Halifax Politics dot ca

I am going to Toronto on Wednesday for NXNE. Woot! Buffalo Tom at the Shoe on Thursday the 7th.

HPX got our Service Canada grants. The program is a total farce, now. They are giving everyone what they got last year, with no actual oversight or review. Garbage. So much for the new government of Canada.

I am on youtube. The quality of this ad is really good. I am going to put a bunch of historical Pop Explosion stuff on line later on this week!

Here comes the new boss… same as the old boss.

From: Waye Mason [mailto:waye@halifaxpopexplosion.com]
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 1:26 PM
To: Stephanie Domet; Phlis McGregor; Stewart Young; Carmine Klassen; Steven Cooke; Dean Lisk; Stephen Claire; Tara Thorn; alexa@hfx.eastlink.ca; Dawn Marie Sloane; Peter Kelly; Leonard Preyra; Maureen MacDonald; mikesavage@ns.aliantzinc.ca; sgee@hfxnews.ca; asmith@herald.ca; Steve Maher
Cc: mackay.p@parl.gc.ca
Subject: Summer Student Program
Importance: High

Hi there folks.

Please forward this email to whomever should be aware of our small part in this ridiculous summer employment issue.

The Halifax Pop ExplosionAssociation applied for 2 student summer grants this year. One was our Showcase Coordinator, a college student position that we have had for the last two years. One was for a Summer Activities Coordinator, aimed at a high school student.

Showcase was going to be the same gig as Ben Pearlman filled the last two years. He is now in Toronto having graduated King’s and works FULL TIME in the music industry at Against the Grain Concerts.

Summer Activities was targeted at an African Nova Scotian high school student, in order to have that student be mentored by our ANS Advisory Committee, and for that student to help organize and run the North End Community Fair stage here on Gottingen.

Did I mention that our office is in the heart of the ‘hood? That we are a part of the North End community?

With this in mind, Service Canada says the program exists for the following reasons:

1emphasis on creating skills that get them full time employment
2 emphasis on low income areas
3 emphasis on minorities

We meet all three criteria. We scored 22 out of 70. We did not get the grants.

I am more than happy to talk about this on the record.

I have attached the job descriptions we submitted for your records.

Bad enough that my popexplosion email was getting 220 spams a day, but all of us here at wayemason.com have been horrified to start getting comment spam by the tonne. Now, I made it so I have to approve any comments, but that just meant I had 300 unproved comment spams in my que, waiting for approval or deletion, with maybe one or two actual comments mixed in.

So today, welcome to the brave new world of captcha. Captcha is the annoying “type in the text you see in the graphics” deal that you see on most websites now. It is sucky because visually impaired people, or people using text or mobile access cannot access past a captcha graphic. But unfortunately, you have to do what you have to do.

I also had a horrible and now funny spam email problem. I have a boxtrapper, which is a program that means you have to be on an approved list or I don’t get your email. All you have to do to be approved is respond, just once, to the automatic email my server generates to “confirm you are a human being.”

Unfortunately, the “confirm you are a person” email was being captured by the corporate spam filter of one of the Pop Explosions partners. So she sent me an email, I never got it. My server sent her an email, she never got it. I sent her an email wondering where the proposal was, she thought I was an idiot, I thought she was forgetting us… and so it went… for. a. month. Note to self, pick up phone, call after first failure to get email response.

Last night was fun. Hello to everyone I chatted with at the Helen Hill Family memorial benefit at the Seahorse. I wish I had been able to stay up till Windom Earl. I just couldn’t do it. I promise that I will be strong and network like a mothersomthing during the ECMAs in two weeks. I had better start taking vitamins right now.

Short bullet posts seem order of the day today.

* I am amused how many dear old friends are suddenly on myspace… when Ben and I created our personal and HPX pages everyone was younger than Ben, and he was 23 at the time. Then slowly the core mid to late twenty set of volunteers and coordinators all registered, then nine or ten months ago, people in their 30s started showing up. Now pretty much everyone I know no matter what their age seems to have a myspace page. Except my 14 and 18 year old cousins, because Myspace is lame, they are all on nexopia and think I am sucker for being on a site owned by News Corp.

* We appear to be winning this phase of the battle at the old HRSB. I will donate $250.00 to the charity of Doug Hadley’s (spokesfella for HRSB) choice if the new school is built as planned. HRSB staff are in fact open and maybe excited to do consultation now, I think, just as long as we/I/us collectively live up to the promise to be there to put massive pressure on the Province to fund and build what results from the process. Stand by DOE and cabinet, here we come… softly, softly, and carrying a big stick. Thus, the next note:

* I am working hard to establish a Citadel wide school association, to formalize the political representation of the whole peninsula. This will hopefully take us from the “perceived as rich and taken care of” to where we really are “no new schools in 40-50 years except St Agnes (because it burned down)”. If anything central Halifax has one of the biggest infrastructure gaps in HRM, though Dartmouth has a massive pile of crappy 1960s and 1970s schools AND the problem of massive drops in the student population. One parent told me the politics of the area going back to the end of the catholic and parochial school divide, giving my a nice historic view of how we got here. It is now time to get everyone at the table and set out a bold plan for the future… or some crap like that.

* I am meeting MC J today, of Halifax rap group MC J and Cool G. He is going to be on the Halifax Pop Explosion African Nova Scotian Advisory Committee. I am going to facilititate and provide resources to a committee of people from teh community to establish programs for ANS youth. The idea is to tie together summer employment, mentorship and the high school coop program to develop skills and leadership in the young black music community. IT IS VERY EXCITING.

The bar owners don’t want a police state, and don’t want early closing hours. Fair enough. But its a lot more complicated, as I am sure you know.

Every year, people from Toronto and parts west come to the Halifax Pop Explosion and are shocked by the late closings in Halifax. They are also shocked by how late people come out to drink. In Toronto bars are closed at 2am and people are at shows watching bands or dancing in a club by 9-10pm, here it is 10-11-12pm.

I am personally convinced that a 1am or 2am closing would not cost any bar lost sales. People would come out sooner and drink sooner and go home sooner. Bars might actually save money on staffing. The city would save money on policing.

One of the things you really notice in Toronto and Montreal is how many more adults in the 25-40 are in clubs, and at shows. Earlier closing times mean more 21+ age people are out, going to shows, seeing bands, dancing, having a martini, until close. When you have a show at the Attic where the headliner goes on stage at 1am or 2am, very few adults with day jobs can stay out until then.

The biggest issue of course is the cabarets. The only cabaret that is actually living up to its license is Grafton-Connor, with the Attic and the Dome. Cabaret was created for “quality live entertainment” and “good quality food”. Reflections and the Palace do not even have kitchens, and neither comes anywhere near the mandated 4 nights of live quality music. If you want to know about food service at these bars, they hand you a delivery menu for pizza! Unless the regulations have changed since I last reviewed it, if the actual letter of the law was enforced all the bars would loose their cabaret license except Grafton-Connor.

And cabaret might have made sense 30-40 years ago, but I don’t think it does now. Long gone are the days when 2,000 people cheered on Matt Minglewood or Soma on the stage of the Misty Moon until 3:30 am. There was a reason for this license, at that time. That time is past. Now most cabarets are warehouses where drunk people go to get even drunker between 2:30-3:30. What socially positive good does that serve?