OPEN HOUSE

Once again I'm overwhelmed by the response to something I've written.

Bill Brioux, DMc, Cunningham, Michael Geist and Inside the CBC, thanks so much for the links and kind words for the post below this one. Your readers have been flooding over here in an obvious endorsement of their trust in your opinions.

Just one thing – and don’t take this personally, because I know it’s accepted web-speak -- aren’t you getting as tired as I am of every passionate dissertation on something being called a “rant”?

Similarly, I don’t have a lot of “anger” in my life. Especially since I gave up Golf. Plenty of righteous indignation to be sure. But the thought of climbing on top of a water tower with a sniper rifle or picking up somebody’s kids after school never crosses my mind.

Like the Geriatric industry, which continues to terrify Seniors more than assist them with terms like “Dementia” and “Panic buttons”, we’ve got to find more appropriate terms to describe people simply speaking out on the things they believe in.

The Internet may have started with a bunch of unable-to-get-a-date geeks sharing their frustrations at “The Well”, but we need to evolve beyond our Neanderthal ancestry and its rituals.

And to you thousands of new faces peeking in at the Legion, if you didn’t get here via one of the above links, do check them out. There are a million interesting voices in this naked industry and I’m merely one of them.

But if you feel the way I feel about local television in Canada, I’d also like you to think about doing something else…

In their campaign for “Carriage Fees” or ‘saving Canadian broadcasting from drowning’, as they’d like to more positively package it, CTV is holding several Open Houses at their local stations this weekend.

I’m going.

And if you’re a Canadian writer, director, producer or performer (or just anybody who wants to see better television here) you should go too.

This issue is far too important to allow the PR flacks and Marketing people to re-focus the discussion into some narrow, constricted pen where Ivan Fecan and Leonard Asper can make doe-eyes at you like calves about to become veal if the public doesn’t pay their ransom.

“Please save us – Pull-eeeeze! It’s only 50 cents a month ------- for now.”

As the in-camera CRTC minutes addressed in the last post revealed -- despite their multitude of black lines -- there are many pro-active measures our networks could be making to save themselves before they need to beg for your money.

If you live in Toronto, local CTV affiliate CFTO’s Open House is Saturday from 11 am - 3 pm (401 & McCowan). It’s easy to spot from the highway and I’m sure they’ll put an inflatable Gorilla on the roof to go along with the BBQ’d weenies they’re cooking up for the kiddies.

This is CTV’s chance to introduce you to some of their local stars. Their website includes a subtle reminder to bring your camera.

But it should also be an opportunity for the thousands of local TV industry and creative types to ask CTV execs why they fill their ‘A’ Channel shelf space with “Supernanny” and “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” instead of Canadian programming that couldn’t help but be more original and just might have some international resale value that would put cash in CTV’s pocket.

Perhaps some of you Arts Community executives who speak so eloquently to the deaf ears of the CRTC would like a chance to share those sentiments with viewers who don’t understand why they get so little for what they pay on their cable and tax bills.

Maybe some of the hundreds of people recently laid off by CTV will turn up too and remind the public that CTV’s parent company actually earned millions last year and most of those smiling guys in Golf togs and VP name tags even received bonuses while their staffs were turned into the street so the orchestrated begging for your cash could begin.

And hey, if you’re a member of the GTA Tamil Community – THESE are the actual people who might get your message out. Come talk to them on Saturday so the rest of the city can finally get down the street to buy groceries.

Look, I’m not trying to cause trouble here. And I’m not going to formally organize any kind of protest. You should be there simply because it matters to you.

I’m just saying that if we really are in danger of losing television as we know it, then maybe we all ought to share our opinions. And the public needs to hear more than one side of the argument.

Hey, Jim Shaw, maybe you could take the afternoon off from happily castrating bulls and CRTC Commissioners and head on down to CTV Calgary to let the public know what kind of improvements they can expect once you buy the ‘E’ affiliates in Red Deer and Kelowna.

C’mon, Dude, you know you want to. You must be tired of watching those poor kids in Winnipeg twist in the wind. Just give ‘em enough money to keep CanWest ahead of the bank for another week and I’ll bet you’ll finally have your own network.

Konrad von Finckenstein! Looking for an excuse to get out of another boring Saturday lunch at Michel Arpin’s Book Club?

CTV Ottawa’s Open House runs from 10 am – 1 pm. They’re promising to show you “What it takes to run a local TV station”. Maybe you can even meet local GM Louis Douville and listen to a live version of the plea he makes for his right to not have any competition at all here.

Norm Bolen, you live in Ottawa now! Surely you can tear some of your CFTPA members away from their Beavertails to offer an alternate opinion. Buddy, I know better than most just how awesome you can be with a bullhorn.

In Regina, their open house is Saturday from noon – 4 pm and they’ve already promised the “CTV Balloon” will be flying proudly atop the station to help you find it. They’re also saying a display of “historical materials” from their last 50 years will be on view.

Gee, I wonder if that will include the awesome locally produced “Our Gang Club” I loved when I grew up there.

Now there was a show that couldn’t have cost more than a hundred bucks an episode, repurposing cheap material from another generation into a show that kept 10 year olds glued to the TV and completely up to date on the goings on in their town.

Maybe some of you folks in Regina can ask why they don’t make even a cheap local kids show anymore or why so many of the program feeds you watch include local ads from Pizza Parlours and Auto Body shops you can’t patronize because they’re two provinces away in Windsor.

Is nobody in the booming Saskatchewan economy buying ads in Regina or is it just cheaper for CTV to forego all that and send you the Windsor feed?

And Tony in Windsor – Mi Fratello - stop trying to re-think mama’s recipe for calzone. There might be another reason those thousands of people CTV says are watching your ads aren’t coming in for a taste.

From coast-to-coast-to-coast, if your local station is an ‘A’ Channel, just go in and give those folks a hug. They don’t deserve the way they’re being treated by CTV or like still having to run “America’s Funniest Home Videos” any more than you do.

I could go on. But the point is, go here to find out what your local station is up to and attend.

Maybe instead of signing another pointless petition, you could also just phone your local MP and ask them to attend as well.

What better way to find out what the people really feel.

YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

The image above is taken from the published minutes of the in-camera sessions of the CRTC’s license renewal hearings last week. The entire document is available here.

Don’t rush to grab it in the hope it will finally give you some much needed insight into what’s really going on in Canadian television. Because those blacked out lines are repeated on virtually every one on the report’s 251 pages.

One wonders why anybody bothered to create, publish and distribute so pointless a document. But then, that doesn’t matter. It’s not their money. It’s just another example of how your tax dollars get spent so others can continue to play by themselves in the Canadian broadcasting sandbox.

It’s further proof that – you can’t handle the truth.

Of course, it was printed because CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein is running a more open and accessible Commission.

Yet, even in the midst of a discussion on the apparent “very survival of television as we know it” that will impact all of us personally, not to mention the billions we’ve already invested in and may need to further feed the broadcast system, we’re not allowed to know what the people in charge are doing or even if they have the first clue about what they’re doing in the first place.

Doesn’t matter. They’re in. You’re not. Membership is open to current members only.

More than anything else, what the document makes abundantly clear is the close and clubby nature of the regulator/broadcaster relationship. Like all secret cabals, they have information that can only be known to a few within their ranks and jokes the rest of us shouldn’t be allowed to hear.

After all, if they revealed how the system really works – why, somebody else might be able to do it better.

In another country, this kind of document would be about water boarding. And although that might feel appropriate to those of us who’ve endured the torture of trying to get a show on the air at a Canadian broadcaster, it has no place in the public forum of a supposed democracy, let alone for a meeting between a regulator mandated as a public watchdog and broadcasters dependent on the public purse.

They have the secret meetings. You pay the dues.

CTV has been running a very public campaign asking people to write their MP asking Parliament to toss local TV a life preserver. How about sending your federal representative this CRTC document, appended by a personalized “WTF?”

Maybe you can also let your MP know that BellGlobeMedia Inc., of which CTV is a partner, earned a 9.7 % operating profit in 2008 to the tune of $214 Million, a year in which the CRTC itself also found that their local news operations “showed a healthy overall profit”.

You might want to additionally inform them of what Commissioner Leonard Katz reveals in his opening question to CTV’s Ivan Fecan on Page 2 after referring to a CTV document which reads:

“Despite robust economic cycles in the postwar era, the ‘A’ channels have consistently lost money for almost 20 years. CTV GM states that as a group these stations were never profitable under CHUM ownership when they routinely lost between $12 million and $17 million annually.”

Katz asks the obvious question: “So if that is the case and it has been 20 years since the ‘A’ Channels have made money, if at all. 20 years ago there weren’t 400 stations out there. There wasn’t the economy we have today. If they haven’t made money, can someone deduce that maybe these stations are not viable in these cities no matter what you do?”

Good question.

Unfortunately a bunch of black lines hide the answers.

But Canadians are growing more aware that we seem to have a lot of business types here who can’t maintain their pre-eminence or privileged lifestyles without a government handout. 

Whether you’re a broadcaster, a car manufacturer or a Billionaire shopping a hockey team you don’t even own to whichever municipality will pony up an arena you won’t have to pay for, those with apparent money and power keep asking us to forego much needed roads, bridges and hospitals so they can trade real live hockey players or hire their wives to produce dancing shows.

Some in government are referring to this process as “picking winners from losers”, but it’s really “picking losers from losers”. A form of capitalist triage in which the contracts of elite bankers are honored while those of guys on assembly lines are not.

It’s an emergency ward system where incompetent management has its life support plugged into your savings account instead of being turned off and where the Salvation Army is literally trotted out to pluck at your local station heartstrings so the son of a Prime Minister who pocketed envelopes stuffed with cash in ritzy hotel rooms can tell you what Paris Hilton said to some Porn star in the toilet of a Hollywood booze can.

Like Colonel Jessup in Aaron Sorkin’s “A Few Good Men”, it seems Konrad von Finckenstein believes he stands on a wall defending us from God knows what and would rather we were relieved he was up there, just said “Thank you” and went on our way.

Katz’s almost desperate plea -- “I was just hoping we could find somewhere in the past when it was profitable and I can sort of say let’s take a look at what made it work at that point in time and can we re-create that…” is answered with lines of redacted comment that give you the clear feeling that responding to logical questions like that wasn’t on the agreed agenda.

In a later section of the minutes, the discussion turns to what the networks spend on the American programming that is the apparent source of all/most/whatever sounds best of the Canadian networks’ profits.

And here the Commissioners are informed that despite spending hundreds of millions each year in Hollywood, our networks don’t actually know what the programming they bought will cost them until the American networks broadcasting those shows tally up the number of times they themselves showed them.

As CanWest’s Barbara Williams puts it, “You are trying to establish a budget and stay in control of that budget, when you are really, completely dependent on the US network’s scheduling”.

Gee, is she saying that American networks already direct and control the budgets and scheduling of the same broadcasters that the CRTC doesn’t allow them to have ownership in up here?

In the same category of discussion, CTV’s Ivan Fecan agrees with Von Finckenstein that he bought the ‘A’ Channels as a way of using up all the lower value shows he’s forced to purchase from American studios in order to get his hands on one of their hits.

So, the Americans control not only budgeting and scheduling but CONTENT as well? And still we have autonomous Canadian networks?

I’m sorry, but I’m just not buying that CTV and CanWest are on the same buyer level as some poor schmuck who owns eight drive-ins in Arkansas and has to allow himself to be ass-raped in one of the back rooms of Lowe’s Santa Monica during AFM, forced to buy three zombie flicks filmed in a weekend and a remake of “Drums Along the Mohawk” just so he can get that cheerleader movie where some really hot chicks take their tops off.

I mean maybe Fecan’s argument explains why “According to Jim” is still on the air. But are you really telling me that Canwest sits at a table with a couple of hundred mil in front of them and are told that if they want “House” they also need to buy a season of “Flipper: The Next generation” and a couple of Deanna Durbin movies???

“Lenny, Bubee, she’s from your home town! Tell ‘em it’s Cancon!”

Throughout the process, CTV and Global reiterate that the current television business model is broken, yet they apparently don’t take the first obvious step in fixing it. If the American studios and networks are in the same desperate straights (as our nets insist they are), how come they can’t pry a better deal out of them?

But No. Our nets continue to allow themselves to be led to the Hollywood casting couch.

While other businesses are demanding and getting cost certainty, they continue to be dictated to by their American suppliers. Nor do they insist on identical terms when they sell Cancon to a US network. Whatever terms the US partner wants are agreed to – except on script notes and casting and all of that other stuff on the Canadian produced shows, of course.

Of course.

And despite all this, CanWest’s Barbara Williams assures the Commission that they can use their “Leverage” with the studios to mitigate costs.

How?

Where?

What becomes clear is that Canadian nets still fail to see that the way around their problems is the same strategy most European nations have used to end-run the Hollywood studio insistence on owning it all -- to produce programming they can own and sell.

But I’ve been beating that drum since I started writing this blog and it seems CTV and Global would rather swallow lye than make a couple of dollars from their own labor.

It makes you wonder if their development people aren’t really working as hard as they claim, maybe aren’t good enough to come up with a hit more than once every few seasons – or if part of those purchase packages is a non-compete clause that says you get “House” as long as you don’t make a potentially competing medical show or can distribute “CSI” only as long as your own cop shows don’t spend a lot of time wrestling with forensics.

At any rate, my favorite moment in this whole sorry affair occurs on pages 144-145, wherein the Commission Chair offers the following:

Unfortunately, “…what Ms. Williams just explained to me” has been redacted. So I, my fellow artists and the Arts Guilds the Commission Chair speaks of have no way of understanding her argument.

Or perhaps – of REFUTING it…

But then, we don’t matter to this Commission any more than the public does. And that’s made crystal clear over and over during CRTC hearings.

Writers Guild of Canada Executive Director Maureen Parker can explain a half century of Broadcaster “betrayal” of her membership and MP Cheryl Gallant can detail how her constituents in Pembroke were consistently lied to by CanWest. But those submissions are not explored while this document illustrates that the Commission feels enormously educated by whatever the broadcasters have to say.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, Konrad von Finckenstein and the CRTC are the ones who can’t really handle the truth…

 

LAZY SUNDAY # 71: CHOCTAW BINGO

Luckily, it's a long weekend (at least here in Canada) so you've probably got time to take on one of my favorite looooong songs.

Back in my rock 'n roll years, radio DJ's loved the long song. The first I remember was Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", a story I imparted a while back. But then I moved on to "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida", Vanilla Fudge's "You Keep Me Hangin' On" almost anything by Pink Floyd -- and, of course, the grand daddy of 'em all -- Don Maclean's "American Pie".

That song always reminds me of my first summer in Toronto because CHUM-FM's all night DJ, the inimitable David Pritchard, would play it every night. It was not only a great song, it probably gave David the chance to hit the john and make a fresh pot of coffee to see him through the night.

Yesterday, I was getting groceries and "American Pie" kicked in on the supermarket speakers. It lasted the length of my shopping spree and got me wondering if the feature length song might become a victim of the ADA iPod generation's need for quicker fixes.

And that would be a shame, because while most songwriters can get their point across in the requisite 3 minutes or less, great ones can do amazing things if you give them just a little more bandwidth.

James McMurtry wrote and recorded "Choctaw Bingo" in 2002. But as long as it's been around, I'd venture few of you have heard it. Yet, it's story telling at its best in a genre (Country music) that I've grown to love for what it can teach writers about telling stories.

The son of novelist James McMurtry, the singing offspring probably has story telling embedded in his genes and it shows from opening line to closing coda. In concert, he refers to this composition as an homage to the crystal meth industry, an apt description of the song's complete celebration of "badass".

More infectious than Swine Flu and loaded with lyrics linking Texas football to the small arms trade and picturesque phrases like "Sister twisters", which once heard never leave your memory or your vocabulary, "Choctaw Bingo" just might be the best drivin' song ever.

This is time far from wasted. And perhaps made even better if you are. Enjoy your Sunday.

POOL UPDATE: THE FINAL FOUR

Round Two is over and it’s on to the Conference finals. In the West, two “Original Six” teams will compete to move on. In the East, twin sets of relative newcomers who’ve been recent runners up go at it. On both sides of the bracket, one team of stars and veterans will face a gang of speedy young guns. This is turning into a Stanley Cup Playoff for the Ages.

Don Cherry and CBC can drop all the F-bombs they want, but who really cares if there isn’t a Canadian team in the final four! Chicago has more Canadian players than anyone else in the League, not to mention the most guys from Saskatchewan. The All-Canadian kid captains Pittsburgh and the Staal brothers will be going head to head on the Atlantic coast. But that’s not what really matters. We’re dealing with the geography of Heart, here. Anybody who worships at the altar of their local Chamber of Commerce is missing the point.

 

While Jim Balsillie figures out all kinds of new ways to be a Dick, the kids who play the game demonstrate the kind of values you can really be proud of embracing.

Am I the only one who looks at all these NHL backroom business dealings and sees the same guys who convinced Gordie Howe a team jacket was a terrific playoff bonus, sold fake Roman coins and screwed Carl Brewer out of his pension?

And people say all the Goons are on the ice.

In Pool news, we have our first casualty. It’s a good thing Mr. McGrath is busy, because he’s out of players and will watch the rest of the festivities from the deepest depths of the basement. Don’t be too quick with the catcalls, however, because three or four of you look to be joining him soon.

Don’t despair, DMc! At the end of this round “The Props” are coming back! A chance for all you one-time Boston, Vancouver, San Jose and Washington fans to redeem yourselves.

And for prizes too!!!

Sometimes I’m so much like “Ellen” it scares me.

Anyway. The standings at the end of two full rounds are listed below. Savour your lofty perches while you can and expect a lot of movement over the course of Round Three.

I’m not sure how much hockey will have been played by the time Uncle Willis updates next. But I have a feeling it’ll be even better than what we’ve seen so far.

The Standings

	1	Michael Foster	154
	2	Will Pascoe	151
	3	Moviequill	150
	4	Brian Stockton	145
	5	Barry Keifl	138
	6	John Callaghan	136
	7	Mark Wilson	135
	8	Allan Eastman	132
	8	Peter Mitchell	132
	10	David Kinahan	131
	11	Larry Raskin	129
	12	Wil Zmak	119
	13	Scotty William	114
	14	Will Dixon	113
	15	Jim Henshaw	110
	16	Daryl Davis	95
	17	Jeff Martel	94
	18	Denis McGrath	71

TATTOOING YOUR REGINA

I spent a couple of days shooting in my old home town this weekend. Actually we had two shoots on the go, one in Regina and one in the middle of a Hamilton thunderstorm. I hear the dailies on that one are awesome.

And I gotta tell you -- working without endless form filling funding or network letters all this “broadcast model is broken” talk must be testing any bank’s confidence in bridge financing  -- is truly freeing.

This is my first ‘more than a fly-by’ visit to the old stompin’ grounds in a couple of decades so, of course, much has changed. Familiar haunts are gone and others have altered to the unrecognizable.

But one thing struck me at almost every turn – because there was one at literally every one of them – the tattoo parlour.

Now, I know tattoos are as common as earrings everywhere these days. But Regina’s still a fairly small and conservative town and I wasn’t seeing any ink on any of the people I was around.

I started thinking that maybe I just hadn’t seen enough of them naked, so I asked -- (if they had a tattoo, not if I could see them naked).

Nobody was marked. So now I had a real mystery.  A mystery that deepened when I saw racks of Saskatchewan Roughrider “temporary tattoos” in a local Sporting goods store.

If Regina’s most beloved symbol wasn’t worth sacrificing a little epidermis to exhibit, what was?

When I broached the subject with local expert and apparent fellow blank slate in the body art department, Uncle Willis, he recalled hearing that Regina had the highest per capita number of tattoo parlours and Chinese restaurants in the country.

Now it’s not hard to have the highest per capita anything in Saskatchewan, since you’re dividing whatever you’re analyzing by next to no people in the first place. But the Chinese restaurant part of Will’s recollection made sense.

That’s because when the province was crisscrossed with railroad tracks to haul away all those acres of wheat, many of the workers were Chinese and many of them settled in the small towns they passed through and opened restaurants.

If there’s a restaurant in any prairie town, odds are it’s still Chinese.

But nothing Willis and I speculated explained a tattoo explosion so vast there should be a local Crown corporation called SaskTat to culturally promote the craft.

So, when there were breaks in shooting, I visited a couple of the ink outlets and asked.

The first one claimed to have been the first shop in town and didn’t really know what had attracted all the rest -- but remarked that many of them were very good.

The second illustrator admitted learning his craft in a prison work release program, which struck me as oddly prescient of the penal system. But he claimed he “honestly didn’t have a clue” where his customers came from, insisting they inhabited “all walks of life”.

I got this odd feeling that both artisans I spoke with weren’t comfortable with my question. And neither chose to extend the conversation. So the mystery remained one until very late on my last night in town.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Saskatchewan is that there isn’t a lot of cliquish behavior. Not a lot of these people don’t talk to those people or somebody’s more important than somebody else.

There’s an equality and sense of brotherhood there that comes from a land that can be harsh at times and where you’re taught from birth to look out for and after your neighbors.

So it didn’t strike me as odd when the record producer sitting on one side of me in a Country bar introduced me to the Judge sitting on my other side.

I mentioned my mystery to “His Honor” and the question didn’t phase him one bit.

“It’s the gangs,” he said, “When they’re not spilling blood they’re spilling ink to mark their status.”

It made sense.

My once sleepy and trouble free home town now regularly battles to top the country in murders, car thefts and violent crime. The downtown core is beginning to resemble the “donut syndrome” of American cities where people have fled ravaged city centers for the safety of the suburbs.

And that socially disrupted center with all its unclaimed turf has now become home to the “Native Syndicate”, “Indian Posse”, “Crazy Crees” and many other violent gangs.

Most people put gang crime down to poverty and alienation and that’s all true. But so are a laisse-faire attitude toward drugs and a feeling that it’s politically incorrect to lean on folks who are more sociopath and psychopath than member of a definable race or culture.

I’ve spent a lot of time in gang ravaged neighborhoods of American cities and the people most victimized by them are their own. The people most harmed are the ones they most appear to champion.

And perhaps worst of all, their very presence prevents the rest of the community from reaching out to those most in need.

Intimidation is the gangs’ most powerful weapon and it infects everyone from those under their thumbs to politicians afraid to appear insensitive to tattoo artists who know silence is good for business.

But unlike most American cities, Regina has a history of co-operation and caring that (combined with the current economic boom) still offers an opportunity to save it.

My hometown is a place that has given this country a lot from art and culture to bio-research and medical care that have made all Canadians what we are.

And for far more people than me, it’s too special to lose.

LAZY SUNDAY # 70: THIS ONE'S FOR THE GIRLS

It's Mother's Day.

You know where you should be instead of here.

Enjoy your Sunday.

POOL UPDATE: BRING ON THE BIG KINDLE

 

How long is it going to take for the people who make newspapers to realize you can’t read them on a plane anymore?

They offer stacks of them for free when you park your car, check in at the airline and go through the gate. Which is all well and good if you’ve got a couple of hours to kill before your flight. But once you’re in the air -- forget it.

Airline seats are now so crammed together, it’s almost impossible not to be in a sexually compromising position with the people sitting next to you, let alone open and/or even try to fold back the normal sized broadsheet.

Put two people in adjoining seats with the Globe and Mail or the National Post and there’s more elbow work than you get from Chris Pronger.

I mean, do I really need an 8x10 front page color glossy of Manny Ramirez like I got this morning? The man’s just another juiced baseball doofus. Why does he need to be on the front page, let alone that big? Or have the steroids made an 8x10 the smallest photo you can take of him?

And speaking of this morning’s Globe and Post – is it too much to ask for the score from a game that ended 8 hours before I got to the airport? I know you guys pride yourself on being more “in-depth” than other media. But hey, there’s no “in-depth” when you don’t have the story in the first place.

What’s the point of being big, wide, unwieldy – AND – empty?

You could shrink your paper, save a few trees, save some ink, save gas on the delivery trucks, and still have room for all those car ads with print too small to read in even the VistaVision version.

I’m also thinking these newspaper guys have picked up the studio script fetish for white space.

Today’s Globe column by Dave Shoalts (who, credit due, said the Coyotes were going bankrupt months ago) is six columns wide, including one column of white space featuring a two line internet poll on who’ll win that battle, Jim Balsillie  or Gary Bettman.

How can any sane editor type person read the comment thread of any Globe article and then decide it’s imperative to print how those dough heads voted in a poll!!??!!

So, big newspapers – thanks for the free copies this morning. But I’ll get my news in a more timely and convenient manner from here on.

And the first airline to supply their passengers with a Kindle gets my business for life.

Anyway – back to the important white space – the ice.

We’re halfway through the Marathon. the games this week have been nothing short of breathtaking in all four series.

This week’s standings in the pool:

1 Brian Stockton 106

1 Michael Foster 106
3 Barry Keifl 102

4 Moviequill 101

4 Will Pascoe 101

6 John Callaghan 97

7 Peter Mitchell 96

8 Wil Zmak 94

9 Mark Wilson 91

10 Larry Raskin 88

11 Scotty William 86
12 Allan Eastman 85
13 David Kinahan 84
14 Jim Henshaw 78

15 Will Dixon 72
16 Denis McGrath 67

16 Daryl Davis 67

18 Jeff Martel 66

Don’t forget to check your early week update from Willis. We might have a couple of victors by then, but something tells me all of the 2nd round series are going the distance.

MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU

Uh…it’s a play on words causa the date and…anyways…

But that title also parallels the good wishes I want to offer my old hero, Jim Shaw, for the dramatic little industry game changer he pulled off at the end of last week.

                                                                        

Our non-fiction Al Swearengen played a little poker with CTV’s Ivan Fecan on Thursday night, called the net exec’s “the conventional television model is broken” bluff and came away with not only three local licences, (stations, transmitters, equipment and staff all rolled in) but a whole lot more than Fecan and all the high paid and bonused execs at CTVBellGlobeMediaEtc may even now be realizing they have lost.

Actually, a lot of us in the industry were picking up the obvious “tells” as Fecan appeared before the CRTC in Ottawa and turned up for highly unusual interviews on CTV News, BNN and even CBC Radio’s “The Hour”. “Methinks the fellow doth protest too much” quickly devolved to “He’s got nothin’…”. I was all set to truck up to Agincourt with a couple of Toonies myself, but gentlemen elites such as Jor-el do not sit down at cards with the likes of me.

But Jim Shaw can cadge a chair at the high-rollers’ table and anted in his $3 for Brandon, Wheatley (Windsor) and Wingham. Even knowing full well that Fecan was playing with his own deck didn’t matter. Because an old poker player like Jim already knew that his opponent’s cards would never be turned over. Fecan couldn’t let the Canadian public really see what he was holding and would therefore have to fold.

Fecan’s bluff had been confirmed by another player earlier in the day when CRTC Commissioner Leonard Katz asked CTV exactly which of their licenses were not going to be renewed. The previously named three were placed on the sacrificial block and then, in detailing why each station was being cut free, Fecan let it be known that if the Local programming support fund already in the pipeline arrived sooner than expected, at least one of those stations might be welcomed back into the CTV fold.

Both Katz and I (and apparently Jim Shaw as well) experienced a profound “WTF?” moment. Was he saying that the funding already in place made any lack of Carriage Fees moot? And if the Wheatley station was that close to being okay, just how exaggerated were the broadcasters’ other claims of poverty???

Fecan’s argument had already been hard to swallow on a number of levels. In trying to appear as the fair haired champion of all things local, he’d argued that if the Cable companies had room for Porn, there should be room for stations like Timmins – neglecting to mention that the Sympatico satellite division of his own conglomerate would laugh him out of their cubicle down the hall for suggesting that the money rolling in for “Debbie Does Don Mills” should be used to shore up some Northern Ontario backwater.

Their argument would parallel Fecan’s own that the money rolling in from his Specialty channels could not be spent to support another division of the same company. Even though CBC had made clear earlier in the hearings that those Specialties still needed the Free to Air net’s much wider audience in order to initiate programming.

Katz’s pulling back of the corporate veil at CTV was followed up by the next Commissioner to question their arguments. Peter Menzies asked for a simple assurance that the network had done all it could to lower costs. If he was going to make a ruling that dipped further into the public pocket, he just wanted to know that Canadian TV viewers weren’t sustaining somebody else’s lifestyle at the expense of their own.

The CTV group assured him they had cut their expenses “to the bone” – somehow missing the obvious optics that Fecan had opened the festivities by introducing the eleven (count ‘em – Eleven) senior network executives who flanked him – all of whom apparently had the day free from their now crushing workload of new multiple responsibilities in order to be in Gatineau.

Also telling amid this series of “tells” was that despite ample opportunities offered by Commission Chair Konrad von Finckenstein for input on how the broken conventional model of television could be fixed, Fecan offered nothing but “give us more money”.

Seemingly unable to articulate how that money could be spent, be it on local news or maybe even drama, to bring back both audience and advertisers, he raised the same question a lot of people have been asking about auto industry bailouts -- “If nobody’s buying the product, how does keeping the company afloat a while longer solve that problem?”

Even when von Finckenstein mentioned that it’s been a downhill slope for “ten years”, Fecan couldn’t come up with one idea on what might change things.

Anybody remember what happened ten years ago? 1999? The year the nets won a reprieve from doing expensive dramas in favor of cheaper to produce and mostly unwatchable pap?

And throwing more money at this guy, just like the CRTC did back then, is going to make it all better. Uh-huh.

So Jim Shaw made what he knew was a winning bet, and immediately further pissed on Fecan’s parade by stating that his Kenora station (another small market outfit) had managed to end up $200,000 in the black last year.

Huh?

You mean local TV can make money?

How come the CTV affiliated Globe & Mail never mentioned that? Is there some odd reason Canwest’s National and Financial Posts both missed it as well? Whatever could cause such a journalistic lapse?

                                                                              

Jim says $200,000 isn’t a lot of money. Maybe not to him. But it’s more than GM or Chrysler made last year. And suddenly a lot of people who pay Cable bills or work at the CRTC have begun wondering just how well those other stations could be doing if they weren’t saddled with a schedule of lame celebrity magazine shows and derivative reality offerings their viewers can already get elsewhere.

In addition to immediately shifting the Public and regulatory mindset by undermining Fecan’s claims of poverty, Shaw has a couple of other immediate gains in winning the argument that he shouldn’t have to pay and/or pass on Carriage Fees.

First, he’s now got several local markets that can tell the Commission that carriage fees will be detrimental to their audience.

Moreover, he’s now in line for those local programming funds, carving the allotment for three stations that CTV now has to subtract from their windfall total.

And with the offer to buy even more stations from Canwest, Shaw’s making it clear that he thinks there’s gold in local markets – and if somebody says they don’t need public money to do what the locals do, the CRTC is going to be hard-pressed to justify a Carriage Fee.

But there’s more here. Last year, Shaw dumped a number of local CTV and Global affiliates off the Shaw Cable dial in Western Canada because he could prove his audience was adequately served from other venues.

Now he’s in a position to drop even more – further eroding CTV and Global’s reach, audience numbers and all important ad rates.

Moreover, his own reach is spreading close to the point where he can link all of his new and potentially soon to arrive stations into another national network. And where will that leave CTV and Global?

A year ago, Shaw was scathing in his condemnation of what our private networks offered his subscribers, demanding they do more Prime Time programming that was unique and Canadian.

"You repeatedly hear that CTV has a better US line-up than Global. They never talk about Canadian shows being part of a competitive slate."

By pooling the local programming support he’ll get for 4 stations, he’s now in a position to create something competitive of his own.

                                                                            

Nobody really knows how Jim Shaw’s mind works or what he’s got planned for this little gift he’s been given. But instead of winning his argument that there’s “too much competition” for conventional Canadian television, Ivan Fecan has just succeeded in creating even more of it.

And if Jim Shaw lives up to his demand from one year ago that "We need more opportunities for creative people in Canada to be creative", we just might be at the dawn of something very special.

May the Force be with you, Cable Cowboy! I think I hear a couple of Death Stars beginning to implode.

LAZY SUNDAY #69: THE NEW JOURNALISTS

A couple of weeks ago, a movie written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray based on the TV series written by Paul Abbott called "State of Play" opened. It's a political thriller featuring a journalist investigating the connection of a Washington D.C. murder to a much larger crime.


Virtually all the reviews I read (whether positive, negative or indifferent) reiterated the sentiments expressed by New York based critic Maitland McDonagh (Miss Flick Chick)...

"When the newspaper thriller's obituary is written, 'State of Play' may well be cited as the genre's last gasp. (It) acknowledges the grim state of traditional print journalism while remaining firm in its faith that ink-stained wretches are steadfast foot soldiers in the war against political corruption, institutional malfeasance, spin control and all forms of business as usual."

It struck me as interesting that while all of those newspaper reviewers were more than aware of the decline of their industry, none of them twigged to one of the main reasons people no longer rely on newspapers -- most have simply stopped being "steadfast foot soldiers in the war against political corruption, institutional malfeasance, spin control and all forms of business as usual".

My own sense of the reason the crusading reporter isn't doing his job anymore is that the people he works for are usually part of one of those confusing media conglomerates that includes everything from oil companies to political think tanks and aren't sure who they can afford to piss off.

As truth was always the first casualty in times of war, now it's often sidelined or has its veracity questioned because more and more of us are aware of the corporate links that allowed it to reach our front steps in the first place.

I'm a big fan of the critical faculties of the Globe & Mail's TV critic John Doyle. And I'm sure nobody messes too much with his opinions. But in the last weeks, as Mr. Doyle has repeatedly voiced support for television Carriage fees in this country, no thinking person can help wondering if the fact that his paper belongs to a conglomerate desperately seeking those fees has played a part.

I always used to wonder why despots of one form or another always went after writers, poets and playwrights. The first I was really personally aware of was Chilean theatre director, poet and songwriter, Victor Jara.


Jara was rounded up with other "dissidents" during the 1973 Coup and tortured with many others in a soccer stadium that had become an open air prison. His captors mocked him, urging him to play his guitar with broken hands. Instead, he sang one of his songs of freedom before he was executed.

Today the stadium where he was murdered bears his name.

Over time, I've come to realize that all writers, whether of a journalistic or artistic bent, have a desire to get at and get out the truth. And that can be a real threat to those who'd rather their own view of the world were believed instead.

You can see another example in Ottawa right now, where the Writers Guild of Canada has been denied the right to voice their (our) views to the CRTC during what might be the most important television regulation hearing of the last decade.

One wonders what the Commission fears might be revealed...

EDIT:

Hey, Good News -- the Writers Guild has been invited to speak with the Parliamentary Committee on Canadian Heritage May 6th and the CRTC on May 7th! Tune in to CPAC for the fireworks!

Despite what the corporate owned (and controlled?) newspapers might have you believe, journalists with ethics still ply their trade. They just do it on that other platform newspapers despise -- the internet.

And like the journalists who inspired most of the current crop to get into the business in the first place, these "new" or "citizen" or "anonymous" journalists are risking their very lives to speak the truth.

A double feature about two groups of these people is my offering for your Sunday viewing. The first on the massive blog movement in Iran, and the last, a trailer for a feature documentary that opens later this month on Video journalists in Burma.

Political repression, Corporate repression -- what's the difference? The truth really will set you free. Some of you guys working for newspapers should try it. Enjoy your Sunday.

Iran: A nation of bloggers from Mr.Aaron on Vimeo.

POOL REPORT: BEETLE BOMB

When I was a kid, I found this old collection of 78s my dad had which included a bunch of records by Spike Jones (not the director guy). I almost played the grooves off them because they made me laugh my ass off and my favorite was one called “Beetle Bomb”.

It’s an orchestral/sound effects rendition of a horse race with a horse named “Beetle Bomb” perennially bringing up the rear until the finish line – where the winner is “Beetle Bomb”.

                                                                                

I only bring this up because this year’s pool is a very tight horse race of its own and, in wrapping up Round One, Uncle Willis pointed out that he and I resided in last place.

However, in the same way that Willis often buries the details, he didn’t point out that I also happen to be the only Poolie who got his ENTIRE ROSTER through the first round!

So, while some of you geniuses are going the rest of the way with a handful of snipers, I got all my guys in the action. Including, I would point out, three picks who scored the winning goals that sealed their respective first round series (Burrows, Franzen and Staal) and one coming off an injury (Sundin) who still holds the Leafs record for most game and overtime winners.

Oh, and look at this –- anybody else score 6 points last night in the one game played in Round Two? Anybody else move up three whole slots overnight? Anybody…? Anybody…? …Beuller?

Remember “Beetle Bomb” people! I’m charging through the backfield! Oh yes, this is why they call me, “Mr. Excitement”!

The Pool Standings as of this morning:

1 Michael Foster 75

2 Brian Stockton 74
2 Barry Keifl 74
4 Peter Mitchell 73
5 Moviequill 72
6 Will Pascoe 68
6 John Callaghan 68
8 Wil Zmak 67
9 Mark Wilson 66
9 Larry Raskin 66
11 Scotty William 61
11 Denis McGrath 61
13 Allan Eastman 58
13 David Kinahan 58
15 Jim Henshaw 55

16 Daryl Davis 54
17 Jeff Martel 50
18 Will Dixon 49

AT THE RISK OF BEING PREMATURE...

I drove over to pick up a package today and the guy on my satellite radio's Fox News feed was reeling off the monumental casualty list from the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918, angry at his government for not completely sealing the border to Mexico, something I've heard him rant about in other contexts many times in the past.

It was the current state of American journalism at its finest. Sensationalism mixed with dubious research and a slice of political bias on the side.

There always seems to be a way for people blinkered by their preconceptions to mutate the day's events into a convenient diatribe. I'm sure by tonight, Geraldo Rivera will have traced the virus to a Mexican Druglord swineherd sympathetic to the Taliban.

The Fox guy then began interviewing a "confirmed victim" of the Swine Flu, ignoring the man's chipper insistance that he was actually feeling a lot better, to ask if his neighbors were afraid to come near him.

I punched the CBC News button and got a doctor involved in monitoring the current status of the outbreak calmly offering a list of what you could do to lessen your chances of infection.

It was a nice example of how our two countries are different.

I parked and walked into the parcel place, discovering that the girl at the counter was already wearing a surgical mask. Actually, it wasn't a surgical mask, it was one of those dollar store jobs you buy when you're clearing out the basement or garage. I gave her the slip for my package and asked if she thought it was doing any good. She said something, but I couldn't make it out because of the mask.

When she brought my package, the cloud of pollen I'd walked through to get into the place finally got to me and I sneezed. She reacted as if I'd pulled a gun on her. So I got her down off the ceiling fan by telling her a joke I remember from the last time Swine Flu came around in 1976....

The symptoms of the disease are fever, aches and a tendency to roll around in mud.

Because of the mask, I'm not sure if she laughed or even smiled. The guy next to me said he didn't think the joke was very funny.

I told him it wasn't -- but at least it wasn't making things worse.

Look, I don't know if this is the end of the world or just a sign that the End Times have arrived. But beyond washing my hands more often and not taking a tour of the agricultural outskirts of Cancun, there's not a lot I can do.

But please stop asking me to be afraid, because that doesn't do any good at all -- and it also makes me go looking for pictures like this...


Laughter really is the best medicine. If you find something, send it along and I'll stick it up. It may not help. But it sure won't hurt.

LAZY SUNDAY # 68: LIFE = RISK = LIFE

The first time I was in a hit show, the playwright walked in one day with a newspaper review panning a play opening across the street. He was thrilled, uttering a Broadway adage I was hearing for the first time -- "Nothing makes success sweeter than the failure of a friend." I know he was only repeating a much repeated phrase, but I lost all respect for him that night.

I've never understood celebrating the failure of somebody else. But then I've never understood the value in shorting stocks or betting against your home team either. I know those practices have made some people rich or famous. To me, they're just inadmirable weasels.

Great success usually means you took a chance on something. So does failure. And win or lose, taking a risk adds value to your life that is not only special in the moment, it's special forever after, no matter what the outcome.

Because in the end, Life always fails. Nobody gets out of here alive. But those who took chances have less to regret in the final moments.


Last week I had the honor of accompanying my father to an Air Force reunion. There wasn't a man there under the age of 85, guys who had been Spitfire pilots in the Battle of Britain, once young men who had flown Hurricanes over the Jungles of Burma, boys who had taken Lancasters deep into the Heart of Darkness.

They arrived walking with difficulty, wheeled in chairs or moving slowly because of old war wounds or growing frailties. But the moment they entered the Mess Hall that was their meeting room, they transformed, becoming 18 and 19 again, full of purpose, defiant of authority, laughing and drinking and telling bawdy stories and exaggerated tales of combat.

Several had been shot down. Some more than once. Several had been wounded. Some more than once. One had spent so long in a Japanese prison camp he still can't buy anything made in that country. All had lost a few friends back then, and all but a few of them by now.

But they had never admitted defeat, which is the only time you truly are defeated. How often you fall doesn't matter as long as you get up just one time more.

I tried not to look shocked as they described their growing frailties to one another. A kidney removed. A heart re-circuited. Eyes that had winked out. Ears now fitted with hearing aids. As the Bartender pulled pints, one turned to me and said, "The Brits used to put Saltpeter in our beer to reduce our libidos." He smiled. "Unfortunately, it's starting to work."

I started to wonder how I might feel if I reach their age. What will keep me able to laugh at my infirmities, the loss of strength or perception or dignity? And then I realized the answer was all around me.

At some point or another, all of them had dealt with horrific failures. But they'd had the courage or simple forethought to believe their path was the right one, to pick themselves up and refuse to be broken by what had happened.

The courage to take a risk had rewarded them with the courage to go on. When you don't quit, give up, give in or knuckle under, there are no regrets. Then, there is only success.

Enjoy your Sunday.

POOL UPDATE: HOW SWEEP IT IS!

I honestly can't remember the last time so many teams were swept in the first round of the playoffs. And it could just as easily have been an even higher number. You get the feeling some true powerhouses are in the running this year. And all of them will inevitably have to go head to head in the coming rounds. Does it get much better than that?

I had the good fortune to be in Vancouver the night the Canucks swept St. Louis, in one of the most exciting games I'd seen all season. The euphoria in the city was palpable. But you can't take anything away from the Blues. They fought hard, definitely sending the message they'll be back next year.

Columbus also deserved better than having to face the worst team they could possibly draw in their first taste of playoff action. I got a feeling they'll be back too.

Montreal? I know there'll be an official story. But the writer side of me definitely senses a massive untold and even better one behind that debacle. I wonder if it'll ever come out? I wonder if the Canadiens will ever be the same if it does?

Next year for Montreal? I guess miracles can happen...

By this time next week, we'll either be debuting Round two or down to one final series that has gone the distance. Either way, the pool standings are likely going to undergo a seismic shift by the time former basement dweller, Uncle Willis, updates on Monday.

The Standings as of this morning, while most of us can still look relatively prescient are:

1 Will Pascoe 61
2 Michael Foster 60
3 Moviequill 58
4 Mark Wilson 57
4 Peter Mitchell 57
6 Larry Raskin 54
7 Barry Keifl 53
7 John Callaghan 53
7 Denis McGrath 53
10 Brian Stockton 52
11 Scotty William 48
12 David Kinahan 47
13 Allan Eastman 46
14 Daryl Davis 38
14 Will Dixon 38
16 Jim Henshaw 36
16 Wil Zmak 36
18 Jeff Martel 32

LAZY SUNDAY #67: THE COMMENT THREAD

The thing that sets the inner tubes apart from virtually all other forms of media, maybe except for talk radio, is its ability to be interactive. Oh, you could always write a letter to the editor, that might or might not get printed, maybe or maybe not in an unedited form, sometime sooner or later – and often well after your point or the issue that prompted it had dropped from the Public consciousness and even your own list of things you actually gave a shit about.

The internet is different. You can be getting your two cents out there before whoever posted their own opinion has had a chance to get up from the computer, stretch and take a pee.

And not only do you get to comment on the original writer’s opinion, you get to comment on the other comments as well as the commenters, their friends, their family, their life style choices and whether or not they should have access to what’s obviously you and the planet Earth’s personal private stash of Oxygen.

It’s been often said that “Opinions are like a**-holes, everybody’s got one.” and when you start writing a blog one of the first things you notice is how many a**-holes there really are in the world.

Not you guys reading this, of course! You people are just about the smartest, kindest, most personable and apparently good-looking audience a guy like me has any right to deserve. Among fellow bloggers, I regularly refer to you as “All that Heaven will allow”.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Differences of opinion (and just about everything else) are a fine thing. They make life interesting and/or challenging. And hearing somebody else’s take on a position you’ve taken can be enlightening or humbling in a lot of wonderful ways. The more we honestly intermingle, the sooner we’ll reach a consensus that probably works mostly well for most of us on anything.

Last week, I had a couple of guys respond in the comments thread to a video I posted on a fairly high-minded topic. And then they responded to each other in a way that was entertaining and enlightening not only to anybody reading their thoughts, but to the writers themselves. And that was very cool.

And I’m sure that’s the way the guys who invented the inner tubes thought it would all go.

But make the mistake of clicking on the comment threads of any newspaper story on even something as mundane as pet ordinances and before you’ve gone down half a page, you discover it’s all connected to and/or the fault of the middle east, homosexuals or The Obama. Empowered by anonymity and untethered from any need to be civil, people are capable of creating bile the stomach of a Vulture couldn’t secrete.

It’s a situation that could cause you to lose your faith in humanity, or what remained of it after you’d spent the day moderating the hate speech out of what gets submitted to your own blog comment threads.

A couple of days ago, the dependably sophomoric guys at College Humor released one of the most brilliant insights into our inability to use this amazing interactive tool to actually interact.

I hope it restores your faith in humanity’s ability to at least laugh at itself as much as it did mine.

Feel free to comment. And enjoy your Sunday.