John Manley, CEOs, propose details on perimeter security

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 3:24 PM - 5 Comments

The Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the business group headed by former deputy prime minister John Manley, who worked closely with then-DHS secretary Tom Ridge on the “smart border” initiative in the wake of 9/11, has issued its proposal to the US and Canadian governments as part of the “beyond the border” public consultation process that Harper and Obama launched in February. Working groups in each country are preparing an “action plan” aimed at improving the flow of goods and services and cross-border trade .

The group, which represents 150 CEOs of large companies, make a wide range of proposals that they say could be implemented immediately or within two years.

Some of their suggestions include:

On border security:

- Move cargo inspections away from the border to the factor gate for trusted frequent shippers,

- A pilot project to eliminate border re-inspections for meat that has already been inspected within earch country

- Raise duty-free allowances and gift exemptions

- Inspect goods coming from outside of the US/Canada only once upon entry rather than re-inspecting at the border

- Automated information sharing on entry/exit data at the land border

- Align passenger screening programs

- Canada should invest in more biometric technology compatible with existing US systems

On regulatory cooperation:

- Canada should update is copyright legislation

- Eliminate country of origin labeling for meat

- Eliminate agricultural inspection fees

- Harmonize food safety and animal health standards

- Develop energy and environment accord with common standards on advanced technologies

- Align ‘market-driven energy policies’

- Streamline energy infrastructure approvals

- Avoid border charges on greenhouse gas emissions

- Cooperate on clean energy projects

The full document is here.

'We can not afford to get caught up in internal wrangling'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 3:11 PM - 38 Comments

Bob Rae has written as follows to the Liberal caucus. He has apparently told supporters that he won’t seek the permanent leadership.

Colleagues and friends,

I want to advise you that I am willing to let my name stand for the position of interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.  It is my understanding that this issue will be discussed by the caucus on May 25, 2011, and by the national board of the Liberal Party before the deadline of May 30.

After the worst election defeat in our history, it is vital that we come together as a party, and engage directly with Canadians about what matters to them. The pursuit of social justice and a sustainable prosperity in a united Canada has to remain our focus. We cannot afford to get caught up in internal wrangling.

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Newsmakers: May 12-19, 2011

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Ben Lemphers/CP

Some supporters are always loyal

Ed Stelmach got choked up as he sat for the last time as premier in the Alberta legislature last Thursday, his 60th birthday. “Steady Eddie” was said to be the salt of the earth, but “he never seemed comfortable or confident at the head of the table,” the Calgary Sun editorialized. “He picked fights where none were necessary, appeared to see criticism as a threat” and, “painfully,” never found a way to communicate. After a strange showdown with then-finance minister Ted Morton in January, Stelmach chose to exit the bruising realm. He’ll return to the farm in Andrew, Alta., to his family and his beloved dogs. “I’m so grateful for them,” he told reporters last week. “If you have a really bad week and you come home to the farm, they’re always anxious to see you, and never hold anything against you.”

What’s in a name?

Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi travelled to Asbestos, Que., last week. “Does ‘asbestos’ mean something different in French than it does in English?” Mandvi asked Georges Gagné, the town director. “Because in English, it means ‘slow, hacking death.’ ” Mandvi also spoke to Bernard Coulombe, president of Asbestos’s Jeffrey Mine, which received $60 million from Quebec to ramp up sales of the ultra-dangerous mineral in places like India—a country “so open-minded,” said Mandvi sarcastically, “it hasn’t banned the material that causes an estimated 100,000 lung cancer deaths a year.” Indians are “used to pollution,” said Coulombe, apparently suggesting they wouldn’t be bothered by asbestos fibres—“it’s like they have a natural antibiotic.” What, Mandvi wondered aloud, “is the French word for douche bag?”

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Real estate porn: The 15 most expensive homes in Canada

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 2:40 PM - 4 Comments

According to a new report from Re/Max, sales of luxury homes in Canada—the land that the global housing correction, and gravity for that matter, forgot—are exploding. Here’s the breakdown from the release.

$2 million is nothing to sneeze at, but in Vancouver there are crack shacks worth nearly that much. If you really want to talk luxury, set your sights higher. So without further adieu, here’s a countdown of the 15 most expensive homes in Canada right now, as drawn from the real estate industry’s listing service, Realtor.ca, after the jump…

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Higher threat of terrorism from Canada than Mexico: U.S. official

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 2:11 PM - 9 Comments

A U.S. security official says there is a greater threat of terrorism coming from across the Canadian border than from Mexico. During his testimony to the U.S. Senate this week, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin expressed concern potential terrorists are exploiting Canadian immigration loopholes in order to gain entry into the U.S., saying “we have more cases where people who are suspected of alliances with terrorist organizations, or have had a terrorist suspicion in their background—we see more people crossing over from Canada than we have from Mexico.” In 2010, U.S. border officials arrested 450,000 migrants who crossed the Mexican border, and 7,500 people crossing from Canada. But Bersin said that despite the numbers, the more significant threat comes from Canada, where there are more people who are flagged as terrorist threats. But memos from the State Department released by Wikileaks on Wednesday show that some of the practices being used to flag terrorist threats are being called into question, such as the criteria used to place people on U.S. blacklists or the lack of cooperation between the two countries on “No Fly” lists.

The Globe and Mail

Punk band draws federal government's ire

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 2:08 PM - 16 Comments

The Vancouver punk band Living With Lions has drawn the ire of Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, due to the band’s controversial new album entitled Holy Sh-t, which was funded in part by the Canadian government. The album is packaged in the likeness of the Bible and compares religious imagery to excrement. The liner notes acknowledge the government’s support through FACTOR (Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings), which approved $13,248 in funding to the band’s label, Black Box Recordings Inc. “The content of this CD is offensive and the fact that that it is clearly designed to offend a group of Canadians based on their faith is simply wrong,” Moore’s spokesman, James Maunder, told the Vancouver Sun. “The Minister has called Duncan McKie, president and CEO of FACTOR to express his profound disappointment with this content.” Black Box Recordings co-owner Ian Stanger responded by saying the album title and content should be interpreted with a sense of humour, saying, “I think there’s a tongue-in-cheek element of this recording people may be missing.

The Vancouver Sun

And now a word from Brad Wall

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 2:07 PM - 11 Comments

Noted democracy advocate Brad Wall laments for Stephen Harper’s latest Senate appointments.

“I think it takes away momentum for change at the provincial level and it will probably increase calls that we hear from time to time just saying, ‘Do we really need this institution?’” Wall told reporters at the provincial legislature Wednesday.

Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter is also unimpressed.

Calgary stops fluoridating city water

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 2:05 PM - 10 Comments

Calgary will stop adding fluoride to the city’s water supply beginning Thursday following a February vote by city councillors, which went 10-3 in favour of stopping the fluoridation program. The move is expected to save the city $750,000 a year, a portion of which will go toward improving dental health for children living in poverty. The city had been facing $6 million in upgrades to the Bearspaw and Glenmore water-treatment plants to continue with fluoridation.

CBC News

Good news, bad news: May 12-19, 2011

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Good news

Not up to the job

Donald Trump is out of the U.S. presidential race, and good riddance. Yes, he would have brought an amusement-park atmosphere to the campaign, but his “birther” demagoguery was ridiculous, and his refusal to let the issue go after President Barack Obama released his long-form birth certificate suggests a serious judgment deficit. Trump disingenuously took credit for putting the issue to rest, but his only real accomplishment was to degrade American political discourse. Now he can return to what he does best: playing himself on TV.

Judging our judges

With two benchers retiring, Canada’s process for selecting Supreme Court justices is starting to resemble that of an enlightened, democratic country. Justice Minister Rob Nicholson has invited members of the public to suggest candidates, while a parliamentary panel will create the short list from which he and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will choose. The two nominees will then answer questions before an ad hoc Commons committee. It’s not perfect—the scope of questions MPs can ask the prospective judges remains limited. But it’s a lot better than the old method of appointment by prime ministerial fiat.

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'The most aggressive GHG reduction efforts undertaken by any economy in the world'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 1:24 PM - 9 Comments

Andrew Leach explains what Environment Minister Peter Kent has to sort out if we’re to meet our greenhouse gas reduction targets.

With these challenges in mind, Mr. Kent’s decisions will determine whether or not we are in a position to meet our Copenhagen commitments, and determine either the costs we incur to meet our targets or the costs we incur as a result of not meeting them. Meeting them will require the most aggressive GHG reduction efforts undertaken by any economy in the world, and the challenge gets tougher with every day we do not act. Not meeting them may limit access to markets for our exported products and access to capital for our investment projects. Inaction could also provide other nations with justification for the imposition of low carbon fuel standards or border adjustment tariffs on our products.

Scenes from the 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 1:18 PM - 0 Comments

Men Watch TV Like This

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 12:48 PM - 3 Comments

I have not a great deal to say about ABC’s or CBS’s lineups. CBS plays it very close to the vest – the network hasn’t yet even decided on some of the shows it will pick up for midseason – while ABC just goes the NBC route of dumping a huge number of shows on the schedule and hoping one of them is a hit.

The most bizarre trend in half-hour comedy is that everybody seems to be trying to make shows that are “for men” or “for women.” ABC has scheduled two mismatched shows – Tim Allen’s Last Man Standing and Chris Moynihan’s Man Up - because they want to have an hour of comedy about the issue of what it means to be a man in a woman’s world. They even picked up what was generally considered their worst idea for a pilot, the cross-dressing Work It, because it’s about masculinity and the “mancession.” In other words, the president of ABC read a magazine article somewhere about how the recession has affected men, and decided that this was a thing that he should build his network around. (The creators of Work It actually had two pilots at ABC. One, Smothered, was supposed to be pretty good and was rumoured to be a likely pickup all through the pilot cycle. At the last minute, the network decided to drop the good pilot and buy Work It instead. I imagine the creators must have been scratching their heads a little.) To balance out the Manly Man comedies, there are comedies with “girl” or “girls” in the titles. ABC and CBS’s best new comedy pilots had virtually the same female-odd-couple premise: ABC’s Apartment 23 (originally Don’t Trust the Bitch In Apartment 23) and CBS’s Two Broke Girls. It’s a thing. And not a particularly interesting thing.

Drama pickups have no obvious rhyme or reason to them. As you may imagine, I kind of admire CBS for their commitment to acting like a real broadcast network: they responded to the erosion of the TV audience by trying to find shows with the broadest possible appeal, rather than trying to compete with cable. (Ironically, by doing so, they came up with The Good Wife, the broadcast drama that comes the closest to competing with the big cable dramas.) It’s a much healthier attitude to the new TV landscape than that of NBC, which constantly trumpets the fact that it’s aiming at affluent people – which is the sort of thing a network should privately boast about to advertisers but be embarrassed about in public.

Still, CBS’s method for getting the most possible viewers cannot be described as exciting: every drama has to be a crime drama of some kind. This is something most of the networks do, to be fair; NBC’s most-anticipated drama, Awake, is a cop show. But other networks’ shows sometimes use the cop-show format to create an accessible episodic core to an “ambitious” semi-serialized project. CBS, in keeping with its accurate belief that TV viewers haven’t changed all that much since the ’70s, prefers shows to be episodic first and foremost. (The Good Wife is a partial exception.) Which is fine, except the network is almost completely committed to one type of episodic drama: the show where an elite team solves mysteries, a crime show with an undercurrent of family dynamics.

Like much of what broadcast networks do, this is carefully calculated to draw in both men and women: the idea is that men will watch for the mystery and women will watch for the family bonding. I have no idea if this is actually true, but that’s the thinking. But my issue with CBS is not that they’re old-fashioned or that they like case-of-the-week shows; it’s that they have only a couple of kinds of case-of-the-week drama, repeated over and over again without much variation throughout the schedule. Of course, that may simply be an unavoidable bi-product of their policy of making mass-appeal shows: USA or TNT has more different types of episodic case-of-the-week drama, but those are cable networks, albeit cable networks that sometimes get more viewers than broadcast shows. The audience erosion may have lead to a situation where even shows we thought of as mass-appeal – spy shows, Macgyver or A-Team type adventures, or family drama like 7th Heaven- may now be niche shows. Which leaves the CSI/NCIS format as one of the few sure-fire things, along with shows that have singing in them.

ABC seems to be trying to test that proposition by picking up several dramas that its own president has described as “escapist,” but that don’t fit into the template of NCIS or House or Bones. Charlie’s Angels is, well, Charlie’s Angels, while Pan Am is betting on the idea that escapism mixed with nostalgia will be a winning formula. And it might; I can’t help but root for any type of drama that is neither a pure serial nor a pure crime procedural. On the other hand, reboots don’t work that well (Hawaii 5-0 has never done as well as CBS expected it to, possibly because of by-the-numbers writing and an uncharismatic star) and Pan Am sort of gives me flashbacks to this:

From the backbenches

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 12:37 PM - 25 Comments

Yesterday’s Senate appointments prompt anonymous complaint.

One of Mr. Harper’s MPs suggested that the Prime Minister is no longer trying to kill the Liberal Party but has instead decided to become the Liberal Party. The MP said this was an abuse of his trust and support.

Strauss-Kahn resigns from IMF

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments

Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned as head of the International Monetary Fund. In a letter to the agency’s directors, Strauss-Kahn, who is facing sexual assault charges in connection with the alleged attempted rape of a hotel maid, said he was stepping down to “protect this institution which I have served with honour and devotion, and especially—especially—I want to devote all my strength, all my time and all my energy to proving my innocence.” Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers will ask the New York’s Supreme Court on Thursday to release their client on bail under strict conditions. Meanwhile, Strauss-Kahn’s alleged victim spent Wednesday testifying before a grand jury. Her testimony is expected to continue on Thursday.

CNN

Do it for your country

By Jenn Cutts - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

What’s Vladimir Putin got on his mind ahead of next year’s elections? Babies. In a speech last month, the prime minister pledged $51 billion for “demographic projects” meant to raise the country’s birth rate by up to 30 per cent in less than five years.

Russia’s population has dropped by 2.2 million people in the last eight years, to just under 143 million. Putin calls the decline Russia’s gravest problem. The billions will fund incentives such as free land for families with three or more children, and increased child-benefit payments. It will also support existing schemes, such as one-time $13,000 payments for mothers of two or three children, and medals for women with many children (a Soviet-era practice Putin rekindled in 2007). In the past, youth roused by Putin’s message set up “sex tents” at summer camps and wore T-shirts declaring, “I want three children.”

Though Russia’s birth rate is comparable to those of many Western countries, it’s compounded by a high death rate. Drug and alcohol abuse has increased sharply since the collapse of the Soviet Union, taking a toll on men in particular.

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Lars Von Trier banished from Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

We were filing into the premiere of This is Not A Film, a clandestine video diary made by Iran’s Jafar Panahi while under house arrest, when we heard the latest Cannes bombshell about Lars Von Trier’s “I’m a Nazi” scandal, documented in a previous post (Lars Von Trier: Nazi pornographer manqué). More about the Iranian movie in a moment, but first this bizarre communiqué from the festival brass:

“The Festival de Cannes provides artists from around the world with an exceptional forum to present their works and defend freedom of expression and creation. The Festival’s Board of Directors, which held an extraordinary meeting this Thursday 19 May 2011, profoundly regrets that this forum has been used by Lars Von Trier to express comments that are unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity that preside over the very existence of the Festival. The Board of Directors firmly condemns these comments and declares Lars Von Trier a persona non grata at the Festival de Cannes, with effect immediately.”

Later  a Cannes press official told me this means that Von Trier’s film, Melancholia, remains in competition for the Palme d’Or, but if it wins a prize Von Trier won’t be allowed to accept it. In fact, from here on in, he is stripped of his festival badge and forbidden to set foot in the Palais, the festival’s headquarters.

This overreaction comes as a shock for two reasons. First, Von Trier issued a contrite apology yesterday for that silly lapse of judgment at the Melancholia press conference, insisting he is, in fact, neither an anti-Semite nor a Nazi. Second, anyone who witnessed the director’s comments was fully aware they were sarcastic. Also, there was a context for them: he was musing about the movie’s allusion to German romanticism, its use of Wagner, and reflecting on his disappointment at discovering that he was not Jewish, and that his family was simply German. Thinking that he could joke about Jews and Hitler and Nazis to the world media without harsh repercussions is idiotic and naïve. But we’ve come to expect that from the Danish auteur provocateur, who seems to combine a flair for outrage with a genuine lack of impulse control. Somehow, the same standard doesn’t apply to Mel Gibson, who walked the red carpet this week to promote The Beaver.

But the ultimate irony of Von Trier’s banishment is that the news broke just as we were sitting down to watch Panahi’s This is Not a Film, a wryly satirical self-portrait of a banned filmmaker. For months Panahi has been confined to his high-rise apartment, awaiting the results of an appeal against a six-year jail term and a 20-year ban that prohibits him from writing a film, shooting a film, or leaving the country. It’s one of two clandestine films in Cannes by Iranian victims of censorship and repression. Both premiered in the Cannes sidebar program, Un Certain Regard, without their directors present. The other is Goodbye, Mohammad Rasoulof, who is also appealing a six-year prison term and a 20-year ban on activities. Continue…

HIV deaths in China cut 60 per cent in 7 years

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 12:17 PM - 4 Comments

Improved access to HIV drugs in China has reduced deaths by more than 60 per cent in seven years, although more still needs to be done to improve access, researchers say in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal. The country introduced free anti-retroviral drugs in 2003, and reached more than 60 per cent of patients by 2009, the BBC reports, although some groups could use better access, including men, the elderly, migrants, intravenous drug users, and those who’ve caught HIV through sexual contact.

BBC News

Unfit recruits are to blame for their injuries, U.S. Army chief says

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 12:15 PM - 3 Comments

U.S. Army recruits are in worse shape than those in previous generations, and are suffering more injuries from the heavier loads they’re lugging into combat, Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey told a Senate panel on Wednesday. He pointed to poor eating habits and carbonated drinks as a risk factor for musculoskeletal injuries like fractures, tendinitis and connective tissue disorders (not combat injuries), a leading cause of medical evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan, Reuters reports. Troops’ heavy combat load is another concern, and the Army’s trying to lighten boots, helmets, rifle opticals, and other equipment. But part of the problem is simply that soldiers aren’t as fit as they used to be, he said.

Reuters

Couples therapy in robes and slippers

By Rebecca Eckler - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images/Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

“The Spa Date is not therapy,” insists clinical therapist Ashley Howe. “It’s meant to revitalize and celebrate all that is wonderful about you and your relationship. Spas are all about mind, body and spirit. This focuses on the mind.” Well, you can dress it up however you want—in this case, in robes and slippers in a spa room—but it’s still two people talking about their relationship in front of a professional.

Howe, who has a master’s degree in couples and family therapy, founded Spa Date last year. “I don’t believe that traditional couples therapy works,” she says. “Couples will show up and just end up hammering out their issues in a last-ditch effort or because one party feels guilty and figures they should at least try to save their relationship with counselling.” After years of working with couples on the brink, Howe realized, “This sucks.” And, also, that traditional couples counselling was “not helping to encourage the relationship.” She thought couples needed a more “positive way to look at their relationship.”

It can’t hurt that couples going to see her (or one of her trained professionals) on a Spa Date are offered a glass of champagne and a cheese plate. Still, I’ll admit I was skeptical. Wouldn’t men feel less comfortable talking about their relationship in a robe in front of a stranger? Most importantly, I wondered, “Does she not know I’m naked under here?”

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Is soup the window to a chef's soul?

By Pamela Cuthbert - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 2 Comments

Justin Lewis/Getty Images

Often overlooked in restaurants in favour of the stars of the show—the meaty mains, the flashy apps, the sensual sweets—soup is frequently dismissed as an also-ran or a mere filler-upper. But great chefs know better. “I love soup. It’s a brilliant thing,” enthuses the man behind the nose-to-tail movement, pioneering chef Fergus Henderson of the Michelin-starred restaurant St. John in London, England. “Food has two things it should do: to sustain and to uplift. Both are in the nature of soup. Yet it gets forgotten.”

Revered as much for his philosophical musings as for his culinary genius, the former architect likens soup to “flying buttresses,” essential to a meal’s structural integrity, and ventures that perhaps it is looked down on because “there was always soup with grandparents. Maybe that’s it in some Proustian way.”

Another reason soup is so often taken for granted may simply be its ubiquity. There isn’t a culinary culture without it.There’s turtle, truffle, French onion, hot and sour, clam chowder, miso, pasta fazool—for starters. “I don’t think there’s any other dish that can fit any style of cuisine quite so well,” says Jonathan Gushue, executive chef at Ontario’s luxe Langdon Hall hotel in Cambridge. And soup invites extremes, from terrible tinned tomato to XLB, or xiao long bao, a Shanghai dumpling creation that has online critics raving about the life-changing flavours.

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What's with Dilbert's creator?

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 11:45 AM - 1 Comment

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Dilbert creator Scott Adams once described himself as “an early user of the Internet.” Now the Internet is hurting his reputation. For two months, Adams has been taking time off from drawing comic strips about office life to make controversial statements about race and feminism—and even to come to his own defence under an assumed name. Asked by Maclean’s to comment on the online fracas, Adams replied: “Which fracas? Is it the one where I’m an evolution denier, a Holocaust denier, a racist, a misogynist, a troll, or just the biggest douche in the entire world?”

Adams has always used blogging to express his proudly libertarian views. But recently he’s been writing some things that sound worse than just hating government regulation. It began with a post where he said that “the reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.” When a Republican official sent out a picture portraying President Barack Obama’s parents as monkeys, Adams argued that the incident proved how “non-racist” the official was. And he later wrote that a journalist should admit the “advantages” her career had gotten from being “a brilliant, smoking-hot African-American woman.”

Popular websites jumped on Adams’s gaffes, though he says they weren’t gaffes if you knew what he was really saying: “No one who has read my writing in its proper context, and understood it, is angry at me.” But his attackers might not have had as much ammunition if it hadn’t been for Adams’s attempts to defend himself. After the post about women got him in trouble, he deleted it, causing other blogs to re-post it and accuse him of trying to hide his shame. He also referred to Gawker, a site that has been particularly relentless in making fun of him, as “pure evil” and “Nazi wannabes.”

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'It happened today, and it happened to Peter'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 11:31 AM - 3 Comments

Tonda MacCharles profiles the new Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs.

The remarkable journey of Innu leader Peter Penashue—the first First Nations person to achieve a full-fledged position at the federal cabinet table—began with sobriety. As a young man, Penashue battled twin demons common in his native Labrador Naskapi Indian community. Sexually abused as a youth by a priest from Ontario, he drank too much, and despaired that things would ever change.

At 26, Penashue woke up “really hung-over” and alone on his son’s sixth birthday. He had a moment of clarity. Nothing would change for his family unless he did. The father of four set out to do just that.

This ain't my mama's L'Air Du Temps

By Kim Pittaway - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Alexandre Weinberger/Global Look Press

When Krista Janicki walked into Fritsch Fragrances in Kitchener, Ont., last fall, what she saw might have made other shoppers turn away. The counters were cluttered, the shelves a “higgledy-piggledy jumble” of old perfume boxes and bottles. The back quarter of the store was impassable, blocked off with boxes and furniture. She wasn’t dismayed, though; she was delighted to see decades-old bottles of Bandit, Emeraude, Arpège. “It was like finding treasure,” says the collector and blogger who specializes in vintage perfumes. “The dustier the box, the better!”

Conventional wisdom says perfumes don’t age well, but a new breed of collector is defiantly searching out discontinued perfumes and old versions of classics still in production. “The new versions just don’t smell as good,” says Margot Adam of perfumeniche.com, a Canadian site that sells samples of hard-to-find perfumes. Adam started her search after finding that fragrances her mother used to wear—L’Air du Temps, Madame Rochas—didn’t smell as she recalled. At first she blamed her memory, but then she learned many of those favourites had been reformulated in ways that noticeably altered the scent.

Perfume formulae are rarely constant. In the past, changes were driven by Mother Nature—or accountants. One caused variations in the quality and availability of natural ingredients, the other substituted less costly ones. Chanel stopped using civet, harvested from the musk glands of civet cats, in the late 1990s, while the soaring costs of endangered Indian sandalwood have pushed many companies to opt for synthetic isobornyl cyclohexanol. In recent years, there’s been a third force: industry efforts to cut back on allergy-causing ingredients, to avoid labelling requirements or outright ingredient bans.

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Review: Robert Redford: The Biography

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 10:15 AM - 0 Comments

Like a more industrious, fair-haired Warren Beatty, Robert Redford has carved out a Rushmore-like reputation as iconic star, Oscar-winning director, influential activist, legendary sex symbol, and meticulous control freak. But unlike Beatty, this golden boy was no playboy, and seems immune to gossip and scandal. At least that’s the impression gained from this highly authorized portrait. Whether he’s bridging the gap between Hollywood and indie cinema as founder of the Sundance festival, or making a fable of Watergate in All the President’s Men, Redford has built a legacy of heroic virtue. So it’s revealing to read how he grew up in the mean streets of Los Angeles as a delinquent jock, came of age as a renegade painter who worshipped the Beats, married his first wife (Lola) at 22 in a five-minute wedding on the Vegas strip, and cut his teeth playing psychos on TV. “I didn’t want to be an actor,” he says. “I wanted to be Modigliani.”

Ever since Redford’s career as a romantic lead exploded on Broadway in Barefoot in the Park—followed by the 1969 screen version— he has bridled at his designated role of matinee idol. Redford’s discomfort with his manifest destiny, and his quest for a higher calling, is the main thread of this diligent biography. Documenting Redford’s impressive career, from Butch Cassidy to Ordinary People, Callan acknowledges a “disarray of failures—marriage, friendship and films.” But as wives and children come and go, along with one-line allusions to possible lovers such as Natalie Wood, there is scant detail. Sidney Pollack, who directed Redford in eight movies, expresses some frustation with his long-time friend. But Bob’s worst sin seems to be his disregard for punctuality. Redford is a compulsive diarist and Callan had access to all his personal papers, plus hundreds of hours of taped interviews. Yet the subject’s privacy seems all too well protected, as the author’s softball approach fails to penetrate Redford’s elusive strike zone.

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