I used to spend an awful lot of time in taverns.
Typically, I’d take my place amidst a stretch of solitary men drinking at a long bar. The conversation was a slow background rumbling, almost like distant thunder, and it lasted all night.
Sports.
The weather.
Women.
TV.
The past.
Strangers who had no expectation of seeing one another again, with little in common beyond the drink in front of them, making a conscious effort not to be alone, to try in some way, to connect. These conversations were beautiful to me, and I’ve come to miss them.
As a substitute, I’ve taken to listening to Sports Talk radio at night. The other day was a call-in show out of Toronto. Lacey from Oshawa had a few things to say about the Blue Jays. She was stubbornly defending third baseman Josh Donaldson:
“ Josh is far and away the greatest Blue Jay, and just because he’s injured the team shouldn’t quit on him! He’s given them everything, and now they just want to abandon him? That’s just so crappy. You can’t treat people like that. It’s wrong.”
The voice was familiar, and as I listened I realized that I knew her. Lacey from Oshawa was part of a group of patients I did pulmonary reahb with at a facility in Toronto. She was so thin then, and so angry, and every single day she wore a Blue Jays jersey with Josh Donaldson’s name on the back.
Her path had been difficult, and the heavy veil of sadness and pain that shrouded her was rarely lifted. Maybe at Bingo, if she got a line, she might allow herself a thin, bitter smile, but that was about it. She simply could not bring herself to socialize, and what we found out about her was through observation and hearsay, all of which reduced to this: when she fell ill and became incapacitated her husband left with their young son. That was how her life had worked out.
As I listened to her on the radio, hearing her speak more than I had in the two months we shared at rehab, I heard a stronger, braver voice. She was– with this phone call decrying a lack of loyalty to somebody doing their best in the face of physical limitations– making a conscious effort not to be alone. She was reaching out, and it felt like a miracle that I got to witness this, that I got to imagine her recovered and at home, fully herself now, and fighting for somebody she loved.
]]>This is an excerpt from our debut episode:
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Me: Hey! Welcome back to The Breakfast Club with Heidi and Mike!!
Heidi: We all bark and all bite!!
Me: We sure are, Heidi, we sure are, and I have to say, that was a fascinating interview we just did with Muffin the cat! I mean, WOW, what an interesting cat!
Heidi: Heidi want to barf.
Me: What do you mean?
Heidi: HORRIBLE interview. Heidi no care what Muffin think about immigration or Kim Kardashian getting mom-shamed for straightening daughter’s hair.
Me: Well, you have to admit, Muffin did have some pretty interesting and unique ideas about how to solve the global immigration crisis.
Heidi: You want crisis? Heidi give you crisis. Name Muffin is crisis. So stupid! Why moron cat named after food? Why after crappy food? Why not Steak?! Why not Cheeseburger! Why not Twizzler?
Me: Twizzler is a good name!
Heidi: Heidi like Twizzlers.
Me: Me, too.
Heidi: Twizzlers a uniter.
Stupid Muffin don’t deserve name Twizzler. Such a fat, lazy animal! Muffin never hunt, just lie there! Make society hunt for her! Heidi hate that!
Me: Well, Muffin is an indoor cat.
Heidi: Heidi have no time for Muffin excuses! Muffin staring at diabetes, Heidi tell you.
Me: And hey, for those of you who have to commute today, you should know that traffic along the DVP is slow, so you might want to explore some other routes…
Heidi: Look. Heidi know this controversial, but Heidi think it wrong to normalize cats. Cats evil.
Either you against evil cats or you for evil cats. Not complicated. Not nuanced. You have cat on show, you cat apologist. You part of problem.
Me: The Heidi Hot Take! I was wondering when that was going to happen, so tell us, how can you be certain that all cats are evil?
Heidi: You got to break some eggs to make omelette. Way of the world. Dog eat cat eat other dog eat it all.
Me: Okay, well, maybe now would be a good time to open up the show to callers! Anybody out there have an opinion on whether it’s wrong to normalize cats or not?
Heidi: Ha! Heidi laugh!
Me: Why?
Me: No way you have callers! Also, Muffin really stink. Heidi almost faint from stench. Heidi need danger pay! You think cats clean because always licking paw and brushing self, but just OCD. Cats mental in the head! Cat hygiene fake news!
Me: While we wait to get connected to our first caller, it’s time to provide you with a message from one of our sponsors. Support for The Breakfast Club with Heidi and Mike comes form MailChimp…
Heidi: More than 7 million businesses around the world uses MailChimp…
Me: To send newsletters, messages and deliver high fives…
Me: Heidi?
Me: Heidi, it’s your turn now.
Heidi: Oh! Heidi sorry. Licking herself. What words?
Me: You say, “MailChimp, sends better email!”
Heidi: MailChimp, sends better email!
Me: And now you bark, Heidi.
Heidi: Heidi no bark. No chance. Heidi have self-respect.
Me: Okay, still trying to connect with our caller, just be a sec.’
Heidi: Ha! Heidi marry Muffin if actual caller. No way caller. Heidi can smell your lie sweat. Heidi know.
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I was 13 years-old, hopelessly white and just starting high school. I wanted to be cool but didn’t have the foggiest notion how to go about it. Cool was an undiscovered, mythic country that existed off at some unknowable distance, and I was lost, so very, very lost.
Eventually, I learned that the best passage to this land was through music. At the time, while punk and new wave were exploding around me, Billy Joel was my God, and this was not cool.
I found out that the music I had been listening to was wretched kid’s stuff, as were the lame, middle of the road radio stations I pledged allegiance to. If I wanted to be cool, I had to listen to college radio, CKCU specifically.
Listening to this radio station felt subversive, like receiving secret transmissions from a dangerous and lawless place. Unlike the chipper and inauthentic DJ’s I had previously been listening to, the ones who used sound effects and clearly knew nothing about music, the college DJ’s seemed singularly interested in what they were playing, as if it was their holy mission to bring “good music” to you. It was, I think, my first exposure to what might be thought of as the alternative scene.
It was here where I first heard the voice of Nadine Gelineau. She was a DJ at CKCU, and for whatever reason she struck a chord with me. I loved her. I mean, I was in love with her.
Her voice, so knowledgable, confident and fun, suggested worlds I had never imagined. It was a voice that for a 13 year-old boy in Ottawa, was a path, a path to a world of music and cool and all that lay beyond, a path out of the childhood I had always inhabited and on toward something much grander. Her voice conjured the possibility of thousands of different lives.
She was a legend. Hosting radio shows, spinning discs at the counter-culture clubs, championing music and just generally being Ottawa’s single-combat hero of cool, she was the way we collectively wanted to be seen. She gave us all hope and pride, I think, and now she is gravely ill. I hope that she’s able to get through it and return to herself and the legions of people whom she loves and love her.
The thought of her passing is a kind of cataclysm. Ridiculously, it seems impossible, but time, it just slips away, quietly sliding away into a larger and larger pool now forming beneath and behind us. Who knew that pool would get so big and we would get so old? Who knew the present would so mercilessly raze our beloved past?
I was recently reminded that the last song she played at all the club sets she performed was Enjoy Yourself by The Specials.
At the time it struck me as a drunken party song, but now when I listen to it, there’s a sadness and inevitability to it. It was an appropriate song for Nadine to have played, I think. It’s a funny time, that last song of the night, bittersweet. I never wanted it to end, I wanted it to stretch out infinitely, with more and more people joining in, each one a light in the greater constellation of who we were, each one shining so brightly.
So, thank you Nadine, thank you.
( Photo courtesy of Julie Beun)
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“On Wednesday morning, the public got their first glimpse of disgraced CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi– who is charged with five criminal offences including sexual assault and choking–as he appeared at a downtown Toronto courthouse.
What are sex criminals wearing this season?
Well, foregoing his signature, I’m-old-but-a-downtown-scenester-who-likes-beating-women-rock-guy style, Ghomeshi went with a black suit, crisp white shirt and subtly pattered dark tie. Standing beside his fearless and brilliant lawyer, Marie Henin, who was smartly turned-out in black with a lurid splash of lipstick across her face, the pair looked evil and powerful, like they had mastered the dark arts and were taking the charges very seriously.
Ghomeshi, who typically sports a youthful, mop of dyed hair that suggested the gentle innocence of a Muppet to his victims, had trimmed it, a clear attempt to convey to the court that he was a serious man, a full grown predator and that these women would have understood that, via his hair, and thus implicitly consented to being attacked by him. His signature five-o’clock-shadow, a reminder of his love and violent fantasies surrounding the sleazy 1980’s TV show Miami Vice, 
was gone, once again suggesting that he was a powerful, business-savvy man of violent and criminal action. “Think Christian Grey, not Ted Bundy, “ Mr. Ghomeshi’s stubble-free face declares.
By not wearing a bloodstained white shirt, Ghomeshi and his legal team are sending a clear message to the courts that he is not always beating women for his own twisted sexual gratification, but is often taking time to try to plot some form of consent from his victims, usually while setting up his video camera and arranging his other props. The tie, dark and respectful, but with a subtle pattern, is a clear indicator of the BDSM interior of Ghomeshi, a bold statement of his violent intentions that not even the most drugged, intoxicated or star-struck woman could possibly have misunderstood.
In court we see that Ghomeshi has decided to eschew the tie and go for a more casual, you’re-relaxed-and-in-my-lair-and-I’m-showing-you-my-record-collection vibe. He’s showing the court that he’s their friend, the voice that they allowed into their home, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom for so many years, and that their relationship is now so intimate that the obvious next step is to introduce a startling, brutally violent, dangerous and one-sided sexual component into their life together.
With Ghomeshi, the safe word is always “style.” “
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Ford has submitted an audition tape with a number of sample interviews he’s conducted, and this is a small selection:
Doug Ford interviews Deepak Chopra (Indian-American author, public-speaker, businessman and physician)
Doug Ford: So, what do you like better being a doctor or being a businessman?
Deepak Chopra: Well, we are more than just the labels that society puts on us. Yes, it is true that I am a businessman and doctor, but I, like all human spirits, am many things, and everything that I do nourishes my soul equally.
Doug Ford: I’m a very successful businessman. We make labels. We’re called Deco Labels. Three different locations, two in the GTA and one in Chicago. Deepak, let me ask you, you ever been to Chicago?
Deepak Chopra: I have been many times and will be there next week to promote my new book, Why is God Laughing: The path to joy and optimism.
Doug Ford: That’s great. You should take in a Blackhawk’s game and go to Michael Jordan’s steak house. Jesus, those are some good goddamn steaks. Do you eat steak in India? I mean, you folks worship cows, you’d think you’d know and appreciate how delicious steak is. By the way, I’ve always admired the Indian people, you guys are great, very colourful and polite.
Doug Ford interviews Suzanne Somers (comedienne, actress and businessperson)
Doug Ford: Let me tell you, thirty years ago you were just about the hottest thing I ever saw. Chrissy Snow. Jesus Christ. Hot. And let me tell you, Three’s Company, that was a real comedy. Classy.
Suzanne Somers: Thank you.
Doug Ford: So, you write poetry in your spare time?
Suzanne Somers: I’ve always felt the need to express myself creatively.
Doug Ford: I like to box. Sometimes shot put. Okay, my producer wants me to read one of your poems. It’s from a collection called Touch Me: The poems of Suzanne Somers. I bet you have a lot of takers when people hear you say, “touch me,” eh? Right for the boobs.
Suzanne Somers: I mean it spiritually, not physically.
Doug Ford: Yeah, whatever. So it’s called “Organic Girl,” and it goes like this:
Organic girl dropped by last night
For nothing in particular
Except to tell me again how beautiful and serene she feels
On uncooked vegetables and wheat germ fortified by bean sprouts
Mixed with yeast and egg whites on really big days
She not only meditates regularly, but looks at me like I should
And lectures me about meat and ice cream
And other aggressive foods I shouldn’t eat.
Nice. Okay, I got a two-parter for you. So, what’s the theme of this poem and you ever have any work done? You still look pretty good.
Doug Ford interviews Tanya Tagaq (award winning throat singer)
Doug Ford: Sorry, I had a real hard time there with your last name. If you’re in show business you might want to change it so that it’s easier to say and remember. Just smart business.
Tanya Tagaq: I like my name as it is, thank you.
Doug Ford: (Stares at her, a burning silence for 20 seconds.) Are you saying you don’t care about business?
Tanya Tagaq: No, I’m saying I care about my name.
Doug Ford: You’re First Nations, right? Am I right? Yeah, look, don’t you think if maybe you guys were better at business you wouldn’t have signed all those treaties where you gave up prime real estate for bracelets and you wouldn’t always be asking tax payers for hand-outs? So maybe business is important, okay? You get it? (Aggressively bangs question cues cards on table) Alright, so what the hell is throat singing anyway?
In talking to a doctor about this, it was suggested that I try Mindful Meditation as a way to help ground this impulse, the idea being that I’d learn to live more attentively in the moment and bring some stillness to my life. I should state that that I am the opposite of a Mindful person, by which I mean I barely exist in the moment, possessing an analytic mind that almost exclusively inhabits the future or past, and that slowing down and not thinking—just “being”–is virtually impossible for me.
Before the classes began, I had an orientation session. The waiting room had rugs on the wall, constantly flowing water, plants and little statues of Buddha all over the place, emitting an aggressively, “mindfully” organic ambience. The woman who walked out her office to greet me had a creepy tranquility beaming from her eyes and looked at me with unnerving sincerity. She spoke in an even, robotic voice that never varied. It was creepy, like Nurse Ratched, and it made me nervous, and the more she talked in this manner, the more anxious, almost angry, I felt myself becoming.
Her: What are you doing?
Me: (Hastily putting away my iPhone.) Not being Mindful?
Her: What would a Mindful person be doing?
Me: Experiencing the fabric of the chair I’m sitting on?
Her: That’s good Michael, now follow me.
Me: You know, the music in the waiting room surprises me.
Her: That’s interesting, Michael. What is it about the music that causes you such anxiety?
Me: Well, it doesn’t make me anxious, it was just something I noticed.
Her: (Silently staring back at me, waiting for elaboration.)
Me: With the whole Buddhist thing going on here, all the fountains and enforced serenity, I did not expect AM radio to be playing.
Her: I see. What did you expect?
Me: Maybe Brian Eno, some gentle, distant gongs, perhaps, but certainly not somebody excitedly trying to sell me cars, you know?
Her: Have you started your Happiness Jar?
Me: No, I forgot. I’ve been really busy.
Her: You haven’t been Mindful.
Me: No.
Her; I want you to think of something you’re happy for, write it down on a piece of paper and put it in your Happiness Jar when you get home, okay? Michael, tell me, what are you happy for?
Me: My iPhone.
Her: How about this blue, shining day, this day that just is, are you happy for that?
Me: (An angry sigh, and words now tense) Yes. I am happy for this blue, shining day, dammit.
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Prince:
“ It was in 2004 and I was on a flight from London to Dubai. While flipping through the stations on my headset I started to listen to the Oldies station because they were playing a little known Beach Boys song that I just adore called “I Can Hear Music.” I just sort of fell into the station the way that you do, and then as if plucked from my nightmares, they played “Purple Rain.” I will never forget the cheesy announcer saying, “He may be a gracefully aging king now, but he’ll always be a Prince to us.” I wanted the plane to crash.”
Bryan Adams:
“I was at the fucking Home Hardware buying a couple of those big 5 gallon water pumps for my studio, okay?”
Michael Stipe of REM:
“I was paying for gas in Michigan. Funny, though, it didn’t make me feel old or irrelevant, it just made me feel beyond time. How long did it take for that to happen? 20 years? That’s really not very much time, but that’s all it took for us to become a part of musical history, to become the music that your parents loved. “
Sarah McLachlan:
“Oh Christ, I wish you hadn’t asked me that! I was in a Vancouver wine bar with a friend and the place was playing some generic radio station, and I don’t know why, but I was listening to the DJ just as she announced, “And here’s an oldie but a goodie by our own Sarah McLachlan—a classy woman.” And then my song “I Will Remember You “ came on and all I could think about was some woman in a retirement home singing along, broken and out of key, while thinking of her dead husband. Oh, it was just awful, I mean, it shouldn’t have been, but it was, it really, really was. And my friend Liz, who was sitting across from me, could see the obvious look of mortification on my face, and she just said, “Classy, classy woman, that Sarah McLachlan. “
Randy Travis:
“The God honest truth is I’m not positive that it was an Oldie’s station, but I was damn sure at the time that it was. I was in jail, that first night after my infamous DUI, and as I was getting processed one of the clerks was playing her radio and my song “Forever and Ever, Amen,” came on. I looked up, startled and ashamed, thinking about the words and what was actually happening to me, and I must have looked a fright because she turned it off immediately.”
]]>Lebowitz is in possession of a verbal brilliance that’s brusque and clarifying. Without hesitation or doubt, she can distill complex matters into weighty yet witty gems that are so elegant you want to wear them as if jewelry.
Massey Hall, which is as beautiful as an old movie, was about half full of her acolytes, and we all awaited her arrival in happy anticipation. Unfortunately, the talk was a brief, superficial and epigrammatic “Show.” I suppose I’d been hoping for something more along the lines of a conversation, an organic flowering of thought that wasn’t bound by subject, time or convention, but what Lebowitz delivered was more like a greatest hits, as if she was a tribute band of her own best material.
Ghomeshi, who was affable and charming, was little more than a straight man, with Lebowitz, like some Vaudeville comedian, delivering the punch. There was nothing that she said on Friday that I had not heard her say before. She was the Fran Lebowitz persona throughout, and that was kind of exciting in itself, but overall it was a thin and disappointing experience, leaving me feeling the way I usually do after leaving the Ex.
Taking the subway home, I couldn’t help but feel kind of sorry for Lebowitz. She burst onto the New York cultural scene back in the 70’s, amidst much fanfare and expectation, and has been unable to produce a written work (she considers herself a writer, not a Hollywood Square wit) since 1981, when she published a collection of essays called Social Studies.
Now 62, she complained– with customary charm– about other people’s children, how suburban New York had become, our impoverished arts culture, and information technology—a revolution she’s heard about rather than participated in. It was stellar cocktail party chatter, but not very sturdy, lacking in any desire toward self-awareness or examination.
When I think of her now, I imagine a ghost living in a timeless, self-created limbo. Pacing the same 15 Manhattan blocks, too frightened or unsure to realize her genius, she remains in the golden age of her potential, locked in a glittering city that will always be bigger, better and more real than any subsequent iteration. It’s ironic that New York, a city defined by velocity and constant change, is the place that Lebowitz, who seems the very opposite of these qualities, has chosen as a professional avatar.
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