Sharp September 2015

The

LOOK BETTER • FEEL BETTER • KNOW MORE

SEPTEMBER 2015

SHARPMAGAZINE.COM

Joseph GordonLevitt Lays It On The Line

SOUR GRAPES

Uncorking the world of wine fraud

Fall Style Issue

35 PAGES OF

Coats Suits Shirts Pants Boots Shoes Glasses Watches

HOW TO ALWAYS WIN AT POKER

David Baazov buys the house

TOUCH THAT DIAL

All the shows to watch, binge and avoid

HE CLICKS! HE SCORES!

The improbable rise of eSports

2015

DENIM GUIDE

Everything you need to know about your next pair of jeans

Contents September 2015 84

THE KING OF (INTERNET) POKER

How Montreal’s David Baazov turned his littleknown tech startup into the biggest player in the online gambling world.

110

VINTAGE FRAUD

Counterfeit wine is a surprisingly big industry in Canada. But how much longer can its peddlers bottle success?

116

JOSEPH GORDONLEVITT’S HIGHWIRE ACT

The star of The Walk is an old man trapped in a young man’s body. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

COLUMNS

104

THE RELUCTANT FANATIC

Nick HuneBrown tries to understand why watching other people play video games is becoming the next big spectator sport.

128 THE STRIKING IRISH

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108

FATHERHOOD

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall teaches his son the importance of proper breathing. (Hint: it helps you punch like Bruce Lee.)

Photo: Peter Ash Lee. Styling: Luke Langsdale. Clothing: Cotton-wool blend jacket ($780) by A.P.C.; cotton sweater ($1,525) by Berluti; cotton pants ($110) by Banana Republic. Cover image by:Kai Z Feng / Trunk Archive.

F E AT U R E S

Letter from the Creative Director

Timeless Style’s Best Before Date

Photo: Matt Barnes. Overcoat, suit, shirt and tie by Garrison Bespoke.

W

E BANDY ABOUT THE IDEA of timeless style all the time. Have done for years. The idea being, of course, that certain pieces form the foundation of a properly curated sartorial opus. A wardrobe collection of greatest hits that you will go back to time and time again until you’re the most stylish guy at the retirement home.

Only problem: it’s a lie.

To prepare for this column introducing the state of men’s style in Fall 2015, I asked for a debrief from the most qualified man in Canada on the subject: Sharp’s own fashion editor, Matthew Biehl. As I reviewed his notes on layering, pattern, texture and colour, I was also assaulted with the poignant realization that I’m middle-aged. This happens when a new trend is something that happened to also be in style when you were 12… in the ’80s.

The oversized overcoat is back, again.

Now if you’re thinking “That’s great!” because you never really warmed up to the painted-on, trim-fitting cuts of the last few years, or because you happen to have one feeding moths in a closet under the front steps, I’m afraid I need to be the bearer of even more bad news. You can’t wear it.

Staple though it may have been, sold to you by the charming sales person and your trusted men’s magazine as an investment piece, you can’t wear it. Why? Because time marches on, and though oversized overcoats, wider legs, bomber jackets and cargo pants have all been around before, they haven’t been resurrected so much as reincarnated. True to their progenitors in concept, the latest trends are the product of a new generation of designers, and are formed by the wants and needs of a different era. They are reboots, not reissues. But that’s OK. In fact, it’s better than OK. I’ve confessed before to not being an early adopter, but I do like to look forward. Reinterpreting styles of trends past almost always makes the older iterations look, well, old. Modern fabrics, contemporary colours and patterns and tweaks to the cut and fit all conspire to render those cherished staples out of style. The reinterpretation of past trends builds on familiarity and nostalgia, but infuses them with innovation. That’s what timelessness really means: it’s not about staying the same, ignoring time, but rather evolving and growing with it. Building on it.

If it didn’t, what would be the point?

MICHAEL LAFAVE

Editorial and Creative Director S EPTEMBER 20 15

S HARPMAGAZINE .COM 23

Contents September 2015

120 GET YOUR DENIM ON

STYLE

100

HEROES OF MENSWEAR

Tommy Hilfiger reflects on the 30th anniversary of his iconic brand.

102

GROOMING

120

GET YOUR DENIM ON

Jeans have been reborn — this time with actual room for your wallet and cellphone.

How to wear your favourite wardrobe staple right now.

138

WATCHES

When buying a watch, it’s best to stick to the classics. But just what, exactly, makes a classic?

128

THE STRIKING IRISH

We trawl Dublin’s streets to demonstrate why you should by taking sartorial cues from the Emerald Isle this fall.

140

STATE OF THE ART

Heed our instructions to dressing your best this season, with tailored pieces from brands like Tom Ford and Gucci.

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Photo: Mathew Guido. Styling: Mark John Tripp.

You should be taking care of your mug in the nocturnal hours, too. Here’s how.

Editor’s Letter

A Novel Idea

J The Sharp Magazine Show is now on SiriusXM Canada Talks (channel 167) every Sunday at 8 p.m. Hosted by myself and Ward Anderson (of SiriusXM’s Ward and Al), it’s yet another chance to enjoy everything you love about Sharp, in a funny, conversational format.

You can also download all of the episodes at SHARPMAGAZINE.COM/SHARPSHOW.

GREG HUDSON Editor-in-Chief

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Photo: Matt Barnes

Sharp is on the air

ONATHAN FRANZEN DOESN’T NEED MY HELP. This month, his new novel, Purity, will be released with the kind of media buzz usually reserved for Hollywood blockbusters. That is to say, I’ve seen the book’s dramatic cover plastered on billboards across the city. Whether a new Franzen novel is actually a big deal — i.e. that it will be purchased and consumed by people who don’t already consider themselves “book people” — at the very least, it’s being marketed as one. I haven’t finished the book yet, but so far it’s as good as I expected. Still, a man famous for turning down Oprah — not to mention writing one or two generation-defining novels — doesn’t need my endorsement.

Before I received Purity, I had been on a Don DeLillo kick. The two authors are of a similar type. If DeLillo is the ruling monarch of post-modern novels about How We Live Now, Franzen is Prince Harry. More accessible, more populist (and popular), even if he isn’t next in line for the crown. They both represent the somewhat antiquated idea of the Important Author. (Back in the day, if an author was a recluse, it was actually noticed. Now, when Franzen complains about Twitter, he just seems out of touch). I like Big Authors who write Big Novels and engage in Big Conversations. I like being a part of those conversations, however tangentially. You probably do too, if you’re still reading magazines.

And yet, you can’t deny that the author is less relevant than they used to be. The Dick Cavett days are long passed. But I don’t bemoan the author’s fall from cultural dominance. Because, and this has been said before, TV has done a good job replacing the novel. I don’t mean just that it’s been effective at overshadowing the novel.

That has always been the fear, and that fear has come true. But, I mean also that television has done a serviceable job providing what novels provide: complex narratives, rich characters, epic storytelling, important conversations. The fact is, you can read a book as passively as you watch an episode of Mad Men, but the beauty of television now is that the inverse is also true.

That’s not to say that television is without its flaws. In fact, as we put together our Fall TV package (pg. 60), it became clear that the Golden Age of Television is showing signs of decay and decline, as networks and creators emulate the appearance of quality TV, without the depth. But, TV isn’t dead yet. And, thankfully, according to the poster I saw outside the Hasty Market near my home, neither is the novel.

E X C L U S I V E LY A T

SHARPMAGAZINE.COM FALL CLOTHES EVERY MAN NEEDS

Goddamn, summer blew by! At least we have fall fashion to look forward to, when you can layer your denim under your leather and accessorize with basically any material in your closet — the more textures, the better.

Women You Should Meet: Sci-Fi Edition

We’ve met some pretty spectacular women over the years. Here’s a look back at our interviews with our favourite babes from TV’s creepiest sci-fi series.

CONTESTS!

Book for Men Fall/Winter Party

We’re giving away awesome stuff all the time! You like awesome things, don’t you? Visit our contests page for your chance to win luxury timepieces, fragrances, and bikes like this one .

Log on to Sharpmagazine.com to get a behind-the-scenes look at our exclusive Book For Men launch party at Toronto’s Design Exchange.

NFL Instagrams to Follow

FACEBOOK: FACEBOOK.COM/ SHARPFORMEN 32 SHAR PM AGA Z IN E .C OM

TWITTER: @SHARPMAGAZINE S E PT E M B E R 2 0 1 5

INSTAGRAM: @SHARPMAGAZINE

YOUTUBE: YOUTUBE.COM/ SHARPMAGAZINE

Photo: J.Crew

Time to do some fantasy pool research. We take a look at all the social media accounts of some of the NFL’s biggest stars, to see who was workin’ and who was shirkin’ during the off-season.

Pre-ramble

Know Your Can-Con: Hip-Hop Edition In honour of rapper-turned-CBC host Buck 65’s new

book (pg. 52), test your knowledge of Canadian hip hop by matching the artists below with their hit (uh, you know, relatively) singles:

"Wicked and Weird"

C U LT U R A L E Q U AT I O N :

Nancy Meyers

Nancy Meyers has a lot to say about modern manhood in this month’s The Intern. For those unfamiliar with Meyers’ work (sure, sure) here’s a breakdown of who she is. There’s more on pg. 72.

On pg. 110, we examine the world of oenological forgery.

And right here, we rank the ease of faking other oft-faked things:

EASIEST

Female orgasms

BUCK 65

"Rhyme the World in 80 Days"

NANCY MEYERS

=

Someone else’s signature

NORA EPHRON

ORGANIZED RHYME

"My Definition of a Bombastic Jazz Style"

MAESTRO FRESH WES

"Let Your Backbone Slide"

KISH

"Northern Touch"

DREAM WARRIORS

"Check the O.R."

CLASSIFIED

SCORING: 1-3 right answers: Congratulations, you are a typical Canadian with an appropriate level of knowledge regarding Canadian hip hop. 4:You remembered that Tom Green was once a rapper. It’s a good bit of trivia. 5-7: Let’s be honest, there is no earthly reason to remember Kish. For answers go to google.com

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FAKE THIS!

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Illness

+

Your resumé Currency

JUDD APATOW

�

Wine Male orgasms

THE PROPERTY BROTHERS

HARDEST

FU N FACT! S H A R E T H I S AT P A R T I E S T O S O U N D C O O L / I N S U F F E R A B L E

Did you know: the word denim (pg. 120) comes from the French term serge de Nimes, referring to the town where the fabric was invented. And now you know!

Man About Town

Veuve Clicquot Strikes It RICH Tornado warnings didn’t stop Veuve Clicquot from unveiling their new mixable bubbly, RICH (seriously, try it with some pineapple), at the Toronto Island Yacht Club on Muggs Island. Between downpours, a vessel transported A-listers to a Gatsby-esque garden party replete with clubhouse games and flowing champagne cocktails.

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Photos: Ryan Emberley

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Man About Town

FGI Hearts Polo Fashion Group International helped launch the 36th annual Polo for Heart fundraiser at the Toronto Polo Club. There was a polo showdown between the Canadian and Irish national teams, a halftime show from The Canadian Cowgirls and even a Best Hat competition, with all proceeds going to Canada’s Heart and Stroke Foundation.

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Photos: Nick Lee

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September 2015 LOOK BETTER FEEL BETTER KNOW MORE

Guide

Back in Black The only piece of kitchen equipment you need just got a whole lot cooler HETHER YOU’RE THE KIND OF MAN who bakes his own bread or the kind who survives on pot roasts and simple stews, there’s almost nothing a good Dutch oven can’t do. Their one flaw? Colours. They always come in bright, borderline obnoxious colour schemes — perfect for a country cottage or your wife’s Instagram feed, but maybe not your modern condo. That’s why we’re so into these new matte black versions by Le Creuset (the undisputed king of the cast-iron game, by the way), which are solid and stylish and decidedly masculine. Bon appétit, indeed. L E C R E U S E T. C A

W

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Guide A WELCOME INTRODUCTION

Lyndie Greenwood Isn’t afraid of (almost) anything

BY BIANCA TEIXEIRA

YNDIE GREENWOOD doesn’t scare easily.

Since moving to Wilmington, North Carolina to shoot the supernatural FOX show Sleepy Hollow — a 21st-century retelling of Ichabod Crane — she’s been the victim of a ghostly presence in her home. “There are curtains that open and close by themselves, footprints on my pillows, handprints on second- and third-storey windows,” Greenwood says.

“But I don’t need to leave. I feel a weird sense of calm there.”

Greenwood’s fearlessness isn’t only limited to supernatural beings, though. The 32-year-old Torontonian spends her time between projects hiking through the always-empty desert trails of Utah, exploring Lehman Caves in Nevada and climbing to the top of Mammoth Mountain in California.

Not bad for a city girl. “I like exploring,” she says. “I’m not afraid to get out there by myself.

It’s where I’m most comfortable.” Now, filming the third season of Sleepy Hollow, Greenwood will admit there is, actually, one thing in the world that rattles her: “The set is actually really spooky. In the dark with all the shadows, I can’t help but get a little nervous.” But then, who doesn’t get a little scared going to work?

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Photo: Shanna Fisher

L

Guide A (WO)MAN WORTH LISTENING TO

Margaret Atwood Is ready for the end of the world B Y N AT H A N W H I T L O C K

When I was preparing for this, I came across a story about Atwood Oceanics, a deep-sea drilling operation.

They’re probably relatives of mine — there aren’t that many Atwoods on the planet.

I had a brief moment where I thought maybe this was one of your many side projects.

It’s not, but I did have to kick two other “Margaret Atwoods” pretending to be me off of Twitter. I think they were tribute accounts of a strange kind: they were posting things they thought I might conceivably say or do. They weren’t right about that.

Given how engaged you are on Twitter and how often you’re quoted in the media, I’m amazed that you’ve mostly avoided being at the centre of a scandal for something you’ve said. It seems to happen to every celebrity at least once.

I think some people are just too quick off the mark. They jump the gun before they’ve really investigated what the fuss is about. You saw that with the Jian Ghomeshi thing.

You mean, people jumping in to defend him when it first came out.

Yes, and you could see why people would.

But they quickly jumped out again.

Do you feel sympathy for writers who prefer the old-school method of shutting up between books and staying away from social media?

I

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The Heart Goes Last began as a serialized story online. Have you reworked that material?

I absolutely had to, because when you’re writing a serial, you have to keep reminding people of what happened the last time. A lot of stories were serialized in magazines and newspapers up until the 1970s. The Internet has taken the place of those spaces.

Photo: Erin Combs / Getty.

F MARGARET ATWOOD has an unofficial motto, it’s “Can’t Stop; Won’t Stop.” Since self-publishing her first book in 1961, she’s released more than 60 award-winning novels, short story collections, children’s books, collections of poetry — and still had time left over to write the odd television script and opera libretto (why not?), appear at a handful of festivals and conferences every year, throw her weight behind a few dozen worthy causes (birds and the environment, especially), and tweet out to her more than 800,000 followers. At 75, an age when a lot of her writing peers have become mired in the nostalgia for a sepia-tinted past, she continues to be obsessed with telling us about the future — specifically, which cliff we’re about to go over next.

For decades now — especially in her recently completed MaddAddam sci-fi trilogy, which is currently being turned into an HBO miniseries by director Darren Aronofsky — she’s been creating dystopian visions of humanity’s fate that are as wickedly satirical as they are deadly serious. Her new novel, The Heart Goes Last, depicts a not-too-distant future in which people make ends meet by getting paid to be prisoners in for-profit jails. It’s not a particularly cheerful vision, but you get the sense that Atwood is as amused as she is concerned by the mess that humanity is constantly getting itself into. If we really do go over an apocalyptic cliff one day, it’s hard not to imagine her standing right at the edge, watching us fall, making notes toward a new book or three.

Absolutely. They’re not cut out for it.

They weren’t on the college debating team, they have thin skins and they’re easily wounded, and should stay away from it, no question. What writers should do primarily is write their books.

But that doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing they should ever do. That’s the “art for art’s sake” position, which is in itself a moral and philosophical stand.

In a way it’s true, but in a way it’s not true, because that’s not what human beings are like — they will put a moral in whether you want them to or not.

Guide

A (WO)MAN WORTH LISTENING TO

You see these experiments happening now — even Fifty Shades of Grey started as online fanfic.

blog post called “I Had Sex with Furniture.” He begins by saying, “I did this so you don’t have to.”

Unlike, say, Fifty Shades of Grey, the story you came up with is not exactly a beach read.

Even as you are positing possible future dystopias, you are constantly referring back to classic literature.

It’s fairly dark. I realized about three-quarters of the way through that I was channeling Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is funny from the point of view of people watching it, but it’s not at all funny for those who are actually in it. So I put a quote from the play at the front. I also used a quite hilarious quote that I found online in a

Anything we’re doing now we’ve already thought of about 4,000 years ago. Look at desire: the first gorgeous female robot is in The Iliad, where Hephaestus has these golden females he’s created to be his helpers. Pygmalion and Galatea: same story. And there was a big piece in Vanity Fair recently about life-sized sex dolls you can have custom-made to be your pal. It’s nothing new.

The new novel posits a future in which people are willing to trade their freedom for financial security.

Know Your Margaret Atwood

Atwood doesn’t always show up on lists of Books Every Man Must Read — but she should. If you’re not already familiar with her work, here’s where to dive in: The Edible Woman (1969) Her first novel, about capitalism, carnivorism and, yeah, feminism.

Survival (1972) This series of essays about Canadian literature is the seminal text on our national canon.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) About the US as a futuristic theocratic dictatorship. Won the GG Award.

People always have been. Having been a World War II baby, I read a lot about Hitler, and that’s what happened, that’s how he got power. He was promising full employment, a chicken in every pot, and fun vacations. Who wouldn’t like that?

So are we fated to keep making those kinds of mistakes?

I don’t think anything is fated. Let’s say it’s been a motif, and it’s something we should be aware of. And we’ve just done it again in Canada with Bill C-51.

Once you have a no oversight/ can’t-know-your-accuser situation, it’s a recipe for false accusations and getting even with people. The human tendency, unfortunately, is to believe that those who are accused, are guilty.

I’ve got a whole little library on the Salem witch trials, which is a case in point. Once you were accused, you were guilty.

Oryx and Crake (2004) A man has to figure out how the whole world (literally) fell apart around him.

I play this game sometimes where I try to guess which contemporary headline — about fish dying, or whales washing up on a beach or whatever — would work in the opening montage of a post-apocalyptic film, where they show all this bad news that leads up to the disaster.

Payback (2008) The text version of her Massey Lectures is surprisingly insightful on the subject of debt.

A creepy thing happened to us with The Handmaid’s Tale opera, which opens with a scroll of catastrophic headlines.

When we opened it in Denmark in 2000, one of the headlines was that the Twin Towers blow up.

But do you ever spot overlooked stories that we’re going to look back on and say, “Aha:

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that’s where it all started”?

Frequently. For instance, the advent of CRISPR, the new DNA-splicing tool.

Now that we have CRISPR — kids doing their own gene splicing in a high school lab — that will happen.

As a species, are we screwed?

We’ve made it through many a bottleneck in human history. There was a very big bottleneck that wiped out 90 per cent of the aboriginal population of South and North America with diseases to which they had no immunity, but you’ll note that it didn’t kill all of them. Similarly, there are people who seem to be naturally resistant to AIDS. So, there’s no absolute doom, apart from the fabled meteorite hitting the planet.

Some people might say that’s a strange basis for optimism: that we survived the Black Death.

It was awful for people going through it: more than half the population died.

But then after it, wages went up, careers opened up for women, briefly.

Look on the bright side!

Shifting to the past, how much time do you spend thinking about your back catalogue?

I’d say none. Next question. [Laughs.]

So you never give much thought to how people are reading your earlier books?

It’s amazing that they are, actually.

What really floors me is The Edible Woman, which was written in the mid-1960s — there wasn’t even pantyhose yet. People are still reading it, and I think, “What are you getting out of it?”

You were the first author to submit a book to the Future Library, which will be printed 100 years from now. Is that an act of hope?

Writing any book is an act of hope: you hope you will finish it; you hope it will get published; you hope people will read it, you hope they will understand.

And writing a book is already a time capsule, because there’s always a gap between you writing it and somebody reading it. This is just a lot longer.

The 2115 Goodreads review of the book would note that it can be burnt for fuel.

[Laughs.] That’s one argument for paper books: at least if the lights go out you’ll be able to set them on fire.

Guide BOOKS

Patrick deWitt’s follow up to The Sisters Brothers is funny sad

BY GREG HUDSON

HAD A BOOK of Aesop’s fables as a child. Teaching me with lush illustrations and intelligent animals not to be an asshole, like a PSA from antiquity. The lessons were biblical: be honest, don’t be greedy, good is rewarded, and evil is a self-defeating endeavour.

It’s tempting to call Patrick deWitt’s new novel, Undermajordomo Minor, an existentialist fable for grown-ups, albeit without any anthropomorphized animals spouting life lessons. In setting and tone the book is fable-like, a bedtime story full of dark castles, forbidden love, angst and disturbing sexual practices. And, you know, some hard metaphysical truths, too.

It’s also funny. It shares that with The Sisters Brothers, deWitt’s previous novel that earned seemingly every literary award Canada could give it. Whereas The Sisters Brothers was a western by way of the Coen Brothers, Undermajordomo Minor, is a castle story, gothic and strange, shot through with scenes that play like comedy sketches. Most importantly though, deWitt’s new book shares a kind of worldview with its predecessor: a bit cynical, a bit absurd, somewhere between surreal farce and uplifting tragedy.

It’s a worldview that, sadly, and sweetly, fits our reality, even though, like a children’s fable, it’s specifically exaggerated and stilted to prove a point.

The plot is relatively simple, as fables typically are. Lucy, a restless lad with a propensity to tell tales — call it millennial ambitition/entitlement in an age centuries before those became buzzwords — leaves his small town for a job as an assistant to the major domo, basically the butler, of a faraway castle. He falls in love. He meets thieves, murderers, sadomasochistic dukes and duchesses. Outside the castle walls a small war is constantly being waged, though no one understands, or explains, what it’s about. Farther away from the castle, there is The Very Large Hole — a seemingly bottomless pit, that exists as the metaphoric anchor of the kingdom. Lucy experiences all of this, and — spoiler alert — survives.

That last bit, that’s maybe the point of the fable: there is comedy in absurdity and war, there is hope and love, even in a castle that is dark and mad. But, like the goofy exploits of the selfish or righteous animals of Aesop, the moral isn’t as important as the story, or how the story is told. At least, not to the reader — as important as those life lessons were, I woudn’t have remembered them as a child if the medium wasn’t entertaining. And, in terms of entertainment, deWitt is a master. The prose is unflowery and the dialogue is perfectly proper, and thus absurd: somehow coming off like a storybook and corporate emails, all at once. It injects just enough familiarity into the fable to make it true. Real and edifying. Because we all live near a Very Large Hole, a mad castle, near a pointlessly violent war. Life is a bedtime story, and we survive it.

I

FOR A FULL INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK DEWITT, CHECK OUT SHARPMAGAZINE.COM.

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Buck Naked In his new memoir, Buck 65 — a.k.a. Rich Terfry, a.k.a. the original rapper-turned-CBC Radio host (sorry Shad) — spins a truth-bending, reality-skewing tale of music, baseball, growing up and falling in and out of love. It’s a terrific read: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, we mean it. It’s also a total mind fuck.

We spoke to the first-time author to clear up a few things.

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Why write a book?

The real impetus was that I got divorced and it sucked. I had all this stuff on my mind and I started writing, because as you write and string these things together, maybe you can sort through some of it. I was keeping myself occupied so that my brain wouldn’t catch on fire.

So is it a memoir?

I don’t know what it is, to be perfectly honest. I thought primarily the audience would be people who have been listening to my music for 20 years. They know me as Buck 65 — so what name should even appear on the book?

We figured Rich could write the story of Buck 65. And that gave me license to write a bit creatively. You’re fictionalizing something that started out as a true story.

And then you’re left with this thing that’s rooted in real experience, but it’s all tossed up. I’m still wondering what section of the bookstore it will go in — but that’s their problem.

Are Buck 65 and Rich Terfry equally real for you?

I would say Buck 65 is a character in the same way another musician would say, “it took me a while to find my own voice.” That means you developed a character for yourself, which is weird, especially when it collides with real life. Something I picked up growing up in Cape Breton is the idea that if you’re going to tell a story, make it good. Do whatever it takes to make sure it’s not boring. If you catch a fish that’s, say, 18 inches long, might as well round it up to two feet, you know?

Don’t be boring. That’s how I’ve always wanted my life to be.

Photo: CSA Images/ Color Printstock Collection /Getty.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

HEALTH

Smarten Up Will the new wave of brain-enhancing drugs give you an edge — or just a headache?

Come on, everyone’s doing them

BY ALEX NINO GHECIU

AVE ASPREY absolutely crushes every workday.

No morning grogginess or post-lunch slowdowns. The 41-year-old Silicon Valley investor is in the zone — nailing presentations, dominating his inbox, spearheading projects — all the damn time. And he gets there by downing a handful of pills each morning.

He lists them like a litany: Aniracetam, Piracetam, CILTEP, Methyl and Cobalamin. Asprey’s cocktail is a mix of nootropics — the name given to a broad class of “smart drugs” meant to optimize the bejesus out of your brain. They’re quickly gaining steam among the workaholic set, with

D

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everyone from college students (11 per cent in the US alone) to tech entrepreneurs popping them to get a mental power-up.

“It’s like unlocking one of those energy boosts in a video game,” Asprey explains. “All of a sudden, you can do more and you’re faster and you’re smarter, and even better yet, you have more self control.”

Yes, this stuff is legal. Nootropics include prescription analeptics like modafinil, originally intended for narcolepsy, though some doctors give it to patients struggling with attentiveness. You can also order natural supplements online — made of vitamins, amino acids and antioxidants — that are kosher by law.

Here’s the claim: these drugs protect your neurons from damage, stimulate receptors and strengthen neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize itself. This gives you an edge in memory, attention span, motivation and learning capacity — without the jitters or crashes that come with stimulants such as Adderall. Think Bradley Cooper’s mind-enhancing drug in Limitless, but in real life.

Asprey first plunged into nootropics in the mid-’90s. After selling his first tech startup for millions, he realized something was amiss with his noggin. “Some days my mental performance was way off,” he says. “I couldn’t think of words or remember what happened in meetings.”

The brain fog worried Asprey enough that he spent 15 years and over $300,000 “hacking” his own biology.

After experimenting with various supplements, he found modafinil turned his mind dramatically on. Nowadays, he mixes and matches an ever-evolving list of ingredients, even marketing some via his company, Bulletproof. He’s become the de facto leader of the biohacking movement. “There are people who spend an hour a day meditating, who’ve never tried these drugs,” he says. “That’s absurd. Nootropics don’t take nearly that long and you might get some of those same benefits.”

But the science on smart drugs is still murky. While nootropics have been proven to help people suffering from dementia, there’s a lack of long-term studies on whether they’re safe for the otherwise healthy man to take. “If you’re going to experiment with these things, use at your own risk and be sure you don’t have any underlying medical conditions,” says Emily Deans, a Massachusetts psychiatrist. “But if you’re healthy, it’s probably not going to hurt.”

As with all miracle cures, nootropics do have potential, if unsurprising, side effects.

Upset stomach, insomnia, anxiousness and a slower heart rate. Deans recommends sticking to proven brain-boosting solutions, like exercise, proper sleep, healthy food and strong coffee.

Still, Asprey swears he wouldn’t be as successful as he is today if it weren’t for his magic pills. What’s more, he says, the world’s best and brightest are popping them too. “I have meetings with CEOs running companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I’ll pull out a baggy of nootropics, and they’ll go, ‘Oh, you also do it?’ We’re all doing it.”

Illustration: Mmdi

Guide

Guide T H E T R AV E L L I N G M A N

EAT:

Hanoi, Vietnam Why there’s never been a better time to go

BANH MI 25

Best way to begin a day in Hanoi?

With a mind-meltingly perfect banh mi from this tiny, family-run roadside cart. For just 25,000 dong — roughly $1.40 Canadian — you’ll get a hefty pile of barbequed pork, savoury sausage, fresh pâté and pickled veggies on a warm, lightly toasted baguette.

Don’t be sheepish about ordering seconds; it’s not every day you get a little taste of heaven.

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25 HANG CA, HOAN KIEM

2. LA BADIANE

Don’t be fooled by the spartan courtyard setting at this bistro. The sublime tasting menus — prepared by Parisian wunderkind Benjamin Rascalou

HE CONSTANT, FRENZIED RUMBLING of scooters on its narrow streets might suggest otherwise, but in recent years, Hanoi has grown into one of Southeast Asia’s most agreeably serene cities. Tree-lined lotus ponds bisect a medley of ancient temples, grand colonial buildings and pastel shop-houses. There’s great food on every corner, lively chatter in every bar and a cosmopolitan arts scene that’s constantly getting better. It’s a city worth cherishing, a place to take your time and acquaint yourself properly.

And there’s no better time than right now.

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STAY: 1. SOFITEL

LEGEND METROPOLE HANOI

For well over a century, the Metropole has stood directly at the heart of Hanoi‘s cultural life. It’s the hotel where Charlie Chaplin brought his third wife to honeymoon in 1936; where Graham Greene holed up in 1951 to write The Quiet American; where American presidents, Korean prime ministers and Danish princes have all laid their heads. Today, it still crackles with the opulence of a time long passed. Whitegloved doormen usher you into a towering atrium of carved mahogany and marble.

Fresh flowers and a brass-handled rotary phone (yes, they

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still exist) adorn the sitting area in your suite. Live jazz complements the sound of tinkling glasses in the stately cocktail bar every evening.

After a night or two in its lush embrace, you’ll catch yourself inventing reasons to extend your stay.

SOFITEL-LEGEND.COM

— inflect classic French plates with just a hint of local flavour. A duo of beef tenderloin and foie gras, for instance, comes spiked with a zesty kick of Sichuan peppers and mango. And to finish, a serving of blackcurrant pepper

Guide

T H E T R AV E L L I N G M A N

DRINK 5. SUNSET BAR

Though Hanoi’s thick haze renders its name something of a misnomer, this openair lounge remains a superlative choice for a nightcap. Set directly over the waters of West Lake — the city’s largest body of water — you’ll swill finely crafted cocktails on a plush daybed as the neon glow of the skyline shimmers across the way.

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6. TADIOTO

5 sorbet — straight from the coastal island of Phu Quoc — cuts through the richness of the melt-in-your-mouth chocolate cake.

LABADIANE-HANOI.COM

3. POTS ’N PANS In its well-appointed, sensually lit dining room, Pots ’n Pans takes Vietnamese cuisine to experimental new heights: tender, traditionally herbed pork belly gets elevated by a tart apple compote; crispy-skinned seabass arrives on a bed of black sesame noodles with an inventive tamarind-andcoconut sauce. The friendly wait staff is just as praiseworthy — the restaurant exclusively hires graduates of Know One Teach One, a non-profit vocational training program for disadvantaged youth.

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Hanoi’s thriving creative class congregates nightly at this dark and smoky watering hole, owned by former NPR broadcaster Nguyen Qui Duc. Live music,

SHOP

ZERO STUDIO

Smack-dab in the middle of X98 — a hip enclave of cafés, stores and bars housed in a repurposed factory space — this stark, concrete-walled boutique specializes in forward-thinking menswear from the likes of Belgian minimalist Ann Demeulemeester, Japanese streetwear label Mastermind and their own tasteful in-house line.

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This leafy, laid-back lunch spot serves up clever interpretations of iconic dishes from across Southeast Asia, like an Indonesian-style beef rendang curry, Thai shrimp satay salad and a spaghetti that uses Singaporean chili crab as its sweet, spicy sauce.

You want handcrafted, thoughtfully designed goods?

Of course you do; it’s why you travel.

Stop by this quirky two-storey shop.

Pick up a pair of locally made sandals for your better half, an asymmetrical ceramic jar for your mantelpiece, and a handsome leather shoulder bag to carry it all home.

THEHALIA.COM

From the moment you step inside this hole-in-the-wall noodle joint, you’re inundated with an intoxicating wave of aromas: beef caramelizing on the grill; fragrant cilantro and freshly chopped peanuts; tangy cupfuls of fermented fish sauce. You’ll find all of that and more in every bowl of their signature vermicelli, which tantalizes and transfixes the tongue with each delicious slurp.

TADIOTO.COM

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4. HALIA

BUN BO NAM BO

poetry readings and animated conversations over ice-cold brews combine to give the slightly cramped saloon a heady, eclectic energy that lasts long into the night.

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Guide

The Resurrection Will Be Televised Does TV’s Golden Age end where its obsession with the remake-industrial complex begins?

BY ALEX NINO GHECIU

OACH HAYDEN FOX IS coming out of retirement.

Mulder and Scully are once again searching for The Truth. The Tanners are back for more synth-backed family bonding. Everywhere you look, everything old is new again. Or at least it is on television in 2015, where long-dead shows are being

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resuscitated en masse. This fall alone, we’re seeing revamps of Coach, Heroes and The Muppets, as well as big-to-small screen adaptations of Rush Hour, Minority Report and Uncle Buck. And there’s much more on the way, from Netflix’s Fuller House to FOX’s The X-Files miniseries. It’s all well and good, if memory lane is your trip. But this is

supposed to be the creatively fertile Golden Age of TV. What’s with all the rehashed ideas?

We expect this sort of pop cultural grave robbery from the film industry.

Hollywood has no shame pouring billions of dollars into Big Nostalgia, knowing full well they’re guaranteed every C O N T I N U E D O N P. 6 2

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cent back 10 times over. (Jurassic World was made for $150 million and became the first-ever film to gross over $500 million in one weekend.) But we trust TV today to act as the tasteful counterbalance to schlocky cinema. We’re told again and again, from actors to directors, that TV is where it’s at, thanks to the last decade-plus of dark, cable antiheroes (from Tony Soprano to Walter White) and novel-like serialization. We’ve come to count on the tube (and yes, the laptop) for compelling, original storytelling.

More True Detective, less Kindergarten Cop: The Series (which, by the way, is actually happening).

Ironically, the TV landscape’s abundance of quality content may be the reason network suits have begun chasing ghosts. Over 400 original shows are being produced for cable, broadcast or streaming networks this year — a 50 per cent increase since 2007, and a 1,000 per cent explosion since 1999. There’s too much TV and too few eyeballs. That means low ratings and lower ad revenues are the new norm. Nowadays, says media analysis firm REDEF, most shows aren’t picked up for a second season, and have ghastly debuts — Lifetime’s much-hyped UnReal premiered to a paltry 815,000 viewers in the US earlier this year, despite near unanimous critical love. Surely, there are exceptions, like FOX’s Empire, which opened stateside to a rare 9.8 million, or Gotham, which had last year’s strongest Canadian debut with 3.4 million. But compare that to, say, 1997, when 41 million Americans would tune in just for an episode — any episode — of Home Improvement.

It’s been a while since that many folks chortled along to the same laugh track.

In our fragmented cultureverse, where there are a million specialty channels and never-ending streaming playlists to choose from, water cooler banter is hard to come by. Make a Seinfeld reference though, and people will almost always see what you did there. Nineties tropes carry enormous cultural currency in this divided age; they give a generation of withdrawn Millennials something to recall fondly and rally around. They carry huge financial currency, too — 18-to-34year-olds now make up the majority of the Canadian workforce (36.8 per cent), meaning they’re the new demographic advertisers are eager to target. Kermit’s 62 SHAR PM AGA Z IN E .C OM

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creepy felt smile is a totem that connects this generation to an imagined greater whole — and makes them twice as likely to reach for their wallets.

So, TV execs, like film and music and junk food execs, are trying to find pay dirt by marketing directly to our shrinking shared memories. In this age, even the faintest whiff of a pop culture revival is enough to send media outlets into a slavering mania. Coach was the top trending hashtag on Twitter moments after NBC announced the 13 new episodes; Full House has been inspiring BuzzFeed quizzes (“Which Tanner sister are you?”) since Netflix confirmed the reboot. None of this guarantees ratings, but if a pre-existing property can blow the wheels off the Internet, standing out in a sea of shows trawling for attention, it has a big head start. That’s why TV’s under the déjà voodoo spell.

But don’t mourn the small

screen just yet. If there’s one thing the history of bad programming has taught us, it’s that remakes have horrible luck on TV. In recent years, viewers have yawned at new incarnations of Charlie’s Angels, Knight Rider, Melrose Place and The Bionic Woman. Sure, a show might pique curiosity on premiere night, create some buzz on Facebook, but unlike a movie, it requires its audience to come back for 22 consecutive episodes. Chances are the cultural behemoths of yesteryear, once seen through nostalgia-free lenses, won’t evoke the same warm, fuzzy feelings you allowed yourself to think they did. And that’s okay. They entertained us when they were relevant, giving us cultural in-jokes, and then they ended, like everything must. You will enjoy new shows. It’s just a matter of knowing when it’s time — in the words of Uncle Joey — to cut it out.

They have risen!

A primer on the deluge of TV rehashes coming your way

Coach (NBC)

Craig T. Nelson reprises his role as coach Hayden Fox, getting back in the game to assist his son, who is, coincidentally, a college football coach.

Fuller House (Netflix)

Twenty years after Full House, Kimmy Gibbler and Stephanie Tanner move in with a recently widowed D.J. Tanner to help raise her fatherless kids. This family can’t catch any breaks.

Heroes Reborn (NBC)

Uncle Buck (ABC)

The X-Files (FOX)

Twin Peaks (Showtime)

A revival of the superhero drama from the mid-aughts, back when shows about superheroes were new and exciting.

Now? Not so much.

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reprise their roles as Mulder and Scully — TV’s most chaste couple — in a six-episode reboot full of little green men.

A reboot of the 1989 John Candy film about a lovably wayward uncle, but with an all-black cast led by Mike Epps.

Subversive!

David Lynch returns to direct this continuation of the early ’90s cult detective drama about owls that are not what they seem.

Nancy Meyers and Robert De Niro on the set of The Intern.

FILM

Hey! What’s Nancy Meyers doing here?

Teaching you how to be a man, that’s what B Y P E T E R S A LT S M A N

OU’VE SEEN A NANCY Meyers joint at some point.

Whether you were dragged to a theatre against your will, or whether you stayed up late sobbing, alone, in your pajamas, you are familiar with her work. She wrote both Father of the Bride movies, pegged Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton together in Something’s Gotta Give, hooked up Jack Black and Kate Winslet in The Holiday and masterminded the ultimate middle-aged love triangle of Meryl Streep, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin in It’s Complicated.

But Nancy Meyers doesn’t just make romantic comedies.

She builds on the celebrated tradition of Billy Wilder and Nora Ephron by subverting it, lightly, in her richly detailed, Pottery Barn catalogue worlds. Her movies are about people who just shouldn’t be together, or people older than you’re used to

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seeing onscreen or, in the case of her latest, The Intern, people who (spoiler alert, but also thank god) don’t get together at all.

In The Intern, Robert De Niro plays a retired company man who, at 70 years old, goes back to work as an intern at a fashion startup run by the always-delightful Anne Hathaway.

De Niro’s character is as old-school as it gets, a man who carries a 40-year-old leather briefcase and doesn’t even own a pair of jeans, let alone a hoodie he’d wear to work. He’s a stand-in for the kind of masculinity we don’t see much anymore. Through De Niro, Meyers isn’t just asking what happened to men, but what happened to the great men of the movies — what happens when Raging Bull is 70, and there’s no one to pick up the gloves?

“I think the slacker boy movies have had an effect on it,” she says, referring to R-rated bro-fests like The Hangover films, Horrible Bosses, and most Judd The World of Apatow movies. “People say I Nancy Meyers write fantasy, but those slacker guys getting all those one does wonderful girls…to me that’s > No romantic just as big a fantasy.” comedies — or She’s not wrong. And maybe “relationship movies,” it’s telling that Meyers and as she’d have you call them — better than Apatow both trade in a similar Nancy Meyers. If you’re comedic formula: long, loose not well acquainted scripts, aspirational interiors, with the genre, well, an emphasis on heart and you should be. We emotional truth above all else. asked Meyers for some They’re movies about people. good places to start.

Which brings us to Meyers’ Consider this your rom-com internship. other pet peeve, one we happen to share: “Rom-coms Broadcast News get a bad rap,” she says. “There “I just love Jim Brooks’s was a period when there was movies.” no substance in them and the characters weren’t great. But Anything by Billy Wilder that’s changing.”

“To me, he’s god. He’s The rom-com, according to a movie god. He’s the greatest. His movies are Meyers, was replaced by the the ones I go to time and bromance, and, we’d add, the again.” comic book movie. But after a summer of dulling our brains Samson Raphaelson one CGI space-mutant fight and Ernst Lubitsch scene at a time, it’s incredibly movies “If I ever see them on refreshing to watch a movie there’s no chance I’m that’s just people, talking to going to turn them off.” each other, often about their real, non-superhuman feelings.

It Happened One Night And being funny in the process.

“At its heart it’s a Just like Meyers has always romantic comedy. And I think it won the first done. Just like movies were Oscar.” always meant to do.

“I read something that Silver Linings Playbook argued women can be funny in “It’s a newer one, but movies with women, and men it fits the mould. Real can be funny in movies with characters. Real heart.

And funny.” men, but can’t we now see them being funny together in a movie? Wouldn’t that be refreshing?” What a concept.

Photo: Francois Duhamel.

Guide

Guide MUSIC

Newer Order Thirty years after starting an electronic music revolution, New Order aren’t digging what the kids are dancing to HAT IS EDM?!” asks Stephen Morris. “Can you tell me? I don’t know!”

New Order’s drummer can’t even recognize the genre he co-fathered. Back in 1983, the English band wrote “Blue Monday,” the original club banger. The tune’s innovative (at the time) drum machine-and-synthesizer stomp helped plant the seeds for the Tiëstos, Aviciis and Skrillexes of today. It became the best-selling 12” single ever, the proceeds of which they used to fund Manchester’s Haçienda nightclub, ground zero for the global rave movement. But Morris isn’t exactly proud of the Molly-addled mutant monster electronic dance music has become.

“There are so many categories of what

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it is,” gripes the 57-year-old. “You’ve got techno, progressive house, minimalist — god, I can’t even remember them all! It’s too specialist, really. It’s a turnoff.”

Call them curmudgeonly, but New Order can still walk the walk. On their latest record, Music Complete, the dance icons throw the gauntlet down to today’s headphone-fondling DJs with 11 lustrous tracks of EDM — or their take on it, anyhow. Here they use modern programming tech, while bringing it something sorely lacking from today’s knobtwiddling party noise: a human touch.

There are laser-like blips and searing synths, but also orchestral flourishes, guitar atmospherics, Morris’ muscular, mortal beats and Bernard Sumner’s vulnerable, average bloke croons. The result? Songs that actually make you feel

The High-bro Stuff Three EDM artists you can listen to without shame

TYCHO

PRETTY LIGHTS

HOLY FUCK

San Francisco’s Scott Hansen writes sunny, ambient techno that could just as easily be labeled space rock. He records with a three-piece band—who play actual instruments!

Check out: “Hours”

Mixing live instrumentation with electronic sounds, this Colorado electro-soul pioneer draws on classic rock, hiphop, soul, funk and disco, all laced with thudding basslines—by real bassists!

Check out: “Yellow Bird”

A Toronto four-piece who craft dynamic electro-noise pop that’s equal parts chaotic and euphoric. And they make it with legit instruments—hey, we’re seeing a pattern here.

Check out: “Royal Gregory”

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something, from agitation (“Restlessness”) to euphoria (“Superheated”).

Nobody marries flesh and machine quite like New Order, even today. And yet, they never planned on becoming electro gods. In a past life they were Joy Division, playing somber post-punk — until singer Ian Curtis’ infamous suicide in 1980. The band’s surviving members decided to keep trucking, but to another place: the dance floor. They eschewed the agonized guitars and doomy bass lines for synths and sequencers, forging a wistful fusion of post-punk and dance music that wound up dominating ’80s pop charts. “We made a conscious effort that we were going to do something that would take us away from Joy Division,” says Morris. “We needed New Order to be a completely different thing.”

Nowadays, though, New Order have their hands full protecting both their past and present legacies. The last decade has seen hordes of acts — from Interpol to The Killers (whose singer Brandon Flowers guests on Music Complete) — shamelessly ape the band’s brand of happy-sad dance-rock. At the same time, fascination with Joy Division has grown exponentially, inspiring cinematic retellings (24 Hour Party People, Control) and fashion trends (see: that Unknown Pleasures T-shirt hipsters can’t stop wearing). And then there’s that laptop-generated frat boy racket they helped spawn. For better or worse, they’ve left a mark.

“I can see the funny side of it, I’m not a miserable son of a bitch,” Morris chuckles. “But you have to ask: ‘what would Ian have thought of all this?’ I don’t really know.”

And he can’t really know. Nor can New Order control the newer order. All they can do is keep their own beat going — and see where it drops.

Photo: Nick Wilson

BY ALEX NINO GHECIU

Guide Justin Leboe is the chef/owner at Model Milk, Calgary’s best (there, we said it: best) restaurant, and the recently opened Pigeonhole. Look for his column on food and restaurants in this space every issue.

FOOD

Stage Fright Why our new food columnist hates Instagram, loves chanterelles, and thinks the mark of a good chef is how much he’s sweat in someone else’s kitchen

BY JUSTIN LEBOE

AST FALL I WENT TO Copenhagen to stage in one of Europe’s most respected restaurants, Relæ. I was 41, almost twice as old as the other stages, and an established chef back home. I had a successful restaurant, and I was about to open another, a wine bar called Pigeonhole. And I was standing in an unfamiliar kitchen beside a couple of 20-year-olds, about to break my back washing two kilos of Polish mushrooms.

The task was simple: with the tip of a small turning knife, clean any debris, twigs, tree needles or sand from the chanterelles, then plunge them in a clean bowl of water, agitate, remove and, using the knife, clean or remove anything that hadn’t come off. Turns out those forests in Poland are home to all the missing sand from the shrinking Sahara Desert. Twelve kilos and nine hours later, my back was killing me. My knees were throbbing. I longed for Ibuprofen. I wanted to stick that turning

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knife in my eyes. What was I doing here?

I was hunched over that pot of mushrooms for some much-needed reinvigoration — to see if I still had the same drive, the same passion, the same curiosity I had when I was starting out. I needed those things if I was going to open a new place. A chef works for 20 or 30 years honing their craft, pursuing some elusive notion of perfection. A stage — a French tradition of chefs working for free in other kitchens to gain knowledge and skills — is an opportunity to scratch around in their ever-expanding world and unearth as much as they can. The idea is to gain confidence by being tested in the unfamiliar. After all, running a successful kitchen is about far more than just artfully arranging food on a plate. No amount of Instagramming, or reputation, will make something taste better if it sucks to begin with.

My first stage was over 20 years ago.

I was a kid who’d never been to New York City. I’d never eaten at a restaurant like Daniel Boulud’s Daniel or Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry, let alone

“Running a successful kitchen is about far more than just artfully arranging food on a plate. No amount of Instagramming will make something taste better if it sucks to begin with.” worked in a kitchen of that caliber. I ended up staging at both in quick succession. It was tough. Halfway in, my long-time girlfriend moved out. Despite the hours, the stress, the exceptionally tedious lengths that were taken to refine and finesse an ingredient, I finished it.

These stages helped form how I look at kitchens, food and cooks — and my life as a whole. The truth is, there is no magic secret to great food. It all comes down to product, discipline, know-how and extremely hard work.

For all of these experiences, I never received a cent. I lived off savings, woke up for 5 a.m. start times, spent hours repeating the same task, and re-

warded myself with bottle after bottle of Ibuprofen. Sometimes, numbly, I’d question my life choices.

This industry is filled with chefs looking for a shortcut. I couldn’t open a restaurant if I wasn’t dedicated to putting in the work to make it perfect. I’m unwilling to use the smoke and mirrors of social media, or PR dollars to prop up my reputation. So I did what I’ve always done. I got myself into a famous kitchen as a stage, I put my head down and went to work on those mushrooms.

At the end of my stage in Copenhagen, I dined at the restaurant. That chanterelle dessert? It was worth all the self-doubt.

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September 2015 LOOK BETTER FEEL BETTER KNOW MORE

Cars Where Heroes Are Born Le Mans isn’t just another car race.

It’s a 24-hour proving ground for the all-time automotive greats

HE TOWN OF LE MANS in northern France is overrun by people. And cars. Huge crowds clog the main streets to watch professional drivers parade through the city. Fans climb up the sides of buildings, beer in hand, to get a better look.

We’re all here, on an otherwise quiet weekend in June, to watch the 83rd running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, which

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might be the most famous — and most prestigious — race in all of motorsports, matched only by the likes of the Monaco Grand Prix and the Indianapolis 500.

Those who follow racing know that heroes are born at places like Le Mans. This is where drivers get truly tested, where the trophies are biggest and the competition is at its most fierce.

Photo: Guillaume Souvant / Getty.

B Y M AT T B U B B E R S

Derek Bell and Jacky Ickx win in France, June 16 1975.

THIS YEAR AT LE MANS, the cars are faster than ever, and more complex: futuristic prototypes powered by oil and electricity and kept running with supercomputers and tireless mechanics. It’s no longer an endurance race. It’s a 24-hour sprint to the finish.

Porsche takes the lead early. The team — three cars, nine drivers — wants to claim its first overall win in 17 years.

No one is more excited about this than Jacky Ickx, who won Le Mans four times at the wheel of a Porsche between 1976 and 1982.

Ickx is now 70 and every bit as rakish as all the old photos suggest. He’s got a sweater tied over his shoulders, below a full head of windswept grey hair.

Walking into Porsche’s VIP tent at Le Mans, he’s immediately surrounded. He glad-hands and smiles and indulges. He struts around the paddock like he owns this place — and, for fans of a certain age, he does. In total he’s won Le Mans six times, a record that stood until Tom Kristensen won his seventh in 2005.

But Ickx, unlike Kristensen, has gone from being one of the greats to an honest-to-god hero of motorsport. It’s an impossible — and impossibly small — list to pin down, but it’s easy to agree on at least a handful of names: Fangio, Clark, Stewart, Senna. Badasses, all.

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The Porsche team celebrates their 2015 Le Mans victory.

The Le Mans-winning Porsche 919, by the numbers Drivers: 3 (Nico Hülkenberg, Earl Bamber, Nick Tandy) Spectators: 263,500 Laps completed: 395 Electric power: >400 hp V4 gas engine: >500 hp Total power output: >900 hp Chassis: Like an F1 car with a roof Cost: Undisclosed millions

sport? What makes a racing hero?

Luckily, a 24-hour race provides ample opportunity to ponder these questions — and to get five minutes of a hero’s time to ask them. For his part, Ickx points to Jim Clark as a model of all Le Mans stands for. “He had the most sportif image as a racer, and as a man, in a time when racing was not a business.”

But surely, greatness is about more than just image. “It’s the level of competition,” he says, “you must face the best.”

It’s difficult to get athletes to be eloquent about their own sport. Ever watch an interview with any member of the Leafs? Sometimes it’s better to ask someone who was on the sidelines.

At another race, months ago, I ran into Neil Trundle, the man who was Ayrton Senna’s chief mechanic for the ’88/’89 Formula One season. Trundle had a seat, front row centre, to maybe the biggest hero in all of motor racing.

Trundle got to see how a hero worked.

“Ayrton was a very special person. He was very confident. Very pushy. Selfish?

Yes, but then he needed it. Schumacher too. Phenomenal driver. Won more championships than anyone else. But again, very selfish guy. He always needed to be No. 1 in the team.”

The point is that what separates Le Mans and places like it — and what makes it possible for a great, selfish, confident maniac to become a hero — is that each time it’s fantastically different. As racing changes, so too do its heroes. They each write their own legend: Senna in the rain at Monaco, Ickx charging from last place to win at Le Mans, Fangio who wrestled with monstrous pre-war cars and lived — until he didn’t.

Heroes are why these races are worth going to — why hundreds of thousands of people turn up every year to watch.

Maybe they’ll witness a hero being born.

All three Porsches survived the night.

With the sun high in the sky, No. 19, piloted by a band of rookies, charged towards the finish line. They survived to claim Porsche’s first win in 17 years. Ickx is back in Porsche’s VIP tent to join in the speeches and celebrations. The team beat the dominant Audi squad. It was a flawless win, a masterful drive.

Did we see any heroes born? Probably not. But, we’ll be back again next year.

Because that faint hope of finding one is what motorsport is all about.

Photo: Keystone-France, Guillaume Souvant, Jean-Francois Monier / Getty.

Cars

September 2015 LOOK BETTER FEEL BETTER KNOW MORE

TRENDS

Style

Off-Court Kicks Lacoste’s shoe game

OU CAN HAVE SHOES. And then you can have shoes that stand for something. That have some history. Like, for example, these Lacoste Turbo 2s. Drawing on the brand’s tennis heritage, they were originally designed to wear on the court, but have been updated with leather uppers, suede details and, of course, the signature croc logo to take them off the court and turn them into seriously street-worthy kicks. L A C O S T E , $ 2 0 0

Y

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Photo: Mathew Guido. Styling: Mark John Tripp.

is strong

Style GROOMING

Own the Night There’s only so much you can get done when you’re asleep. Why not use that time to be more handsome?

THE MORNING GETS ALL THE GLORY when it comes to grooming. The shaving, the moisturizing, the fragrance selection and application. The sleepy-eye-crust removal. But you have a washroom routine before bed, too. Men should use that time to help their skin look healthier and younger. Getting a good night’s sleep is essential, but you can make that downtime even more effective with these.

T

You don’t always get the sleep you should.

These eye creams are the secret weapon against the ravages of last night:

AINHOA EYE SOOTHER CREAM $55

D.R. HARRIS CRYSTAL EYE GEL $20

DERMALOGICA OVERNIGHT RETINOL REPAIR

Packed with retinol, vitamins C and A and peptides — all proven to help fight the effects of aging — this is the secret weapon to destroy those lines around your eyes that you thought made you look like Clooney, but actually just make you seem tired. $110

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UNCLE PETER’S MAN DOUBLE DUTY SOLDIER SCRUB

It starts with a good face wash, and before you go to bed is the best time to exfoliate to get rid of the oil, dirt and dead skin you build up throughout the day. Packed with natural ingredients, this tough scrub will leave you smelling fresh (a bonus before bed) and get rid of the day’s nastiness with its mixture of brown rice, cane sugar, hempseed oil and jojoba oil. $ 2 5

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PROFILE LIFT ANTI-GRAVITY MOISTURIZER

If Rob Lowe’s eternally youthful skin wasn’t enough to convince you that his new line of skin care products are legit, then at least trust that the cocktail of natural ingredients in this anti-aging cream will help you look younger right now. The man obviously takes care of his skin — only makes sense to have him help take care of yours, too. $ 5 7

NICKEL EYE CONTOUR LIFT $34

Column 1

T H E R E L U C TA N T FA N AT I C

Maximum Excitement Why watching other people play video games might just be the next big spectator sport

T

B Y N I C H O L A S H U N E - B R O W N • I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y V I V I A N L A I

HE GAME THAT’S either the future of professional spectator sports or a silly pastime for weedy, basement-dwelling nerds or — who knows? — probably both, begins the same way every other commercial sport does: with dimmed lights, a thumping soundtrack, and a carefully engineered crescendo of pre-game hype that is absurd and stupid and totally enthralling.

“FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE” the crowd chanted, clapping their thundersticks in time as the clock on the big screen counted us down. “Laaaadies and gentlemen,” the announcer rumbled over the din. “These are your World Championship Series Premier League season two finalists!”

The stage at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre exploded in light, mini-spotlights wheeling around drunkenly through the dry ice haze to indicate MAXIMUM EXCITEMENT, as two skinny gamers stepped forward

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to awkwardly accept the adulation of the crowd. Shin Dong Won, a Korean 23-year-old who plays under the name “Hydra,” was facing off against David Moschetto, a 20-year-old Frenchman who goes by “Lilbow.” The two finalists smiled, pleased but bashful, shifting their weight from foot to foot — a pair of introvert birthday boys caught in the moment after the lights come on at a surprise party.

I was there for the finals of the StarCraft II World Championship Series, a tournament held before thousands of screaming fans in a darkened room that had been made over to resemble some combination of a WWE wrestling arena and the set of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Many more watched from home, where the tournament was being broadcast live around the world. On a raised stage, two plexiglass-fronted pods held the athletes — eyes forward, strapped into sound-cancelling headphones, hands on mouse and keyboard. The real action happened on the three enormous screens behind them, where their vast armies of brightly coloured aliens and futuristic humans did battle.

I’d come because, after years of ignorance, I was curious about the world of eSports. Competitive gaming has been around for two decades, but in recent years it has exploded so far out of its niche market that it has forced the mainstream to pay attention. According to market research firm Newzoo, 205 million people watched or played eSports in 2014.

Games like Defense of the Ancients and League of Legends, have blown up, with multimillion-dollar championship pots and rabid fans who flock online to watch the best gamers do battle. Last year’s League of Legends

“How can something be a ‘sport’ if its grand champion is a skinny Korean kid who looks like he rarely sees the sun?”

championship sold out Sangram Stadium in South Korea, the same place that hosted the World Cup. Online, it drew almost 30 million viewers, more than the 2014 NBA finals.

StarCraft is the original eSport. It’s a real-time strategy game in which players mine minerals, build an economy and then use that economy to destroy their opponent. It’s like chess, except the board changes after every round, you have to manually control the pieces in combat, and teenagers really love playing it. Despite being called the “World Championship,” the tournament in Toronto was just the minor leagues compared to tournaments in South Korea, eSports’ spiritual home, where there are two TV channels entirely devoted to professional StarCraft.

In September 2014, Amazon purchased the video game broadcasting website Twitch for almost a billion dollars. Shortly after, ESPN president John Skipper was asked about eSports. “It’s not a sport,” he said. “I’m interested in doing real sports.”

The fact that traditional sports outlets have greeted gamers with suspicion is to be expected. A new sport is like a new religion: it threatens to reveal the absurdity of the old forms.

Scientology is silly, sure, but no more ridiculous than stories about talking snakes and virgin births. Likewise, a game in which people use their keyboards to build ultra-powerful alien armies is no more inherently absurd than a game in which grown men try to hit a bit of leather-wrapped cork with a stick. At a sport’s birth, it’s difficult to tell if it’s the next UFC or the next Slamball, the short-lived league that combined all the excitement of basketball with the inherent idiocy of jumping on a trampoline. History is what adds depth and gravitas to

what might otherwise seem nakedly absurd. In 2015, the world of eSports has millions of fans and full-time competitors playing for prizes that reach $5 million. It’s undoubtedly professional. Only time makes a silly “game” into something meaningful and dignified.

More than this general skepticism, however, eSport athletes seem to inspire a particular animus. Professional gamers train 8-12 hours a day to stay sharp. At a California eSports lab sponsored by Red Bull, gamers don’t just play the game but deconstruct their technique, using eye tracking technology, following exercise regimes, and running set plays with coaches. Gamers have received athletic visas, there are eSports athletes in the collegiate system, and they competed at this year’s X Games.

Despite all this, there’s a natural reluctance to call gamers “athletes.”

This April, when ESPN broadcast a Heroes of the Storm tournament on ESPN2, the move immediately confused and enraged people like ESPN radio personality Colin Cowherd, who was appalled that a video game had aired in the sacrosanct space reserved for events like obstacle-course running, hot-dog eating, and spearfishing. “Somebody lock the basement door at mom’s house and don’t let ’em out,” said Cowherd with disgust. “I will quit this network if I am ever asked to cover that. I tolerated Donkey Kong. I’ll tell you what that was the equivalent of… of me putting a gun in my mouth.”

The defensiveness of people like Cowherd — the flagrant nerd-baiting and howls of outrage — feels like the last gasp of a particular kind of sports bro traditionalism. We live in a time in which it feels like the nerds have triumphed. Even sports,

that last bastion of unreconstructed manliness, can feel like it’s under siege by Moneyball-quoting quants, stations that insist on broadcasting female soccer players and analysts who treat the epic battles between modern-day gladiators as just so much grist for the data mill. Maybe accepting eSports feels like a step too far. After all, how can something be a “sport” if its grand champion is a skinny Korean kid who looks like he rarely sees the sun?

At the StarCraft tournament, no one was worrying about this. Call it a sport or a spectacle, competitive gaming is big and — in a crowd full of maniac fans screaming themselves hoarse — it is exciting.

Onstage, two announcers (called “casters”) did rapid-fire play-by-play as Hydra tried to hold off Lilbow’s frenzied attacks. “Lilbow really piling on the pressure now!” The Korean sat in his booth, composed, the long, slim fingers of his left hand articulating across the keyboard like the legs of a spider while his right hand controlled the mouse, zipping this way and that.

On the towering screen, Lilbow’s stalkers crawled backward, repulsed

by Hydra’s army. “Hydra has fought this back!” yelled the caster. A steady crush of tiny alien creatures advanced on Lilbow. There was a flash of gunfire, a confusion of pixels, as the volume in the arena swelled and the thundersticks boomed. “Hydra, 4-2 is able to win the championship, is able to go the distance!” yelled the caster over the screaming crowd.

Hydra smiled. He walked to the centre of the stage, pumped his fists above his head, and picked up the trophy while silver confetti exploded into the crowd — the champion of a new sport, or something close to it.

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Column 2

FAT H E R H O O D

Just Breathe Why the simplest things in life are often the hardest — and most important

B Y S H A U G H N E S S Y B I S H O P - S TA L L • I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y E VA N K A M I N S K Y

“

Y

OUR BEER CAN IS OPEN,” says Dr. Grimmett as he finishes his examination.

I can’t help but look down, as if I’d forgotten that I brought a drink into his office, or didn’t do up my zipper.

“The abdomen is like a cylindrical can,” he continues, as if holding one in his hands. “And the diaphragm is the lid, flattening down to keep it closed. This helps maintain stability and strength. But yours is...”

“My can is open,” I say.

He nods, smiling. I’ve known Dr. Grimmett for a very long time. He’s a good, smart guy and one hell of a chiropractor. His unique understanding and careful practice of Active Release Therapy has got my family through a myriad of acci-

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dents and injuries. And the man never stops learning. Apparently these days he’s been learning about cans.

“So, what does that mean?”

“Well, when a can is open, it loses its inside rigour, it can easily collapse under pressure and then more air escapes, more energy. It makes all your core functions more difficult.”

“So what do I do?”

“You need to learn how to breathe.”

I’d planned on writing a column about learning to box again, and teaching my kid how to fight. But for that I needed to get back in shape, and when I tried, I got pounding headaches — which is why I came here. But somehow what he’s saying makes sense; the truth is, I’ve felt unable to breathe for a while now.

Over the past few months I’d broken up with my girlfriend, quit my teaching job at the university, moved across the country into my parents’ home with my son part-time, then accidentally flooded their home with an errantly flushed toilet and had to move with them into a hotel due to contamination; in those same few days the family dog died of a sudden cancer, then the cat, leaving my parents grief-stricken as well as homeless. Meanwhile, I have a deadline for a book that refuses to write itself, the guy who subletted my apartment back in Toronto hasn’t paid his rent, so I’m facing eviction there, too, and now my boy’s mum

“I am losing the rigour inside me. I am collapsing under the pressure. And I don’t know how to breathe.”

wants to move from this city of flood and family back to that one of heartbreak and burned bridges. The boxing, I think, was supposed to help with the stress. But I am losing the rigour inside me. I am collapsing under the pressure. And I don’t know how to breathe.

“You’re not alone,” says Dr. Grimmett. “About 70 per cent of people don’t breathe properly. We can do it at birth, but then we unlearn it. We become shallow-breathers, chest breathers. Some of that’s from sucking in your gut, or from bad posture.

Posture and proper breathing are essential to a strong core. It’s where all your focused power comes from.

Think of Bruce Lee; it’s what gave him that four-inch punch.”

Who hasn’t coveted that punch?

But Bruce Lee feels a long way off and maybe the doctor can sense it.

“Breathing is essential if you want to relieve stress and pain,” he says.

“I do,” I say.

“How old is your son again?”

“Zev is five.”

“He probably knows how to breathe,” says Dr. Grimmett. “You should watch him.”

D

uring the next week I watch my boy breathe, and he watches me doing my breathing exercises and laughs at me. The exercises involve me sitting in front of a mirror with my shirt off and a red ribbon tied around my unstable core. When I

breathe in, it is my bow-tied belly that is supposed to expand, not my chest.

The following week, I do a version of this, shirt on, in the driver’s seat of my parents’ car, my palms pressed against the wheel, to make sure my collarbone doesn’t rise. Zev continues to laugh, even as he squirms to get out of the parked car. Also, a few times a day, I press my tongue firmly against the roof of my mouth and hold it there for a count of 10.

This is all to train me how to do what my cackling monkey of a son can supposedly do just perfectly, as easy as breathing....

I ask Zev if he wants to come with me to the doctor who’s making me do these things. He seems a bit skeptical until I tell him about the importance of breathing for the Bruce Lee power punch. “And anyway,” I say, “the doctor thinks you’re already an expert — just by being a kid.”

“At power punching?”

“No, breathing.” Zev does a quick little hyperventilation, puffing out his chest instead of his core.

H

“

uh,” says Dr. Grimmett, looking down at big little Zev who is standing shirtless before him, breathing in and out. “His pop can’s a little bit open. He points to the lines on his back and shoulders. “You see this? The two sides are uneven.”

The kid’s a firecracker, but also a bit of a sloucher. His back is slight-

ly curved... and yes, a bit lopsided.

“Why is that?” I say.

“Maybe he didn’t crawl enough as a baby, or roll over enough. A lot of the time that’s because they’re being helped too much by the parents.”

“Hmm...” I say, trying to compute the variables of such a slight accusation.

“Be tall!” says Dr. Grimmett. And both Zev and I straighten right up.

“You see that? How he corrects himself perfectly!”

I thought I’d done pretty well too, but Zev is beaming.

“Just do that for now,” says Dr. Grimmett. “Keep reminding him. We’ll get him back to a stage he sort of missed: make that core nice and strong — get him thinking of being tall.”

“I am tall,” says Zev. “Yes,” says Dr. Grimmett. “But you have to remember it.”

“And daddy, too?”

“Absolutely. You two should get in the habit of reminding each other. It’ll help you breathe properly.”

“And power punch?”

“And power punch, and everything else.”

Zev turns to me quickly. “Be tall, Daddy!” he says.

“Be tall, Zevvy!” I say.

We keep reminding each other as we walk out of the building. We’re trying to breathe, our bellies out and our heads held high.

But it’s hard to do while laughing.

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BY LAUREN McKEON

A massive police sting on a wine fraud ring in Ontario and Q uebec earlier this year left an industry reeling .

Inside the surprisingly robust business of collusion and counterfeit in C anada ’ s wine world

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In early 2000, amateur baseball scout and future Team Ontario coach Murray Marshall co-founded a small wine company in Niagara with his favourite former player, Andrew Green. Together, they named it Diamond Estates — less a nod to luxury, and more an homage to their shared beer-and-ballpark-hot-dog roots. The winery sold and marketed mostly cheap, mostly fruity wine, the kind you can pay for with a $20 bill and still get enough change to pick up a wedge of brie. But Marshall, the president and CEO, had bigger dreams: expansion.

Throughout the next decade, Diamond gobbled up in-trouble wineries across the province. In just two months in 2009, it dropped a cool $20 million on acquisitions, buying the massive Niagara-on-the-Lake winery that’s now its flagship tourist destination. By the end of 2012, it ranked amongst Canada’s top five wine producers, by capacity. It was also the third-largest independent sales agency in the country, representing more than 100 other brands including Dr. McGillicuddy’s Schnapps, Hpnotiq and Fireball Cinnamon Whisky. Its wine portfolio included Dan Aykroyd’s wine and the NHL alumni wine, Hat Trick.

That fiscal year, it cleared $28.4 million in revenue.

Marshall also established himself as an industry expert: he sat as

a board director on the Winery and Grower Alliance of Ontario, a powerhouse industry organization; was chair of the Vintners Quality Alliance of Canada (VQA), a group dedicated to ensuring and enforcing high wine standards; and represented the wine business in lobbying efforts to the House of Commons. It seemed, in those heady days, that Diamond, and especially Marshall, could not be stopped. He was on top of Ontario’s burgeoning wine industry.

Yet at some point in 2010, he got greedy.

The Stoney Creek, Ont.-based 58-year-old, who is grey-haired with a sloping belly and marble-slab face, was fired quietly in May 2014.

A year later, he, along with 11 other one-time wine industry hotshots in Ontario and Quebec, was arrested in a mega Montreal police sting called Project Malbec. Knee-deep in the muddy operation of a wine fraud ring, Marshall stands accused of helping smuggle incredible amounts of bargain-priced dreck into Quebec, passing it off as something far better, circumventing governmental alcohol sales rules, and, in the process, defrauding thousands of Canadians. Police say there will be charges of conspiracy and fraud, counterfeit, possession of stolen goods and money laundering — although when I spoke to Montreal police Commander Ian Lafrenière in early July, he told me the thicket of charges was too complex to say, then, who would get what. He also warned there were more arrests on the way: “It’s not over yet.”

Police allege Marshall was a major player in the high-stakes wine fraud ring, along with 52-year-old Luca Gaspari, a self-declared oenologist and director of Bolton, Ont.-based winery Les Vins Tenute Santarelli Inc., which is famous for its maple syrup-derived wine, and 57-yearold Floyd Lahache, a former, but not exactly formidable, professional hockey player, another director at

Satarelli, and owner of First Nations Winery in Quebec. They’re accused of making and selling 1.8 million bottles of counterfeit wine between 2010 to 2014 — a grand total value of $14 million. It was so much wine, Lafrenière says, that as part of the sting Montreal police seized 89,000 litres — roughly enough to fill two backyard swimming pools — and had to work with the Société des alcools du Québec (SAQ) to buy extra equipment to store it all. In fact, police were first tipped off to the ring after seizing 100 cases of wine in one go.

The wine fraud ring is accused of importing mind-boggling amounts of inexpensive Italian wine, which arrived via ship to the Port of Montreal in 24,000-litre containers. Once there, police say, the ring’s members moved it to a winery where it was doctored with different types of sugars, acids, glycerol and fruit essences, like blackberry and raspberry to taste like better wine. It’s a common, legal practice in winemaking, especially when it comes to low-cost wines — there’s even an additive called Mega Purple, often used to make a too-light red wine deeper in colour and flavour.

What’s illegal is for an oenologist to use his skills to copycat another, legitimate wine. The altered wine was then bottled to mimic more than 20 different legitimate brands — including those sold and manufactured by Diamond, such as the winery’s popular, lightly fruity label, Fresh.

Through the well-connected circle, the ring allegedly moved the wine around Quebec and Ontario, where it was sold in bulk to everyday wine drinkers who, in turn, would bring it back to their hometown and resell it by the bottle. Buyers would usually pay $10 to $12, believing they were getting wine worth at least twice that amount.

“People thought it was a heck of a bargain,” says Lafrenière. “But at the end of the day, they were having a very — what we say in French — a piquette. A very bad, bad wine.”

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King of Pop Culture He’s an old-school movie star. A writer. A director. And the man behind an online production company that’s changing the way we consume media.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the future — and he’s loving every minute of it

By Peter Saltsman • Photo by: Kai Z Feng / Trunk Archive

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DENIM ON TOP The always-classic jean jacket easily works on its own, but is also a great layering piece for when the temperature drops — throw it on under a blazer or winter jacket and you’ve got yourself the perfect base layer.

Cotton denim jacket ($240)

by Fidelity; wool-nylon blend double-breasted coat ($695)

by Michael Kors; cotton T-shirt ($60) by adidas.

THE SHARP GUIDE TO

DENIM

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JEANS: you wear them with everything.

Now it’s time to wear them with everything else.

Welcome to the definitive guide to your born-again wardrobe staple

FANCY PANTS More of a chino guy? Then consider the trouser cut jean. They trade in the traditional five pockets and do away with contrast stitching and any embellishment.

You can even crease them if you want. (Though they’re still denim, so we don’t recommend it.)

Cotton denim pants ($600) and linen henley shirt ($200)

by John Varvatos; cotton chambray shirt ($275) by Paige; leather sneakers ($300) by Tiger of Sweden; sterling silver and bead bracelet ($265) and leather and metal bracelet ($345) by Thomas Sabo.

There’s a reason jeans have never really fallen out of favour. They’re rugged. They’re versatile. They’re a working man’s pant and, dammit, they just plain work. Your closet isn’t just full of them — it’s built on them. You might have a pair for every day of the week. You might just have one pair, worn and creased and threadbare, a single seasonless, trendless cut and finish that goes with everything because, well, you make it go with everything. And that’s exactly what’s new again in the world of denim — we’re back to basics, skinny jeans be damned. So yes, they’re jeans, we know you know what you’re doing. But consider this a re-education. A renewal of vows. Get into it.

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WHERE THE STREETS HAVE NO NAME

BUT WHERE STREET STYLE IS SERIOUSLY ON POINT

Dublin may be an old city, but it doesn’t feel like one. We took to the pedestrian-friendly streets of Temple Bar — an area rife with pubs and cafés — and the courtyards of the historic Collins Barracks to showcase what you really need to be wearing this fall: turtlenecks, tailored coats and ridiculously rich fabrics.

Photography by: Peter Ash Lee Styling by: Luke Langsdale Shot on location in Dublin, Ireland

Suede bomber jacket ($1,720) by A . P . C . x L o u i s W ; wool turtleneck ($150) by To m m y H i l f i g e r .

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CLASSIC ROCKS The enduring appeal of— excuse us—timeless design By: Ariel Adams Photography by: Adrian Armstrong WHAT IS A CLASSIC WATCH? It’s a big question. A classic watch looked good yesterday, looks good today and will look good tomorrow.

A classic watch illustrates the best practices of watchmaking, from design to mechanics. A classic watch is equally stylish on the wrist of almost any man, and in almost any situation, formal, professional or, heck, even casual. A classic watch isn’t conservative — it’s the most forward-thinking investment you can make in a timepiece. It should be your first major purchase, your longest-lasting standby, your go-to. It should be dependable, and in putting it on, should evoke that manliest of feelings: a sense of responsibility, commitment, patience. It should, in short, be one of these.

1

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3

2

1. RAYMOND WEIL

Two-tone watches in steel and gold present a unique blend of both class and humility — the gold is luxurious, the steel implies that you have a strong sense of self-worth. Raymond Weil offers gold-plated elements on this Freelancer model, which makes for a handsome, yet slightly less conservative, statement. $ 2 , 1 5 0

2. TUDOR

Sometimes a classic watch isn’t for everyday wear. The Tudor Glamour is a black tie watch. Curved lunes add a decorative flair to what can sometimes be overly minimalistic designs, at least for some people’s tastes. $ 3 , 3 5 0

3. CHOPARD

In the heart of Swiss watchmaking country, Chopard operates their venerable L.U.C production facility where the brand’s most elite timepieces are produced and handfinished. Broadly sized, this model in gold expresses classic style with the addition of some complicates for those who love mechanics as much as looking good. $ 2 9 , 2 2 0

4

4. CARTIER

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The famed Cartier Tortue collection is quite literally named after its tortoise-style case, which combines a tonneau shape with distinct lugs.

There’s a French old-world, pre-war charm to the Tortue, which allows even new models to feel like a reminder of another age. $ 2 3 , 2 0 0

5. TISSOT

Because of their often-uncomplicated design, high quality watches in this genre can be more accessible.

Tissot adds a masculine sense of purpose to an extremely versatile classic dress watch in black and steel with a Swiss quartz movement.

6

$375

6. GUESS

This watch goes back to basics: a mostly minimalized dress watch with a classic silver dial, matched to a thin steel case and high-gloss brown leather strap. This is how a simple watch can become an indispensable fashion accessory. $ 1 1 5

7. MONTBLANC

This is a modern approach to classic design. The steel band suggests a bit more style and edginess than such a design would otherwise evoke on a leather strap. The strong hands suggest purpose and importance. $ 3 , 2 1 0 7

Wool coat ($1,295), cotton suit ($1,050), cotton shirt ($205), silk tie ($185), silk pocket square ($55), leather belt ($165), leather shoes ($675) and leather bag ($2,195) by BOSS. Styling by Joanne Jin.

APPLIED ARTS Dressing well is as much an art as it is a skill — and the real artists are the designers who nail it, season after season. For the fall, we put together some foolproof looks from a few modern masters Photography by: Carlyle Routh Styling by: Marc Andrew Smith Location provided by RAW DESIGN

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Painting: Flower of Life Freehand (thank you for being what you are) by Kyle Tonkens.

Tom Ford

Wool suit jacket ($4,610), wool pants ($1,770), cotton button-down ($725), wool knit tie ($280), linen pocket square ($220) and patent leather loafers ($2,280).

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Rank & File 1 3 2

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4

5

8

7

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Our highly scientific ranking of things that do and do not deserve your attention

1. BLACK MASS

Because playing a sociopathic, murderous mob boss is the closest Johnny Depp has come to playing a real human in a long time.

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2. TIFF

You heard it here first: that film everyone is Oscar-buzzing about? It’s totally overrated.

3. POLARIS PRIZE

Canadian indie music’s holy grail is announced this month, though we’re mostly just excited that childhood favourite Fred Penner will be hosting the event. #ThePennaisance

4. KIT AND ACE As Lululemon’s spinoff gains surprising momentum, here’s hoping it’s the Frasier of technical active wear, and not the Joey.

5. CHARLOTTE LE BON She’s starring opposite cover man Joseph Gordon-

Levitt in The Walk this month. Quebec: where have you been hiding her?

electing the first bearded Prime Minister since, like, the 1800s.

6. MERCEDES SELF-DRIVING LUXURY CAR

Don’t choke don’t choke don’t choke don’t choke!

Because you would never be caught dead in a self-driving Kia.

7. IT’S AN ELECTION YEAR!

Politics aside, we’re excited by the possibility of

8. BLUE JAYS

9. POP OF COLOUR

We’re as sick of that phrase as anybody else. Too bad the only thing that’ll brighten the oncoming winter darkness is a jaunty pair of socks.