If you live in Accordion City’s Ward 18 (I work in the area, but live in High Park), you might be interested in tonight’s Active 18 Association meeting taking place at The Great Hall at Queen and Dovercourt. There’s a lot of hubbub about the developers building in the Queen West Triangle and if you’d like to have your say in what happens to this up-and-coming neighbourhood, this is you chance. For more details, see the Active 18 Association site.
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"And Suddenly I Heard a Big Boom"
For most of us here in North America, Israel’s one of those places that we often talk about but haven’t visited. Even among Wendy’s and my immediate families — remember, her family’s Jewish — I believe only my Dad has been there. He went there as a young man in the early 1960s and probably saw a different country than it is today, both newly-formed and ancient at the same time. It was well before the Six-Day War, Golda Meir, Munich, Entebbe, Begin and Sadat, Lebanon, the Intifadahs, Gulf Wars and suicide bombings.
[To the left is a snapshot of channel 2 in Tel Aviv; Lisa’s the second person from the left.] I am probably quite unqualified to talk about the socio-politico-complexo-migraino issues surrounding Israel, but my friend Lisa Goldman is. She’s my friend Deenster’s older sister and is a journalist living in Tel Aviv. When I want a view of what’s going on in Israel and the West Bank that I’m not going to find in the news or the foaming-at-the-mouth pundits on either side of the Israel/Palestine debate, I go to her blog, On the Face.
Lisa’ latest entry covers Monday’s suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. She was about a fifteen-minute walk away when it happened, and she’s got words and pictures covering the aftermath. I’m glad to see she’s unharmed.
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Happy Belated Easter!
Following up a couple of Passover dinners at friends’ places, Wendy celebrated her first Easter yesterday. She seems seems to have enjoyed it. As she wrote, it was a medium-sized gathering for my family: me, Wendy, my sister and brother-in-law, their three kids, mom, two aunts, an uncle, a cousin and her son. Nothing too large…at least by Filipino standards.
Dinner was great: Filipino-style ham cooked by a friend of the family, pancit (noodles), fresh lumpia (spring rolls), bangus relleno (stuffed milkfish), potato salad, a Middle Eastern parsely salad given to my mom by one of her patients, potato-scallion bread from Absolutely Fine Foods, and of course, rice. Dessert was a fruit-topped cake and Smarties-and-vanilla ice cream and blueberry frozen yogurt that Wendy and I made.
Since I posted a day-late comic for Passover featuring a robot, I thought I’d do the same for Easter. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dalek Catholic Mass:
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More on PowerPoint Breakups
Vincent Marianiello, on his blog My Hypertextual Life, takes the idea put forth in my article The Breakup Style of PowerPoint (whose name is based on Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint) and runs with it:
Go check out Vincent’s “breakup” slides. They have this “funny because it’s true” quality. I know a couple of guys who fit the dumpee’s description perfectly.
(By the bye, Vincent’s not the only one who’s quoted my slides — David Byrne’s been using them as examples of intentionally funny PowerPoint.)
This Is London
Back in 2000, I made a little extra pocket money with the accordion thanks to a club booking agent named Joa. Joa worked for a club called This is London, a “meet market” for the investment bankers, Andersen consultants and the like, and the women who wanted to hook up with them.
Joa hired me to add strange twists to the evening. Sometimes the job was simply to stand on top of the DJ booth and play Deee-Lite’s Groove is in the Heart (a terribly easy song; it’s got a I-IV pattern in the key of A flat) on the accordion along with the DJ. Othertimes, it was a little mor einvolved, such as the time when she put a beret on me and had me perform a Paris-in-the-twneties version of Fatboy Slim’s Praise You (another easy song in A flat; this one’s got a VII-IV-I pattern).
These gigs never lasted longer than three minutes, after which I was given $100 and asked to promptly leave the club. Although anyone who performed at the club was allowed to enter without forking over the $20 cover — clubs often use ridiculous cover charges as a sort of “class filter” — performers weren’t allowed to be part of the club crowd on the night they performed.
“Nothing against you, Joey darling,” as Joa would constantly remind me, “but there needs to be a wall between artist and audience, you see.”
Since I was effectively being paid $2000 an hour and since my friends were waiting for me at the dance club down the street, I didn’t complain. Besides, the drinks at This is London were ridiculously overpriced and I often overheard banter like “If you stand him on his money, he gets taller.”
Money
In May of that year, Joa called me and asked if I’d like to try something a little different. She also booked acts for a club called “Money” (for an idea of what the club is like, see this photo gallery).
Money’s dance floor had a really high ceiling, over which the storage rooms and offices were located. Someone had cut a hole in the floor of the storage room/office level, through which they often lowered go-go dancers in a harness to swing high above the audience. Joa had come up with the idea to lower me, with my accordion, and have me play along with a DJ tune while suspended above the audience. They gave me a trial run, during which I played along with I Will Survive. Hooking up a microphone to me seemed to be more work than the sound guy wanted to do and the manager wasn’t terribly enamored with the whole accordion concept, so the plan was scrapped. Still, for a brief shining I moment, I got to have my own wire team and I did play accordion in mid-air.
Although nobody shot any pictures of me in the harness, I took some pictures of one of the go-go dancers, who took the harness for a test before I was strapped in. This shot is one of my favourites:
Tonight, the second monthly Rails Pub Night gathering will take place. These nights, organized by Pete Forde and the gang at the web development company Unspace, are meant to stimulate a healthy Rails developer community here in Accordion City by bringing together people who work with Rails, who dabble in it, who hope to dabble in it and who are wondering what the hell all the fuss about Ruby on Rails is.
I was just getting over a mild bout of the flu at the last meeting and wasn’t operating on all four bits, which meant that I brought neither the accordion nor some Tucows squishy cows. This time, it shall be quite different: both accordion and a bag full of squishy cows shall accompany me! I’ll give away cows on a first-come first-serve basis: the earlier you show up, the more likely I’ll be able to give you one. See you there!
- Venue: The Rhino
- Address: 1249 Queen Street West
- Time: 7:00 p.m.
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Passover
Passover began yesterday, and Deenster invited Wendy and me to Seder over at her mom’s place. The lamb was excellent, the company doubly so, and since I’m fond of Jagermeister, Manischewitz doesn’t taste so bad to me.
In honour of Passover (which very closely coincides with Easter this year), here’s the latest Shabot 6000 comic…
