Category Archives: Television

Best of 2013: Music, Spanning Genre and Critical Recognition

A & E, Best of 2013, Cinema, Music, Pop Culture, Television, VanRamblings, Web & Tech

Best of 2013

VanRamblings’ two favourite times of year occur from mid-July through the end of August, a six-week celebration revolving around the anniversary of our coming to this Earth (at least in this incarnation, in this time and place and history of life on our planet), and the period beginning in mid-
November through until December 31st. We have long been a romantic about most aspects of life, and love the idea of simply taking a bit of time off from the hurly burly of our everyday, and often too busy, life to reflect on the conditions of our existence, a deep and abiding reflection, a process in which we seek to provide meaning, context and, perhaps, resolution.
Within that contextual framework is contained our love for the arts — dance (we love the ballet), music (mostly of the pop culture variety, although we love progressive country), film, anything tech-related, literature, television, and the art of politics, which is to say, the political maelstrom that is public engagement early in this new millennium.

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In this first of five columns on the Best of 2013, we’ll survey a cross-section of critical opinion on the best music of the year, much of which art you may have been utterly unaware of prior to the writing that’ll appear below. As a means by which to introduce new music into your life, there is no more salutary event than that which occurs at year’s end, as you (and I) become aware of the music of our age, through a survey of informed critical opinion — always a life-enhancing event offering steadfast insight, in the most propitious, enlightening and expedient manner possible. Yippee!

Best Music of 2013

There was a time, in recent years, when we turned to Salon (in its heyday, in the late 90s through 2005), Rolling Stone, the now defunct and the much-missed Blender magazine, but since 2009, Popmatters has been the go-to place for insight into the Best Music of the Year. Yes, we know there’s NME and Paste (now available online only), Q, Pitchfork, Mojo and more, but we’ll stick with Popmatters, at year’s end, for our annual hit of unexpected and oh-so salutary musical insight.
Here’s Popmatters ‘best of music’ home page, detailing the 75 Best Albums of the Year, Best Canadian, Country, Metal, Indie-Pop, and more …


Popmatters' 75 Best Albums of 2013

Making Popmatters’ 75 Best Albums of 2013 list, at 72. The Boards of Canada; at 63. the ever-present Lorde; at 47. David Bowie’s The Next Day; 42. Julia Holter (a favourite of our friend, J.B. Shayne); 38. Rhye, to whom we introduced you earlier in the year; 27. Queens of the Stone Age; 24. Our very own Tegan and Sara; at 9 and 8, the breakout bands of the year, Haim and CHVRCHES, and at number one … well, who else would you expect? But you’ll have to read through to be sure you guessed right.
One of our favourite discoveries is a duo out of England, with whom our son Nathan has long been familiar, but is new to us this year: 4. Disclosure, who represent the very best danceable British garage house music of 2013.

Now, make no mistake, there’s more, a great deal more …

And, of course, much, much more.
In the The Best Country Music of 2013 category, we discovered a couple of artists with whom we were not previously familiar, Brandy Clark, and our favourite roots, working class, progressive country find of the year, Kacey Musgraves, who’s making a whole tonne of Best Of lists in 2013.

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We leave you, dear and constant reader, with a survey list of the Best Music of 2013, critical reception from some of our favourite publications …

Lots to listen to, lots to grok. Good luck. Enjoy. Merry Christmas!

Mad Men: The Best New Show of the Summer TV Season

Television

MAD MEN

Broadcast time in Canada, Season One of Mad Men: Sundays, at 10 p.m., on CTV

One of the great delights that VanRamblings has experienced with our new Telus HDTV system occurs each Sunday evening at 10 p.m. when we tune into AMC / CTV’s ground-breaking Mad Men television series, an odds on favourite to pick up a whack of Emmy’s come September 21 on ABC, and most assuredly the best show of the otherwise woeful summer TV season.
Tracking the machinations within a swingin’ 60s ad agency, “when guys wore narrow-lapelled suits and guzzled bourbon”, Mad Men emerges as outstanding period television drama (and far superior to its period drama competition, the pandering 70s CBS summer drama, Swingtown).
Mad Men excels because of its universally superior and eminently identifiable performances, an unusually sophisticated storytelling style rarely found on broadcast television, a wonderful evocation of time and place, as well as its arresting visual style (even more appealing in HD). As Tim Goodman writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mad Men emerges as “an adult drama of introspection.” One could hardly wish for more this summer TV season.

Telus HDTV: 175 Channels and (Almost) Nothin’ On

Television, Web & Tech
TELUS HDTV

Here it is summer, the days are warm and the sun shines, and what has VanRamblings all excited? HDTV. That’s right, High Definition Television.

Yes, in the sweltering days of summer, VanRamblings has signed on to the Telus HDTV package, replete with 57 channels and nothin’ on (well, actually, there are more like 175 channels, and nothing to watch). Be that as it may, we’re still pleased that we switched to Telus TV.

And why might that be? Because we’ve saved money on our home phone, Internet and TV package — with more goodies than we had before — over what we’d been paying previously. Here are the Telus TV packages …


TELUS TV BUNDLES

Being cheap, VanRamblings went for package number 1, including …

  • Telephone: Telus IP phone with crystal clear reception; call waiting and call display (including call display on the TV when someone phones); 200 minutes of long distance free, and 7¢ a minute after that
  • Telus high speed enhanced, which doubles the speed of downloads, and makes surfing perceptibly quicker
  • Telus HDTV, with the essentials, and two theme packs. There’s an additional $15 charge for HDTV.

 

Total cost of the package: $95.95 + $15 = $110.95, plus tax.

Telus Optik TV Channel Guide, June 8, 2011

Well, hold on a minute. Things aren’t quite what they seem at first glance. There were some hiccups that occurred on the way to achieving HDTV bliss.

First off, according to the somewhat confused folks who initially answered the phone at Telus TV in late June, if you want almost all of the HDTV channels available in Canada (the few of those that are currently offered), as well as most of the U.S. networks that are broadcasting in HDTV, we were told, latterly, that you have to sign up for theme packs that include those channels. HDTV for those channels is not automatic. Well, if you have a look at the Telus HDTV page all of the HDTV theme packs come in at $15. Which is where Telus
gets its $15 HDTV subscriber "come on" from.

But the Telus TV folks told VanRamblings that subscribers have to subscribe, at a cost of $6 for each theme pack, to the conventional digital theme packs that include those HDTV channels. And pay $15 more to watch those channels in HD. Confusing. Misleading. And off-putting.

So, if you want the Discovery Channel, the Time Choice channels, Movie Central HD, TSN and Sportsnet HD (which broadcast out of Toronto), you’ll end up paying another $24, plus another $15 for those channels in HD! Telus HDTV isn’t quite what it seems, then. Not good. We were not happy.

On top of that, Global TV Vancouver HD is not (currently) available on Telus HDTV, although it is available to Shaw and Bell satellite subscribers.

Locally, only CBC broadcasts the local news in HD. Global news programmes may go HD in the autumn, BCTV’s engineer told VanRamblings; hopefully Telus will have initialed a broadcast agreement with GlobalBC by then. CTV Vancouver broadcasts most American programming in HD, but not their news programmes. CTV Vancouver promises full HD by 2010, in time for the Olympics, which will likely mean sometime towards the end of next year.

Telus also does not currently offer a PVR, as Shaw does, so subscribers cannot record HDTV programming for viewing later.

Shaw, if you indicate that you’re leaving them for Telus will offer you a bundle package, including Shaw High Speed and IP Home phone with unlimited long distance in North America, for $95, plus $29 more for the HDTV package. But VanRamblings did not want to move to Shaw at this point, although we were most recently on Shaw’s digital TV package.

VanRamblings called Telus TV to express concern about their confusing and misleading advertising, and commitments not met, and was forwarded to Telus’ Loyalty and Retention division (where we found some fine folks).

Telus finally stepped up to the plate, and during the course of a quite pleasant discussion about what we had been promised at the time we signed up for Telus TV in May, not to mention the information that appears on their website, we arrived at a joint agreement which offered VanRamblings: 3 months of Telus TV (including HDTV) for free — so VanRamblings won’t begin paying for TV til October — with an additional $144 in credit on VanRamblings’ Telus account, for a total saving of $330.

Beginning October 1st, VanRamblings will pay $136, plus tax, each month, for the phone (with call display and call waiting, plus 200 minutes of long distance, monthly, in North America), high speed enhanced Internet, and the essentials TV package, plus 5 theme packs. VanRamblings will receive almost all of the HDTV channels available in Canada with this agreement.

If VanRamblings deducts the $144 credit offered by Telus, as well as the $186 three month saving on the TV / HDTV that was agreed to by the Loyalty and Retention division, VanRamblings’ monthly HDTV / telephone / Internet package, in reality, will come to only $108.50 per month.

VanRamblings can live with that. Cheaper than Shaw, with a decent service.

Come fall, though, when we switch to the five theme packs from the full-meal deal that VanRamblings is receiving for the next three months for free, we expect trouble with Telus (not to mention, we’re not sure that we want five theme packs).

So far Telus has not been great at keeping their word, or being consistent from Telus salesperson to Telus salesperson as to what Telus offers respecting HDTV, and how much that will cost a subscriber. Come late September, chances are that we’ll end up writing more about Telus TV and what shenanigans, if any, Telus may be up to at that time. Stay tuned.

Prison Break: A Potential Breakout Hit for Fox Television
Fall 2005 Television Season Kicks Off at 8 p.m. Tonight

Television

FOX-TV-PRISON-BREAK

The weather is cooling, the sun seems to be heading back behind the clouds, and the rains appear to be on their way. What does this mean for most of us? Yes, the fall TV season is about to commence.
This year the fall television season is set to kick off a bit early with the début tonight of Prison Break, one of the more lauded new shows of the fall TV season. Globe and Mail television columnist John Doyle writes …

Prison Break (Fox, Global, starts Monday) is about a guy who goes to prison to get his brother out. He’s got the blueprint of the prison’s design tattooed on his body. That’s the gist. Fast-paced, kinetic, moody and filled with characters either brutal or beatific, it grabs you by the throat and takes you on a wild ride. Michael (Wentworth Miller) is the hero. His brother, Lincoln (Dominic Purcell), is on death row and scheduled to die in a few months. As Michael sees it, Lincoln has been framed for the murder of the brother of the vice-president of the United States. There’s been a cover-up and, in some way, the Catholic Church is involved. The prison setting is dangerous and filled with foreboding. The warden (played by Stacy Keach, who did time in prison in England in the 1980s) is well-meaning but wary of Michael and Lincoln. Heavily promoted by Fox, the series gets a jump-start by launching this week. With little else new to watch, it could get viewers instantly hooked.


John Crook, reporting for zap2it.com, provides some background on Prison Break. USA Today’s Bill Keveney also weighs in on tonight’s début of Prison Break, as does USA Today critic Robert Bianco, who says “check it out”.
Meanwhile, The Vancouver Sun’s Alex Strachan says, “a breakneck-paced thriller about a prison break will make the weeks fly by before a new season of 24 débuts in January … Prison Break is a fast-paced, rousingly good entertainment — a rock ’n roll roller-coaster ride that hurtles along the tracks like a runaway train.” Strachan awards Prison Break an A- rating.
The fact that first-rate actors Peter Stormare (Minority Report, Chocolat) and Robyn Tunney (The Craft, The Secret Lives of Dentists) have opted to set aside their movie careers in order to star in Prison Break speaks volumes about its probable quality. The series débuts tonight at 8 p.m. on your local Global TV outlet (BCTV locally), with a 2-hour season première.
Update: Following a week of fun and frolic, VanRamblings finally got around to watching the 2-hour season première of Prison Break. Our assessment, overall: comme çi, comme ça. Although the actors’ performances are across-the-board solid and praiseworthy, the writing is at best pedestrian, the production values (camera work, cinematography) second rate, and the story line cheesy and requiring of such a level of suspension of disbelief as to pull you out of the narrative. The good thing? We won’t be adding Prison Break to our regular television viewing this upcoming fall TV season, allowing us time instead this autumn to pine away for lost love, now found.