Mojo
April-May, 2008
In the mid-1980s it seemed Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were going to do the right and decent thing and break up the Rolling Stones. Alas, it didn't happen and since then the Stones have lived out Noah Cross's maxim in Roman Polanski's Chinatown: "Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough." Perhaps the defining moment in this sad, slow slide occurred in 2003 when Mick Jagger accepted (rather than rejected) his knighthood as Sir Michael Phillip Jagger.
Of course, the Stones continue to intrigue. Not, mind you, the Stones who've been traipsing around the planet on one tour or another over the last 20 years, but the band as it was in the years 1965 through 1973 when the urgency of its music matched the insurgency of its fans. Britain's Mojo magazine returns us to those halcyon days in "Children of the Revolution" by Peter Doggett, author of There's a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of '60s Counter-Culture.
Doggett's focus is on the Stones as they were in 1968, perhaps the band's most crucial year. The year previous, Jagger and company had been beset by drug busts, court dates and rising tensions between band founder Brian Jones and the Jagger-Richards ambit, culminating in one of their most disappointing LPs, Their Satanic Majesties Request. Doggett shows how the Stones got their groove back, first with Jumpin' Jack Flash, then the B eggars Banquet LP.
Queen's Quarterly:
A Canadian Review
Spring, 2008
Memoirs by significant political figures tend to be bestsellers in the countries where these politicos did their greatest good or worst damage. This certainly was the fate last year of the memoirs of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien, whose combined 19 years as Canada's prime ministers resulted in tomes with a combined extent of almost 1,600 pages.
Yet for all their popularity (and physical heft), these books didn't give readers so much "the backstairs of history" as what Carleton University historian Duncan McDowall calls "a pleasant view of the front porch." In other words, if it's candour you want or a complete airing of fiascos or a rigorous examination of political philosophy, fuggedaboutit. As McDowall writes, "our Canadian memoirists mention nary a book or an idea behind the formation of their political style. Chrétien talks rather curiously of Plato and Montesquieu informing his view that human nature is immutable. Mulroney venerates Diefenbaker's extolling of the common man. But that is it."
McDowall argues these inadequacies are shared by most Canadian political memoirs of the last 100 years or so. Better, he says, to peruse the autobiographies of such Brit politicos as Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson and former Tony Blairites Robin Cook and Clare Short if your tastes incline to the "combative and revelatory," the "sharply opinionated and ideologically unwavering."
Ryerson Journalism Review
Summer, 2008
Harvey Cashore is not a household name for most Canadians. But the fact that these same Canadians now know of Brian Mulroney's financial relationship with German lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber and the complicated ins-and-outs of the Airbus fandango is largely the result of Cashore, a man whom The Globe and Mail's managing news editor Colin MacKenzie calls "the godfather of investigative journalism."
Working primarily for CBC-TV's the fifth estate, Cashore has been on the Airbus story for more than 13 years - a lifetime in reportage circles where a one-month stint on a particular topic is often described as "investigative journalism." Amazingly, for all of Cashore's revelations, research and persistence, Ryerson Review of Journalism writer Canice Leung notes that in those 13 years, Cashore, now 44, has done only six Airbus segments. Along the way there also have been reports on insider lottery wins in Ontario, Pepsi-Cola's lobbying of Health Canada, bodychecking injuries in junior hockey and Paul Martin's business dealings, among others.
Leung uses her profile of Cashore as a springboard to explore the state of investigative or enterprise reporting in Canada, both on television and in print. The public, she suggests, wants what one of her interviewees calls " 'protein news,' stuff that contains real meat;" however, this makes "few friends among potential advertisers" and bosses at some media conglomerates who fret about the cost.