Canada’s public life has been diminished today by the death of Jack Layton, leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and of the New Democratic Party. Known to millions of Canadians simply as “Jack,” Layton embodied the kind of decent, energetic, principled, and optimistic political leadership that so many of us wish to see more of on Parliament Hill. Though he was a visionary party leader and skilled at pulling the levers of power on the Hill, his achievements, in many ways, transcend partisanship. He was a champion of causes and people even when—perhaps especially when—there was no electoral advantage in being so. That commitment to his principles—that everyone deserves opportunity, that our affluent society has a duty to share its wealth equitably, that every voice has something to contribute—endeared him to people across the political spectrum (and made him a scourge to a deserving few). His family, his party, and his country are sharing a tremendous loss today.

The press and the web are buzzing with tributes to Jack Layton now, and memories of the effects he had, large and small, on our civic lives. We’re not going to repeat them here; everyone has their own thoughts and can share them as they like—or contemplate them in silence, as we’re choosing to do today. Please feel free to leave your thoughts below, but perhaps the best thing all of us can do now is to think about what the life and career of Jack Layton means to each of us—and how to preserve that spirit in struggles yet to come.

Update: Jack Layton’s parting letter to Canadians was just released, and it is a stirring read.

“Total Eclipse” (2005) by Will Munro. Photo by Sean Weaver, courtesy Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

It is impossible to speak of Will Munro. It is easy to talk about Will Munro(s).

Will Munro, the artist/activist/social wizard/impresario and all around wunderkind, passed away one lovely, clear-as-a-bell summer morning in 2010. He was 36.

In that too-short time, Will produced an enormous amount of highly influential, DIY-infused art, reinvigorated the Toronto, and by extension the Canadian, and some argue international queer club scenes—and I support that argument, having seen Will’s influence up close in countless cities far and wide. He empowered an entire generation of artists, who felt the ossified Canadian art scene was not for them, to simply make/display/distribute their art on their own terms.

You’ll note I’m using the “/” rather a lot—I have no choice. Will was so many things, Will made so many things.

I generally distrust the concept of “legacy,” but not in the case of Will Munro. His simplest and most inspired conceit was that queers of all stripes (homo-normative, hetero-normative, just plain fucking crazy, what have you) have far more in common than not, and can share a big sandbox with joy. And we did. For a decade, Will ran the legendary Vazaleen parties— mad, dressed-to-thrill events that spawned many, many subsequent cultural products and collaborations. And that’s putting it mildly.

The parties and the underlying concept—shared space for a diverse population—were both quickly copied, largely because a generation of queers had grown up under the segregationist, essentialist politics of the ’80s–’90s (dykes only go to dyke spaces, fags only go to fag spaces…oh, it was all so tiresome, so numbing), politics that no longer made sense, no longer reflected the day-today reality of the third wave of queer liberation. Suddenly, we all had a meeting place, and we used it.

Now it’s time for a more rigorous examination of Will’s beautiful, sexy art. Will’s social contribution is well-documented (and I’m doing it again), but his highly original art practice, one fuelled by punk-rock aesthetics, righteous rage, and delicious impertinence, rough homemade fashion, sex-worker rights, and queer youth advocacy, club and DJ culture, anti-corporatism, and, less remarked on, his long fascination with, and promotion of, queer cultural history (an interest that made him, again, unique in his generation) has been, to date, not as well-considered.

I sense a sudden boom in Munro studies coming. Retrospectives and monographs galore. More gifts from a relentless giver. It’s the least we can do.

But this is not the place for academic pursuits. Let other people get post-grad degrees off Will’s back.

Right here, right now, I just want to say thank you. I miss you, Will.

With the rise of paid death notices, the old-fashioned obit's days may be numbered. Photo by Graham F. Scott.

Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs’ conspicuously detailed death announcement, accidentally published by Bloomberg news service in 2008, revealed a little-known fact about the craft of writing obituaries: the blood doesn’t have to have gone cold before someone writes the first draft of your final epitaph. In fact, there doesn’t even have to be a reason to suspect that you’re in dire straits for an editor to assign a writer the task of encapsulating your entire life history into six inches of column space.

That’s why it might not be too early to start writing about the death of the obituary itself. Obituaries may not be dead and gone, but they’ve certainly seen better days. And as things stand now, obituaries may just predecease the rest of the newspaper industry. “The dead beat,” as it’s called by professional obituary writers, may finally live up to its name.

“In this country I think there are five or six people left on ‘the dead beat,’” says the Globe and Mail’s Alan Hustak, a 30-year veteran obituary writer with 700 obits to his name. “I would venture to guess all across North America there are probably no more than 100 of us.”

Most newspapers don’t have the luxury of having a full-time obituary writer anymore, he says, since they’re too busy trying to survive with a reduced staff. Instead, they buy articles from American wire services. “If you look at Canwest newspapers, very few Canadians die now, but you’ll have a detailed obituary about the floor salesman who worked at Filene’s Basement or a hairdresser for Marilyn Monroe,” says Hustak.

John Heald, a funeral director by trade and vice-president of sales for Tributes.com, stands to gain from the newspaper industry’s losses. “If you look at the current state of the newspaper industry now versus what it was three years ago,” says Heald, “the only section of the newspaper that hasn’t successfully migrated to the internet are death notices and obituaries.”

The brainchild of Monster.ca founder Jeff Taylor, Tributes.com hopes to change that by cataloguing new and archived obituaries going back to 1936 from those submitted to newspapers by funeral homes. As a business model, literary obituaries aren’t nearly as profitable to newspapers as paid obituaries from the families of the bereaved.

“In the newspaper industry, there used to be an editorial staff that wrote obituaries that told a life story and which would take up a couple of inches of a newspaper,” says Heald. “But what would happen was an obituary was always free, because it was just good content, and that couldn’t be supported.”

What remains, says Heald, is a paid death notice in the form of classified advertising.

“It’s too expensive to tell everyone how much of a great person this guy was and his interests and his hobbies, so the days of some really robust good editorial obituaries being written are far and few between,” he says.

Obituaries for the rich and famous, however, are still in tight supply.

Marilyn Johnson, author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, got her start writing celebrity obits at Life magazine in 1997, following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Many of her assignments, however, were for people who still had a pulse.

“I actually had assignments from a series of magazines to write obits of celebrities who were presumed to be on their way out, and everybody I wrote about sort of got a fresh wind,” she said. Her obituary of Katharine Hepburn, originally intended for Life, didn’t see the light of day after the magazine predeceased Hepburn by three years when it folded in 2000.

Hustak, who left the Montreal Gazette in March of last year after 22 years on the obit desk, says people often stop him on the street to say, “Oh, you’ve left the Gazette? That must mean no one’s going to die anymore.”

Hustak hasn’t stopped writing obits entirely, and even if he did you would still be able to run into his byline for years to come, since he has a cache of 100 unpublished pieces just waiting for their recipients to expire.

So could the obituary industry go on living longer than expected? If the experience of obit writers is anything to go on, mortality is a fickle thing.

“One of those obits I’ve already written was written 14 years ago because I was told this man had one week to live,” says Hustak. “I had lunch with him two weeks ago. Only [God] knows.”

Len Dobbin, the most important audience member in Montreal's jazz scene. Illustration by Aislin.

In early fall of 1950, Len Dobbin stepped out of a listening booth on Rue Ste-Catherine in Montreal to find himself confronted by five New York jazz enthusiasts seeking potential founders for a satellite jazz appreciation society. Only 15 years old at the time, Dobbin had never met enough fans to think the project would succeed, but he agreed to give it a shot. As it turned out, there was enough interest in the city to sustain the club for almost a decade, but, more importantly for Montreal, the experience was enough to get Dobbin hooked indefinitely.

He spent the next six decades as a self-described “friend to jazz,” though his tireless enthusiasm as a journalist, photographer, promoter, researcher, and fan—almost entirely without pay—suggests an unusually demanding definition of friendship. His years post-retirement were dedicated to promoting young musicians, popularizing jazz in print and on the air, connecting musicians to one another, and bringing talent to the city. At 74, his stories and encyclopedic memory bordered on mythical: the man had photographed Miles Davis, gone clubbing with John Coltrane, earned a song dedication by baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams, and hosted some 1,500 radio shows.

When Dobbin died in July—after falling ill at his favourite Montreal jazz haunt during the world’s largest jazz festival—the city lost a great player in (surely not coincidentally) one of the healthiest jazz communities on the continent. But it is hard to tabulate Dobbin’s impact. It’s also hard to understand precisely his role: he was a trained accountant, a man who reportedly owned a jazz instrument for only a day in his life, but also, by all accounts, he was an integral part of the music scene.

Perhaps Dobbin’s passion offers us a model. As one of the first widely popularized improvisational art forms, jazz is often cited as a performance by all involved: without a score or conductor to follow, a piece relies on performers to generate its shape and depends on listeners to create its meaning, by becoming aware of the possibilities presented by each shifting cadence and making sense of how they are resolved. Never a musician, Dobbin was, perhaps, the ultimate listener: he heard potential in Montreal’s artists and denizens and did his best to realize its meaning.

Poster for John Hughes' "The Breakfast Club," 1985.

You probably won’t see his face on t-shirts anytime soon, but for a wide-sweeping generation of twenty- to fortysomethings, the late John Hughes falls just short of being a cultural Messiah. The screenwriter and director became the latest Summer of Death casualty yesterday morning at age 59, and while most of his fans probably wouldn’t be able to identify his mug in a lineup, the mere mention of his name conjures a strange brew of nostalgia and admiration. For many of us, those first encounters with Hughes’ films tugged on the same sentimental strings as our first illicit beer swigs and sloppy make-out sessions.

While my dad was an alcohol and drug counselor in the mid-1980s, he somehow got his hands on a pre-release, bootleg VHS copy of The Breakfast Club—arguably the landmark of Hughes’ lasting cultural imprint. He showed this earnest film about high school cliques, rebellion, and alienation to teen addicts at the treatment centre where he worked throughout the ‘80s before retiring it to the VHS cabinet of our home’s basement, where I would discover it a few years later. It resonated then, and it resonates now.

Regardless of how high school actually was, an entire generation’s adolescent recollections have been conveniently repackaged into John Hughes-esque vignettes thanks to Hughes’ patented ability to create lovable ingénues out of self-aware, articulate teenaged misfits. He made talking about feelings—and publicly obsessing, rehashing, and ruminating—par for the adolescent course, which would explain why my father saw the icebreaking appeal in showing Hughes films to troubled teens and why, ever since, calculated representations of high school angst have become standard criteria for both small and silver screen.

Sure, Hughes’ films have their own problems, being notably absent of racial and cultural diversity and prone towards a Cinderella-trite treatment of class interactions. Still, we forgive the filmmaker for these shortcomings. After all, Hughes didn’t create the teen screen genre; he just grabbed it by the horns and made it into something a bit more honest.