Migrating Landscapes explores unsettling first encounters with the Canadian landscape and building forms.
Canadian identity
Reimagine CBC: Canadians come together to think big in troubled times
In late January, a small team gleaned from the ranks of Vancouver-based citizens' organizations OpenMedia.ca and Leadnow.ca took the wraps off an exciting new project called Reimagine CBC. The goal was simple, but ambitious: to spark a massive brainstorm on the future of public media in Canada by asking Canadians how the CBC, as a public broadcaster, could be reimagined as a leader in participatory, innovative and engaging media production.
Migrating Landscapes exhibit opens in Toronto's Brookfield Place
Migrating Landscapes was inspired by the individual experiences of architects Johanna Hurme (born in Finland), her business partner Sasa Radulovic (born in the former Yugoslavia) and colleague Jae-Sung Chon (born in South Korea), collectively known as the Migrating Landscapes Organizer or MLO. All three are first-generation immigrants, who, like most new Canadians, had unsettling encounters with the very different Canadian landscape and building forms as they settled into their new country.
Feeling Canadian: Book Launch & Reading by Marusya Bociurkiw
Feb 16 2012 - 7:30pm
Location
Aqua Books
274 Garry Street
Winnipeg, MB Canada
49° 53' 35.9988" N, 97° 8' 25.9728" W
See map: Google Maps
"My name is Joe, and I AM Canadian!" How did a beer ad become a
national anthem? When did Olympic opening ceremonies become an
advertisement for national superiority? What do toques and canoes have
to do with nationalism? Canadian couch potatoes need wonder no longer.
This book by award-winning Toronto-based author, media theorist,
filmmaker and professor Marusya Bociurkiw examines how affect
(passionate sites of feeling) and consumerism work together to produce
shows like Canada A Peoples' History, North of 60, and television
coverage of the 2010 Olympics. As Canadian TV expert Michelle Byers
writes, "Providing anecdotes that most readers will be very familiar
with, Bociurkiw's analysis situates us firmly within the context of
Contact name:
Leslie
Contact email:
Canadian cultural nationalism lives
Consider this a delayed obituary for McClelland & Stewart, "The Canadian Publishers," which effectively expired this month after a lengthy decline in the care of several owners and convoluted arrangements. They waited till the firm's 100th anniversary had passed -- a full week. Our question is: does this also mark the demise of Canadian cultural nationalism?
The making of a Canadian: The Golden Age of CBC radio and me
The recent Sunday Morning Program's celebration of 75 years of CBC radio -- as hosted by Michael Enright -- was a lovely reminder of this octogenarian's romance with radio.
It started, oddly enough, with Marvel Comics. Every issue had a full page ad on the back cover from a mail-order store in Detroit which sold novelties such as joy buzzers and whoopee cushions. Near the bottom of the page was a little box with the copy: "Crystal Radio -- Really Works! -- 25 cents." I don't recall how the shipping and handling was accounted for. But I taped a U.S. quarter to my order and stuck a three-cent stamp on the envelope.
Canada as the India of the new world
Columbus made history's most famous mistake when he called the people his lookout had sighted Indians, and thought he'd arrived on the outskirts of India. The late Vancouver humorist Eric Nicol caught the jumble nicely. When Columbus heard the cry "Indians!", wrote Nicol, he ordered his three ships to form a circle with the women and children in the middle, like a wagon train in a Hollywood western. So the women and children all started drowning.
The 'boob tube' and feelin' Canadian
Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism, and Affect
(Wilfrid Laurier University Press,
2011;
$32.95)
Feeling Canadian, by academic and filmmaker Marusya Bociurkiw, explores the impact of television and corporate culture on Canadian identity.
Bociurkiw's book is not organized as a linear argument aimed at proving a thesis, however. Instead, she examines specific "traumatic points" in televised Canadian history. The cultural artifacts and traumatic points studied include the television shows A People's History of Canada and Loving Spoonfuls, the Molson Canadian television commercial "The Rant" featuring Joe Canadian and Pierre Trudeau's funeral. She studies these shows in order to determine how much the elusive Canadian identity is simply a product of commercial culture.
Election 2011: Deconstructing the myth of Canadian exceptionalism
If you dare to tell a Canadian that they live essentially in a colder, under populated version of the United States expect a string of vehement -- however polite -- rebuttals. But aside from the friendly border patrol running along the 49th parallel, what distinguishes us from "the land of the free, home of the brave"?
