Rod McQueen's Blog, page 58

The titleist

The title of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s memoir, Total Recall, is perfect. It reminds us of his films and promises truth. Even such awful stories like how bad he feels again and again about cheating on his wife with the housekeeper. Still, a good memory about terrible events may be better than Bob Dylan who couldn’t remember anything about the 1960s when he sat down to write his life story which should have been called Total Blank.

Anyway, all this got me to thinking about titles for memoirs yet to be written. Titles sell books, so here’s a few that may or may not be in the offing. In politics, we could expect Bland Works by Bill Davis. The Huddle and Other Horrors by Rob Ford. Stephen Harper should get a start while still in office on his autobiography with the working title, Sometimes in Error, But Never In Doubt. Dalton McGuinty could pen My Time at the Top: How Long Was It Anyway? From Pauline Marois, Mon Pays, C’est Hier. And ready ahead of the Liberal leadership convention, Justin Trudeau’s tome, The Little Prince.

Business leaders are hot these days, so an autobiography by Frank Stronach might do well in both Canada and Austria if it’s called The Last Dictator. Look for Bank on Me by Mark Carney, and Bread Crumbs by Galen Weston, as well as Felons and Filigree: The Pulchritudinous Architecture of American Penitentiaries, by Conrad Black.

Best sellers on the sports beat could include No Consequences by John Farrell, No Contest by Gary Bettman, and Halfspeed is Muy Bueno for Me, by Yunel Escobar.

Lady and gentlemen, start typing.

The Power of Why

Amanda Lang’s book launch last evening was a great success. Held in the CBC’s Barbara Frum Atrium on Front Street, it attracted a high-profile crowd of 150. There were politicians such as Paul Martin Jr. and Frank McKenna, authors Allan Fotheringham and Michael Bryant, and CBC colleagues News Editor-in-Chief Jennifer McGuire and Kevin O’Leary, Lang’s partner on The Lang & O’Leary Exchange. In addition, there were numerous friends and family members including her mother Adrian, step-father Donald Macdonald, and various siblings and offspring.

The book, The Power of Why (HarperCollins) is about innovation, how it happens, and how we can nurture more of it. I can recommend this book as readable and authoritative in the style of Malcolm Gladwell. There is a well-explained thesis supported by interviews and studies that make for a compelling argument. The title points to a major driver of innovation, curiosity. Kids have it naturally and we can encourage them to keep asking why, or we can educate that wonderment out of them. Too often, the latter happens.

Among the real life examples from Lang’s research is an excellent case study how Canadian Tire set out to reinvent itself. A few CEOs ago, Canadian Tire decided to go after female shoppers, arguing that they made the buying decisons and too few of them shopped at Canadian Tire. Trouble was, the new merchandising methods attracted too few women and drove away the men. The study wasn’t just about getting men back in the store, it was about Who Are Men and What Do They Want. As an author in 2001 of a book about Canadian Tire and its controlling shareholder, Martha Billes (Can’t Buy Me Love), I still follow the company closely but had been unaware of the lengths the company went to with this work and the conclusions they reached.

But this is not just a business book, it’s a book for everyone interested in helping people fulfil themselves or find a new way of thinking. Lang points to Quest University in Squamish, British Columbia, as a template for the future of education. There, the point of classes is not content, but learning how to ask questions. Students take one subject at a time so they can focus rather than spread themselves too thinly over a busy curriculum.

But the rest of us can change our ways, too. The good news is that we’re not thinking like little kids, despite how well they ask questions. Instead, as adults we’re able to think about how we think. “Self-awareness is the adult trait that elevates curiosity to a new place, where it’s not just fun but powerful because it fuels not only engagement and interest, but also actual, implementable innovation,” writes Lang.

This an important book that, unlike most similar works these days, actually provides a workable prescription. That’s the real power of why.

Shine on Harvest Moon

Nuit Blanche overnight was Toronto at its best: mild temperatures, the Harvest Moon shining down, and strangers talking to each other about the 150 projects by 500 artists.

We started at lululemon in Yorkville where a DJ spun music for passersby who danced and admired an abstract work about the natural world by local artist Samuel Crowther. Next was Jeng Yi, a Japanese percussion group, at the Church of the Redeemer. The music was based on twelve animals, such as the rabbit, boar, and ox, represented on banners. In order to make the “playing of the animals” more difficult, they changed the order of the banners just before the performance began. That way, no one could presume they were taking the easy road and following some prearranged pattern.

On the sidewalk outside the church was one of those serendipitous moments that always adds a frisson to Nuit Blanche. Ten women wearing eye masks stood in a circle and sang an a cappella version of (maybe) some Renaissance madrigal. We then spent less than three minutes peering into the new Louis Vuitton store next door, admiring the designs and architecture. During that brief time, the choral group evaporated. No idea who they were, what they sang, or where they went.

The Gardiner Museum featured The Robotic Chair by Max Dean. The otherwise normal-looking wooden chair collapses with a crashing noise, its constituent parts spread everywhere. Then, slowly and inexplicably, it rebuilds itself and stands erect again. Across the street at the Royal Ontario Museum were 32 pen and ink drawings by German artist Jorinde Voight. Her swooping lines represented in two dimensions Beethoven’s 32 sonatas played by Stewart Goodyear in a single day and recorded at Luminato.

Pianos dominated the exhibits at Hart House where a woman banged on the wire innards and hammered the keys of a grand piano. While my description may not sound appealing, after a few minutes, there was a certain musicality. Outside in the courtyard was Gordon Monahan’s A Piano Talking to Itself. In this sound art installation six piano wires are strung tightly from a point about seventy feet away and run through the sound board of an old upright piano. Somehow sounds travel down the wire and can be heard emanating from the piano as if it were a speaker. As Sam Goldwyn used to say, “I’ve now told you more than I know.”

The final event, before I flagged out, was in the bar area of Koerner Hall in The Royal Conservatory of Music. We’d seen the shadows of people and small cutouts on the covered windows as we ambled along Philosopher’s Walk. This time the explanation was simpler. Construction paper was available so anyone could create art by tearing the paper or cutting it with scissors and then pinning up the results. We were all artists. It was a fitting ending to a fine night.

Pshaw Festival

Over the weekend we attended the misnamed Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Of this year’s eleven productions, only two are by George Bernard Shaw: The Millionairess and Misalliance. As I recall, some years back, the Festival decided to expand beyond Shavian wit to include any play written during his lifetime, a vast period encompassing almost a century, from 1856 to 1950. I guess that was an understandable move. You can only sit through all four acts of Man and Superman once in your life. Still, Shaw did write more than 60 plays. You’d think that would be sufficient to fill a few summer schedules. Stratford has followed a similar strategy to move away from its original oeuvre: of this year’s fourteen productions only three were penned by William Shakespeare.

But the Shaw Festival seems to have abandoned even that broad canvas of Shaw and his contemporaries. One of the plays we saw, Ragtime, was based on a 1975 novel and first produced on stage in 1996. This version of Ragtime is a dud. The only two outstanding voices were Thom Allison as Coalhouse and Alana Hibbert as Sarah and she dies before the intermission. Apart from this saggy production, why put on such a sad musical? The only explanation must have been to pander to American tourists. But any thinking American would realize that the theme – racial relations haven’t improved much since the time in which the play was set a century ago – was a real downer. Give me the upbeat South Pacific or the rowdy Oklahoma anytime, each with many  a hummable tune.

By contrast, Come Back, Little Sheba was terrific. Corrine Koslo as Lola and Ric Reid as Doc Delaney perfectly portray the despair and despondency of an unhappy marriage. The supporting cast was excellent. William Inge was the first playwright to bring to the stage desperate elements of family life such as alcoholism and a shotgun wedding. While the shock value is far less today than it was when first produced, the themes are eternal. And, in the end, there is redemption. Looking ahead to the 2013 season, for what its worth, here’s my advice: always send the audience home with a laugh or at least some hope that life’s worth living.

Plus ca change

During my life so far, media coverage of business has grown faster than everything else in the world. When I was named business editor of Maclean’s in 1978, stories about stock markets, real estate and the economy ran only in the financial press. Some CEOs were so naive they were startled to be quoted in my first book, The Moneyspinners, published in 1983, even though I had told them exactly what I was doing, came to their office, turned on my tape recorder, and asked questions.

Today, money is the new porn. Entire television networks are devoted to market news with streaming ticker quotes formerly available only to traders. Some of the most popular TV shows, Dragons’ Den on CBC and Shark Tank on ABC, focus on would-be entrepreneurs. Individual business journalists and investment advisors, like Maria “Money Honey” Bartiromo and Jim “Mad Money” Cramer, have public followings that rival Oprah Winfrey.

Even David Chilton has been drawn back to the fame flame. After he published The Wealthy Barber in 1989 and sold two million copies, he pretty much disappeared. When I interviewed him in the late 1990s he spent most of the interview telling me how he was all through doing interviews. I guess he got lonely. A sequel, The Wealthy Barber Returns, came out last year and this fall he has joined the other wiseacres on Dragons’ Den.

Don’t get me wrong. I was happy to ride the wave of growing interest in business. But what good has all this higher profile achieved? Precious little as far as I can see. One of the things I used to do as a business writer was attend the so-called “investment seminars” that people like Brian Costello and Garth Turner gave during RSP season. These evening events held in hotel meeting rooms across Canada attracted hundreds of people at a time. Some of the speakers were better than others, and all of them were just shills for salivating financial advisors who lined the walls looking for clients, but that’s not why I went. I went to listen to the questions from the audience in order to remind myself that most Canadians haven’t got a clue what to do with their money.

A recent story I read tells me that for all the profile that business news and information has achieved, far too many Canadians remain woefully uneducated about finance. The story was about a woman I met once years ago, now in her seventies, who was fleeced by a smooth talker. He promised her fantastic returns so she mortgaged her house, sold her stock portfolio, and handed over more than $600,000. He didn’t even go through the motions of investing; he just spent her money until it was all gone.

So bring on your brassy business gurus, nerdy research analysts, and hot-shot hedge fund managers. They might be making good money, but despite all the info flow, we in the business of explaining business haven’t done our jobs. The world remains pretty much the same. Agog and ready for the taking.

The last impresario

The new documentary by Barry Avrich about Garth Drabinsky purports to explain what drove the impresario to the point of committing fraud and going to jail. Show Stopper opens today at the Toronto International Film Festival, so I haven’t yet seen it, but I already know his motivation to succeed. Garth contracted polio as a child and was left with a severe limp. The best line I ever heard about Garth was, “He caught polio as a boy and it was your fault.”

I spent a lot of time with Garth over the years, particularly when I did a 5,000-word profile on him for Toronto Life. In addition to hours of interviews in his office for that piece I also travelled with him on his corporate jet for a two-day visit to Montreal. He was always open, honest, engaging, and hospitable. Everything was on the record except for a two-hour period when he said I could accompany him to an appointment if I agreed to keep it off the record. I agreed but I think enough years have passed that I can reveal he met with Guido Molinari, the renowned abstract painter, whose colourful canvases were so large they had to be hauled up from the floor below by a crane for proper viewing by a practiced eye looking to buy.

I admired Garth. He started with nothing, practiced entertainment law, and wrote a well-received textbook on film and the law when he was only twenty-seven. He was the first to use a prospectus to sell units of a film to investors so he could work with stars like Christopher Plummer and George C. Scott. With Nat Taylor he pioneered the cineplex, now found around the world. Then he moved on to Broadway musicals; his Kiss of the Spiderwoman won Tonys.

It always seemed to me that Garth needed bigger and bigger spectacles to distract everyone’s eyes away from his disability. He could sit among the audience, and revel in his creative glory, just don’t ask him to walk across the stage. More important, don’t let ‘em look behind the scenery. His company, Livent, was a complicated structure where revenue and costs were shuffled about like cards in a street game meant to fool the mark.

Garth was sentenced to seven years, later reduced on appeal in 2011 to five years. Whenever he’s paroled, I can tell you this, he’ll find someone to finance his next big idea and be back in business. And I for one will happily go see whatever extravaganza is combusting in his head right now.

Vive la difference

I was in a neighbourhood children’s clothing shop this week looking for a dress for my granddaughter. The only one I liked was so over the top that I thought it would make her look far older than she is. I said as much to the owner and within earshot of a female shopper. “Little girls grow up so quickly,” said the owner. “Not boys,” I said, “we stay stupid forever.” Both women laughed so hard I thought they were going to fall down. Finally, one of them managed to say, “You said it, not us.”

This incident occurred the day after Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention. You know, the one about her father and Barack’s grandmother, and how poor they were when she and the president were first married that there was a rusted hole in the car door through which the road was visible. I had a car like that in the first year of marriage, too. The hole was in the floor. I covered it with a wooden vegetable flat so that no one would fall out.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking about the difference between men and women. I have come up with what I think the difference is: Women know what matters. Relationships matter, families and friends matter, fellow employees sometimes matter, the clerk in the store who comments on your outfit can matter. It’s the connection that counts. Guys don’t care about that stuff. They want to get rich, drive fast, hit a golf ball 300 yards, and flirt with a tart across the room. Preferably all on the same afternoon.

I worry about women I don’t even know who are trying to get ahead in their careers. If there’s a newspaper ad with photos of the new partners at a law or accounting firm, I’ll count heads and see if the new female appointees number more than the usual 22 percent. One such ad in recent days was 30 percent female, the highest I’ve ever seen. My daughter tells me that of the dozen women in her high school graduating class twenty-five years ago who went into law, none of them is practicing today.

There may be all kinds of reasons why they left: the pressure for billable hours, too few promotions, babies. I have no idea whether they are happier or not. I hope so. Maybe the recent controversial piece in The Atlantic is right: Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.

All I know is this. I enjoy what I’m doing now. I have a book coming out his fall called Driven to Succeed, written with Susan M. Papp, about Frank Hasenfratz and the company he founded, Linamar. I am currently working with Donald Macdonald, the Trudeau era cabinet minister whose Royal Commission in the 1980s brought about free trade with the U.S., on his memoirs.

Moreover, I wouldn’t change a thing about my resume. I was lucky to have worked in politics, business and journalism. But I don’t miss the boring meetings, the bitchy co-workers, the office politics, the competition for promotions, or the time wasted on nonsense that was meaningless then, let alone as I look back. Relationships. That’s the secret to life. Women know that instinctively. If only they’d told us guys earlier. Except we wouldn’t have been listening anyway.

Damn the torpedos

The Newsroom, which just finished its first season on HBO, has been given a terrible drubbing by the critics. A typical tirade came from Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker. She dismissed the show as nothing more than “clever people … admiring one another.” She goes on to say, “They sing arias of facts. They aim to remake television news … their outrage is so inflamed it amounts to a form of moral eczema – only it makes the viewer itch.”

I’ve heard about getting diseases from door knobs or toilet seats, but this is the first time I learned you can catch something from TV. Whatever I’ve got, it’s good. I like The Newsroom. I awaited each of the ten episodes with itchy eyes. I sometimes replayed that week’s episode the next night to revisit scenes I relished or pick up on dialogue I’d missed because I was enjoying the previous line.

Aaron Sorkin, creator and writer of The Newsroom, is brilliant. Of course, I enjoyed The West Wing. But I’m not easy to please. Studio 60, another of his attempts, was a dud. The Newsroom, however, is equal to The West Wing when it comes to relevance, plotting and characters. I read one review that grumbled The Newsroom was trying to make itself look prescient by working with stories that already happened. I think that approach makes sense and offers a way for the cast to climb aboard developing stories such as BP’s Deep Horizon, the assassination of Osama bin Laden, or the Arab Spring in Cairo.

Another critic complained that Sorkin didn’t understand women. I wonder if that critic has ever worked in a newsroom. I have certainly met in various newsrooms women who are eerily similar to executive producer Mackenzie MacHale played by Emily Mortimer, the strung-out Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill), and the brainy Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn).

Most scenes are redolent of real life writ large such as when Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) goes to the New York Library to meet a man he only knows as Late For Dinner. Skinner mistakenly approaches the wrong man because he’s wearing a white carnation. When Skinner finally finds the right man, Late For Dinner says, “I never said anything about a white carnation.” No, Skinner, admits, it was just his idea of how such furtive encounters were set up in spy dramas. Late removes the battery from Skinner’s smartphone. “I’ll never be able to put that back together,” says Skinner.

Or when Neal Sampat tries to convince Sloan to let him be a troll and run amok on her blog, he says he will make up stories about how “she screwed her way to the top and she’s got a big ass.” Sloan slams him against the wall, and demands, “Is it?” “Of course not,” he says, and then adds, “A lot of men like women with big ….” She slams him against the wall again. “Do they really? Never mind.” But as she walks away, you can see her turn her head slightly to see how her ass looks in her reflection in the office glass. These are the kind of deft touches for which Sorkin is renowned.

The last time I praised an HBO series, Luck, it was cancelled days later. This time, I’ve waited until The Newsroom was renewed for another season rather than risk putting the kibosh on it. With an audience of two million per episode, I’m not alone. Critics! Who can explain them. They can’t even explain themselves.

The long good-bye

For the life of me I can’t figure out why all the fuss about the death of Jack Layton. A year ago, the entire country seemed to be riveted to the event. Citizens flocked to the Parliament Buildings where he lay in state and descended upon Toronto City Hall to make chalk drawings that glorified his memory. I couldn’t understand the outpourings at the time. After all, he appeared to be a happy political warrior who’d been elected city councillor and then leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition but he didn’t really achieve much of anything that was very lasting other than being the first NDP leader to hold that latter role.

Now, on the anniversary of his death, we’re going through the same keening process all over again. It’s like we’re on track for canonization. My late wife died of cancer, too, so I know what that illness and death must have meant for the family, but, really, a full-blown documentary with scenes from the hospital? And a first-person story by his widow Olivia about her northern canoe trip to find the meaning of life which seemed to be about the best food and wine to carry into the bush? I’m baffled.

I am well aware of the old saw: About the dead say nothing but good. I’m okay with that. But do those good words have to be so relentless?

Slowpoke service

Well, I spoke too soon about the great service from Bell. Not only do I not yet have my promised new modem and higher-speed service, my Internet download speed has dropped to 3 megabits per second even though I am paying for 12 Mbps. I guess my current situation is better than dial-up, but not much.

Turns out my neighbourhood is not wired for the higher speed of 15 Mbps I was promised. When I last talked to Bell on Monday, they said work was going on in the area and would be completed that day. They expected my speed would by Tuesday return to where it should be – and where it was before all this started – but of course, it hasn’t. Moreover, I didn’t see any Bell trucks during the time they were supposed to be here.

In response, I’m looking into Rogers where they claim they can offer 75 megabits per second. And I already have the necessary cable connection. Hmm, 75 Mbps. If only I could think that fast, I’d really be onto something.