‘Dirty oil’ vs. ‘blood bananas’ slugfest

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, January 6, 2012 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

iStock; Chuck Burton/AP

On the surface it’s a silly affair, no more serious than a banana peel pratfall. It began in November, when Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International—the banana company—wrote a letter committing to avoid “fuels from tar sands refineries” while vowing to work toward the “elimination of those fuels.” That pledge was in response to an anti-oil-sands campaign mounted by ForestEthics, an activist group based in San Francisco’s fabled Haight-Ashbury, the one-time hippie district, against Chiquita and Dole, another fruit giant. “Say no to rotten tar sands bananas,” reads the campaign’s website, rottenbananas.org, part of a broader campaign drawing attention to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would funnel Alberta crude to Texas, but which has now been put on hold over environmental concerns.

What ensued was a fight between environmentalists on the one hand and pro-oil-sands lobbyists on the other, over who can claim to be “ethical.” ForestEthics often wins these battles. Ten years ago, to cite one example, similar persuasion forced the U.S. office supply chain Staples Inc. to sell more recycled paper, a commitment that required it to introduce fundamental changes to its procurement practices. “When we find that wild places and forests are being destroyed, we determine which corporations are purchasing the products of that destruction,” ForestEthics says on its website. “If a corporation refuses to change its practices, we hold that company publicly accountable—with protests, websites, email campaigns, national advertisements, and more.” In other words, the group goes on to boast, “we turn our corporate adversaries into allies.”

With Chiquita it’s been tougher going. That’s in large part due to a counterattack engineered by the Alberta-based Ethical Oil Institute, a pro-industry group that touts Canada’s oil sands as more “ethical” than oil sourced from human rights basket cases like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In response to Chiquita’s promise to forgo oil sands crude “where possible,” Ethical Oil launched a campaign to boycott its bananas. The gambit spawned what the group calls a “grassroots” movement among Canadians, who began voicing their disapproval of Chiquita via Facebook and Twitter (one handle that appeared: @BloodBananas). “Canadians should be fighting back,” Ethical Oil spokeswoman Kathryn Marshall says. “We’re proud of our record when it comes to the environment and human rights, and we’re sick of being picked on—we’re the good guys, not the bad guys.”

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REVIEW: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Photographs so swiftly attract our inner muse. Confronted by their mystery we fill in the blanks, devising the most satisfying narratives, imbuing the blankest of faces with the knowingest of smiles. Few faces, though, are as blank or as knowing as Maier’s, a nanny whose first book of photographs has arrived posthumously, decades after they were taken.

It’s a treasure of over 100 black and white images, shot mainly in the ’50s and ’60s in New York and Chicago, a paean to vernacular life. A boy carries a blur of pigeons. Kids in an alley take a scolding from a burly white-haired man. Some convey the directness of an icon: a black man rides a massive draft horse bareback, with rope reins, through the city. There are dead horses in the gutters and panhandling men in well-kept suits. Buttoned-up cops cart off bloodied drunks. The long shots contain the warmth of Bruegel: in the corner of a schoolyard, a priest in a cassock drills a ball at an adolescent boy.

Little is known of Maier—as Dyer, a novelist, observes, she “exists entirely in terms of what she saw.” She grew up in France, moved to New York in 1951, then turned to nannying in Chicago. When free, she roamed the streets shooting, showing the results to no one. It’s said she was briefly homeless in old age, but children she’d cared for learned of it and intervened. She died in 2009, at 83. No one knew of her work, which surfaced only in 2007, when Maloof, a Chicago entrepreneur, bought a bundle of her negatives, sight unseen, at an auction held after she failed to pay for a storage locker. (The book’s failure is that it lacks much of this backstory.)

Who was she? In self-portraits she holds her Rolleiflex like a talisman against her chest—a boyish face with a frank, blank expression. In the final print, captured unawares in a mirror fleetingly held aloft in a workman’s gloved hands, she’s suddenly smiling in her truest account of herself.

Canadians feel like they’re on top of the world: poll

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, December 19, 2011 at 5:00 PM - 0 Comments

For the past three weeks or so, the highest reaches of the Billboard 200, which ranks top-selling albums in the U.S. across all genres against Nielsen SoundScan sales data, has been dominated by one single, identifiable group: Canadians. In late November, the Toronto-born hip-hop artist Drake entered at No. 1 with Take Care, its 631,000 in sales making it the third-bestselling debut of 2011. Michael Bublé, of Burnaby, B.C., followed at No. 2 with his Christmas album, and Stratford, Ont., native Justin Bieber rounded out the top five with another seasonal offering—Under the Mistletoe. Billboard magazine writer Keith Caulfield noted, though, that Drake wouldn’t hold on to the top position for long, “as early forecasts from sources suggest Nickelback’s new Here and Now (released Nov. 21) may open at No. 1.” The prediction didn’t entirely carry: Bublé climbed to the top spot, and Nickelback debuted at No. 2.

A coincidence, likely, this preponderance of Canuck talent gathered at the top of America’s premier pop chart. It may also reflect a new Canadian swagger on the world stage, and yet another sign we’ve become a nation less timid and more muscular—no longer “punching above our weight,” as we’ve long liked to claim, but stepping into a brand new, beefier class altogether.

Fact is, Canadians have been feeling pretty terrific about themselves lately. According to an Angus Reid Public Opinion poll conducted recently in partnership with Maclean’s, we’re much more satisfied with our lives than our counterparts in the U.S. and Britain. Forty-two per cent of us think Canada’s best days lie in the future rather than the past. By contrast, only 36 per cent of Americans are that optimistic, and fully 58 per cent of Britons believe their day in the sun has been and gone. And where once a vague sense of inferiority defined us, the online Angus Reid survey now shows most Canadians—86 per cent, in fact—agree with the idea that their country is “the greatest in the world.”

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Norman Nathan Parker

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Team Macho

Norman Nathan Parker was born on Jan. 12, 1966, the third of four children, and grew up in Back Bay, N.B., a village on the Bay of Fundy, where his parents Glendon and Melva worked at the Connors Bros. sardine cannery. Jutting out into the sea, with a white, red-trimmed lighthouse standing sentry nearby, Back Bay is a place of flinty, taciturn people, folks who, despite hardship, have managed to live off the briny riches of the mercurial bay—calm one minute, fog and treachery the next.

Norman’s disposition was sunnier than most, a charming boy with green-brown eyes and sand-brown hair who shared a bunk bed with his little brother and never learned to read or write. At 15, too young by law for full-time employment but by temperament too restless for school, his parents secured special dispensation from a judge to let him work. This he did with gusto, at Harvey Hooper’s lobster pound, and later on the sealing line at the cannery. Soon he struck out on his own—“he couldn’t work under anyone,” a relative says—buying an 18-foot skiff for clamming and periwinkling at low tide. About that time he took up with Rose, a woman older than he and already pregnant. Ashley became his daughter, too, whatever her ancestry, though he was soft. “You’re the adult,” Rose would say. “Punish her!” And he’d try. More often he’d mouth the words to Roy Orbison—Oh, Pretty Woman—“grab my hands and dance,” says Ashley, “he’d get me twisting.” At night he’d wait for teenage Ashley to get home; it broke his heart she got pregnant at 14.

He was full of contradictions—a fisherman who couldn’t swim, a family man who drank too much Bud and caroused (“he loved his women and the women loved him,” says Ashley). When, after 16 years, he and Rose split, Norman quit booze. Yet he’d go back to it now and again, and meet new women. “He was a charming guy, I can’t remember the women he been with,” says Melva. When his friends hit rough patches with girlfriends, they went to Norm’s to drink and throw darts. “House for battered men, they called it,” says Melva. With Melinda, a much younger woman, Norman had Nathan, a red-headed boy. Though things with Melinda grew rocky, Nathan got his father’s full attention—they fished and four-wheeled on nearby Frye Island, where there was good hunting, too (years back, Norm shot himself a 14-pointer, and searched for the trophy for days after the wounded buck fled into the bush). When Nathan came to live with him full-time, Norman quit drinking for good.

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Mergers: Sarkozying up to the chancellor

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Franck Prevel/Getty Images

Things were, as they say, touch and go there for a while between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy—way too much “touch” for the German chancellor’s taste (aides say Sarkozy loves greeting her with his country’s customary cuddle and double-kiss, largely because he knows she detests it), not near enough “go” for the French president (“France is acting, while Germany is only thinking about it,” he exploded a couple of years ago, as Europe slid into the economic abyss without, as Sarkozy saw it, appropriate intervention from Germany).

But since the eurozone crisis took hold some months ago—all that bad Greek debt threatening to contaminate weaker European economies, like Spain and Italy—Merkel and Sarkozy have entered into an uneasy but powerful rapprochement. What else could they do? Germany and, to a lesser extent, France, are the economic superpowers who must either prop Europe up or watch it collapse. And so Sarkozy and Merkel now embody France and Germany’s long-time roles—the “dual engine of European integration”: they cozy up, meet endlessly, often into the wee hours, kibbitz on the horn, and even tag-team haranguing phone calls to recalcitrant colleagues like Silvio Berlusconi (whose unkind words about Merkel are much too salty to reproduce here). As Sarkozy put it: “It is vital that, in the face of this unprecedented crisis, France and Germany speak with one voice and form a common policy.” They are so united a front—the Maginot Line erased, a terrible booboo—that, as with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (and Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck before them), observers truncate the pair into a single, sentient being: Merkozy. At times their joint efforts elicit the rhetoric of erotica—for example, when Joachim Fels, chief of global economics at Morgan Stanley, called their suggestion that Greece might leave the eurozone “taboo,” as though monetary policy and forbidden love are closely aligned concepts.

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REVIEW: Charles Dickens: A Life

By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Dickens at 12 was head of his family: John, his father, considered himself entitled to high living, and his debts put him in jail. By the time he left prison, Charles was working in Covent Garden, labelling jars of shoe polish. When John and a colleague, Charles Dilke, stopped to watch the boy at work, Dilke “went in and gave him half a crown, and received in return a very low bow,” writes Tomalin in her affecting account of a life as full of coincidences, far-fetched luck and wrenching reversals as any Dickens novel.

The episode haunted Dickens, and shame long prevented him from telling even his dearest friend, John Forster, who learned of it years later from Dilke, then manager of the Daily News, the very paper Dickens launched as editor in 1846, but then abruptly left amid worries he was finished as a novelist. Indeed, Dickens sensed himself nearing breakdown: bad memories, long suppressed, were resurfacing. That tumult he poured into David Copperfield, another triumph for a man still in his 30s who’d already written Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and more—a proto-celebrity whose appearances drew vast crowds.

Dickens was maniacally active, and Tomalin at times risks producing itinerary rather than biography. Still, you want more: her Dickens is moody, a dastardly bargainer with publishers, pathologically social. His judgments are shrewd—he wrote of Toronto that “the wild and rabid toryism … is … appalling.” Catherine, his long-suffering, mismatched wife, is always pregnant (they had 10 children), his father is constantly broke and forging his wealthy son’s name on cheques.

Astonishingly, Dickens himself isn’t overshadowed by his own output: he remains a character—unique, curious, game, as on New Year’s Eve, 1846, when in Paris “he visited the morgue to look at the unidentified bodies laid out there. He went alone at dusk and saw an old man with a grey head in the otherwise empty place.”

Was Einstein wrong about our universe?

By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Christophe Vander Eecken/Reporte/Redux

The life of the neutrino as we know it began amid personal chaos. Its existence was first postulated by Wolfgang Pauli, a brilliant but troubled Austrian physicist who at 20 wrote a definitive, 200-page book on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity that Einstein himself admired, and at 25 proposed his “exclusion principle,” a fundamental statement on the behaviour of matter at the subatomic level that later earned him a Nobel Prize. Colleagues called him “God’s whip” and the “conscience of physics” for his ferocious skepticism and probing, often devastating questions. Yet he was also a prodigious drinker and carouser who, while lecturing at the University of Hamburg, was on intimate terms with the Reeperbahn, that city’s notorious red light district, and who suffered strange, haunting dreams.

The neutrino was perhaps Pauli’s least favourite of his contributions to modern physics. In the late 1920s, physicists examining the decay of radioactive materials such as uranium puzzled over a mysterious gap in the amount of energy they shed: they knew uranium emitted energy in the form of electrons, but when they added these electrons up they discovered that some energy was missing. Faced with this mathematical quandary, Pauli found himself forced in 1930 to accept the presence of an invisible and hitherto unknown neutral particle that could account for the loss—a ghostly spectre of the subatomic world. This was the neutrino. “It was the first time anyone ever postulated a missing particle,” says University of Toronto physicist Bob Orr. “Most people thought this was a really stupid idea.” Even Pauli himself called it a “terrible thing,” and he lamented that in proposing it he had “invented a particle that cannot be detected.” Indeed, he placed a standing bet—a case of champagne—on the notion that it never would be, outlining his ideas on the particle in a letter to colleagues that began: “Dear radioactive ladies and gentlemen.”

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Welcome to my yurt

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Andrew Tolson

Late last month the same central Asian dwelling appeared in both the posh Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue and in the park where anti-consumerist protesters with Occupy Toronto remained camped out for the long haul: the yurt, that collapsible, cylindrical hut with a conical top that for eons has housed all classes of nomads, from simple shepherds to the Great Khan.

The Neiman Marcus yurt, dubbed the “Dream Folly,” starts at $75,000, boasts an interior designed to look like the inside of a genie’s bottle, comes equipped with a Plexiglas dome, and is billed as “the ultimate girls’ club.” Photographs make it look like Martha Stewart’s grotesque shrine to the cult of Moammar Gadhafi. The Toronto protesters, meanwhile, got three authentic yurts for $20,000: imported from Mongolia by Gatineau, Que.-based Groovy Yurts Inc., they stand swathed in high-quality sheep’s felt, are covered in whimsical Mongolian designs, and sheltered Occupy Toronto’s library, media centre, assembly space and health clinic. In such incongruous pairings can the voice of the zeitgeist be heard: finally, millennia after the Greek historian Herodotus described the Scythians camping out in them, the yurt’s time has come in the West, where they’re now big business. Purveyors report sales as much as doubling, thanks to two contradictory trends—an appetite for roughing it à la luxe on one hand, and apocalyptic fears of a collapsed economy on the other.

The yurt has made its trek into modern times with few alterations: the true Mongolian yurt is assembled on the bare earth using a series of latticed wooden sections brought together in a circle, with wooden rafters meeting in the centre. It’s a skeleton that can be put up and dismantled quickly but that gives the yurt an amazing durability against wind and snow. Clad in layers of canvas and felt, it is bound together using horsehair ropes, with carpets thrown down on the packed dirt.

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Madoff women sound off on Madoff men

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

GI/BM/Getty Images

Bernie Madoff’s decades-long Ponzi scheme, worth upwards of $50 billion, put the Manhattan money guru, former NASDAQ chair and philanthropist in jail for life and devastated thousands of investors, including some of his closest friends and family members. To his son Mark, who later committed suicide—he hung himself with his dog’s leash from the same beam in his SoHo apartment where he’d lately hung a pinata for his daughter’s birthday party—Madoff left what Mark colourfully described as a “legacy of s–t.”

That Mark put his father’s impact on his life in scatalogical terms is no accident: a preoccupation with poop defined Madoff’s private life, according to many not-so-subtle hints offered by two recent “inside” accounts of the family—The End of Normal: A Wife’s Anguish, a Widow’s New Life, by Mark’s widow, Stephanie Madoff Mack, the other, magazine writer Laurie Sandell’s Truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family, brokered by Catherine Hooper, fiancée to Mark’s younger brother Andrew.

In both books Madoff emerges as a screamer, a domestic tyrant, anal in the truest sense. He could not “abide the feeling of elastic,” Sandell writes, and therefore ordered custom-made underpants with buttons up the side. On his 88-foot-long boat (appropriately, but perhaps incompletely, called Bull), Madoff enforced strict cleanliness, including walking new guests through proper use of the bathroom: “close the lid on the toilet before you flush,” he tells Catherine, “or it’ll be a s–t shower.” “Bernie was fastidiously neat to the point of being obsessive-compulsive,” writes Madoff Mack. “Even worse, Captain Dick, the man who looked after Bernie’s boats, kept coming in to use the toilet, which Bernie would then inspect. The rest of us were then treated to his crude description of what he had seen, and his almost girlish outrage over how disgusted he was.”

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Made in China, even then

By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 10:35 AM - 0 Comments

This summer, archaeologists clearing the way for a new mining project deep in the Yukon interior unearthed a 17th-century Chinese coin—providing further tantalizing proof of a trade route hundreds of years old linking First Nations peoples with Chinese markets and seagoing Russian merchants.

Dug up at a traditional lookout spot high above a valley some 200 km north of Whitehorse, the coin was minted between 1667 and 1671 at the Xuanhua garrison, northwest of Beijing, during the reign of the Emperor Sheng Zu of the Qing dynasty. It subsequently travelled across the Pacific, then through mountain passes controlled at the time by the Tlingit First Nations, a passage that offers a fascinating glimpse into the business relations binding Russian traders with both China and Canada’s pre-colonial North. Those visiting Russians offered First Nations traders such goods as tobacco, glass beads, tea, kettles and coins in exchange for sea otter, fox, beaver and other pelts, furs that in turn appeared for sale in China, says James Mooney, an archaeologist with Ecofor Consulting, who was on the dig that uncovered the coin.

Indeed, these coins were common on the northwest coast by the 18th century—this is the third found in Yukon—and were often sewn into armour worn by Tlingit warriors. That may explain this coin’s unusual punctures, at each corner of a central square hole, which may have been made to ensure a securer fit on a tunic. Russian traders may not have been the first to arrive here, either: Mooney describes old indigenous accounts of arrivals wearing long “many-coloured silk” robes, their heads shaved in the front, the hair on the back “plaited into tresses”—perhaps the Chinese themselves.

Parliamentarians of the Year (best orator): John Baird

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 7:28 PM - 0 Comments

Recently in the House, when, at the end of question period, the Bloc Québécois’s André Bellavance asked the government about its plans for spending cuts, it wasn’t immediately clear who among the Tories would take the question—so ensued five or 10 seconds of awkwardness, until Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, despite having no responsibility in this regard, and without benefit of script, leapt up and spun a vague but applicable response: “Mr. Speaker, we are obviously seeking to ensure that every dollar of taxpayer money is spent wisely,” he intoned. Continue…

The Occupy movement: from farce to tragedy and back

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, November 11, 2011 at 10:25 AM - 0 Comments

Darryl Dyck/CP

In Saskatoon last week, as temperatures sank below zero, residents of the local Occupy encampment began taking stock. The tiny tent community had dwindled from the 30 who’d set up camp on Oct. 15, part of a wave of occupations mounted in solidarity with lower Manhattan’s Occupy Wall Street, to about a dozen. Many who remained were less activists than they were homeless people. The activists chose to pull up stakes. “I’m not too sure whereabouts I’m going,” a homeless man named Spike said. “I just don’t know.”

So it was across Canada: from Vancouver to Halifax, workaday realities had crept in and soured utopia. At some Occupy sites, such as in London, Ont., the movement had fractured into splinter groups, multiplying the number of encampments. Elsewhere, as in Ottawa, where one group of protesters discovered a blanket soaked in bodily fluids draped over their tent and left, core supporters abandoned the movement over philosophical differences. In most cases, protesters have had to come to terms with an influx of people for whom addiction and mental health issues loom larger than concerns about wealth distribution. In every case, occupiers have tested the resolve of municipalities striving to balance their rights to free speech with long-standing bylaws, safety concerns, and the rights of neighbours to order and good government.

On Saturday, Vancouver’s drug problem infiltrated one of dozens of tents erected outside the Vancouver Art Gallery, where 23-year-old Ashlie Gough of Victoria died, likely of an overdose. She is one of just two Occupy fatalities in North America so far (18-year-old Louis Cameron Rodriguez, a homeless man who called himself “The Poet,” died of causes unknown in Oklahoma City). Mayor Gregor Robertson, in the midst of an election, used the death as the final stroke and ordered the tent city closed (an official later said the city would seek to force the matter with a court injunction). At the same time, Victoria, where authorities had already cut water and electricity to the site, officially ordered protesters out: “The city appreciates you vacating the lawn around the sequoia tree,” read the notice.

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A forgotten war no more

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, November 11, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

Capt. Mort Lightstone was too young to serve in the Second World War, as his father and brothers did. An industrious kid who grew up in downtown Ottawa, he delivered the Ottawa Citizen instead, and with his earnings later bought a bicycle to secure more lucrative work delivering telegrams. Sam, his father, was able to use his skills as a watchmaker to maintain aircraft instruments in the war; peace put him out of a job. Lightstone’s entrance into military life was therefore practical. “I had three older brothers,” he says. “I never got new clothes—they were all hand-me-downs.” He joined the Air Cadets and suddenly everything was new. “New boots, new shirts, pants, jackets, caps, raincoat, winter coat—amazing,” he says. “It made my life for me. It made my life.”

He’d thought of becoming a lawyer, but turned to the air force when his folks couldn’t afford university. By the spring of 1952 he’d earned his wings and was training as a navigator on the Canadair North Star, a four-engine transport aircraft with a dome permitting consultation with the stars—unlike radar, a navigation system that “can’t be jammed” by the enemy. Before long, at 19, he was charting a course for Tokyo as part of the Korean airlift, an important air support detail in the Korean War. On his first day he landed in Tokyo, unloaded personnel and supplies destined for Korea, and took off carrying American wounded and the nurses charged with their care. He found those nurses, in their starched white uniforms, very appealing; during the return flight stateside, he resolved to slap his flight cap on and visit with the troops in the rear. By the time he made the trek the nurses’ whites were splattered with blood. “The soldiers had arms missing, legs missing, pipes and gadgets holding their faces together,” he says in a video testimonial, part of the Historica-Dominion Institute’s Memory Project, which just launched a Korean War component to coincide with Remembrance Day. “That’s when the movie ended and the reality of war set in.”

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What’s being done to keep cars from crashing into moose

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 5:00 AM - 0 Comments

Robert C. Nunnington/Getty Images

Moose aren’t native to Newfoundland, but the province has proven a paradise for the spindly-legged interlopers. All the island’s estimated 120,000 moose—some say there could even be as many as 200,000 munching through the landscape—descend from six moose brought there as hunting fodder over a century ago (two in 1878, from Nova Scotia, four more in 1904, from New Brunswick), an arrival coinciding, happily for the moose, with the decline of the predacious Newfoundland wolf, now extinct.

Today, Newfoundland boasts what’s understood to be the world’s highest-density moose population, a scourge to motorists. With as many as 800 collisions a year, everyone has a story about hitting one, vehicular encounters that can be fatal for drivers as well as for moose. “They’re basically a one-tonne animal on these long legs,” says wildlife scientist Tony Clevenger, who recently wrote a report on the trouble. “The whole body comes right through the windshield.” These accidents each year result in deaths—one so far in 2011, “but last year we had two, the year before that four,” says Eugene Nippard, a leader of the Save Our People Action Committee, which lobbies the province for anti-moose measures. (Nippard speaks longingly of the days when authorities still allowed charities to raffle off roadkill meat.)

PLAY “MISS THE MOOSE” ON YOUR SMARTPHONE:

All this makes moose an emotional, and frequently political, issue in Newfoundland. A class-action suit, stickhandled by accident and injury lawyer Ches Crosbie, the son of Newfoundland politician John Crosbie, has been filed against the province. Some propose a major cull of 50,000—an unpopular option for outfitters, who make a tidy living guiding U.S. hunters (“because the success rate for hunting moose in Newfoundland is—you know—better than anywhere in the world,” says Clevenger). Moose were even an issue during the recent provincial election: the Grits pledged to erect fencing and negotiate a settlement with class actioners. The Tories (who won) announced pilot projects that will see $5 million spent on 15 km of fencing and two wildlife detection systems.

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From Trudeau’s woman troubles to Reform MPs’ moral missteps

By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 4 Comments

Photograph by Peter Bregg

When not distracted by their métier—bearing witness, asking questions, conveying facts—journalists do what comes most naturally to them: they drone on, drop names and deliver glib pronouncements on those they cover. Reporters who write memoirs risk bronzing that same tripe. How lucky we are that Craig Oliver, best known for his political reporting for CTV, often opposite Lloyd Robertson, saw the dangers and dove in anyway, writing a book at once human and sharp.

The Dickensian allusion in its title, Oliver’s Twist: The Life and Times of an Unapologetic Newshound, is earned: he grew up in tough Prince Rupert, B.C., both his parents alcoholics; his father made a job of his hobby, becoming a bootlegger. When his mother vanished, turning to taxi driving and another man, Oliver’s father shopped him around to various paid foster homes, an unhappy experience. One surrogate, Mabel, was particularly tormenting. “I forgot myself and called her ‘Mommy,’ ” he writes. “I had a real mother, Mabel told me, but she was an immoral woman who had left me behind.”

Oliver otherwise fended for himself, growing up among prostitutes, gamblers and other modern-day pirates—a one-legged steam-bath owner and Ricardo the Hook, who lost a hand in the war. “I felt no loneliness and in fact revelled in the novelty of my circumstances,” he writes. Billeted with a Christian family, he briefly became a target for conversion, a failed project: “Too much untried temptation lay ahead, and I was willing also to give the devil a chance to convert me.”

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REVIEW: The death-ray

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

Mere weeks after the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 comes The Death-Ray, the famed graphic novelist’s oblique reaction to that horror. The superhero fantasy uses the conventions of the genre—a masked hero, inhuman strength and sci-fi gadgetry—to explore the toxic effect of power. It amounts to a devastating portrait of American decline.

Luxuriously drawn and gloriously printed in Day-Glo colour, it presents a tale, set during a beautifully realized 1970s, of Andy and Louie, teen castoffs from troubled homes. When Andy, an orphan whose father was a scientist, smokes a cigarette for the first time—a fabulously mundane trigger—it unlocks superhuman strength. “I thought about Lon Chaney, Jr. and that horrible, haunted look Larry Talbot got when the moon was full,” he says. “Was I going to kill someone and forget about it by tomorrow?”

Evidently Andy’s mysterious father has treated him with a hormone designed to unleash terrific strength upon exposure to nicotine: Andy uncovers notebooks full of his father’s explanations, as well as instructions that lead the boys to another comic-book staple—a ray gun that makes things disappear. Its power and Andy’s cigarette-fuelled strength make him formidable; Andy keeps smoking and accepts it all. Soon Louie persuades him to get rid of a threatening character in Louie’s life. It’s a dramatic moment, yet Andy is unfazed—so much so that Louie is revolted by his lack of doubt and resolves to limit Andy’s power.

Best known for Ghost World, later made into a film, Clowes is associated with the slacker chic of the ’90s. This is the first time The Death-Ray, published as a pamphlet in 2004, has received appropriate treatment—a handsome edition by Montreal’s Drawn and Quarterly, issued in advance of a film now under development by Jack Black. It’s not for the squeamish—it begins with a middle-aged Andy and a defecating dog; in the next panel, Andy is cleaning up. “I don’t smoke anymore,” he says, though he’s “fallen off the wagon a few times.” Louie’s gone, and Andy is still too full of certainty.

Occupy Wall St. comes to Canada

By Nicholas Köhler and Richard Warnica - Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 6:25 PM - 25 Comments

One of the first arrivals early this morning at Bay and King, the financial district launch spot for today’s Occupy Toronto demonstration, was a transgendered woman named Stephanie who parked her silver Dodge Dakota SLT pickup truck on the southwest corner, erected a hefty P.A. system, a microphone and stand, and began blasting dated top-40 hits at high volume into the gathering crowd. At one point, Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible”, from 1988, welcomes the arrival of young people in Guy Fawkes masks and skinny jeans. Continue…

War on Wall Street

By Claire Ward and Nicholas Köhler - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 29 Comments

Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis

Last Sunday, just before 7 a.m., as the sun cast its first light on Manhattan, cold, damp Zuccotti Park, just south of Ground Zero and north of Wall Street—those twin poles of a shattered American psyche—looked like little more than a junkyard. Shopping carts, blankets, garbage bags, sodden pizza boxes, piles of cardboard protest signs. Most of the two or three hundred anti-Wall Street protesters camping out there were wrapped in sleeping bags and under tarps, the pigeons pecking about their heads. A couple snuggled together on an air mattress. An elderly man in combat fatigues, his grey hair tied back in a bandana, slept against a concrete wall, a German shepherd at his side. Such were the moments of first light, before the makeshift village in Zuccotti Park came to life.

When the people awoke they gathered in groups to discuss ideas: corporate control, securitization, debt and credit, the environment, the Federal Reserve. There was heated debate and a lot of hugging. “I see it as a mathematical improbability to have a growth-based system based on finite resources,” said Tim, a 57-year-old bassist from New Haven, Conn., with long grey dreadlocks. “It’s kind of depressing, to be honest with you. I think the bottom is going to have to fall out of the economy.” When a protester approached asking for rolling papers, Tim promptly produced some from his pocket. “The solution is money,” said Rick DeVoe, 54, an environmental activist from East Hampton, Mass. “If the dollar doesn’t work for us, let’s create something that does.”

Over by the info booth a mousy girl in her 20s handed out a newspaper—The Occupied Wall Street Journal, a deliciously tongue-in-cheek jab at Rupert Murdoch’s business broadsheet. On a nearby table, various pamphlets lay strewn beside a Macdonald’s coffee cup and a well-thumbed copy of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. A white-haired soccer mom on vacation from Tennessee, all smiles and glasses, asked if there was a petition to sign. Volunteers distributed food from the kitchen—concrete benches laden with donated bagels, coffee, juice. At the media centre, marked off with caution tape, youths sat on cement benches glued to MacBooks, spreading the word on various social media networks. @OccupyWallStNYC, one Twitter handle among many here, had some 39,000 followers as of Tuesday.

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Rob Ford can’t fight city hall

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 67 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

The Saturday after the worst week in Rob Ford’s political life, the mayor of Toronto and his councillor brother Doug attended the inaugural game of Toronto’s new women’s lingerie football team, the Toronto Triumph, in which players wear bras, hot pants, garters and shoulder pads, and for which Doug’s daughter Krista is captain. “How these puppies are going to stay in place beats me,” Krista, in her early 20s, wrote before the game on Twitter, an apparent reference to her breasts. “All I care about is: not missing a single tackle & leaving it all.”

The Triumph lost badly, 48-14, to the Tampa Bay Breeze. For the Fords, the losses did not end there. Bad news has dogged them for weeks, a situation so intriguing to many Torontonians that it often pushes Ontario’s provincial elections off the city’s front pages. Much of that fascination has to do with the intense culture war under way between the Fords and Toronto’s downtown elite. If Krista’s LFL—the Lingerie Football League—is the most powerful symbol of the conflict, it is by no means the only one. No politician in recent Canadian history has had as polarizing an effect as Mayor Ford and his brother Doug, generating an industry of Tweedledum and Tweedledee caricatures and promoting a level of civic engagement at city hall not seen in years.

Ford, who secured an improbable election win by promising to deliver a stripped-down Toronto—one free of graffiti, a Toronto of roads, perhaps some police, lower taxes and little else—has been stopped in his tracks by the city’s old order. His story is a morality tale that plays more like farce. It would be funny if it were not such a powerful lesson in the staying power of civic vested interests and the Sisyphean challenge of changing a city.

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Conrad Black: not just another number

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, September 12, 2011 at 10:35 AM - 2 Comments

Phil Snel

That a man whose baronic title remains Lord Black of Crossharbour should have written a book so redolent of his abhorrence of hierarchy, and of authority in general, must tell us something about our enduring fascination with Conrad Black, who returned to prison this week after a 13-month reprieve. During that period of freedom he saw an appeal of his 2007 fraud conviction fail and, because he could do himself no further harm, arranged publication of A Matter of Principle, as subversive a treatise on American justice as has likely ever been written by someone who also boasts of having received correspondence “from every U.S. president from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush, the last four while in office.”

In total, the story represents “the ludicrous demise of my great love affair with America.” It’s as much a tale of lost fortune, influence and reputation, one that should have been foreseen: “My pride and haughty spirit were of the nature that often leads to a fall,” he allows. “My prison number, 18330-424, is stamped on my clothes and mandatory on all correspondence. I am 65 years old. I entered these walls a baron of the United Kingdom.”

He and his wife, Barbara Amiel, first arrive at Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida and are ignored. “Barbara, thinking I had been struck dumb, said, ‘My husband, Conrad Black, is here to self-surrender.’ ” Soon, a “beefy correctional officer, unarmed but heavy-laden with gadgetry, surged into the room and pointed at me with well-rehearsed purposefulness.” He and Amiel prepare to separate: “A kiss, a searching look, a very few words, and I walked forward, not turning back to wave lest I be reproved in front of her and add to the distress of us both. She departed.” Long before, Amiel had quoted from the Book of Ruth—“Whither thou goest, I will go.” The night before, “We had held each other during the night.” Within a few paragraphs Black is handcuffed and prison officials are probing “the approaches to my rectum.”

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The long goodbye to Jack Layton

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, September 5, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 10 Comments

Jenna Marie Wakani/Maclean's

When, a decade or so ago, his activism in support of same-sex marriage triggered death threats, Rev. Brent Hawkes would call his friend Jack Layton, the Toronto city councillor who, along with his wife and colleague Olivia Chow, had done so much to champion gay rights, and gave him the specifics. The bullies said they’d turn up at this or that event, and promised violence. Layton was always determined to show up. When Hawkes, wearing a bulletproof vest, officiated at the 2001 double wedding ceremony that eventually led to the legalization of gay marriage, Layton was there.

Now here they were again, Layton and Hawkes, on stage at Roy Thomson Hall. Layton was dead—“cruelly gone, at the pinnacle of his career,” as eulogist Stephen Lewis put it—his body within a flag-draped casket that over the last days, amid much pomp, had travelled to Parliament Hill, to Quebec, and to Toronto’s City Hall, where thousands came, waited to gaze upon him, many with tears in their eyes.

Before Hawkes was an audience composed of some of the most powerful people in Canada, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who, while in opposition, had been a leading antagonist in the fight for gay marriage. This was a state funeral—an extraordinary gesture normally reserved for past and present governors general, prime ministers and cabinet ministers, but one that Harper had offered Layton’s family. Hawkes did not exploit the moment—not to partisan ends, anyway. Rather, he dwelt on the way Layton’s life, at its best—despite his mistakes, his “normal imperfections,” to quote Lewis again—could be used as a model to live better. “If the Olympics can make us prouder Canadians, maybe Jack’s life can make us better Canadians,” Hawkes said, noting that Layton was always careful to ask after his husband, John. “It’s about remembering, about remembering to say, ‘Hi, Brent. How’s John doing?’ Hawkes paused, looking into the hall. “Hi, Prime Minister. How’s Laureen doing?”

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REVIEW: The Cat’s Table: A Novel

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, September 2, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Michael is an 11-year-old boy who boards an ocean liner in Ceylon in 1954 for the journey to London, to reunite with his mother. On board he falls in with two other boys—the careful Ramadhin and the outrageous Cassius. The trio, parentless, deracinated, only partially conscious of how changed they’ll be by exile, terrorize the ship. They spy, pilfer and smoke bits of cane torn from the furniture. Stealing into the labyrinth of Aden, they spot female shipmates disguised as men, hide a forbidden dog aboard, then sidestep the consequences. In a tour de force of swashbuckling narrative, Ramadhin ties Michael and Cassius down so that, Odysseus-like, they can feel the full strength of an ocean storm. Each evening they eat at a lowly spot dubbed the “Cat’s Table.”

The effect, the collage of character and vignette, is a picaresque tale that’s as close as Ondaatje has ever come to a page turner—a detective yarn with boy sleuths, a mysterious prisoner kept in “hellish chains,” told with all the fantastical detail of magic realism.

The Hyderabad Mind, leader of a theatrical company, reads the thoughts of strangers, his “ghoulish eyes…full of sulphur and perception.” Deep within the ship, a botanist tends a garden of marvellous plants, some poisonous, others hallucinatory. The suave Baron C. slathers young Michael in oil and forces him through transoms, the better to rob first-class passengers. Catching himself in a mirror mid-heist, Michael sees “a wild boy in there, somebody from one of the Jungle Book stories whose eyes watched me, white as lamps.” Adds the narrator: “It was the image of my youth that I would hold on to for years—someone startled, half formed, who had not become anyone or anything yet.”

Much will be made of the fact that another young Michael—Ondaatje himself—once left Colombo by ship; here he has refashioned himself into a stranger, to startling, enchanting effect.

REVIEW: Bed

By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments

Coinciding with the London riots that last week pitted the alienated, angry, bored, mischievous youths of middle-class England against the dull, endless monotone of their own recession-weary lives, comes Bed, a novel that elaborates on that same theme of waste, decadence and disaster, but casts the whole into the form, not of an angry mob, but of the world’s fattest man, Malcolm Ede.

Mal, a charismatic young man with everything to live for (including Bed’s love interest, the selfless, beautiful Lou), retires to bed on his 25th birthday, for good, eventually growing so fat that he looks “like an enormous sea monster caught and displayed in a Victorian museum of the grotesque.” That sci-fi obesity makes him the centre of his family’s universe—“our sun, our lives in his orbit.”

Told from the vantage of Mal’s brother, who’s left unnamed, Bed takes place in a similarly blurred suburban England, a beige world described here with striking imagination and energy. This is Whitehouse’s first novel; therefore it is an existential book. “What is the point,” Mal asks his brother, pre-fat. “I work in a chair. I fight on a computer game. When I vote, it changes nothing. What I earn can’t buy anything. Maybe my purpose is to give purpose to others.” And purpose he gives. Mal awakes each morning to “a huge cooked breakfast, all the colours of an artist’s palette as he sits at an easel to paint autumn.” His mother spends her life ministering to stasis—“basting an enormous turkey in the oven, lifting it, turning it and coating its flesh without the reward of a hearty meal.”

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An 84-year-old artist gets her first show

By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Laura Mills

A few years ago, Ross and Barb Smith, both in their early 70s, set up a yard sale in front of their Fredericton, N.B., home, just down from one of the city’s several cemeteries, and waited to see if there was a market for any of their junk. Before long, an elderly woman had shuffled onto the scene and began buying up the yard. She wanted the wooden blocks Ross had used to raise the car during fix-it jobs, and a collection of metal odds and ends. “Oh, she liked that, she could use that,” they recall her saying. Ross, sensing an opportunity, invited the woman down to the basement to see if there might be anything else she could use. There below, she snapped up a mouldering grand piano.

“What could she want with it all?” the Smiths wondered. As they befriended her (the couple has now made a hobby of bringing the woman discarded bric-a-brac dragged from the local dump), they came to learn she was busy slapping the detritus together into sculptures—“objects of art,” as Ross, who worked for years for the provincial power utility, puts it. That was interesting, they thought, but also a bit mysterious. Nevertheless, upon receiving a handwritten invitation, last month the Smiths headed for the prestigious Beaverbrook Art Gallery, where the woman, Catherine Hale, is now having her first major solo art show, at the age of 84. “I stressed all day,” says Barb. “I thought, ‘What do I wear to something so special?’ ”

As it turned out, much of what she saw that day—a collection of eerie tapestries made from discarded lace and face veils, dismantled knick-knacks screwed together in incongruous ways and painted black—“looked familiar,” says Barb. Hale had caked their old piano in black paint and converted it into something like a motorcycle sidecar, a piece she calls Earhart—Amelia-style aviator shades and a leather flight cap are tacked up in the area of the cockpit—a nod, perhaps, to Hale’s great inspiration, Emily Dickinson, and her poem “Because I could not stop for death” (“The Carriage held but just Ourselves—And Immortality”). So close does Hale feel to Dickinson that Terry Graff, the Beaverbrook’s chief curator, subtitled her show Between the Spirit and the Dust, another Dickinson allusion.

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