Between a Rock and a High Place

It’s Wednesday afternoon and Sonnie Trotter has made his way to an Internet café in El Paso, Texas. Not that he was dodging the interview, but it took some effort to get the Canadian alpinist on the phone. Trotter is a professional adventure rock climber, and when your job is hunting down the world’s most challenging lines, it means immersing yourself in some fairly remote locations.

“It’s like a killer instinct. It’s a really raw, beautiful thing that comes out of you,” says Trotter, one of the most prolific climbers of the past decade, as he describes his body’s response to an especially challenging route. “I feel like I’m lighter, I’m strong, I’m sharper – all those kinds of things occur. It’s a very fleeting moment, but it’s a very addicting feeling. It’s almost drug-like.”
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A Day in the Life of Emmanuelle Gattuso

A private express elevator glides to the 20th storey of a Cumberland Street condo, opening up to Emmanuelle Gattuso’s immaculate oasis in the sky. The stark white walls of wonder act as blank canvases for contemporary artists like Tim Whiten and Barbara Steinman, leading the way to a self-fulfilling great room. It’s 10 a.m. on a mid-January morning and a thick billow of morning fog is dampening the impact of 11 foot-high floor-to-ceiling windows, which on any given Sunday would offer an unrivalled Yorkvillian view.

What starts to feel like trespassing after-hours at an art gallery is quickly curtailed by the raucous voices of Gattuso’s poodles, which protectively ensure that not a single soul slips by. “This is James and this is Stewart,” she says, stepping out of her office. It’s not what you think. While she may have a wonderful life, the pups Read more

Design Supernova

Before a basketball court on a roof of a five-storey home in Lower Manhattan could echo its first slam-dunk, a building in a parking lot was knocked down so that a crane could hoist the quadrangular concept onto the structure’s crown. The ambitious project was coined by an eclectic pair of New York-based designers and lovebirds, who gutted the former gun-shop to make room for a renovation of rustic finds, Grecian floors, French doors and their fledging family of nine. Successfully flipping properties for exorbitant profits is nothing new for reality TV stars Robert and Cortney Novogratz, who have re-nested five times in seven years. They have since transformed a motorcycle garage into their new home, an über-hip yet kid-friendly townhouse that doubles as their office. While the lens of a camera has catapulted a family of unique proportion into the public eye, it has also captured the true essence Read more

Jian Ghomeshi

City Life Magazine turns the tables on award-winning broadcaster and host of CBS Radio One’s talk program.

CL: Do you believe that someone in your position has a responsibility to give back?

JG: I’ve always been eager to do what I could to create social change; it didn’t come from any sort of ego-driven way. When I was a kid it was more so from the big questions that I had about the world that I couldn’t reconcile and that would really bother me: Why do we live in such an inegalitarian world, why does a woman make 70 per cent of what I make, why does this person get born into poverty and I’m in a middle class suburb? Those are just philosophical questions, something about the way I was brought up and the way I understood the world; it bothered me Read more

Porter Airlines CEO, Robert Deluce

Robert Deluce shows no signs of jet lag after touching down in Toronto just before sunrise. His red eye from California was preceded by a long day of aircraft-fuelled meetings neither distracted nor tempted by the Golden State. When we meet in his office at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport later that afternoon, it becomes apparent that the CEO and president of Porter Airlines isn’t the type of man that mixes business with pleasure, but a man who paradoxically puts forth a company that does.

Deluce gestures warmly towards his office where to the left of his uncluttered desk rests a pile of framed portraits that chronicle his roots and achievements in the aviation industry. Despite their significance, they emit an unpretentious display as they rest on the floor stacked against the walls. Read more

Marshall Jay Kaplan, Reaches for the Stars

It’s 3 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon and Marshall Jay Kaplan is in the middle of reviewing an episode of My House Your Money for the W Network, one of five shows he’s produced in recent years, which  includes TLC’s Brides of Beverly Hills and TVTropolis’ Instant Cash. A few hours earlier he received a phone call from a Canadian Forces corporal who wanted to inform him that the base loves his reality show Totally Tracked Down, where Kaplan himself heads to Hollywood and hunts down celebrities from the ’80s and ’90s like Cloris Leachman and Doris Roberts. If we can learn anything from this Vaughan, Ont. resident, it’s that we’re all capable of drawing our own destinies.

Most people would go on to become a doctor after getting a double degree in microbiology and biochemistry, but as you’ll soon discover, Read more

Steve Jobs: A Visionary Great

When Albert Einstein formulated E = mc², he changed how we looked at the universe. When John Lennon told us to Imagine, he changed how we heard music. And when Steve Jobs gave us a new device, he changed how we interacted with technology. When the Internet exploded with dialogue discussing the passing of the 56-year-old Apple co-founder on October 5, it can be said with all confidence that millions of people did it using the products he created. This is his legacy; this is the most important innovator in the last 35 years.

No one, especially in the world of technology, has influenced more lives than Jobs. Rival developer Bill Gates spoke of the pleasure of knowing him, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg thanked him for showing “what you build can change the world,” celebrities wished him a heartfelt farewell, U.S. President Barack Obama Read more

David Chilton: The Wealthy Barber Returns [w/video]

When David Chilton self-published The Wealthy Barber during the economic slump of 1989, he had an unassuming goal of selling 10,000 copies and helping Canadians live fiscally solvent lives. The 25-year-old did slightly better. Chilton’s humorous approach resonated with more than two million North Americans by breaking the banal textbook paradigm of personal finance paperbacks. His common sense hit an entire dartboard of demographics, with a novel style that made readers feel like they were having a latte with a financially savvy friend who spoke colloquially about credit cards, real estate and RRSPs.

You can imagine the surreal experience of enjoying that cup of coffee with Chilton a day after the official launch of his long-awaited follow-up, The Wealthy Barber Returns. The conversation coincidentally takes place amongst a backdrop Read more

Vince Tarantino: Invincible

Vince Tarantino can still recall the rough texture of what felt like rock bottom. It was 2005 and the frustration of being consumed with a roaring hunger for success, yet not a morsel of opportunity in sight, was painful. While he had triumphantly climbed the ranks in the banking sector from teller to mortgage sales representative in three short years, he was still financially fazed.

The daily defeats of door-knocking spurred sleepless nights and fears of not being able to feed his two young kids on a commission-based salary. “I just ran out of steam. I borrowed the last dollar I could on the credit card, borrowed the last dollar I could on the line of credit, couldn’t refinance my house anymore; I was down to the last drop,” he says of a situation that many Canadians face.

Weekends were the worst for Tarantino. While he would Read more

Heart-to-Heart with KMH’s Neena Kanwar

On June 21st, 2011, Neena Kanwar validated to a throng of guests at the HSBC Great Canadian Woman Awards that anything is possible. At the time, she was being honoured for her inspiring entrepreneurial success by founding an independent health-care centre in 1988 with her husband, Vijay Kanwar, that has since become North America’s largest provider of nuclear cardiology. “Nobody should be able to tell you that you cannot succeed where others have failed,” says Neena.

With a family history of heart disease and a father who suffered two heart attacks in his 40s, Neena felt inclined to pursue a career in cardiology. In the early ’80s, she obtained a degree in nuclear medicine from the Toronto Institute of Medical Technology, which led to a position at St. Michael’s Hospital as a nuclear medicine technologist. It was there that she became perturbed by the long waits patients endured to see doctors, take tests Read more

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