Entries by Philip Turner

Taking a Page from Honourary Canadian

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As readers of this blog may have noticed, I started a second blog in 2013, called Honourary Canadian: Seeing Canada From Away. After starting this blog in 2011, I was often posting about Canada, and a couple years in, decided to start a second site devoted to Canadian topics, where I’d offer my views of Canada for Canadians and others interested in the country. I aspire to the perspective and the work of Alistair Cooke, who broadcast and wrote knowledgeably and sensitively about America, after moving to the US from England. Like this site, at the new blog I write about Canadian books, publishing, live music, media, and politics, with the cross-cultural perspective of a respectful outsider. I’ve been sharing HC links here from time to time and integrating the two sites one with another, for instance setting up a feed so the latest posts from each site are readily visible and linked to on the other. The two blogs are sort of like siblings, with this one the older brother.

I’m posting here today to let Great Gray Bridge readers know I recently published a new entry at Honourary Canadian called Why I Started This Blog and Call It Honourary Canadian, which explores my lifelong interest in the neighbor to the north. I invite you to read it. It’s a memoiristic piece that chronicles many trips I’ve made in Canada since childhood, beginning with Expo ’67 when I was just twelve years old; authors whose books I’ve read and published; bands I’ve seen live and become friendly with; and reflections on differences between the US and Canada, and the media in both countries. Along with the essay, I’ve included dozens of scenic photographs, book covers, band photos, and scans of letters I received from Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, with whom I had a lengthy correspondence when I ran Undercover Books in the 1980s.

At the top of this entry is a shot of that new post, which will give you a sense of what the new site looks like if you’ve not visited yet. Just as I found a visual touchstone for this blog from a scenic landmark—the George Washington Bridge, aka the Great Gray Bridge, and the little red lighthouse—I found visual inspiration for the new site in a true wonder of the world, the majestic Percé Rock (aka le rocher percé or ‘pierced rock’), a huge rock face on eastern Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, a veritable lobster tail jutting in to the Gulf of St. Lawrence where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. Below is a pic of what that post looks like. If you enjoy awe-inspiring scenery, I recommend you check out the whole post, which includes many photos I took during a visit there in 1988. In fact, I invite you to visit Honourary Canadian, and have a look around. 

Is Some Sort of Journalistic Karma Striking the New York Times?

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To expand on my tweet, it is Aron Pilhofer that’s leaving the New York Times and joining the Guardian now as Executive Editor for digital. As is clear from the Guardian‘s announcement, he was recruited by Janine Gibson, beginning last March, she points out, to make clear it was underway before the recent unpleasantness. Gibson has found herself an inadvertent participant in the Jill Abramson firing debacle, as she had been in the process of being courted by Abramson, and other Times bigs including Dean Baquet, now the top editorial exec at the Times replacing Abramson. A continuing disagreement among the principals in the imbroglio is what Abramson said to Baquet about the likely level of Gibson’s role, if she came to the Times. Baquet says Abramson never told him they’d be co-managing editors. For what it’s worth, I think he ought to have sensed she’d be a senior figure, with a great rep preceding her at the Guardian. Did Baquet underestimate her likely station, hence his dismay upon learning of it? Whichever is the case, it seems clear that Abramson never had a chance to offer Gibson any job at all before Sulzberger acted to get ride of her, following lunch with an angry Baquet. I love the irony then of the fact that Janine Gibson, onetime recruiting target of the Times, just “pilfered,” in a manner of speaking, a bright new hire named “Pilhofer,” an improbable aural accident of two words sharing several sounds.

I might not have bothered to tweet this yesterday, or written this follow up—the lethal politics of the NY Times don’t interest me that much—if not for the high irony of the new hire.

I had an experience of my own involving the Times. From 1997-2000 I was Executive Editor at Random House for the Times Books imprint, a long running line of books for which the Times licensed their name to titles often written by their reporters, or drawn generally from the newspaper’s deep reporting. I liased with editors and staff at the newspaper, dreaming up book ideas with sections like the Sunday Book Review (Books of the Century); Real Estate (“If You’re Thinking of Living In . . .“; City (FYI); and Dining (The Best of Craig Claiborne). I also got to do a fun analog job of photo-editing, publishing illustrated wall and desk calendars drawn from the Times’ 100-plus-year-old Photo Archive, once a physical place that is now digitized.

As the imprint liaison I was invited to a few Times parties. I recall going to one for a new Anna Quindlen novel. I arrived on the early side. At first it seemed a light, fizzy crowd, certainly no tensions evident. Suddenly I took note of a rising anxiety in the room as senior honchos arrived, one by one, each seeming to jockey for positioning in some hierarchy fully visible only to those in the power circle, though the rest of us in the room could sense it. The toasts and encomiums that came when the author was feted seemed to be done through gritted teeth, as eyes darted around the room. Watching the takedown of Abramson committed by Sulzberger reminded me of that Times party, which I recall leaving as soon as the speeches were finished.

As a closer here, I want to share the succinctly apt tweet put out by Janine Gibson the day Jill Abramson’s firing was announced by the NY Times.

Observing Holidays without Exclusion, including this Mother’s Day

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PT & SylviaI don’t like when holidays became all but compulsory to observe. With religious holidays it’s particularly unwelcome, but even secular celebrations can get that way, carrying the weight of oppressive tyranny by a majority group. It’s like the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on prayer, basically overlooking that in that case, the public meetings in Rome, NY, began with prayers of one dominant faith, over and over again, for years. The plaintiffs documented an almost total monopoly ely Christian benedictions, yet the majority of justices voted to allow these regular observances, as if the exclusivity didn’t matter, or shouldn’t have been seen as contrary to the US constitution.


It was the above tweet by Mona Eltahawy that got me thinking about all this, even as I’ve been enjoying memories of my own mother and my whole family, today. Eltahawy’s an outspoken Egyptian-American feminist I admire, about whom I first wrote in 2011, when she was beaten and mistreated by Egyptian security officials. I approve of her affirmation that a person who isn’t a parent is not a lesser person. Also, let’s remember that many of our holidays are promoted and brought to us by the greeting card industry, the chocolatiers, the florists (in NYC, the cost of flowers is higher on holidays). Those businesses are entitled to make a living, too, but sometimes it all just get to be too much.

With that slightly misanthropic sentiment out of the way, I want to say happy Mother’s Day to all who observe it, and note how grateful we are to our mothers, those who came before and those in our midst still, improving the lives of their children and so many people around them.  Here are pictures of all, or nearly all, the mothers in my life, along with other relations. Included in these pictures are my late mother Sylvia Turner (1921-2006), who married Earl (1918-1994); Sylvia’s father, Louis Shiff (1901-94); Earl’s sister, my Aunt Francis (1922-2009); Sylvia and Earl’s eldest child, my sister Pamela, mother of Ben and Emma; Sylvia and Earl’s middle child, my late brother Joel (1951-2009); me with my mother Sylvia; and Kyle Gallup, my wife and mother of our son, Ewan Munro Turner, a baby in 1996.

Indie Musical Instrument Store Flourishing 100s of Miles from a Big City

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I was delighted to see this article in the New Hampshire Union-Leader, reporting on Northern Lights, in Littleton, NH, where my singer-songwriter son Ewan Turner has gotten one of his favorite guitars, a Fender acoustic. The store was founded by Dan and Moochco Salomon, two friends and classmates from Franconia College, where we all went to school in the 1970s. It’s a good-news article by John Koziol emphasizing how the couple have managed, since 1978, to make the store in to a destination for musicians and avid players. They carry keyboards, drums, and other instruments, and really specialize with a fabulous guitar selection, with instrument prices that range from $100 to $95,000, the latter for a 1957 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop. They operate from a rustic wooden building they own that was erected in 1833, on Main Street of one of the most livable small towns in the eastern U.S., roughly equidistant from Boston, Portland, ME, Burlington, VT, and Montreal, Quebec. They carry many fine guitar brands, including Martin, Taylor and Santa Cruz, which has only sixty authorized dealers in the whole country, and benefit from what Koziol reports is, “according to the April 2014 issue of Music Trades magazine…a ‘golden age’ for acoustic guitars with the market for acoustics costing more than $1,500 up 40 percent in 2013 over 2012.” I would add it seems to me a phenomenon similar to that which is fueling the renewal of vinyl’s popularity as a format for recorded sound.

I’m very happy that this store operated by my friends Dan and Moochco is doing well, thirty-six years after they first opened their doors. It reminds me that yesterday, May 4th, was the thirty-sixth anniversary of the opening of Undercover Books, the indie bookstore chain that I operated from 1978-85 with my sibling and parents, and which still ran as an online book ordering service until my brother Joel’s death in 2009. Congrats to Dan and Moochco, I hope to see them at Northern Lights sometime soon! Meantime, I invite you to see a picture of them in this screenshot from the article, and read it all via this link. Northern Lights

New B.B. King Documentary Opening May 21

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Last year I saw a great documentary on the blues, “Born in Chicago,” and now it looks like this film on the life and career of B.B. King will also be terrific. At B.B.’s site is a full listing of the more than twenty-five cities in which the film will be opening later this month. In NYC it will be showing at Village East Cinemas.

Bonus for guitar players: here’s a blog post showing how B.B. King played, something you can apply to your own playing.

#FridayReads, April 25, Robert Palmer’s “Blues & Chaos”

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