Spectator

Posts with category ‘Magazines’


So Long. Farewell. Auf wiedersehen. Goodbye.

This is my last post for Spectator, as I am moving onward and upward, or backward and downward, depending on your point of view. I’ve gotten a real kick out of the past 16 months, first blogging about the Conrad Black trial, then more broadly on whatever it was I’ve spent the past five months mouthing off about.

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Magazine maven Bonnie Fuller poised to market her toughest brand yet: Herself

The gap between Canada Day and the star-spangled Fourth is a good time to reflect on the differences, similarities and absurdities that define the decidedly imbalanced relation between our “two great nations.” (My colleague Andrew Clark, The Guardian’s man in New York, full of ill-informed good cheer, saluted our national day thusly: “Happy St. Canada’s Day. Hope the turkey and cheesy fries go down well.”) And while I’m sure it was inadvertent, The New York Times did devote rather a lot of space—the lead feature in last Sunday’s business section—to one of our own: the inevitable Bonnie Fuller. The writer was David Carr, the Times’s go-to guy on the media biz, who contends that Fuller—whose peripatetic risings and fallings in the New York magazine world are the stuff of endless clucking—is to our celebutante-inebriated culture as Einstein was to quantum theory. (That’s a, er, rough analogy, but you get my drift.) To wit: “Through nearly two decades of vision and relentlessness, Ms. Fuller created a way of objectifying the A- and B-list that turned celebrities into not only our ‘friends,’ but also American royals, unelected gods who walk among us.”

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John Macfarlane grabs The Walrus’s tiller

Take this with however big a grain of salt as you like. John Macfarlane, the man who hired me to write this blog and who used to edit Toronto Life, is taking over as co-publisher and part-time editor of The Walrus magazine on an interim basis. As I’ve suggested here before, The Walrus is a decidedly good thing. Thousands of Canadian magazine readers were cut adrift when Saturday Night went under, and they washed up on Ken Alexander’s shores. That said, though, the fact remains that the editorial and managerial life of The Walrus has been somewhat, how to say, stormy under his regime. Macfarlane will bring a steady hand to the tiller while the magazine rides out its co-founder’s departure and the current economic unpleasantness. A smart move all the way around.

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Satirists of Canada: Your day has come!

The past few days have seen a considerable improvement in the climate for free speech in this country. First, the Canadian Human Rights Commission pitched out the egregious complaint filed by the Canadian Islamic Congress against Maclean’s (and Mark Steyn). And now, the Supreme Court of Canada, courtesy of the good offices of Justice Ian Binnie, reconfirmed the importance of and extended the purview of what counts as fair comment. A read-through of Binnie’s opinion—which spoke for the court’s 9–0 rout reversing a B.C. Court of Appeal decision that favoured anti-gay activist Kari Simpson over shock jock Rafe Mair—reveals a veritable free speech manifesto:

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In the debate over Google’s effect on humanity, everyone is missing one big issue

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For the second time this week, I’m taking my lead from The Atlantic (it’s the best magazine in the world right now, making even The New Yorker appear precious and overwrought). Unsurprisingly, the two articles that stirred me to blog were both (a) about the Web and (b) rife with fundamental, flummoxing misperception. I’ve already written about Mark Bowden’s piece on the Web-induced demise of The Wall Street Journal. Now for the big kahuna: Nicholas Carr’s take on Google. Titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” this cover story has been sticking in bloggers’ craws all week, inspiring them to pee on hydrants to mark their view on the current state of media, the Web and the human condition. Carr’s view is clear: the hypertext world of Google is slowly eroding our capacity for sustained contemplation, thereby flattening our collective intelligence. One thing is also clear: the piece has an enormous blind spot.

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A three-sheet salute to The Walrus’s Ken Alexander

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The word went out last night: Ken Alexander—perpetually described (yet again this morning in the Globe) as “colourful, chain-smoking and tempestuous,” or some such code for irascible and sodden—is calling it quits after four years of editing The Walrus. In short order, the periodical essentially replaced Saturday Night as Canada’s national magazine of high-end, long-form magazine journalism. It was this shift—exacerbated by Alexander’s studied old-money indifference to forelock tugging and civility—that brought down the wrath of the established journalistic orders (see Robert Fulford in the pages of Toronto Life). Over the course of Alexander’s tenure, The Walrus simultaneously attracted and repelled talent. The result was an earnest, ambitious, if somewhat worthy publication.

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Two rich white guys face a higher power

Here are a couple of stray observations on a steamy Toronto Monday. Friday night, Peter C. Newman won a National Magazine Award for his magisterial take on the Conrad Black trial in the pages of Toronto Life. From the podium, he thanked the man himself. Mr. Black noted in the pages of Saturday’s Post that, to his mind, this “outpouring of sentimental celebration…is a nostalgic re-enactment of the leftist ritual of self-indulgent historical myth-making.” He was writing about the 40th anniversary of student rioting in France, but as an expression of his likely take on Newman’s triumph, it’ll do just fine.

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The newsworthiest breast in Canada

At this time last week, l’affaire Bernier was taking wing and sending a Canadian news story flying around the world: “Over the course of 72 hours in midweek,” reported the Globe, “Ms. Couillard was the subject of thousands of articles and 821 TV reports in no fewer than 61 countries.” Moreover, “she took sole possession of a remarkable six per cent of all U.S. news coverage.” But in the blogosphere—where currency is the, uh, currency—sometimes it takes a solid week for a particular issue to come into focus. Take, for instance, John Barber’s “satire” of this coverage in last Saturday’s Globe. It was printed under the slug “Analysis” and titled “Thousands of articles, 821 TV shows, 61 countries and one breast.” That “breast” is the first of seven mentions (eight, if you count the cutline) in the piece, accompanied by two instances of the more ribald “knockers.”

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Toro rides again

Wednesday saw the launch—or, more precisely, the relaunch—of Toromagazine.com. Toro, you might remember, was a National Magazine Award–winning men’s magazine distributed through subscriber copies of The Globe and Mail between 2003 and 2007. Toro was beautifully designed and well written, covering a lot of journalistic ground in unexpected ways (Gare Joyce’s profile of Michael Ignatieff was, and probably is, the most original take on Macbeth along the Rideau to date). And it did all this without ceding any ground as a stylin’ men’s mag. It was a community of writers, editors, designers, illustrators and photographers (of which I’m proud to say—full disclosure—I was one). The contributors were likely names that, if you’re Canadian, you’ve heard before: Derek Finkle, Graham Roumieu, Charles Foran, Mark Kingwell, Mark Schatzker, Russell Smith, and the wonderfully monikered sex columnist Bebe O’Shea (actually playwright Claudia Dey).

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In defence of Mark Steyn

A couple of weeks ago, I reported in this space about Mark Steyn’s appearance at Indigo’s Bay and Bloor store, during which Heather Reisman interviewed him. I suggested the event might better have been titled “White Guys’ Night Out” or some such, and played it mostly for laughs. The story picked up again yesterday, when the National Post featured an op-ed by left-coast writer Terry O’Neill on the subject of Macleans’—and by extension, Mark Steyn’s—upcoming trial before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal (a discrimination complaint brought “on behalf of Muslim residents in the province of British Columbia” that will be heard on June 2). O’Neill reminds us that when you defend free speech, you’re doing it for everyone. Or, in the words of Noam Chomsky: “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”

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White men cheer for Mark Steyn at Bay and Bloor

You can’t swing a cat in this town without hitting Heather Reisman interviewing some author. Such events usually go down at Indigo Books (where lately it seems she’s the CEO, picks the books, arranges the floor displays, sweeps the floor, changes the light bulbs and sews the employee smocks), and last night, at the Bay and Bloor location, the author in question was the ubiquitous Mark Steyn. He was there to plug his much discussed book America Alone, and held forth in front of a jam-packed audience of mostly white men on his general discomfort with and disdain for the Muslim world and multiculturalism. He espoused what he called a “natalist” policy for Canada—i.e. Canadians should produce more babies, thereby vitiating the need for immigration—and something about “telescoping” our educable years, presumably so as to free up time for more babymaking.

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Gaffe of the Week: Tory hacks caught on tape!

This morning’s on-line version of The Hill Times offers a thorough and thoughtful summary of what, for lack of a better handle, I’ll call the Sparrow’s Folly. I am referring, of course, to the ill-fated effort of the PMO’s media machine to spin the RCMP’s investigation into alleged election finance malfeasance. In events that sound remarkably like the embarrassing jokes told by your Uncle Lester after several too many at Christmas, three Torys—a flack (party spokesman Ryan Sparrow), a hack (Tory campaign director Doug Finley) and a lawyer (Paul Lepsoe)—held a secret briefing in an Ottawa hotel for selected journalists (this after changing the location to put other ink-stained hounds off the scent). They were found out, confronted by the excluded journos and forced to flee down a fire escape. I’m not making that up. Promise.

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Why not lionize Canada’s captains of industry? Here’s why

Friday’s cover story in the Globe’s Report on Business magazine is a laudatory profile of Mike Lazaridis—the co-founder of RIM Ltd., manufacturer of the ubiquitous BlackBerry. The piece tells us that Lazaridis’s personal fortune is $3.6 billion and that the company’s market value is $67 billion on revenue of $6 billion last year. Despite this, the profiler (David Fielding) never mentions the fact that RIM has been the subject of an SEC investigation into backdating stock options—hardly a small detail, considering the investigation led to Lazaridis’s partner Jim Balsillie stepping down as chairman last year. Efforts to establish whether the SEC investigation is ongoing proved fruitless. The SEC, as a matter of principle, will not comment. RIM has yet to respond to our inquiries.

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Dispatches from the surreal calamity of last night’s Democratic leadership debate

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Last night, in a massive Philadelphia museum devoted to the American Constitution, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hammered away at each other—gladiators in the great Democratic political contest. The debate itself, part of the run-up to the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, took place in a smallish TV theatre and was moderated by ABC correspondents Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Outside that small room, though, in a massive cathedral of spin, looking out 30-foot-high windows at Independence Hall, a thousand journos banged away at laptops, murmured into microphones and adjusted their ties and blouses before the camera. This horde represented an array of newspapers, Web sites, blogs, and radio and TV stations bearing a Dadaesque constellation of acronyms from throughout the world—ABC, NBC, CBS, WLS, WLAY, WABC, WDKA, WSYR, BBC, CNN, C-SPAN—most of which were repeated out along 6th Street, where satellite trucks stretched into the distance like a futuristic trailer park and news helicopters floated above. It was American madness pure and thick, and I wandered through it, as Leonard Cohen would say, like a lost Canadian.

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Litigiously yours, CanWest

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Recently, I reported on efforts by The Wall Street Journal to buy up copies of a parody version of their publication titled My Wall Street Journal. Despite the slightly sinister implications, the whole absurd fiasco was essentially found comedy. Not so hilarious is the lawsuit against a parody version of The Vancouver Sun brought by the Aspers, owners of media behemoth CanWest. The parody satirizes the Sun’s avowedly pro-Israel editorial bent. In addition to the folks who actually produced the thing, the Aspers are going after a Palestinian activist named Mordecai Briemberg. Here’s his description of his liability in the matter:

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NYC newspaper war now playing out in the Post, Observer and Vanity Fair

Over at the Department of Double Standards we find Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff writing one of those self-fulfilling-prophecy pieces about how dim-witted the Sulzbergers are. The item is in the May issue and muses on how the family will inevitably sell The New York Times to Warren Buffett or the Washington Post Company or Michael Bloomberg or the highest bidder. And that whoever gets it will deserve it more than the Sulzbergers because whoever it is isn’t—how to put it?—as stupid as the Sulzbergers.

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The myna bird call of Barbara Amiel

Barbara Amiel’s latest pensée in the pages of Maclean’s—besides perfunctory references to her new dog and the shortcomings of Barack Obama—contains a sentence that reminded me of something I’d read before. Now, usually when my memory is jogged like this, it means Amiel is repeating something penned earlier by her own good self, since doctrinal and rhetorical inconsistency aren’t among Lady Black’s more evident sins. Not this time, however. The recollection bothered me enough that I followed my nose—and voila!

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Happy 80th birthday, Chatelaine—you could use a good party

So Chatelaine, Canada’s premier women’s magazine, is having a mad old party tonight. The Windsor Arms Hotel will be packed to the gills with publishing types, there to celebrate Chatelaine’s 80th birthday, a new design and a new editor. It’s all sweetness and light these days at the Rogers-owned publication, having just put a rough patch behind it (four different editors in four years and the rest of the Canadian media running plenty of who’d-a-thunk-it stories—including David Hayes’s hereabouts two months ago). None of the roughness seems to have made a whit of substantive difference, though: the magazine still has a circulation of 550,000 and $50 million-plus in revenue. All of which suggests that the rough patch was set off by Chatelaine managers who—looking at a slight drop in PMB numbers and believing that change solves everything—made a classic, fundamental error: “It ain’t broke but we’re going to break it anyway.”

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Who tops the Toronto Star for Earth Hour ballyhoo? Noooooobody!

Because what I am about to say will sound churlish to even the meanest ear, I would like to begin by stating the following: I think a lot of people turning out their lights and appliances at the same time is a good idea. I prize silence and the dark as much as the next guy, so Earth Hour is, to my mind, a good thing. Still, it’s all a bit of motherhood, isn’t it (so much for the anodyne opening)? Who could possibly oppose it? For all the caveats about Earth Hour’s symbolism, one longs to spray-paint dissent on its wall of temperate virtue—but you can’t since it’s all so virtuous. Which brings me to my mean-spirited, cynical, toxic point: what in hell is the Toronto Star doing promoting Earth Hour in its editorial pages (and every other page after page after page) like one of the Lastmans braying on about Bad Boy?

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David Frum compliments lefty bloggers—watch for flying pigs

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The January-February issue of National Interest, a mainstay of America’s neo-con commentariat, has two aspects of note. First, it is the last issue listing Conrad Black as a member of its advisory council. The reason for his departure, other than the obvious, may include the fact that his decidedly former pal Henry Kissinger is the publication’s honorary chairman. The second aspect, much as it galls me to say, is an intriguing piece on the influence of the blogosphere on American foreign policy debates written by former White House speech scribbler and big-time Conrad Black apologist David Frum.

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Jonathan Black rear-ends celebrity status

Well, it’s not exactly Britney Spears shaving her head, but when Jonathan Black allegedly bounced his vehicle—what the Toronto Star characterized as his “luxury” car—off the back of a GMC Safari van last Thursday, he verged, however briefly, into the tawdry world of Lindsay Lohan, celebutantes, the paparazzi and whatever else it is that fuels the 24/7 not-so-beau monde of TMZ, Perez Hilton and X17online. Jonathan hasn’t hit Brangelina status quite yet, but the reach of the story should give the Canadian media pause. The story has made it all the way to The Sydney Morning Herald and the Malaysia Star.

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