Cbc Times

Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television, the first anthology dedicated to analyses of Canadian television content, is a collection of original, interdisciplinary articles, combining textual analysis and political economy of communications. It explores the television that has thrived in the Canadian regulatory and cultural context: namely, programs that straddle the border between reality and fiction or even blur it. The conceptual basis of this collection is the hybrid nature of television fare: the widely theorized notion that all mediations of reality involve fiction in the form of narrative or symbolic shaping. Each of the contributions here is a reminder, too, of the significant relationship of television to nation building in Canada—to the imaginative work involved in thinking through the relations that constitute nations, citizens, and communities. The collection focuses on English-language Canadian television because the imperatives guiding its texts are markedly different from those pertaining to their French-lanugage counterparts. The collection, therefore, develops a nuance of perspective on the cultural and political economic specificities that inform the imaginative work of television production for English Canada.

The End of the CBC? is about three overlapping crises: the crisis that has enveloped the CBC, the crisis of news, and the crisis of democracy. The emergence of platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix, the hyper-targeting of individual users through data analytics, the development of narrow online identity communities, and the rise of an attention economy have changed the media landscape in dramatic ways. Describing the failure of successive governments to address problems faced by the public broadcaster, this book explains how the CBC lost its place in sports, drama, and entertainment. Taras and Waddell propose a way forward for the CBC – one in which the corporation concentrates its resources on news and current affairs and re-establishes a reputation for depth and quality.

A love letter from an Indigenous mother to her new baby Drawing from Indigenous creation stories and traditional teachings and illustrated in dazzling watercolors, I Sang You Down from the Starsis a tribute to the bond between mother and child. The narrator gathers gifts for a medicine bundle in anticipation of her baby's birth; a fluffy white eagle plume, bunches of cedar and sage, a quilted star blanket, and a small stone from the river. When the baby arrives, the mother shares the bundle with her child and reveals the importance of each item inside. But when her family comes to meet the new arrival, she realizes the baby arrived with gifts of its own and that the baby is also a sacred bundle: a baby bundle. Writing in simple, lyrical text, author Tasha Spillett-Sumner draws from her cultural heritage in order to celebrate Indigenous traditions and the universal nature of a mother's love.

From the earliest days when radio stages resembled funeral parlours to the frenzied coverage of royal tours and wartime broadcasting, the author presents the major events in Canadian radio.

Canadian composer Louis Applebaum devoted his life to the cultural awakening of his native land, and this "magnificent obsession" drove him to become a founder of the Canadian League of Composers and the Canadian Music Centre. He was an instrumental figure in the early development of the National Film Board, the Stratford Festival, and the National Art Centre in Ottawa. For nearly half a century he composed music for the Stratford Festival, television, radio, and films. This illustrated biography explores the man who was beloved by his fellow artists and the icon to whom every Canadian, knowingly or not, is indebted.

Mapping Canada’s Music is a selection of writings by the late Canadian music librarian and historian Helmut Kallmann (1922–2012). Most of the essays deal with aspects of Canadian music, but some are also autobiographical, including one written during retirement in which Kallmann recalls growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in 1930s Berlin under the spectre of Nazism. Of the seventeen selected writings by Kallmann, five have never before been published; many of the others are from difficult-to-locate sources. They include critical and research essays, reports, reflections, and memoirs. Each chapter is prefaced with an introduction by the editors. Two initial chapters offer a biography of Kallmann and an assessment of his contributions to Canadian music. The variety, breadth, and scope of these writings confirm Kallmann’s pioneering role in Canadian music research and the importance of his legacy to the cultural life of his adopted country. In the current climate of cuts to archival collections and services, the publication of these essays by and about a pre-eminent collector and historian serves as a timely reminder of the importance of cultural memory.

Using recent scholarship in ethnography and popular culture, Miller throws light on both what these series present and what is missing, how various long-standing issues are raised and framed differently over time, and what new issues appear. She looks at narrative arc, characterization, dialogue, and theme as well as how inflections of familiar genres like family adventure, soap opera, situation comedy, and legal drama shape both the series and viewers' expectations. Miller discusses Radisson, Forest Rangers and other children's series in the 1960s and early 1970s, as well as Beachcombers, Spirit Bay, The Rez, and North of 60 - series whose complex characters created rewarding relationships while dealing with issues ranging from addiction to unemployment to the aftermath of the residential school system.