Something Wicked This Way Comes
Do such remorseless, amoral, psychopathic creatures really exist in our world? Yes, they do. I’ve met more than one or two of them. And so, perhaps, have you.
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A Terrible Beauty Unearthed
Like the technological hubris that sank the Titanic, or the monstrous ideology that destroyed the World Trade Center, the sudden, shocking obliteration of Pompeii is an emblem of human achievement brought low in a humiliation of ruins.
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Leonard Cohen: Not
Happiness. Meaning
The brokenness of existence is Leonard Cohen’s theme. Incompletion perpetually striving towards completion. The agony and ecstasy of love. The silent indifference of God.
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Rogues, Damaged Idealists,
and Neo-frootloopians
The friction between the Ideal and the Real abrades every race to the Presidency. But in Canada, the United States, Europe and a few other places, no one gets jailed, tortured, or killed for lampooning political or religious leaders. That separates us from much of the rest of the world. Yes, however imperfect, our system is better.
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Sex, Art and Euro-American Culture
Dietrich’s sexual allure, intoxicating and dangerous, offers us as much attention to detailed symbolism as a medieval crucifixion. Note the image of a man contained by an egg-like shape on the chair-back, shadowed, wombed, and contained by the dominance of a cultural archetype: a woman who is both nature and artifice, masculine . . .
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Step Out Smartly Into Spring
In Montreal, we are well known for our joie de flâner, and for our smartly turned out flâneurs. You begin to notice them in spring, when the red buds of the silver maple begin to bloom. They appear as solitary walkers, dapper in a grey fedora, or sporting a wine-dark silk scarf, or carrying an umbrella with a wooden handle carved in . . .
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Mick Jagger, Pope Benedict and Me
I recently performed a modest service for Anthony Jenkins, the esteemed illustrator, cartoonist, and occasional writer who frolicked, gambolled, and capered at Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, for nearly 40 years.