speaking voice and should go into radio, though.

March 5th is a special day: it’s my sister’s birthday!

Happy birthday to the best sister in the world!

You were the only one who listened when the others fell deaf,

my only advocate when no one else would stand up for me,

the only one who believed when everyone else doubted.

You’re the best, sis.