Month: July 2003

I’ll admit that I do not own the Bovine Sex Club, nor do I have any serious pull with the management or staff other than the fact that they recognize me and know that I tip decently. It is a bar that is open to the public, there is no dress code and anyone is welcome to enter the establishment.

But still, can’t a guy have his loud music and Shanghai Stout without Holly Golightly 2.0 ruining it by showing up?

Apparently not. In today’s edition of the Globe and Mail, Leah McLaren’s discovered the joys of slumming (a term first documented in Lisa Birnbach’s The Official Preppy Handbook about 20 years ago). And she’s come up with a worse name for it. And she did it at my bar!

Maybe it’s something about the summer, but since coming back from my holiday in New York, all that I want in life is low rent. Just recently a great pal of mine had her 34th birthday celebration at the Bovine Sex Club, an old punk rock/metal head institution on Queen West in Toronto, where your bar bill reads: “cheep booze.” She is a polite, cheerful, well-educated sort of girl, and some people were surprised at the venue. I hadn’t been there since high school, and was a little hesitant about the grit level. (Would we be forced to slam dance?)

It turned out to be the best drinks night in recent history. Since then you can’t drag me to an air-conditioned hotel bar for flutes of bub. Forget the bling — I’ve become a biker-bar bitch. I ask how much the draft costs beforehand and if it’s more than a pack of smokes, I’d rather sit on my deck.

Fancy suddenly sucks. I’ve taken to carrying my lunch to work in a plastic grocery bag. It’s not that I don’t have half a dozen designer canvas totes. It’s just that I’m more interested in the reused plastic look these days.

My Bovine friend and I even have a name for it: “Keepin’ it bummy.” (As in, “I could have traded in the Pontiac for a Merc, but instead I’m keepin’ it bummy.”)

A guided tour of cheap places in New York by some guy from Billyburg, a couple of drinks at a bohemian rock and roll watering hole and plastic-bagging it to lunch (despite the fact that she has a half-dozen Martha-Stewart approved canvas lunch caddies) and suddenly she’s all down?

(Ooh! She packs her own lunch! How charmingly pro-vin-see-al! I guess she has to, considering that the Globe and Mail offices — a short bike ride straight south from my house — aren’t too close to a lunchery sufficiently upmarket for The Leah.)

I take great offense to the surprise she expresses that someone who’s polite, cheerful and well-educated would deign to go drinking at the Bovine. We Bovine patrons may dress (or in Carson’s case, undress) a little glam and like our music loud, our hobbies strange and our liquor strong, but we’re not dour barbarians. Why only recently, I had lovely conversations with local dominatrix Mistress Demonica about salad forks, home decorating and my permanent smile, glam rocker Robin Black about computer programming and videogame design, music theory with Jeff and with some random person about Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, all at the Bovine.

As for her the plastic-bag-to-lunch-as-fashion-experiment remark, let me just state for the record: Why, oh why, hasn’t someone yet invented some kind of long-distance pimp-slapping device?

This concludes today’s Two Minutes Hate. Now I’m off to get a hot dog from Max’s 24-hour stand. Gotta keep it bummy, you know.

Recommended Reading

Why Leah should not be a Torontonian ambassador. Yeah, maybe a lot of the Montreal-based resentment of Toronto in this article was there prior to Leah’s visit, but did she have to make it worse?

Here’s a scan from the Ryerson Review of Journalism in which Leah gives us her stats, Playboy playmate-style. Trees died for this?

Even Golden Words, the Crazy Go Nuts University humour paper where my old pal Scriban and I used to write, has taken notice of The Leah. [That’s a PDF link]

Proof that we need to gather the Canadian Literature Brat Pack into a remote place and then nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure…

The Salt Lake Tribune ran an article titled Accordion players bellow against ‘square’ reputation.

FARK picked up the story, running it with the following headline:

Accordion players insist they’re cool

And so far, two pictures of me have appeared in the ensuing discussion. One photo is captioned “Anyone who’s been to DefCon knows this guy”. But geez, both photos are from before I went on Atkins. Couldn’t they have used something else, say this more recent one?

Another photo that appeared in the discussion is this one of a Klingon accordion that got featured on an episode of Deep Space Nine. I’m sure I would look like a total badass with one of these! Right? Uh, anyone?

Thanks to Margot Beddoe-Lewis for the heads-up!

Today is the last business day that I will be a freelance programmer. Next Monday, July 14th (Bastille Day!), I will report to Tucows for my first day as their first-ever Technical Community Development Coordinator.

The thing I will miss most in the switch from working at home to working at the Tucows offices: naptime!

It’s the best perk of working at home, far better than being able to sneak a quick peek at the TV, do laundry, singing along with a blasting stereo (my current thing: doing a falsetto along with Goldfrapp’s Strict Machine), work in your pajamas (or nekkid) or take a nice private dump in your very own bathroom. Sometimes the answers to vexing programming problems come to me when I put the computer and myself to sleep for a half hour in the middle of the afternoon.

There’s got to be some place in Tucows’ warehouse space where one can recharge their batteries with a quick snooze. Maybe I can fashion some kind of secret napping cubbyhole in the ductwork.

(Note to Elliot and Ross: I kid! I kid!)

Jim Moore writes in his weblog:

Maybe what we want is a “politics of tenderness.” Tenderness is healing, tenderness provides a sense of safety, tenderness allows the “other” to become open enough to touch and express their highest creativity and love.

This seems to me to be one of the most radical ideas in politics. It’s so radical it freaks a lot of people out — “Too soft.” “Won’t work.” “What about security?”

Well, what about security? In a very small world shared by 6.3 billion people, most of whom now can see what the others are doing, isn’t it possible that much of the toxic resentment and anger that swirls around is a response to a lack of tenderness? Not just lack of personal tenderness, but lack of “institutional” tenderness. How tender is it for us to intervene in Iraq, where there is lots of oil, but not become involved in Liberia or the Congo–where people are experiencing near genocides?

I’m not sure how it could be translated into the world of global politics, but in my own personal experience, an ounce of goodwill today has always proven to be a better and less costly investment than a pound of whup-ass tomorrow.

Jim Moore writes in his weblog:

Maybe what we want is a “politics of tenderness.” Tenderness is healing, tenderness provides a sense of safety, tenderness allows the “other” to become open enough to touch and express their highest creativity and love.

This seems to me to be one of the most radical ideas in politics. It’s so radical it freaks a lot of people out — “Too soft.” “Won’t work.” “What about security?”

Well, what about security? In a very small world shared by 6.3 billion people, most of whom now can see what the others are doing, isn’t it possible that much of the toxic resentment and anger that swirls around is a response to a lack of tenderness? Not just lack of personal tenderness, but lack of “institutional” tenderness. How tender is it for us to intervene in Iraq, where there is lots of oil, but not become involved in Liberia or the Congo–where people are experiencing near genocides?

I’m not sure how it could be translated into the world of global politics, but in my own personal experience, an ounce of goodwill today has always proven to be a better and less costly investment than a pound of whup-ass tomorrow.

There’s a new blog in town, and it’s about Leah McLaren, the Globe and Mail’s terribly cute, terribly self-absorbed columnist. You might remember her from last year’s fuss over an article she wrote in The Spectator complaining about how British men were pretty useless at the art of seduction (You may also recall that another pretty North American woman, Gwyneth Paltrow, had the same complaint). Leah writes the what-it’s-like-to-be-young-blonde-and-beautiful-like-me-in-this-crazy-old-world column Generation Why, which I presume is the Globe and Mail’s bid to attract the twenty-something entry-level-at-the-firm crowd. Middle-level white collar worker bees make up the lion’s share of their readership, and they have to come from somewhere.

I have met Leah in passing at one cocktail party or another (hey, the accordion opens doors) but I what I know about her, I know through her columns. Let’s just say that I’ve seen better paper after wiping my ass. The self absorption is so great that not even light — and certainly not humility — can escape. There’s not much research or thought put into the writing; one can imagine that she bashes them out just before deadlines between venti macchiatos at ‘Bucks (and one can imagine she calls it “‘Bucks”, too) while multitasking between the Pottery Barn and Holt Renfrew catalogues. Her writing doesn’t contain so much personality as metropolitan hipster responses to urban stimuli.

Someone by the name of Coyle seems to agree with me. Coyle is the person behind Dissecting Leah McLaren, a new blog “dedicated to the examination, analysis and ridicule of Canada’s (and quite possibly the world’s) most inept “celebrity journalist”.

A snippet from the inaugural entry:

Now, if you don’t know who Leah McLaren is, you’re probably sitting there, wondering aloud “who the hell is this Leah person and what’s so wrong about her?”

The answer is that she is a 20-something columnist for the Globe and Mail (www.globeandmail.com), which is the most respected of Canada’s newspapers. She writes a column entitled “Generation Why”, which is probably a not-too-clever reference to Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X, but appropriately titled considering that she seems to have no idea what the hell is going on in the world. Her column is effectively a mosaic of ridiculous cultural and gender stereotypes, vacant explorations of pop culture and her own sense of self-importance. On the oft occasion, she’ll try to appear self-depreciating, but the veneer that Ms. McLaren believes that she is anything but the greatest human being in history the universe isn’t even worth laughing at.

With her model-like appearance and likewise proportioned ego, McLaren is the daughter of another writer and former editor of the same paper, and now a synonym for “nepotism” in Canada. Because god knows that there are thousands upon thousands of struggling young writers across the nation who are wittier, more incisive, more intelligent and much, much more interesting than Leah, but will never get the chance at having her job because they lack the requisite connections to be as successful as she is.

I’d call her the Vanilla Ice of journalism, but frankly, not even Vanilla deserves to be treated with such disdain.

Word to your editor.

Now you might wonder what all the vitriol’s about. After all, you might ask, is what I’m doing here in The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century all that different from what she’s doing?

And I would reply — but not after first giving you a well-deserved and bracing pimp-slapping — that I do it better, smarter, with more interesting stories over a wider range of topics, with more thought, research, personality and integrity — and I do it for free. And many other bloggers out there do an even better job than I ever could. Therein lies the difference.

Recommended reading

Recent Leah McLaren articles for your perusal:

• Why everyone should be blond like me. Dear. God. No.
• Being profiled: as queerly tempting as Temptation Island. In which our heroine talks about her less-than-flattering profile in this month’s Toronto Life magazine.
• Enlightenment comes with balance — and the right clothes. You got your self-absorption in my yoga! You got your yoga in my self-absorption! They taste great together!

FYI: The term is self-deprecating, not self-depreciating.

This awesome clip of a Matrix-style ping pong game from a Japanese TV show proves that it’s possible to get The Matrix’s signature “Bullet Time” effects live and onstage, without computer graphics. Windows Media Player required.

(Thanks to Jason Kottke’s sidebar for the link.)