Michael Enright and Me and the United States of America

It's very funny to listen to Michael Enright light up when he gets to talk to an American politician or commentator about the state of U.S. politics and international relations. A few years ago he did a two-part interview with Conrad Black. One part was about his legal case and Hollinger International, and the second part about the book Black wrote about Franklin D. Roosevelt, and it was pretty obvious that that was the half of the interview Michael wished would last for the whole time slot. And frankly so did I.

One thing Michael Enright is just not good at is pretending to be interested in Canadian politics. And it is rather hard to be when one has instant access to the thousands of US political blogs and news sources which sound like reports from a trench war that's been being fought since the Nixon years.

Up in Canada we get the fun of having access to all the media coverage of the high-pitched political and culture war, while getting to live in a relatively sensibly-run society. For infovores like us it's much more satisfying to dive into the deep pool of conflict and history of US politics than to try and give two shits about Stephen Harper.

It's rather obvious just how deeply immersed in American history and politics Michael Enright is. Today in an interview on the Sunday Edition, Krugman made a reference to "the macaca incident" in the 2004 Virginia senatorial election, and while Krugman did a very good job of summarizing the whole incident for presumably an audience in a foreign country who would have no idea about a state-level campaign incident from four years ago, you could hear a little bit of impatience in Enright's voice that sounded like "yes yes of course, everyone knows that" but he managed to restrain himself.

Now thankfully CBC has Rex Murphy and Kathleen Petty on Cross Country Checkup and The House to pick up the slack and actually make Canadian politics seem interesting and important, So Michael Enright can be left to play in his preferred waters and make some very informative and important radio interviews that happen to catch my interest as fellow voyeur into US public life.

Labels: CBC, Politics

jPod - Episode 1

This year's Hollywood writers' strike has made me so eager for new TV that I have actually been eagerly awaiting the debut of a new CBC drama. But here I am, and since I am never home on Tuesdays I had to do something that most certainly was not download the first episode of jPod (Promo video | Wikipedia) on Bittorrent and watched it tonight.

First off, before any real critiquing, I will say that I found myself laughing out loud more than a few times at some pretty great lines ("If it was too easy to bury bodies, there wouldn't be any people left.") and setups, like when Ethan's stoned yoga-doing girlfriend suddenly makes it known that she could hear them talking about her through the window the moment the subject of her high-school lack of popularity was mentioned. So someone involved in directing the show definitely has an intuitive feel for what makes for funny and engaging TV moments. Not always a given with Canadian TV, and usually only found on HBO-type American shows. With the source material for the show being a novel I was expecting all the jokes to be talky quotes lifted from the written dialog, so I was very pleased to see well-executed visual setups.

The writing is good, I'm hoping the clever lines aren't just the build-up that a script writer working on a new show has of clever lines stored away in his head pouring out too quickly to sustain over the course of a TV series. Time will tell on that one. Fortunately the book contained many little sub-plots rather than one over-arching conflict that took a whole book to resolve. So the show should work well with episodic story arcs.



I found the acting to be uneven. The actors have a Gilmour Girls / West Wing way of being 'always-on' - which can be a good way of rapid-firing clever dialog, but makes the characters less like real people talking and relating to each other. But here's the problem: Coupland is probably doing this on purpose. All of the members of jPod (the forgotten team at Electronic Arts (The show may be afraid to get sued but I'm not going to bother changing names. Help I'm buried in 2nd-level parentheses.) who's members were all placed there because their surnames start with the letter J.) aside from the main character - a revival of the sympathetic everygeek from Microserfs, is living a carefully constructed identity, deciding to adopt some bizarre habit or obsession and making it their identity. But where the Microserfs characters had hope, the jPodders could all make a pretty convincing case that life is meaningless enough that either constructing a completely new person and acting as them is the only worthwhile way to approach the world. And so the overacting that got on my nerves might just be deliberate. I hope Alain Thicke's character continues to have a lot of screen-time, hopefully his Shatner-esque ability to completely hide self-awareness from the viewer will rub off on the other actors. This is a faint-hope. Right now the moments that are supposed to be sincere, like Caitlin and Ethan discovering a shared love for an old video game as cue for a romantic interest, are telegraphed so horribly you just want to get up from the room and wait for it to be over before it even begins. Pulling off making essentially contrived characters watchable will be a tough feat, it was the weakest part of the book for me.

Characters I want to see more of:

• Cancer Cowboy - including the sex addiction and how it plays out
• Ethan's Father
• Also hoping that when they do introduce Kam Fong he will steal the whole show.
• Also sad there's no trace of Evil Mark

The music was a nice touch, but it was too much 'lets grab recognizable Canadian music icons so people will feel comfortable, and I hope they dig a little deeper into the pile of great but lesser-known Canadian bands as the show goes on. And seriously, don't say "defendoid", say "Defender". You're allowed to mention real-world products, for crying out loud. Using fake names is jarring and takes away our ability to identify with their geeky obsessions even more.

I'm going to keep watching it, and there's enough of a chance that the first-episode wrinkles will be ironed out into a truly high-quality show that I'm holding out hope and telling people to watch it. At the same time, I'm also hoping Coupland will want to move on to something else at the end of the first season. I would really love if the Canadian TV industry moved towards a Channel 4-style of television production, making short runs of interesting shows and moving on to something else before it gets old.

Labels: CBC, Douglas Coupland, Reviews, Television

More Michael Hlinka Drivel on My Radio

A good motivation for me to get to work early is to avoid hearing this radio columnist's voice even for a second.

Yesterday's bit of warmed-over Reaganomics was about how we should all stop complaining that we don't get enough vacation time. He starts with the old saw about how if you really loved your job it wouldn't feel like work. Well, I like my job as much as any other, but I like sleeping in and travelling and going to the beach a hell of a lot more. And people with families like to spend time with them, if they're good parents, anyway. Sorry, sir, but cutesy clichés are not getting this week's column off to a good start. And it gets worse.

Hlinka's points:

- The US has the lowest number of vacation days but the highest "standard of living". He doesn't say where this rating comes from or what it even measures. I suspect he's making use of the misleading way extremes on the high-end skew up "average" numbers to make the 'average' person feel like they're better off than they are. Sure the US's GDP per capita is higher than other countries', but how much of that is actually allocated to your particular capita? Not as much as an 'average' would seem to indicate.

But then, the faint hope that he might say something sensible..

- European countries, which have the most vacation days for workers, have a higher quality of life than the United States, but says this is not related to vacation time - does not explain why. At all. It's just a hand-waving 'please ignore this inconvenient fact' kind of dismissal.

He concludes this tax-payer funded waste of my time by saying that success is not given by government, it's something you go and get for yourself. But you don't get it by letting your boss pressure you into giving up your family's trip so he can make his bogus time estimates. That makes you a slave. On the other hand, if I have 5 weeks of paid vacation in a year, I might use that time to get the gears moving on a small business I might want to start. That's real freedom and opportunity, wringing every waking moment out of your workers is not.

Christ, what an asshole.

Labels: CBC, Economics, Work

Ads in CBC Podcasts

I just played the latest As It Happens podcast and was pretty jarred to hear "Delivery of this podcast is brought to you by the all new Cadillac..." Hearing a CBC radio announcer voicing an advertisement is quite off-putting. You expect these voices to be giving you real news and the reputation of CBC Radio's objectivity as a public broadcaster lends these voices an air of authority and trustworthiness. This evaporates when you hear one of them reading ad copy.

Yes I know it costs money to deliver these thigns, but CBC's been able to do live streaming for over a decasde now without resorting to inserting audio ads in the content.

The way people listen to music and audio content now is no longer confined to listening to it live on a radio. As far as any listener is concerned, this is CBC radio, it's how they listen to it now. So sticking an ad in ther eis not somehow less of a transgression against their duty as a public proadcaster than putting ads in their live broadcasts.

They put baner ads on CBC.ca last year, now this, what line will they cross next?

Labels: Advertising, CBC

My E-Mail to CBC Radio's The House

Peter MacKay is trying his best to hide Harper's charge to snuggle up to the United States. Unfortunately for him, he's just not very smart. Here's what I wrote to CBC's show The House on the subject:

Peter MacKay let slip something very telling today in your interview with him about a shift to foreign aid focus to the Americas. When asked if Canada was not just mirroring U.S. policy, MacKay sought to reassure Canadians that Canada would have leverage to help deal with human rights and democracy issues in Cuba and Venezuela.

Mentioning Venezuela specifically when there are many other South and Central American nations in far worse shape reveals that Canada's New Government is buying into the Hugo Chavez as Bogey-man narrative being pushed by the Bush Administration and the U.S. news media. This doesn't leave me with a lot of hope that Canada will be a positive force in our own part of the world.

Labels: CBC, PEI Politics

The Also-rans Debate

CBC radio ran a segment this morning where they had PEI Green Party leader Sharon Labchuk on along with Dean Constable, leader of the New Democratic Party of PEI. The premise was to give the longshot parties some airtime where they're not dodging crossfire from the two main parties acting outraged about one unwise big spending plan while talking up their own equally illl-thought out big project.

Now, I'm writing this as someone with a Dean Constable sign in my window, but I have to say he came off miles better than Labchuk did. He realized he had nothing to gain from taking swipes at her or her party, and instead talked in his usual way, straightforwardly addressing what he thinks government should be doing better to improve lfe for islanders.

Unfortunately this wasn't the sensational radio that CBC probably wanted, so they let Labchuk have the majority of the air time. What she proceeded to give us was a series of petty swipes at the NDP and those who've support the NDP now and have in the past - insulting and belittling the voters most people think would be the first to turn to her party.

Meanwhile, the PC party ca ntout successes in wind energy and initiatives in reforming the farming industry to claim taht they're the real deal if one wants to be conscious of the environment - no need to throw away your vote. I still believe that there would be no problem at all for an intelligent, well-spoken environmental expert to run as a candidate for a major party, and become the obvious choice to be minister of the environment in a ruling government and actually do some good - rather than following the road of uncompromising (supposedly) ideology down the dark path into the political fringe. Our environment deserves better support tha nthat.

Labchuk even dismissed the role the NDP has had nationally as the conscience of the ruling party. She can turn herr health card over to me, and I'll put it on display up on this blog if she wishes to stick to her guns on that statement.

This election is doing very little besides piss me off repeatedly.

Labels: CBC, Elections, Green Party, NDP, PEI Politics

Torture to Listen To

It was, of course, too good to last. But for two shining, hopeful minutes on Thursday, Michael Hlinka almost made sense.

Karen Mare must have been embarrassed to have to let this guy on her program. Her being the one who has actually travelled to Africa and talked to farmers who all had an intimate knowledge of how the World Bank operates, and him being just some twerp who as far as I can tell isn't even a working economist.

Hlinka is taking the classic American right wing line that because there are problems in some institution that was meant to serve some public good that clearly the whole idea was a mistake in the first place and it should be scrapped. Funny, though, that the Enron scandal didn't cause him and others like him to call for the end of corporate-friendly capitalism.

And yeah, I'm as familiar as any sheltered first-worlder can be expected to be with how rotten the World Bank and IMF are and how their policies are to the detriment of the countries they are meant to be helping. However, if Mr. Hlinka were to -- God forbid -- get on a plane and go talk to an African farmer about it, and suggest that the ideal solution would be to completely pull out and wait for private banks to roll in and start doing business there, the farmer would simply laugh in his pasty little face. Private Western economic interests already tell the World Bank what to do, letting them have at their victims directly is not any kind of solution.

Labels: CBC, Economics, Stupidity

Killer Q

I didn't realize this this afternoon but CBC has used this mediocre host vehicle, Q, to not only kill off the lovely and quirky Freestyle, but is using this same dull club to kill their respectable arts show that aired in the evenings, The Arts Tonight.

CBC's evening schedule is now nothing but re-runs after Ideas.

Let's review - Shows that CBC has decided to kill:

Freestyle

Brave New Waves

The Arts Tonight

The CBC Radio 3 broadcast on Saturday evenings

And they've also replaced the classical music show in the late evening with.. more reruns.

Shows that CBC is keeping:

Go with Brent Bamburry (At least Arthur Black could punch up a string of pointless interviews with nitwits with a witty and well-written rant at the end.)

Shows that they're completely gutted of original and interesting content:

DNTO (Also now known as 'what SYL found on YouTube that week.)

Some of the short run series like the Age of Persuasion have been decent but I get the feeling that this is the end-result of the process of outsourcing content to independent producers, bringing them on for a short while and then letting them go, rather than having a staff of talented generalists who can regularly produce good content for CBC's regular shows.

These recent changes have been more drastic than the ones that resulted from Paul Martin's budget cuts a few years back, yet there's no financial necessity this time like there was back then. Which makes these changes look more like meddling and incompetence rather than necessary cutbacks.

Also, teh NPR-voice-trained guy on Sunday afternoon has worn out his premise. Somebody tell him, please.

Labels: CBC

Q? Queue? Cue? Qué?

Within 5 seconds of me tuning in to CBC's new show, notfreestyle, Gian Ghomeshi made a Snakes on a Plane joke. Bad sign.

Gian's selling point is supposedly that he's funny, unfortunately when he's just by himself in a studio, or if he's interviewing someone who isn't also funny themselves, then he comes off as completely dry.

They're interviewing a conductor of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and the recording had hisses and gaps, which make it sound like it was done using some kind of digital recording device that compressed just a little too much.

Making a big deal out of the letter Q is going to get really tiresome really fast. Ugh.

I miss Freestyle.

Labels: CBC

Memo to CBC Radio

Just a few thoughts about CBC radio..

• Why oh why do they keep giving Gian Ghomeshi work? Are they hoping that the third time will be a charm for him and are sacrificing the great show Freestyle to do it? They're planning his new show to be some kind of arts and entertainment deal, I'm pretty dubious to say the least.
  
  
• I hate Shelagh Rogers, mostly for her turn of phrase yesterday.. "if this song doesn't melt your heart then it's made of Canadian shield granite." Does the CRTC force her to include contrived Canadiana references in her torturous waxing?
  
  
• The show Fuse on Saturday afternoons has been pretty enjoyable. However, Alan Neil needs to stop fawning over the musicians and acting like getting two random musicians to play together for an hour is some kind of epic event in musical history. He's the James Lipton of yuppie-friendly Canadian indie pop.
  
  
• DNTO is getting really lazy lately. Back when Norah Young hosted it they did all kinds of original material, had some great in-depth interviews and was four hours of really solid listening. Now it's been reduced to two hours where Sook Yin Lee just gets on various regulars to ramble about TV or whatever funny Youtube video the producers were watching while they goofed off and surfed the web during the week instead of working. I have the Internet, I already know what funny things have been going around lately. I don't need someone on the radio to tell me about them a week later. Please do something slightly original.
  
  The internet is making so many CBC producers very lazy and is sucking away their creativity. Perhaps they should be banned from surfing at work.
  
  
• I can't say enough good things about Vinyl Tap, but maybe I love it more than I otherwise would just out of relief that Danny Finkleman is no longer stinking up my Saturday evening radio listening with his gripes about his toothbrush being too skinny.
  

Labels: CBC, Radio

The Mystery of Michael Hlinka

Dear CBC,

I'd like you to clear something up for me. Is Michael Hlinka a brilliant Swiftian satire of self-righteous college Republican idiocy, or is he actually as stupid as his radio column would suggest?

The net result of his diatribe this morning attacking the NDP's proposal to curtail exhorbidant ATM fees charged by banks as being "against freedom" is this:

1) I hadn't heard of this idea, now I have, and

2) I think it's fantastic. Go NDP.

The language he used was notably dimwitted. His 'gotcha' moment was when he said that you wouldn't pass a law preventing pizza places from charging a delivery fee because there'd be no more pizza places. There are two notable problems with this:

1) If ATMs didn't charge fees for withdrawals over $20 like pizza places offer free delivery for orders over $20 he might have a better analogy, and

2) If I could call up the Royal Bank and say "hey, send a guy over with $200 in cash, k'thanks" I would absolutely pay a delivery fee for this service. Banks don't do this. Michael Hlinkka is an idiot.

My other real problem with this radio column was that it was written specifically to attack, in blatant terms, a proposal by one political party. One line, and I'm quoting, is "and speaking of losers, that's a nice segue back to Jack Layton, Judy Wasylycia-Leis and the Canadian people". Hurling insults at a political party on free air time provided by Canada's public broadcaster is grounds for a CRTC complaint.

Which CBC VP felt that our morning show needed this childish form of balance, anyway? Who exactly was it that thought that the road to success in broadcasting in canada was to emulate John Stossel and his crusade to protect entrenched corporate power?

Labels: CBC, Economics, Michael Hlinka, Stupidity