Spectator

Posts with category ‘Egos’


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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Margaret Wente’s take on gay pride proves that one kind of prejudice is still OK

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On a day when North Korea more or less gave up her nukes and the axis of evil was reduced to the axle of evil (and what with the surge going as well as it is, soon Iran will stand apart: a lone beacon of general depravity), there is much to celebrate. And yet somehow the Globe’s Margaret Wente tortures me still. Her subject yesterday: gay pride. Her lead, written in a “mocking” style, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that sarcasm really is the lowest form of humour: “Yes, folks, it’s that time of year again. Time to get out the feathers and the leathers and the nipple rings, and celebrate the wonderful diversity that is Pride Day.” Isn’t that clever? By suggesting that gay people—men and women alike—only wear leathers and nipple rings on Pride Day, “folks” like us can safely ridicule them and their “wonderful diversity.” Why? Because deep down inside, they know themselves how silly they all are? Why else would they only dress like that once a year? One thing you can safely say about Wente is that she is clearly unafraid of being either ignorant or stupid. Hell, she embraces it.

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Denied: Posner’s wry prose more or less sends Black to jail until 2013

Yesterday, in 16 pages of tightly woven legal reasoning, Richard Posner more or less put paid to whatever faint hope remained that Conrad Black will see a free day anytime before 2013. Moreover, he ensures that, barring a judicial miracle, Black’s co-conspirators Jack Boultbee and Peter Atkinson will join him as guests of the United States on or about July 10. Posner is among the most estimable minds on the American bench, and his decision reflects its author’s eclectic, sometimes eccentric, but always razor sharp intellect. The prose possessed a sniffily dismissive and wry air. In explaining the nub of Black’s fraudulent endeavours Posner writes:

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On not being famous at Moses Znaimer’s IdeaCity

It’s a Friday night in Toronto’s Distillery District, a vast commercial, residential and “arts” space installed in a renovated booze factory close to downtown. I’ve come to attend one of Moses Znaimer’s “legendary” IdeaCity parties, held at this time every year as part of a three-day festival attracting “luminaries” to the city. There’s a rather elaborate entry protocol, which involves me standing around a long while waiting to be confirmed. Once in the door, I feel practically naked as I don’t have a giant badge with my name on it indicating that I’ve paid Moses however many thousands of dollars to listen to 20-minute snatches of wisdom selected by him. Among this year’s merchants of wiseness are Margaret Atwood, listed as a “Canadian literary icon”; Christie Hefner, written up as “CEO Playboy Enterprises” (now there’s an idea!); and Betty Krawczyk, “Head Raging Granny.”

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Falling over ourselves to pay tribute to Tim Russert

Tim Russert, in case you hadn’t noticed, is dead. The longest serving host of the NBC political chat show Meet the Press passed to his eternal reward recently, and the Excited States of America lived up (or down) to its somewhat sardonic anglophilic nickname. At his memorial service, Bruce Springsteen sang and eulogized via video hookup. This in tribute to Russert’s working-class roots in benighted Buffalo (a city rapidly overtaking Detroit as a symbol of rust belt decline). At the “request of the family,” McCain and Obama sat together at the funeral, implying that, even in death, only Tim could reconcile America’s political divide. And more or less anyone in the media who deemed his passing worth mentioning was slavering in their praise. Even the New Yorker’s cleverer-than-thou David Remnick heaped on the praise with just the right touch of superiority.

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Nortel, Livent, BCE: A red-letter day for white-collar law

White-collar law, both civil and criminal, dominates this morning’s headlines: the Livent trial is ongoing, the BCE decision is expected from the Supremes later this afternoon and the RCMP is finally charging execs from Nortel and Royal Group Technologies (coverage of this last story comes complete with perp-walk photos and an alleged fraudster named—I kid you not—Vic De Zen).

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As long as the CBC is losing things…

OK, so CBC lost Hockey Night in Canada’s theme music. Now, having set that happy precedent, perhaps the Ceeb brain trust might, for the sake of good taste and our collective sanity, consider losing this jacket (and maybe even the guy in it).

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Fallout continues after Conrad Black’s contentious appeals hearing

The fallout from Lord Black’s contentious appeals hearing included the now-familiar bumptious rebuttal from his Lordship, backed up by the usual ventriloquism offered up by George Jonas of the National Post. In all this, there was the assertion that judges Posner and Sykes were, as Black put it, “essentially part of the prosecution.” Whatever his motivation throughout the hearing, Posner was by turns caustic, sarcastic, incredulous and dismissive. Afterwards, Andrew Frey noted that it’s an appeals judge’s job to be skeptical and that it was unlikely that Posner would come off the bench and give him a hug.

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How Mark Steyn got Canada on the cover of the New York Times

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Whenever our home and native land gets a mention in the mighty New York Times, we feel that concomitant frisson of recognition. For a moment, we’re a little closer to the centre of things. Today we made the front page above the fold, and not in a way that was especially flattering. The subject, in part, is the discrimination complaint before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal involving a piece Mark Steyn wrote for Maclean’s. I’ve written before about this sorry situation and expressed my opinion that the sooner we put paid to this sort of frivolous prosecution, the better. While Times legal reporter Adam Liptak takes seriously the Supreme Court’s efforts to balance speech rights with other societal concerns, he appears to imply that the situation in B.C. is the bridge too far. His argument, after the jump.

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Peter Munk interview at Indigo goes awry due to rowdy audience member

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Balzac’s neatly turned observation that “behind every great fortune there is a crime” has developed into a veritable shibboleth of the activist left. One thing is sure: if you make or inherit a great fortune, it’s a lock you’ll be accused of a great crime. Gates is a monopolist, Murdoch a closet fascist, Thomson a virtual polygamist, and don’t even get me started on all those Russians. Tuesday night in Toronto I saw this phenomenon in action. Peter Munk, whose Barrick Gold Corporation has developed into one of the great Canadian money-spinners of recent times, was interviewed on the stage at Indigo Books. His interlocutor was his daughter, Vanity Fair contributor Nina Munk. The subject of the chat was supposed to be a new book by Munk the Younger and Rachel Gotlieb that is titled The Art of Clairtone and celebrates the design innovations of Peter Munk’s long-defunct stereo company. The evening went more or less as planned, with Nina asking Peter straightforward journalistic questions concerning the content of her book. And then, in a moment, things went haywire.

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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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Foul language bumps Livent trial rating up to PG-13

The air turned a distinct shade of blue today at the Livent trial when the normally avuncular Brian Greenspan, having taken over his brother’s cross-examination of Gordon Eckstein, reacquainted the former Livent CFO with his expressed feelings for his former employers. Reading from a deposition given by a former Livent employee, Greenspan read testimony in open court stating that Eckstein had on numerous occasions referred to his bosses as “fuckheads, shitheads and idiots.”

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Pressure’s rising in the Livent trial, as Greenspan’s cross-exam goes into day five

Yesterday was Gordon Eckstein’s fifth day under cross-examination in the Livent trial, and for fans of Eddie Greenspan’s particular brand of withering, scornful sarcasm—the kind he marshalled against David Radler to mixed reviews—yesterday’s midday cross-exam was of pure vintage. Going back and forth as to the propriety of “papering the house” (i.e., buying up tickets, then giving them away so as to give the impression of a full house), Eddie and Eckstein snapped at each other like a couple of Dobermans scrapping for sport.

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Conrad Black looking to teach, rewrite history

He haunts us still. Conrad Black—newly minted instructor of American history at Coleman Federal Correctional Institute—takes his case before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals this Thursday, with the help of his able appeals lawyer, Andrew Frey. Oral arguments are limited to a half-hour on both sides, with yellow and red lights aflashin’ to ensure a timely disposal of the arguments. Steve Skurka has a piece on the National Post’s Web site that neatly summarizes the case on both sides.

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When it comes to the ethics of embedding journalists, Christie Blatchford misses the big picture (again)

I spent last week working in L.A.—an experience like no other, one that could make even the most deluded dreamer crave Toronto’s low-ceilinged ambitions. On Monday, seeking to inoculate myself against the general lunacy abroad in the land, I attended a sober Memorial Day ceremony at the Los Angeles National Cemetery. And while even this event had its share of native nuttiness (among the colour guard was an outfit called the Sons of Confederate Veterans, complete with period costume and a confederate flag), I was still struck by the unironic and severe atmosphere that is central to such American commemorations. During the Pledge of Allegiance, every person present (save the odd interloper) enunciated the national creed loudly and clearly, right hand draped over heart: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

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CityTV celebrates Ted Rogers’ 75th birthday by flouting journalistic standards

Canada’s idea of a media mogul (i.e., bland and ruthless), billionaire Ted Rogers (number 173 on the Forbes list, with seven-odd billion dollars), turned 75 years old on Tuesday. Rogers still makes news, and his pursuit of an NFL franchise for Toronto is one of the big business and sports stories of the moment. So when CityTV’s Web site decides to cover its owner’s birthday, while it’s a stretch, it does not beggar all credulity. If you were expecting a bland, pleasantly inoffensive statement of fact, much in keeping with the man himself, then you’d be wrong. CityTV provided a jaw-dropping hagiographic blow job that makes Mark Steyn’s coverage of Conrad Black look like All the President’s Men.

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What a difference a year makes for Eddie Greenspan

While Garth Drabinsky struggles mightily to remain among the unconvicted and non-felonious, the man making his case is in something of a battle of his own. Through the course of the Conrad Black trial, Edward Greenspan’s reputation as Canada’s defence attorney nonpareil took a ferocious beating. Leaving aside his client’s conviction, the much-publicized antipathy between himself and the jury, and his often rancorous relations with lawyers for Black’s co-accused, there still remains outstanding, as a matter of public record (courtesy Mark Steyn and Maclean’s), the accusation that he and Ed Genson (Black’s co-counsel) each demanded a substantial extra payment on the eve of closing arguments. So, in seeking to afford Drabinsky the best defence possible, Eddie, like a relief pitcher coming off a particularly severe shelling, is looking to impress on this, his next trip to the mound.

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On the hook for Conrad Black’s legal bills

There’s a thick vein of irony running through the tortuously long odyssey of United States v. Conrad Black, et al. And with the final chapter to be written June 5 (when oral arguments are made before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals), Judge Leo Strine of the Delaware Court of Chancery offers one of the richest paradoxes to date. Strine, you might remember, effectively blocked Black’s efforts to sell the Telegraph out from under Hollinger International shareholders. Regarding that case of corporate litigation, Strine wrote: “It became almost impossible for me to credit his word…. I found Black evasive and unreliable. His explanations of key events and of his own motivations do not have the ring of truth.”

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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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“Legal problems” may delay Conrad Black’s memoir of his legal problems

There are rumours floating around concerning delays in the publishing date for Conrad Black’s much-ballyhooed trial memoir The Fight of My Life. Until as recently as last week, his Lordship’s publisher, McClelland & Stewart president Douglas Pepper, was saying the doorstopper would be out this October. However, a source close to Black reports that “legal problems” could push it out a year to fall 2009. Black’s busy litigation schedule may have something to do with it.

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Today’s Livent verdict: Blue pens are very popular

As the Livent saga grinds on, the analogy I drew between Livent accountant Gordon Eckstein and Hollinger turncoat David Radler is being proven in spades—with one significant enhancement. Where Radler based his entire testimony on his recollection of a series of phone calls with the accused (Conrad Black), Eckstein is snaking his way through a positively Amazonian paper trail that leads to and from the desk of Garth Drabinsky. And, natch, it all suggests an accounting fraud that makes the shilly-shallyings of our old pal Jack Boultbee pale in comparison.

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Livent trial revelations: Cooked books rooks schnooks

He’s a lot taller, rather more phlegmatic, and considerably more fragrant (having applied substantial splashes of eau de something), but Livent’s former VP finance Gordon Eckstein had about him more than a whiff of David Radler when he walked into court yesterday to testify against his erstwhile bosses Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb. The examination—in chief carried out with brisk efficiency by the Crown’s lead prosecutor, Robert Hubbard—directed Eckstein to tell the court that though he was the one who cooked Livent’s books, he did so at the behest of Drabinsky and Gottlieb (both of whom were sitting not 20 feet away).

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Greenspans initiate Radler redux at Livent trial

For those of us who sat through the trial of Conrad Black, yesterday afternoon at the Livent fraud trial was a trip down memory lane. Eddie Greenspan (acting for Garth Drabinsky) took over the cross-examination of former Livent contractor Peter Kofman from his brother Brian (acting for the co-accused, Myron Gottlieb). In what was clearly a warm-up for the main event, the cross-examination of former Livent senior VP finance Gordon Eckstein (playing, for the purposes of this trial, the role of David Radler), Eddie and Brian led Kofman through a series of questions meant to portray Eckstein—in the words of one press gallery wag—“in horns and a tail.”

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Day two of Her Majesty the Queen vs. Drabinsky and Gottlieb

What started as a tedious prologue transformed, in a flash, into a testy rough-and-tumble drama. The shift in tone was undeniably due to today’s introduction of Peter Kofman, Livent’s contractor, whose job throughout the ’90s was to renovate and build the theatrical palazzos that housed various Phantoms, Showboats and Sunset Boulevards. In a mood that might best be described as somewhere between abysmal and exasperated, Kofman testified on the Crown’s behalf regarding Livent’s accounting practices—practices that would have put a blush on even Max Bialystock’s face.

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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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Theatre puns running low among journos at Drabinsky-Gottlieb trial

This country’s most famous and fabulous theatre impresario and his long-time partner went on trial for fraud yesterday morning in a large, airy courtroom (under an enormous coat of arms featuring a lion and a unicorn and the words Dieu et mon droit) on the fourth floor at 361 University Avenue—a mere driver and a wedge from the theatres that made Garth Drabinsky famous. The setting was likely a little dull for Garth’s taste. He did look good: tan and fit in a snappy check suit, with that insane shag carpet still growing out the top of his head. There were the usual oyeh, oyeh, oyehs, followed by the introduction of the Crown and its opponents, the Greenspan brothers.

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Cue the madness—Drabinsky and Gottlieb are now on trial

After a mere decade of delays and distractions, former theatre impresario and alleged fraudster Garth Drabinsky will finally see the inside of a Canadian courtroom. He and his Livent Inc. partner Myron Gottlieb are facing criminal charges before Ontario Superior Court Judge Mary Lou Benotto—she of the tainted blood trial. Reporting on CBC Radio this morning, Mike Hornbrook pointed out that it’s considered “Canada’s largest ever prosecution of corporate fraud”—a good thing, too, considering the Americans were ready to prosecute these two as long ago as 1999. Unlike their former board member Conrad Black, Gottlieb and Drabinsky had the good sense to hole up in Canada and wait for the RCMP to conduct its investigation (an indictment took three years). As for the subsequent delay in the case coming to trial, Drabinsky can thank (in part) a certain aforementioned peer of the realm: the Crown was only too happy to accommodate Eddie Greenspan’s crowded calendar as he flew about the continent defending Black.

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The selective sympathies of Christie Blatchford

Christie Blatchford’s selective sympathies and predilection for men in uniform is fodder for much water cooler criticism both in and out of the scribbling trades. But in all my time observing the Globe scribe’s commentary—and particularly in view of my interest in her on-again, off-again empathy/sympathy for Conrad Black—I’ve never seen anything quite as brazen as her recent columns on Robert Baltovich (April 24) and Paul Croutch (May 1).

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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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Peter C. Newman weighs in on “Robber Baron” and Conrad’s prison publishing

Peter Newman, my colleague and Black scribe extraordinaire, dropped me a line this morning. Always a joy, especially since parts of the message are well worth sharing:

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Rosie DiManno’s profoundly wacky campaign against Robert Baltovich

This past Wednesday, the Toronto Star gave Rosie DiManno space to vent her long-standing grievance with Robert Baltovich. Today I’ve asked Derek Finkle, whose book on the subject is a cornerstone of Baltovich’s public defence, to respond. Herewith is his guest blog:

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Times 2, Journal 1: Murdoch takes a page from Conrad Black’s “The Art of Newspaper War”

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Newsweek’s latest has a mammoth take out on New York’s newspaper war. Titled “Murdoch, Ink,” the dek on the article reads, “With a redesigned Wall Street Journal, mogul Rupert Murdoch is launching an old-fashioned newspaper war against The New York Times. Not since William Randolph Hearst took on Joseph Pulitzer have we seen such a fight.” And from there on in, it’s all Rupert all the time, punctuated by a series of delicious quotes straight from the horse’s mouth.

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Conrad Black roundup: A finger, a fiction, a fallacy and a foundation

While things may be workaday at Florida’s FCI Coleman, the last several news cycles have seen an eclectic array of press coverage. It was announced over the weekend that David Chidley’s oft-printed photograph of Conrad Black flipping the bird to a gaggle of preying vermin during the Trial of the Millennial Epoch has won a Canadian award for spot news photograph of the year—trumping, I might add, 2,200 other entries. Dare I say that the photo and its recognition neatly capture the essence of our national press’s love-hate obsession with Prisoner #18330-424? We loathe and mock him. We bait him. And yet we yearn for, if not his affections, at least his attention. And God bless him: he always seems to return the favour in spades.

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Hillary Clinton: one part Susan B. Anthony, one part Carly Simon and one part Joe McCarthy

In the aftermath of what was, by just about anybody’s estimation, a rout of Barack Obama in Wednesday night’s primary debate, Hillary Clinton moved to the horsey hills of Philadelphia college country to conduct a town hall in front of an adoring crowd at Haverford College (the oldest college of Quaker origin in the United States—who knew?). Hillary kicked back in front of a mostly female audience, sharing a stage with her mother and daughter and, for the better part of 90 minutes, conducted a sisterly love-in whose subtext was “Sisters, we certainly kicked some ass last night.”

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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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Sandra Martin: Superstar obituarist or Grim Reaper?

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Beryl Plumptre is dead and that matters. We know this—in part, at least—because Sandra Martin, the Globe and Mail’s lead obituarist, tells us so. Martin is part of a recent phenomenon: the superstar obituarist. Apparently, it’s been the rage in the U.K. since at least 2006, when the BBC reported that:

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Gaffe of the week: Stupidity is stupidity, whether you’re Tom Lukiwski or Jeffrey Simpson

One of the stranger excretions during the Lukiwski news cycle arrived yesterday courtesy the Globe’s big-foot national affairs columnist, Jeffrey Simpson. In avoiding discussing the actual issue—and the content of the tape at the centre of it, in which MP Tom Lukiwski takes a rather dim view of gay men—Simpson combines a sort of boys-will-be-boys apologia with an extended swipe at the NDP. To wit:

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Mark Penn’s sleaze machine links Clinton to Canada

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Yesterday’s coverage of Hillary Clinton tossing her chief strategist, Mark Penn, includes—shock of shocks—a Canadian angle. Penn, acting in his role as CEO of global flacks Burson-Marsteller, was jettisoned for personally servicing a contract with the Colombian government that would help grease the wheels for a pending free trade deal with the States (a deal that Hillary, in an effort to suck up to working-class voters, has repudiated vociferously). Turns out that Burson-Marsteller is the same outfit that contracted with a Canadian company, Spin Master (yes, that’s really their name), to do damage control over a toy they were distributing.

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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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Hey, Toronto, why should we take Richard Florida’s word for it?

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A while back, my colleague Philip Preville and Toronto’s newly minted urban affairs media guru Richard Florida crossed swords over the perils and opportunities of civic boosterism in T.O. On the whole, they grudgingly agreed to disagree. Florida acknowledged that he was something of an optimist: “I have been wondering for some time now why people like Preville are so negative and insecure about what Jane Jacobs said is North America’s greatest city.” And Preville agreed that “being a negative kind of guy, I’d rather focus on problems and prod people toward solutions.” I raise all this because I spent part of the weekend traipsing around Philadelphia and came across a column by Florida in The Inquirer titled “Why Philadelphia’s economic future looks so bright.” It’s essentially a love letter to the city:

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On the complexity of Rob Ford

In his blog on the Rob Ford imbroglio today, Philip Preville hits a walk-off home run. Preville gets it exactly right. The entire blessed mess is sad, tedious and points to the need for the 24/7 news maw to step back occasionally and wonder silently at the horror that is our human lot.

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Clinton, Obama, McCain star in Sheila Heti’s presidential dream team

I’m in New Jersey at the moment, preparing to gorge myself on a revealing slice of the American political pie. Before I get started, though, I thought I’d try a Canadian appetizer—a phenomenon affecting in a minor key the political scene down here. I speak of Sheila Heti, the whimsical Toronto novelist and all-around cultural entrepreneur whose blogs I Dream of Barack, I Dream of Hillary and I Dream of McCain have generated a mountain of press down here. Heti transcribes, more or less verbatim, the nocturnal imaginings of her readers and turns them into blog posts describing dreams of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. These dreams are not of the political variety—or at least not as “politics” is conventionally understood. To wit:

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E-mail now among Conrad Black’s luxuries

Conrad Black’s recent missive to the Canadian Press, much bruited upon by this blog over the Easter weekend, reveals the weirdly Janus-faced attitude that the United States adopts toward the free speech of the two million of its own citizens (reportedly the highest rate of incarceration per capita of any nation on earth) it now imprisons.

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Mark Kipnis is competent 99 per cent of the time

The top story on law.com today reprises the strange case of Mark Kipnis, former Hollinger International corporate counsel and, pending appeal, convicted felon. Kipnis—who benefited not at all from the scheme that paid out millions to his bosses—was convicted essentially of negligence. In pleading to stay out of jail (successfully, it turns out), Kipnis admitted that “ninety-nine per cent of my time, Judge, I believe I was competent. I believe I did do a good job. It was that one per cent—the compliance aspect—that should have taken much more of my time. I admit…I did not fully understand the magnitude of those responsibilities.”

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CBC execs: low on reason, high on the hog

Yesterday’s Toronto Sun reported on its freedom of information requests that dug up the following on the expenditures of senior CBC executives:

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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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Is Rupert Murdoch’s reporter sniffing out Obama pal Tony Rezko?

Filed under “W” for “what a weird coincidence,” a reporter close to the scene at the Tony Rezko trial (overseen by the same judge who handled the Conrad Black matter, Amy St. Eve) told me last week:

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Jean Chrétien on Conrad Black: “Justice is justice”

Demonstrating his trademark canny candour, Jean Chrétien gave a speech at U of T yesterday and shed one (and only one) crocodile tear over his former frenemy, Conrad Black. “It’s sad, but justice is justice,” said the former prime minister. “It’s done and it’s an American problem—it’s very sad.”

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The ongoing irony of Conrad Black

For those among you who are fans of lead-weight irony (and who among us isn’t?), I give you John Willman today on the Financial Times’ Web site, FT.com:

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Best of the Black coverage (or, Conrad quaffs America cocktails)

As the Black coverage continues raining down cats and dogs, I can’t help but think that this is the storm before the calm. There’s something all too ephemeral about the endless recitation of grim prison factoids: the mandatory shirt tuck, the khaki trousers, the steel-toed boots, lights out at 11, maximum 15 minutes on the phone, only five books, three magazines and one newspaper at a time, pedophiles for roommates, starchy food, 12 cents an hour…this too shall pass. And then there will be a silence into which everything else will flood—Britney, Obama, Cadman, Schreiber and on and on and on. Amid all the noise, I have found several highlights of today’s coverage (listed below). One item in particular intrigued me. It’s an entry by Michael White on his politics blog at The Guardian. In it he demonstrates the British gift for taking away with the right hand, then taking away more with the left:

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The glitzy Toronto event that linked Bill Clinton, Shakira and Eugene Levy

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The skybox on the front page of yesterday’s Toronto Star featured a bunch of gold stars with the faces of famous people: Tom Cruise, Robin Williams, John Travolta, Shakira and Elton John. The bold, all-caps display copy reads “STAR STUDDED,” and the underline pitched a story on the front page of the business section: “Bill Clinton fundraiser in Toronto draws big names.” The piece itself was a slavering paean to the fundraising abilities of the former president and his Canadian partner, mining billionaire Frank Giustra. To wit:

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Character assassin–cum–biographer Tom Bower weighs in on Black

Among the more grinding ironies that his Lordship had to endure on that inauspicious yesterday was the appearance at 2:19 p.m. EST of a piece on the Web site of his former flagship, The Daily Telegraph. In it, and without the riposte, Black’s most ferocious tormentor, the character assassin–cum–biographer Tom Bower, puts the boot in without fear of contradiction:

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Mark Steyn defends Black’s breast-cupping gesture

Writing on his Maclean’s blog today, Mark Steyn—playing Cohn to Black’s Joseph McCarthy—enlightened the passing multitudes on the injustice of it all. In doing so he offered the following: “As for the various papers around the world, they’re not in such great shape under their new owners. ‘You have to have a feel for it,’ Conrad said to me a couple of months back, making that little motion he does with his right hand that makes it look either as if he’s re-tuning an ancient radio or cupping the breast of a passing waitress.”

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Avi Lewis: pompous, literal and working for Al Jazeera

Ever wonder what happened to CBC journalist and lefty icon Avi Lewis? Well, here’s the skinny: According to the National Post, Mr. Naomi Klein is settling into a new job as a talking head at the Arab news network Al Jazeera, working out of Washington.

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It’s official: Conrad Black is going to jail

“It’s like back to boarding school, without, one dares to assume, the tedium and indignity of corporal punishment.” So said Lord Black in a recent missive to the Irish Independent, and so it shall be. Last evening, as expected, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Black must report to the Coleman Federal Correctional Institution—located an hour or so northwest of Palm Beach—no later than 2 p.m. on Monday. In a twist, both Jack Boultbee and Peter Atkinson were granted a continuance of their bail, pending appeal.

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John Ibbitson flaunts knowledge of NAFTA, human condition

In this the most compelling political season in recent American history, the powers that be at The Globe and Mail have as their man in Washington (and further afield) the hard-working and, for the most part, balanced John Ibbitson. He is the quintessential “Globe man”: fiscally conservative and progressive on social issues. Another quality he shares with the Globe is rampaging self-importance. Wednesday, Ibbitson chastised The New York Times’ lead political columnist, David Brooks, for failing to grasp the central importance of Barack Obama’s campaign. Details, such as they are, after the jump.

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Jeanne Beker busts out at the Oscars

A couple of sidebar observations on the Canadian Oscar coverage Sunday night:

In her interview with Barbara Walters, Ellen Page pointed out the difference between what is understated and fundamentally decent and what is crass and fundamentally gauche. And while Ms. Page rendered unto Caesar (we all gotta make a living), she proved you don’t necessarily have to wax his laurel while you’re at it.

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Welcome to Spectator

A little over half an hour into Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane takes control of the moribund New York Inquirer and fires the editor. On completing his fourth draft of the front page of his maiden edition, Kane turns to his soulmate and dramatic critic Jedediah Leland and reads to him a prospective declaration of principles for the paper: “I’ll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. I will also provide them…with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings.”

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