Jeffrey Loewen

Many of us instinctively nodded our heads when John Lennon’s song “Revolution” from The Beatles’ White Album (1968) first hit our ears with its slow-grooving guitars and sardonic lyricism: You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world... The song was one of Lennon’s first forays into the...

Perhaps I am growing less tolerant in my dotage, but I have had it, already, with some of the blindered and jejune commentary that I hear from too many citizens in this country. Particularly when it comes to folks whose smug self-satisfaction with their lives leaves them impervious to the nuances that might change their...

Remembrance. Bearing witness. Story-telling. Commemoration. Resistance. These terms have been sharpening my mind in the days leading up to today, the 27th of January. Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Russian liberation of the site of so much death and suffering, a name that resides in historical memory as one of the most infamous...

I search in vain for the Thin Men. My partner Wendy and I are currently luxuriating in the sun and surf of Ixtapa, Mexico. It’s a wonderful interruption to our lives as wage slaves in “el Norte” where we scrimp and save for occasions like our glorious Now. And yet it´s disconcerting to a Thin...

Are you Charlie Hebdo? Are you Charlie Hebdo? And what about you? Are you Charlie too? What about your Wednesday morning monologist? Am I Charlie? There’s been a lot of sanctimonious shite shed about what we in the pampered-puss West consider sacred “freedoms.” Freedom of speech, freedom of the Press: the words roll off the...

Despite the fact that ours is a consumption-driven society madly obsessed with the peccadilloes of our gorgeous pantheon of celebrities, I propose that we talk a bit about politics. That’s right, politics. Canadian politics. “Show business for ugly people,” some call it. And they may be right. After all, scan the benches of our House...

Your scribe is happy to bid adieu to 2014. It’s been an interesting year, to say the least; but it is with ever hopeful eyes that I look forward to 2015 as the year in which we say “so long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, goodbye” to the calumnies and deceits of the current government. There’s an...

Family gatherings can be marvelous measures of familial love and support. The crackle and spark from a well-stoked hearth, the mellow numbing of mind after a few cocktails shared in the proper spirit of the season, the laid-back luxuriating in one’s favourite chair with the soft chatter of folks well-fed -- all of these aspects...

We marked the 34th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder on Monday the eighth of December. The failure to neutralize an unsettling agent in America's midst by the paranoid Nixon administration and the machinations of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was carried out, eventually, by Mark David Chapman,...

For those of us able still to remember a Canada lacking endless opportunities for distraction as a result of a seemingly limitless selection of “TV channels” on a dizzying array of media platforms, and an even greater number of traditional and internet-based radio stations, there was always the presence of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. At...

As the polar vortex shifts the seasons into a wintery overdrive, even the ordinarily balmy and frivolous Thompson-Okanagan has taken on a grey pall. The mercury is heading south and the frost-tipped ears after a morning walk suggest that it’s time to think about booking some time down south again. For years now my partner...

In the southern Ontario of my youth in the Seventies, we were surrounded by reminders of war. Every little town, every larger city, had its monuments and memorials erected to commemorate the fallen, usually young men of British descent whose names, borne in stone, stared back at us, muted reminders of mass suffering too horrible...

Against my better judgement, I found myself hankering for a breakfast sandwich last month. The handful of vitamins and Ibuprofen that normally steady a guy’s nerves weren’t cutting it, so I decided to chance a stroke and snag something breakfast-like from the offerings off a fast-food menu board. Entering the plastic environment of the place...