“The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste.” – Joe Orton
The playwright Joe Orton said these words during an interview published in 1967, when he was both the toast of the London theatre world and a scandalous new player in the arts.
His plays — like Loot and Entertaining Mr. Sloane — were quick-witted and fired-up, and are still performed to this day.
The interview happened in Orton’s apartment, just a few months before he was murdered in it.
When I read last week that the executive of the students’ union at Memorial University wants to eliminate the campus radio station, I was taken straight back to the 1980s, when youthful politicians around Canada seemed to regularly flex their muscles in almost always failed attempts to muzzle student media.
MUNSU’s issue doesn’t seem to be with what CHMR says or broadcasts. The issue is money.
But the chilling effect is the same, and the circumstances here — the MUNSU executive made a unanimous recommendation after a highly questionable consultation process, just weeks before their jobs expire — feel familiar, too.
“One of the things we learn in movies directed by men is what the ‘fantasy woman’ is. What we learn in movies directed by women is what real women are about. I don’t think that men see things wrong and women right, just that we do see things differently.” — Jane Campion
The first Jane Campion film I saw was Angel at My Table, about the writer Janet Frame. Not long after that, Campion made The Piano, which was an international sensation. Campion won an Oscar for that — although for writing it, not for directing it.
Campion would have made history if she had won for directing that year, as no woman up to that point had won that Oscar. History would need to wait another 15 years, when Kathryn Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker.
Campion did eventually win an Oscar for directing: for The Power of the Dog, four years ago. She became the third woman to win for director; Chloé Zhao won earlier for Nomadland.
“I always find there’s a kind of serendipity to research. I’m a generalist, so one of the things that compels me to a story is addressing my own ignorance.” — David Grann
I came across this quote in an interview with the writer David Grann, specifically about his wonderful 2023 book The Wager. The full answer gets into how he worked the archives, looking for details on a broad subject (naval history) he at first did not know much about.
One of the biggest stories in the U.K. this weekend is the death of Jenni Murray, who hosted the program Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 for more than three decades. Murray, 75, died March 12, her family said, but news of her death was only made public on Friday.
For Canadians to appreciate Murray’s role in British media and culture, her interviewing style was reminiscent to me of the late Barbara Frum: firm and tenacious, but also warm. Her presence on BBC Radio 4 — the great analogue on the Beeb to our CBC Radio here, with a format heavy on talk and news (and some comedy in there, too) — defined the public broadcaster’s morning service.
As this obituary put it, “Murray, who has died at the age of 75, could tear a strip off a politician, talk about hydrangeas, then campaign against domestic abuse, all within a few minutes.”
While you sleep, what’s in easy reach? It likely includes a lamp, something to read, your phone charger or maybe a glass of water.
When RCMP searched a house in St. John’s recently, they found a fully loaded assault rifle. It was tucked in between a headboard and a nightstand that otherwise looked normal.
In a closet, they found a tactical shotgun — also fully loaded.
These were some details in reporting this week by Ariana Kelland, my former colleague at the CBC newsroom in St. John’s. Kelland’s focus was on gun crime, and what police have been discovering when they search properties.
“When we execute a search warrant, we almost always find firearms,” said Insp. Dave Emberly.
“And it’s not a hunting rifle. It’s usually a pistol or an assault rifle or a tactical shotgun. It’s commonplace now.”
“That’s what books are, they’re containers for memory. They’re containers for the stories of the past. It’s an artifact that allows you to communicate with the past… I would imagine most writers have this sense of the book as being a kind of conduit between the past and the present, because of course, as I’m writing the book, I’m realizing that I’m talking to people who exist in the future, who might not even be alive yet.” — Ruth Ozeki
The author Ruth Ozeki turned 70 earlier this month. This thoughtful commentary about books, writers, readers and time comes from a 2021 interview.
As rock managers went, Ian Faith always looked for the best way to frame a situation … and to take advantage of a poorly worded question, too.
Ian Faith, of course, never existed. Played by Tony Hendra, the British expat who upended comedy in America with the National Lampoon and many other projects, Ian Faith was the manager of the fictional, hilarious metal band Spinal Tap.
This is one of my favourite scenes from 1984’s This is Spinal Tap, when supposed documentary maker Marty Di Bergi (actual director Rob Reiner) quizzes Faith about the self-evident facts of dwindling attendance.
The scene features a common interviewing mistake and Faith’s answer (I’d like to believe that, in keeping with much of the film, Hendra and Reiner improvised it all) is a familiar path that subjects will take to get out of a sticky spot.
“Discovering witnesses is just as important as catching criminals.” — Simon Wiesenthal
When he died in 2005 at the age of 96, Simon Wiesenthal was the world’s most famous Nazi hunter. A Holocaust survivor liberated from one of the death camps in 1945, Wiesenthal spent decades tracking down not Nazis, and to do that, he spoke with countless people to piece together stories that Nazis and their supporters wanted to bury.
About five years after his death, a biographer who had access to hundreds of thousands of his records published a book that found Wiesenthal was not quite a one-man army for justice, but had in fact quietly had the support through payroll of Mossad, Israel’s secret service. Tom Segev’s book Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends added detail to an effort that, regardless of who paid the bills, had a considerable impact for years after the Holocaust.
We went to see Man of the Year, the first-ever musical from the theatre company Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, on Wednesday evening.
Dom has been playing in a band for at least 30 years, but still dresses — and drinks, sleeps in and stumbles through life — like his 20-year-old self. He’s still wearing Doc Martens and a plaid shirt over an old tee, but his hair is grey.
His life is more than just a mess. His best friend is struggling to quit the band, if not the friendship, his upstairs neighbour is pregnant by him and can’t seem to get him to hear it, and his estranged daughter has been in therapy for more than a decade.
We also learn he’s a widower. I won’t say much more about the plot, so audiences can discover it for themselves.
Binding the whole show together are songs by Sean Panting, who’s still going strong in the St. John’s music scene. Not quite a jukebox musical — think Mamma Mia or Jersey Boys — Man of the Year weaves songs from Panting’s career to push the story.
“It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.” — A.S. Byatt
Antonia Susan Byatt is best known by her initials. Her books — especially the bestselling 1990 novel Possession, which everyone for a while seemed to have on their coffee table — were highly acclaimed.
The older sister of fellow English novelist Margaret Drabble, she became Dame A.S. Byatt in 1999. She died in 2023.
“One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” — T.S. Eliot
The British poet and writer T.S. Eliot is often credited with the quip “good poets imitate, great poets steal,” which also been attributed falsely — with variations, like substituting “artists” or “writers” as the noun — to Pablo Picasso, Calvin Trillin, Steve Jobs and others.
Eliot wrote many words and phrases that have profoundly influenced the culture (and many others — more on that shortly.)
A supermarket in suburban Toronto is one of the latest companies to pay a penalty for passing something off as Canadian that actually came from another country.
Hawk-eyed shoppers have been scrutinizing food labels with much more intensity since relations between the United States and Canada soured last year. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and relentless jibes about the 51st state, etc., have had a retail impact from coast to coast to coast, and it’s fair to think elbows are up with shoppers pushing their carts around the supermarket floor.
But at a Fortinos supermarket in Etobicoke — it’s around the corner from the Woodbine race track and a short drive from Pearson International Airport — the product that got nailed was not American. It was French.
The $10,000 penalty was one of a series of fines announced Thursday in a statement from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Fortinos is a premium brand that Loblaw operates in southern Ontario.
“Saying that men talk about baseball in order to avoid talking about their feelings is the same as saying that women talk about their feelings in order to avoid talking about baseball.” — Deborah Tannen
I’m sure many academics have a dream, however briefly, of breaking through, as it were: popular acclaim for their work, media interviews, speaking tours, acclaim from far beyond their peers.
Deborah Tannen, a linguist who has dozens of academic publishing credits to her name, is better known as an author. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation was not just a best-seller but a full-fledged phenomenon: the book, first published in 1990, was at the No. 1 position for non-fiction on the New York Times best-seller charts for eight straight months.
The book produced this quote, which gets at one of her points: men often talk about information (like baseball scores) as a way of connecting through common interests, just as women find their own social channels and ways of speaking.
Tannen is now 80 and evidently still active. Just this month, she was interviewed by the New York Times about how the word “tranche” has been used so much in the wake of the widening Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
