Wayne MacPhail’s interview with CIUT’s Take Five morning show from Wayne MacPhail on Vimeo.

Wood Frogs Singing Video

On Easter Sunday we happened on a group of wood frogs singing to mate. Great sound.

ebgb Graffiti Mural Video

Happened by on Easter Sunday when two young artists, Jordan and Shawn, were working on a new mural for the ebgb clothing store on Locke Street. They spent some time chatting with me as they worked.

My B&W video, Union Station

The nexus of Toronto commuters in the morning.

Portrait of a Journalist as a Digital Tourist

In the past month a handful of mainstream journalists have sojourned in the foreign territory that is Twitter. They were doing early reconnaissance for their reading publics in an attempt to make sense of a communications medium that is growing at a rate traditional media can only imagine in fevered and nostalgic wet dreams.

Ian Brown, a writer I greatly admire, got it into his head that people Twitter because they fear death. His column on the subject is behind a pay-firewall, the irony of which should not be ignored.

Margaret Wente, another large-brained columnist, followed a few high profile (and late-to-the-game) Twitterers and divined that nothing that passes for substance exists in their brief missives. [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090328.wcowent28/BNStory/specialComment/home]

But, Brown, Wente and other journalists who pop in on Twitter to see how the locals are doing, are just playing at digital tourism.

Digital tourism by journalists is nothing new. Its practitioners view Twitter, or facebook, or Second Life or role-playing games or whatever odd digital preoccupation has strummed the outer ganglia of the mass media nervous system in the same way Victorian tourists viewed the most remote of England’s far-flung colonies.

Certainly the natives are colourful, speak an amusing pidgin English and have quaint customs and beliefs, but, really, not our sort, dear.

And like Englishmen out in the noonday tropic sun, the digital tourist reporters mail back postcards and steamer trunks full of the oddities and curios seen and sampled; but not understood or truly explored. And so their travelogues contain more fancy and falsehood than genuine discovery and learning.

It has always been this way. Journalists come to believe they have the agile brains that allow them to quickly become experts on Afghan rape laws one day, tasers the next and serial shootings the day after.

It’s like the scene in the first Matrix movie when Trinity jumps into a helicopter and Neo asks her, “Do you know how to fly a helicopter?”.

“Not yet,” she responds and waits a moment while that expertise is downloaded to her brain and muscle memory.

General assignment reporters in newsrooms make their living by becoming instant and momentary experts ready to record the first draft of history while steeped in the transient mastery that passes for rich understanding.

Sometimes, often, that works just fine – or at least well enough that no one except the person or group covered notices. But equally as often, when it really matters, daily journalists often get stories terribly wrong and are, despite the rhetoric of correction, apt to repeat errors in the echo chamber of the wire service story and the archive.

Anyone who has tracked stories involving incidence rates for, say, chatroom pedophiles, knows that wildly incorrect data repeats like an onion sandwich once it hits print and the Web.

To make matters worse, many print journalists view the Web view as the place where morals, conscience, grammar and etiquette go to die. Exhibit One: Christie Blatchford’s recent spittle-soaked column which refers to the “grunting pig English of the Web” [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090323.wblatch23/BNStory/CHRISTIE+BLATCHFORD].

So, when journalists play not just expert, but digital tourist, their lack of real knowledge can be compounded by a preconception that the Web is a dark, threatening place – sort of like the Congo to our Victorian wanderers.

The result is that neither Wente nor Brown returned from their brief Twitter sojourns with much of value. Neither spent the time to go native, or even live with them before they wrote their pieces. Now here I must give Brown his due, he has stuck with Twitter after his column appeared, and good on him [http://twitter.com/BrownoftheGlobe]. I hope Brown follows up once he’s lived in country a while.

This is a time of fiscal restraint, certainly for newspapers. It’s time, I think, for editors to cancel all travel that involves digital tourism. And perhaps time to buck the trend, and spend the money on bureaus.

Review of Canon HF S100 Camcorder

Michael Badregon – Forest Firefighter, Brantford Character

Michael is a former forest fire fighter from Windsor. A life of drugs and drinking spiraled downhill for him after three relatives died rapidly, one after the other. These days he bums change on Colbourne Street in Brantford, Ontario. I spoke with him before one of my classes at Laurier.

My Interview with a Vampire

Jake G. Willis, a guy I met in Gore Park, Hamilton, today fancies himself a vampire. Jake obviously has a tenuous grasp on reality, but is remarkable at laying a narrative sidewalk in front of him while he’s in motion.

Emil and his Fabulous Suit

For the past two months I’ve had the pleasure of documenting the making of a custom suit with Emil Fusaro, a custom tailor here in Hamilton, Ontario. It was a simple arrangement – Emil would make me a suit, I would document it in video and put the videos on a WordPress site for him. We began with the consultation (picking of colour, style and fabric) and, as you can see from the video series, moved through every meticulous stage of the process until I got to wear the finished product.

It was a wonderful project for me as I had the privilege to capture on film what is, sadly, a fading profession. Emil is a true craftsman and a true Old World tailor. They don’t make them like him anymore. He began as a teenaged apprentice in Italy. In Italy, now, there are few, if any young tailors who will spend the next fifty years honing their precise art and craft.

I watched as Emil paid attention to the smallest detail of the suit, from the way the stripping of the fabric lined up perfectly on fabric that would go inside a pocket, to the perfect line of lapel. This suit wasn’t just made for me, it was handmade and moulded to every slant, curve and inequity of limb and stance I am victim to.

A good friend of mine, journalist and former Spectator fashion columnist Paul Benedetti, told me that everyone should have the pleasure of having a suit handmade for them at least once in his or her life. He’s right. This was a real pleasure for me and I will wear the suit with pride and with the knowledge that I got to spend time and become friends with a great craftsman. Thanks Emil.

The Sad Tale of Canadian Publishers and the Fear of e-Books

I recently attended the BookNet Canada Technology Summit. BookNet is a non-profit organization that helps Canada’s book publishers think through and use emerging technology. Many of them could use the help.

Book publishing in Canada has always been a bit of a mug’s game of small margins, big bets, scrawny long tails and bullying big box bookstores. Like the music business, it depends on often tawdry best sellers to prop up the little gems agents and the employees of small presses fall in love with. It is a risky game of compromise, hope – and fear.

Fear that U.S. publishers will ship directly into Canada and erode Canadian publishers’ purpose or revenue stream. Fear that a financially-frightened federal government will choke off the IV drip funding the industry depends on. And fear of e-books.

This will be the year of the e-book, in a variety of forms. E-books are, by the way, electronic books – devices that display text and make it possible to read on a screen rather than on a pulp page. The most famous right now is the Kindle 2 from Amazon. But Sony and other manufacturers have been making them for years, and selling them to nerdish early adopters who put up with dull screens, horrid interfaces and kludgy ways to stuff the silicon and plastic slabs full of creative writing.

E-readers these days are more elegant devices with quite lovely screens, easy book purchasing (via wireless in the case of the U.S.-only Kindle) and a geek-chic cache that is spreading rapidly. And, companies like Indigo, Lexcycle and others have developed software that turn Blackberries, iPhones and other mobile devices into very practical e-books as well.

I read Stanza books on my iPhone often and Indigo’s Shortcovers application and webstore brings popular titles to handhelds anywhere, anytime. Shortcovers even allows would-be-published authors to upload their own original content to the site and take a run at becoming a famous Canadian writer.

So, you would think a precarious industry would be all over e-books and their promise. And, the sense I got from the conference was that publishers are excited, but in the way you might be going on a date with a handsome biker, the scent of danger hovering near the ceiling like stale cigar smoke.

Here’s the problem. Getting authors’ books into e-book form means convincing authors that you should have the electronic rights to those books. Publishers have been sadly slow to do that. And, many authors aren’t willing to give them up (or even let the Kindle’s tinny computer voice read their work out loud). The American Authors Guild is foolishly fighting that like millworkers with clubs and pitchforks. There are exceptions, the brilliant Canadian author Cory Doctorov, for example is the anti-DRM posterboy [http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2005/07/copythat.php] and author Terry Fallis podcasts his own novel [http://terryfallis.com/]. They’re outliers.

And, the general retrograde resistance means publishers must  assure frighted old school authors that it’s okay to put their work on the “Internet” – that dark lair of pirates, scofflaws and bittorrenting fiends.

In order to placate authors, publishers lie to them and tell them that DRM (Digital Rights Management) or software locks, will keep their works safe and secure.

This is both patently untrue and beside the point. Anyone who wants to badly enough, can already pirate and bittorrent books even if they haven’t been put on the Web. You can ask Stephanie Meyer about that. She had the first 12 chapters of a draft of her book “Midnight Sun” pirated even though it was not in online form (and threw a bit of a hissy fit about it, btw).

But, the fear of piracy eroding actual sales appears, from early data presented at the conference by Brian O’Leary of Magellan Consulting Partners, to be greatly exaggerated. Most folks, given easy, unencumbered ways of buying content, will do just that. Look at the now non-DRM iTunes Music Store for evidence.

But, once again, like the music publishers, book folks are, out of fear and ignorance, misleading authors and denying readers free and clear access to the goods they’ve purchased – for no good reason.

The endgame? Tech-savvy authors will just end run the publishers and use social media to share their unencumbered work with their own networks of potential buyers. Indigo will go from being the object of love/hate to being a publisher in its own right. Meanwhile, Amazon will expand the reach of the Kindle beyond the borders of the U.S. and sell e-books directly to Canadians. Those will be sales Canadian publishers will get no credit for, or revenue from.

One rights agent I spoke with at the conference blamed the DRM situation on authors agents who demand it. Others blamed the authors themselves. Writers blame publishers. And so on. So, ironically, as e-books finally begin to gain mainstream traction, the industry that could most benefit has become the author, of its own misfortune.