In Harmonium

Marc | March 2, 2010

My friend Jim Cassidy just sent me a link to this presentation.  Totally cool, and a fantastic way to show the power of music.

Category: Music | No Comments »
Tags: Bobby McFerrin

Marc | February 1, 2010

A week ago, I posted about the medium is the message vs. massage and used a couple of YouTube Videos from the Ottawa Back Choir as example.  On Saturday, I was over for dinner at an old friend’s house and he showed me one of his favourite YouTube recording artists: Pamplamoose Music.  As he showed [...]

Category: COIN, Communications Theory, Evolutionary Theory, Presentation & Performance | No Comments »
Tags: adaptation, Canadian Communications Tradition, New Media

Marc | January 26, 2010

The Medium is the Massage (no, that isn’t a spelling error), is the name of a rather famous work produced by Marshall McLuhan and Quenten Fiore in 1967.  It is, in many ways, a popularizing, as well as exemplar, version of McLuhan’s  major research focus on how media influences messages or, in it’s better known [...]

Category: Communications Theory, Music | 1 Comment »
Tags: Canadian Communications Tradition, Marshall McLuhan, Ottawa Bach Choir

Marc | January 15, 2010

A very interesting discussion is starting to heat up over at the Small Wars Council over a paper written by Matt Lauder called Religion and Resistance: Examining the Role of Religion in Irregular Warfare (March 2009, DRDC Toronto TN 2009-049; NB: originally posted by milNews.ca over at army.ca forums).  I expect the discussion to expand [...]

Category: COIN, Mythology & Narratives | No Comments »
Tags:

Marc | January 12, 2010

CBC just carried a story that Sarah Palin will be joining Fox News as a commentator.  I think that her comment that
It’s wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news.
just about says it all.  Needless to say, I will continue my personal classification of Fox News as an amusing, [...]

Category: Social Theatre | 8 Comments »
Tags: Fox News, Sarah Palin

Marc | November 26, 2009

I really don’t like rap at all, but one of my ex-students just sent me a link to an incredibly powerful rap video (hat tip to Lindsay Aranoff).  The video speaks for itself.  Do not watch it if you have a weak stomach.

Category: Music | No Comments »
Tags: Holocaust, Music

Marc | November 13, 2009

One of the things that is often forgotten these days is why people fight – not nations, not governments; people.  All to often, especially during long conflicts with not actual “fighting” in a homeland, we forget and dismiss the conflicts and blame those who go to do the fighting as being “war mongers” and “myrmidons” [...]

Category: Ethics, Social Theatre | No Comments »
Tags: attitudes, remembrance day, why people fight

Marc | November 3, 2009

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has just released a briefing on anti-terrorist cartoons in the Saudi Arabian press.  As with all humour, it has a cutting edge to it.  My favorites, and I’ll admit I have a warped sense of humour, really capture how what Richard Dawkins calls Mind Viruses operate.

To view all [...]

Category: Presentation & Performance | No Comments »
Tags:

Marc | October 18, 2009

I normally limit my posts here about music but, given the concert season, I thought I would post a few announcements about upcoming concerts.  The first two are in Ottawa, while the second two are national broadcasts which can be heard online.

Category: Music | 1 Comment »
Tags:

Marc | September 18, 2009

My friends Adam Elkus and Mark Safranski just released what is one of the more insightful, and scathing, critiques of US “Grand Strategy”.  The short article is entitled Theory, Policy, and Strategy: A Conceptual Muddle (abstract | PDF) and focuses on one simple observation: grand strategy for the US is now being driven by operational [...]

Category: Epistemology, Social Theatre | No Comments »
Tags: Grand Strategy