This Magazine articles from September 1998

This Magazine archives from September 1998

Seat of power.
September 1, 1998... THREE MONTHS AFTER HE FLEW HIS PLANE over the Supreme Court to protest hearings on Quebec's secession, 24-year-old Bloc Quebecois MP Stephan Tremblay pushed the envelope even further. On April 20, as his colleagues registered shock and...

Zen and the art of fund-raising.
September 1, 1998... "Glamour," a style editor with an Anna Wintour haircut tells me, "is the new global movement." We've just eaten in a dining room decorated like an African savanna, watched fashion victims bid on expensive auction objets (a set of Louis...

No kids on the block.
September 1, 1998... A guarded gate prevents "undesirables" from entering the new suburb under construction in La Molina, an upscale neighbourhood in Lima, Peru's capital city. But somehow, around a blind corner, at the end of a paved road where workers are putting...

Burger school dropout.
September 1, 1998... ONE OF MY FIRST JOBS WAS DOWN the street from my high-school at the local McDonald's. After class, I'd hurry off to assume the turd brown/mustard yellow pullover polyester top of the "Lot and Lobby Representative"--meaning I would slop up the...

Courting the free market.
September 1, 1998... Pity Canada's right wing. With deficit hysteria fully entrenched, they've been bereft for some time, searching for a new bogeyman. Now, it seems, they've found one. But this time it isn't welfare moms, tax-and-spend NDPers or similar deadbeats....

Naked ambition.
September 1, 1998... For a country as cold as our own, a tradition of public nudity comes as somewhat of a surprise. Yet such a tradition does exist. For instance, what student of Canadian history can forget The Sons of Freedom, a sect of the Russian immigrant...

Bombs away: if you thought the threat of nuclear destruction ended with the Cold War, there's some swampland in Florida we'd like to show you.
September 1, 1998... There are some things most of us would sooner not think about. Like a nuclear holocaust. It makes sense in a way, since there's a limit to the amount of anxiety most people can cope with on a non-stop basis. (Such as: you are, at each and every...

Close quarters: the new battle lines around social housing are being drawn in Vancouver's neglected Downtown Eastside.
September 1, 1998... The hallways are choked with the rancid smell of piss and vomit. Michael Henry leads me up a garbage-strewn staircase to his room in the Dodson Hotel. Amid the filth and broken glass is a scattering of empty syringe wrappers and orange plastic...

Culture issue.
September 1, 1998... NOBODY SPEAKS MARX ANY MORE. I mean, the only people putting out manifestos these days are management gurus, and you don't see them writing stuff like, "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned." And you wouldn't catch any...

Culture Inc. (business and art).
September 1, 1998... When we asked five artists to describe how business and consumption culture have invaded their lives and their work, we didn't really know what to expect. Artists are, of course, mavericks. But that's the thing: we didn't want to hear the same...

Never mind the Manifesto: when a slick new 150th anniversary edition of The communist Manifesto came out last winter.
September 1, 1998... LIKE so many trend frenzies before it, it appears to have started with that great generalizer of modern culture, New York magazine. COMMIE CHIC was the headline on a February story about a sleek new edition of The Communist Manifesto....

U of You name it: the University of Toronto is selling its classrooms, its programs, even its washrooms, to the highest bidder.
September 1, 1998... "This is a good news day," a beaming University of Toronto president Robert Prichard tells me as he looks out into a sea of high-schoolers touring the spacious downtown campus. As news editor of The Varsity, the university's student...

Territory: my husband's idea of bliss was to be able to go back to when we first met.
September 1, 1998... We weren't kids, not by then; we were into our late 20s. I was a veterinary assistant and Luke was a clerk at A+B Sound. Then I decided to go into medical school, a six-year commitment, and Luke, later when I was into my residency and had some...

Poem in six vignettes.
September 1, 1998... chronicles OF emilia AND THE letter g I when a woman called emilia desdemona angelique g sassafrass hangs her wide briefs out on the clothesline to dry (blackbirds & weathervanes, a sky) stiff upper lips wearing young men pause, cease...

Stealing beauty: Indian chic is all the rage.
September 1, 1998... Indian chic is all the rage. Madonna, Demi and Gwen Stefani are all sporting bindis. You can get mehndi done on any urban street corner. And Eastern religions have never been so hot. Is this the evolution of multiculaturalism? THERE IS a...

Not a toy story: a conversation with Sally McKay.
September 1, 1998... MOCK TOYS, an extensive collection of Fisher-Price phones, and somber pamphlets telling the tale of estranged Sesame Street characters are all ways of questioning the values of culture in the work of artist-activist Sally McKay. McKay wants us...

(DuoDuo).
September 1, 1998... Even if you've never read his delicately crafted poetry, DUODUO's personal history might tip you off to his well-developed sense of timing. Leaving his home in China for a European tour on the very day of the Tiananmen Square massacre, DuoDuo...

(Vancouver Cooperative Radio).
September 1, 1998... Since its beginnings as a cranky, old-school leftist, milk-crate radio station in 1975. VANCOUVER CO-OPERATIVE RADIO has continued to give B.C. listeners a lively, intelligent choice in an increasingly dumbed down and automated, news-lite...

Brandspankin': Michael O'Conell.
September 1, 1998... I'm not supposed to like Guelph, Ontario, homeboy MICHAEL O'CONNELL's debut CD Brandspankin'. I'm supposed to dislike music by sensitive, well-travelled young men. And Brandspankin' is kind enough to be cruel--it has a lot of earnest guitar...

Mondragon.
September 1, 1998... When Winnipeg's last two independent, social-justice bookstores closed their all-welcoming doors in 1993, a group of local literati and bean-sprout defenders banded together to form MONDRAGON--a combination bookstore and vegetarian food depot....

Knock it off (MMT).
September 1, 1998... It's a dubious claim to fame but this summer Canada regained its membership among an elite group of countries, including Bulgaria and Argentina. In what amounts to capitulation over Canada's national sovereignty, its environment and the health...