Four years ago today, I was flying into Washington, DC to both attend and give presentations at RWDevCon, a conference for mobile app developers.
The winds were high that day, and as the pilot made their first attempt at a landing, the gusts hit the plane with enough force to make it obvious that we’d have to do a go-around.
On our second landing attempt, the gusts were still there. There was a nervous vibe throughout the cabin, and one of the flight attendants decided to lighten the mood by making an announcement over the PA system:
“If we need to do another go-around, I’m getting the accordion man to play us a song.”
To celebrate our seventh anniversary, we took a a Thursday-to-Sunday road trip to St. Augustine.We had a great time, mostly because we had each other for company, but also because we brought this lucky charm, which made for an interesting Saturday night:
We’d lucked out with our early reservation and were able to get an outdoor table with a view of the fort, river, and partygoers wandering (or stumbling) down the pedestrian-only St. George Street.
“What do you want to do now?” Anitra asked after we finished dessert.
“I figure we should walk around and see where the night takes us,” I said.
With that, we got up and started making our way out of the restaurant. We was starting our way down the stairs when someone called out: “Hey, you with the accordion!”
It turned out to be a table of eight, two of whom were celebrating their twentieth anniversary. We told them that we were celebrating our seventh, and it was congratulations all round.
“Here, let me play something for you,” I said, playing the first fitting song I could think of — Praise You by Fatboy Slim. It got applause not just from the table but the rest of the room, and the couple insisted on giving me a $20 bill by way of saying thanks.
“Looks like they covered the first round of drinks!” Anitra said as we walked out.
Bagging a discount
We started walking southward on St. George Street and saw that Cotton St. Aug was still open.
“Do you want to take a look?” Anitra asked.
“I’d love to check out their aloha shirts.” I replied, and we walked in.
We were greeted by the manager, Bridget, and struck up a conversation. Of course, the question came up — “Could you play me a song, please?” — and I went with the crowd-pleaser, Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time, which she recorded on video with her phone.
After the performance, Anitra started checking out their sizable selection of Anuschka hand-painted leather handbags. She picked out the “Lighthouse” design pictured to the right. As Bridget rang up our purchase, she looked at us, said “for the entertainment”, and gave us a discount.
“We’re on a bit of a roll tonight,” I said. We continued on our way south.
Turning music into free drinks
As we walked past Casa Monica (pictured above), a guy came up to us and talked about a friend of his who played classic rock on the accordion and asked if I did the same. I answered by playing AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long.
A couple overheard the performance and asked if I could play it again so that they could capture it on video for their friend. I obliged, and they invited us inside to buy us a drink at Casa Monica’s lobby bar, the Cobalt Lounge:
Here’s the text of the poster, with all its oddly abitrary capitalization (a growing phenomenon) faithfully recreated:
THE BATMAN
Movie
This is a Dark Movie and will
have a lot of Dark Scenes.
We will Not Issue any Refunds
or Re-Admission Tickets due to
DARKNESS as the Studio
informed us this will be a Dark
Movie.
Of course, you can’t properly mention “Batman” and “DARKNESS” without this playing this tune:
At the time, I was a high school student living in the Toronto suburb called Etobicoke (pronounced “Eh-TOE-bih-COE”), not far from my friend Peter Venuto. If the name of the suburb rings a bell, it’s because it’s the same suburb where Toronto’s most notorious mayor, Rob Ford, grew up.
Peter had started playing guitar a few months prior. He was a natural with the instrument, and his playing skill was growing in leaps and bounds. We started playing music together often — him on guitar, me on synthesizer.
With his growing interest in writing and playing music, he was getting less interested in his collection of comics and graphic novels. One day, while jamming at his house, he pointed at a box of comic books and graphic novels and said “take whatever you want”.
One of them was issue 3 of Raw. It captured my interest with its subtitle: “The Magazine That Lost Its Faith in Nihilism”.
While the magazine had some great stuff (including an amazing article about Wonder Bread), the most interesting part was a smaller magazine within the magazine: chapter two of Maus, titled The Honeymoon.
While comic books and graphic novels were seen as more than kid-lit in Europe and Asia, they were still seen as juvenile in North America. This began to change in the mid-1980s, and some of the credit has to go to Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, the creators of Raw.
Raw felt like a zine, but a zine that has somehow found some of the best artists in the genre (RAW alumni include folks like Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, Kaz, Ever Meulen, Alan Moore, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware), and published them in giant-size high-quality paper format instead of as photocopies stapled together.
Spiegelman included Maus in serial form in Raw. It would later get anthologized into a book, which in turn would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
A page from Maus, Chapter Two: The Honeymoon.
Maus is a story depicting Spiegelman talking with his father Vladek, a Jewish Polish immigrant to the U.S., about his experiences during World War II. Most of the story is told from the point of view of Spiegelman’s father.
Spiegelman used anthropomorphics as a story-telling device, depicting Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. Later issues would feature Americans as dogs, the English as fish, the French as frogs, and the Swedish as deer.
A page from Maus, Chapter Two: The Honeymoon.
Maus was by far the best part of Raw issue 3. When it got turned into a book, I picked up the book, and somewhere in my mother’s house in Toronto, both the book and that issue of Raw are on a bookshelf in the basement. I’ve got to dig them up the next time I visit.
Maus is more than just a story with comic book animals, and it’s also more than a story about of the horrors of the Holocaust. It also tells a story of generational trauma brought on by institutionalized and nationalized cruelty — the kind that we’re regrettably test-marketing here in the U.S. today.
It also tells the story of a son and father trying to come to an understanding, challenged by the differences in their life experiences and the fact that the father grew up in “the old country” while the son grew up “here”. Being in the same situation myself, that resonated with me.
“Value vodka” is a great way of putting it. It communicates that you’re getting maximum drunk for the dollar without making you feel that you’re one bad break away from living in a van by the river.
