The juicy backstory:

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The real story, of course, is slightly less romantic; instead of a Ferrari 275 GTB, it was an old Mercedes 450SEL. Instead of the Formula 1 driver, it was Lelouch himself, along with two others in the car. The sound of Lelouch’s Ferrari was dubbed over the movie for added oomph. And for all that, C’etait un rendezvous is still an astonishing bit of driving cinema. And now you can follow Lelouch’s route as the video plays, via Google Maps.

Fifth Gear tried and failed to recreate the glory of C’etait un rendezvous earlier this year. I almost hesitate to link this because it was a pretty boring segment; morning rush-hour Paris is no time to be making a speed run.

BBC article. Official word from last.fm. As someone who’s got over four years of listening data on the site, it’s a reminder that there’s more than enough data on me out there to satisfy any marketer—including possibly the higher-ups at CBS, last.fm’s reassurances about maintaining privacy notwithstanding. Hopefully someone’s putting together the open-source alternative to last.fm should things go south quickly.

I was downtown to meet some old friends who are now interning at the Globe and Mail, and I didn’t bring a jacket with me because I am an idiot, so I thought “that Rosebuds/Land of Talk show I was thinking of going to is totally not happening now because it’s windy and I am cold.” So I walked over to Bathurst and took the streetcar up after 9pm, and then I passed Queen around 9:30pm and I thought, “man, it’s 9:30, and Land of Talk’s going onstage at the Horseshoe in like 10 minutes, and I’m so close to the Horseshoe, it would be such a shame for me not to go to the show when I’m this close and live sooo far away,” but it took about ten more minutes and three more stops for my head to send the message down to my feet, and I didn’t get off the streetcar until I was well past Dundas.

[insert twenty minutes of speedwalking]

I enter the Horseshoe, which is thankfully not sold out, and plunk down $12. Land of Talk have thankfully not started yet, though a woman that looks suspiciously like Elizabeth Powell is holding court at one of the merch tables. Someone’s family is here, because what middle-aged/elderly couple goes to see a rock show these days? Both my suspicions are confirmed when a) said woman walks into the side-stage area and b) motions to the guy with the older couple, who is in fact the new drummer, to get his ass in gear already, in a totally friendly and bemused manner. Three minutes later the bassist hops on stage and they just start playing while the crowd quickly files to the front of the stage. Welcome, Land of Talk.

It’s a short set because the band have one EP under their belts and not much else in the way of new songs. When they start the crowd is typical Toronto—one hand in pocket, other hand with pint, nodding to the beat and rocking back and forth slightly to the music. I did it too, I’m sorry. But as the set progresses everyone gets looser, so that by the end of the show we’re maybe nodding a bit more vigorously and maybe we have our hands out of our pockets, but we make up for our physical reticience by cheering loudly and heartily after every song.

Land of Talk have just returned from the UK, and they’re still breaking in their new drummer and probably used to a month’s worth of small crowds that maybe don’t know who they are. So when Elizabeth stepped to the mic and quietly murmured “the next song is Breaxxbaxx,” she probably didn’t expect the wild chorus of cheers from the left side of the stage. This would be a recurring theme throughout the night: Land of Talk continually ambushed by hearty cheers of appreciation. By the end of the show everyone’s all “WE LOVE YOU LAND OF TALK, PLAY AN ENCORE!” and Land of Talk’s all “oh-em-gee, this is awesome but we’re, like, the openers and we don’t even have any more songs, except this one that we haven’t played live before,” and then Elizabeth took a couple of minutes to tune her guitar while Chris cracked jokes about being horrible at filling time, and then they broke out the new song and the new song was all “I WILL BREAK YOUR EARS WITH AWESOMENESS!!!!!” and the audience was all “WE LOVE YOU LAND OF TALK!!!!” and Land of Talk was all “WE LOVE YOU TOO PLEASE STAY FOR THE ROSEBUDS!”

So I did what any sane person would do in my position. I, erm, left the Horseshoe and hopped on a streetcar so I wouldn’t have to take a $20 taxi ride home from Finch into the heart of York Region because the busses stop running after midnight. Sorry, Rosebuds. Perhaps some other time. As for Land of Talk, I’m glad you used your awesome psychic powers to convince me to come to your show even though I had decided not to before. Also, I still love Elizabeth Powell.

THE END.

We’re about a third of the way through series 11 of Britain’s second best car show, Fifth Gear, and it’s clear that the producers have taken some of the criticism of the last series to heart. Series 10 was the worst Fifth Gear stretch by a huge margin; the shift in location, the addition of more celebrity puff pieces, the restricted duties of regulars Jason Plato and Tiff Needell, and the addition of new host Tim Lovejoy all combined to make last season very, very difficult to watch. In its continuing attempts to cement a unique identity for itself in the shadow of the colossus that is BBC’s Top Gear, Fifth Gear had thrown away nearly everything that made the show decent and distinctive and replaced it with drivel like “Wreck My Ride,” a segment where they would tear a car apart in a “creative” fashion for no apparent reason.

After a bottoming-out like that, nearly anything would be better, and this series began on a high note: Tim Lovejoy had left to work on other projects. Whether or not that’s a euphemism for “fired for being an uninteresting host who didn’t seem to care much about cars” is almost besides the point: Fifth Gear’s biggest mistake is gone. Unfortunately, the Ace Cafe is still around, but taking the co-host position beside Vicki Butler-Henderson is Tom Ford, the only person to emerge completely unscathed from the poor critical reception the show got. Routinely putting a fun, lighthearted and informative spin on his reviews, Ford was an obvious choice for more exposure, and now he has it.

But problems still linger, and the shock of seeing a decent Fifth Gear episode again has worn off. A couple of things the producers need to fix:

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I wrote a somewhat lengthy review of Spiderman 2 a couple of years ago. I won’t need nearly so many words for Spiderman 3, nor will I even need my own. From an internet forum I frequent:

dude1: off to see the spiderman flick… OH BOY
dude2: because you just couldn’t give that money to a hobo and ask him to kick you really hard in the balls instead.

Spiderman 3: worse than paying a hobo to kick you really hard in the balls.

P.S. Sandman really needed a theme song for every time he appears as a giant cloud of sand. I suggest Darude’s “Sandstorm.” They could even make a sad version of “Sandstorm” for Sandman’s oh-so-tearful outro. It’d be exactly the same but its tempo would be cut in half for PATHOS.

Bonus points for telegraphing his appearance by having random passersby on the street make inane comments like “gee, it sure feels windy… I hope it doesn’t turn into a… SANDSTORM.” Or construction workers being all “Hey Bob, this 2×4 feels a bit rough, got any suggestions?” “Yeah, Randall, here, you can borrow my… SANDPAPER.” Or maybe a dad and son waiting at a bus stop, and the son asks, “hey dad, what colour is that car?” “Why son, I believe it’s… SANDSTONE.”

Album: Lucky Soul’s The Great Unwanted. UK import, not easily available here.

Option 1: Ordered from Amazon UK on the 16th of April. Expected arrival date in Canada, April 23-25. It is now May 3rd and the CD still hasn’t arrived. The last CD I ordered from Amazon UK arrived ahead of the expected date, so this is a bit odd. I fear that it may be lost, which will mean an e-mail to Amazon asking them to resend it, and possibly other lovely customer support headaches.

Option 2: I’ve already paid my monies for the album, so feel absolutely no shame in downloading the album from Oink. Total elapsed download time: three minutes.

I have my fingers crossed that my CD will show up in the mail tomorrow, but dammit, I’ve been waiting for this album for over two weeks now. So screw the post; I’m listening to “One Kiss Don’t Make A Summer” right now and I feel fiiiiine.

Hot on the heels of a Copyright Royalty Board decision that could potentially kill internet radio as we know it, a possible hail-mary save. The CRB decided earlier this year that webcasters and internet radio stations, who’ve been paying royalties on the songs they play as a percentage of revenue, should start paying strictly enforced fees per song and listener. The formula is simple but deadly: take a base rate per song (11/100ths of a cent, but potentially increasing over the next five years), multiply that by the number of songs played in an hour, multiply that by the number of listeners in an hour, and you have the cost in royalties per hour of airtime. With this revamped metric, smaller broadcasters were shocked to discover their royalty costs swallowing up their revenue and then some. No less than NPR filed an appeal, saying the vastly increased fees were capricious, but to no avail.

That’s why if you support sites like Pandora, Last.fm and the mighty NPR, and you live in the United States, you’ll want to get in touch with your representatives and ask them to support the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would reverse the Royalty Board’s decision and return to a flat-fee-plus-revenue-percentage model. As someone who grew up listening to tons of internet radio—I owe my musical tastes to a guy in Portland named Rich and a site called indiepopradio—I know full well the impact rising costs can have on internet radio, and the power of internet radio to reach people and expose them to music, culture and opinions outside what’s available on the local dial. We lose these stations and webcasters and we might as well go back to the bad old days when Clear Channel ruled everything.

What happens when you’re a video sharing site and the leading competitor gets bought out by Google? You make your own material, that’s what:

I believe this is the sort of thing I’m supposed to snark out, but if they’re lip-syncing to a mid-90s one-hit wonder like Harvey Danger, then they are clearly my kind of people. Well played, Vimeo hipsters, well played.

This is kind of a pretty awesome concept.

SPOILERS AHEAD. Though if you’re like me, you no longer care.

Dear 24,

When President Batshitinsane Palmer launched a nuclear missile from the U.S.S. Vickery last episode, it was like you’d taken one bold step closer to fulfilling my fantasies for the show: all-out nuclear war, followed by a seventh season where everyone is either dead, dying of radiation poisoning, or eating rats off the street—in other words, a 24-episode version of Threads. This would’ve been some of the finest television ever to grace American shores, even if you didn’t necessarily buy into the belief that American aggression would cause a nuclear holocaust—but then, you’re watching 24, so you’ve already been asked to believe far more ludicrous things.

All of that fine nuclear porn has been completely undone in the course of ONE EPISODE. Let’s recap:

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