Men’s style journalist, editor of Toronto’s The Hogtown Rake menswear blog, and veteran CBC Radio producer Pedro Mendes’s TEN GARMENTS EVERY MAN SHOULD OWN: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO BUILDING A PERMANENT WARDROBE, an illustrated guide to dressing well by building a classic wardrobe, an approach to identifying sustainable apparel that aligns with 21st-century environmental values, to Scott Fraser at Dundurn Press, in a nice deal, in a pre-empt, for publication in fall 2020, by Philip Turner at Philip Turner Book Productions (Canada).
philipsturner@gmail.com

I first met Pedro in 2012, during one of many visits I made to Toronto in the first half of the present decade. I flew up there just about every June for the annual NXNE Music Festival, which in those years featured a lot of great indie rock n’ roll bands, especially Canadian bands, whose live shows I wrote about for this blog, and my other site, The Great Gray Bridge. A thriving bunch of friends coalesced around the infectious music; the community-building spirit of CBC Radio 3 daily host in Vancouver Grant Lawrence and other creative CBCers, such as Pedro, who produced a daily show in Toronto for Radio 3 with CBC host Craig Norris, himself lead singer for a terrific group The Kramdens.

A lively blog to which fans and hosts contributed was also glue for the online community. In 2012, about forty people including Grant gathered at the CBC HQ in downtown Toronto, where Pedro met us on an upper floor and led the group on a Canadian media and music fan’s dream tour of the storied CBC studios.

Some years after that, Pedro had left his full-time job at CBC to embark on a freelance writing career and we met for coffee when I was in the city again. He had always written on men’s style, and now was hopeful it would become his main focus. He was interviewing garment-makers and designers and writing about their work for his menswear blog, which he began in 2014. As a professional in book development I encouraged him to begin drafting a book proposal that once ready I would pitch to publishers in the US and Canada. The proposal expressed Pedro’s belief that , “Dressing well matters and is readily within the grasp of any man, no matter his station in life or his age. The problem today is that men don’t know where to turn for help in building a wardrobe that is classic in style, fit and quality.” We began shopping the proposal, and though it took some time, we forged a terrific deal in recent weeks with Dundurn Press, who last February had announced new ownership, under Toronto tech entrepreneurs Lorne Wallace, Jason Martin, and Randall Howard, and a focused new direction with publisher Scott Fraser at the helm. Pedro is excited to have his book become part of all the new initiatives at Dundurn, as am I, also for the welcome renewal and culmination of many visits to Toronto with friendships and connections among creative Canadians.

While Pedro’s attention will naturally now turn to finishing the manuscript, you may want to know about his latest completed work, which in September aired on CBC Radio’s Ideas program titled, The Problem with Jeans“, documenting the deleterious environmental impact caused by the way blue jeans aren manufactured, especially since the 1970s when “distressed jeans” became a lamentable fashion trend. In addition to Pedro’s blog, you can find him on Instagram, where his handle is @thehogtownrake, where he has more than 4000 followers, a number sure to grow now with the book deal. I’ll add that while we now have a Canadian publisher, I am still working to place book rights in the States, so please reach out if you know of a US editor or publisher who may be interested in the book.

I

I don’t have any data harvesting software that picks up people’s info, even when they don’t leave it deliberately.

II

If you choose to subscribe to my blog—which you can do by clicking through to “Sign up to get New Posts By Email” on the right-hand rail adjacent to this post—that just means you get an email announcing each new post I publish, but my referral system doesn’t do—and will never do anything—with your email address, other than to automatically send you the new posts.

III

If I ever were to email you directly and personally it might be to announce something major, like the creation of a wholly new blog, but not randomly or incessantly.

IV

If you happen to subscribe to this blog, or to my other site, The Great Gray Bridge, thanks for doing that. But whether you do,or not, I promise to keep your data away from any commercial users. Thanks most of all for reading The Great Gray Bridge and Honourary Canadian.

For more information, please visit this web page.

If I had time, I could write a post about how it is that Canadian comedy has been leading the comic parade since the 1980s. Until then, here’s a video of one of my favorite sketches by SCTV, when he played Babe Ruth. Candy plays the skit in a Yankees uniform, visiting the hospital room of a supposedly mortally ill kid. Babe’s been told he’s supposed to try to make the kid feel better, even if only for an hour. So he promises the kid he’ll hit a home run for him. But the kid, played by a good kid actor, acts all entitled and selfish—”Gee, Babe will you hit two home runs for me?” Gee, Babe will you dance around on one foot with your hand on your cap and singing a song for me, Babe?” It’s a subversive little playlet.

For the record, I shld add a long parade of live hosts worked @CBCRadio3, inc @LisachristCBC @amandaputz @Tariqmusiq @grahamwright and the folks mentioned below in this thread. By 2015-16, most had fallen away, while Grant Lawrence&Lana Gay were the last on-air. #GoneNotForgotten

— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) March 25, 2018

At the Great Gray Bridge I wrote about Davies in 2013 on the 100th anniversary of his birth, when CanadaPost made a stamp in his honor. With my web designer Harry Candelario, I later adapted the stamp into a motif for this blog.

Elsewhere, on Honourary Canadian, I shared several letters I received from Davies when I was selling his books, and marketing executives at his publisher, Viking Press, asked me to encourage other publishers to read and recommend his books. One of Davies’ letters was a response to my question for him after a visit I had made to London, which included a pilgrimage to a statue honoring the great thespian Henry Irving. Davies wrote to me on May 30, 1980:

“You will not find any magicians or jugglers under Henry Irving’s statue in London now because they have put flower beds around it, but at the time that Magnus Eisengrim [of The Deptford Trilogy] performed there it was flat pavement and street performers of all kinds gave their exhibitions there and on the outskirts there were always a number of pavement artists, who are also a vanishing breed. Unfortunately, life is becoming so heavily policed in our Welfare State that all these picturesque people are vanishing, but, when I saw them there when I was a young man, I always thought how pleased Irving would be that these humblest members of his profession were gathering, so to speak, under his cloak for protection.”  

I love Davies’ phrase “pavement artist” and the twinkle in his eye that appears in all these renderings of his audaciously bearded countenance!  #CANLit

Click here for tickets to the Sept 13 show at Rockwood Music Hall. That’s a venue friendly to acoustic or unplugged acts. I wonder if Matt, who can rock with the best of them (I like think of him as Canada’s Springsteen, or a bit like Tom Petty), will be playing with a band or on his own. I’ll found out a month from today!

Link to Matt Mays’ new song, “Sentimental Sins”:

Bonus link—youtube of Matt Mays’s “City of Lakes”: