RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK,TORONTO. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2024. I first met David Alexandre Montgomery at a late 1960s gathering of young employees in what was then called the Department of Municipal Affairs, in the Ontario public service. He memorably (and with some humour) introduced himself to the group as “an existentialist.” I still do not […]

ONTARIO TONITE. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11, 2023. When Ian Tyson’s sad death at 89 was announced a few weeks ago, during the last days of 2022, my thoughts rushed back almost 60 years, to the summer of 1963. I found an article online that caught the moment : “Where the boys […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, FRIDAY 1 JULY 2022. On the one hand, Canada Day 2022 could be declared a happy event since the country has largely joined the growing part of the global village that is pretending the COVID-19 pandemic has ended. This year there is a Canada Day Picnic more […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, FROM THE EAST TORONTO OFFICE (NORTH OF THE LAKES AS THE OLD AGRARIAN DEMOCRACY USED TO SAY). JUNE 24, 2021. The weather is more than just agreeable here today. The sun is shining. Early summer is in full bloom. And we are cheered, dismayed, and/or puzzled by eight different stories in the recent […]

CW EDITORS : The summer is in sight. We have just a few quick things to say, before settling down to a more rigorous holiday schedule of (more) regular (more brief) reporting in these fascinating and intermittently near-overwhelming times. (That at least is the plan.) To start with, while diverse protests for equality and freedom […]

When relief is needed from Canada’s intermittent bouts of feeling that, to stay relevant in the global village, we must do a bad job of imitating political craziness elsewhere, the editors on this site turn to me. Or so it all too often seems, waiting for the eccentric winter of 2019 to end. Lately I […]

It may well be that 2019 proves a difficult year on any number of fronts. But I was lucky enough to spend its first Thursday evening at one of the “top 21 new bars in Toronto” (blue bird or The Bluebird, 2072 Dundas St W, at Howard Park). I was listening to an excellent jazz […]

I have no deep familiarity with the writing of V.S. Naipaul, who “died at his home in London” Saturday, August 11, 2018, just a few days short of his 86th birthday. But he is at least one of only a few great literary talents I for a while found fascinating after my mid-30s. I feel […]

[UPDATED JANUARY 10]. What are some options for dropping by the Rex Jazz & Blues bar in Toronto in the first month of this perhaps fateful year 2018? Which of the scheduled groups would you most like to hear? Those asking these poignant questions also promised that if we did go to any of these […]

At last we have summer in the city 2017 up here on the northwest shore of the most easterly great lake (well, sort of …). Back from a short communion with early July mosquitoes further north, I somehow bumped into a YouTube clip called “Paul Desmond & Gerry Mulligan – Stardust.” As happens in the […]