CW EDITORS : The summer is in sight. We have just a few quick things to say, before settling down to a more rigorous holiday schedule of (more) regular (more brief) reporting in these fascinating and intermittently near-overwhelming times. (That at least is the plan.) To start with, while diverse protests for equality and freedom […]

When relief is needed from Canada’s intermittent bouts of feeling that, to stay relevant in the global village, we must do a bad job of imitating political craziness elsewhere, the editors on this site turn to me. Or so it all too often seems, waiting for the eccentric winter of 2019 to end. Lately I […]

It may well be that 2019 proves a difficult year on any number of fronts. But I was lucky enough to spend its first Thursday evening at one of the “top 21 new bars in Toronto” (blue bird or The Bluebird, 2072 Dundas St W, at Howard Park). I was listening to an excellent jazz […]

I have no deep familiarity with the writing of V.S. Naipaul, who “died at his home in London” Saturday, August 11, 2018, just a few days short of his 86th birthday. But he is at least one of only a few great literary talents I for a while found fascinating after my mid-30s. I feel […]

[UPDATED JANUARY 10]. What are some options for dropping by the Rex Jazz & Blues bar in Toronto in the first month of this perhaps fateful year 2018? Which of the scheduled groups would you most like to hear? Those asking these poignant questions also promised that if we did go to any of these […]

At last we have summer in the city 2017 up here on the northwest shore of the most easterly great lake (well, sort of …). Back from a short communion with early July mosquitoes further north, I somehow bumped into a YouTube clip called “Paul Desmond & Gerry Mulligan — Stardust.” As happens in the […]

[CW EDITORS NOTE : Nos cœurs et les esprits vont vers les gens du premier pays de mère européenne du Canada, à la suite de l’attaque terroriste épouvantable à Nice hier — un jour que tous ceux qui aiment la liberté et la démocratie dans le monde d’aujourd’hui célèbrent, épaule contre épaule avec le peuple […]

According to Paul Rimstead (I think), Bud Grant, the old Winnipeg Blue Bombers coach from the USA, used to say that “Canadians should be more like Texans.” Today it might be said that Stephen Harper from Alberta has now realized this dream. And whether you approve or not is the main ballot question in this […]

TORONTO, ONTARIO STREETCAR SUBURBS, AUGUST 11, 2013. When I bought the Summer Issue of the New York Review of Books at my local magazine store several days ago, it came wrapped in a plastic bag, with a red and white seal on the outside saying “FREE 1963 premier issue reprint!.” Technically, the summer of 2013 […]

Our Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper is supposed to be making a big cabinet shuffle this week, but I couldn’t care less. He is the only important person in his cabinet. And how many times can he shuffle himself? Anyway, it has been hot and humid in the summer in the city. We’ve had unexpected […]