Innholdsfortegnelse for April/May 2022 i Zoomer Magazine

A WEEK INTO Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, I called up my friend John-Paul Ricchio. I had seen his Instagram posts of outrage and despair, with information about protests, and links to donate. He was also sharing memories of a 1991 trip his mother, Marianne Ricchio (née Eurke), and grandmother, Mary Stephanie Eurke (née Wozney) and grandfather, Michael Eurke, had taken. It was their first visit to Ukraine. One photograph shows the group in front of the family’s ancestral home in the village of Horodnytsia in the Ternopil region of Western Ukraine. His grandmother is meeting her father’s sister, Stephanie — holding the traditional greeting of bread and salt — who is the last living link to J.P.’s great-grandfather, Dmytro Wozney, who made his way to Canada in 1913 as…

SEVERAL NEW PROJECTS – and our pandemic nesting tendencies – have put Julia Child on the cultural menu again. In late 2021 there was Julia, a mouthwatering documentary available on digital platforms from the filmmakers behind the Ruth Bader Ginsburg doc, RBG, which offers a comprehensive look at the late American chef’s fascinating life and legacy. Now, a new eight-episode HBO series, also called Julia (on Crave, March 31), traces how the insouciant host of The French Chef, who stood a gawky six-foot-two, became an unlikely TV star at 50 and altered the landscape of American food and the course of television. Like the backstage drama Being the Ricardos, the series revolves around the production of her influential show. Episodes retrace Child’s early TV career, beginning in 1962, when a…

IT’S A PIECE OF FAMILY history we’re trying to unearth. In the meantime, it may inspire a charitable commitment my brothers and I will make as a family. It started with a letter the Jewish Immigrant Aid Service (JIAS) Toronto sent to Moses (founder and CEO of ZoomerMedia). “Given your family history and connection to JIAS, we would love to find a meaningful way for you to be engaged in our 100th anniversary.” This raises the question: What was our family’s connection to JIAS? Our parents, Chaya and Aron, and Moses landed in Halifax aboard the SS Falcon on June 26, 1948. They proceeded to Montreal, where our father’s first cousin lived. They’d been living in a displaced persons camp in the American Zone of Occupied Germany. When the war…

IN A Q&A WITH Margaret Atwood about her new book, Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004-2021, Susan Swan talks to her old friend about the climate crisis, the Steven Galloway scandal at the University of British Columbia (UBC), tarot cards and growing old. Swan, whose ninth book of fiction, The Dead Celebrities Club, was published in 2019, is the co-founder of the $150,000 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. It is North America’s first literary award for women and non-binary writers, which will be awarded for the first time in 2023; Atwood is both a literary and honorary patron. Swan is also writing a memoir, Too Big: Fate, Feminism and Life with a Large Body, about how, at six-foot-two, size shaped her life. Atwood and screenwriter Susan Coyne have…

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WERE THREE BEARS. MAMA BEAR, BABY BOY BEAR AND BABY GIRL BEAR. Mama Bear enjoyed white wine, especially during the jagged years when she and Papa Bear were splitting up and moving into separate dens. Sometimes, as her fairy-tale family came apart at the seams, Mama Bear would hold forth on the institution of marriage with her friends. They’d sit around on the broad-viewed balcony of Blond Bear’s den and Mama Bear would get stroppy about love and marriage. “The nuclear bear family unit is messed up,” she’d begin, holding her second glass of Pecorino as the night breeze gently ruffled her neck fur. “It’s the least co-operative living arrangement ever created and has long since outlived its benefit for bear society. It’s time” –…

AH, WINE. So many attributes, so little time. Among its least desirable qualities – apart from its ability to decimate the morning after the night before – is this: Wine makes people nervous. They worry about bringing or serving the wrong bottle, sounding dumb asking a question in a shop, or that consulting a sommelier in a restaurant will result in being served something wildly expensive they won’t appreciate. Yet here’s the thing I’ve learned after interviewing experts, writing about wine and, especially, selling it at the retail level since 2014: There are no rules. There are so many aspects to winemaking and wine tasting and wine pairing – all of which are arguably as subjective as your taste in music or film – that there is never a definitive…

THEY CALL IT the “Martha Mitchell Effect.” An actual term in psychology circles, it’s the misdiagnosis of patients as delusional when, in fact, they are telling the truth. And the woman who bears its name is set, again, to get her close-up, played by none other than Julia Roberts in the Starz limited series Gaslit (April 24), which is based on the U.S. podcast “Slow Burn.” Mitchell was the canary in the coal mine in the time of the Watergate scandal (1972-74). The socialite wife of President Richard Nixon’s loyal attorney general, John Mitchell, she was the first person to publicly speak out about the president’s crimes. She was an unlikely whistleblower, and her decision prompted no end of blowback. Calling her an unreliable narrator, Nixon’s allies alleged she had…

IF HELEN MIRREN WERE TO STEAL a painting from the National Gallery in London, it would be a Wassily Kandinsky. “I love Kandinsky,” she says of the Russian painter, known as the father of 20th-century abstraction, although if you strolled through a gallery of his work, you might never know it’s all from the same man’s brush. Among his oeuvre, you’ll find art that incorporates impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, Art Nouveau and Bauhaus. Similarly, the many, many facets of Dame Helen were showcased in the spliced compilation reel shown at the 2022 Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards before she collected her Lifetime Achievement Award in February: Shakespearean thespian in Antony and Cleopatra and Hamlet; drunk and gruff Detective Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect; regal as Queen Elizabeth I and II; a…

“GOSSIP IS NEWS RUNNING AHEAD OF ITSELF IN A RED SATIN DRESS.” This is the most acute definition of scuttlebutt I ever did hear, coming via Liz Smith, one of the greatest merchants of gossip, circa fin-de-siècle 20th century Manhattan. It’s a maxim that swam through my head, more than once, as I made my way through the first season of the Netflix sensation Bridgerton, beamed through our screens in 2020. Brought to us by the crowd-pleasing producer Shonda Rhimes, and set in an alternate-reality Regency era – where people of colour are members of the ton, a.k.a. fashionable society – the series got going during the thrust of the London social season in 1813. The show, based on Julia Quinn’s popular novels, is presumably about love and courtship,…

By Kim Honey UP Nailing It When Fleetwood Mac first made it big, drummer Mick Fleetwood dressed in open-necked shirts and wide-leg jeans, but the 74-year-old has a trippier look these days as a model for Pleasing, Harry Styles’ beauty and lifestyle brand. Fleetwood loves the psychedelic hues of the new Shroom Boom collection, saying the nail polish reminds him of the Summer of Love days, when he used to sport the odd manicure. Well, who are we to keep you down? New Wordle Order A San Francisco man was shocked to discover his Wordle! app was getting 50,000 downloads a day, until he realized it was one punctuation mark away from the wildly popular New York Times brainteaser that has millions staving off cognitive decline by madly typing five-letter…

RUSSIAN ROULETTE VLADIMIR PUTIN’S military assault on Ukraine in February, and his quest to reconstruct “historical Russia,” came as no surprise to an older generation of Ukrainians who retain vivid memories of how terrible life was under another authoritarian madman, Joseph Stalin. In the 1920s and ’30s, Stalin’s genocidal agricultural collectivization policies uprooted farmers from their land, resulting in a punishing famine that killed millions of Ukrainians and forced others to start a new life elsewhere, with many eventually settling in Western Canada. In the hopes of avoiding a similar tragedy, many European and NATO countries, including Canada, imposed economic sanctions on Russia, banning imports of natural gas and oil. While this move will likely increase our heating and petrol bills, a far larger concern is how NATO countries plan…

IT SEEMS unlikely that a life chronicled as exhaustively as Leonard Cohen’s could yield a riveting untold chapter almost six years after the singer-poet’s death at 82. In Who By Fire: War, Atonement, and the Resurrection of Leonard Cohen, Canadian-Israeli journalist and author Matti Friedman provides a richly detailed account of the late musician’s momentous and very risky concert tour for soldiers serving on the front lines of the 1973 Yom Kippur War as they fought Soviet-backed Egyptian and Syrian forces over the Israeli-occupied Sinai peninsula, which the Israelis had wrested from Egypt during the Six Day War of 1967. Hastily organized and not sanctioned by the Israeli army, Cohen’s desert tour didn’t get much coverage from local or international media. Friedman says it was relegated to a “footnote” in…

YOU MIGHT KNOW Toronto chef Suzanne Barr as a judge on television shows like Top Chef Canada and Wall of Chefs, or, if you’re a foodie, eaten her comforting Afro-Caribbean fare at the Gladstone Hotel, Saturday Dinette and True True Diner, which Barr has said was unceremoniously closed by her financial backers in 2020 during the first wave of COVID-19. Her cooking honours her Jamaican heritage, while her restaurants acknowledged the pivotal role lunch counters played in the civil rights movement as places where sit-ins were staged in the fight for desegregation. The walls of the Saturday Dinette and True True Diner featured iconic black-and-white pictures of leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and a shot of everyday heroes like “the lone Black man refusing to leave the counter…

SEAWEED, A VERSATILE, nutritious, planet-loving powerhouse, is poised to be the next must-have ingredient. “We don’t say it’s the new kale. We don’t say it’s a superfood. We talk only about its own virtues,” says Mike Williamson, CEO of Cascadia Seaweed, a Vancouver Island aquaculture company that has partnered with several First Nations to cultivate a fast-growing brown seaweed called sugar kelp in Vancouver Island waters. Cascadia launched its Kove Ocean Foods line in February with Sea Spice, a flavour-enhancing vegan sprinkle, similar to the Japanese mix of sesame seeds, seaweed, dried fish, herbs and salt called furikake. The company is working on vegetarian seaweed burgers and crab cakes, along with seaweed snack foods like puffs, jerky and crackers. Williamson adds Sea Spice to his morning omelette and likes to…