Someone sent me this clipping from the Eugene Weekly’s personals:
Studio of Unfine Art.
You: lanky dork behind counter.
Me: dark hair stray looking at your accordion.
Want to find bigfoot together?
Sounds like my kind of girl and my kind of date. You bring the sasquatch bait, I’ll bring the mazola.
Yesterday was an exercise in patience and perseverance.
It all started with an airline ticket that never made it to my house. I got the ticket using points I’d accumulated on my VISA card and the travel agency associated with the card insisted on sending me a paper ticket. I can’t even recall the last time I used a paper ticket. They were supposed to send it to me in the mail, but it never arrived. I tried calling the agency, but got stuck on hold each time.
Not knowing the difference between a paper ticket and an e-ticket, I went to the airport anyway. I’d paid for the ticket, so I assumed it would be on the airline’s computer.
Apparently not. The folks at the ticket counter explained to me that while an e-ticket represented an actual booking of an airline seat, a paper ticket was simply a cash equivalent that could be redeemed for a booked seat. No paper ticket, no seat.
I spent the next hour navigating the voice mail system of my credit card’s travel agency. About eight levels deep, I found an option that might help.
“To contact the emergency travel arrangements desk,” the voice said, “press five.”
I pressed five and twelve rings later, got connected with an agent. He suggested that I buy a ticket to San Jose and fill out a lost ticket indemnity form that would allow me to get the money back once my ticket had been confirmed as lost. The round trip ticket was a little more than I could afford — even with the guaranteed refund — so the people at the airline counter suggested that I buy a one-way ticket to San Jose and have the travel agency courier me a one-way ticket back home.
I followed their advice and proceeded to customs.
I handed customs my passport and boarding passes. They took one look at my ticket and decided I fit the profile:
I was escorted into a customs interview room, a small place with a desk equipped with a microphone, a chair on either side of the desk and a surveillance camera pointed at the interviewee’s chair. As I waited for my interviewer, I imagined someone in one of the adjoining offices snapping on a pair of latex gloves and slathering them with lube.
After about fifteen minutes, a man in a U.S. customs uniform approached the room, but was interrupted by a coworker. “Hey, Phil just brought in four boxes of Krispy Kremes!”
Both of them made a beeline in some other direction, and I waited another ten minutes for my interviewer to return. By then, I’d missed my flight.
The customs guy was pretty nice, asking me the same questions I’d been asked earlier — where was I headed, how long was I staying, whom I was visiting — as well as some out-of-the-ordinary questions:
He then asked if he could search my luggage; I said “yes,” partly because I had nothing to hide and partly because I didn’t want to face the consequences of saying “no”.
When he opened my accordion bag, he asked me to play it in order to prove it was a real musical instrument.
It was then that I decided that there is only one song you play when trying to establish your bona fides with a U.S. customs official: The Star Spangled Banner.
About four bars in, he declared me free to go.
He explained that my circumstances looked a little suspicious, hence the interrogation and search. I told him that I understood he was just doing his job and hustled out of there.
I was thankful that the searching was restricted to my luggage. I’m pretty sure that playing the U.S. national anthem played a part in convincing him that I was not a terrorist and that he should recognize my right to anal sovereignty.
On Saturday, May 1st, 1999, I took the accordion out and played it in public for the first time. I soon discovered that I could wear it like a backpack when I wasn’t playing it, which made it convenient to take whereever I went. That in turn led me to discover that interesting things happen when you carry an accordion around on your back. Life hasn’t been the same since.
I’ve got two accordions — the original, a Titano two-reed student model, which I call the “Street Accordion” and a Crucianelli three-reeder, which is the “Club Accordion”, which I bought in November 2000. The Street Accordion is the better-travelled of the two, having accompanied me to New York City, Burning Man, San Francisco, L.A. and Prague. The Club Accordion’s been to San Francisco.
Here are some notable things people have said to me:
I thought I’d post the all-time-best accordion picture in my collection in honour of this event. It doesn’t have me in it, but it does have the accordion:
Thanks to everyone who took part in my accordion adventures. I’m certainly planning on having more.
At last, the go-go dancer story.
There was a birthday party for my friend Marlo on Saturday. Dinner — which I missed, owing to some prior commitments — was at the anything-goes yuppie hangout Seven Numbers.
I caught up with Marlo and her entourage after dessert, at which point everyone decided that they wanted to go dancing. I suggested the neighbourhood I call “Clubland”, a busy row of bars and clubs just south of where I live. We were going to see if we could get into Fez Batik, and if the line was too long, we had at least a dozen other clubs from which we could choose.
The line for Fez wasn’t moving at all, so we decided to walk south and try our luck at the clubs on Adelaide Street. Luck was with us; while The Living Room had a decent crowd inside, there wasn’t any line.
A brunette bartender in pigtails and olive green tank top motioned for me to come over to the bar.
“Can you play that thing?” she asked, pointing at my accordion, which I was wearing like a backpack.
“Yeah, otherwise it would just be a thirty-pound fashion accessory,” I replied.
“I’ll buy you a drink if you play something for me.”
I don’t remember what the DJ was playing at the time, but it was easy to figure out which key it was in. I remember the song having a simple riff and that I had no trouble playing it. The bartender was impressed and she poured two shots of Goldschlager — one for her, one for me.
A bearded man in a grey sharkskin suit walked up to me.
“That was great! By the way, I’m Tony. I run this place. Follow me to the DJ booth.”
I followed him through the crowded dance floor and into the booth.
It was occupied by the DJ and a couple of hangers-on. The DJ was
starting an old-school set with Prince’s Kiss. Tony asked the DJ for the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Tony announced, “please welcome the latest addition to The Living Room family…the Accordion Dude!”
I tipped my hat to the crowd. Tony pointed the microphone at the accordion and said “Go on, play.” Luckily, Kiss is a I-IV-V song, heavy on the sevenths, and it took me only two stabs at the keyboard to find the right key – A. I played through to the end of the song and even managed to get in a decent solo.
Tony led me to the bar on the opposite end of the dance floor, where he asked me to play something for the dreadlocked barman. I forget what the DJ was playing at the time, but once again, it was easy to figure out the notes and I played along. The earned me a free drink from this bartender, and Tony gave me a fistful of tickets good for free drinks. He then led me to the lounge near the front of the club to play for the bartender there. Marlo and company were in the lounge, so I gave them the drink tickets.
“When the accordion train comes in, everybody rides!” I said.
I managed to have a couple of vodka-and-cranberries with the birthday party before Tony came back with an idea.
“I’m gonna have you dance right on the main bar. It’ll be just like Coyote Ugly, but with an accordion.”
He put two crisp fifty dollar bills in my hand and led me to the bar with the pigtailed bartender who served me first. They cleared off a section of the bar for me, and I climbed up and played and danced.
The bartender, Jenn, kept feeding me Goldschlager shots. So far, I hadn’t spent a dime on drinks and I was actually making money.
Marlo had my camera and took a couple of pictures:
A couple of women reached up and tucked fivers in my pants. Inspired by this, Jenn climbed on the bar after last call and tucked my shared of the bar tips into my pockets while spanking me to the beat. This, of course, is why we boys take up playing instruments in the first place.
We decided to head out for some late-night eats after Jenn closed the bar. As I walked out, Tony asked me to meet with him later in the week to discuss a performance schedule. He wants me there every Friday and Saturday night.
I don’t really want to sacrifice my weekend nights to go-go dancing.
(I just read that last sentence and thought: That’s one of those things I never expected to write.)
As it gets closer and closer to the third anniversary of the day I first played the accordion in public, its powers to bend reality seem to be increasing. Life becomes more and more like a beer commercial every time I bring it out.
This, of course, is a Very Good Thing.
More details later.
Photo by Weegee010, and under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 license.
Click to see the source.
Friday, February 15th: North Beach is one of San Franscisco’s most lively neighbourhoods. It’s a strange mix of date-worthy Italian resto-bars and strip clubs, as if New York’s pre-Disneyfied Times Square and Little Italy had merged. The sidewalks are crowded with people eating tiramisu at cafe tables and passers-by taking in the sights. The road is packed with cars looking for places to park and limousines and buses full of partygoers toasting each other and people on the sidewalk with cans of beer.
Paul, Scott Hardy and I were being led to The Lusty Lady by Annalee Newitz, sex-and-tech writer extraordinaire, whom we’d met at CodeCon earlier that day. We were joined by her friend Charles Anders, who wore a smart little skirt uniform (Meter maid? Police? I don’t recall.) and sensible red flats.
A little aside: I have a theory that the “Gay Disneyland” part of San Francisco’s Castro neighbourhood stops where Castro Street turns into a steep hill because it’s impossible to climb it in a pair of pumps.
It was the kind of group you might only see in an ensemble cast movie: cross-dressing Charles, Annalee in indie-rock olive drab, Scott (who looks as though he could’ve been a member of Steppenwolf), Paul the tall guy from the Midwest, and the mop-topped Asian guy with the accordion on his back (“…and together, they fight crime!”).
Photo by “Noodle”, and under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Click to see the source.
The Lusty Lady is no ordinary peepshow theatre. It was the setting of a documentary film called Live Nude Girls Unite!, a story about the struggle to form first exotic dancer’s union. In order to supplement her income, comedian Julia Query started dancing at the Lusty Lady and found the work arrangements appallingly bad. Dancers had to pay stage fees — the exotic dancer’s equivalent of the musician’s onerous “pay-to-play” contract, were being asked to “date” the owners’ friends and were being videotaped for porn without their knowledge or being paid. The end result: the Exotic Dancers Union was formed. The Lusty Lady is, as I understand it, the only unionized strip club in North America.
“Do they have a good dental plan?” I asked Annalee. “I’m unemployed, you know. And is it, you know, empowering? I don’t want to be exploitive. I mean, I’m like that guy from the Chris Isaak Show, the guy who had the line ‘You give me a boner…with respect.'”
When we arrived at the Lusty Lady, we were met by more of Annalee’s and Charles’ friends, making our combined group an almost even mix of men and women. How different this scene was from what it was like ten years ago, when many of my women friends shared Catherine MacKinnon’s and Andrea Dworkin’s views: “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice”.
The Lusty Lady’s front desk is in a room painted a very lurid red with cheesy furniture; it would look right at home in a Russ Meyer film. A little weasel of a man sat at the front desk.
“Are the art films still in the video booths?” asked Annalee.
“Art films”, I thought. Yeah, right.
“Yesmam!” he said in an cartoonish Spanish accent with an even more cartoonish sing-song cadence. He sounded like a less gravelly-voiced version of “Cheech” Marin’s character, Chet Pussy, in From Dusk Till Dawn. “De regular pooooorno feelms are on channels hwone t’ru twenny-seven, wit’ the art feelm on channel twenny-h’eight.” He said pooooorno feelms and art feelm with particular gusto, and cupped hands pantomiming the squeezing of breasts. “An’ don’ forget ’bout de nekkid ladies!”
The back area was painted the same lurid red. It was a hallway with closely spaced doors, each with a number and a light overhead that was lit up if the room was occupied.
“Let’s get the corner booth,” said Annalee. “There’ll be more room there.”
The five of us piled into a triangular shaped room with a bench built into the wall. On one wall was a machine that accepted bills. The wall that the bench faced had a plexiglass window that was covered by a shade on the other side. The booth was stuffy and had a vague, mushroom-like odor.
“I just stepped in something slimy,” Paul said.
That’s when I noticed the paper towel dispenser on the wall.
Someone fished out a five-dollar bill and fed it into the machine. The shade on the other side of the plexiglass rose, giving us a view into a small room lined with animal print faux fur and lit by several chaser bulbs. Five women, some completely nude, others wearing tiny pieces of gauzy lingerie looked inside our booth and seemed a little annoyed that we were “cheaping out” and cramming inside.
I raised the accordion so that they could see it.
“What’s in the box?” one of them asked. Oops. I was showing them the back. I turned it around and put it on.
“Let me play you a little song,” I said, and started into Wild Thing.
One by one, they gathered around our window. Three of them lay down on their stomachs, their heads propped up in their hands, as if they were kids watching Saturday morning cartoons. The other two did a sexy dance along to the music.
When the number ended, they appluaded and asked for more. I could not possibly turn down five naked women asking for more. All the women, save the cute blonde one with glasses, took turns dancing; she stayed by the window, watching the show. I smiled at her, she smiled back.
“Take your clothes off!” she yelled.
“I will, but first you have to put money in the machine on your side!” I answered.
We kept feeding the machine for another five songs and left the booth afterwards.
“I tell you, that blonde was checking me out!” I told Paul.
“Yeah, right.”
Paul and I tried one of the video booths next. We opened the door and Paul checked the seat for gooey substances before we sat down. I gave Paul a couple of dollar bills to put into the machine. We cycled through the first twenty-seven channels, which were standard run-of-the-mill porno: anal, vaginal, fellatio, threesome and posing.
“Not much variety,” Paul noted.
The twenty-eighth was quite different. It was a reel of student- and “artist”-produced short films. The first was a close-up of a woman’s mouth licking a one hundred dollar bill, which we found hilarious. The next segment showed a naked woman standing in the woods, with two men in soldier’s uniforms running at her from her left and her right. As they approached her, she raised her arms to face each of them, revealing that she was carrying two handguns. She shot them dead before they could reach her. This repeated in a loop for about a minute.
“Pavlov Video Chicken One,” I said. (You’ll have to ask a fan of the old Saturday Night Live about that one, it doesn’t appear in Google.)
Someone knocked at the door. “Joey,” said Jesse on the other side. “Your presence is requested.”
One of Annalee’s friends, a rubenesque woman with a low-cut black shirt was going to strip for the strippers and wanted some accompanying music. She, Annalee and I piled into the corner booth. I played a blues progression in C minor while she pulled up her top, presenting her breasts for the dancers’ viewing pleasure. Such reciprocity!
I could feel the love in the booth. I just hoped I wasn’t standing in any of it.
After the call-and-response peep show in the booth, we returned to the hallway, where we gathered to talk about what we’d just seen or done. We were interrupted by the guy from the front desk, who spoke over the public address system.
“E’scuuuuse me! I just haf an announcement for all the people jus’ standin’ in de hallway. Eef chu wan’ to talk, please do it outside an’ don’ block de way for de people who are tryin’ to spend their money on de poooooooorno feeelms!” He said poooooooorno with particular gusto and spoke so comically we couldn’t help but laugh. We walked outside.
We went to a cafe on Columbus street and occupied the sidewalk tables. Jillzilla arrived and joined us.
She and I looked through Charles’ book, The Lazy Crossdresser, a copy of which he’d just received from the printer. It starts with a chapter titled Matter and Panty-matter and continues to be hilarious to the very end. I’m definitely going to purchase a copy and have it on my coffee table to put The Fear into some of my more timid guests.
After some cake and coffee, we all parted ways. Jill and I were still in a partying mood, so we gave Brandon a call and headed towards his hotel. We caught a cablecar, where Jill noticed that someone had altered one of the signs within.
The sign had four of those red circles with the red diagonal bar cutting across an image within the circle.
Three of them were what’s you’d expect: no smoking, no food or drink, no leaning out of the cablecar. Someone had altered the fourth one so that the pictogram and text said “No IGOR”. Apparently lab assistants aren’t allowed on board.
The Hotel Metropolis is on the edge of San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district. I was expecting it to be a complete fleabag, but it turned out to be the one of the nicest hotels I’d ever seen. It looked as if it had been decorated by Asian readers of wallpaper* magazine, complete with a glass wall waterfall behind the concierge’s desk and Delirium being played instead of standard Muzak. We went to Brandon’s room, where he, Bram, Jane, Steve and Liza were relaxing. I told them about our evening at the Lusty Lady.
“I refuse to believe it happened!” said Brandon with a smile. “It’s all lies, Joey! Lies!”
“I want to believe,” said Steve.
“I want to sleep,” said Jane.
Somehow Jill and I managed to convince them to go out for a bite to eat at a nearby restaurant, which made for a lovely end to a fun and unusual evening.
The Lazy Crossdresser by Charles Anders. Be sure to check out Chris ‘site.
A little cross-dressing humour: Transvestites are cross-dressers who hang from the top of the cave, while transvestmites stand on the cave floor. Ha! I slay me!
Annalee’s card says TECHNOLOGY * POP CULTURE * SEX on the front and Must…East…Brains… on the back. How can you not visit her site now? Be sure to check out some of her articles:
I get mentioned in the latest Techsploitation column, which appears in today’s San Francisco Bay Guardian. This column covers blogs and CodeCon.
Thanks, Annalee! You don’t know how much this means to a skanky accordion ho like me!
I had a bone to pick with San Francisco. The entire damned seven-by-seven miles of the city from the yuppie ghetto of the Marina to the no-man’s land known as South San Francisco. (Don’t get me started on the Valley — especially San Jose.)
It’s not any one thing that brought about the rift between me and what I like to call “The Richest city in the Third World”, but a combination of its many annoyances:
And let me tell you, even the lowest of the low in the shantytowns surrounding Manila do not take a dump in the middle of the sidewalk the way San Francisco homeless do.
It’s all that, along with what happened to me during my abruptly terminated stay in the city.
Like most of my stories, it starts with an accordion. One of its many powers is to attract job offers, and in 2000, it got me promoted from programmer to programmer-and-developer-relations-guy. In a fit of needing to be where the action is, the company decided to open a San Francisco office and send its best or loudest spokespeople — namely Cory, me and our white-guy-who-drops-a-lot-of-black-urban-lingo-for-street-cred Chief Strategist — down there to shill our not-yet-existent and often-changing product. There was a short period, maybe a day or two, where I was leaning towards turning down the transfer when my then-girlfriend sagely pointed out this important fact: if I didn’t at least give it a try, I would regret it later.
I moved to San Francisco on December 28th, 2000. I was put in charge of taking care of the corporate apartment, a two-bedroom townhouse in a complex right by Alamo Square Park, whose Victorian houses you’ve probably seen in San Francisco pictures and postcards, as well as the opening shot for the intro to the TV series Full House (brr). The company was constantly sending people from Toronto to San Francisco, and the bean-counters figured that it would be cheaper to maintain a corporate apartment than to book them into hotels. My caretaker role meant that I lived rent-free in a new place equidistant from Soma, the Haight, the Marina and downtown. It was an arrangement not unlike the way Higgins looked after Robin Masters’ estate in Magnum, P.I., the differences being that I was not a stuffy Englishman and my Hawaiian shirt collection puts me in the Magnum fashion camp. (I suppose that Cory was my Robin Masters.)
By February, we had moved to the best damned office I’d ever worked in, made a big splash at a major conference and were being courted by the Beast of Redmond. It was all going accordion to plan.
My girlfriend at the time and I were maintaining a long-distance relationship and had decided to shorten that distance considerably. She moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco in early March. About a week and a half later, horrified at everything about the city that makes Cory refer to it as “San Fran-scarcity”, she told me how much she hated the place and that she suddenly had some very serious doubts about the relationship. I asked her to think it over. After all, she hadn’t been there two weeks and it may just be a case of homesickness. I tried to tell her that although it’s not New York — no city is — it wasn’t as if she were suddenly moving to a cardboard box in downtown Calcutta. However, after a couple of hours of talking it over with her, it seemed that she was determined to flake out and I was resigned to the fact that she was going to move back. She booked a flight home for the following Monday.
That weekend could’ve been a miserable one, but it wasn’t. I “officially” broke up with her on Thursday, thereby demoting my status back to “um friend“, a role that made her considerably more comfortable. We spent a very debauched St. Patrick’s Day weekend weekend painting the town red. The bars were serving Irish whiskey, Guinness and green beer, the street parties were great raucous affairs, and playing The Wild Rover on the accordion got us a lot of free drinks. It was one of my better turn-lemons-into-lemonade moments.
Monday was difficult, to say the least. I took her to the airport, said goodbye to her and watched her plane disappear, A few hours shy of two weeks after she’d arrived in San Francisco, she was gone. It was the lowest I’d felt in a very long time.
I didn’t even get the chance to take a couple of days off to cry in my beer; the company had scheduled a series of very important meetings with to-die-for clients: an on-line auction company of some repute and a portal whose name is an expression of glee. I’d written some user interface prototypes that I would be demonstrating at these meetings, as well as talking tech with their developers. I spent the rest of the week putting on my happy face and burying my woes with demos and work.
At the end of that week, it was decided that I should fly back to Toronto for a couple of weeks to meet with the rest of the team that would be developing the 1.0 version of our software. About a week into my visit to Toronto, the company laid off a dozen people in Toronto, cancelled the lease on our San Francisco office, and downsized the San Francsico team to just me and Cory, who would work out of an office at our VC’s headquarters in Palo Alto.
I saw which way the wind was blowing and decided it would be better for me (and even earn me some points with management) if I volunteered to move back to Toronto. They thought it was a good idea, but said that they couldn’t spare me for enough time for me to fly back and pack my stuff. They dispatched our office manager Amy to pack up the office and my apartment and ship it back. About five weeks after I had come to Toronto for a visit, an moving truck packed with all the evidence that I’d ever lived in San Francisco brought my stuff to Toronto. Within the span of four months, I had moved from Toronto to San Francisco and back again.
I spent a week in an “I’m not supposed to be here!” daze. Having lost a girlfriend and then being involuntarily displaced, I felt as if I’d been harshly dumped by San Francisco too. The bitch!
From that point on, I associated San Francisco with unpleasant memories and heartbreak, as if I’d been through some kind of neo-Pavlovian negative reinforcement experiment in which the city was the gerbil cage (whose liner needs changing very badly).
Just over a week ago, I made my first trip to San Francisco since my abrupt move back to Toronto. I was there to present Peekabooty at CodeCon, do some developer relations with the various hackers who would be attending, and maybe even make my peace with the city.
(Yes, I realize I’m anthropomorphizing a seven-by-seven mile clump of hilly land, its people and its human urine- and feces-stained sidewalks. Don’t tell me you haven’t done something similar.)
Cory gave me the keys to his apartment, where I dropped off all my stuff save the accordion. I had plenty of time to kill before meeting Jillzilla for dinner, so I decided to spent the afternoon walking about the city that was supposed to be my home.
I stopped by Brain Wash, and old hangout of mine located across the street from the old office. Its back half is a laundromat and its front half is a cafe. I’ve eaten just about everything on their menu, spent many afternoons writing prototype software at their tables and even did a couple of accordion-assisted stand-up routines at their regular amateur comedy nights. (For the brave or the shameless, performing in front of an audience is a great way to meet people if you’re new in town.)
The place was silent. Normally, the sounds of the kitchen, stereo and washing machines fill the place. Something wrong happened with the power grid, leaving the entire block without electricity.
Amy, one of the cute punkish staff, was talking to a co-worker. I used to fantasize about her, wearing nothing but Doc Martens, softly kicking me in the head. But I digress.
“It’s too quiet here. If I don’t hear some music soon, I’m going to go crazy,” she complained as I walked in the door.
That was my cue. I switched the accordion from backpack mode to ready-to-rock mode, unstrapped the bellows and said “Did someone say music?”
“You! Free cookies and drinks if you play!”
That’s when I knew that San Francisco was about to make it up to me in many weird and wonderful ways.
San Francisco, you are forgiven. (Now, if you can do something about your personal hygiene…)
Next: The bustling metropolis known as downtown Mountain View, CodeCon, children trust me, matter and panty-matter and entertaining a room full of naked women.
