Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2020 i Zoomer Magazine

Due to the peculiarities of traditional publishing schedules, this edition of Zoomer magazine – the final one of calendar year – will arrive in your homes and on newsstands around Thanksgiving, which is not unusual. But 2020 has been an unusual year and, because of that, the timing feels auspicious. It’s been a year thus far of threats, real and existential, every day and apocalyptic. We mourn the lives lost to the pandemic, particularly those of vulnerable elders living in long-term care facilities, and empathize with those who have suffered in countless ways because of the virus. We fear the uncertainty of what future flare-ups will mean to our health and prosperity. There has been shock, but I am in awe of what we’ve been able to hold on…

LONG BEFORE celebrities got political on social media, John Lennon used his fame to help promote social justice causes on a global scale. Take, for example, the 1969 “War Is Over!” campaign that took him and wife Yoko Ono everywhere from Amsterdam to New York. Eventually their famous Montreal Bed-In for Peace landed them at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal where they recorded “Give Peace a Chance.” Lennon’s music has served as an outlet for protest, while his signature “Imagine” remains the ultimate anthem for world peace. So to mark what would have been Lennon’s 80th birthday on Oct. 9, Ono and their son, Sean Ono Lennon, produced Gimme Some Truth: The Ultimate Mixes, a collection that includes 36 of the rocker’s tunes remixed anew. MEANWHILE, the Boss…

ONE OF THE starkest images to emerge from the turbulent summer of illness and protest was the vandalized statue of Sir John A. Macdonald lying helplessly on the pavement, vandalized and beheaded by a group of anti-racism protestors. The young Jacobins responsible for the destruction of the statue, along with their compatriots in the U.S., are angry about any number of issues these days – all of which have seemed to coalesce into one giant outburst against racism by young people of all colours and creeds. By toppling the monument of a man they associate with originating the residential school system and for implementing a head tax on Chinese immigrants, they signalled their displeasure not only of our first prime minister but the current social and economic order that they…

“Sound the trumpets! Beat the drums! The Princely heir of England comes!”–R.J. de Cordova, The Prince’s Visit (1861) Sixteen-year-old Lizzie Wilmot of Cobourg, Ont., was consumed with excitement. “Everybody in town was agog over the impending celebration,” she recalled more than 60 years later. “New gowns, decorations and surmises as to whom should dance with the Prince were the topics of the day … and locally, Mrs. Connells had fitted many fluttering hearts with taffetas and tarlatans and heavy embroidered satins.” The focus of so many fluttering hearts was Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the second of Queen Victoria’s nine children. The queen would have raised an eyebrow at the notion of her teenaged son as royal heartthrob since she found him rather plain (“handsome I cannot think him”). Nonetheless,…

THIS YEAR, we mark the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War while in the midst of another global battle – the COVID-19 pandemic. The viral outbreak is altering plans for public Remembrance Day ceremonies in November, including those of the Royal Canadian Legion, which announced that their ceremony at Ottawa’s National War Memorial (shown above) will be pared down, with only 100 people present. But in a year where technology, more than ever, reinvented how we communicate, it’s also allowing us to honour war veterans and survivors in digital form. In January, the Duchess of Cambridge photographed two Holocaust survivors with their grandchildren – images that were widely disseminated across social media — to mark the U.K.’s Holocaust Memorial Day. And in May, Queen Elizabeth…

■ THE CASE A 65-year-old-man comes to his local rural emergency department with lower back pain that had been present for the past 12 hours. The patient is generally healthy, being treated only for high blood pressure. ■ THE SYMPTOMS The patient was in sharp pain, requiring morphine for analgesia. Heart rate was a bit elevated, and blood pressure was low normal, a bit surprising for someone with high blood pressure. ■ THE TESTS The patient’s heart sounds were normal, lungs clear and abdomen soft. The pain was not worse with movement (making muscular pain less likely as a cause), and there was no tenderness in his spine (making an injury or infection less likely). Strength, sensation and reflexes were normal (reassuring for spine nerve health). Blood tests showed mild…

“I’m just tired,” he said in the message. “I’m just tired.” He’d sent his guitar to his sister. “I won’t ever play it again.” “I’ve had a very good life,” Robert said in his voice mail to his sister, “and a very interesting life.” ON A WARM August evening, I attended a book launch for a woman who’d written candidly about her suicide attempts. After the launch, I went to a memorial for an old friend I’d lost touch with, a brilliant jazz guitarist named Robert, who’d taken his own life. My brother David, also a musician, took his life 14 years ago. Since his death, four friends have killed themselves. Suicide is a recurrent theme in my life, but I’m not alone. THERE WERE 4,157 suicides in Canada in 2017. The highest risk age…

“I am a hunter by name and by nature,” writes chef Michael Hunter, in the introduction to his new cookbook, The Hunter Chef Cookbook: Hunt, Fish, and Forage in Over 100 Recipes. And as a chef, he muses, it’s only natural that the two worlds would come together. “Food is more than a passion for me. It’s a way of life.” Knowing the provenance of the food on our plates is a given – locally sourced ingredients are key to the Canadian chef’s cooking at home and at Antler, Hunter’s Toronto restaurant. The good stuff grown or reared in its natural environment is also good for the environment, he believes. His rural Ontario upbringing and country inn training as a teenager didn’t hurt either and had him hunting, fishing and…

The Cold Millions by Jess Walter (Oct. 6) > From the author of the bestselling 2012 Hollywood satire Beautiful Ruins comes this hotly anticipated novel about two adventurous orphans, Gig and Rye Dolan, who are emblematic of the class divisions roiling at the turn of the century in Walter’s hometown of Spokane, Wash. The boys are itinerant workers, but as Gig dreams of a steady job and a house, idealistic Rye gets involved in the union fight for fair wages and better working conditions. The social injustices have modern-day parallels that are glaringly apt. The Searcher by Tana French (Oct. 6) > The Dublin-based queen of the literary mystery is back with her seventh crime novel, this one about a retired Chicago cop, Cal Hooper, who buys a fixer-upper…

IT’S A GOOD thing I answered the phone. It was an hour before our first pandemic-time dinner party. I was cooking an elaborate meal, which we hoped to serve outside, but the weather was not co-operating. “This is awkward,” said my friend Jo-Lynn as she asked if we were still on. It was my first experience of COVID social confusion. Why was she calling after we had exchanged numerous emails? Normally when we entertain, we invite eight people to sit with us around a table that holds 10 in close quarters. The crush usually makes for a very convivial evening. On that night, there were just six of us – a concession to the coronavirus. When it became clear that heavy rain would not let up, my husband, Doug, came…

As we age, we all inevitably get a little banged up. Like the concentric rings marking the age of a tree, scars are what we have to show for our time on this earth, chronicling bumps in the road. But more significant scars are signposts of events that change lives – and perspective. Toronto photographer Alkan Emin is known for his fashion and celebrity portraiture, most notably his work with Jann Arden. In his long-term series of art projects – which feature portraits of “real” people cast via Facebook – Emin has been tackling increasingly intimate subject matter, progressing from a white shirt series to achingly honest black-and-white nudes. “I want,” he says, “to get down to the truth of people.” This time he sought out people willing to bare…

JANN ARDEN IS EMBRACING HER INNER CRONE. We’re not talking about the crotchety Disney stereotypes who cast spells and hand out poison apples. Rather, as she writes at the outset of her new memoir, If I Knew Then: Finding Wisdom in Failure and Power in Aging, her idea of a crone is “a kick-ass, take-no-prisoners, damn-the-torpedoes, own-your-own-crap, great kind of person to be.” In a phone interview from her Alberta home, the 58-year-old explains, “The crone in me is my biggest fan, my biggest cheerleader. I’m looking forward to being 68 and 78, God willing, maybe 88 if all goes well.” And discovering this in her 50s allowed her to adopt an attitude of “picking up the tools that you’ve carefully made in your life and racing to the finish…