• The Fire Theft @ The Mod Club, June 5
• The Fiery Furnaces @ The Mod Club, June 19 (the Mod Club will be very much about fire in June, it seems…)
• Ted Leo/Pharmacists @ The Horseshoe, June 21

Canada’s Tragically Hip have decided file sharing is bad for their wallets.

The group (with absolutely NO help from their label, Universal Music, or the CRIA) point out that during March 30 to May 7 there were more than half a million ‘unauthorized’ attempts to download their new single, Vaccination Scar.

Tragically Hip is one of the biggest selling Canadian bands ever, with all that implies

“The grim economic reality aside, it shows how widespread the practice of downloading has become,” says the band’s Gord Sinclair.

But Hey! “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “Anything that gets people into music is okay with me, but at some point people have to recognize their role in the creative process. To me it’s an ethical question.”

In the same puff piece, Jann Arden (?) “reacted to the news”, saying,

“Downloading music from the Internet is ironically the hope, and alarmingly the impending decay and destruction, of the music industry. Unless these downloads are monitored and artists are compensated for their work, there will be NO work to download. None of us, as writers and performers, can afford to keep making the music that has always, and will always, make the world a little easier to swallow in troubled times.

“We cannot play if we are not paid.”

There you go.

No pay, no play.

In other words, the musical arts depend absolutely on the dollar. Or franc. Or pfennig. Or whatever.

No way.

The Barenaked Ladies’ Ed Robertson also wades in with, “I’m totally fine with people downloading music, as long as they steal everything that they want. If you want pants, go steal them. If you need gas in your car, you should steal it, because you can. As long as people are consistent I don’t have a problem. As long as they see themselves as thieves in general then I don’t mind if they steal everything that they like. But it irks me that it’s only okay to steal music.”

And to cap it off Brian Robertson, the president of the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America), says grimly:

“It underlines, again, the vulnerability of our artists, creators and producers to the lawlessness of the Internet in Canada and the need for federal politicians and bureaucrats to move far more expeditiously than they have in the past to update Canada’s woefully inadequate Copyright Act.”

But while Robertson & Co are singing the blues, in terms of their careers, “more artists say free music downloading online has helped them than hurt them,” says a Pew report here.

“Fully 83% of those in the survey say they provide free samples or previews of their music online. And strong pluralities say free downloading has a payoff for them. For instance, 35% of them say free downloading has helped their careers and only 5% say it has hurt. Some 30% say free downloading has helped increase attendance at their concerts, 21% say it has helped them sell CDs or other merchandise; and 19% say it has helped them gain radio playing time for their music. Only fractions of them cite any negative impact of downloading on those aspects of their work.

“Some 60% of people surveyed say they don’t think the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) suits against online music swappers will benefit musicians and songwriters. Those who earn the majority of their income from music are more inclined than ‘starving musicians’ to back the RIAA, but even those very committed musicians don’t believe the RIAA campaign will help them. Some 42% of those who earn most of their income from their music do not think the RIAA legal efforts will help them, while 35% think those legal challenges will ultimately benefit them.”

And Oh Yeh – wasn’t Universal Music one of the labels that, following a two-year investigation by New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s office, was ordered to return $50 million to musicians they’ve had under contract.

Spitzer’s office found many artists and writers weren’t being paid royalties because record companies “had failed to maintain contact with the performers and had stopped making required payments”.

Finally, the CRIA (and, hence, its owners, the Big Five record labels) recently suffered an embarrassing defeat when it failed to convince a Canadian federal court that online file sharing is illegal and is “devastating” the multi-billion dollar music industry.

from P2Pnet: Tragically Hip’s money troubles

From a Nov 2003 Guardian interview with the Fiery Furnaces: “Closing track We Got Back the Plague suggests that a brief outbreak of bubonic plague in New York last November was divine retaliation for George Bush’s increased majority in the recent mid-term elections.”

Guardian interview

…I think it would be Jon Stewart, Corin Tucker and Bill O’Reilly.

‘Cause even though Jon and Corin are only little, I’m pretty sure the three of us could beat the shit out of Bill O’Reilly. Give him the bootfucking of a lifetime, as it were.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Would somebody please just kill off David Palmer already? No one cares about his storyline this year. Better yet, kill off Sherry. She’s the one who keeps producing the screwball comedy plotlines.

While we’re at it, let’s just kill off Kim, Tony, Chloe, Michelle and Wayne as well. Just let Jack run around and shoot/beat/kick/smash the crap out of everyone.

I swear, I’m a pacifist. Honest. All I ask is that you don’t mess up my favourite TV shows, and don’t bounce the basketball through T-Bone’s legs.

From BBC News: Man sent gun in internet mix-up

A Canadian student who ordered an MP3 player over the internet from the US was shocked to receive a licensed handgun instead.

Brandon Buchan, 21, an English student at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, bid for the MP3 player on eBay, the Star Phoenix newspaper said.

The pawnshop that auctioned the device sent him an unloaded .22-calibre Smith & Wesson gun and a licence by mistake.

A Canadian customs official said not all parcels were X-rayed at the border.

‘I’m no hit man’

The package, sent by courier, was labelled as containing an MP3 player.

“I was really shocked to see it was a gun,” Mr Buchan told the newspaper.

“I’m not a hit man. I was mostly confused about it all. I thought ‘How did this end up here?’, and I figured it must just be a mistake.”

The third-year student called the police, who removed the weapon.

He also e-mailed the shop, who are arranging for his MP3 player to be sent to him.

Mr Buchan says he is keeping a photocopy of the gun licence as a souvenir of the incident.

Applicants for firearm licences in Canada are subject to background checks, and all firearms must be registered.

We rented 3 DVDs from the excellent Bay Street video this weekend:

Master and Commander was better than I expected. It had been built up so much, oscar nominations and all, that I half-expected Gladiator on water. But it steered away from cheesiness, for the most part, and the superhuman heroism was kept to a minimum. There were sections of dialogue that I missed completely, but the visuals more than made up for it. I was also surprised — pleasantly — by how the action in the movie was balanced with tension…single-ship naval battles back then were less like standing in and trading blows than they were like chases over hundreds or thousands of miles. A perfectly good weekend time-killer.

House Of Sand And Fog was bleak and beautiful. Or bleakly beautiful. Or beautiful because it was bleak. Or all of the above. Ben Kingsley seemed mildly over the top about 2% of the time, but spectacular the other 98%. Speaking of spectacular, Jennifer Connelly is becoming an excellent actor (I just didn’t like A Beautiful Mind, I guess, since I was never that impressed with her performance, nor with Russell Crowe’s, and she sucked in the Hulk), and she seems to have recovered from her heroin-thin stage to become ridiculously gorgeous again. She’s right up there with Salma Hayek now. Anyhoo, back to the movie: the ending was too contrived, but the first 3/4 of the movie were very good…even the visuals that broke up the scenes…shots of fogbanks rolling into San Francisco, clouds, ocean, sunsets…all gorgeous shots to break up the ugliness and misunderstanding. I could sympathize with both main characters, but also got angry at how they acted. Sounds like all the Israel/Palestine documentaries we watched last week…

The Cooler was one we wanted to see last year at the Film Festival, but it conflicted with something else. Alec Baldwin deserves all the accolades he got for his role, William H. Macy…is just always, always good. Always. And Maria Bello surprised me; all I could remember her from was Coyote Ugly, which wasn’t exactly The Godfather. In this, she seemed girlish and world-weary at the same time. Hopeful yet beaten.

All in all, a good movie-watching weekend (and a good weekend for movie watching…it’s been cold, grey and shitty outside all three days). And it was all topped off by a Team Canada comeback win against Sweden to claim the world hockey championship. The juggernaut rolls on…

from Now Magazine: Molson Amphitheatre, Aug 6.

The good: Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, The Flaming Lips, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Von Bondies, Modest Mouse, Gomez, Le Tigre, The Walkmen, Elbow, Broken Social Scene
The bad: Morrissey
The I don’t really know/care: String Cheese Incident, Polyphonic Spree, The Coup, Bumblebeez 81, The Datsuns, The Thrills, The Secret Machines, Sound Tribe Sector 9, Wheat

From CBC: report: Conservatives want Don Cherry to run in federal election

What are the Tories thinking? Just as they get some momentum because of the sponsorship “scandal”, just as they have enough pull to actually accomplish something in the next election, they show themselves to be (in the words of Wayne Gretzky) a Mickey Mouse organization. First you elect Peter McKay, then you bend over for the Alliance party, and now you want to recruit an illiterate xenophobe. Bravo.

Is this the equivalent of American politicians aiming for the Nascar dad swing vote?

• My only must-watch shows: 24, The Daily Show, Sportsdesk
• The best show that never seems to be on: The Shield
• The best show that’s already wrapped up and out on DVD: The Office
• The show I’m only holding on to out of loyalty: The West Wing
• Shows I’d be addicted to if I had HBO: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and probably The Wire
• The only reality TV show I can tolerate: The Amazing Race
• Shows I watch if I have nothing else to do: ER, Law & Order, Jeopardy, South Park
• Constant re-runs that I use as time-fillers: Simpsons, old Law & Order
• What I spend most of my time watching, September through June: hockey & basketball