Digital, Media, Politics

The five YouTube video questions Stephen Harper is least likely to answer (so far)

Comments 11 March 2010

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is back from a winter-long vacation and ready to crush it! And, since lazy newspapers of every political stripe love nothing more than to freely pass off the thoughts of generally unidentifiable YouTube user names as authoritative vox populi, the Conservative Party of Canada will give them exactly what they want. This morning’s prime ministerial response to the Speech From the Throne streamed live at 10:45 via the new TalkCanada channel — a means of promoting that Harper is happy to take questions leading up to a YouTube interview next Tuesday night. The project is heartily endorsed by Google’s chief financial officer Patrick Pichette, who was previously an executive at Bell Canada. Generally, the idea is to get people to type questions that will be voted up or down by lurkers: 500 were submitted by 1:40 p.m. More ambitious is a solicitation of video questions, displayed in a separate category. A new partisan hero could be plucked from the webcam submissions, and perhaps Canada will find its own Joe the Plumber before this is through — even if the first few sincere entries bear more resemblance to the Star Wars Kid. But it’s also a place to accentuate dissent, which risks being flagged as inappropriate, so here’s some preservation of the earliest YouTube “interviewers” maximizing this unprecedented invitation to have their say. Continue Reading

Business, Music

The real future of the Canadian music industry is already gone

Comments 11 March 2010

Canadian Music Week, the industry conference concurrent with the public Canadian Music Fest, will again pack many conference rooms at the Fairmont Royal York with satin-jacketed 20th century refugees wondering what comes next. For the live music business, though, the future involves a trend that few of those executives seem too willing to admit exists: the big-ticket legitimization of the tribute act.  While collective media enthusiasm is feigned for a few hundred indie bands slogging it out, all of that practice, practice, practice won’t lead to playing Massey Hall — especially when they’re up against shows like Queen — It’s A Kinda Magic, reaching that stage on March 19. (Coincidentally, the same night, an orchestral Music of Queen show is booked at Casino Rama.) This production from Australia, starring Craig Pesco as Freddie Mercury, prominently touts an endorsement from the late Queen singer’s 12-year personal assistant, Peter Freestone: “It’s wonderful to see the poses, and arm and hand movements again.” He has seen the future of rock and roll and its name is necrophilia. Continue Reading

Daily Scroll

Daily Scroll: March 11, 2010

Comments 11 March 2010

Today on the Scroll: effecting Lohan; salvaging MySpace; cashing Tim Hortons.

LouLou redesigns to match consumer reality [Masthead]: Shopping magazines were once the next big deal for women — without a chance of an advertiser-offending word in the editorial package — and natural for Canadian knock-offs before there was enough internet to provide such distractions. Now, this one published by Rogers is being pushed downmarket, by spotlighting celebrities: “The stars are adopting the trends at the same time the collection comes out,” says publisher Marie-José Desmarais. “They are the ones that influence retailers and consumers. I call it the ‘Lindsay Lohan effect’.” [Related: "Why Lindsay Lohan's at war with an Oakville toddler".]

Olive Media Reps MySpace Canada Online [Mediacaster]: Does a secret cult following exist for MySpace in Quebec? That seems to be the case based on the Torstar online advertising company’s enthusiasm for signing a deal to handle their entire Canadian business in March 2010 — nearly a year after Rupert Murdoch’s interactive troops had their Toronto office shut down: “Our experience with MySpace in the Quebec market has proven that advertisers are eager to custom integrate their brand with MySpace’s highly targeted and deeply engaged audience, and” etc.

The secret economics of the double-double [Steve Thoms, National Post]: Does the success of Tim Hortons have less to do with Roll Up the Rim to Win and more due to the fact that their high-traffic locations are hostile toward debit cards? Like the Freakonomics books, the question is easier to contemplate than the answer, especially when there is no conclusion. [Previously on Mondoville]

He’s done this before, you know [Jonathan Goldsbie, Spacing Toronto]: Mayor David Miller quite likes holding press conferences about topics of marginal interest to the mass media — he just never had the opportunity to call one 10 weeks into a heated 10-month campaign to replace him. [Previously on Mondoville]

Corey Haim became a punchline [Jim Slotek, Toronto Sun]: “You seldom saw a story on Haim that quoted him uttering more than a sentence at a time,” notes the correspondent, who met the late homegrown actor in 1987, amidst promotion for the short-lived NBC sitcom Roomies — whose premise was that Haim was a teenage brainiac forced into a dorm with the oldest man on campus, played by Burt Young. [Previously on Mondoville]

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Celebrity, Culture, Movies

The next nine Oscars that Corey Haim was striving to win

Comments 10 March 2010

In the 2001 episode of E! True Hollywood Story where the depth of his substance abuses, dating back to when he left Toronto as a teen to star in movies like Lucas, came to light when his drug-addled incoherence was captured during one infamous interview session. Corey Haim’s father reinforced the reason why he was willing to back his son returning to the movie business that enabled him after his initial teenage success: when your main goal in life is to win an Academy Award, there was no other way he was going to get it. Getting a part in a film capable of being nominated might have helped, of course, but by then the kind of big-screen comedy where his cameo services were in demand was Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star — and then the A&E train wreck reality show The Two Coreys, centered on a real-life reunion with similarly troubled Corey Feldman, co-stars of four theatrical releases culminating in a threesome with Nicole Eggert in 1992’s Blown Away, then 1995’s straight-to-video sequel Dream a Little Dream 2. These are the choices that lead, not to winning an Oscar, but selling one’s extracted molar on eBay. But the kid kept on trying, right up until his death today of an accidental overdose. Haim’s attempt to ride a comeback trail actually started over 10 years ago, though: Universal Groove, a Montreal indie film set in the rave scene of 1999, touted as Haim’s first grown-up breakthrough, was left unreleased until 2007 — when it was issued to cash in on The Two Coreys, with the wacky claim that its stolen footage had to be reconstructed from clips found on the internet. So, maybe he just needed a better agent? Continue Reading