new book on copyright lobbying in Canada

From Michael Geist's blog:

Simon Doyle, the Deputy Editor of the Hill Times, has just published his new book Prey to Thievery...

... a study of CRIA's lobbying efforts from 1997 through 2005. It provides a remarkable perspective on the power of the copyright lobby and the intensity with which it has pursued DMCA-like reforms. The book is a must-read for anyone who wants a behind-the-scenes look at copyright reform in Canada. ...

... here's an excerpt ...

Vancouver audio archives for Sept. 17, 2006

Vancouver's Ukrainian radio audio archives for Sept. 17 are now available!

On Chetverta Khvylia (4th Wave) join host Pavlo Manugevych for the latest news and views from Ukraine, in Ukrainian, as well as some great tunes!

On Nash Holos, get your pencils ready for another yummy recipe for shashlyk that Sylvia will share with you on Ukrainian Food Flair, along with some interesting trivia about the origins of this dish.

OnTravel Tips for Ukraine and Eastern Europe, Fr. Bruce will give you the scoop on church sites to visit in Ukraine. Fr. Bruce also introduces a new weekly feature called A Spiritual Moment, exploring our rich Ukrainian spiritual heritage.And of course, there's plenty of Great Ukrainian music!

This week's CD of the Week is a compilation CD, 24 Golden Ukrainian Hits Vol 3, featuring a variety of artists. (With thanks to Nestor Shydlowski of Baba's Records). Get your dancing boots on!

Vancouver audio archives for Sept. 10, 2006

Vancouver's Ukrainian radio audio archives for Sept. 10 are now available!

On Chetverta Khvylia (4th Wave) join host Pavlo Manugevych for the latest news and views from Ukraine, in Ukrainian, as well as some great tunes!

On Nash Holos, Sylvia brings you another yummy recipe on Ukrainian Food Flair - this week it's a delightful old-world dish, shashlyk. On Travel Tips for Ukraine and Eastern Europe, Fr. Bruce will give you the scoop on church sites to visit in Ukraine. Fr. Bruce also introduces a new weekly feature called A Spiritual Moment, exploring our rich Ukrainian spiritual heritage.

And of course, there's plenty of Great Ukrainian music! This week's CD of the Week is From Kozyn to Wadena, with Anne Pleskach and Bill Scherbatiuk.

light blogging this month

Blogging will be on the light side this month, but do check in now and then!

Or, better still, get yourself an aggregator and it will tell you when there's a new post up!

new segment on Nash Holos

Just thought I'd give any Nash Holos listeners a "heads -up" that there will be a new regular feature on Nash Holos called "Iz Dukhom tvoyim" ... "And with your spirit" starting this Sunday, Sept. 10.

It will be narrated by charming and charismatic Fr. Bruce Power, who has also been sitting in for Myrna Arychuk of Solaway Travel on our Travel Tips segment for the past several weeks.

Stepping back into his more traditional role, Fr. Bruce introduces this segment, reflecting on the spiritual history and legacy of Ukraine and Ukrainians, and setting the stage for future features.

Upcoming issues will include spiritual unity between Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox Christians, the meaning of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the spiritual roots of the number "three" (i.e. why Ukrainians seem to do everything three times), and various other Christian and ecumenical topics.

Stay tuned!

surname-sake

This is nothing to do with Ukrainian music, or Ukrainian anything for that matter. Well, maybe marginally.

I just came across a blog called Knit like a man by some guy sporting my maiden name. The blogger lives in Toronto but is originally from Winnipeg.

No relation far as I know, but, you never know how far back these connections go.

Quite by accident ... through a client, actually ... a few years ago I found a 3rd cousin here in Vancouver by that same name (we figured out we have the same great-great grandfather). My newfound relative had in his possession a copy of an unpublished family manuscript written by my great-uncle years ago, which he very kindly shared with me.

Funny how these things happen.

So anyway if you're into knitting, check out his blog. H/T to Inside the CBC

Hunky Bill still sizzling at the PNE

Came across this Vancouver Sun article Institution was born on a bet, about Vancouver's famous (or infamous) Hunky Bill.

Billie Konyk was a salesman when a friend bet him $10 he couldn't get a PNE booth to sell Ukrainian food. Billie Konyk is in his 40th year with the PNE .

You can read this delightfully entertaining article here.

I happened to be at the PNE on Sunday with hubby and we had a great time. We wandered by Hunky Bill's food stand, but unfortunately found it shortly after we had finished eating a traditional PNE greaseburger.

But it smelled wonderful at Hunky Bill's ... you just can't beat the smell of fried tsybulia. My only complaint is that I didn't hear any Ukrainian music there.

Ah well, there's always next year.

Vancouver audio archives for Sept. 3, 2006

Vancouver's Ukrainian radio audio archives for Sept 3 are now available!

On Chetverta Khvylia (4th Wave) join host Pavlo Manugevych for the latest news and views from Ukraine, in Ukrainian, as well as some great tunes by Alla Kudlai (Povernys), Pavlo Zibrov (Zabuvai), Ruslana (Tango), Divchata (Vesillya) and Katya (Bili nochi).

On Nash Holos, Sylvia brings you an interesting west-coast variation on a traditional and well-know Ukrainian recipe, Prawns Kiev. On Travel Tips for Ukraine and Eastern Europe, Fr. Bruce has some "life's advice" for making the most of your trip to Ukraine ... and a bit of shopping and fashion advice as well!

There's some exciting news about the upcoming Ukrainian World Challenge Golf Tournament in July 2008. The president of the Ukrainian Golf Association of Canada Bohdan Kushnir dropped by for a chat when he was in town scouting out facilities to help determine if Vancouver will be the site... and I just happened to record our conversation!

As usual there's the Proverb of the Week, and plenty of Great Ukrainian music! Strap on your dancing boots for this week's CD of the Week, Prairie Crocus.

Film review: Everything is Illluminated

Here's an interesting review of the film Everything is Illuminated, which I saw at Ukrainian camp last month.

Narrator Alex (Hutz), is a young Ukrainian obsessed with the Western culture. He wears clothes akin to hip-hop videos and speaks lovingly of icons in American pop culture ... His old-world family, however, loves the United States more for its tourists (more specifically, Jewish-American tourists). Alex’s father and grandfather run a company called Heritage Tours, which helps American Jews look for surviving family members estranged during World War II.

Enter Jonathan (Wood), whose ailing grandmother has given him a mysterious photograph of his immigrant grandfather and a Ukrainian woman named Augustine. ... Believing this Augustine responsible for saving his grandfather from Nazi persecution, Jonathan flies to the [sic] Ukraine, employing Alex and his grandfather to search for her.

The interplay between these main characters — Jonathan, Alex and Alex’s grandfather — makes the movie work. Each character displays a degree of cultural ignorance unique to his background, leading to comedic and poignant cultural clashes.

Hutz of course is Eugene Hutz, lead singer of Gogol Bordello, which toured Canada earlier this year and apparently made quite an impression on Edmonton.

The demise of pop culture?

I find it hard to sympathize with anyone anguishing over this:

The Colbert Report last week had a great riff on the fragmentation of media and culture. Starting with a scrapbook of 1970s advertisements that once lodged in our collective consciousness ('plop, plop, fizz, fizz..'), Colbert laments the end of the water-cooler era.

No great loss. Anyone with a lick of sense and good taste prefers Ukrainian music and culture to pop culture anyway. ;-)

But I did find the video quite amusing ... and the lead singer of Ok Go very cute.

Finally - Mazeppa writ right!

Finally, a writer gets it right!

Much the same audience response greeted Peter Stein's spectacular production of Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa presented by Opera National de Lyon. This was opera as it used to be and should be, some would argue. Presented exactly as the composer intended, it was historical opera with political overtones. Set among Ukrainian nationalists seeking separation from the oppression of Russia's Peter the Great, it tells the unlikely and tragic love story of the historical figure, Mazeppa, his betrayal of those around him, and his participation in the political violence of the time.

So nice not to be reading about manufactured Ukrainian "separatists" rebelling against "Cossack landowners"!

From the article: Making beautiful music together in Glasgow's Sunday Herald

There's another in the Times Online worth reading.

Ukraine's holocaust still largely ignored

Came across an article, by Eric Margolis called Stalin and the Ukrainian Massacre.

It has absolutely nothing to do with Ukrainian music or broadcasting, but it is worth noting.

A few weeks ago, on the way to Adult Ukrainian language immersion camp in Saskatchewan, my sister and I were discussing how our non-Ukrainian husbands can't quite understand why we cling so tenaciously to our Ukrainian roots, and why we have such a hard time articulating the answer. This article serves as a good reminder.

Five years ago, I wrote a column about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I was shocked to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent telling me that until they read my article, they knew nothing of the 1932–33 genocide in which Stalin's regime murdered 7 million Ukrainians and sent 2 million to concentration camps.

How, I wondered, could such historical amnesia afflict so many young North-American Ukrainians? For Jews and Armenians, the genocides their people suffered are vivid, living memories that influence their daily lives. Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the destruction of a quarter of Ukraine's population, this titanic crime has almost vanished into history's black hole. ...

During the bitter winter of 1932–33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being shot or dying of starvation and cold. Cannibalism became common. Ukraine, writes historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future Bergan-Belsen death camp.

The mass murder of 7 million Ukrainians, 3 million of them children, and deportation to the gulag of 2 million (where most died) was hidden by Soviet propaganda. Pro-communist westerners, like the New York Times' Walter Duranty, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, toured Ukraine, denied reports of genocide, and applauded what they called Soviet "agrarian reform." Those who spoke out against the genocide were branded "fascist agents."

The US, British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to Ukraine. The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder were, ironically, Hitler and Mussolini. ...

After the war, the Left tried to cover up Soviet genocide. Jean-Paul Sartre denied the gulag even existed. For the Allies, Nazism was the only evil; they could not admit being allied to mass murders. ...

While academia, media and Hollywood rightly keep attention on the Jewish Holocaust, they ignore Ukraine. ... We know all about crimes of Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler; about Babi Yar and Auschwitz.

But who remembers Soviet mass murderers Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovitch, Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria? ...

The souls of Stalin's millions of victims still cry out for justice.

Full article here.