Q

He’s a likeable, functional, multicultural star, but CBC’s choice of Shad as the new host of Q suggests the network hasn’t learned much from its mistakes

Newsmaker, March 11: The award-winning rapper is a great choice to host the marquee culture show. Will a great idea in theory work in execution?

I was jack-of-all-trades and master of none. But it worked.

Book by Jian Ghomeshi

Post-Wildean British artist/writer/dandy Sebastian Horsley has died of an apparent heroin overdose. The good people at Q have reposted an interview Jian did with Horsley two years ago. It’s an amazing bit of performance art, from the very start, and almost everything out of Horsley’s mouth is quotable. I especially like the exchange that starts just after the six minute mark, when Jian asks why Horsley didn’t just put his memoir online for all to read. Horsley responds that ‘The internet is loser central, and it is basically replacing masturbation as a leisure activity.” Then comes this:

Just because you haven’t heard enough of Stephen Harper’s Ringo impression last weekend, the Ottawa Citizen today had dueling columns about what the upshot of the performance really is.

That’s how PJ O’Rourke described Obama’s governing style, today on Radio Q.  No podcast yet, but I hope they’ll have it up soon, because I missed the setup. Can anyone help me out?

If you have the slightest interest in music in this country, go right now and listen to Jian Ghomeshi interviewing Gord Downie on Q today. For one whole hour. This is the sort of stuff that reminds you how absolutely necessary the CBC can be sometimes. Jian is on a roll.

You gotta love a morning radio man who’s typing after midnight, and rhyming “pristine” with “Joaquin”