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The comprehensive index of every blog post, magazine story and restaurant review that appears on Torontolife.com
Thank you for your support for Douglas Bell’s “Spectator” and “The Trial of Conrad Black” blogs. As this part of our site is no longer active, Toronto Life is now turning off the commenting tool and moving the blog content to an archive.
Thanks again for your support.
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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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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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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Lately, I spent some time talking to a guy whose job it is to advise another guy (one with more money) exactly what the future holds for the media. In that kind of job, it’s important to have forceful, reasoned views that point the way to concrete action. Why else would the latter pay the former to tell him what to do with his money? As required, the former went out and did scads of research into the future of the Internet—most importantly how to “monetize” content, which is the question pretty much everyone’s asking at the moment. At one point, he patted a stack of papers in front of him and announced that research shows people don’t want to watch TV on the Internet; they want to watch TV on their TVs. He said this in an effort to buttress his argument that people don’t “migrate” from one media to another (radio to TV, TV to the Internet, the Internet to another solar system, etc., etc.). Why then is The New York Times reporting that Google—one of the experts on how to monetize the Web—has just signed a deal with the creator of the cartoon Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane, to provide Web-only distribution for original material?
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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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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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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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Three days in, it’s pretty clear. With the cross-examinations of Gordon Eckstein and Maria Messina in the defence of Garth Drabinsky, Edward Greenspan seeks nothing short of vindication for his client and himself. After last summer’s mistake by the American lake, wherein his brutal cross-examination of David Radler had even his co-counsel objecting, Eddie is back on the beaten path—and loving it. This time, there are no more jack-in-the-box objections from impertinent Yankee grade schoolers. But there is plenty of time and latitude to roam through and excoriate the half-truths, prevarications and damnable lies of the Crown’s witnesses to what “they call crimes.”
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Eddie Greenspan’s continuing cross-examination of Maria Messina at the Livent trial took an odd turn shortly after noon yesterday when, in his continuing effort to erode, corrode and generally subvert Ms. Messina’s credibility, he mocked her testimony that former Livent finance VP Gord Eckstein once threw a clock at her during a meeting: “Do you recall how close it came [to hitting you?]… You must have thought he was stark raving mad…Sybil had run amok.”
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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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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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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 expected, Eddie Greenspan was in full flight today as he launched his cross-examination of former Livent CFO Maria Messina. He started by telling his prey that they would be spending quite a while together and advised her to confine herself to the specific questions he was asking. This led to 90 minutes of finger wagging, browbeating, accusation, innuendo and outright disdain. He characterized her consulting for a downtown Toronto law firm—one charged with representing the interests of Livent against their former executives Drabinsky and Gottlieb—as the “Stikeman Elliott witness protection program.” Furthermore, Eddie “accused” her of “taking three million bucks to prepare testimony in an effort to convict Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb.” It was all jolly innuendo accompanied by the usual apt and brash theatrics. What does it all amount to? Stay tuned.
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After a week’s interregnum, the Livent trial gears up again this morning with the cross-examination of former CFO Maria Messina. In her testimony to date, Messina more or less confirmed everything Livent’s other primary bean counter, Gord Eckstein, told the court about Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb’s alleged perpetual motion fraud machine. The difference highlighted by the Greenspans’ last ferocious cross-examination is that Eckstein is a pretty horrible guy: arrogant, mendacious and given to obscenity. Messina, on the other hand, has (so far) come off as saintly and long-suffering. She repeatedly testified that during her time at Livent she was “immobilized by fear” and that in preparing her memos revealing the fraud to new management, her hands shook so badly she had to get somebody else in the office to type it.
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