If you want to teach your kids tolerance and open-mindedness, skip the lectures and introduce them to food from other cultures. After all, the way to all our hearts (young or old) is through our stomachs. I was born in Montreal’s Mile-End district, a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood that saw an influx of Greek immigrant families like ours in the 1960s. Our family business (which folded after four years) was next door to St. Viateur Bagel, a legendary shop that still makes them the old-fashioned way: the hand-rolled bagels are boiled in honey water, then fired in a wood burning oven.
Fresh bagels were an integral part of my childhood. My mom would send me next door with a handful of coins to get piping hot snacks for all of us. She would also give us dimes to spend at Benny’s, the corner store two doors down run by a kindly old Jewish man who never failed to amaze us because he loved kids and therefore understood what six-year-old boys wanted to buy. Benny sold an assortment of penny candy, as well as joy buzzers, whoopee cushions and all the other gadgets, gizmos and novelties that were advertised in the pages of comic books (which he also stocked). His store looked and smelled like heaven. We found happiness sandwiched between the bagel shop and the convenience store. What could we want.
After we moved out of the neighbourhood, my cab driving father would often come home, weary after an all-night shift, with a freshly-baked dozen in a bag, and we’d have bagels with our juice and cereal before walking to school. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, growing up in Mile End—with its bagel shops and kindly neighbours—we learned to value people who are nothing like us and to appreciate the way that their respective cultures can enrich our lives.
Today’s lunch of toasted bagels with cream cheese, smoked salmon, and a side of sweet pickles, is feeding my inner child.
Of Legacies and iPods
My first memory of G&L guitars is the Leo Fender ad on the back page of Guitar Player magazine in the 1980s. That image of a bespectacled craftsman sitting behind a dozen or so instruments and leaning his elbow on a headstock made quite an impression on me. While other manufacturers’ ads simply touted the features of their instruments or urged us to buy guitars endorsed by famous players, that early G&L ad asked guitarists to stake their hopes and dreams on the reputation of the man who designed the Stratocaster. Even as a beginner, I’d already learned the difference between pre- and post-CBS Fenders, but the G&L ad said to me: somebody put their heart into those guitars, they were more than wood, metal and wiring slapped together in a factory.
In a time before celebrity CEOs like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Victor Kiam (I liked it so much, I bought the company), Leo Fender branded his business by presenting himself as its main selling point and as its guarantor of quality. Like Steve Jobs of Apple, Fender was all about designing killer products and refining them. Like Steve Jobs he took a niche product and made it mainstream. And like Steve Jobs, he left the company he founded, and it was destroyed by the bean counters.
Apple went from popularizing home computers in the 1970s to being a niche manufacturer with Macs in the 80s-90s to being the world’s leading brand in the first decade of the 21st century, thanks to iPods and iPhones. When Apple slumped, the company brought back Jobs, his design savvy and his larger than life personality to save it. Fender Guitars never went back to the source, but G&L ended up being the lab for the crazy dreamer that gave us the Strat, the Tele and the P-Bass. However, unlike Apple of the 80s, G&L never moved past a niche market. (Which is not a bad thing, given the current reality of guitar manufacturing in the United States.)
This brings me back to that initial ad. When I was looking for a new guitar late last year, I saw an S-500 in a local guitar shop. It had already been sold, but seeing it triggered a memory of that old Leo Fender ad. I went online to discover more about the brand, which led me to this site and elsewhere. A few weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, I saw a Legacy in that same shop and ended up buying it after playing it and subsequently confirming its value and quality on guitarsbyleo.com and other online forums. However, the fact remains that my initial impulse to purchase was triggered by a memory of that ad from the 1980s, which led me past a sea of Fenders and Gibsons straight to that G&L.
In advertising this is called top-of-mind awareness. The ultimate goal of any campaign is to have “people think of you first to fulfill their product or service needs.” The fact that G&L achieved this with me 30 years after the fact is a testament to a launch strategy that emphasized the reputation of the company founder rather than relying on the celebrity endorsements we so often see from other companies. (Seriously, do you really believe XXX guitarist plays XXX second-tier brand on stage or in the studio?) Of course, as is the case with Apple, G&L backed up the promise of that ad with an exceptional product. But I have to admit to myself that, as indifferent as I am to most advertising, that back page of Guitar Player sparked the seed that became a sale.
What sparked the seed that led you buy your first G&L? Did the ads influence your decision at all? Or did you "discover" G&L instruments after playing them?
Fauxhemians and Fauxlgas
Over the weekend, there were dozens of Jane’s Walks held in cities across North America and around the world. Inspired by Toronto urbanist Jane Jacobs, these walks are neighbourhood tours that encourage sustainable, walkable cities and allow citizens to discover the secret (or not so-secret) histories of where they live, work and play. I took part in a guided walk of Toronto’s Ossington Avenue strip, which has been transformed into a hipster hub in recent years.
For those of you who haven’t encountered this particular subculture, a Hipster is a slang term that first appeared in the 1940s, and was revived in the 2000s and 2010s to describe types of young, recently settled urban middle class adults and older teenagers with interests in indie rock, independent film, magazines such as Vice and Clash, and websites like Pitchfork Media In earlier contexts (2000s), hipsters were also referred to as scenesters. (I borrowed this definition from Wikipedia).
Although I embrace the counterculture values espoused by hipsters, I am somewhat dismayed at the commercialization and codification of the hipster aesthetic. To put it mildly, hipsters dress really badly, on purpose and as a joke. They wear dated fashions and skinny jeans that most people would cast aside. They love the fashions the rest of us leave behind on the shelves of Sally Ann Thrift Stores and Value Village locations. Currently, they favour tacky glasses from the 1980s with ridiculous fluorescent flourishes. Girls sport scarves. Boys sport beards. They hang out at bars that have no names. It’s all good clean fun, as long as it doesn’t get too serious.
I like to call hipsters fauxhemians. Unlike real bohemians hipsters are not poor. They spend a fortune on their clothes and various hipster paraphernalia. One of the iconic hipster accessories is the Holga, a cheap plastic film camera from China that is famous for light leaks (i.e. when light seeps into the camera elsewhere than from the lens, causing parts of the film to overexpose). You probably had something like a Holga when you were a kid, a toy camera that looks a lot like a real camera and which takes real film, but you probably never used it, other than to pretend you were Clark Kent or Lois Lane. The thing is, Holgas cost a pretty penny. A base model Holga goes for 30 dollars online, but double that if you buy it from a hipster-friendly boutique. To complicate things, Holgas use medium format 120mm film, which costs about 8 bucks a roll (12 or 16 pictures) and even more to develop. However, expired film, which costs a lot less and can be highly unstable is much more desirable to hipsters adds to the DIY unpredictability and lo-fi quality of Holga shots.
Did I mention that hipsters don’t take photographs? They take lomographs, so named after Lomo, the company that popularized lo-fidelity toy cameras like the Holga. The aesthetic is so popular that there are Lomography boutiques around the world, and even an iPhone app called Hipstamatic, which simulates the hipster/Lomo aesthetic.
Below are some Fauxlgas, digital photographs that I’ve altered to look like they were taken with a Holga or such a similar camera. Think of these pictures as being created with the equivalent of modeling amplifiers and pedals, with the notable difference that the modeling technology costs significantly more than the product it emulates. It takes a 700 dollar iPhone to simulate this type of picture with the Hipstamatic app. In my case, I used a Canon digital SLR and post-processed them in Adobe Lightroom on a Mac tower. I used thousands of dollars of equipment to make my pictures look like they were taken with a two-dollar camera that sells for thirty. Appropriately, these are images of hipsters.
What is your take on hipsters, scenesters, fauxhemians, subcultures, and musical subgenres you may have encountered? In our digital age, is it possible for a subculture (even a small one like our merry band of G&L enthusiasts) to survive and thrive without being co-opted by commercial forces and becoming as codified as the mainstream?
. We love international food in our house. My wife is of south Indian descent so we have no choice! I agree that food is a fantastic window into other cultures and it encourages us to broaden our minds (and tastes).
.
Early 70's had some incredible shows, 100's of boots to re-live shows.
