Year: 2018
Berlin, 1984
A divided city before it reunited When I visited West Berlin in 1984 to cover the Filmfestspiele, or Berlin Film Festival, the city was thoroughly divided. Much of my day there was spent exploring the two sides of the city. In the 1920s, the 1960s then again in the 1980s, Berlin was at the centre…
San Francisco – City of art
SAN FRANCISCO — Despite its problems, tops among them a stratospheric level of housing prices and vast homelessness, this city remains a magnet for creative design of all sorts. A compendium of art we saw at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF-MOMA) helps launch our new Cities Cities section at the davidwinch.website.The sensational…
Bertolucci, cinema’s past — or its future?
Bertolucci and the European film adventure Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci’s recent death brought to mind all his artistic achievements, some of which have fallen into disrepute in a different cultural climate. His later Hollywood-funded work was more popular (and Oscar-winning) but did not get the critical applause of the early films. And his treatment of…
Can tigers bounce back?
Let’s take a break from ecological doom-saying for a moment. Tigers are among the species that have received good news recently, as in this Nepal report : https://tinyurl.com/ybcvspe2 Back in 2011, I looked at the tiger issue in another light, as a UN Special reporter, interviewing the head of UN wildlife-conservation agency CITES by David…
Sartre : a free man
Sartre: still alive today? Jean-Paul Sartre died in April 1980. Curiously, that was the month I graduated in Philosophy, after studying Sartre’s writing intensely. I hastily composed a detailed obit/essay, which was somehow published in the Montreal daily Le Devoir. For me, college was serious business: I studied a lot of politics and philosophy, working…
Thai elephants get some love
From the archives: 2011 Elephants have been in trouble in northern Thailand for decades, but now efforts to conserve and revive their population are showing promise By David Winch Photos, Pierre-Michel Virot and Thai Elephant Centre UN Special magazine, May 2011 First things first: elephants are fun to watch. A lot of fun. But just…
Spy — satire with a stiletto
The 1980s were golden for satirists in New York City, as blowhard personalities such as mayor Ed Koch, the Yankees’ George Steinbrenner and garish hustler Donald Trump dominated the mediascape. Celebrity headliners from Spike Lee and Madonna to Darryl Strawberry also crowded the tabloid fronts. Upstart magazine Spy took full aim, with a brazen style…
A phony crisis: tourism blooms in Montreal
My impression from discussions over recent years with New Yorkers and Europeans, especially young people, is that they have an almost absurdly positive view of Canada generally and Montreal specifically
Census and sensibility: Anglo angst deflated [2018]
Talk of decline and ‘exodus’ comes easily to media, but federal figures are more realistic by David Winch, October 1, 2017 MONTREAL – The touchiness in Quebec about demographic issues could be described, apologies to Jane Austen, as census and sensibility. Following the release of the 2016 mid-term federal census (in August 2017), reactions to…
Havana home run: Cuba loves its baseball
by David Winch, Montreal Gazette March 13, 2015 HAVANA – It is late February, sweltering hot, and the Cuban baseball season is in full swing. We are racing in a shiny 1955 Dodge taxi to the stadium, where hometown team Industriales will face cross-island rivals Pinar del Rio this evening, in game 2 of a…