The circumstances that found Richard Syrett filling in for a night on the syndicated radio show Coast to Coast AM in the wee hours of April 25 were anything but a conspiracy. But his dismissal from his own competing local show on Newstalk 1010 CFRB on the day of Barack Obama's
inauguration — after an interview segment about whether Obama might
have ineligible to be president — was chock
full of the dots the die-hards in the audience wanted to
connect. ...more
We Live In Public, the documentary about online-video martyr Josh Harris, has its Canadian premiere next week at the Hot Docs festival. The mystique surrounding his late-'90s loft-based internet television venture, Pseudo.com,
was largely due to the fact that relatively few people had a pipe fast
enough to properly watch. But that only emboldened entrepreneurs north
of the border trying to cash in on his buzz. Marc Weisblott looks at Canada's web-TV boom in the early 2000s, and the inevitable bust.
...more
Don Mills getting its own very incarnation of a
pedestrian-oriented prefab retail environment — the best-known
example, at least to viewers of The Hills, being The
Grove in Los Angeles — is not without broader significance. The new Shops at Don Mills
means everything to the neighbourhood and its demographics. ...more
Susan Boyle's ascent to the top of the monoculture actually represents the ultimate
vindication of heavy metal. In these recessionary times, what the world wants is music made by
ugly people. Good thing Toronto’s longest-suffering ambassadors, Anvil, had a
hard-luck documentary ready to roll. ...more
Hosting a national pop countdown show was the kind of thing adolescent
radio dreams were often made of. But those dreamers didn’t go on to
study history at Duke University before getting a law degree at Laval. Ben Mulroney, it's safe to say, never dreamed such a dream — yet there he is, hosting the ETALK 20, on CTV's recently acquired chain of radio stations. And he knows it is your worst nightmare. ...more
The end of the personal blog as the primary platform for idiosyncratic
iconoclasts to get attention also means the end of the notion that the
blog can be a direct line to a book deal. But publishing advances
continue to be exchanged for webstunts: Love, Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages From Home, based on the email-submission website Postcards From Yo Momma, aspires to be a seasonal impulse hit for Hyperion. Twitter Wit, a curated collection of 140-character messages, is slated for HarperCollins publication this fall. ...more