Last chance to tell the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) what you think about their plan to increase the amount of advertising allowable on television.
Television stations currently broadcast twelve (12) minutes of traditional advertising per hour. The proposed amendments would increase that number to:
* 14 minutes per hour in peak viewing periods (7pm to 11 pm) effective 1 September 2007;
* 15 minutes per hour for all viewing periods effective September 1, 2008; and
* THE ELIMINATION OF LIMITS ALTOGETHER as of 1 September 2009.
The deadline for letters is tomorrow, Friday, August 3rd. The link for this notice can be found here.
Act now and act fast.
Posted by Michael Lithgow on August 2, 2007 in
By Lucine Kasbarian, originally published in Hairenik / Armenian Weekly.
A financier is provoked to discover himself, his life, and the world anew when he awakes one morning lost, bewildered and alone, having contracted retrograde amnesia through the night.
A photo assistant scribbles his phone number on a chalkboard prop photographed for a "Crate & Barrel" catalog, only to receive 15,000 phone calls from around the country. He organizes a “National Dinner Tour” to interview his newfound friends and make art from these encounters.
An “accent elimination course” spurs a New York woman to produce a sound-art pastiche and social commentary about cultural preservation and assimilation by trying to acquire her Lebanese-Armenian father’s and Finnish-Swedish mother’s foreign accents, while they unsuccessfully try to lose theirs.
In response to rampant shoplifting and gross consumerism, an artist collective leaves behind hand-crafted objects on grocery shelves to make political statements known as “shop dropping” and “culture jamming.”
These are some of the eclectic, eccentric, and enigmatic stories heard on Tania Ketenjian’s provocative programs airing on radio stations around the country and the globe. Many of her storylines emerge from the depths of creative expression—from the lives of visual artists, actors, writers or musicians. Other interviewees are not artists at all. The common thread throughout is that the voices, ideas and emotions brought to the airwaves—and facilitated by Tania’s own discernment, aptitude and finesse—serve to tell stories that often are not, and to spotlight or question prevailing standards, preconceptions and realities held and presented in our increasingly pre-packaged and sanitized world. [More...]
FULL STORY + COMMENTS
Posted by Rob Maguire on June 13, 2007 in
A bumbling, stammering Michael Moore is in a new YouTube video (below) asking for Americans to post their American healthcare horror stories on his new YouTube Sicko Group.
Moore's new film about the failure of the public healthcare system in the US hits theatres June 29th, and as usual reviews have been mixed since it was shown at Cannes earlier this summer.
Posted by Ezra Winton on June 11, 2007 in
The Pirate Party wants to reform copyright law. They are starting by running in the September Swedish elections -- First, they take Stockholm, then they take Berlin! And, hopefully, everywhere else where democratically elected representatives can rewrite the pernicious cancer of over-expanding copyright laws. There are parallel initiatives in several European Union member states and in North America.
The Pirate Party has three items on the agenda: Reform copyright. Abolish the patent system. Respect the right to privacy. And there is also the Pirate Party U.S. that has added net neutrality to the campaign.
Reforming copyright means finding a way to return copyright laws to a useful but non-culturally lethal state. All non-commercial copying should be free including file sharing and p2p networking. Copyright monopolies should be limited to 5 years, and there should be a complete ban on DRM (digital rights management) technologies and contract clauses that restrict consumers’ legal rights in this area.
Abolishing the patent system means completely re-writing patent laws that encourage pharmaceutical companies to risk human lives for market share and profit margins. The Pirate Party has an innovative alternative that would have governments more actively involved in research. In a nutshell, if 20% of what is currently spent on drugs in European Union public health systems was spent on research, there would be more money being spent on drug research than is being spent now by the private sector. Without patents, the price of pharmaceuticals generally falls by two-thirds, so the public money spent is more than made up for -- check out the Pirate Party’s more detailed explanation.
And finally, the Pirate Party wants to roll back the invasive levels of state surveillance ushered in by governmental paranoia since September 11.
Check out the Pirate Party’s Declaration of Principles and website for more info.
Posted by Michael Lithgow on June 7, 2007 in
Martha Stiegman’s two short documentaries are currently featured on the National Film Booard's CitizenShift website United We Fish. Her works tackles the fisheries in Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy and in Bear River First Nation. As a videomaker, Stiegman's work connects community and activism.
Martha is presently working on her PhD at Concordia University where we met to talk about her amazing projects.
[Interview by Mél Hogan for ArtThreat]
FULL STORY + COMMENTS
Posted by Mél Hogan on June 6, 2007 in
Nick Broomfield is a filmmaker used to controversy and his newest film, recently released on DVD by Tartan Video is no exception. GHOSTS tells the story of Ai Qin Lin, a Chinese migrant who pays a large sum of money to have herself smuggled into the UK in order to find work to put her small child through school. After a harrowing journey Ai Qin quickly realizes that England is not the promised land, and is eventually "escorted" to a small dirty townhouse where she will live with 11 other Chinese migrant workers. From there the film follows her through one grueling job after another - in a duck processing factory, on a spring onion farm, and the last job 23 workers did before drowning off the coast at Morecambe Bay at night.
GHOSTS is a work of social realism: Broomfield hired non-actors, put them in real scenarios (such as the migrant house where all the performers lived for one month), and based the script and storyline on real events that have occurred recently in the UK. The film credits Guardian journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai's stories for inspiring this gritty, digitally shot narrative.
Broomfield has produced a masterpiece of understated cinema. GHOSTS is a documentary waiting to be born: it is fiction only insofar as scenes are recreated with some creative construction. The British filmmaker, who up until now has stuck with the documentary genre, has retraced the steps backward from the real-life 2004 tragedy of the 23 Chinese workers who - after being beaten and driven off the sands during the day by white English cocklers (a tiny shellfish) - returned in the evening only to misjudge the quickly moving tide and drowned. The families of the victims are still paying off their debts, totaling 500,000 pounds.
On the recently released DVD a 64-minute making-of featurette shows Broomfield, his crew and his "actors" actually being bullied and driven off the beach by white workers as they try to construct the scene that depicts the same events. As Broomfield puts it:
"Some actors are method actors, but in GHOSTS I bring the method to them, to the non-actors."
GHOSTS is a film that has largely slipped under the radar in North America, and with this fabulous featurette added, the DVD is a compelling artifact of not only the genius of Nick Broomfield, but also of the process of making "fiction" as real as the first time it occurred.
To watch the trailer, find out how to order the film, or donate to the fund set up to pay off the workers' debts, visit the film's official site.
Posted by Ezra Winton on June 5, 2007 in
A significantly edited version of this editorial by Paul Boin was published by The Globe and Mail on May 30, 2007. Boin sent Art Threat the original commentary, which we reprint below.
The CRTC decision on May 17 to no longer regulate network advertising limits, and recent comments by its Chairman, Konrad Von Finckenstein, make it painfully obvious that this CRTC head is unfit for the job of regulating Canada's broadcasting system.
While some media watchers were wary when the present Conservative government appointed Von Finckenstein to be the new CRTC Chairman, others were willing to "wait and see" if this new CRTC head would take his new legal and public interest responsibilities seriously. This initial wariness stemmed from Von Finckenstein's past positions and comments during his tenure as the head of Canada's Competition Bureau.
Among many of his deregulatory positions, he advocated for the removal of all foreign ownership restrictions from our airline industry to our telecommunications industries (telephone, cable, satellite, internet). The recent decision to allow networks, not the CRTC, determine how much advertising Canadian viewers can stomach per program hour (the current limit is 12 minutes), proves that these concerns were indeed justified.
It now seems that Von Finckenstein has been put in as the proverbial fox to "guard" the CRTC (public interest) henhouse. In a Playback Magazine interview he states, "We [CRTC] are getting out of the business of regulating advertising. We don't think it's necessary for us to restrict something Canadians can do themselves with their remote control."
Anyone with any foresight can see that this false "what the public will bear" argument holds no serious weight, as it will be a foregone conclusion that advertising time on all networks will start increasing per programming hour, each month and each year, leaving less and less time for vital public affairs, news and other uplifting programming (i.e., Canadian Drama) at a time when our democracy and society have never been so impacted by media. As for the viewer-choice point he makes, I ask the following: if all networks do the same (as they will all likely be doing as extra Ad-time = extra Ad-dollars) then where is a person with a remote control to switch to? ...
FULL STORY + COMMENTS
Posted by Rob Maguire on June 4, 2007 in
The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has announced an ultra-important public hearing scheduled for Fall 2007 to decide on foreign ownership regulations for media in Canada. The Commission is inviting written submissions – deadline July 18, 2007. All Canadians are invited to submit their recommendations and comments. Unfortunately, what usually happens is that most Canadians never hear of these public hearings and most of the submissions received by the CRTC are from industry representatives. This is a critical opportunity to intervene to ensure what few protections that do still exist for diversity in the Canadian broadcasting system remain in place, and maybe to re-invigorate and expand them.
Under the “diversity of voices” provisions of the Canadian Broadcast Act, the Canadian broadcast system is supposed to “ensure that the broadcasting system offers a diversity of voices...
FULL STORY + COMMENTS
Posted by Michael Lithgow on June 1, 2007 in
The Electronic Freedom Frontier has exposed a plan by the television industry to revamp television technology to severely limit viewers’ abilities to record and share programming. The Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB) is developing standards for television technology that will deliver up viewers’ rights on a digital copyright platter. So-called “screw the viewer” technology is being planned without public input of any kind. “These restrictions,” say the EFF, “will take away consumers' rights and abilities to use lawfully-acquired content so that each use can be sold back to them piecemeal.”
The DVB, founded in 1993, is a loose affiliation of Hollywood studios, major TV providers, broadcasters and technology companies. Since 2003, the DVP has been working on what they call Content Protection and Copy Management (CPCM) – a plan to manage consumer abilities to make recordings that would see:
* Enforcing severe home recording and copying limitations – technology that obeys and forbids copying of certain programs even for home use.
* Imposing controls on where you watch a program -- "geography controls" that prevent playback once you leave home or a particular locale.
* Breaking compatibility with devices. CPCM restricted media will also be able to carry blacklists and revoke compatibility with particular devices that don't enforce Hollywood's restrictions sufficiently.
“None of these restrictions need to be revealed in advance--you won't even know ahead of time whether and how you will be able to record and make use of particular programs or devices,” says the EFF. “The restrictions can be changed at the whim of the rights holder. It may be that today you can record your favorite program and transfer it to DVDs for long-term storage. But next week, you could be prevented from recording or archiving to DVD.”
For the full story, check out the full report on the EFF’s website.
Posted by Michael Lithgow on May 31, 2007 in
While a lot of art has been called pornography, is pornography necessarily art? Chanelle Gallant, manager of Toronto's Good For Her, who are organizing the Feminist Porn Awards thinks that “all cultural production is art”, regardless of whether that art is considered "good" or not.
Now in their second year, The Emmas (named for feminist godmother Emma Goldman), will be handing out more shiny glass butt plug trophies for films and videos in categories like Smutty School Teacher (for educational titles), Hottest Trans Sex Scene, Indie Porn Pioneer and Hottest Diverse Cast.
This celebration doesn't just recognize the good work being done by filmmakers and actors though - it's also continuing the discussion around pornography and women's role (or lack thereof) in the production of mainstream porn. The round table discussion this year includes Shine Louise Houston, director of The Crash Pad, SuperFreak and In Search of the Wild Kingdom (and the only queer woman of colour with a distribution deal as of yet), Anna Span, who has filmed more than 185 scenes in the U.K., Simone Valentino, actress extraordinaire in titles including AfroDite Superstar and The Bi Apple, and Peggy Comstock, who along with partner Tony Comstock produces raunchy documentaries with real-life couples.
While many more women and feminists are embracing pornography and erotic expression (with or without caveats) there is still plenty of debate surrounding issues of representation within dirty movies, with some question still to what an event like this hopes to achieve. All in all, Gallant says that the Feminist Porn Awards are set up with multiple goals in mind: “One, to celebrate feminist porn filmmakers who don't otherwise get much recognition for the fact that their work is feminist [...] and to let people know that they have choices when it comes to the porn that they watch. People think that what the mainstream porn industry offers is all that there is, but in fact there are a lot more options out there”. And with more events like the Feminist Porn Awards, more discussion, and more thoughtful, engaged, critical artists making hump films, the future for sexy and feminist porno looks pretty bright.
The Feminist Porn Awards will be doling out trophies, accolades, screenings and music Friday, June 1st at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. Tickets are $15 advance or $18 at the door, and can be purchased through Good For Her's website or at their store (175 Harbord Street).
Posted by Alison Lee on May 30, 2007 in
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