Bill Poole’s Wonderful Life

MORE THAN ANYONE I’ve known, Bill Poole lived his life exactly as he wanted. It was as if he’d stepped out of You Can’t Take It With You, the Moss Hart and Irving Kaufman play, and Frank Capra movie. He…

Martin’s Room

JUNE 2000. Martin Cohnstaedt lies in a bed at West Park, a continuing care hospital in Toronto, surrounded by photographs and other memorabilia. He holds my right hand in a firm grip, his blue eyes alive as I talk about…

Tim Buck, Too

EACH YEAR I show the students in my Canadian film class Michel Brault’s remarkable 1974 film, Les ordres, a film all too few Canadians have seen. Les ordres dramatizes what it was like to be one of the 450 political…

The Struggle for Equity at OCA

“IT HAS DICK to do with art,” muttered an angry male faculty colleague as we left a tense meeting of Toronto’s Ontario College of Art Faculty Association on October 31, 1989. The subject of the meeting had been the employment-equity…

Watching Big Brother

In Jolts (1985), now out of print, I speculated on the implications of living in an increasingly high JPM world. … LITTLE IS KNOWN for certain about the physiology of watching television — exactly what the brain does to and…