This Land is Your Land Fall 2001
Aeron Bergman
Accordion Zen
index

There are many buskers on our street, and we can clearly hear them morning, afternoon, and night from our balcony above. Often there is a string quartet playing Mozart standards, they quickly make me irritable. Some summer days there is a creepy fat clown standing there with barely moving puppets and smurf music. Last week an old, drunken, crusty, English hippy came around dragging a stumpy guitar and a pack of younger, drunken Spanish hippies to accost people and spew alcohol fumes. I grew to hate him and his friends, (and their little dog too) very quickly. All last winter, a Russian accordion player sat without gloves or a warm coat to sing and play nearly every day. He never played the same song twice in a 12 hour day, each one of them sadder and more forlorn than the last.

For about three weeks another accordion player, pictured here right, set up on our corner. He played the same 5 songs during his daily 9 hour street corner concert for approximately 3 weeks. At first it was unbearable, the same 5 songs all day, each sounding more or less the same in the first place.

As the first week ground on, I couldn't help but notice very slight differences between each round of his 5 songs. In fact, he finished each song with a flurry of chords and stray notes wound around each other, a different variation each time. His 5 songs became familiar wallpaper during the second week. However, when I occasionally listened to his flurry finishes, each time I grew more impressed with the tiny details he found to enrich what were otherwise quite dreary accordion standards. By the third week, when he arrived late because of rain threat, I found myself looking forward to his minimal anthems. Frequently smiling, his red face was usually lost in thought while his fingers and arms pumped by rote. However, as the finale grew closer during each number, he would come back into consciousness and wiggle a little dance for the end chord weaving finale.

One morning he was gone, off to the next destination. I can't say I miss him terribly, but I would change him in a second for the fucking hippy that replaced him.