IT’S A FEW MINUTES after a Friday midnight in Vancouver. And warm. The promise of summer is in the air. Beer, bare thighs, open shirts, aimless hippies. The promise of trouble for the city’s 750-man police force. Bill Moldowan, 26, rookie cop — a wiry six-foot-some, boyish face, grade-12 education — is just beginning his eight-hour shift.By Douglas Marshall15 min
In his last article for this magazine, Maclean’s Ottawa Editor examines the state of separatism in Quebec and dangers facing René Lévesque’s moderate leadership
STAN PERSKY, 27, puckish intellectual, prison martyr (three days for loitering), the acknowledged Socrates of Vancouver’s hippie symposium, sits sipping Scotch-and-soda as if it were hemlock and talking — erupting — with nervous verbal energy.By Douglas Marshall8 min
“I’M CLEARING OUT this attic,” the lady was saying, “and it’s filled with a lot of weird old junk. It looks just like your apartment. Maybe you should come over.” The lady happened to be a cleaning lady and she was describing the attic-clearing to two of her once-a-week clients, Doug and Hedda Johnson, a handsome young Toronto couple who make their living as illustrators.By MARJORIE HARRIS7 min
Above Ground by Jack Ludwig (Little, Brown, $6.95): The narrator of this novel spends much of his Winnipeg childhood in bed with a gimpy hip. and much of his young manhood in bed with his other weakness — women. But the real casualty is the novel itself; Ludwig (who will be writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto this fall) lets it bleed to death in a hemorrhage of pseudoJoycean language.
DURING THE PAST decade or so, with the influx to North America of many great European films with off-beat themes and characters, the idea has flourished among certain allegedly sophisticated movie makers and movie viewers that any film dealing with peculiar people and made in the style of a whiz-bang European soufflé is automatically more “artistic” and honest about life than anything Hollywood puts out for “mere entertainment.”By Arthur Zeldin5 min
DUST OFF one ancient and ringing political cliché — The People’s Choice. It's suddenly valid currency again. The movement isn’t as strong or as widespread as some millennially minded optimists would have you believe, nor is it much like the “participatory democracy" the activists of the New Left have in mind.By NORMAN DEPOE5 min
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