I Get To Attend an Opening...Again

Ah yes, I remem­ber it well: The long lines in the Cam­brid­ge­side Gal­le­ria Mall, the T-Shirts for those nearer to the front of the line, the excite­ment as the doors finally opened… The Apple Store open­ing in Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts was one of the first ones that Apple had. We were used to the fact that although we weren’t Cuper­tino (or even San Fran­cisco), Cam­bridge was one of the East Coast cen­tres for Apple’s pres­ence. After all, in the early days of Mac­world Expo (and I doubt if many peo­ple who own an Apple prod­uct know this at this point), there was a West Coast Mac­world Expo in San Fran­cisco in Jan­u­ary and an East Coast Mac­world Expo in Boston, usu­ally dur­ing the hottest week in August. It wasn’t until that fate­ful day when Bill Gates’s 20-foot face appeared on the screen behind Steve Jobs dur­ing his keynote (and it was hissed by the crowd) that Steve made sure that there would be no more Mac­Worlds in Boston.

I know, I know, there were prob­a­bly other rea­sons, but Jobs’s annoy­ance at the dis­agree­ment of the Boston crowd with his strat­egy of hav­ing Microsoft invest in Apple dur­ing their dark­est hour prob­a­bly didn’t help the show. In the fol­low­ing year, Jobs refused to give the keynote, and the show moved to New York City. It con­tin­ued on a few years there at the Javitts Cen­ter, but atten­dance at that venue quickly petered out. As many have pointed out, the Inter­net can now dis­perse infor­ma­tion about prod­ucts far faster and far­ther than any show floor could. There is now only one Mac­World Expo, each Jan­u­ary, and it remains a San Fran­cisco tradition.

When we moved to Van­cou­ver, I missed that sense of being on Apple’s radar. Despite the fact that many here use the Mac (in fact, in recent years it’s increased), I found the local Cer­ti­fied Apple Deal­ers a bit ram­shackle, with rel­a­tively small vari­ety of periph­er­als and messy, poorly main­tained dis­play areas. My first job was work­ing for some­one who hated the Mac, and he was relieved when I didn’t insist that I use one in his small office (I would have been the only Mac user in the shop). At IBM, we all were assigned Thinkpads, of course. The con­sul­tants from Vic­to­ria often had Macs. At Blog­ger and smaller busi­ness events, the Mac was pre­dom­i­nant. Nev­er­the­less, the absence of the iPhone in Canada, the higher prices for prod­ucts, and con­stantly hear­ing the rumors that Apple Hated Canada didn’t help matters.

Our days of liv­ing in a rel­a­tively less impor­tant spot in the Apple uni­verse are about to end. On this com­ing Sat­ur­day morn­ing, I hope to be in line for the open­ing of the first Apple store in Van­cou­ver. We’ve been wait­ing for this for some time. Its going to be in the heart of down­town, at the Pacific Cen­tre Mall (actu­ally the pre­vi­ous loca­tion of Holt Ren­frew, a high end Depart­ment Store, who have moved into new digs nearby). I believe that it’s only the fifth store in Canada, with the other three in Toronto and one in Laval.

To put things in a bit of per­spec­tive, another Apple store opened in Boston (across the river from Cam­bridge, but cer­tainly near our old home) last week. It’s the largest Apple Store in the world, tak­ing up three floors and sport­ing an all glass facade, on Boyl­ston Street. Oh well, I guess Boston still looms larger in Apple’s realm, but at least we’re no longer off the map.

Woo hoo! Airborne Swine Sighted!

This morn­ing I awoke to some incred­i­ble (and I mean this in the true sense of the word; I can scarcely believe it) news:

Rogers Issues State­ment on the Apple iPhone

TORONTO, April 29 /CNW/ — Ted Rogers, Pres­i­dent and Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer of Rogers Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc. today issued the fol­low­ing state­ment:
We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year. We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.

About Rogers Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc.
Rogers Com­mu­ni­ca­tions is a diver­si­fied Cana­dian com­mu­ni­ca­tions and media
com­pany. We are engaged in wire­less voice and data com­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices
through Wire­less, Canada’s largest wire­less provider and the oper­a­tor of the
country’s only Global Sys­tem for Mobile Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (“GSM”) based net­work.
Through Cable and Tele­com we are one of Canada’s largest providers of cable
tele­vi­sion, cable tele­phony and high-speed Inter­net access, and are also a
full-service, facilities-based telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions alter­na­tive to the
tra­di­tional tele­phone com­pa­nies. Through Media, we are engaged in radio and
tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ing, tele­vised shop­ping, mag­a­zines and trade pub­li­ca­tions,
and sports enter­tain­ment. We are pub­licly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange
(TSX: RCI.A and RCI.B), and on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: RCI). For
fur­ther infor­ma­tion about the Rogers group of com­pa­nies, please visit
www.rogers.com.

Yes folks, Hell has offi­cially frozen over.

But wait… let’s see: “later this year” could mean any­thing between April 30^th to Decem­ber 31^st. So the longest I’ll have to wait will be 8 months. I guess that’s good news. I have to admit, this did look like an April Fool’s post­ing that is 28 days too late.

At the very least, we’ll see an end to the hand-wringing and cries of Why does Apple hate Canada? on so many of the web sites here.

The other thing you can be sure of in Life, besides Death...

That does it. From now on, I stop try­ing to do this myself and get an accountant.

When we lived in Boston, we had a com­pli­cated tax sit­u­a­tion. I was fre­quently work­ing as a con­sul­tant, and worked with an accoun­tant who knew us like fam­ily, but even­tu­ally left the busi­ness (Genevieve, wher­ever you are and what­ever you are doing, I hope you’re happy) to make sure that I could make the right deduc­tions, amor­tize the depre­ci­a­tion of equip­ment pur­chases, and fig­ure out when it was best to pay esti­mated tax vs. go nearly broke in late April.

I though that after we moved to Canada it would get sim­pler, and up until this past year, it was. I had mostly income from one employer, and we didn’t do much in the way of retire­ment invest­ing (hey, when you don’t have much income from a pre­vi­ous year, you can’t sock much away in an RRSP — what used to be a 401K for us). There was no notion of a joint return here and the forms even looked a lit­tle sim­pler, I think.

In 2007, that all changed, and I should have real­ized this fact a while back, but pro­cras­ti­na­tion of tax prep is some­thing I’ve done all my life. When you’re a self-employed per­son and keep­ing your money in your account as long as pos­si­ble is your goal, fil­ing taxes early never makes much sense, unless you pre­fer the plea­sure of not scram­bling on April 14^th (the tax dead­line day for the US) . So, after 7 or so hours of agony, I’ve decided that it is just too damned hard to do my own return any more. I used some soft­ware, Tax­Tron — which was pretty hard to use, but which did the cal­cu­la­tions, but the ques­tions were still cryp­tic (CNIC? QPP/CPP pen­sion­able earn­ings? Coti­sa­tions de l’employé au RPC? Huh?). I’m prob­a­bly going to file an amended return for this past year’s mess after May 1, and for sure next year it will be under the care­ful guid­ance of a CGA (That’s what a CPA became after the move). I’ve learned my les­son. Now, if I could only get my Sun­day refunded back to me, since I worked yes­ter­day, albeit for the last time for a while. So much for a Spring weekend.

An Answer to One of my Protests

OK, I real­ize that I’m becom­ing a bit of a bro­ken record, and I promise that these post­ings about the CBC are reach­ing an end. After all, each of us have to ‘get a life’.

Nev­er­the­less, I couldn’t resist post­ing this, because it shows just how the blather the CBC spouts about mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and other BS is being used so that these peo­ple can get their way, a commercial-style radio net­work with next to no chal­leng­ing or intel­lec­tual content.

Here’s the back­ground: In addi­tion to my let­ter to the CBC, I left a sub­mis­sion at the ‘Con­tact Us’ form on the CBC Web site, and here’s what I got in today’s email :

Dear David Drucker,
Thank you for your email about upcom­ing changes to the week­day sched­ule of CBC Radio 2. We’re enthu­si­as­tic about the changes being planned. It’s good news for all Cana­dian per­form­ers and all Cana­dian lis­ten­ers. How­ever, we know some peo­ple have mis­con­cep­tions of why we are mak­ing these changes and how the new sched­ule will look.

The ques­tion fac­ing CBC is whether we use Radio 2 to reflect excel­lence in all Cana­dian music and musi­cians or just a part of the indus­try; and whether we serve a broad spec­trum of Cana­dian lis­ten­ers or just of a por­tion of the audience.

Allow us to pro­vide you with a lit­tle back­ground to the proposals.

First, we rec­og­nize the qual­ity and pub­lic value of “seri­ous” music. Clas­si­cal music will remain the most broadly rep­re­sented form on Radio 2 while we expand the spec­trum to include other forms of music for adult Cana­dian listeners.

Next, it may inter­est you to know that Cana­dian per­form­ers of all stripes release about 30,000 pieces of music every year. Less than 1 per cent of those receive reg­u­lar air­play on com­mer­cial radio sta­tions. The rich diver­sity of Cana­dian music and musi­cians is clearly not being heard on Cana­dian air­waves. Music gen­res for which Canada is famous through­out the world cur­rently have lit­tle expo­sure on CBC Radio’s music network.

Since CBC’s man­date charges us to “reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audi­ences, (and) actively con­tribute to the flow and exchange of cul­tural expres­sion” as well as “reflect the mul­ti­cul­tural and mul­tira­cial nature of Canada” the pub­lic broadcaster’s adult music net­work must be a home for these artists and this music.

Finally, we also believe there will still be some lis­ten­ers who desire noth­ing but clas­si­cal, or jazz, or adult singer-songwriters. So, this fall, CBC Radio will be launch­ing three 24-hour-a-day web radio ser­vices to serve each niche exclu­sively. Obvi­ously we would rather have a full FM net­work for each genre, but since that is not pos­si­ble, the online solu­tion is another option for Canadians.

Radio 2 is now and will be remain a music net­work for adult Cana­di­ans. Our val­ues of thought­ful­ness in pre­sen­ta­tion and excel­lence in per­for­mance remain intact. Our com­mit­ment to offer an alter­na­tive on the dial con­tin­ues. The kind of lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence will not change; the music high­lights will just come from a broader spectrum.

We’re pas­sion­ate about Cana­dian music. Radio 2 will be the only place to truly reflect the incred­i­ble breadth and depth of tal­ent that exists in this country.

Again, thank you for writ­ing. We look for­ward to your feed­back when the new shows are intro­duced in the fall.

Ray Rusk
Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Offi­cer
CBC Audi­ence Relations

I’m get­ting the stan­dard party line I’ve seen in other media: Clas­si­cal doesn’t rep­re­sent true Canada; We’re not cut­ting out Clas­si­cal music (or now an even bet­ter sub­tle insult: ‘Seri­ous’ music; gee, why don’t they call it ‘Long-hair music’ or ‘Egghead music’); we’re just mak­ing sure that every­one is rep­re­sented, so Clas­si­cal Music has to go to make room for the other Cana­dian artists. That bit about ’30,000 pieces of music’ is, I sus­pect, plucked from thin air.

Never mind that the myth­i­cal ‘audi­ence’ they are talk­ing about (instead of ‘por­tion of that audi­ence’) doesn’t exist. The peo­ple who lis­ten to Radio 2 by def­i­n­i­tion lis­ten to Clas­si­cal Music because if the CBC didn’t broad­cast that, they wouldn’t lis­ten to Radio 2. The alter­na­tive to Radio 2 is, let me see…Oh right: noth­ing.

Never mind that Cana­dian com­posers and Cana­dian Clas­si­cal Music are going to con­tinue to be phased out of the air­waves. The biggest bald-faced lie in the email is this one: Clas­si­cal music will remain the most broadly rep­re­sented form on Radio 2 …

Sorry, pop­u­lar light clas­sics from the hours of 10AM through 3PM, when no one but home-bound seniors will hear them is not ‘most broadly represented’.

To under­stand just how much the oppo­site of ‘most broadly rep­re­sented’ is, here are some facts not men­tioned in the let­ter:

The CBC Young Com­posers Com­pe­ti­tion has not been held since March 9, 2003. It, as well as the CBC Young Per­form­ers Com­pe­ti­tion have been sus­pended for the past four years. The Canada Coun­cil pro­vided the fund­ing for the $10,000.00 grand prize.

The CBC set the clas­si­cal music bud­get for CBC Records to 0 in Feb­ru­ary 2008, pre­cisely on the eve of their first Grammy win by Cana­dian vio­lin­ist James Ehnes and the Van­cou­ver Sym­phony Orches­tra under Bramwell Tovey on the CBC Records label. That’s right; the first Grammy win, and these guys get rid of the record­ing label. Many Clas­si­cal Music per­form­ers launched their careers on a CBC Records label recording.

The com­mis­sion­ing bud­get pre­vi­ously devoted to com­mis­sion­ing new works from com­posers is now spread out to cover jazz, pop musi­cians, and some unspec­i­fied amount of con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music.

CBC can­celled Two New Hours, a multiple-award win­ning pro­gram that was aired for two hours a week in the incred­i­bly prime time slot of Sun­days 10pm to mid­night. This pro­gram was ded­i­cated to the music of liv­ing Cana­dian com­posers. It was can­celled in March 2007 in its 29^th year.

CBC can­celled Music For A While, which aired clas­si­cal music daily from 6pm to 8pm.

CBC can­celled In Per­for­mance the flag­ship Clas­si­cal con­certs program.

The CBC dis­banded the CBC Radio Orches­tra: North America’s 70-year old last remain­ing radio orches­tra and plat­form for count­less pre­mieres of new Cana­dian com­po­si­tions cit­ing lack of resources. The next day, they ran a full-page ad in the Globe and Mail cost­ing an esti­mated $30,000 to con­vince us of the same party line that I was read in the let­ter. It’s worth not­ing that there was not a sin­gle clas­si­cal music (com­poser or per­former) listed in the ad. Instead, the rep­re­sen­ta­tion was pri­mar­ily from com­mer­cial record­ing labels and oth­ers involved in pop­u­lar music.

That bit about a ‘web’ sta­tion is utterly ridicu­lous as well.  Will I be able to lis­ten to the web sta­tion in the car or on the Sky­train? Will I have to rig up a com­puter in the bed­room so I can wake up to it in the morn­ing? Will kids in school who have never been exposed to Clas­si­cal Music dis­cover their Internet-based sta­tion?  Maybe in 5–10 years we’ll have per­va­sive Inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity so that stream­ing audio is avail­able at all times, includ­ing while trav­el­ing at decent qual­ity, and is next to free for all, but not today. Like mag­a­zines that stop print­ing paper edi­tions and only pub­lish on the web, putting most of the CBC’s Clas­si­cal Music solely on the Inter­net is pretty much get­ting rid of it from main­stream listeners.

It’s sick­en­ing to be read a party line that is disin­gen­u­ous at best. That bit about mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism is a smoke-screen.  Do you think they are going to be play­ing a lot of Pak­istani and Chi­nese music? ( And isn’t ironic that so many Chi­nese are huge fans of Clas­si­cal music and are build­ing con­cert halls like mad in China while the CBC takes it away from lis­ten­ers in Richmond?).

If the CBC says that peo­ple like me ‘just don’t get it’, that ‘The kind of lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence will not change; the music high­lights will just come from a broader spec­trum’ and should sim­ply lis­ten to web radio, what they really mean is that they are sim­ply inter­ested in mak­ing more money — just like they do on TV by air­ing ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ — by pre­tend­ing to be ‘mul­ti­cul­tural’, and then run­ning a com­mer­cial Easy Lis­ten­ing sta­tion. The pat­tern they’ve fol­lowed from the last 3 years plainly shows it.

The Sound of More Silence

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse with the CBC, they prove me wrong. This morn­ing, I lit­er­ally awoke to this news story:

CBC kills radio orches­tra
Vancouver-based group last of its type in North Amer­ica
Lloyd Dykk, Van­cou­ver Sun
Pub­lished: Fri­day, March 28, 2008

VANCOUVER — The Vancouver-based CBC Radio Orches­tra — the last radio orches­tra left in North Amer­ica — is dead.

The head of CBC Radio music, Mark Stein­metz, flew from Toronto Thurs­day to tell the orchestra’s 35 free­lance musi­cians that the orches­tra will be dis­banded in Sep­tem­ber, key play­ers in the Van­cou­ver music scene said.
Stein­metz met with the musi­cians at a late after­noon meet­ing at the Geor­gian Court Hotel, which is near the down­town CBC build­ing. Reporters were barred from the meet­ing.
Colin Miles, head of the Cana­dian Music Cen­tre, an orga­ni­za­tion that pro­motes Cana­dian com­posers, said his under­stand­ing was that Stein­metz con­sid­ered axing the orches­tra an inter­nal CBC mat­ter and had no plans for a pub­lic meet­ing fol­low­ing the session.

The CBC Radio Orches­tra was founded by John Avi­son in 1938 and has had an illus­tri­ous his­tory.
It orig­i­nally con­sisted of 25 musi­cians and was increased to 35 in 1952.
Its other con­duc­tors were the Eng­lish­man John Eliot Gar­diner and Mario Bernardi. Quebec’s Alain Trudel has held the reins of the orches­tra for the past two years.

The orches­tra does only eight con­certs a year, but that’s irrel­e­vant, Miles said. “If they’re cost­ing so lit­tle, why get rid of it when it’s a national treasure?”

Richard Kurth, head of the Uni­ver­sity of B.C.’s school of music, called the loss of the orches­tra “a tragic event, both cul­tur­ally and eco­nom­i­cally, for the musi­cal life of the region and of the nation.”
He said he feels that being the last radio orches­tra in North Amer­ica has to be put in con­text — radio orches­tras con­tinue to play vital roles in Euro­pean nations, he said, and that shows peo­ple do lis­ten to them.

“The CBC is appar­ently plan­ning to use the money to record and broad­cast other Cana­dian orches­tras,” Kurth said. “We … have to wait to see whether they would actu­ally do that, beyond the degree to which they already do.… They were cut­ting the orches­tra just as it entered a period of renewed vital­ity with a dynamic new conductor.”

“This is the most impor­tant orches­tra in the coun­try, with a 70-year his­tory,” Miles said. “What the CBC is doing to their man­date is what [U.S. Pres­i­dent George] Bush is doing to the constitution.”

After news of the CBC meet­ing leaked, Miles orga­nized a rally of local musi­cians in the lobby of the Geor­gian Court Hotel. The approx­i­mately 40 peo­ple who showed up included musi­cal heavy­weights such as Bramwell Tovey, con­duc­tor of the Van­cou­ver Sym­phony Orches­tra, and music lovers such as Mary Lou Hen­ley, one of the city’s top arts patrons. As for­mer CBC Radio Orches­tra cel­list Ian Hamp­ton described it, the loss of the orches­tra was only the next log­i­cal step in the “dumb­ing down” of the pub­lic network.

The loss of the orches­tra comes as lit­tle sur­prise to Vancouver’s music com­mu­nity. In recent months, the CBC has killed such clas­si­cal music shows as Music for a While and In Performance.

Despite my shock and sad­ness on los­ing clas­si­cal music on CBC Radio 2, I could say that this doesn’t sting quite as much, and feels a bit like ‘the other shoe drop­ping’ (i.e. the inevitable follow-on to what’s been hap­pen­ing to date). I did hear the CBC as recently as last year, when they played a bril­liant per­for­mance of Shostakovich’s Piano Con­certo No. 1 with my child­hood friend Sarah Davis Buech­ner as soloist. Alain Trudel, who I believe was indeed that ‘dynamic’ con­duc­tor Miles spoke of, was the con­duc­tor of that con­cert and is indeed a bril­liant tal­ent. I hope he doesn’t leave the coun­try to pur­sue his career (although that seems likely). The fact that the CBC was based in Van­cou­ver means that the musi­cal life of this city is affected even more than most of Canada.

Clearly, some­one in the CBC has it in for Clas­si­cal Music and peo­ple who lis­ten to it. Their reign of ter­ror is far from over. Appro­pri­ately enough, this day in late March, it’s snow­ing like crazy. Metaphoric frozen tears do match my mood.