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 - 5 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 - 26 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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Murder and a maritime dynasty

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 4:55 PM - 7 Comments

Canadian Yachting Association

They say that when Richard Henry Oland’s secretary noticed something was amiss on the morning of July 7, a Thursday, she ran downstairs to the printing business operated by the building’s landlord, an apparently squeamish man who in turn sent up one of his employees to look into the matter. What was discovered, at 52 Canterbury Street, between the major thoroughfares of Princess and King streets—a fairy-tale block of 19th-century brick buildings in the gentrifying core of historic Saint John, N.B.—has likely changed the city forever.

Oland, the 69-year-old president of the Far End Corp. investment firm, had been messily dispatched at his desk—bludgeoned with the blunt end of an axe, according to local rumour and a Toronto Star report that the Saint John police force refuses to confirm. A man who in photographs is seldom without a face-cracking grin, Oland had last been seen at six o’clock the previous evening.

This week, a professional cleaner specializing in mopping up after suicides, homicides and unattended deaths spent days vigorously scouring the premises, the hose of a high-powered air-cleaning device designed to clear the stench of death hovering out from the covered window.

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Review: Lovesick Japan: Sex Marriage Romance Law

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, July 11, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Love and sex in Japan have long exercised a strange fascination over the Western intellect. Consider the strangest fruit in the orchard: a novel, The Apprentice, written by Lewis “Scooter” Libby, set in turn-of-the-century Japan, which contains the sentence: “At age 10 the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons.” Allowed to go out of print, it enjoyed a brief vogue after Libby, a former Dick Cheney adviser, became embroiled in the Valerie Plame scandal, was disbarred, and went to jail.

Now, in Lovesick Japan, an American law prof parses love, sex and marriage in thousands of Japanese judicial decisions—divorces, sexual assaults, molestations—for an arresting glimpse into Japan’s secret heart. West, who has written widely on Japanese law, argues the rulings betray an underlying assumption among Japanese judges that “physical and emotional intimacy, affection, and interconnectedness in personal relationships” are largely absent between the sexes—even from marriage vows (West reports one bride promised not so much love as to greet her husband “with a smile on my face when he comes home late from drinking, and to moderate my purchases of brand-name handbags”).

Could it be otherwise? A 2006 government survey found half of Japanese men and women had no relationships of any kind with members of the opposite sex, not even friendships. Many men pay for their first sexual experiences. An astounding number of both men and women remain virgins into their 30s (how-to books for late starters advise men to clip their fingernails before the act). Where love does surface, it’s seen by judges as “an overwhelming, disorienting force to which people unwittingly cede self-control.” Judges therefore view marriage as necessarily loveless, and conjugal sex (when it happens at all) as largely procreative.

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This week: Newsmakers

By Ken MacQueen, Nicholas Kohler, Jason Kirby and Nancy MacDonald - Monday, July 4, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Mike Hewitt/FIFA/Getty Images

Hollywood’s high rollers

His day job is playing such film roles as Spiderman and Nick Carraway, in the upcoming Great Gatsby adaptation. But incredible as it may seem, Tobey Maguire’s hobby—high-stakes poker—may be even more lucrative than the silver screen. Maguire’s winnings, which could amount to as much as $30 to $40 million over three years, came to light in a lawsuit filed against the 35-year-old actor by a group of investors attempting to recoup money lost to Brad Ruderman, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for operating a $5.2-million Ponzi scheme. Ruderman lost much of the money playing Texas Hold ’em, including over $300,000 to Maguire, in an exclusive poker ring that drew players like Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Now, Ruderman’s investors want some of that cash. DiCaprio, Affleck and Damon aren’t being sued, though. “Matt never won,” a whistle-blower said.

One for the lads

As contingencies go, this one was a doozy. David Hart, a 23-year-old Royal Marine killed by a bomb blast in Afghanistan last year, earmarked $160,000 from his life insurance policy for an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas for his best friends and their girlfriends—32 people in all. “In a letter, David said he had had a great life and had no regrets about anything,” one friend told a reporter. “He said, ‘Go and have a good time and spend all this money.’ ” He left a second portion to his family, and the rest to charity. Hart, who died a day short of his 24th birthday, had always dreamed of a Vegas weekend. When his pals return to England they will continue training for a 275-km bike ride to raise money for the Royal Marines Charitable Trust.

Stick with a bike

The 911 call to police in Caseville, Mich., went something like this: “Believe it or not, I just passed about a five-, six-year-old flying down the road with a red Pontiac Sunbird.” Actually, Chief Jamie Learman discovered that the driver, who stood on the floorboard of his stepfather’s car to see over the steering wheel, was a pyjama-clad seven-year-old. He hit speeds of 80 kph during a 32-km drive across Huron County, north of Detroit. Police gingerly boxed him in, stopping him without incident. “He was crying, and just kept saying he wanted to go to his dad’s,” Learman said. “That was pretty much it: he just wanted to go to his dad’s.”

Quit that racquet!

There are tasks where a grunt or two are justified. Piano moving or childbirth come to mind. But tennis? It’s all a bit much, says Ian Richie, head of the All England Lawn and Tennis Club. “Whether you are watching it on TV or here, people don’t particularly like it,” he told Britain’s Telegraph, with precisely the sort of understatement he’d like to see on Wimbledon’s grass courts. Jimmy Connors was a pioneering grunter back in the 1970s. Women then took it up with great enthusiasm. Maria Sharapova was recorded at 105 decibels in 2009—as loud as a car horn from three feet. Portugal’s Michelle Larcher de Brito and Serena Williams have also employed the tactic as a weapon of mass distraction. Richie has made his concerns known, but certain fans find the sound effects appealing. Former Wimbledon Champ Michael Stich accuses the women of trying to “sell sex.”

#DMFail

Think a weakness for sexy social networking, à la Anthony Weiner, is a purely American failing? Turns out the language of <3 knows no borders. Xie Zhiqiang, a health bureau official in the Chinese city of Liyang, set up an account with Weibo, a Twitter-like service in China, early this year believing it was a private chat tool. “Please marry me if there is a second life, so that we can live in romance until we are 100 years old,” he wrote to a married woman on the site before the pair were able to follow through on a planned tryst. Xie learned of the mistake after a reporter called about the exchange. “How can you view our messages on Weibo? It is impossible, isn’t it?” He has since been suspended from his job.

Captain courageous

For more than a half-decade, she has been the face of Canadian women’s soccer—though perhaps never more so than now. Christine Sinclair wrote herself into the country’s sports lore for refusing to leave the field after her nose was broken in the opening game of the women’s World Cup at Berlin’s Olympiastadion. “You can’t play on,” Canada’s team doctor, Pietro Braina told her, trying to corral her onto the bench. But the Canadian captain turned, teary-eyed to Italian-born coach Carolina Morace who shrugged, palms up, and nodded to the field. Sinclair, of course, went on to score Canada’s lone goal, on a beautifully executed free kick in the dying minutes of the gutsy 2-1 loss—the first goal the two-time defending champion Germans have allowed since 2003. Sinclair, after having her nose resculpted by a German doctor, took to Twitter to opine on the new appendage: “amazing,” she wrote—joking, of course.

How to lose a billion dollars

It takes a lot to go from “the wealthiest divorcée in history” to bust in two decades—a lot of waste, that is. Patricia Kluge landed a $1-billion settlement when she split from media mogul John Kluge in 1990, only to blow the lot on parties for royalty, a 120-hectare estate in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains and a private winery. Kluge and her third husband, William Moses, have racked up $46 million in debt and filed for bankruptcy last week. Her antiques, and her personal jewellery collection have already been auctioned off, and the Kluge winery was sold at auction—to none other than Donald Trump, her old friend, for $6.2 million. But Kluge isn’t the only one exiting the billionaire club. Research in Motion’s co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis lost their status after a sharp drop in RIM’s share price cut their personal net worth to around $800 million each, down from $1.8 billion in March.

The Doc returns

After 12 years on the mound for the Toronto Blue Jays before he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, star pitcher Roy Halladay is set, this week, to make his long-awaited return to the mound at Rogers Centre, where he earned both a reputation and a nickname. The two-time Cy Young winner, Toronto’s first pick at the ’95 draft, was set to pitch against the Jays last year, but security concerns around the G20 summit forced the series to be shifted to Philadelphia instead. “Doc,” as he’s known around the league, was calm before the game: “I feel like it’s any other start.”

Tears of joy

“Alec! Now we can get married!” Steve Martin tweeted to his Oscar co-host, after New York legalized gay marriage in the state. “Ok,” Alec Baldwin responded, “but if you play that effing banjo after eleven o’clock…” Lady Gaga, meanwhile, was a bit more emotional: “I can’t stop crying,” said the staunch gay-rights activist. “We did it kids. The revolution is ours to fight.”

Life out of office

It was a good week for Gordon Campbell, who is off to London as Canada’s high commissioner to the U.K.; the plum posting comes with a chauffeur, a chef and an official residence in swank Mayfair. In London, the former B.C. premier, who always resisted the temptation to bash the feds, will further hone his diplomatic skills among royals and the global elite. Gilles Duceppe, an Ottawa basher par excellence, had a big week too, granting his first televised interview since the Bloc’s stunning collapse in the last federal election. Unless Quebecers choose sovereignty, they’ll be “eating gumbo” in 50 years, he told Radio-Canada. He went on to hint at a return to politics, likely at the helm of the PQ, which appears to be imploding, a mere two months after the Bloc. He may well return to helm a sovereignist party, but the better question may be whether anyone will still be interested in the idea.

No medal for the penguin?

Dozer, a three-year-old goldendoodle from Fulton, Md., now merits his own runner’s page on the Maryland Half Marathon website, after escaping his masters Sunday and running the race. He crossed the finish line at the 2:12:24 mark, limping and exhausted, and received a medal from organizers after they discovered he was running solo. Truth is, Dozer probably slipped into the run several miles into the event. Far more impressive is the emperor penguin who swam an astonishing 4,000 km from Antarctica to New Zealand. Happy Feet, as he was nicknamed, was operated on at the Wellington Zoo to remove the stick and pebbles he’d eaten on Peka Peka beach. A committee has been struck to decide whether he should be returned home.

Building ships, and political futures

After a week in Ottawa spent championing the province’s bid for part of an estimated $35 billion in federal shipbuilding contracts, B.C. premier Christy Clark returned home to announce a major investment in a new marine trade training facility on Vancouver Island, sweetening the pot. If successful, the contract, which could create thousands of new jobs and raise millions in spinoffs, could also help Clark in a possible fall election, which could come as early as September.

Returning the warm embrace

Michelle Obama was hailed as a queen in her first solo trip to Africa this week. There, the U.S. First Lady spoke passionately to students, danced with African youth, met with Nelson Mandela and even squeezed in a dinner with her gal-pal Oprah Winfrey, a queen in her own right.

Review: Edith Sitwell: Avant garde poet, English genius

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 0 Comments

Fifty years ago, Edith Sitwell was one of the U.K.’s leading poets. Today no one reads her. Small wonder that Richard Greene, whose new biography is the first in 30 years, has titled its prologue simply: “Why?” The reasons are many and at the same time one: her gender. “Of the great poets of her generation, Sitwell was the easiest to knock off the pedestal,” writes Greene, who teaches at the University of Toronto. “She was a flamboyant, combative aristocrat and, better still, she was a woman.” She could make it easy for opponents. Tall, ethereal, with an outlandish beaked nose and wild clothing, she was the epitome of the decadent Chelsea snob. Her barbs could confirm such charges—answering a nasty letter to the Daily Mail, Sitwell wrote that its author “has taught me the value of birth control for the masses.”

Others dismissed Sitwell and her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell—“the Sitwells,” as they were called, wielded much power in literary circles—as rank self-promoters. F.R. Leavis judged that they “belong to the history of publicity rather than of poetry.” Younger writers, like Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, reviled the high rhetoric of Sitwell’s poems.

She came by it honestly, and Greene’s account of her upbringing can be as surreal as her poetry. While at Eton, her father invented a “tiny revolver for killing wasps.” Her mother, who boasted Plantagenet blood, drank, gambled and was later jailed for fraud. The Sitwells and their Derbyshire manor may have inspired Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Sitwell never forgave D.H. Lawrence). Young Edith was made to wear a nose truss to straighten a crooked proboscis; there’s no evidence she ever had a sexual relationship.

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Strauss-Kahn’s defence is a ‘PI firm on steroids’

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, June 6, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 4 Comments

David Karp/AP

Even now, so the rumour goes, detectives with Guidepost Solutions LLC, the global investigations firm that’s reportedly been hired by Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s defence team, are in Guinea probing the background of the 32-year-old hotel maid whose allegations last month led New York police to lay charges of attempted rape against the former IMF chief. Guidepost, which enjoys international reach from its Madison Avenue address, is who you hire if, like Strauss-Kahn, you’re married to the multi-millionaire Anne Sinclair—an agency said to charge in the range of $700 an hour per investigator.

This isn’t your traditional film noir gumshoe. Guidepost’s principals include past federal prosecutors, a former chief of IBM security, and a one-time special agent with the U.S. secret service—“a cross between a PI firm on steroids and an accounting-slash-forensics firm,” says Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former senior intelligence officer with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. “People who are capable of reaching out to international resources and counting on a network of investigators and sources.”

The firm’s clients are just as rarified. One is Ken Feinberg, the co-called “pay czar” appointed by Barack Obama to administer compensation claims made in the aftermath of the BP oil spill; the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, the agency established to divvy up BP’s $20-billion fund and which Feinberg heads, has tapped the firm to investigate thousands of fraudulent claims, a dizzyingly amorphous file. Guidepost investigators reportedly uncovered one fraud last year when they compared photo ID of a claimant they knew to be dead with a photo of her living sister, finding them “very similar.” That probe led authorities to charge the woman with making a bid for BP cash by posing as her deceased sibling.

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High prices leave the polar bear population at risk

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Kevin Frayer/CP Photo

Earlier this year, word began spreading among the Inuit families of the Belcher Islands, a treeless archipelago of rock and snow in Hudson Bay, that their cousins across the sea ice in Quebec had shot many dozens of polar bears this winter. For some in Nunavut, the rumour rankled. Hunters there must follow strict quotas governing the number of polar bears each community can harvest. Their cousins in northern Quebec, meanwhile, don’t.

At a time when polar bear hides are fetching between $5,000 and $11,000 at auction—double the price of just a couple of years ago—it was the kind of gossip that could only excite envy. “That means more income for them,” says Lucassie Arragutainaq, manager of a local Nunavut hunters and trappers association. A polite, cautious man who likes to stress the high cost of gas and ammunition in the north, Arragutainaq couldn’t say whether the number of polar bear kills in Quebec was as high as he’d heard: “It may be,” he allowed, “but I could be wrong.”

Actually, the number was even higher than initially reported. Hunters from the community of Inukjuak, Que., shot as many as 60 polar bears this winter, perhaps more—the official numbers aren’t yet released—all of them likely from a population centred in southern Hudson Bay that’s particularly at risk. The situation is this: high prices for polar bear skins on the world market is putting Canada’s oldest industry—the fur trade—on a collision course with what’s become the most potent symbol of global warming: the polar bear.

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Review: Please Look After Mom

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

A sort of antidote to Amy Chua’s churlish take on motherhood, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, from earlier this year, Please Look After Mom, by leading South Korean novelist Kyung-sook Shin, has sold over a million copies since its release in 2008. While Chua, a Yale law prof, stresses the toughness of the stereotypical Asian mother, Shin’s novel probes the emotional investment and selflessness of a woman who gives so much of herself that she’s nearly obliterated: “Please take care of yourself,” she tells her son. “That is the only thing your mother wishes from you.” It’s an erasure of self that threatens to take with it even the mother’s secret life—a life as rich as it is feverishly hidden.

The tale of a rural woman in her 60s who mysteriously disappears at busy Seoul Station during a visit to her upwardly mobile children, Please Look After Mom is at once a masterpiece of sentimentality and the story of South Korea’s sometimes painful transition from an agrarian, war-torn nation to an economic powerhouse. It is at turns haunting, with an almost supernatural edge, and prosaic, with deliciously endless descriptions of red peppers ground in mortars for kimchi, salt cabbage and fermented soybean cake.

Told over five chapters using four different voices—one of them a middle-aged female novelist who holds more than just a passing resemblance to Shin herself—the novel distills its missing central character down to a series of warm, sometimes heart-wrenching vignettes, coloured by the guilt of the shifting narrators. As her children scour the streets of Seoul for their inexplicably vanished mother, they begin hearing reports of a confused, dishevelled woman wearing the same blue sandals she’d worn years before, suffering the same old wound to her foot, walking aimlessly through their old Seoul neighbourhoods. By the end of the book, in a masterful combination of South Korean folk tale and Western spirituality, an epiphany experienced by the novelist daughter completes Mom’s transformation entirely.

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