Bruce Wark

I must have been really wicked in a past life because in this one, I’m required to scan news releases. On Tuesday, November 8, I noticed one from Canada NewsWire, a PR outfit that gets paid to send a daily flood of promotional blurbs into newsrooms. The release, from the giant condom maker Durex, claimed […]

I was leaning against a meeting room wall on the ramparts of Citadel Hill last week when businessman Bill Black waltzed in to the strains of the Stones’ Paint It Black. About 75 portly, south end Tories applauded enthusiastically as Mick and the boys wailed about death and depression. “I see the girls walk by […]

“OK, what about banning cigarettes totally?” asked radio talk jock Andrew Krystal last Friday as he tried to pick a fight with a caller named James. Krystal, host of Maritime Morning on the new Rogers News 95.7, added, “I can’t go out and buy morphine. It’s bad for me, right?” “Yeah, no, absolutely,” James blurted […]

First we had Bacon, Tory premier Roger that is. Then we had Hamm, as in Tory premier John. Who will be the next Tory Sausage? Expect the media to be abuzz with speculation in the coming months. Most political news these days is all about top dogs, er, I mean, top wieners. Last week for […]

It’s been 25 years since the Terry Fox Marathon of Hope and still the hype continues. The dogged one-legged athlete hobbled halfway across Canada in 1980 before he had to abandon his marathon after cancer spread to his lungs. Fox died 10 months later, only 22. Since then, millions of runners have collected hundreds of […]

It’s depression time at the Green Toad, the glass building that squats on the Halifax waterfront near the foot of Sackville Street. Journalists who toil in the Toad’s Daily News offices worry “the people’s paper” is going down the tubes. Shaune MacKinlay, one of its best reporters, recently departed to the greener pastures of PR. […]

I spun Mozart’s Greatest Hits recently as I perused a lengthy discussion paper on the development of the SuperCity’s new cultural policy. A Cultural Advisory Committee composed of two city councillors and an assortment of citizens, artists and kulturcrats released the paper in June. To the foreboding strains of Mozart’s famous mass for the dead […]

On a cloudless September morning four years ago, hijackers commandeered two passenger jets and flew them into a showcase of American capitalism. The 110-storey twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center collapsed in less than two hours. The American writer, Lewis Mumford once described those towers as dinosaurs, examples of “the purposeless giantism and technological […]