If you haven't checked out my music page yet (Accordionasty), here is a sneak peek. A video shot by a subway fan:
St. James Infirmary (with a bit of Chopin thrown in at the end). Unfortunately, you don't get the full stereo effect so integral to the awesomeness that is Accordion, because the dude was by my treble side. But I like the video. That was a good night. If I can figure it out, I'll post to my videos section up here.
Oh yeah, and I'm single again. Actually, I've been single about a month and a half. I won't get into the whole story. But suffice it to say...this site was maybe party responsible. In a good way. I was looking around the IBTC group a couple months ago, and noticed an interesting thread, asking girls what the worst small-boob-comment you've ever gotten was (<--poorly formed sentence, oh well.) I pondered it for awhile, expecting to come up with a memory from a middle school locker room or something. And then I had a revelation: I can't even remember shit kids most likely said to me when I was young about my boobs. All I could think about were several comments made by my current boyfriend. One of which regarded this picture, in which he said it looked as though I had "grown boobs" (I cropped him out of it. You're welcome.)
Surely, I couldn't post on a thread that the person I'm still allowing to sleep with with me makes disparaging remarks about my body, to my face. So I wandered away from the thread...and kicked the bastard to the curb a month later (for a multitude of reasons, but the aforementioned issue was definitely a big part of it). So, thank you SG! I guess I can go comment on that thread now!!
Now on to more fun things!
Week before last, my oldest NOLA friend came up to NYC for a few days. He was Mardi Gras'd out. It was so awesome to see him, and we heard so much live music while he was in town. It took a tourist to show me the cool shit right under my nose in my own damn neighborhood! It was a far cry from the old days when we would trip on acid for days on end, and roam around the Quarter and Audobon Park. Ah to be 18 again, and living in The Big Easy!
So 2 weeks ago, the day my NOLA friend got into town, I got dipped in the subway:
Buskers may find themselves targeted by thieves due to the very open and public nature of their craft. Buskers may have their earnings, instruments or props stolen. One particular technique that thieves use against buskers is to pretend to make a donation while actually taking money out instead, a practice known as "dipping" or "skimming". George Burns described his days as a youthful busker this way:[16]
Sometimes the customers threw something in the hats.
Sometimes they took something out of the hats.
Sometimes they took the hats."
This young man, whose trousers I had just been mentally admiring, mind you, bent down to drop some change into my case. I had a feeling that I was about to get ripped off, and sure enough I looked down in horror to see his hand snatch up a $10. He bolted up the stairs before it even fully registered in my brain.
You're probably thinking "but prokchop! u shld tak big billz out ur case reguarly!!1!!" The thing is, and I've fact-checked this with other buskers....the more money IN your case, the more money people GIVE. I definitely should have taken out the $10, but as I had only been there about 35-40 minutes at this time, I had only made about $20-25 so that one $10 bill was about half of it. So I hadn't wanted to clear it out just yet. Yes, I've learned my lesson.
Another interesting thing, the song I was playing when it happened was none other than Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" As a quick aside, this is not the first time this song has instigated subway crime. When I first started out summer of 2009, I was in the corridor between 6th and 7th Avenues, on 14th St. I always busked in the middle, for optimum acoustics. One day a dude and 2 girls walked by me, from the right. The dude was basically being dragged by the 2 girls, and was yelling at someone on the far right hand entrance to the corridor. I was playing "Gangsta's Paradise" and trying to ignore the yelling which was getting louder, and, I realized, not as innocuous as someone yelling at their friend to hurry up before they missed the train. What tipped me off, was that I had my head down, but out of the corner of my eye, realized the dude had broken free from the girls' grasp, stopped right in front of me, opened his backpack, and had unearthed from its depths a long, shiny object. I looked up, and saw it was a long ass knife, which he was now waving around, a mere 5 feet in front of me, as it were, and yelling at the other guy to come and "fight like a man." I don't remember what happened after that. I mean, I was still playing of course. Perhaps it's time to retire this song, I don't want to be the crazy accordion lady being blamed for driving people to acts of violence. That's what action movies and video games are for.
Back to getting dipped...the worst part was there were many random people standing around....it was a Sunday fucking afternoon! And no one did anything! (Bystander Effect) Maybe I'm old-fashioned...but really, what is the point of being a man, or just anyone, regardless of sex, of substantial physical stature, if you're not going to use those muscles to help when it's needed? I know, I'm just an old fart from the South. Sue me. Here, actually just reach into my accordion case, take whatever you want.
I'd been planning a very epic blog post sort of tangentially tied in to the story above, but I'm going to save it for now. It's actually pretty deep....
....instead, here comes a second blog post full of goofy pictures from my cameraphone!!!
For now, lyrics stuck in my head (and I'm not even a lyrics person, I just care about the music for the most part):
"I wrote you a letter
but the bottle broke before
I made it to the shore
but I threw it in away
watching the ink run, run from the page
seemed better than anything I could say"
--from the song "1000 colors" by Why Are We Building Such A Big Ship?
I loooooove this band. They are fairly new, from the post-Katrina music revolution in my former home of New Orleans. Check 'em out! And stay tuned for irrelevant pictures!
St. James Infirmary (with a bit of Chopin thrown in at the end). Unfortunately, you don't get the full stereo effect so integral to the awesomeness that is Accordion, because the dude was by my treble side. But I like the video. That was a good night. If I can figure it out, I'll post to my videos section up here.
Oh yeah, and I'm single again. Actually, I've been single about a month and a half. I won't get into the whole story. But suffice it to say...this site was maybe party responsible. In a good way. I was looking around the IBTC group a couple months ago, and noticed an interesting thread, asking girls what the worst small-boob-comment you've ever gotten was (<--poorly formed sentence, oh well.) I pondered it for awhile, expecting to come up with a memory from a middle school locker room or something. And then I had a revelation: I can't even remember shit kids most likely said to me when I was young about my boobs. All I could think about were several comments made by my current boyfriend. One of which regarded this picture, in which he said it looked as though I had "grown boobs" (I cropped him out of it. You're welcome.)
Surely, I couldn't post on a thread that the person I'm still allowing to sleep with with me makes disparaging remarks about my body, to my face. So I wandered away from the thread...and kicked the bastard to the curb a month later (for a multitude of reasons, but the aforementioned issue was definitely a big part of it). So, thank you SG! I guess I can go comment on that thread now!!
Now on to more fun things!
Week before last, my oldest NOLA friend came up to NYC for a few days. He was Mardi Gras'd out. It was so awesome to see him, and we heard so much live music while he was in town. It took a tourist to show me the cool shit right under my nose in my own damn neighborhood! It was a far cry from the old days when we would trip on acid for days on end, and roam around the Quarter and Audobon Park. Ah to be 18 again, and living in The Big Easy!
So 2 weeks ago, the day my NOLA friend got into town, I got dipped in the subway:
Buskers may find themselves targeted by thieves due to the very open and public nature of their craft. Buskers may have their earnings, instruments or props stolen. One particular technique that thieves use against buskers is to pretend to make a donation while actually taking money out instead, a practice known as "dipping" or "skimming". George Burns described his days as a youthful busker this way:[16]
Sometimes the customers threw something in the hats.
Sometimes they took something out of the hats.
Sometimes they took the hats."
This young man, whose trousers I had just been mentally admiring, mind you, bent down to drop some change into my case. I had a feeling that I was about to get ripped off, and sure enough I looked down in horror to see his hand snatch up a $10. He bolted up the stairs before it even fully registered in my brain.
You're probably thinking "but prokchop! u shld tak big billz out ur case reguarly!!1!!" The thing is, and I've fact-checked this with other buskers....the more money IN your case, the more money people GIVE. I definitely should have taken out the $10, but as I had only been there about 35-40 minutes at this time, I had only made about $20-25 so that one $10 bill was about half of it. So I hadn't wanted to clear it out just yet. Yes, I've learned my lesson.
Another interesting thing, the song I was playing when it happened was none other than Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" As a quick aside, this is not the first time this song has instigated subway crime. When I first started out summer of 2009, I was in the corridor between 6th and 7th Avenues, on 14th St. I always busked in the middle, for optimum acoustics. One day a dude and 2 girls walked by me, from the right. The dude was basically being dragged by the 2 girls, and was yelling at someone on the far right hand entrance to the corridor. I was playing "Gangsta's Paradise" and trying to ignore the yelling which was getting louder, and, I realized, not as innocuous as someone yelling at their friend to hurry up before they missed the train. What tipped me off, was that I had my head down, but out of the corner of my eye, realized the dude had broken free from the girls' grasp, stopped right in front of me, opened his backpack, and had unearthed from its depths a long, shiny object. I looked up, and saw it was a long ass knife, which he was now waving around, a mere 5 feet in front of me, as it were, and yelling at the other guy to come and "fight like a man." I don't remember what happened after that. I mean, I was still playing of course. Perhaps it's time to retire this song, I don't want to be the crazy accordion lady being blamed for driving people to acts of violence. That's what action movies and video games are for.
Back to getting dipped...the worst part was there were many random people standing around....it was a Sunday fucking afternoon! And no one did anything! (Bystander Effect) Maybe I'm old-fashioned...but really, what is the point of being a man, or just anyone, regardless of sex, of substantial physical stature, if you're not going to use those muscles to help when it's needed? I know, I'm just an old fart from the South. Sue me. Here, actually just reach into my accordion case, take whatever you want.
I'd been planning a very epic blog post sort of tangentially tied in to the story above, but I'm going to save it for now. It's actually pretty deep....
....instead, here comes a second blog post full of goofy pictures from my cameraphone!!!
For now, lyrics stuck in my head (and I'm not even a lyrics person, I just care about the music for the most part):
"I wrote you a letter
but the bottle broke before
I made it to the shore
but I threw it in away
watching the ink run, run from the page
seemed better than anything I could say"
--from the song "1000 colors" by Why Are We Building Such A Big Ship?
I loooooove this band. They are fairly new, from the post-Katrina music revolution in my former home of New Orleans. Check 'em out! And stay tuned for irrelevant pictures!
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