A sad story, but possibly true.

When I was a teenager, I’d often call the downtown Vancouver Public Library where the staff there would look up facts for me. Although it’s hard to believe now, they’d put me on hold and rummage through the appropriate reference books until they found the answers to the questions I’d asked. The librarians always seemed happy, and maybe even a little proud, to be able to help me in this way.

Later in life, a large part of my fascination with the computer revolution hinged on the very real possibility that facts would someday become easily and instantly available without the necessity of those phone calls. The internet tied all the computers together and it soon seemed as though we would presently have access to a worldwide library wherein all truth could be found.

I signed on with more passion and conviction than anyone I knew, and sure enough, the internet eventually became my personal and dependable fact repository. Then a strange thing began happening …

As the internet began to become *everyone’s* personal library and access to facts became ubiquitous, those same facts began to lose their lustre. As they became less rare – they seemed to become less valuable.

And as the internet democratized the collection and storage of facts, institutions formerly trusted to caretake them – The Encyclopaedia Britannica, The New York Times, the Vancouver Public Library for instance – were eroded and undermined. The conflicting agendas of the online masses and the new media they aligned with began to create, re-purpose or spin facts to support whatever opinions they felt required supporting.

For a while there, I thought I was losing my mind. My searches for dependable information became less and less fruitful. Reputable and supposedly trustworthy experts delivered black-and-white opposite versions of what should have been the simple truth. Trying to identify definitive facts became next to impossible for me. I yearned for the nice ladies at the Vancouver Public Library.

If my Dad was still around, he’d be reminding me now that the press and media – and anyone else trusted with the power of information (or simply “the power”) – has always lied – twisting or inventing the facts as they pleased for their own purposes. He was right, I know, but this is different.

I didn’t become a news junkie until September 11th 2001. Before that I’d check the news in the morning the way our parents quickly scanned the front pages of the morning paper. On that Tuesday morning the news page I frequented was simply a white background with black headlines, saying only that New York City was “under attack”.

After 911, I was addicted to unfolding history. I was drunk with the power the internet gave me to parse every molecule of information at the moment it became available. I kept a bottle of Visine beside my computer screen.

Soon, questions arose. A theory was advanced that controlled demolitions had brought down the World Trade Centre buildings. A YouTube clip demonstrated that a 757 couldn’t fit into the hole in the Pentagon wall. If these citizen journalists were actually on to something, the ramifications were almost impossible to consider.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars just added important questions that demanded answers. I waited for those answers to emerge, but the people and institutions now in control of the information simply continued to generate more facts, or statements with the appearance of facts, without ever taking responsibility for their veracity. Fair and balanced now seemed to mean that flat-earth believers still had viable facts to contribute to the news cycle.

While Obama restored my hope, his presidency has since become the focal point of some of the most egregious misuse of the f-word. Ridiculous assertions now stand as fact – unchallenged. Opinion is all that remains.

The Chicago Tribune story, while satirical, contains quotes from Mary Poovey, a professor of English at New York University and author of “A History of the Modern Fact.” Both the professor and her book are, in fact, real. She says:

“There was an erosion of any kind of collective sense of what’s true or how you would go about verifying any truth claims,” Poovey said. “Opinion has become the new truth. And many people who already have opinions see in the ‘news’ an affirmation of the opinion they already had, and that confirms their opinion as fact.”

The world wide web has brought people together in a way that has never before been possible and helped us accumulate a shared treasury of knowledge that’s unsurpassed in history, and yet it’s become a free-for-all in which the truth is threatened by dogma, superstition and politics.

I mourn the passing of Facts, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for truth and wisdom.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

~ Steve Jobs – From his 2005 commencement address at Stanford

As it turns out, I found out about it the way they did. I heard the familiar ‘A’ chord ring out from the living room as I worked at my computer here in the den. I jumped up, and Debbie and I watched, fascinated, as the slow motion crackers dropped into the waiting bowls of exploding tomato soup.

I’ve explained Trooper’s relationship with the Premium Plus cracker company to many people, and now would like to explain it to you. We don’t have a relationship with the Premium Plus cracker company. They don’t send crackers for our dressing room rider and we played no part in the choice of soup used in their commercial. The entire deal was done not only without our involvement, but also, without our knowledge.

Here’s how it works.

Universal Music owns the recording of ‘Raise a Little Hell’. Sony Music Publishing administers the use of the song. In both cases we are supposed to see royalties from the deal that’s struck, but we have no involvement in or control over it. No one even asked.

My share of the royalties won’t be a lot of money considering the song I co-wrote will be repeatedly played on TV – in a cracker commercial – until next March, but not bad considering it just fell out of the sky onto me.

Thing is though, I’d prefer the song be covered by a kick-ass rock band and become a huge international hit. Hopefully said rock band will not see the cracker commercial.

I have great sympathy for the producers of the two-part CBC documentary ‘This Beat Goes On’. A truly comprehensive history of Canada’s pop music would require several full days to present. The two episodes of TBGO, covering the 1970′s, clocked in at two hours, minus commercials.

And, like Roy MacGregor said about our job as judges for the CBC’s ‘Seven Wonders of Canada’ program – beyond all other considerations, a show of this nature needs to be “geographically correct”. Considering writer Nicholas Jennings also wrote the astonishingly Toronto-centric ‘Before the Goldrush’ about the supposed genesis of the Canadian music scene, I was surprised and happy to see so much western-Canadian content. I was particularly impressed with the time and attention lavished on me, and my band.

Nonetheless, I’m still strangely unsatisfied with what will now stand as trusted documentation of the crazy Canadian music scene.

For one thing, I want you to know that the seventies Canadian music scene was a lot of fun. With only a few exceptions, I didn’t get that sense from the show. It was low-key, scholarly and, forgive me Jian et al, a bit dull.

More important to me though is the fact that Canadian-made music is not the only music we Canadians listen to! Isolating Canadian hits from the mosaic of American and British music of the day is akin to presenting Van Halen’s brown M&Ms as a full pack of candy. The constantly buzzing interaction of Canadian writers and performers with the outstanding music coming at us from the US and England was part of the unfolding thrill of what was happening here. Our music did not take seed and grow in the cultural vacuum that the documentary suggests by it’s omissions. My song, “Two For the Show” only reached number two on the Canadian charts because a Paul McCartney song held on stubbornly at number one. That was the world we Canadian artists came up in.

I also have two petty quibbles:

I understand and applaud the doc’s nod to the Quebec music scene but do not understand the omission of Montreal’s Michel Pagliaro – the first Canadian artist to score top 40 hits on both the anglophone and francophone pop charts in Canada. (Last year Pag received the ‘Governor General’s Performing Arts Award’, Canada’s most prestigious artistic honour). His “What the Hell I Got” was one of my favourite songs in 1975, and still stands up well: (please forgive the total uselessness of this video)

And finally, regarding the story that Randy Bachman tells on the show about the pizza boy playing the piano part on “Takin’ Care of Business”: it’s not true. I was there. The piano part was played by Seattle’s Norman Durkee – a professional musician who deserves the credit for his deftly performed and rollicking track.

I have been trying to explain Twitter to friends – especially regarding its differences with Facebook – and have not been particularly successful. I think this article covers it pretty well (while also predicting that Facebook plans further changes to become more “Twitter-Like”.)

Clipped from Bokardo.com:

In general, there are two ways to model human relationships in software. An “asymmetric” model is how Twitter currently works. You can “follow” someone else without them following you back. It’s a one-way relationship that may or may not be mutual.

Facebook, on the other hand, has always used a “symmetric” model, where each time you add someone as a friend they have to add you as a friend as well. This is a two-way relationship, and it is required to have any relationship at all. So as a Facebook user there is always a 1-1 relationship among your friends. Everyone who you have claimed as a friend has also claimed you as a friend.

Andrew Chen recently described one advantage of the Twitter model. It allows 4 types of relationships, while Facebook only allows for two. The two relationships of Facebook are “friend and Not Friend”. The four relationships of Twitter are:

People who follow you, but you don’t follow back

People who don’t follow you, but you follow them

You both follow each other (Friends!)

Neither of you follow each other

Full article HERE.

(You can follow me on Twitter, if you want, here.)
]]> http://ramcguire.com/2009/03/29/20090329-why-i-like-twitter-better-than-facebook/feed/ 0 http://ramcguire.com/2009/03/29/20090329-the-juno-awards/ http://ramcguire.com/2009/03/29/20090329-the-juno-awards/#comments Mon, 30 Mar 2009 03:34:48 +0000 Ra http://ramcguire.computerguts.com/?p=203

After our Juno Awards thank-you speeches we were lead from the stage by a Juno hostess and ushered through a door at the back of the stage. Still buzzed from our victory – laughing and slapping each other on the back – it took us a moment to realize that we were walking noisily through the main kitchen of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel. I still have a vivid memory of an oriental cook in white chef’s hat and uniform, staring at us curiously from behind an aluminum table. Elation turned to confusion as we realized we did not know where to go next. The five of us herded together alongside what we hoped was the back wall of the ballroom and eventually tumbled through the first exit door that presented itself. Flashes flashed and microphones were extended.

“How do you feel about winning the best group Juno?” I was asked.

“It’s fucking wonderful” I responded.

” ‘It’s wonderful’ said Trooper singer Ra McGuire at last night’s Juno Award ceremonies …” reported the Toronto newspaper headline the next day.

It has always annoyed me that I wasn’t quoted correctly. There is, of course, a HUGE difference between “fucking wonderful” and just “wonderful”.

The 2009 Junos took place in Vancouver tonight. I didn’t attend this year. Trooper has received seven Juno nominations – and won the “Best Group” award – but we’ve only attended twice. Once, in 1978, when we were nominated for “Most Promising Group of the Year” and in 1980 when we were up for both “Best Group” and “Album of the Year”.

We flew to Toronto for our first Junos when we were nominated for “Most Promising Group of the Year”. We arrived proudly in the Royal York ballroom which was decorated with large blown-up album covers of all the nominated artists, and saw that ours was the only cover that was, humiliatingly, conspicuous in its absence. The evening deteriorated further when the “Most Promising” award was presented to “The THP Orchestra”.

In 1978, we were one of five bands nominated for “Group of the Year”, but chose not to attend. Rush won that year. In 1979 we were nominated again for “Group of the Year” and we chose, again, to not attend. Rush won it again. In 1980, now simply following a comfortable tradition, we once again turned down the Juno organizer’s invitation to fly to the Toronto ceremonies. At first they tried to shame us into coming, which didn’t work. Finally, they broke down and told us that we were going to win at least one award. So we embarked on what was to become a great Trooper adventure that ended with, among other things, members of the band rolling, drunk and in white suits, in a Toronto hotel driveway with Burton Cummings. My personal most embarrassing Juno moment came that year when a young Vancouver friend shouted across a room filled with Canadian music-biz royalty.

“Ra McGuire!!” he shouted when he spotted me. “You’re BIG!!”

It’s funny that I still remember that. We’ve never returned to the Junos and, because the whole idea of them still makes me uncomfortably squirmy, I’ve only managed to watch them on TV two or three times in the intervening years. There have been a couple of occasions, however, when I would have enjoyed shouting back at Bryan Adams, who’s gone on to do quite well for himself.

I’ve had more to say about this (and other things) on Twitter. You can follow me, if you want, here. ]]> http://ramcguire.com/2009/03/29/20090329-the-juno-awards/feed/ 0 http://ramcguire.com/2009/03/15/20090315-twitter/ http://ramcguire.com/2009/03/15/20090315-twitter/#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 03:33:21 +0000 Ra http://ramcguire.computerguts.com/?p=199

Shauna Mac invited me to join Facebook three years ago. Subway Steve friended me the day I signed up, noting that I had finally succumbed to Facebook’s evils. At the time I didn’t understand what he meant. Shortly thereafter I shut my new Facebook page down.

Newsweek’s Steve Tuttle just did the same because “In the end, Facebook is really the emptiest, loneliest place on the whole World Wide Web”, but my leaving had less to do with it’s inherent evils and more to do with my state of mind at the time.

In 2006 I had painted myself into a very public corner and Facebook just became the digital last straw. The release of my own, non-digital, book – a paper and ink version of my blog musings – had nudged my personal life out into the public world in a way that became surprisingly uncomfortable for me. During one of my first book promotion interviews, an Alberta newspaper writer asked me;

“What is it about blogs, that makes you think that we want to read your innermost thoughts from your personal diary?”

Despite my references to him in a subsequent blog post as “Asshat” and “Dickface”, his question added to my discomfort. What is it, indeed?

(I like to believe that “it” is my innate need for a creative outlet and the subsequent opportunity to interact with those that support that creativity. As they say, that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.)

In February of last year I wrote here about the “exciting but often overwhelming concentration of attention on me and my personal life that has only just lately died down” – an assertion which, in retrospect, was at least a year premature. Regardless, it seems to have died down enough, at this point, that I no longer feel so burdened by the weight of that attention.

So much so, in fact, that I’ve signed up for Twitter …

As you can see I’ve added a real-time feed from my new Twitter account to the sidebar of ramcguire.com. Technically speaking, those are “tweets” – the 140-character-maximum posts that I send to my “followers”. I can create the tweets on my phone or on my computer and they can be “followed” in the same way. My followers follow me and I, in turn, follow my followers. Twitter is a huge phenomenon. It’s free, easy to set up and use and, because of the size limitation, kinda fun. And maintaining Twitter is somehow much less onerous a task than traditional blogging or Facebook maintenance.

It may be foolish of me to make this commitment to a new social network, but I’ve decided that I’m unwilling to opt-out of the ongoing transmogrification of the internet and our interaction with it. I love the bleeding edge of technology – I owned a Radio Shack Model 100, the first portable computer and I wrestled html for the pre-amazon, pre-ebay internet in 1996. Far from bleeding edge, Twitter is already taken for granted by the bulk of the net’s denizens. How hard can it be?

I proceed on the belief that Twitter will be stimulating, useful, and, most of all, fun for me. I’ll shut it down if it fails to live up to that promise.

A good friend passed away last week and an email alerted me to a Facebook group created to commemorate him. Unable to log on without membership I tried my 2006 Facebook log-in and it worked. There was Shauna & Steve (now with photos of his new baby boy) and my other seven “friends”, waiting where I had left them. It turns out I can send my Twitter tweets to Facebook where they will appear as status updates.

I would now like to shamelessly request that you follow me on Twitter.

Thanks in advance for doing so!