Tag: Media
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Media Circus – revisiting radical TV criticism
In 1974, Ontario’s public broadcaster (OECA) launched a unique experiment in live broadcasting and media criticism. Media Circus was 90-minutes of live commercial-free analysis of ‘what is on TV right now’. Until recently it was believed that no recordings of this groundbreaking TV series existed, but recently a copy of the first episode came into…
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Latest Leveson News & Analysis
I have been irregularly blogging about the extraordinary Leveson Inquiry into media ethics in the UK, that has to date resulted in the arrest of dozens of journalists and editors, the overnight shuttering of the UK’s largest newspaper, the resignations and possible prosecution of the number 1 and 2 policemen in the nation, the resignation…
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Larrikin Music + Copyright = R.I.P. Greg Ham
EDIT to this post: as you’ll see if you check the comments to this post, someone has informed me that in fact the Girl Scouts/Guides had nothing to do with the suing of Men at Work and in fact it was an Australian publishing company called Larrikin Music that pursued the suit. I apologize to…
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Everybody Say Hell Yeah!
One night in the early ’80s I found myself at a club in Montreal called Cafe Campus, dancing furiously to the live scratching of a hiphop DJ from New York, Grandmixer DST, and his MC crew, The Infinity Rappers. It was en event I will never forget, my first exposure to live hiphop, and blindingly…
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Solitary Pleasures – Fortner Anderson
LitLive.ca is a website devoted to Canadian poetry in performance. I wrote a review in the latest issue of a new book and CD by an old friend and fine poet named Fortner Anderson, called Solitary Pleasures. There’s lots of other good material on this site too… I met Fortner in Montreal back in 1984…
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Know Your Media Know Your Self
A few weeks ago I gave a talk at the Toronto Reference Library as part of an excellent series called Treehouse Talks. It was a lovely event, attended by about 100 people and held in the spectacular 5-story atrium of the library. I gave an updated version of the talk that I call Know Your…
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Moses Znaimer – TVTV
Back in 1991 I was hired to write and perform a poem about television for the opening of Moses Znaimer’s 3-hour history of television called TVTV. We shot an amazing sequence in front of MuchMusic with my Poetry Band, which at that time featured trombonist Tom Walsh, drummer Paul Fitterer and bassist Ben Carlsson. Looking…
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Digital Kiss
A few months ago I did a music and poetry gig at Casa el Popolo in Montreal, a club I have previously written about in another post, as part of Ian Ferrier’s Words and Music series. Fortunately Zoe Toupin happened to be there videotaping, and as a result I have now got a few new…
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No News Corp. is good news … or is it?
As regular readers of this blog will know, I believe we are living through a profound cultural crisis as digital culture (OS3) undermines and overthrows literate culture (OS2). My new book, You Are Your Media, tracks this conflict across many different social spheres, from food to architecture to business and beyond. Remarkably, we can see…
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A Better Way to Occupy
Yesterday I introduced the idea that the greatest transformative potential for any social initiative lies in creating feedback loops between OS1 and OS3. By OS1 I mean oral culture and technologies and by OS3 I mean digital culture and technologies. I also said that in order to effectively implement such strategies, which I refer to…
SOBOLTALK 