CALGARY CITY COUNCIL today green lighted a recommendation for seed funding of $2.5M to
move forward on a National Music Centre project  in the East Village district. Council  still has to approve the funding, which could be as early as January 25.

“This is a proud moment for music in Canada,” said Beth Gignac, manager of Arts and  Culture with The City. “As Calgarians, we should be equally proud to have an  organization like Cantos in our community who have had the vision to recognize a  significant gap in our national cultural community and have chosen to create this  amazing new resource for Canadian music in Calgary.”

If the funding is approved by Council on January 25th, the planned 80,000-square-foot  facility on the site of the historical landmark King Edward Hotel, will integrate the world-renowned living Cantos Music Collection, the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame  Collection, recording studios, education and public programming, performance space,  public radio broadcasting space, seven-days-a-week live music venue, music and wellness  research centre, artists-in-residence programs and more.

The City will release $2.5M in “seed funding” that will allow design work to continue  with the architectural team and allow for Cantos to continue building support and awareness across the country in 2010. The payment of the balance of the $25M commitment is contingent on similar commitments from the provincial and federal governments as well as support from corporate and individual donors. Calgary City News Blog

JANN ARDEN has a wicked sense of humour for someone who has been called the queen of melancholy,

Take this recent tweet on her Twitter page:

“I am going to shower now. May shave my legs even…. Or maybe just one leg and one armpit? Yeah, that’s all I have time for today.”

An ardent tweeter, she announces daily what she’s wearing, eating, her dog’s pooping habits and her own menstrual cycle.

“Nothing like trying to figure out the universe on a Sunday afternoon,” she tweeted last week. “Picking up dog crap always brings clarity.”

She’s also an avid bubble tweeter — basically, short video clips that pop up on your screen. Most focus on her dog.

…Since releasing her 2007 covers album,Uncover Me,the biggest change in Arden’s career has been hiring Vancouver-based veteran Allen (Bryan Adams, Anne Murray) to manage her. The two were longtime friends previously. They’d have dinner a couple of times a year going back at least a decade.

“He said, ‘You need to let me manage you. Rumour on the street … is that you’re unmanageable,’ ” Arden says. “And maybe I have been.

“I’ve been managing myself for 20 years (through a management company). You just come to a fork in the road and you take it. There’s nothing that made me go, ‘I gotta get away from these people.’ I just thought I feel stifled and I need to make changes.”

After Arden called Allen for advice, he rang her up in July 2008 when he was in Calgary, seeking a meeting.

“He says, ‘You’re just an untapped talent. You haven’t reached your potential. And you’ve been dicking around too much and you’ve got to be more focused.’

Arden, for her part, agreed. The Sudbury Star

Pat Robertson Blames Haiti Earthquake on “Pact With the Devil”

Pat Robertson discusses the crisis in Haiti, saying the country has been cursed ever since it made a “pact with the Devil” and that what the country needs is “a great turning to God.”

SHAW COMMUNICATIONS plans to finally get moving on launching a cellphone network in 2010.

During its first-quarter earnings announcement Thursday, the company said it will take “initial steps to commence wireless activities, with build-out planned over the next several years.”

Shaw did not elaborate on its plans and a company official did not immediately return a request for comment.

In 2008, Calgary-based Shaw spent $189 million on 18 wireless licences covering mostly Western Canada, with a few in northern Ontario as well. Unlike most other new companies that acquired wireless spectrum, Shaw decided to hold off on plans to launch a network.

Along with main rival Telus, Shaw was a vocal opponent of fellow new entrant Globalive and helped convince the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to conduct a public review of that company. CBC

NW BROADCASTERS reports that Vancouver market CKNW AM 980 promotions director Jamie Hunt has announced he is taking early retirement, effective February 1.  Hunt started over 30 years ago as the station’s Eye in the Sky pilot and went on to marry and have a family with Cathy Robertson, CKNW’s traffic reporter, who happened to be sitting next to him. In spring 2008 he was named the 2007 Broadcaster of the Year by the British Columbia Association of Broadcasters … Vancouver’s legendary big band leader/broadcaster Dal Richards, who turned 92 Tuesday, swims 20 lengths, runs twice a week and is preparing to lift weights as he preps to carry the Olympic torch in Vancouver February 12.  He still hosts Dal’s Place Sunday evenings on CISL AM 650 ( Susan Lazaruk, The Province) … Kuljeet Kaila, who has reported news and traffic in the Vancouver market for over 10 years, has landed the morning host position at RJ1200 CJRJ AM Vancouver.  Local singer/musician Hardeep Sahni will co-host the new program.

AT C.E.S., the screens were big, the images were high-def, the sound systems were state of the art, and the video samples were vivid and punchy. They made 3-D TV seem fantastic. You almost couldn’t wait to buy one when they come out this summer. But once the retractable leash pulled your C.E.S. demo glasses back onto their pedestal for the next customer, you’d be forgiven for having a few doubts.

First of all, those glasses. E-w-w-w. Do we really want to have to put on glasses every time we sit down for some TV? Don’t we lose something when we look around the room to exchange glances, and we can’t see anyone’s eyes? Do we really want to nuzzle up to our fiancées and spouses with those things on?You’ll get one or two pairs of glasses with each set. Additional glasses will cost $75 or more. New York Times

President Nixon and Elvis Presley shake hands in the Oval Office.

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (in Washington, DC) is like a safe-deposit box for America’s really important papers — the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the $7.2-million cancelled check for the purchase of Alaska, the picture of Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley shaking hands in the Oval Office.

Copies of that photo — the president in his charcoal suit, the king of rock ‘n’ roll in his purple velvet cape — are requested more than just about any of the archives’ treasures, including the Constitution.

Yet the story that led to their improbable meeting on Dec. 21, 1970, is as little-known as the picture is famous. New York Times

DEBT-LADEN CANWEST Global Communications Inc., which is shopping around its publishing assets, issued what chief executive Leonard Asper described in an internal memo to employees late Wednesday as “the best operating results in a long time.”

CanWest’s net profit from continuing operations was $74 million, versus a loss of $54 million a year earlier. And despite a tough economy, the media giant said revenue fell  just 10 per cent to $571 million in the three months ended Nov. 30.

Net earnings, including a $570 million gain on the sale of its Australian TV network, Ten, were $653 million, the company said.

“After bumping along the bottom of the recession these results demonstrate we have been able to make the adjustments needed to take advantage of the improving Canadian economy,” Asper’s memo says. Toronto Star

RIP: (Winnipeg born) Ed Beach, the host of a popular jazz radio show in the 1960s and ’70s, who attracted listeners in New York and elsewhere with his sonorous voice, eclectic taste, vast erudition and pleasurably irascible temperament, died on Dec. 25 in Eugene, Ore. He was 86 and lived in Eugene. New York Times

CANADA’S LONGEST RUNNING CAMPUS BROADCASTER and one of the oldest continually-operational radio stations in the world just celebrated a landmark anniversary lastThursday. CFRC 101.9 FM celebrated 50 years of broadcasting from Lower Carruthers Hall at Queen’s University in Kingston. CFRC began as an experiment by a group of electrical engineering students that was looking to learn more about what was at the time new technology. The first successful broadcast was of a Queen’s Gaels football game in 1923. Frontenac EMC

YOU’RE A REAL MUSICIAN WHEN you realize that the cheers from the audience after a particularly difficult passage are for a sports play on the big screen TV over the bar, and that in fact, no one is listening to you.

• When the gig you drove 200 miles for to make $100, and had to pay for a hotel room, is later referred to as your “summer tour”.
• When your most sincere, heartfelt comments are made by people that are drunk and who won’t remember you in the morning.
• When you are repeatedly told that the lead singer who can’t read, never practices and has been singing for only six months is “The strongest part of the band,” primarily because she has big tits.
• When you are pleased that the pay for the gig, when looked at hourly from the time you leave your house to when you return meets minimum wage.
• When someone comes up to you to tell you how much they love your playing, because they didn’t think anyone played those things anymore.
• You get to the gig to find out that nothing is comped, and you’re charged $10 to park.
• When someone seeks you out to complement your playing as the “best sax player they have ever heard”, and you’re the trumpet player.
• When you realize that a small piece of equipment- such as a wireless mike you need- will take months of weekly gigs to pay for.
• When you have to add $30 or $40 out of your pocket to find a sub, cause no one will cover you for what you are paid.
• You aren’t offended when all of the young wedding guests leave after the second set to dance to the DJ at a club down the street.
• When you are told that you must play until the very end of when you were contracted for, when your only audience is the bartender, and you’re being paid 40 or 50 bucks for the night.
• When the bandleader or club owner wants to pay you in food or drinks, and you have $100,000 in school loans to pay off for that music degree.
• When the guy collecting money at the door for the band’s performance makes twice over the course of the evening what you do as one of the band members.
• When as a member of a blues band you no longer even pretend to smile when asked to play “Free Bird”.
• When you know that other musicians who routinely claim they don’t work for less than $100 a night only work a few times a year.
• You notice that all of the musicians playing the better functions to young audiences are mid 40’s+ and balding, because young musicians that read don’t exist anymore.
• When people who are drunk tell you that what you are doing is absolutely great and the best thing thing they have ever seen or heard, but refuse to pay more than $5 at the door.
• When someone calling the cops for noise is a good thing. You get to go home early and you still get paid.
• When you realize that asking women out that you meet on gigs doesn’t work, for now they know you’re a musician.
• When you get invited to play the same gig the following year, which means that you don’t have tear down after this year’s gig.
• When you have, for several years, been paid the same amount for a gig, but are afraid to say anything about it for fear that you might lose the gig.
• When you spend more on the bar tab than you get paid for the gig.
• When you finally have to resort to playing Proud Mary in order to get the audience dancing.
• Thanks to Al Mair and Warren Cosford for alerting us to this gem