Innholdsfortegnelse for February/March 2022 i Zoomer Magazine

FOR DECADES I ONLY measured my net worth in clothes, with “you’ve got to spend money to make money” as my personal financial motto. It is the sort of attitude, informed by the ’80s “dress for success” meets “fake it ’til you make it” ethos, that you could only justify to yourself, as I did, if you were fashion-industry adjacent, as I was. It was a world where you were encouraged to channel fantastical – some may say delusional – dreams of glamour and excitement, while proving you belonged through the haute and the new. It was no surprise to my long-suffering father, who provided school fees and living expenses that often went to $12 hamburgers at Toby’s Good Eats, $30 Christian Dior lipsticks and the like, that my…

2022 STARTS OFF WITH a bang as a crowd of seminal rockers gun for the top of the Billboard charts. Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder drops Earthling (Feb. 11), his first solo album in more than a decade, which is chock full of epic ’80s-inspired power ballads featuring haunting organs and fierce guitar solos; Original Guns N’ Roses members – that’d be Slash, Axl Rose and Duff McKagan, if you need a reminder – join the new G&R lineup for the four-track EP Hard Skool (Feb 25); and British pop-rock group Tears for Fears shouts its triumphant return on the emotionally charged and introspective album The Tipping Point (Feb. 25), its first in 17 years. Last, but never least, Canadian rocker, Zoomer cover subject and frequent photography contributor, Bryan…

CALLING IT A trend may be overly optimistic. But in the seven years since Amy Schumer’s brilliantly satirical and viral “Last F--kable Day” skit – about A-list Hollywood actresses being forcibly aged out of babe roles and into mother-in-law parts – 50-plus women have been turning up on screens as vibrant, hip and, yes, palpably sexual beings. Sure, there have always been outliers in casting grown women: Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County, Julianne Moore in Gloria Bell and anything starring Diane Keaton. But a handful of incoming titles suggest a reckoning is underway. The recent Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That…, sparked a tsunami of online chatter about women aged 50 who look 50 and stylish. Now, from acclaimed actress, writer and director…

THE CASE A 93-year-old woman, who lived independently, arrived at the hospital after falling at home. Her left leg seemed shortened and externally rotated. She was alert, but not sure what happened. She remembered being in her kitchen and then waking up on the floor. Her son, who was visiting, called 911, and said she seemed to suddenly lose consciousness. THE SYMPTOMS She was not confused when she awoke and had no infectious symptoms, but she was in pain. A shortened, externally rotated leg is one of the signs of a hip fracture, which is common after falls and is associated with significant morbidity and mortality in older adults. THE TESTS The ER doctor must determine the cause of the fall, including sinister causes such as a…

ARE YOU ITCHING for time on the elliptical? Pining for the pull-up bars? Longing for the leg press? If you were a gym regular before the COVID-19 pandemic and have yet to return, you’re probably yearning for more than just premium fitness equipment. “Most people are coming back for their mental health,” Rhonda Blewett, a long-time personal trainer and instructor at Anytime Fitness in Vancouver, said in November. “They’ve been locked up so long.” Anytime Fitness closed in March 2020, reopened with capacity restrictions that June, and operated as normal – with safety protocols like disinfection of gym equipment – until B.C. shuttered gyms again on Dec. 21, 2021, due to the new wave of Omicron infections. (That month, they were reporting exposures at a fitness centre in Ottawa, a…

BECAUSE IT’S 2022 and the country is in the fifth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada’s first female finance minister was making it rain money. A month before Chrystia Freeland introduced her first budget – in April 2021 – she had chaired the Task Force on Women in the Economy, struck to address what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a “she-cession” after statistics showed women lost more jobs than men in the pandemic. Her budget included a $100-billion stimulus package, includng $742 million for low-income seniors whose monthly guaranteed income supplements were cut back because they received CERB. In December, Freeland announced employment had rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, the deficit was shrinking and GDP was growing. Shrewd, tough and a consummate negotiator, Freeland has been a feather in the…

A CANADIAN TOUR from Halifax to Vancouver and all points in between for a new album might seem like business as usual for Blue Rodeo, but Many A Mile, the 16th studio release from the alt-country legends, almost didn’t happen. Singer-songwriters Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor were both deflated after 2016’s 1000 Arms album and tour, but “the last record exacted a toll on Greg,” Cuddy says. “He puts everything into his music and recording and when it’s over, he often has a dip. That one was pretty extreme.” But then COVID-19 hit, and the long-time collaborators had a chance to recharge during lockdown. They wrote and recorded the songs separately, and the rest of the band hoofed it back and forth between Cuddy, at a studio in Toronto, and…

ANYBODY WHO HOPED COVID-related travel disruptions would be sent packing in 2022 was sorely disappointed. “If COVID has taught us anything, it’s to always expect the unexpected,” says Barry Choi, whose Money We Have blog offers both travel and personal finance advice. He advises travellers to be prepared to alter their plans, or book travel for the second half of 2022 in the hope that the pandemic dies down, rather than focusing on good deals for travel dates now. And industry experts say travel deals are waning for sun-seeking snowbirds who benefited when demand dropped, early in the pandemic. Now that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is causing travel chaos, finding a seat on an airplane headed south is more challenging than landing a deal. At the start of the…

OVER THE LAST TWO years, I’ve been writing All We Want: Building the Life We Cannot Buy, about the damage consumer culture does to ourselves and to the planet. But, all the while, I was still enmeshed in the very culture I was critiquing. I’d sit at my desk to compose an argument against shopping and then step away to buy groceries, pay the electric bill, or pick up some new jeans. I have been living in a state that some call “cognitive dissonance.” But I’ll just call it hypocrisy. We all have to live with a certain amount of hypocrisy these days. No matter how much we care about climate change, we still must, to some degree, live our capitalist, carbon-spewing lives. Icebergs four times the size of…

1 AND JUST LIKE THAT … NEW YORK CITY is back. Armchair travellers can do the Big Apple with Carrie Bradshaw et al., in the Sex and the City reboot, while Assouline has published a coffee-table book for the 90th birthday of the storied Carlyle hotel – fresh off a reno. A fave of Lenny Kravitz (who wrote the book's forward), Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have also spent the night, and were spotted in the legendary Bemelmans Bar. Indeed, its murals painted in the 1940s by Madeline author Ludwig Bemelmans still draws the glam set. —Vivian Vassos 2 CHECK IN, HALIFAX STAYCATIONS ARE the new normal, and Halifax, a city of 400,000 people, has seen a new hotel open every year in the last three years. The latest is…

TWENTY YEARS AGO, Julian Fellowes co-wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Gosford Park, an acerbic masterpiece about a weekend shooting party. The star-studded ensemble was Upstairs, Downstairs meets Agatha Christie murder mystery. It cast an unsentimental eye on the tensions above and below stairs, then coated it all in an acid critique of the fading British aristocracy. The movie launched his career as popular entertainment’s foremost chronicler of bygone high society, and his 2004 international bestseller Snobs cemented it, skewering the social nuances of the present-day upper classes by following the perspective of a young middle-class woman who marries into them. As we know, Fellowes went on to create the hit series and movie Downton Abbey, with the latest instalment – Downton Abbey: A New Era – expected in theatres…

IT’S BEEN A long, glorious reign for Netflix’s The Crown at the top of the hierarchy of family dynasty dramas, but the beloved show might be deposed this spring. Two new shows starring strong matriarchs that could maybe rival the Queen are bringing some big names to the small screen. On Fox, Susan Sarandon stars in the musical drama Monarch, as the head of “the first family of country music” and its empire of complicated characters, beginning Jan. 30. In March, Showtime airs The First Lady, featuring almost-EGOT winner Viola Davis (she’s only short a Grammy) as none other than Michelle Obama. But wait, there’s more: It has also cast Gillian Anderson, fresh from her own Emmy win for playing Margaret Thatcher on The Crown, as Eleanor Roosevelt, and…

> ONCE A BITCOIN MINER: SCANDAL AND TURMOIL IN THE CRYPTOCURRENCY WILD WEST By Ethan Lou • For anyone who ever wondered what Bitcoin is and how digital money works, Ethan Lou has the answers. It helps that the ex-journalist, who once covered cryptocurrency, has a reporter’s eye for the telling details. When he was an intern at the Toronto Star in 2013, Lou sank “all his savings” – he doesn’t say how much, but admits he was a millionaire by 2017 – into Bitcoin, and even gave some to his parents as a Christmas gift. He watched the value of his coins tank to a low of $200, then bought some more. Lou traces Bitcoin’s origins, its peaks ($20,000 a piece in 2017) and troughs ($2 in 2011), the…

ANTOINETTE MESSAM’S work on Netflix’s acclaimed Black western The Harder They Fall has garnered the Canadian costume designer the biggest buzz of her three-decade career. The standout wardrobe she created for the film, which stars a superb cast (Idris Elba, Regina King and Jonathan Majors), earned features in The Hollywood Reporter, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. In November, Messam won her first industry accolade for the movie’s costumes at the 2021 Hamilton Behind the Camera Award, an annual L.A. event where A-list actors honour their behind-the-scenes colleagues. “What I particularly loved about one of my costumes is that it was designed and it remained feminine, but it still had some edge,” said King, who won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 2019 for If Beale Street Could Talk, as she…