“Imagination is the highest kite that can fly.” — Lauren Bacall
Lauren Bacall wrote these words for her memoir, which was published first as By Myself in 1978, and then revised and published in 2005 as By Myself and Then Some. The original version won a National Book Award, which speaks to how it resonated on publication.
Bacall certainly had an incredible life. The former Betty Joan Perske reinvented herself with a new name (she added an L to her mother’s surname) and an attitude that continued through the rest of her life.
She was was not yet 20 when Howard Hawks cast her with costar Humphrey Bogart, who became her husband and best-known costar over several films. Decades before Brangelina, etc., there was Bogey & Bacall. “He gave me a life, and changed my life,” she said decades later, when she accepted an honorary Oscar.
“Canada is a collection of 10 provinces with strong governments loosely connected by fear.” — Dave Broadfoot
As a good Canadian kid in the Seventies, I grew up on Dave Broadfoot (not to mention Sgt. Renfrew and Big Bobby Clobber) and the gentle poking political humour of the Royal Canadian Air Farce.
I would of course encounter and enjoy a much more caustic style of humour later (hey, CODCO!). All the same, I think Broadfoot was of the generation that taught us that holding politicians and leaders accountable was part of their job, and why not do it with a punchline, too?
About a dozen years ago, I went out one evening to buy a simple counter-top radio — and I wound up picking up a lesson in changing consumer tastes.
The anecdote has been on my mind lately for a few reasons, including some reading that car manufacturers want to phase out AM radios from their consoles. More on all that in a moment.
Back to the anecdote. I wanted something similar and affordable for the kitchen counter: better than a clock radio, but not nearly as expensive as the higher-end models like Tivoli. I grew up in a house with radios all over, all the better to tune in a program in any corner (and the yard), and I did not think this would be a big ask.
Well, now. Had things ever changed in the marketplace.
“Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.” — Groucho Marx
A pop culture fixture long before my time, Groucho Marx was still a presence when I was growing up. You Bet Your Life went off the air in 1961, several years before I was born, but I guess it aired in reruns; I remember the “say the secret word” line and the duck dropping from above.
All these years later, you can find novelty gag items featuring plastic glasses and an oversized Groucho mustache. How’s that for staying power?
Goodness, did the boys in Keane actually look like boys when we glance back more than two decades to their breakthrough hit, Somewhere Only We Know. It seemed to be everywhere in 2004.
The trio in the video below are now in their late 40s (and the original trio is now a quartet), but when writing the song, they were navigating not just the pathway they knew “like the back of my hand,” but life itself.
Or adulting, to use a word that became more popular in the years since.
“Recreation means to ‘recreate’ — it’s spiritual. Think about the actual word. It’s fascinating what a beautiful word it is when you look it up in the dictionary.” — Billie Jean King
One of the greatest athletes of the 20th century, Billie Jean King remains a force to this day. The quote above comes from an interview with an ESPN columnist published in 2010.
King is right. The roots of the word “recreation” go back to Latin, and the verb recreare, which means to create again. The word travelled through the centuries into other languages, evolving in modern English to connote having fun, or in the Oxford Languages sense, “activity done for enjoyment when one is not working.”
“A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.” — P.J. O’Rourke
Swimming first with the counterculture, P.J. O’Rourke drifted to the political right as a pundit, all the while retaining a sharp wit and no fear of kicking up some rhetorical dust.
One of his famous targets was, oddly, hats. Apart from the above (it’s from his 1983 book Modern Manners), he also thought that wearing a hat “implies that you are bald if you are a man and that your hair is dirty if you are a woman.”
Ouch.
He may have a point; I’m quite bald on the top, and I do like the variety of hats I’ve picked up over the years.
“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.
