Can’t a busker make a buck?

“I work hard for the money,

So hard for the money,
Something, something, something
money!”

—Homer J. Simpson

By Jay Schreiber, Arts Editor

ne afternoon after a long day at
QO" I was making my usual

trip to the SkyTrain when I
came across a busker who stood outside
the station and was packing up his
gear. Being a busker, I expected him to
pack up and move on but this particular
musician seemed somewhat disgruntled
with a police officer standing over his
shoulder. The busker was being kicked
off the street for playing his recorder
along with a microphone and amplifier
to the incoming and outgoing SkyTrain
passengers.

Busking comes from a long
tradition of freelance musicians who
perform tunes for everyone to receive
cash from virtually no one. Court

jesters in medieval times would often
sing and strum a lute for small pay
in addition to performing comedy to
entertain in the nobles. Busking has
been around for hundreds of years, and
yet only now do police find it necessary
to shoo them away like hobos and
beggars.

Musicians who can’t get work
often find it easy to perform in public if

just to keep up their chops and entertain —

people. More or less, it’s practicing
on a street corner and making enough
to get dinner afterwards. I haven’t
ever seen anybody complain about the
noise and racket of a busker, mainly
because people are either coming or
going and by the time they notice the
musician they’re already on their way
somewhere else.

Oftentimes, I’ve found the music
to be more aesthetically pleasing than
the other options. Downtown New West
has a lot of noise around it, from the
SkyTrain, to the passing buses, traffic
and people talking loudly on their cell

phones. 57 Below, the pub located right
in the SkyTrain station, pumps out its
own music and occasionally you’ll get
the rowdy few who find it amusing to
holler into the night, which I can’t help
but notice.

Throwing a busker in there only
covers up the noises that people don’t
want to hear and makes things slightly
more pleasing. The police standpoint
is that not everyone wants to hear the
music and therefore it shouldn’t be
played. That’s a load of crap if I’ve
ever heard it. Nobody wants to hear
the noise of a construction site, or the
cars with stereos cranked to 11 but they
carry on like it’s none of their business.

My guess is that about 50 per cent
of people in Vancouver have iPods or
MP3 players playing what they want to
hear and don’t even pay attention to the
world around them. It’s like wearing
melodic earplugs to ignore everything
and I don’t know anyone who hasn’t
done it to exclude the general public
from their life.

 

Bink.

To our police officers, I hope
you can find a happy medium where
buskers can play in peace and earn
whatever passing people think they’re
worth. The police have every right not
to like it just like the rest of us but the
fact that they do something about it
is an excessive display of power and
control. I feel sorry for our musicians
of the street who give this city its local
colour and make the daily commute a
bit more pleasurable. I usually throw
them whatever small change I have in
my pocket, for fear that one day that
might be someone I know.

cinta commen

 

 

hat
was
once

a combination
of barely
barbaric black
boxes full of mind-boggling electrical
wires has turned into a world of
imagination, storytelling and realism.
Remarkable as they are, video games
are quickly becoming a reflection of
life and the objective becomes lost in
Imaginationland. For decades the point
of video games has been to sit around
and twiddle your thumbs in a fake
world to beat each other up and call it a
day, but now it’s an excuse to mentally
get lost while passing the time between
meals.

Take for example Grand Theft
Auto 4, the most recent instalment of
the Grand Theft Auto series. In the
game, you must make decisions that
outline your game play in future levels,
and the storyline twists based on your
gameplay experience. Add to that the
most realistic graphics on the planet
and you’ve got a time killer that will
turn anybody into a couch potato.

How about Call of Duty 4, a
game that puts you in the position of
American troops and recreates difficult
missions from some of the most well-
known battles in the history of warfare?
With all the terrorists and cheesy music
to go with it, Call of Duty 4 is perhaps
the best thing for any soldier to do in
their downtime. After all, for them, it’s
practice.

 

   

While I think that moving
forward in technology is great, my

only question is this: Does anyone
remember Pong? Perhaps the most
basic outline and form of any sport in
the world, the motive behind Pong is

to get the bouncing square into their
side before they do the reverse to you.
Every hockey, basketball, football

and American football game that EA
Sports or whoever releases has Pong

to thank. Sports games can throw as
many realistic players, arenas and game
changing moves as they want into the
special effects, but the bottom line is
that Pong is the premiere sports game
and it all stems from that.

Who would have imagined a
world of characters and plot twists
when years ago we were proud to
create a crazy semi-circle that ate dots
while being chased by ghosts? Pac-
Man has made a reputation for being
the first strategy game that actually
required well thought out movements
in order to beat it. Intense levels of
four on one tag that could turn around

  

di ! Ce c
n one blinking second have haunted
any gamer that has attempted to grab
the cherries and taught us the valuable
lesson that if you run far enough left,
you will eventually come out the right
side.
Certain organizations have tried
to put a stop to gratuitous violence
in video games, with rebellious
individuals such as Hillary Clinton and
Tipper Gore (the creator of the Parental
Advisory sticker on albums). Their
argument is that violence is becoming
too prominent in today’s video games
and that it’s doing harm to our children.
Now hold on just a minute; I don’t
think that it’s fair to dismiss violence
in video game form just because it’s
excessive. In my opinion, anything
that is real and happens in real life has
every right to be in a video game, and
if it’s not happening with a controller
in your hand, then surely you’ll see
it on television. While GTA may be a
fabricated story, there are mafia hitmen
and they do kill a lot of people! War is
a very real thing and so why wouldn’t a

video game in its image be created?

Video games have always been
artificial; just look at some of today’s
games ancestors. Mario lives in a
destroyed world of craters, exposed
piping and man eating plants. An
excessive drug user, Mario eats wild
flowers and mushrooms to get bigger or
shoot fire. On top of that, he bangs his
head on everything and because of him
we no longer have endangered species
such as Yoshi! Ever seen a Yoshi in real
life? Didn’t think so!

To me, video games are just
another form of information and
the real problem doesn’t lay in the
content but in the delivery. Humans are
becoming zombies that would rather
live in a world of make believe and
trigger fingers than reality. Some games
have too much realism and often when
playing, I ask myself, “Am I supposed
to feel anything for this character?”
Pretty soon video games will be
designed with levels where you do the
dishes, take out the trash and cycle the
laundry before pulling out your sniper
rifle for a targeted hit.

Games are supposed to be an
escape from reality for brief periods
of time. Violence in a world of pixels
doesn’t always transfer into day-to-
day living. One of the main reasons I
play video games is to get out pent up
frustration and anger in a world that
doesn’t matter so that I can be pleasant
to the rest of society. Call it passive
violence, but in the end, it’s just a
bunch of pictures on your screen.