tales of the city

[metaphortunate]

The train station I get off at downtown frequently features a homeless man torturing a broken violin for money. I don't know if this guy has been deaf since birth and never learned the concept of music, or if he has simply achieved transcendent levels of not giving a shit, or what, but what it looks like is cargo cult behavior: like he noticed that some other bums had instruments that they messed around with and then they got more money, so somewhere he got a beat-up violin and a bow with one or two unbroken strings left on it, and now he rubs one against the other to fill the escalator with deranged nightmarish noise and puts a hat out. It's hideous and pathetic. He doesn't seem to collect very much.

But today he wasn't there. Instead, a totally different guy was there, a white guy wearing clean clothes, playing smooth beautiful music on a violin, and for extra cough-up-the-goddamn-money, the violin case with the money in it was being guarded by an adorable small fluffy tail-wagging dog.

I know it's just a different guy who is 5,000,000% better at his job. But my very first thought was "OMG, he finally found the Blue Fairy and she turned him into a real busker!"

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

A few years back one of the Sydney papers ran an article titled "Is This Man Sydney's Worst Busker?"

I'd heard the guy and would've only rated him as mediocre, but he was playing Chinese violin, and I suspect the Telegraph wasn't having with that furrin rubbish.