…and as a matter of fact, I do have a stitch to wear. Waiting for Jamie Sorgente’s ride from the Hotel Le Germain (a pimped-out Audi that they use to take guests about town) to pick me up at the Queen Elizabeth and take us to Garde Manger.
I stopped blogging for a week, and a number of people asked if I was all right. The second-best answer I can give – at least here on the blog – is “Yes…considering the circumstances.”
As for the best answer, it’s a dream that I had Thursday night, after returning to my hotel room after a healthy dose of rye-and-cokes at a post-conference cocktail party in London, Ontario, and lying awake, having one of those long dark nights of the soul where you ask yourself so what do I do now?
For the purposes of a public forum like this one, I think it does a pretty good job of capturing my state of mind without violating any confidences.
In the dream, I’ve got my accordion strapped on, and for some reason, I’m wearing the stereotypical mariachi band outfit – the kind that’s black with lots of gold trim. Around me are two dozen other guys and a couple of women. The guys vary in age from boys in their teens to men in their 60s and are dressed like I am, while for some reason the women are wearing old-school Swiss Chalet waitress uniforms, the type that had “beaucoup décolletage”.
One of the guys looks familiar, and it turns out to be Paco Ortega. I played accordion with his daughter Lindi, in an earlier incarnation of her band back in 2001, when she was doing shows in support of her first album. For the first few gigs, Paco was our band’s bassist, and in this dream, he had a big Rickenbacker bass slung over his shoulder.
“Paco," I ask him after shaking his hand, “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”
“I have no idea,” he replies, “I was at home, and suddenly, I’m here in this ridiculous costume.”
A quick glance around the room reveals that everyone else is in the same situation: no idea of how they got here or why they’re dressed that way. Upon closer inspection, I realize that everyone has an instrument in their hands: each of the men is holding some kind of instrument suitable for a mariachi band member, while the women have glockenspiels.
“Where are we?” asks one of the younger guys, craning his neck towards the high ceiling as he looks around. To my left is a brick wall with circuit breakers, big electrical switches and pegs securing ropes leading to the ceiling. To the right is a red velvet curtain about two storeys high. Above us are bright lights. I recognize our surroundings: we’re backstage at some kind of theatre.
My curiosity gets the better of me and I try to take a peek onstage to see where we are. As soon as I touch the curtain to move it aside, the backstage vanishes. The rear wall is now an acoustic “clamshell” four storeys tall, the ceiling is now a starless night sky with a distant airliner flying overhead and where there once was a curtain, there’s now an audience waiting patiently for a performance. The venue looks familiar, but I can’t place it. Luckily, Paco knows where we are.
“Holy shit,” he says with a hushed voice. “This is the Hollywood Bowl.”
We’re all trying to make sense of our surroundings when we hear an ostinato piano riff start. The audience is leaning forward, in anticipation of a performance. Onstage, we mariachi/Swiss Chalet players are giving each other very confused looks. The piano part sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. Where have I heard it before?
That’s when I notice a little cubbyhole upstage, dead centre. In it is a musical director, whose face and gestures clearly say will you idiots start already, the audience is waiting!
The piano riff stops, and moments later, starts again. It’s a second attempt at the performance. The musical director is clearly agitated and the audience is beginning to look concerned and annoyed.
We do nothing except stare upstage, all of us with a “deer caught in the headlights” expression on our faces.
The riff stops again, then starts over again: it’s the third attempt. In the audience, a couple of people start making their way to the exits, while the rest of them whisper amongst themselves. A couple of the mariachi players are slinking offstage, trying desperately not to be noticed. It’s like one of those “Play me off, Johnny!” moments from Family Guy.
The musical director is pointing at his temple with his index and middle finger, with his thumb raised, pantomiming the act of blowing his brains out with a gun.
I’m deep in the middle of every performer’s worst nightmare.
For a brief moment, I contemplate getting offstage, but then it hits me: I recognize the piano riff. It’s the vamp for Semisonic’s pub anthem, Closing Time – a pop song that I remember for the line “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end“ (The Wikipedia entry for the song says that this line is a direct quote from Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger). Recognizing the song inspires me, and at that point I decide that rather than retreat, we should perform the number.
I unstrap my accordion’s bellows and started testing out notes on the keyboard in order to identify the chords (I do this at karaoke all the time). In the dream, I identify them as C – G – Dm – F.
(When I woke up and did a search for the chords, it turned out that the actual chords are G – D – Am – C, which is the same chord progression, just in a different key.)
The younger guys in the group recognize the song, and start to play. I yell out the chords to the older guys. I don’t have to tell Paco; he’s already picked out the chords and is playing a suitable bassline.
“Someone take out their phone!” I yell to my newfound bandmates. “Look up the lyrics!”
The song takes shape, and by the second verse, we’ve hit our stride. When the song hits its climax, with the repeated lines of “I know who I want to take me home”, it’s a glorious crescendo of accordions, Spanish guitars, trumpets, castanets, maracas and glockenspiels, bringing it to a perfect, if completely unorthodox, finish. The audience roars with approving applause and gives us a “Standing O”. As we bow, one of the glockenspiel-playing, low-cut Swiss Chalet uniform-wearing girls runs across the stage and puts her arms around me.
“You’re such a glocktease,” I tell her, and the dream ends.
I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something.
“To infinity and beyond”, indeed:
Gamercamp takes place today and tomorrow in Toronto! Billed as “two days of living, breathing and playing video games”, it’s a conference for people who make – or aspire to make – videogames, love to think and talk about them, and of course, play them.
I’ll be there today, catching the keynotes, and tomorrow, demoing XNA, Xboxes with Kinect and Windows Phone (yup, Microsoft’s a sponsor).
Gamercamp spans two days (here’s the agenda), with a different location for each day:
If you’d like to attend, tickets are available at the door and also online. Here’s how much it costs to attend:
It’s the 21st century, and that means it’s time to get your news the 21st century way: not read by some Western talking head on TV, but in the form of Chinese computer-generated animation!
Ever since my first encounter with the Chinese news organization NMA News’ animated take on the Tiger Woods car crash/infidelity story, I’ve been checking on their YouTube channel regularly to see their takes on various news stories, from less-serious stuff like the clash between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, their hilarious one-minute synopsis of the Facebook movie The Social Network and their coverage of George W. Bush’s new memoir…
…to more serious pieces like the Tyler Clementi suicide and the emergency go-around that a China Airlines jet had to do to avoid landing on an EVA Air cargo plane still on the runway. You might not understand the language of the voice-overs, but you will get the gist.
NMA News are aware of their popularity of their YouTube postings and have since expanded to create a “World Edition” version of their channel in English. The latest posting to this channel is an amusing gangsta rap number that does a pretty decent “101 level” introduction to the currency battle between the U.S. and China, as rapped by Hu Jintao and Barack Obama:
Money is not the only resource over which “Westerners” and “Asians” seem to be doing battle – universities are another one. The Canadian magazine Macleans (for those of you outside Canada, think Newsweek with a more conservative bent) publishes an annual issue in which they rank Canada’s universities and feature stories on university life and other issues surrounding post-secondary education. As they are wont to do, Macleans went straight for the cultural “hot button” with an article titled Too Asian?, which starts off with these paragraphs:
When Alexandra and her friend Rachel, both graduates of Toronto’s Havergal College, an all-girls private school, were deciding which university to go to, they didn’t even bother considering the University of Toronto. “The only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian,” explains Alexandra, a second-year student who looks like a girl from an Aritzia billboard. “All the white kids,” she says, “go to Queen’s, Western and McGill.”
Alexandra eventually chose the University of Western Ontario. Her younger brother, now a high school senior deciding where he’d like to go, will head “either east, west or to McGill”—unusual academic options, but in keeping with what he wants from his university experience. “East would suit him because it’s chill, out west he could be a ski bum,” says Alexandra, who explains her little brother wants to study hard, but is also looking for a good time—which rules out U of T, a school with an academic reputation that can be a bit of a killjoy.
Or, as Alexandra puts it—she asked that her real name not be used in this article, and broached the topic of race at universities hesitantly—a “reputation of being Asian.”
Those of you who know me well know that I went to one of the “white kids” schools – Crazy Go Nuts University, a.k.a. Queen’s. For me, it’ wasn’t that University of Toronto was too Asian, but too close to home; going there felt like flying to Paris and eating at McDonald’s. Queen’s, and for that matter, the other “Canadian Ivies” Western and McGill (where my sister did her undergrad), were popular choices with those Asian students who wanted to work both sides of the cultural divide. I led an experience more akin to Harold and Kumar than Long Duk Dong, but still majored in computer science. Crazy Go Nuts University let me sharpen both my computer programming skills and schmooze-fu, and both have proven to be a handy yin and yang that have kept me quite recession-proof (I even ended up benefiting from the econopocalypse of 2008).
The article hints at the possibility of Canadian universities establishing secret – or perhaps not-so-secret – quotas on Asian enrollment. It’s not the first time that people have talked about the insidious presence of a visible minority with a reputation for academics, and it’s just as creepy this time ‘round.
To anyone who’s a bit freaked out over Asians taking over universities, I have two things to say:
Click the photo to see it at full size.
The “Ask the Experts” (or in French, “Demander aux experts”) area of the TechDays Ottawa conference sports whiteboards that were looking a little too blank for this recovering cartoonist’s tastes. Taking matters into my own hands, I started working on a whiteboard “tapestry”, adding to it during lulls that happened in the conference centre as sessions took place. By 2:45 p.m., the whiteboard was full and the result appears in the photo above – click on it to see it at a larger size.