Category Archives: Pop Culture

Arts Friday | Netflix | A Millennial Redefinition of Pop Culture

October 26, 2018A & E, Media, Netflix, Pop Culture, TelevisionRaymond Tomlin

Yesterday at noon, VanRamblings had lunch with eastside activist Jak King.
A short ways into the conversation, Jak raised the topic of The Bodyguard, Britain’s biggest TV hit in years, attracting a record 17.1 million viewers for each episode of the crime series’ 6 episodes, now available on Netflix. Once Jak had read The Guardian’s five-star review of The Bodyguard, he set about to binge-watch the first five episodes of the hit BBC TV series.

Richard Madden as David Budd and Keeley Hawes as the home secretary, Julia Montague

The previous evening, meaning to take a brief break from our writing, we checked into the propulsive series, finding ourselves transfixed.

And that’s the way it is with Netflix, the must-have streaming service.
Eleven thousand first run films are available on Netflix, 20% of which are made in-house by Netflix (that figure will rise to 80% by 2020), with 7,500 TV series from across the globe available for your viewing pleasure 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No wonder Netflix won an unprecedented 23 Emmy’s at this year’s Academy of Television Arts & Sciences ceremony.

Netflix will début 57 new original shows and movies in November.

September and October of this year were two of the most impressive months Netflix subscribers have ever experienced when it comes to Netflix’s original content — including Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Maniac, just one of 52 different original shows and movies released by Netflix in September.
Débuting today on the Netflix streaming service, just in time for Hallowe’en, the well-reviewed The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, starring the heart of the AMC TV series Mad Men, Kiernan Shipka, as the titular teenage witch, the updated story a far cry from the days of Melissa Joan Hart’s frothy TV sitcom, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the new story something to scream about wrapped as it is in a moody, dark, funny, and stylishly atmospheric package that could be not be a better herald of fall and the Halloween season. Definitely a series to binge & watch with friends.
In addition to the horror genre (The Haunting of Hill House débuted earlier in the month), Netflix has also become the home of a genre of film that once was a Hollywood staple: romantic comedies, those mid-range cost films that generally found an audience, largely female, that Hollywood no longer seems to be interested in. Thank goodness, then, that Netflix has stepped up to the plate.

In August, the neglected genre was brought to new life with the streaming hits Set It Up, The Kissing Booth and To All The Boys I Loved Before, the latter (made in B.C.) an online sensation, featuring two winning new stars, Lana Condor & Noah Centineo, making legions of new fans not only for the young stars, whose careers have catapulted into the stratosphere, but for Netflix, which continues to gain a half million new subscribers each month.
Whatever your favourite film genre — action adventure, sci-fi / speculative fiction, foreign film, Oscar winners, British films, animation, family & children’s films, classic movies, crime thrillers, faith and spirituality, film noir, indie films, plus another 100 film genres — Netflix has you covered. Starting at only $8.99 a month that makes for not a bad film lovers deal.

The Future is Female | World Wide | The Revolution is Upon Us

July 2, 2018A & E, Pop Culture, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2018Raymond Tomlin

Winner of the 2018 Prism Prize for best Canadian music video, for R&B artist Charlotte Day Wilson and director Fantavious Fritz, during their acceptance speech the winning duo announced their prize money would be given to two important causes they champion: for Wilson, a women’s shelter in her neighbourhood, for Fritz the creation of a “one-time grant” to be awarded to a nascent woman director to make a music video.

Toronto-based R & B singer Charlotte Day Wilson, and director Fantavious Fritz, were awarded the 2018 Prism Prize for best Canadian music video, for their video, "Work"

Day Wilson told CBC Music following the gala presentation …

“I knew I wanted to donate my portion because the video didn’t cost me any money to make, and I didn’t want to profit off people who had volunteered their time to be featured in this gorgeous, moving video. Every day, I walk past a women’s shelter on my way to work, and when the two of us won the Prism award, I thought, ‘Who really needs the money, who could I help, where could my portion of the $15,000 prize money best be spent, make the most difference?’ The answer to that question for me, as a feminist and an artist, was easy, and that’s why I donated my $7500 to the women’s shelter, to make a difference.”

In fact, we are in the midst of a women’s revolution that began with the worldwide suffragette movement and women’s involvement in the union movement of the 1920s through WWII — when women worked in the factories that kept western economies alive, and made the difference in the fight to preserve western democracy, through until the 1960s and 1970s with the works of Germaine Greer, Bette Friedan, Kate Millett, Diana E. H. Russell, Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Laurence, Andrea Dworkin, June Callwood, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Doris Lessing and Gloria Steinem, and in more recent years Susan Faludi, Joy Kogawa, Marilyn Fry, Inga Muscio, Charlotte Bunch, Eden Robinson, Judy Rebick, Sheila Rowbotham & Naomi Klein, among many, many other feminist writers of consequence.
In 2018 in Vancouver, voters will be given a choice — and a must-elect contingent of women political candidates to vote for — women of conscience and accomplishment, social justice warriors and difference makers from across the political spectrum, from the Vancouver Non-Partisan Association’s tremendous Sarah Kirby-Yung; the always hard-working woman of the people, Melissa De Genova (we’re not sure where she’s gonna land); independent and hero, Sarah Blyth; the Green Party of Vancouver’s democrat par excellence, Adriane Carr; Vision Vancouver’s women of conscience City Council candidates, Heather Deal, Catherine Evans and Margot Sangster; the Coalition of Progressive Electors’ near-revolutionary must-elects Anne Roberts & Jean Swanson; to 2018’s must-must-elect OneCity Vancouver Council candidate Christine Boyle — and that’s only at City Council, for this feminist contingent of must-votes in the critically important to our collective future 2018 Vancouver civic election.

Arts Friday | Netflix July | Time to Curl Up With a Good Movie

June 29, 2018A & E, Cinema, Pop Culture, Television, Video & DVDRaymond Tomlin

Meghan Markle. You know her — a princess and all, married some guy named Harry, purdy young gal, likes the Queen, feminist and known for her humanitarian work. And guess what else? For the past seven years, Ms. Markle has starred in a cable TV series called Suits — and you know what else, on July 18th you can binge-watch all of Season 7 of Suits, the last season of the USA Networks series starring the indefatigable Ms. Markle.

Yep, that’s Meaghan Markle above. And while we’re on the subject of recommendable and beauteous young women possessed of talent, there’s Australian actress Margot Robbie, who works with young, underprivileged children when she’s not filming a movie, as she’s doing now with Quentin Tarantino, starring as Sharon Tate in Tarantino’s new film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which partly involves the Manson Family murders.

Actress Margot Robbie will star as Sharon Tate in the new Quentin Tarantino film

On July 6th, Netflix brings I, Tonya to their indispensable service, the film in which Ms. Robbie was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award.

And, oh yeah, another Margot Robbie film, Suicide Squad, makes its way to Netflix in July, too, for your viewing pleasure, of course, or when the kids want to get out of the hot noon day sun — although Suicide Squad many not exactly be kids fare. But there is plenty of kids fare on Netflix. Honest.

Arts Friday (well, sort of) | Radio Ratings | Whither Thou Goest

June 8, 2018A & E, Pop Culture, Radio, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

One in six people are listening to CBC Radio One in Vancouver at any given time

As I have written previously, in 1957 I received a transistor radio on August 11th, the date of my 7th birthday, which gift not only engendered a love for radio, but changed my life in significant ways.
By the time the mid-1960s rolled around, I had been hired as a rock ‘n roll deejay at the pop radio station of the day, CFUN 141, where I worked the occasional on-air shift, and read the news as directed by the news director, the late Jim Neilsen — who would go on to become British Columbia’s first environment minister, in the Socred government of Bill Bennett — as well as producing the Sunday evening foreground programming.
In 1966, a young upstart pop radio station sprung up in Vancouver — that had adopted a ‘hot clock’ format created by programme director Bill Drake for the lowest-rated radio station in the Los Angeles market, KHJ. Within three months of adopting what was called the ‘Drake format’ — which was also often referred to as Boss Radio — KHJ shot from last place to first in a Los Angeles radio market with over 70 radio stations.
Drake exported his Boss Radio format to hundreds of radio stations across North America, including 730 CKLG Vancouver. Within six months of adopting the BOSS radio Drake format, 730 CKLG shot from last place to second place in the Vancouver market, just behind powerhouse CKNW 98.
Within a year, CFUN was no more, converting to CKVN, the Voice of News.

A 1968 CKLG aircheck of J.B. Shayne, and various Boss radio station jingles. Hint: you’re gonna want to listen to the KRLA jingle (it’s the last one), which I acquired in 1972 from KRLA afternoon announcer, the legendary Shadoe Stevens. The jingle was played at the beginning of each announcer’s show, every three hours, from 6 a.m. til midnight.

All the jocks at CFUN left for CKLG, and LG-FM, including me: Terry David Mulligan, Don Richards, Daryl B., Fred Latremouille, and John Tanner, just to name a few. J.B. Shayne was already employed at the station, as he’d been hired in 1965 to do overnight on Lions Gate radio, playing classical music — which was, as you might imagine, a joy for the inimitable Mr. Shayne (not!). After adopting the Boss Radio format, Shayne remained at the station, continuing on overnights, becoming a Vancouver radio legend.

Courtesy of Ricardo Zborovszky. What has always impressed me about Top 30 music charts from the 1960s is the diversity of the music that was being played on radio, everything from Motown to pop, middle-of-the-road music for parents from Englebert Humperdinck, to trippy local psychedelia from The Collectors and their 1968 hit Lydia Purple to blues rock from the Rolling Stones & Americana folk from Simon & Garfunkel

In time to come, in VanRamblings Stories of a Life feature, I’ll write about my days in radio, including the very public broadcast throughout the entire Kootenay region of the loss of my virginity, a fond memory even to this day.

Believe it or not, there are actually people who listen to radio in this day and age of iPhones and iPods, loaded with 128GB of your favourite music downloaded onto your smartphone device with thousands of songs available at the call of Siri or Google Assistant, bluetooth, and streaming music services like Spotify, Apple Music and SiriuxXM — and, heck, it’s not all old fogeys like the publisher of this blog, either, who listen to radio.

Host Stephen Quinn dominates the radio market mornings Monday to Friday in Vancouver, on CBC Radio One’s The Early Edition, having taken over from longtime host Rick Cluff, when after some 20+ years, Mr. Cluff retired to his West Vancouver home during the holiday season that ended 2017, as it did Mr. Cluff’s 40+ year celebrated history in public radio.
If you want to know what’s going on in our city, our region and the province of British Columbia, you tune into Quinn’s The Early Edition, over the lunch hour on BC Today with Michelle Eliot, or Gloria Mackarenko’s re-invented On The Coast afternoon show — any and all issues of interest and concern are addressed on these three locally-produced broadcasts, featuring interviews with the broadest range of political figures, commentators, academics, and activists in our region and our province.
Little wonder that CBC Radio One dominates Vancouver’s radio market.
Although, CKNW comes in second in the Vancouver radio market in this last ratings “book,” the audience for that station is mainly 55+, hardly the demographic the advertisers want to reach, or so we keep being told.
QM/FM, although it’s ratings dropped a bit from the last time ratings were calculated, Vancouver’s oldest and most reliable music station continues to dominate the traditional radio market, as has been the case for more than 30 years, with its playlist of soft rock and classic radio favourites, with the occasional middle-of-the road contemporary song thrown into the mix.
Otherwise, Virgin Radio, Z95.3 and and KiSS Radio continue to compete for the ears of young listeners, a job they’re mostly successful at achieving.

Courtesy of Broadcast Dialogue magazine, David Bray, June 7th 2018
Vancouver: CBC Radio One continues its dominance of the Vancouver radio market, grabbing the #1 spot for A12+ with a 15.3% share of hours tuned (down from 15.7%). Taking the top spot for F25-54, QM-FM, posting a 16.5% share (down from 19.6% last book). FOX grabs the lead for M25-54 listeners, delivering a 13.8% share (up from 11.4%). The FOX is out in front for M18-34 with a 22.0% share of hours tuned (up from 15.8%). Women 18-34, QM-FM dominates, taking top spot with a 16.8 % share.

Even given its low ratings, TSN 1040 dominates the radio market, men aged 25 – 44, and 45 – 64, so for advertisers who want to reach that target market, TSN 1040 is the station that they’ll turn to more often than not.
Well, that’s it for this sort of Arts Friday VanRamblings post. Feels good to take a bit of break from the ever-so-satisfying maelstrom of local politics.