Category: Accordion, Instrument of the Gods

A Stupid Idea

Seven and a half years ago, I had an incredibly stupid idea.

I thought it would be pretty neat if I took up being a street musician as a weekend hobby. I mentioned it to my friend Robertson, complaining that no matter how hard I tried, I would never master the street musician’s weapon of choice: the acoustic guitar. I’m just not wired to play it, which at the time seemed like a real shame; the “chick magnet” powers of the guitar are well understood by rock and pop musicians and fans.

“It’s a pity that the only instruments that I can understand have piano keyboards,” I said to him. “You can’t drag a piano around, and even the most portable synth needs electricity and a sound system. Maybe I should go to a pawn shop and see if they have any accordions.”

“I can give you an accordion,” Robertson replied. “It’s in my parents’ basement.”

Years before, a friend of his was trying to sell his old accordion to a pawn shop. His story is the story of many abandoned accordions: his parents made him take up the instrument as a young child, and he hated it. A few months after the accordion lessons started, they ended, and the accordion went into storage for years. Now he was months away from leaving home for university, and he’d enlisted Robertson’s help (Robertson had a car) with taking it to the pawn shop.

Call it coincidence or fate: they arrived at the pawn shop to find that it had closed for the day. They went on to do other things that day, and in the course of doing those things, forgot about the accordion in the trunk. It eventually got transferred from the trunk of the car to Robertson’s parents’ basement, where it gathered dust for ten years.

Robertson’s giving me the accordion led to that very strange and wonderful day, Saturday, May 1st, 1999, when my friend Karl Mohr and I took our first steps as rock and roll accordion street musicians. Had Robertson and his friend succeeded in bringing that accordion to the pawn shop, Karl and I might not have become accordion players and gone out busking on that bright sunny day. We wouldn’t have gone past the goth bar where we played “Happy Birthday” for the bouncers, we wouldn’t have been offered a chance to play a goth tune for the crowd that night, we wouldn;t have received that thunderous applause and all the beer we could drink.

A month later, Karl and I were invited to be backup musicians for local indie musician darling John Southworth for his live session on CBC Radio. Two months after that, I did my first accordion performance on television — I played AC/DC’s Big Balls on MuchMusic at the Burning Man festival. Three months after that, I bypassed the lineup for the elevator to Windows on the World (the resto-bar atop the World Trade Center) because they assumed I was one of the musicians for Latin Night. Shortly after that, I played accordion at a party for the then-booming online branch of the Canadian bookstore Chapters; the CEO walked up to me and said “I have no idea what you can do, but I want to hire you!”

On first glance, walking around with an accordion and playing slightly tongue-in-cheek rock and pop numbers is a very stupid idea. But it’s a stupid idea that paid off in spades, from job offers (including the one from Tucows) to that stagette in San Francisco to my short-lived career as a go-go dancer to upholding my anal soveregnty against U.S. customs. I should have such stupid ideas more often.

Another Stupid Idea

About this time five years ago, I was working for OpenCola, a start-up that my friend Cory Doctorow co-founded. By this point, the company had been reduced to a hollow shell by a massive layoff, and I was one of seven original employees remaining. The new management parachuted in a new techincal VP who was more wiener than man, and he proceeded to bring in a new team of programmers. He also began to whittle down my responsibilities on a weekly basis. By the time November 2001 had come around, my responsibilities had been reduced to creating the “About” window for the program.

As a result, I needed to do only five minutes’ worth of work each week, leaving me with 39 hours and 55 minutes of work week to fill. I spent about 10 hours a week briefing the new programmers on things we’d tried before, as well as what was going on in the world of peer-to-peer software development (for the uninitiated, Napster is an example of peer-to-peer software). That still left me with a good 30 hours of sitting at my desk looking for something to do.

I had an incredibly stupid idea. I would take up blogging.

I already knew a couple of people with a blog: Cory had been invited to join BoingBoing, a name I knew from the days when it was a cyberculture print magazine; I thought of it as a less hippie-druggy version of Mondo 2000. Deenster, who used to work at OpenCola until the massive layoff, had started one some months before. It looked like fun, and so on November 10th, 2001, I set up my blog.

I thought it was a stupid way to pass the time, and therefore should have a stupid name. Joey deVilla’s Hall of Shame was an early candidate, as was Thrilla from Manila. I thought that those names weren’t nearly ambitious enough. Rather than worry about the name, I decided to lift the title from the old sci-fi serial Buck Rogers in the 24th Century and go with a temporary name until I cam up with something better: The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. I could always go back and change it later, and hey — how long would I keep it up? A week, maybe a couple of months?

Five Years Later

This stupid idea of starting a blog, like the one about taking up the accordion, has also paid off in spades:

• I got my job partly because of this blog
• The Ginger Ninja decided to date me after reading my entire blog’s archives as a sort of “background check”
• I’ve landed a number of newspaper and television appearances
• I’ve met all sorts of interesting people and made new friends
• I’ve actually made a little money, too!
• I’ve become a better writer
• Blogging cuts into television time. That’s a good thing.
• I’d even go far to say that I’ve become a better person. Writing about what you think and feel makes you think about who you are.

As I begin year six, I’d like to thank all of you for playing along with this stupid little hobby of mine. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have, because I’ve got plenty more in me. Thanks for reading, folks.

Here’s yet another entry about my 1998 trip to Japan, inspired by Sarah “The Hollywood North Report” Marchildon’s blog entries about her moving there to teach English for a year.

Depending on how old you are — or what magazines you read — you may or may not be familiar with Saul Steinberg’s cover for the New Yorker titled A View of the World from 9th Avenue, which depicts how a Manhattanite supposedly sees the world:

This cover has inspired a number of parodies. Here’s one: it’s Ted Rall’s A View of the World from Pennsylvania Avenue:

(For those of you outside North America, Pennsylvania Avenue is the street on which the White House is located.)

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When I was in Japan, I visited the school at which my friend Anne taught English. I was there as her assistant for the day; my job was to talk to the students, give them English practice and an opportunity to meet a real live foreigner.

The strangest thing about the experience was the sense of deja vu that I got during the exercise: every Japanese person at the school remarked at how good my English was. Until that time, I’d only gotten that reaction from white people — it happened a lot in the 1970s — but these days, it’s incredibly rare that someone says this to me.

They thought I was Japanese and were surprised to discover that I was Filipino. “You don’t look it,” they said.

“Give me a pole to dance around and look again,” I replied.

They didn’t get the joke.

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In one of the school hallways, I saw these large sheets on which the younger students had done an English exercise. I got a laugh out of them and had to take these pictures.

The first one was a list of things they associated with America:

Remember, this was October 1998, so Clinton was president, and this only a few months after Clinton’s admission that he’d had an “inappropriate” relationship with Monica Lewinsky. As for “Mr. Big”, I have no idea what they’re referring to.

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Here’s the next poster: a list of things they associated with Britain:

Once again, this was October 1998, just over a year after Lady Diana’s death. It’s interesting that the students would associate gardening with Britain; although it’s a fair association, I doubt you’d get that answer from a North American student. I like the “Pank music” item too.

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And finally, Canada. How do they see us?