ABS-CBN Integrated News and Current Affairs’ Jeff Canoy with Canada Ambassador H.E. John AHolmes.
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Jeff Canoy – The 2018 Marshall McLuhan Fellow – Philippines
This year’s McLuhan Fellow is Jeff Canoy, broadcast journalist for ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp. Mr. Canoy is known to have covered major conflicts, humanitarian and natural disasters in the Philippines including volcanic eruptions, landslides, and Category 5 Super Typhoons that hit the country. He has also worked on stories on the Maguindanao massacre, the botched police operation in Mamasapano, and investigative reports on extrajudicial killings and torture linked to police. He currently covers the Philippine National Police and the government’s war on drugs and is an anchor of the public affairs program Red Alert, focusing on risk reduction and disaster preparedness.
Mr. Canoy’s work – “Never Shall be Conquered” – a TV documentary about the Islamic State-inspired siege of Marawi, the Philippines’ only Islamic city, recently won a Gold Dolphin trophy for Best Documentary under the Current Affairs, Human Concerns, and Social Issues Category at the 9th Cannes Corporate Media and TV Awards in France. This documentary also won a gold medal last year in the New York Festivals – World’s Best for TV. His stories on disaster response have previously won him several awards from the local broadcasters’ guild. Most recently, he was an international fellow for the Malaysian Press Institute and has completed journalism programs at the Lauder School of Government in Tel Aviv, Israel and Columbia University in New York, USA.
See related earlier post on this blog Jeff Canoy Named as the 2018 Marshall McLuhan Fellow in the Philippines at https://goo.gl/26HQj9
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For Media Literacy Week
Is fake news really the problem?
While the term appears in the headlines and on the lips of everyday internet users, is ‘fake news’ really the problem? Or are we facing something much more complex? Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, takes us on a winding journey through misinformation, filter bubbles, content sorting algorithms, shady political ads and cyber warfare in an attempt to show what’s really going on. At the end he asks: what role can media literacy play in rebuilding our democracies? And where should companies and governments do more?
Program Partners: Media Literacy Week, McLuhan Salons
DATE & TIME: Friday, November 9, 2018 – 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm
LOCATION: Royal Ontario Museum, Signy and Cléophée Eaton Theatre, Level 1B – See Map – President’s Choice School Entrance
RSVP is Required. GET TICKETS here https://goo.gl/EA5Xxj
Speaker: Mark Surman
The internet is one of our most valuable public resources — it’s Mark Surman’s job to keep it healthy.
Mark is Executive Director of Mozilla, the global nonprofit that does everything from making Firefox to standing up for issues like online privacy. Mark is focused on fueling the broader internet health movement by working with citizens, technologists and civic leaders around the world. Mark is also part of the team that develops Mozilla’s annual Internet Health Report. Before Mozilla, Mark was the Managing Director of telecentre.org and President of social tech consulting firm Commons Group. In 2007, Mark was awarded the prestigious Shuttleworth Fellowship, where he explored how to apply open source approaches to philanthropy. Mark lives in Toronto with his sons, Tristan and Ethan.
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Tags: communication, culture, education, ideas, Internet, lectures, media ecology, Toronto
Hugh Kenner (1923-2003)
“Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner” has been for me, and will be for many others, the most intellectually exhilarating work published in 2018. In roughly 1,000 letters, mainly from the 1960s and ’70s, two of the great literary polymaths of the second half of the last century converse about art and literature, scholarship, translation, the follies of academe, and the life of the mind. As a bonus, the book’s redoubtable editor, Edward M. Burns, identifies every name, reference and allusion, elevating his sometimes essaylike notes into an integral, invaluable part of the correspondence itself.
Nearly all of Hugh Kenner’s work can be viewed as an extended commentary on 20th-century modernism or, as his 1971 magnum opus called it, “The Pound Era.”Not only did Kenner (1923-2003) produce groundbreaking studies of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett, but his own darting prose, abounding in surprising factoids and anecdotes, also makes his writing vastly entertaining; Guy Davenport once compared reading his friend’s work to the thrill of opening presents on Christmas morning. As one might expect from a star student of Marshall McLuhan, Kenner regularly probes the effect of new technologies, such as the typewriter and telephone, on early modernist literature. This McLuhanesque bent eventually led him to bring out entire books about R. Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of geodesic domes, and cartoon legend Chuck Jones, the genius behind Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote. (Source where you can read the rest: https://goo.gl/NTH6AQ)
A Short Biography of Hugh Kenner
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[William Hugh Kenner]; b. 7 Jan., 1923 at Peterborough, Ontario; son of Henry Rowe Hocking [K], a Catholic headmaster and teacher of classical languages; grandson of a mathematician after whom the local school was named; born with speech defect, and presumed deaf; became an early reader and a childhood polymath; studied under Marshall McLuhan at Toronto Univ.; grad. BA 1945 and MA 1946, with Gold Medal in English; introduced by McLuhan to Ezra Pound, who told him it was his duty to meet all the great men of his age; published Paradox in Chesterton (1948), intro. by McLuhan; undertook his PhD at Yale, supervised by Cleanth Brooks, and grad. 1950; visited Ezra Pound in St Elizabeth’s with McLuhan, 1948; his “The Portrait in Perspective” appeared in Seon Givens, ed. James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism (1948);
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issued The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951), composed in six weeks and intended ‘to help as many people as possible to read Pound for themselves’ at the time of the Bollingen award, and won the Porter Prize; taught at Santa Barbara 1950-73; issued Dublin’s Joyce (1955), Samuel Beckett (1965), and The Pound Era (1971), a monumental study of Anglo-American Modernism; resigned from American Academy of Arts and Sciences, at committee’s repudiation of the Emerson-Thoreau Award to Ezra Pound; appt. Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, 1973-1990; issued Joyce’s Voices (1978), and Ulysses (1982) -a chapter-by-chapter study of the novel; castigated Richard Ellmann in a review of the revised edition of James Joyce (orig. 1959; rev. 1982) for accepting what Kenner called ‘Irish Facts’ LS, 17 Dec. 1982); issued A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (1983), a work that made him enemies among Irish critics leading to disputations in print with Thomas Kinsella and others… (Read the rest at https://goo.gl/4dwGy5)
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See Hugh Kenner and Marshall McLuhan previously published on this blog: https://goo.gl/cGUuUN
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R. Bruce Elder’s Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect
Filmmaker, writer and professor Elder’s new book traces the rise of a new scientific theory, which changed our conception of time, space, objecthood and personhood and demanded revolutionary, new art forms.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Cubism and Futurism were closely related movements that vied with each other in the economy of renown. Perception, dynamism, and the dynamism of perception—these were the issues that passed back and forth between the two. Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect shows how movement became, in the traditional visual arts. Further, it explores the role of the cinema in amplifying this interest, by demonstrating that with the advent of the cinema the time was over when an artwork strived to lift experience out the realm of flux and into the realm of the changeless eternal.
The cinema at this time was understood as an electric art, akin to X-rays, Lumia, and sonic energy. In this book, celebrated filmmaker and author R. Bruce Elder connects the dynamism that the cinema made an essential feature of the new artwork to the new science of electromagnetism.
Cubism he portrays as a movement on the cusp of the transition from the Cartesian world of standardized Cartesian coordinates and interchangeable machine parts to a Galvanic world of continuities and flows. Drawing on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Elder shows that Futurism, by way of contrast, embraced completely the emerging electromagnetic view of reality.
Cubism, and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect examines the similarities and differences between the two movements’ engagement with the new science of energy and shows that the notion of energy made central to the new artwork by the cinema assumed a spiritual dimension, as the cinema itself came to be seen as a pneumatic machine.
REVIEWS
“This volume establishes R. Bruce Elder’s writing as belonging among works of rare analytical depth, and probably unique within the panorama of film theorists. I know of no cineaste more attentive to esthetical and philosophical issues. The tissues of his thought processes manifest constantly in the deluge of original commentary, opening innovative avenues of meaning. Reading this volume is like entering into a fascinating territory of futurist and cubist poetics, with the view of a boundless horizon. Elder, in a systematic way, gathers the boundaries of various theoretical matrixes and melts them to enrich the architecture of cinematographic thinking.” – Antonio Bisaccia, Director, “Mario Sironi” Academy of Fine Arts – Sassari, Italy
“This very important essay by Bruce Elder clarifies perfectly the difference between two great phases in Western Culture. The former, modernity, was dominated by the conceptions of a Newtonian and Cartesian space, based on ancient Euclidean geometry, whereas the latter, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, conceived the first intuitions about electromagnetism. In contemporary art, the consequence is that Cubism remained “between the two,” liberating forms from Euclid but leaving them to the immobility of a surface, whereas Futurism understood that the moment had arrived to conquer movement, time, and real existence through new technological tools like cinema and X-rays.” – Renato Barilli, University of Bologna, Italy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruce Elder is an award-winning filmmaker who received a Governor-General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts: the citation stated that Elder’s film cycle “The Book of All the Dead, inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Commedia and Ezra Pound’s Cantos, grew out of his preoccupation with the horrors of modernity, its faith in progress and the loss of a sense of what is good and evil. His current film cycle, The Book of Praise, makes extensive use of computer-image generation, highlighting his fascination with mathematics and digital technology. Elder has been a guest lecturer at institutions across North America and around the world and has written books and articles on film, music, poetry and the visual arts. The jury described him as ‘highly innovative,’ ‘influential’ and ‘acutely intelligent,’ noting the enormous span of his practice and the demanding nature of his films.” Elder 7.5-hour long film, Lamentations: A Monument to a Dead World was selected as one of the 150 best Canadian moving image works on the occasion of Canada’s sesquicentennial in 2017.
Elder’s earlier book Harmony & Dissent (WLU Press, 2008) received the prestigious Robert Motherwell Book Prize and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. Rudolf Kuenzli described DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect (WLU Press, 2013) as “that rare book that casts the early twentieth-century avant-garde in a very new light.”
INVITATION TO ATTEND THE BOOK LAUNCH
Pages Unbound and Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts are pleased to announce their presentation of a book launch celebrating R. Bruce Elder’s recent Wilfrid Laurier University Press publication Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect. The event will be held on Friday, Nov. 2, 2018, at the School of Image Arts, 122 Bond St., Toronto. Author’s remarks will begin at 7:00 pm and shortly thereafter Elder will be interviewed by Jim Shedden, arts critic, and programmer, and Director of Publications at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
The School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, Toronto
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By Elaine Kahn
This book features the edited and annotated complete correspondence between two intellectual giants of the 20th century — Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Marshall McLuhan — from the moment of Trudeau’s election as prime minister of Canada in 1968 to McLuhan’s death in 1980.
In the letters, the two men — both serious Catholics — delve into contemporary issues such as changes wrought by digital technology, the creation of a global village, the impact of mass media on culture and politics, faith and racial identity. McLuhan, the media guru and coiner of phrases such as “the media is the message” and “global village” became a good friend and adviser to Canada’s charismatic and cerebral prime minister during the turbulent 60s and 70s. The letters demonstrate an openness to change and human diversity that is an antidote to today’s reign of fear of the stranger.
Both men remain fascinating today, years after their deaths
• McLuhan’s philosophy on media is enjoying a resurgence of interest;
• A glimpse into the lives of two global intellectuals and their exchanges of the vital issues of the 60s and 70s;
• Rare revelations into their views on the Catholic faith;
• Will appeal to history and media buffs, and those interested in the intersection of faith and culture. Foreward by Paolo Granata, Book & Media Studies, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto.
About the author
Elaine Kahn grew up in the Toronto area during the 1960s and 1970s. She was in the 10th grade when Trudeau became prime minister in 1968 and was, like so many of her generation, enthralled. She also became fascinated by McLuhan’s work in mass media. She did her undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto and became a journalist, writing for a short time for the Toronto Star and various regional newspapers. She moved to the United States with her husband, a rabbi, and completed her doctorate at Rutgers.
Published by Novalis Publishing, Toronto. Publication in February or March, 2019.
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Tags: academic, books, communication, culture, ideas, Pierre Trudeau
Western thought patterns are highly abstract, compared with Eastern. There developed in the West, and only in the West, a group of innovations that constitute the basis of Western thought. These include (in addition to the alphabet) codified law, monotheism, abstract science, formal logic, and individualism. All of these innovations, including the alphabet, arose within the very narrow geographic zone between the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the Aegean Sea, and within the very narrow time frame between 2000 B.C. and 500 B.C. This is not considered to be an accident. While not suggesting a direct causal connection between the alphabet and the other innovations, it is claimed that the phonetic alphabet played a particularly dynamic role within this constellation of events and provided the ground or framework for the mutual development of these innovations. The effects of the alphabet and the abstract, logical, systematic thought that it, encouraged explains why abstract science began in the West and not the East, despite the much greater technological sophistication of the Chinese – the inventors of metallurgy, irrigation systems, animal harnesses, paper, ink, printing, movable type, gunpowder, rockets, porcelain, and silk. Credit must also be given to monotheism and codified law for the role they played in developing the notion of universal law, an essential building-block of science. Almost all of the early scientists – Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Anaxagoras and Heraclitus – were both law-makers in their community and monotheistically inclined. They each believed that a unifying principle ruled the universe.
Date: Thursday, October 25 Time: 7:15 – 8:15 p.m.
LOCATION: University of Toronto, Carr Hall, Room 404, located at 100 St. Joseph Street, St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. (First street north of Wellesley; the parking lot is opposite Carr Hall).
Sponsored by the:
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Join us for the premiere of Forgotten Genius: The Boy Who Invented Electronic TV – honouring the groundbreaking work of Inventor, Philo T. Farnsworth!
Thursday, October 11th at 6:30 PM – 11:00 PM
MZTV Museum of Television & Archive
64 Jefferson Ave, Toronto (Liberty Village)
The event is free. RSVP Required
Presented by the St. Michael’s College – the McLuhan’s intellectual home in the University of Toronto – and its popular Book & Media Studies program, in conjunction with several high-level academic and cultural institutions, a new series of McLuhan Salons takes place from September 2018 to April 2019 in different dynamic city locations further dissolving the boundaries of the university and the city in bringing the multi-disciplinary multi-practice approaches to bear made famous by Marshall McLuhan.
Please click here to RSVP
McLuhan Salon #2: Thursday, October 11th at 6:30 PM – 11:00 PM Forgotten Genius: The Boy Who Invented Electronic TV
MZTV Museum of Television & Archive
64 Jefferson Ave, Toronto (Liberty Village)
In 1922, 14-year old Philo T. Farnsworth conceived the idea for electronic television while plowing a potato field in idaho. He had not yet been to high school … see his amazing story told through never-before seen films, photos & artifacts including the very first electronic cameras.
6:30 pm // Arrival
7:00 pm // Film Screening in Zoomer Hall
7:30 pm // Talk by Phil Savenick, exhibit curator/filmmaker
8:00 pm // Talk by Malcolm Baird, son of John Logie Baird, the inventor of mechanical television
8:15 pm // Q&A
8:30 pm // Reception (Complimentary food and beverages)
9:00 pm // Ribbon cutting to open new exhibit
9:00 pm – 11:00 pm // Museum open for tours
Inspired by the innovative thinking of Marshall McLuhan, the McLuhan Salons series is committed to make McLuhan’s ideas step out of the university and into the city, to better understand who we are, what matters to us, and where we might be going in a networked and rapidly changing world.
The McLuhan Salon series is generously supported by the William and Nona Heaslip Foundation.
Curators: Paolo Granata and David Nostbakken
For more on the MZTV Museum see on this blog https://goo.gl/Rh7P2w
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A day of free communications and media programming. Featuring creative and scholarly presentations, film screenings, and a book launch.
Primarily understood as a communication theorist and philosopher of media, Marshall McLuhan talked about the various technologies of communication, printing, film, photography, theatre, and dance. His predictions from the 1960s, many of which have come to pass, were prophetic and controversial during their time and remain relevant in disciplines beyond the bounds of media studies.
The Symposium
Presenters include Matthew Flisfeder, Jason Hannan and Kathy Buddle-Crowe with film work by Jarett Cole, Gordon Pepper and Richard Altman. Topics range from McLuhan and urban theory to the connection between McLuhan and the cyberculture of the 1990s.
Imaginations Book Launch
Imaginations is a multilingual, open-access journal of international visual cultural studies. It is published twice yearly and is double-blind peer-reviewed. As a knowledge democracy project, Imaginations is free to submit to and free to read. A print version of issue 8-3 “Marshall McLuhan And The Arts” will launch at West Awake. (UW Faculty of Education Publishing)
For the Contents of Marshall McLuhan And the Arts see https://goo.gl/zECfqZ
Presentations
There will also be presentations including that of Howard R. Engel of Red River College about the Design in Depth Exhibition of Robert R. Reid’s typographic ephemera at Red River College Library titled “McLuhan in curatorial spaces.”
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Tags: academic, communication, conferences, culture, education, ideas, university, Winnipeg
Dr. Christian Sandvig
The H. Marshall McLuhan Collegiate Professorship in Digital Media, School of Information
Christian Sandvig is the H. Marshall McLuhan Collegiate Professor of Digital Media at the University of Michigan, where he teaches in both Information and Communication Studies. He is a researcher specializing in studying the consequences of algorithmic systems that curate and organize culture. He has written about social media, wireless systems, broadband Internet, online video, domain names, and Internet policy. His group blog was named one of the “Must-Follow Feeds” in science, culture, and design by Wired.
Before moving to Michigan, Sandvig was a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (where he founded the Center for People & Infrastructures) and Oxford University. Sandvig has also been a visiting scholar at McGill University, the Oxford Internet Institute, the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford, Intel Research, Microsoft Research, the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.
Sandvig was named a “next-generation leader in science and technology policy” by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the Faculty Early Career Development Award from the US National Science Foundation (NSF CAREER) in Human-Centered Computing.
He has published over 50 scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and papers in conference proceedings, receiving “best paper,” “first prize” and other awards from these venues (including ACM CHI, ICA, AEJMC, ICWSM, SCMS, and TPRC). His work has been translated into French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, and Hungarian.
The US National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council of New York, the MacArthur Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom, and the Internet Society have funded Sandvig’s research.
Sandvig is also a computer programmer with industry experience consulting for a Fortune 500 company, a regional government, and a San Francisco Bay Area software start-up.
Quotations, interviews, and articles about Sandvig’s research have appeared in stories in/on The Economist, The New York Times, Le Monde, NPR, the BBC, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other media outlets. Sandvig’s own writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, The Guardian, and Wired.
Sandvig received the Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University in 2002.
Sometimes Sandvig writes about himself in the third person.
Marshall McLuhan in Michigan
(This is not that much compared to McLuhan’s 33-year career at the University of Toronto (1946-1979), but they named a funded professorship for him at Michigan. And U of Toronto? There’s a room bearing his name at the iSchool.)
H. Marshall McLuhan periodically visited the University of Michigan from 1944 to 1978. He used the University of Michigan Library for his research, attended university events, met colleagues, and gave occasional lectures. These included a university lecture, A College of Engineering lecture, and a broadcast on WUOM. His book, Understanding Media, was excerpted in the Michigan Daily in 1965, and in 1966, the Michigan Daily published a guide to “McLuhanism.” His work inspired a column (“Medium”) in the counterculture Ann Arbor Sun in 1968 and he was placed on the reading list of the Ann Arbor-based Rainbow People’s Party. Mr. McLuhan’s mother, Elsie, lived in Detroit, where Mr. McLuhann also regularly spoke at the Ford Auditorium from 1959 to 1971. Mr. McLuhan himself lived in nearby Windsor, Ontario for two years [while teaching at Assumption College, now Assumption University, part of the University of Windsor].
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Formerly Withdrawn Play About Marshall McLuhan Returns to the Tarragon Theatre, Toronto
R.H. Thomson performs the role of Marshall McLuhan during his time of decline & aphasia
I attended a pre-opening performance of The Message last week. I was not impressed by either the play or production I witnessed, indeed I was disappointed. I know R.H. Thomson to be a highly regarded and skilled actor, but he could only work with the script that he was presented with by playwright, Jason Sherman. I found his depiction to be sadly lacking in that his play showed McLuhan during only two stages of his life, shifting back and forth between these two phases: first, there was the period after 1967-68 when he had been on sabbatical at Fordham University in New York, during which time he was afflicted by a benign but large brain tumor that required an overnight many-hour operation (see https://goo.gl/Mjs8pg); second, we are also presented McLuhan in an aphasic state during his final year, at which time his most common verbalization was “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy”. In other words, we never see a depiction of the brilliant genius who was foundational for the new academic field of media studies, was hailed as “Canada’s intellectual comet” by Richard Schickel of Harper’s Magazine (1965), and who author Tom Wolfe compared to Newton, Darwin, Freud and Einstein. Therefore, uninformed theatre audiences without knowledge of McLuhan might be left with the impression that even before the major stroke that left him speechless, McLuhan was little more than an absent-minded professor who even his secretary, Margaret Stewart couldn’t understand. That is utterly misleading and an unfortunate misrepresentation. No wonder Corinne McLuhan, McLuhan’s wife and the McLuhan Estate, objected to the play in the first place. I could say much more but, maybe I will write a full separate review of this disappointing play and production. – Alex Kuskis
Play about Marshall McLuhan to premiere after long and controversial history
By Brad Wheeler, Toronto Globe & Mail – November 12, 20018
How big was Marshall McLuhan in the late 1960s? The San Francisco Chronicle dubbed the University of Toronto professor “the hottest academic property around,” and the line “Marshall McLuhan, whatcha doin’?” was featured on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, delivered by a giggling Goldie Hawn.
Here’s the thing about McLuhan that nobody likes to talk about, though: In 1967, at age 56, he underwent surgery for the removal of a benign growth in his head. The operation – described by McLuhan biographer Douglas Coupland as a “gross insult to the brain” – extended his life, but may have cost him some of his genius.
Recently I came across a story about the time McLuhan met John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Canada in 1969. For an interview organized by the CBC, the eccentric communications theorist talked to the rock-star couple about their “War is Over” media campaign. He was intrigued not by the duo’s peace message but the medium that carried it: Billboards.
McLuhan seemed a bit off his game. “I just sort of wonder how the ‘War is Over,’ the wording, the whole thinking,” McLuhan began the interview, stumbling from the get-go. “What happened?” Lennon answered that the basic idea was Ono’s, and that they had an idea for Christmas that was a “bit too vast,” but that something would happen, “maybe,” in the following year.
And so it went – a real egghead fandango. McLuhan, the darling of the elbow-patch-and-turtleneck set, wasn’t going to get to the bottom of the ideas held by Lennon and Ono. In his absent-minded state, he sometimes had a tough enough time getting to the bottom of his own. “I don’t necessarily agree with everything that I say,” McLuhan once said. He was, jokes a character in a curious new play by Jason Sherman, “a man of a thousand ideas, three of them completed.”
The Message – the title is taken from McLuhan’s oft-quoted maxim, “the medium is the message” – opens on Nov. 14 at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. The play has a long and controversial history. Fifteen years ago, The Message was scheduled to kick off Tarragon’s 2003-04 season. But after reading a draft of the play, McLuhan’s eldest son Eric and the estate’s literary agent, Matie Molinaro, objected to some of the content and threatened to sue Sherman.
As a result, The Message was put on the shelf. Sherman, a Governor-General’s Literary Award winner, busied himself with other projects. For the last decade, he’s concentrated on writing for radio and television. But, earlier this year, out of the blue, it was announced that Sherman had returned to Tarragon as its playwright-in-residence and that The Message was being dusted off for its long-awaited world premiere. Questions abounded: What took so long? Why now? What about the lawsuit? In short, whatcha doin’, Jason Sherman?
Initially, Sherman wasn’t interested in giving answers. The Message had undergone significant alterations since its contentious beginnings 15 years earlier, I was told by Tarragon Theatre, and Sherman didn’t want to talk about the play just yet. Fair enough. I interviewed him for a short feature about his return to writing for the stage with the understanding that we’d talk about The Message closer to its premiere.
A couple of weeks before The Message was set to open, however, I was informed by Tarragon that Sherman was game to talk about the play… (Read the rest of this article here https://goo.gl/QS1ZFP)
Read the previous announcement of this production on this blog here – Play about Marshall McLuhan to premiere after long and controversial history – https://goo.gl/3emM6k
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Tags: articles, communication, culture, media, theatre, Toronto