Panel: What Has Changed?
Time: Sat April 4, 2 pm - 3:30 pm
Location: Lower Ossington Theatre, 100-A Ossington Ave., Studio B
Moderator: Evan Webber
Panelists: Sarah Stanley (Theatre Director), John Kameel Farah (Musician), Carl Wilson (Author/Journalist), Ross Manson (Theatre Director, Artistic Director of Volcano Theatre)
Theme: What role does the artist play in relationship to major current events? Things are changing. In the past year, America has welcomed its first black president, Israel has invaded Gaza, and the world-wide economy has been thrust into a recession. Does the artist have a responsibility to address these issues, and, if so, how?

I've posted more than once in the past about writer/director Jacob Zimmer's laboratory-theatre troupe Small Wooden Shoe and their series Dedicated to the Revolutions. In the past three years, they've done a set of seven shows about various "revolutions," most scientific (Copernican, Darwinian), some socio-technical (Industrial, Information), all derived from an unfinished school assignment from Zimmer's childhood. Tonight at Buddies in Bad Times theatre, they begin a two-week run of the final show in the series, which attempts to synthesize all seven previous performances into one, "demonstrating the difficulty of demonstrating the effects of progress on our lives."

It's an effort to think through paradigm shifts and how they affect our lives, an attempt to make the ghost of C.P. Snow just a little happier, and also a shot at having some serious-minded but light-hearted fun. Fans of Trampoline Hall, show-and-tell, Bad Bands and other hybrid performance events should feel at home. People who know a lot about science might possibly find themselves a bit impatient - as might some people who don't, but maybe not, I haven't seen the show yet.

I will very soon and report back to you. Meanwhile here are previews and interviews about it from The Globe & Mail, NOW, Eye, MaRS blog, Time & Space and One Big Umbrella.

In answer to the question on the cover above, it seems that Britney has at least outlasted Blender. This morning I got an email from one of my editors there, Jonah Weiner, giving me the news, which was a nice courtesy, considering that I've only written a handful of reviews for the magazine. This is the first time that a publication I actually work for has joined the print-media death march, though I'm sure it won't be the last. (Though to those who wonder, despite the layoffs I am fairly confident The Globe and Mail will survive for the forseeable future.) My sincere condolences to all the staff and to Blender readers.

The shocking part is that I had figured Blender was the most commercially savvy one in the music-magazine market - they built their business on photos (especially of scantily clad pop starlets), best-ever/worst-ever/most-outrageous sorts of lists, titillation and trivia, backed up for credibility with a review section full of some of the best working music writers struggling (for a good paycheque) to squeeze wit and insight into tiny little capsule reviews. I hated its glibnesss, but it wasn't snobby - it was pro-pop, pro-hip-hop and pro-indie all at once - and it certainly seemed saleable; if even they can't survive, I'm not sure there really is a music magazine market. Curiously, a lot of the more niche-oriented publications - rap magazines and metal magazines in particular - seem to be doing well still, when I thought they'd probably be the most easily displaced by fan sites and blogs. Perhaps cliqueishness (and even snobbishness) is actually a safer marketing bet?

I still think there is room in the market for one more readership-oriented music publication, one aimed at the same audience that buys books about music. Something close exists in the UK (Mojo and, to a degree, The Wire) but a North American one might bring less of that musty British muso feel - like a general-interest version of No Depression, a great mag that was hampered by the narrowness of its "alt-country" focus. (ND continues to live online and as a twice-yearly "bookazine".) Given events like Blender's closing, though, I am less hopeful of ever convincing a publishing company of that idea. Sigh.

PS: Does this include the Indian edition of Blender, which I just discovered 5 minutes ago? If not, I want a subscription.

In response to my interview on this week's Spark show on CBC radio about music and technology, in which I talk about ringtones, mp3s and the like, John Meyer sent me this link to a relatively new project rating the sound of various media - which concludes that listening to a 16kbs mp3 is the fidelity equivalent of listening to a wax cylinder! How steampunk, kids. (Maybe the Decembrists are on to something with their annoying neo-Edwardianism after all.) Any comments from audiophiles, anachronists and audio-anarchists?

Today Peli and I talked about Gossip Girl, Britney, poptimism and finding a happy medium between Bourdieu and Adorno or something like that.

I talked to Nora Young of CBC Radio's tech program Spark this morning about ringtones, MP3s, computer speakers, iTunes, Auto-Tune and all the other gadget-adjustments that are changing the sound of pop music. In shorter form, it'll be part of their special music-themed March 25 show (re-aired on March 28) but, impressively, you can already listen to the full interview today on their site.

Speaking of tech and transition, you may have heard the newspaper business is having a rough week. Those who take this blithely because they assume that Twitter is going to take care of everything - or that, for example, somehow the same job can be done by the 20 reporters the now-online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer is retaining as by the 165 it formerly employed - might benefit by reading this Globe & Mail Focus piece by my colleagues Sinclair Stewart and Grant Robertson (which I edited). I also recommend the Clay Shirky piece on "Newspapers & Thinking the Unthinkable" on the parallel between the Internet revolution & the Gutenberg one - only this one of course is much, much faster. The conclusion I draw from both is that, yes, newspapers are mostly doomed (I think weekend papers remain a viable model for now at least), but no, nothing exists to replace them. And we may be in for a rough decade, democratically, until something emerges that can.

Hi everyone. That hiatus was a bit longer than intended. Back to regular Zoilus business this week, but first a couple of links and notes from my psychic-teevee jaunt.

First, in case you missed it, here is my interview on the Colbert show in a link for Canadian viewers and here it is for the Yanks.

A lot of folks have been asking me about the experience, and it's difficult to sum up, except to say that it was very positive. [... continued after the jump ... ]

The details of the many exciting papers and panels at this April's EMP Pop Conference on the theme of "Dance Music Sex Romance" are now posted, including mine.

Otherwise, I'm on the move this week - see below for the reason. Torontonians, some folks are gathering on Wednesday night upstairs at The Pilot on Cumberland St., to watch the Colbert show but also listen to some live music and readings, featuring my friends Laura Barrett, Angela Rawlings, Andrew Kaufman and Sean Dixon plus MC Sean K. Robb. Doors at 9, entertainment at 10, TV at 11:30. Here's the Facebook page - I didn't organize it but I appreciate it.

See you, as they say in the teevee biz, "after the break."

Uh. Huh. Wed., March 4, 11:30 pm EST, on The Comedy Network and Comedy Central.

I woke up this morning to various emails and frantic Facebook "wall messages" conveying the news that James Franco (Sean Penn's boyfriend in Milk, Peter Parker's frenemy in Spider-Man and, of course, bad-boy Daniel in Freaks and Geeks) name-checked my book on the Oscars red carpet last night. Turns out that not only did he mention it, he gave it a more on-point quick summary than almost any of the reviewers.

Now, besides acting and preparing for his bar mitzvah (as he discussed earlier in that interview), Franco's currently doing simultaneous MFA's at Columbia and NYU, so it's not really so weird (however it feels to me!) that he's plugged into stuff like this. I hope he passes the book along to a few of his Hollywood friends - the movie industry could stand to unthink some of its assumptions about the "mass" audience versus the "prestige" audience, no?

PS: Apologies to Idolator for ripping off their headline, but I just loved it too much.

Following up on my piece last week about Charles Spearin's The Happiness Project, in which he turns the cadences of his neighbours' conversations about happiness into the melodies and rhythms of songs, I've put together a quick (well, not so quick) cultural history on how musicians have tried to transform human speech into music through the ages (but particularly, often thanks to technology, in the 20th century).

[ ... continues on the jump ...]

Eye weekly breaks the news that this weekend's Wavelength 450 anniversary shows mark the beginning of the end (or at least the beginning of a change) for the series at the heart of the Toronto scene. Stuart Berman reports that as of next February's Wavelength 500, there will be no more weekly pwyc Sunday-night shows at Sneaky Dee's. The Wavelength umbrella organization will shift its sights towards other kinds of projects.

Besides transforming the number that accompanies each edition of Wavelength from a mounting total to something of a countdown, the move reflects an overall mood and to some degree a puzzlement among those of us who were part of the upswing in DIY activity in Toronto music and other arts in the first few years of this decade. Stuart and his interviewees have smart reflections in the piece - here's my two cents:

The novelty and excitement of that "Torontopian" time led to an exploratory, anything-goes spirit not only in groups like Wavelength that drove it but in a wider circle of people, audience members who were inspired to become more participatory in their attitudes and often to make the leap to starting projects themselves. Now that the amount and diversity of work going on here is taken more as a given, people are more inclined to stick to their own areas of interest - and for a bordercrossing series like Wavelength (or, I'd add, an eclectic website like this one), the result is an apparent re-narrowing of our audiences and contacts. I applaud the Wavelength team for being willing to take risks and reinvent itself to respond - we're all called upon to think creatively about how to renew the culture adventurousness that we cherish, rather than just kvetch that things ain't like they used to be.

It's unfortunate, then, that this weekend's Wavelength birthday festivities - which have been an annual occasion to draw together the best of different scenes and styles - are happening at crosspurposes with a signal occasion in the improvised-music community, an AIMToronto "Interface" series welcoming the renowned British saxophonist Evan Parker to town to play in mixed ensembles with Toronto improvisers at Somewhere There.

Is it really a conflict, you ask? Well, notice how both downtown weeklies, full of WL anniversary coverage, neglected to highlight Parker's visit (same goes for the dailies, but that's less surprising). At least Now has a Q&A with another jazz giant, Randy Weston, who plays up at York tomorrow night. And it's partly that publicity is not AIMToronto's strong suit. But both papers have writers who should be well aware of Parker's stature.

Not to make more of this than it deserves, as conflicts inevitably arise between different concert organizers, but the missed opportunity for intersection - that is, to invite Parker and some AIMT'onians to play one of the WL gigs, for example - is symptomatic of the current, somewhat atomized state of affairs here in ErsTOpia. Not to mention how much trickier it makes my own calendar for the weekend (while trying to squeeze in a bit of proper V-Day hearts'n'flowersing at that).

Today in The Globe & Mail, I have a feature about Toronto musician Charles Spearin (Do Make Say Think, Broken Social Scene) and his new album of compositions based on interviews with his neighbours, The Happiness Project, released this week. Bonus material coming on Zoilus later this afternoon, er, Thursday.

The Guardian puts brilliant spin on sad news: "It's hard to think of Lux Interior as dead, despite what reports say. Then again, it was always hard to think of him as alive."

Psychobilly was never my drug of choice, but it was a key influence on the first post-punk-alt-indie-underground bands that I saw as a teenager, the likes of Deja Voodoo and the Gruesomes in Montreal or Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet (forerunners to the Sadies) and The Forgotten Rebels in Toronto - not to mention what would become goth culture, and even emo, David Lynch movies, neo-burlesque shows, roller derby and so on. It's impossible to resist the romantic mythos of the Cramps - Erick Purkhiser of Akron (part of the irradiated generation of Ohioddity that would create Devo, Pere Ubu and, lest we forget, Eric Carmen) picks up California girl Christine Wallace hitchhiking in 1970, and by 1973 they're reborn as Lux Interior and Poison Ivy - a marriage of true minds and engine parts that gave birth to a band that would last 35 years and a refraction of '50s and '60s garage-band fashion and noise that seems like it will never end - if only because, in a way, it never began.