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BIG LESSONS FROM SMALL PLACES.

For live music lovers, Hugh’s Room was a tiny perfect venue on Roncesvalles with a name as big as the El Mocambo and even the Cobra Lounge in Chicago and the Blue Note in Greenwich Village.

It opened in 2001 and for the next 16 years featured hundreds of amazing artists. But it never made a dime and closed in 2017.

Nonetheless, its name lived on as Toronto’s serious listening room, and what happened next is as rare as it is filled with lessons for every arts group, big and small. Especially these days when all the arts are under threat from fickle funders, changing tastes, technologies, audiences, and soon, politics.

Read on…

February 15, 2025 February 14, 2025

SANTA CLAUS OR SANITY CLAUSE?

Last week in England, a vicar told a group of Grade 6 pupils that Santa Claus isn’t real.

He then told them their parents ate the biscuits the kids left out for Father Christmas. Many of them burst into tears and their parents complained that the Reverend Dr Paul Chamberlain had ruined their families’ Christmas.

The Anglican Diocese of Portsmouth then apologized on Chamberlain’s behalf, saying: “Paul has accepted that this was an error of judgement, and he should not have done so. He apologized unreservedly to the school, to the parents and to the children, and the headteacher immediately wrote to all parents to explain this.”

Read on…

December 21, 2024 February 7, 2025

WILL THE DAY COME WHEN ALCOHOL IS TREATED LIKE TOBACCO?

The fact that this question is even askable, let alone answerable, speaks to how drinking is fading, and what role your own diminished drinking might play in that.

I ask because once again, a respected medical authority has concluded that no amount of alcohol is safe to drink, and because we’re plunk in the middle of drinking season. These “none is too many” reports are growing each year, and the number of Canadians who drink alcohol is falling.

We were all brought up knowing that tobacco will kill you if you consume it over time, but drinking will kill you only if you consume too much of it. But what if the second half of that last sentence is false?

Read on…

December 14, 2024 January 31, 2025

STAY IN SCHOOL.

It’s not been a month since Americans voted in surprising, even shocking ways to put Donald Trump back in office. The time-honoured categories of age, race, gender and wealth weren’t the compass points everyone hoped or feared. Millions of women voted for Trump, as did young immigrants. Many Blacks rejected the Black candidate.

But what caused so many Americans to vote against their own tribes and seeming self-interest?

David Brooks has named America’s great new division, the fault line so few people saw, The Diploma Divide.

Read on…

November 30, 2024 January 11, 2025

Zero Tolerance for Cancel Culture.

On October 5, 2017, The New York Times published shocking allegations about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation. Four months later I hosted a RamsayTalk with the co-author of that piece, Jodi Kantor. She noted that the pendulum had already swung from silence to zero tolerance.

She told a story of a notional office party where the CFO drank too much and made an unwelcome advance to a female colleague. She complained to HR. He was immediately fired, couldn’t get a job, lost his accountant’s license and left his family and life in ruins.

Some would say he deserved all that and more.

Jodi Kantor said, before #MeToo became a movement, and long before she co-wrote She Said, and won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the Weinstein story: “Likely all the woman really wanted was an apology.”

Read on…

August 17, 2024 October 18, 2024

“More immigrants, more restaurants”

The New York Times’ food critic Sam Sifton blurted that out at a Toronto symposium back in 2018 when he chaired a panel with three Syrian refugees, all of whom were in the food business.

Sam was comparing Canada’s role in immigration to America’s where, in those mid-Trump years, “immigrant” was a loaded word, as it is now in the run-up to what could be the Trump II era. Back then, Canada took in as many refugees as America, a country with ten times the number of people. So Sam was happy to tout immigrants as a universal solvent here in Canada instead of the universal problem they seemed to be elsewhere back then – and are viewed as today.

But if a week is an infinity in politics, four years is…an infinity to the power of infinity.

Today, a record 55% of Americans view large numbers of immigrants entering the US illegally as a critical threat to the US’s vital interests. In Canada, the issue isn’t illegal immigrants; it’s immigrants, period.

June 29, 2024 July 26, 2024

Not Novelty Seeking

I was on a flight home from Frankfurt last week playing with one of the things Air Canada got right: its storehouse of movies you can watch for 8 solid hours. But rather than try to find a new first-run film I’d never seen, which all looked like lighter-than-air objects, fluffy and predictable, I did the opposite.

I went on the hunt for my favourite old movies, like Bonnie & Clyde and Catch Me If You Can and Dog Day Afternoon and Field of Dreams, Gladiator, and A Few Good Men. I didn’t want to see these faves in their entirety; I just wanted to see my favourite parts, the scenes whose action and dialogue will forever be imprinted in my brain.

Like when Bonnie and Clyde die in a hail of bullets.

When FBI agent Tom Hanks catches up to fake-pilot Leonardo di Caprio and says: “Nobody’s chasing you.”

When bank robber Al Pacino says: “Kiss me….When I’m being fucked, I like to get kissed.”

When dreamer Kevin Costner hears: “If you build it, they will come.”

When gladiator Russell Crowe says: “My name is Maximus.”

And of course when Marine Colonel Jack Nicholson says to Tom Cruise: “You can’t handle the truth.”

I enjoyed my tour of great scenes from memorable movies enormously.

Rummaging around in these old scenes, and who I was when I first watched them, was new for me. It was much much more fun than trying to focus on the thin gruel of bot-like dialogue and stick-man actions in so many new films.

June 22, 2024 July 26, 2024

Last to survive

“Last to Die” is a form of life insurance, like its cousin “First to Die”.

But with people dying much later in life (if you’re a baby girl born this morning in Toronto, the chances of you living to be 100 are 1 in 3), I’d like to expand the idea of “Last to Die” beyond life insurance into a cash award called “Last to Survive.”

It can be for any group of people bound together not by blood, but by camaraderie and interest, and “it” can be a joint savings account, mutual fund, or other recognized financial vehicle: that is, anything you can contribute to over time.

Many of life’s most tight-knit groups form when we’re young. High school and university friends. Sports team. Military buddies. Sorority sisters. Political interns. Biker gangs. String quartets. Sous Chefs. Knitting groups. Book clubs. Jewel thieves. Big brass bands.

All it takes is a 50th reunion to remind you just how enduring those bonds are and how regret tinges our memories for not having made them stronger before now. And now, hell, everyone’s getting sick and dying. Okay, not everyone. But when you’re 74 like me, it feels that way, especially for our friends whose old age is not their golden years but their tin cup ones.

Some of us boast morbidly that our retirement plan is Lotto 649. But the odds of any of us actually winning that jackpot are 1 in 14 million. The entire population of Ontario is around that. So, no, you won’t win.

Read on…

May 25, 2024 July 3, 2024

Air Apparent

Back in 2019 when newspapers were made of paper, I would take part in an annual ritual of disbelief: I’d turn the page of The Globe and Mail and there would be a full-page ad for Air Canada congratulating itself for being voted the Best Airline in North America.

I would quickly check to see if it was April 1st. Then I would read the small print to find out who gave them the award for four consecutive years from 2019 to 2022.

It’s a magazine called Global Traveler for “U.S.-based frequent, affluent travellers”. It claims the average Global Traveler reader has a net worth of $2.8 million. Yes, Air Canada’s business class is….respectable. But the Best in all Classes in North America? Puleeeeze.

True, this was before Air Canada reduced its routes; slashed the value of Aeroplan Miles; made spontaneously cancelling flights a sunny-day activity; amped fares; admitted its Montreal-based CEO, Michael Rousseau, can’t speak French; saw customer complaints to Ottawa rise from 18,000 in 2020 to 30,000 in 2022, then 57,000 last year; fought to avoid offering refunds if a flight failed to take off; and claimed its own chatbot was “a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions;” before all this, Canadians had a love-hate relationship with our national airline.

Read on…

May 4, 2024 June 28, 2024

Gold for Gould.

The philanthropist Arthur Labatt noted that Canada has so few institutions that can stand up straight on a global podium, we need to do everything we can to ensure they survive.

Last week’s budget offered one of those institutions that chance. Ottawa gave The Glenn Gould Foundation $12 million.

Even though the Toronto concert pianist Glenn Gould died 42 years ago at the age of 50, his name shines brightly the world over – not in spite of his many quirks and eccentricities, but likely because of them. He loved recordings and hated live audiences (and told them so); he wore mittens in hot recording studios; and he hummed loudly while he played. But his genius at interpreting composers like Bach; his unyielding sense of what’s musically right (which caused even the mighty Leonard Bernstein to back down); and his album cover notes which codified his views on the future of music – make him 92 years after his birth a very big planet indeed.

Indeed, in the galaxy of music, Gould remains a god. When the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev performed in Toronto, he would go to Gould’s gravesite in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery to pay his respects.

Read on…

April 27, 2024 June 21, 2024

Women, enter stage left.

I hosted a RamsayTalk last week about AI.

Nothing new there. The world is awash in AI pundits, AI books, and AI doom and rapture.

What was new is that the speaker and author of AI Needs You, a big important book about AI, is a woman. Indeed, Verity Harding is the woman in the arena when it comes to tech’s latest save-the-world-end-the-world invention.

I asked her a couple of months ago who she would like to interview her from the stage, and instantly she said: Diana Fox Carney.

So there were 325 of us in the Bader Theatre last Wednesday watching two deeply expert and authoritative women discuss the prospects of an industry almost totally dominated by men.

Read on…

April 20, 2024 June 14, 2024

Am I a whiner to mourn the death of my diner?

The news that Flo’s Diner in Toronto had closed hit me hard. But why? It was just a diner.

True, I’ve eaten there since it opened on Bellair in 1991, and long after it moved to 70 Yorkville. I was a regular and wore my old-guy-corner-booth-bacon-and-eggs persona like a medal. Not for me The Four Seasons or Park Hyatt, where a piddly bowl of porridge and coffee will now set you back $40.

I’ve always been a diner guy. Years ago, Brothers on Yonge just below Charles was my eatery of choice. It was run by two brothers who kept baseball bats behind the counter to go after anyone who forgot to pay. No one forgot to pay. But Brothers closed long ago, and the idea of opening a diner today seems as viable as the idea of buying a stick-shift car or a Hungarian restaurant on Bloor St.

Flo’s co-owner Pierre Hamel said it was a dispute with their landlord that led to its closing and laying off 15 staff. Hamel said: “We came out of COVID really, really strong, and we would like to stay as long as we can.”

Tags: AI

BIG LESSONS FROM SMALL PLACES.

SANTA CLAUS OR SANITY CLAUSE?

WILL THE DAY COME WHEN ALCOHOL IS TREATED LIKE TOBACCO?

STAY IN SCHOOL.

Zero Tolerance for Cancel Culture.

“More immigrants, more restaurants”

Not Novelty Seeking

Last to survive

Air Apparent

Gold for Gould.

Women, enter stage left.

Am I a whiner to mourn the death of my diner?

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