On a personal note, a stored image returns to the forefront of my thoughts as summoned by the reading of Bill Hayes' achingly beautiful memoir Insomniac City. It is a February night in 2010, a Toronto winter considering an early spring, a night four hours' distant from consideration of a...
He could have blown out eighty candles on a birthday cake this July 28, 2017 if he hadn't blown one bullet through his head on February 20, 2005. If the earlier event never happened the future one likely would have happened in the exact same place, in the kitchen cum...
It was my first day on the job but that wasn't unusual as it was everybody's first day on the job at MAYOUT, an organisation so new that we hadn't even worked out just what the letters in MAYOUT stood for as an acronym. Jenkins, who had come to us...
Once upon a time I was a ten year old boy, one who had already developed a two-way communication with the bulky and sculpted wood furniture in the corner of the living room that contained the tubes and wires, cords and dials of the television innards. Yes, I actually did...
There are few dimmer endorsements to be made of the human psyche when we consider the historical figures chosen for repeated examination and thus de facto celebration in biographies, novels, films, plays, and multi-part BBC series. By and large we are drawn to the Bad Guys. Send armies into battle...
I certainly am not the first to observe that we are watching a fresh and dazzling Golden Age of Television exploding before us like an endless display of holiday fireworks but I'm quite sure I am the first to say that I rather deeply resent it. You see, from the...