The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Two friends of mine, both of whom live in Canada, recently wrote articles about life in different countries. These articles piqued my interest, so I’m pointing you their way.

Germany, after the second world war, really tried repentance and it

succeeded in a way. But I think the price is starting to show. You

don’t realize it when you live in Germany or grow up there, but there

is a deep seated negativity about oneself, about the things that we, as

a nation have done. I think this is seeping even further into it. Hey,

Hitler wanted to create a superior Master Race, so anybody who is

better should not show this, we are just a good group of simple people,

no harm ever came from those, right?

I think that’s the biggest

problem, there is a lot of good things in Germany but Germany is really

building itself into a brick wall. Looking back now to my own school

time and work there I come to realize it.

I did realize a

different attitude when I moved to Canada, how intelligence is rewarded

not punished (at large), while in Germany everybody just tries to fit

in and “not stick out”.

Now,

let it be said that the Philippines is perhaps physically the most

beautiful country I’ve ever visited. Volcanos, beaches, rice terraces,

rainforest, seascapes and hilltops, misty mountains and steaming flat

plains… the quality of light is incredible. It is rich in natural

resources, and it’s been said by more knowledgeable Asiaphiles than me

that if the Philippines ever got its shit together (i.e. elected

officials of an ilk different than the

stream-of-nightmare-consciousness thieves and bandits they’ve elected

for generations who’ve used the national treasury as a personal slush

fund… anyone else, how ’bout?), it could take enormous advantage of

the fact that it’s the only large English-speaking country in Asia.

Could capitalize on its relationship with the United States to push for

preferential trade relations. Could host UN agencies, multinational

corporations, and NGO headquarters. Could supply translators and

executives to the whole region. It’s a shame, really, the wasted

potential and all the grab-the-money-and-run consequences of poor

government and brain drain: urban decay, traffic like nowhere else on

earth, the worst air quality I’ve ever experienced (and I’ve lived in

Delhi), bureaucratic corruption and paralysis. It’s tragic.

And

every born-and-raised-in-the-Philippines-Filipino I’ve ever met outside

the Philippines has a tragic story. I mean, we all have tragic stories.

But they’ll tell you their tragic story inside of five minutes of the

first hello, I guess is the difference. The culture of

immigration-into-servitude among lower-middle class Filipinos has

created a kind of widespread normalization of long-term seperation of

parents from children, wives from husbands, families from clan, that

I’ve never been able to fully wrap my head around. It is not in any way

unusual to meet Filipinas who have spouses, children, families, houses,

jobs, and whole lives waiting for them in stasis back in the

Philippines – while they toil away as domestics, nannies, and

entertainers, in isolation and obscurity and at very low rates of pay,

in Hong Kong condos and Dubai highrise compounds and faceless Canadian

suburbs. There is this “what can I do? I must do this…” flap of the hands, sorrowful upturning of the face, when you talk to them about their situation. Why

are you so far from your family? Don’t you miss them? Isn’t there

ANYTHING you could do back home? When are you going to see your

children again? Don’t know, bahala na. By no means are

Filipinos alone in being migrant workers working terrible jobs far from

home and sending remittances back to keep the family afloat, I do

realize this. It happens all over the world. I think it’s these

Filipinos’ incomparable propensity to communicate the difficulty of

their circumstances, and somehow plead for assistance while seeming

entirely unable to act on their own behalf, that really gets to me.

I’ve highlighted the Tagalog phrase bahala na above, because I think it’s a telling indicator of the Philippines’ number one problem. It’s a Filipino expression that’s kind of hard to translate — think of it like the Arabic word en’shallah, or perhaps the English expression “whatever” when used as a Gen-X dismissal. Perhaps P.J. O’Rourke’s translation of bahala na in his book Holidays in Hell is the most apt: he interpreted it as “You must have me mistaken for someone who gives a shit.”

Bonus reading: Get Real Philippines, a site that points out what’s wrong with the Philippines and what can be done about it.

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.

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!