Toronto Reading List

Reading one of my most favourite blogs, Spacing I came across this article on Dublin. The author makes a great point about Dublin being one city that lives most in the imaginations of people because of its importance in the English canon. Toronto is young and new comparatively so it doesn’t have the same pull on our imaginations but the author links to a great reading list on Toronto. Its from a course on literature and geography. I’m linking to it here for my own reference, more than anything.

YouTube and the Q

Every so often I tune into the ‘Q’. Q107, Toronto’s Rock Radio. I listen to it to see how radio is evolving. The Q used to be one of the most popular radio station in Toronto and represented the Rock life in Toronto. Or some I’m told by the T. I grew up in Sarnia listening to the Detroit Rock City equivalent of the Q.

Today, during my research (in case you were wondering this weekend’s theme on the Q is ‘Classic Rock Movies’) I heard the DJ mention his blog and that he had an entry on Van Halen. He said there was an unreleased VH1 video on a potential Diamond Dave – Hagar tour.

Intrigued I checked it out. The VH1 video he mentioned is from YouTube! It was unreleased by found its way onto YouTube.

There are two interesting aspects here. First that a radio DJ on Q107 ( the Q!) not the CBC is encouraging listeners to check out not just the Q website but his blog no less. And that the Q on their official site would post a YouTube video. It would seem that the media companies have mixed feelings on using content that they are not paying for if its on a website. Radio stations have to methodically log every track played to ensure that artists are compensated and in Canada to show that CanCon rules are being followed.

I think Q107’s use of YouTube on its site illustrates the increasing acceptance people have with video that is not truly licenced. To me, this is a sign that people will be less and less inclined to pay for any streaming content, if people in the industry are comfortable linking to YouTube. Because usually people in the industry are the most sensitive to the use of unlicenced or any content for which the artist will not be compensated. I wonder if they would or have in the past linked to any music videos on YouTube since music videos seem to be the most in contention currently.

Its also interesting to see the Q’s website. I think radio stations with a strong brand like Q107 have realized that if they are to survive past the next decade they need to expand and protect their brand online. There are over 7 blogs on the site, most from the key DJs and a ‘Rock Report’. Also there are audio clips of the most popular segments like ‘The Tool of the Day’ (one day it was Lord Black!)

Can the Q survive with this type of website to bolster the traditional radio broadcast? Possibly. Its certainly the best hope of survival. But by linking to YouTube, it makes me wonder, how much they are acknowledging that the ‘exclusive content’ the Q used to provide is going to become available outside their distribution control.

You can watch the video from the blog entry. But if you are in the mood for some Van Halen, I think far more interesting is this video clip.

What to Read Before You Die (c.1991)

Here is the original List of What To Read Before You Die. A highschool teacher I had put this together and here it is:

Swift – Gulliver’s Travels
Tolkein – The Lord of the Rings
Tolstoy – War and Peace
Cervantes- Don Quixote
Shakespeare – all his plays esp. tradgeies
Camus Strangers – The Plague
Sartre – No Exit, Being and Nothingness
Beckett – Waiting for Godot, Endgame
Malamud – The Fixer
Twain – Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn
Dickens – all of his books
Checkov – The Cherry Orchard
Orwell – Animal Farm, 1984
Golding - Lord of the Flies
Dostoyevsky – The Brothers of Karamazov
Solzhenitsyn – A Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich and anything else
Le Carre – The Spy who came in from the cold
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Romarque – All’s Quiet on the Western Fromt
Hesse – Steppenwoolf
James – What Maisy Knew
Huxley – Brave New World
Ford Maddox Ford – The Soldier
Virginia Wolf – To the Lighthouse
Faulkner –anything
Pynchon – anything
Conrad – Nostro or anything else
Joyce – Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Fielding – Tom Jones
Bronte – Wuthering Heights
Hardy – Mayor of Casterbridge

Non-fiction

The Bible
Plato’s republic
St Augustine City of God
Machiavelli – The prince
Hobbes – Leviathon
Locke – Second Treatise on Government
Rousseau Social Contract
Mill on Liberty
Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto
Zola – J’Accuse
McLuhan Understanding Media
Friedan – The Feminine Mystique
Paine – The Rights of Man
Burke – Reflections on the Revolution in France
Moore – Utopia
Tom Wolfe – anything