DRIVEN Magazine - Sept 2008 by Driven Magazine

september 2008 * drivenmag.com *

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life.in.motion

* t r a v e l * m e n â&#x20AC;&#x2122; s l i f e s t y l e

DRIVEN September 2008

n o l l i D h Hug

t one) s u j , l l e w gers ( n e ll a all ch n o s e tak

life.in.motion The design issue

The design issue

construction

criticism

form defeats function in Dubai

BMWâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Green Giant antler chandelier freshly sliced tech XSR48 Superboat seamless sneaker dapper digitals And more

The driven reader *exclusive comic strip by Jeff Lemire, short fiction by Kenneth J. Harvey

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F o r re t a i l e r l o c a t i o n s , p l e a s e v i s i t w w w. l o n g i n e s . c o m o r c a l l 1 - 8 6 6 - 903-9015 F o r re t a i l e r l o c a t i o n s , p l e a s e v i s i t w w w. l o n g i n e s . c o m o r c a l l ( 4 1 6) 703-1667

On the Cover. Clothes Dolce & Gabbana suit from Holt Renfrew; Hugo Boss shirt from Harry Rosen; Prada tie from Holt Renfrew; Gucci belt from Holt Renfrew; Ferragamo shoes from Harry Rosen Car 2009 Dodge Challenger SRT-8 Photography Finn O’Hara Styling Luke Langsdale Location Downsview Park

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the moose that roared Canada’s top industrial designers are paying homage to our country’s rich natural resources with a wink and a sometimes odd nod. Join STEPHANIE BORIDY as she examines a select few pieces that caught her eye including, go figure, the “12 antler chandelier.”

52 tangled up in hugh “Life is intense,” says singer-turned-actor Hugh Dillon, whose character wears a flak jacket on the hit TV series Flashpoint. He’s a little urgent in person, too, which explains why DEREK WEILER did not call this story “The Freewheelin’ Hugh Dillon.” DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

72 Porsche 911: teutonic Iconic In tandem with the launch of the latest iteration of Porsche’s legendary 911, MARK HACKING and JAMIE HUNTER travel to Germany to both study its history and test its future. 88 the towering infernal Dubai, the metropolis of the Middle East, has seen its profile rise almost as quickly as the multitudinous towers dotting its skyline. But beyond the construction cranes and conspicuous consumption, NEILL MICHAEL NAGIB finds little more than impractical jokes.

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38 Departments 16 Personality Stacey Grenrock Woods 18 Flash The XSR48 “Superboat” 20 Traveller Cases that suit & how to clothes them 22 Vision The decline and fall of Al Pacino 24 Sound CDs reviewed; plus: Noah Mintz 26 Bytes The rise of micro-blogging 28 Words The authorial voice 29 Graphics John J Muth’s curious experiment, M 30 Fitness Giving shin splints the runaround 32 Drink The best bar tools 34 Watches Return of the digital chronograph 38 Sex That Go and Thunderheist’s cocky but sensual video for “Jerk It” 40 Tech Thin is in and lighter is righter 42 Personality Phil White of Cervélo bicycles

DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

Automotive 77 2009 Mazda6 80 BMW Hydrogen 7 More 48 56 62 94 98

On the chopper block, with cool custom Canadian motorcycles Fiction exclusive Kenneth J. Harvey’s “The Ugliness of Emmett Dodd” Haute capture What to wear when the heist goes sour Roundhouse blues (for Toronto, anyhow) Bio-graphical Exclusively created for DRIVEN, a new comic by award-winning cartoonist Jeff Lemire

actual diameter 1 cm

the guardian of time. A watch is only as precise as its oscillator is regular. Conventional oscillator hairsprings are made of ferromagnetic alloys, leaving them vulnerable to magnetic fields and shocks. After five years of research, Rolex created the blue Parachrom hairspring. Crafted from a paramagnetic alloy, it is not affected by magnetic fields and is 10 times more resistant to shocks. Historically, the unique blue colour of the hairspring has been a sign of prestige reserved for only the most accurate timepieces. Today, it guarantees the accuracy of your Rolex. Discover more at rolex.com

OYSTER PERPETUAL COSMOGRAPH DAYTONA

For an official Rolex jeweller call 416.968.1100 - Toronto.

DRIVEN: life.in.motion Editor-in-chief Gary Butler Art director Kelly Kirkpatrick Associate editor Jamie Hunter Managing editor George Zicarelli Automotive Mark Hacking Fashion Luke Langsdale Travel Johnny Lucas Editorial interns Michelle Hunter, Derek Kreindler Contributors Jason Anderson, Carol Besler, Stephanie Boridy, Cameron Carpenter, Michael Costanzo, Richard Crouse, Zach Feldberg, Eric Forget, Jian Ghomeshi, James Grainger, Ian Harvey, Kenneth J. Harvey, Kevin Kelly, Jeff Lemire, Mark Moyes, Neill Nagib, Finn O’Hara, Scott Rankin, Rich Sibbald, Marcus Tamm, Ivor Tossell, Micah Toub, Jeff Vergara, Robert Watson, Derek Weiler, Thomas Weston, Ed White, Nathan Whitlock Account managers Catherine Martineau catherine@DRIVENmag.com, 416.682.3493 x202 Michele Marotta michele@DRIVENmag.com, 866.631.6550 x295 Stéphanie Masse stephanie@DRIVENmag.com, 866.631.6550 x244 Vincent Nöel vincent@DRIVENmag.com, 866.631.6550 x228 Advertising coordinator Melissa Bissett, 866.631.6550 x244

DESIGN INTERVENTION

Finance and administrative director Patricia Petit, 866.631.6550 x227

I welcome you to DRIVEN, as I hope you will also

welcome me. This is my first issue, an auspicious

need to know the following opinions. But this is my

occasion, to be sure. “The design issue.” As themes

page. So: I’m nostalgic for the old Canadian paper

go, this one is grand and expansive. The possibili-

dollar, which had a livelier green hue than any

ties are indeed endless, the limits defined only by

American bill. I can see beauty in a claw hammer’s

the imagination. No pressure, of course.

arch. I think French sevens are both more elegant

and straightforward than English ones—sevens,

Entering the University of Toronto’s vaguely

I think, I digress. Design. I’m not sure that you

defined but nonetheless hallowed gates two decades

that is. And I believe negative space carries more

ago, to study English literature—a fast-track degree

weight and meaning than positive space.

for an early career, waiting tables—I took the liberty

of not re-designing, but designing myself.

the top, welcome to DRIVEN. It’s my first issue, the

design issue, and while I wouldn’t maintain that my

My ostensible point is that I had emerged from

This letter’s been too positive. As I mentioned at

high school as a person. That person, though, that

team has reinvented the proverbial wheel, I hope

character, he was the sum of who knows how many

you’ll enjoy taking it for a spin. I know I did.

parts, the majority of them unconscious whims, ac-

quired habits, dubious instructions. I thought, I was.

What do I want this magazine to be next?

Just the one question left for me to answer, then:

And I thought: Who was I? And then I realized that it was really a question of who I wanted to become.

Gary Butler

Accounts receivable 866.631.6550 x233 Accounts payable 866.631.6550 x235 Printer Solisco Marketing director Larry Futers, 416.407.8338 InField Marketing Group Publisher Michel Crépault DRIVEN magazine 412 Richmond St. East, Ste. 200 Toronto, Ont. M5A 1P8 416.682.3493 DRIVENmag.com Issue #23 ISSN 1712-1906 Auto Journal Inc. 1730, 55th Ave. Lachine, Que. H8T 3J5 866.631.6550 DRIVEN is published six times per year. No part of this publication may be copied or reprinted without the written consent of the publisher. Subscription for one year: $30 (plus applicable taxes); $60 US surface; all other countries $120 airmail. For subscription inquiries, call 866.631.6550 x250.

10 DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

Derek Weiler Derek Weiler (“Another Side of Hugh Dillon,” p52) saw the Headstones when they toured their first album, Picture of Health, in the early ’90s. Hugh and the boys were opening for someone, and though he can’t remember who that might have been, Weiler remembers the Headstones set vividly. That same year, he interviewed Dillon for the first time, and listened to the band’s cover of the Travelling Wilburys’ “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” a lot. These days, Weiler talks to authors more often than rock stars or actors; he is the editor of Quill & Quire magazine. Weiler lives in Toronto with his wife; his favourite font is Gill Sans and his favourite Beatle is John.

Jeff Vergara Photojournalist Jeff Vergara (“Appetite for Construction,” p88) was an early adopter in the digital revolution, shooting clothing and apparel with a Sony Mavica—the first camera to use a floppy disk—in 1999. He moved from his native Philippines to Dubai in 2003 and figured out that not all that shines in the wealthy city is crystal, when he entered a glass-towered condominium and found that the windows were not tinted, but dust-rimed. Vergara’s online journal, The Dubai Chronicles, is a visual and verbal rant on life in the emirate, and was a Philippines Blog Award finalist in 2006 and 2007. He has won awards for his images both back home and in the Gulf region. Vergara’s first photo exhibit, Borderless: Places and Indigenous Faces, ran last June in Makati City, Philippines.

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Kenneth J. Harvey International bestselling author Kenneth J. Harvey (“The Ugliness of Emmett Dodd,” p56) based his exclusive short story’s peculiar protagonist “on a man who I saw around for years and often wondered about.” Harvey is published in over a dozen countries. He has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, the Winterset Award and the Libro Del Mare (Italy), and has been nominated for the Giller Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Random House publishes his epic family saga, Blackstrap Hawco, this month.

Jeff Lemire Accidentally picking up a copy of DC Comics’s Who’s Who Volume II at the corner gas bar in the tiny southwestern Ontario town of Woodslee made a man out of then nine-year-old Jeff Lemire (“Bio-graphical,” p98). Well, it made him obsessed, anyhow. Lemire was immediately taken with the world of superheroes and comic art and is today the award-winning cartoonist behind the Eisnernominated “Essex County” trilogy of graphic novels published by Top Shelf Productions. He is currently working on a new graphic novel, The Nobody, for DC’s Vertigo imprint. Lemire lives and works in Toronto with his wife, sculptor Lesley-Anne Green, and their three cats. His piece for DRIVEN was inspired by a childhood memory of his great-uncle Otto, who lived and worked next to Reginald Duchamp in the late 1940s.

calendar * Soon

By Jian Ghomeshi

Music The New CBC Radio 2, feat. shows hosted by Tom Allen, Rich Terfry (Buck 65), Molly Johnson and Julie Nesrallah September 2 CBC Radio 2 nationally cbc.ca/radio2 Virgin Festival 2008, feat. Constantines and others September 6-7 Toronto Island Park Toronto, Ont. virginfestival.ca Mogwai with Fuck Buttons September 6 Commodore Ballroom Vancouver, B.C. mogwai.co.uk Bloc Party September 14-15 Marquee Club Halifax, N.S. blocparty.com

Elliott Brood September 21 Sugar Nightclub Victoria, B.C. elliottbrood.ca Sigur Rós September 22 Massey Hall Toronto, Ont. sigur-ros.co.uk Here is a rare and outstanding opportunity to see Iceland’s ethereal sound masters in an acoustically fine venue. Sigur Rós make dramatically beautiful post-rock music with melancholic, classical and minimalist elements. The band’s live performances range from eclectic surprises to spectacular audio sweeps. If you’re already a ticket holder, consider yourself lucky—this show is officially sold out. You Say Party! We Say Die! September 25 Starlight Lounge Waterloo, Ont. yousaypartywesaydie.ca

Pop Montreal, feat. Burt Bacharach, Nick Cave and others October 1-5 Montreal, Que. popmontreal.com Pop Montreal has established itself as a major Canadian tastemaker music festival. It was created by music-lovers for music-lovers and it shows. Pop Montreal celebrates its sixth anniversary this year with local and international bands, as well as film, photography, art, fashion and loft parties going into the wee hours of the morning. Don’t miss the opportunity to see legendary pop king Burt Bacharach and poetic-punk troubadour Nick Cave on the same bill. Catch some Wintersleep while you’re at it, too—the Haligonians won the 2008 Juno award for New Group of the Year. Iron and Wine October 9 Myer Horowitz Theatre Edmonton, Alta. ironandwine.com

Seen By DRIVEN staff

Pogo and endo at Whistler Bike Park From August 7-19, Whistler, B.C. hosted Kokanee Crankworx, a festival combining high-adrenaline mountain biking, music and mayhem. The inaugural VW Trick Showdown was the 12-day event’s highlight, as riders waged private wars against gravity in front of a festival crowd of thousands.

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Once (or twice) around the block We’ve spent a lot of time combing various cities across Canada, but nothing compares to Mitsubishi’s City Chase, a scavenger hunt held nationally this past summer in eight separate urban centres. Montreal’s City Chase was held July 12, with hundreds of competitors running, walking, rappelling, using public transit and securing assistance from complete strangers to reach the finish line. DRIVEN’s publisher, Michel Crépault, will attend the World Championships in Marrakesh, Morocco this November. Look for complete coverage in an upcoming issue of DRIVEN. For further information, visit citychase.ca.

Nobody throws a party like a Brightworks party On July 16, Brightworks Interactive Marketing hosted its 3rd Annual Summer Party at C Lounge in Toronto. With the weather finally cooperating, the Brightworks staff hosted over 450 clients, friends and industry contacts to a night of drinks, apps and good cheer. Also mixing it up with us were clients from Bell, RBC and Bayer, among others. Brightworks started the invite-only summer party a scant sixth months after opening and it has now become a not-to-be-missed tradition.

Seven-figure tee off Mid-July saw RBC kick-off its week-long Canadian Open Million Dollar Shootout with a media day hosted by Canadian Idol judge Farley Flex. Various members of the media teed-off at Toronto’s Polson Pier, in an attempt to hit a 165-yard holein-one on a floating green in Toronto Harbour. The prize: a million big ones. Sadly, nobody from the DRIVEN office is seven-figures richer, but Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy accepted a $30,000 donation from RBC on behalf of MusiCan, the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) music education program.

Zhang Huan

Hayden October 11 Vogue Theatre Vancouver, B.C. wasteyourdaysaway.com Festivals/Performance/Film JCVD at Midnight Madness Toronto International Film Festival September 4 Ryerson Theatre Toronto, Ont. tiff08.ca Toronto Urban Film Festival September 5-12 Various venues Toronto, Ont. torontourbanfilmfestival.com Living in the shadow of its renowned counterpart, TIFF, the Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF) is often overlooked. Returning for its second year, the festival airs one-minute films on TTC subway platform screens all across Toronto. This year’s guest judge is former Kids in the Hall star Mark McKinney. Peter Pan Royal Winnipeg Ballet Tour September 18-20 Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium Calgary, Alta. rwb.org Atlantic Film Festival, feat. Afghan Muscles September 22 Empire Theatre Halifax, N.S. atlanticfilm.com Afghan Muscles is an unexpected look into the world of body building in Afghanistan. The Danish (!) documentary follows Hamid Shirzai from the mortar fire of Kaboul to the bright lights of Dubai on his quest to be a national champion in the shadow of his late brother and uncle.

Nick Cave

The Word on the Street Book and Magazine Festival September 28 Various venues and locations Halifax, Kitchener, Toronto, Vancouver thewordonthestreet.ca Scotiabank Nuit Blanche October 4 Various locations and venues Toronto, Ont. scotiabanknuitblanche.ca

Afghan Muscles

Show of Hands: Folk art of Nova Scotia Until November 16 Art Gallery of Nova Scotia Halifax, N.S. artgalleryofnovascotia.ca Figurative and Abstract Art in Québec, 1940-1960 Permanent Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec Québec City, Que. www.mnba.qc.ca

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui/Toneelhuis October 7-8 National Arts Centre Ottawa, Ont. nac-cna.ca Art Exhibits Zhang Huan Altered States Until October 5 Vancouver Art Gallery Vancouver, B.C. vanartgallery.bc.ca Zhang Huan is an artist best known for his controversial and poetic body-based performances, most of which involve physical endurance. This new exhibition includes more than 50 works of photography, sculpture and painting, and presents the experience of a singular artistic voice across diverse cultural domains. Queen West Art Crawl September 12 - 14 Various locations and venues Toronto, Ont. parkdaleliberty.com Utopia/Dystopia: The Photography of Geoffrey James Until October 19 National Gallery of Canada Ottawa, Ont. www.gallery.ca

Jian Ghomeshi is the host of Q, heard weekdays at 2 and 10 p.m. on CBC Radio One, cbc.ca/q

DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com 15

I, Californication You may have missed Stacey Grenrock Woods a few years ago as a Daily Show correspondent and on Arrested Development as reporter Trisha Thoon, but no doubt at some time you have read her hilariously acerbic sex column in Esquire, where she gives practical advice about what one does if one’s girlfriend is allergic to semen or why some people apparently get a headache after orgasm. It should all but go without saying that this multi-talented woman has led quite a life, which is the subject of I, California, out in paperback this month. Micah Toub talked with the author about post-memoir fallout, what it feels like to be mean, swearing in men’s magazines and her grand poetic ambitions. Your memoir has been out for a year now. Has Jennifer Aniston called yet, to complain about being tortured by her father in one of your dreams? No! I wish she would. It’s funny, because my home phone number is in the book and nobody calls me. One of my friends called me, because he had lost my number and went, ‘Oh, there it is,’ because he’d just finished the book. It was just him and one other guy. So Jody didn’t call, your friend at age 12 who crank called you and said, “Tell Stacey she’s a bitch”? No, I have not heard from Jody. Maybe she’ll start crank calling me, and that will be perfect. The circle will close. I put my phone number in a book, the book makes its way to Jody Jacobs, she’s mad, she starts crank calling me. That’s a good movie, actually.

SPINE HERE

Stacey Grenrock Woods

SPINE HERE

personality *

In the book, you explain how you found it in you to be mean on The Daily Show. Also, your sex column can be quite insulting. Are you mean in real life? The column is obviously a joke. It’s sort of written by a person other than me, in my mind. Which is why I want to move towards fiction now, because I want to channel even more meanness through that. So who is this alter ego who writes the Esquire sex column? It’s a part of myself that I let say the most ridiculous things I want to say. Although I’ve been told recently I can’t use the word ‘f**k.’ They’ve taken out the front-of-book ‘f**ks’.

I guess we’ll find out. Yeah, Esquire is taking them out. It’s a ‘f**k’-free zone. Which is strange to me, because I’m writing a sex column. I was using it as a literal term, like, ‘This guy wrote a lot of books on f**king. So we should listen to him.’ Speaking of self-censorship, although your book has a whole section on your canned 1989 Playboy photo shoot, there’s not one sex scene. Why? Would you want to write about your sex life? I suppose there are people who really have that need, and they’re called porn stars. Which is why I got some strange reviews, like one on Amazon that said: “This book was not as good as Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.” Honestly.

SPINE HERE

There used to be ‘f**ks’ in there? There were f**ks in there. Do you guys have ‘f**ks’ in your front of book?

You do describe taking The Pill a lot, though. That’s true. The sex is implied. I read somewhere that you were writing poetry, and compared yourself to Emily Dickinson. Was that a joke? I wish it had been a joke! I read that profile and thought, ‘What an asshole. That makes me sound so corny.’ But no, I’ve tried it. I’m working on a collection.

Poetry is difficult to do well. I know. Emily Dickinson wrote one a day, right? I don’t know. I only know she wasn’t really discovered until after she died. I think you’re right. Maybe that’s my fate.

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SPINE HERE

Could you read something to me? No, but I’ll tell you this: The working title is Saxophone Mountains. It’s nothing like Emily Dickinson.

SPINE HERE

flash *

Water Pistol

The XSR48 superboat is a sleek, slick skiff

The billionaires’ club used to be an exclusive group. This year marked the first time that over 1,000 names made Forbes magazine’s list of people with a net worth of at least 10 figures. With high-performance automobiles crowding the roadways, is it any surprise that the playground of über-rich speed junkies has now extended into the high seas? British manufacturer XSMG Marine touts its new XSR48 as the globe’s first superboat, a claim based primarily on the craft’s unrivalled performance, which has certainly been bolstered by the 2008 Condé Nast Traveller Innovation and Design Transport Award, among other critical accolades. The sleek design alone prompted Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear to label the superboat “the most beautiful thing ever created by man.” This from a gentleman whose everyday vehicle is a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder. Twin bi-turbo diesel engines produce over 1,600 horsepower and give the near 15-metre-long watercraft a top speed in excess of 160 kilometres per hour, making it the world’s nimblest production diesel-powered vessel on the open sea. Travelling faster than any boat before it, the XSR48 requires a lightweight yet strong Kevlar and carbon fibre monocoque construction more commonly

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By George Zicarelli

found in airplanes and auto racing, where high speeds demand that a structure’s external surface absorb some of the physical load. The largest glass roof on any boat in this size class illuminates the XSR48’s lavish interior, which includes two leather sofas, a double bed, a wine fridge and a 19-inch LCD screen. (DRIVEN understands that the engineers strove to save weight to improve performance; still we wonder why they couldn’t manage to fit in at least a 27-inch plasma.) A fully enclosed carbon fibre cockpit seats up to four passengers on leather seats with full harness restraint systems. The handcrafted aluminum console was designed by Frazero Limited, creators of bespoke interiors that have worked with Bentley, Rolls-Royce and Bugatti. For those customers with special security concerns, there is an optional bullet-proof cockpit and engine room. Entry-level pricing is 1.3 million BP ($2.65 million), with delivery already started for the first buyers in Monaco, Cannes, St. Tropez and Dubai. Production will halt at 100 superboats, which is to say, once every 100th billionaire has acquired one. As eight XSR48’s have been sold so far, XSMG Marine estimates that you’ve got until 2012 to buy in.

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Packing is my business and business is good Wrinkle- and worry-free tips for cramming your carry-ons without cramping your style By Michelle Hunter

t doesn’t matter whether you embark on five or 50 business trips a year. When it’s time to hit the road, the last thing any career professional needs to worry about is what to pack, let alone how to organize a suitcase, garment bag or duffel. Really, who’s got the time? Well, Alon Freeman, for one, and Jeff Farbstein, for another. Freeman is market director, menswear at Holt Renfrew and Farbstein is vice-president, general merchandise at Harry Rosen. Both of them travel the globe for work and are quite familiar with living out of a carry-on. Their practical advice involves more than merely socking away those shoes and shooing—and shoeing— those socks.

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Photography by Richard Sibbald

one, two, start with the shoe If you don’t know shirt from shinola about packing your pile of clothes, follow these simple steps

READy-MIX toothpaste There are a number of practical essentials that Farbstein says must be ready to go at all times— no excuses. The list is short but crucial: a full and proper toiletry kit, an umbrella and a pair of galoshes, and one extra each of socks, underwear and shirt.

making light of it all Invest in a slim, well-constructed suitcase. The less space in the luggage, the better, because there will be less movement. Freeman has a few designers in mind whose fashionable products keep the bulk to a minimum. “Think streamlined for a trip that is three days or less,” he says. “Paul Smith and Z Zegna for a sleeker fit; Canali and Ermenegildo Zegna for a classic fit.” Farbstein adds that colour should play a role in what you pack as well. “Travel with single colour combinations of clothing,” he says. “Try taking a blue jacket and grey trousers, and you can bring a sweater to be more casual at night.” running from the bulls You should know exactly where you are travelling to, not only in terms of geography but also culture. “Be aware of holidays that mean stores are closed or services unavailable,” Farbstein says. “You should also make sure you know exactly what specific services your hotel provides.”

* Shoes always go in first. Buy lightweight shoe trees or fill your shoes with socks and belts to make sure they keep their shape, Farbstein advises. Always make sure the shoes go closest to the wheels or in the bottom of the suitcase, because they are the heaviest items and should not be sliding around. They should also be placed face down in order to create a flat surface upon which to pack. * Most quality suitcases have a built-in layer. Strap the layer down as rigidly as possible to hold shoes in place—again, less movement equals less creases and fewer wrinkles. * After shoes, skip the shirts and pack all other items—pants, sweaters, jackets and toiletry kit. Fold clothes out to the corners of your suitcase in order to maintain a flat surface. When packing a garment bag, hang a jacket over two pairs of pants—but hang them opposite ways on the hanger, thus keeping the packing area even as possible. * Shirts go in last. They should be on the top of the layer and should be folded so the collars are opposite each other, for proper layering. Further wingtips *Purchase flatpacks—a folding aid that keeps shirts crease-free and clean *Instruct dry cleaners to fold shirts instead of hanging them *Use dry-cleaner’s wrapping plastic as layers between garments in the packed suitcase (reduces creases) *Travel wearing materials made from high-twist fabric (wrinkles less) *Don’t rule out duffel bags, which are quite practical for destinations that have a lot of snow or rain (reduces potential for salt stains)

DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com 21

vision *

Al Pacino’s sagging, gagging career—going, going… Gone in 88 Minutes By Jason Anderson

You can always tell when it’s coming. The eyes widen, the chest puffs up and the hair seems to instantly grow taller and wilder. Then the voice box’s volume knob suddenly jumps from three to 11, preferably in mid-sentence. “If I were the man I was five years ago, I WOULD TAKE A FLAME-THROWER TO THIS PLACE!” “You’re out of order. THE WHOLE TRIAL IS OUT OF ORDER!” “You wanna play rough? Okay. COME SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!”

Call it the Pacino Explosion. Ever since Alfredo James Pacino burst out in 1972’s The Godfather, he has made a specialty out of outbursts. Such is the fury of the Noo Yawk actor’s expressionism, it seems almost redundant for him to pack any extra firepower. Surely the man’s bellowing should be enough to lay waste to the feds who swarm his mansion during Scarface’s histrionic finale. In movies like Brian De Palma’s beloved gangster flick, the Pacino Explosion is easy to savour. When a moment needs to be over the top, no one can say the man doesn’t go all out. But at some point in Pacino’s much-storied career, that volume knob got stuck. It probably happened while he was bursting blood vessels as a blowhard football coach in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday. Whatever the case, he now spends most of his time on screen yelling his ass off. Now out on DVD, 88 Minutes (Sony Pictures, 2008) is the latest in the series of rote thrillers that have lost the actor much of his cachet. Starring as a blustery criminal psychologist facing a deadline from a mysterious killer, Pacino is—to paraphrase his beloved Shakespeare—full of sound and fury yet signifies nothing. Pacino Explosions come hard and fast, but as in the equally dire likes of Two for the Money and The Recruit, they seem like default responses to unworthy material. Maybe he’s mad at himself for going for the paycheque and squandering his talent on such dreck. 88 Minutes is a painful reminder that even mid-career hits like Sea of Love at least represented a higher grade of trash. What makes me mad is that Pacino has forgotten that he’s often at his best when at his quietest—think of him closing the door on Diane Keaton at the end of The Godfather, having a low-key meet with Robert De Niro in Heat or facing his doom in Donnie Brasco. While it might be more fun seeing him tear Kevin Spacey a new one in Glengarry Glen Ross or go hog-wild as Tony Montana, those milder moments can have just as much power. As for any modernday Pacino Explosion, it’s all grown so routine, the melodrama usually has less impact than a stale firecracker. Outburst? Burst bubble, more like. 22 DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

Reel design

DVDs worthy of your critical eye By Richard Crouse Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Paramount, 2004) In this unique blue-screen film, computer-generated images provide spectacular backgrounds for the live-action cast. It’s so beautifully rendered that its design and style almost overwhelm the eye. The story of giant-robot attacks on New York City is secondary to the incredible visuals, which pulsate with energy and life. Even the humans are high concept—Angelina Jolie, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow all look as though they were designed and produced for maximum eye pleasure. Mad Men, Season One, “Zippo” Box Set (Lionsgate, 2007) The video store can be a daunting place. Thousands of discs, all in uniform sizes and colourful cases, can boggle the mind. Occasionally, a snappily designed box can cut through the quagmire and Mad Men’s “Zippo” packaging—an oversized, silver faux-cigarette lighter—leaps off the rack. But it’s not just an eye catcher of a design: it reflects the show’s mid-century Madison Avenue setting. Like the show, it’s sleek, sexy and just a bit naughty. Unzipped (Miramax, 1995) Design is part of all of our worlds, but who exactly are the designers? Long before Project Runway introduced the term “fierce” to the general lexicon, a documentary about American designer Isaac Mizrahi lifted the veil to reveal the real inner workings of the fashion industry. Unzipped is an up-close-and-personal look at the outrageous Mizrahi as he prepares for his fall 1994 collection, which included “dominatrix mixed with Hitchcock” and Mary Tyler Moore-inspired frocks.

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sound *

reviews

Divine Brown The Love Chronicles (Warner Music Canada) Three years, one record company and an untold number of life’s experiences later, Divine Brown follows up her 2005 debut with an album that demonstrates range both in terms of vocal dexterity and also the source material that inspires. The sweeping scope of this disc treads many a different path of soul, from doo-wop to the discothèque, Memphis to Motown. The Love Chronicles could be the soundtrack to a production that is as-yet unstaged, telling a story that spans the ’60s to the ’80s. One wouldn’t normally expect to find songs like “Bebe,” which is sweeter than Millie Small, and the Corey Hart-channelling “Sunglasses” (featuring Nelly Furtado), appearing on the same album unless the words ‘Original Cast Recording’ were included. Overall, though, these stylistic shifts work well individually and only slightly less so as a whole. If your lover loves musical theatre, this is your pre-show buffet dinner. —Marcus Tamm

Johnny Flynn A Larum (Vertigo/Universal) Citing influences including W.B. Yeats and The Bard, it’s no wonder that Johnny Flynn’s North American debut, A Larum (a medieval term for a village’s central warning bell), sounds more like a theatrical recital of 13 tales than a standard collection of pop songs. The good news: it’s both. Door-creaking cello, mandolin, viola, guitar, bass and rollicking percussion weave through the album compliments of Flynn’s band, The Sussex Wit, who are an enormous part of this record’s appeal. Flynn is a consummate storyteller, employing a kitchen-sink folk base similar to traditionalists such as Mike Scott of The Waterboys, Canada’s Elliott Brood and even a young Ray Davies. To that last one’s famous penchant for social pegging, the song “Wayne Rooney” finds Flynn calling the Manchester United football star “a primordial soup of a man” and later quipping that “the bartender looks like George Best—many of them do.” This is a record in the classic sense (the packaging for the vinyl version is stunning) and deserves to be savoured as a full meal, not a series of snacks. To quote another decent lyricist, “If music be the food of love, play on.” —Cameron Carpenter

Conor Oberst S/T (Merge/F.A.B.) You could hear where Conor Oberst was heading on the song “Four Winds” from last year’s Bright Eyes release, Cassadaga. He continues in that vein on his latest self-titled solo album, sans the Bright Eyes moniker for the first time (a reverent hat-tip to this release’s absence of multi-instrumentalist, producer and friend, Mike Mogis). It’s also the first album to don the former wunderkind’s 28-yearold mug on its cover art. He still evokes easy comparisons to Bob Dylan—in fact, a little too blatantly on “Get-Well-Cards”—but nonetheless seems to be settling in to a Tom Petty Full Moon Feverera singer-songwriter mode, with a dash of Gram Parsons thrown in for good measure. This works well, for the most part. “Cape Canaveral,” “Sausalito,” “Moab” and “Souled Out!!!” are some of the best songs he’s ever written. “I Don’t Want to Die (In the Hospital)” is a rocker that shows the looser, more playful side of Oberst, while “NYC – Gone, Gone” takes it a step further and borders on breaking into Slade’s “Run Runaway.” On the other hand, “Lenders in the Temple” loses a lot of its charm with the cheesy sound effects of loose change, and if there’s an in-joke to the intrusive three-conch blast in “Valle Mistico (Ruben’s Song),” then it’s beyond me (and I will not be pleased when it shuffles its way on to my iPod). Overall, though, some pretty nice sleight of hand, bright eyes. —CC

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Tricky Knowle West Boy (Domino/Outside) It’s been five years since Tricky’s last album and 13 since his game-changing debut, Maxinquaye. In the interim, much of what made the Bristol triphop maestro so refreshing—the kitchen-sink samples and sounds, the startling covers, the thick production, the mix of guitar stomp and hip-hop beats—has been extended and/or popularized by everyone from Fatboy Slim to Gnarls Barkley to Girl Talk. So Knowle West Boy, which relies on all those tricks, doesn’t exactly set a new pace. That’s okay, though, since it does offer a few hits of pop bliss. “Council Estate” (a reference to Tricky’s hood growing up, as is the album title) zips along on the back of a gleefully misshapen “Gone Daddy Gone”style riff, while the mid-tempo “Far Away” catches a chugging ’80s vibe, complete with a zonked-out female chorus. At times, notably the Kylie Minogue cover “Slow,” the record feels less revelatory than rote. Still, new and rote Tricky is better than no Tricky. —Derek Weiler

The Verve Forth (Parlophone/EMI) Spearheaded by the heavy groove of the non-album, Internetonly download “Mover,” advance hype led us to expect a triumphant return from The Verve. Instead, after a lengthy 10-plus year hiatus, Forth plays out like another watered-down solo effort from lead vocalist Richard Ashcroft. The album’s pop-lite lead single, “Love Is Noise,” sports a cringeinducing background vocal loop that suggests the session was crashed by Alvin and the Chipmunks. The inlay card draws a line of visual association between this band and the one that released A Storm in Heaven, A Northern Soul and Urban Hymns, but the sound renders the connection tenuous at best. The signature swirling effects of Nick McCabe’s guitar have been toned down; allbut missing are the introspective lyrics once known to be Ashcroft’s staple. Instead, the four-piece has opted for safe guitar rock and effortless meanderings: “She’s the teacher and I’m the pupil/And I ain’t learning anything at all” from “Sit and Wonder” comes to mind. The one true return to form on the album is “Columbo” with its intoxicating bass line, reverb-soaked vocals and spacey guitars, but on the whole, Forth unintentionally rocks its listeners to sleep, dreaming of a time when “a new decade” really meant something to The Verve. —Jamie Hunter 5

The Week That Was S/T (Memphis Industries/ Outside) The reputation of Sunderland, U.K. for creating lilting art-pop must have been in some doubt with the shelving of Field Music. But brothers David and Peter Brewis, two-thirds of that trio, didn’t leave the town to the Futureheads (another local group that once featured a Brewis brother). David revealed his follow-up project, School of Language, earlier this year and now Peter illuminates The Week That Was. This is indie music for the short hair and leather-soled set, with clever lyrics, meticulously-handled instruments and nary a fist-raising anthem in sight. Surprisingly rich for its eight songs, this debut is proposed as a soundtrack to an imaginary crime thriller, inspired by the work of novelist Paul Auster. TWTW is smart and melodic and won’t fill you with a sense of impending doom, although you may feel the little hairs tingle. From the intriguing opening percussion of “Learn to Learn” until the last haunting oohoohs of “Scratch the Surface,” you’ll chew a succession of pencils into tiny stumps delving into each track’s minimystery. —MT

Brian Wilson That Lucky Old Sun (Capitol/EMI) For a guy whose career soared, peaked and imploded when he was in his early 20s, Brian Wilson has recovered fairly well. Since 2000, he-who-was-just-notmade-for-these-times has performed Pet Sounds worldwide, rerecorded his legendarily aborted SMiLE LP, released new solo material and now, in the spirit of late-’60s Beach Boys, has issued a concept record, That Lucky Old Sun, a California travelogue as told by, well, the sun. Sometimes it works—“Midnight’s Another Day” is an “In My Room”calibre serenade and “Live Let Live” instantly brings to mind “Sail on, Sailor” without aping it altogether. At his worst, though, Wilson sounds like he’s channelling Steve & Eydie (“Good Kind of Love”) or Little Shop of Horrors (“Forever My Surfer Girl”), which means that the storytelling conceit in his sunny melodrama often plays more like musical theatre than plaintive balladry. That, unfortunately, is where the Sun ultimately loses its shine. —Zach Feldberg 7

Mixing board magician Noah Mintz debunks the hocus-pocus of mastering By Jamie Hunter

his job Does NOt involve witchcraft, SORCERY OR VOODOO. And although some might refer to the process of album-mastering as a “black art,” Noah Mintz would be the first to tell you it’s not the case. “A few people see it that way, but I think it’s simple,” says Mintz, mastering engineer at Toronto’s Lacquer Channel studio. “After [mastering for] 11 years, I can just listen to a song and know exactly what I want to do to it. I listen for frequencies, impact, colour—it’s almost indescribable.” The bands might write the songs but Mintz makes them listenable. Besides having a keen ear and a knack for detail, a mastering engineer makes sure that the audio level is balanced at that all bass, mid and treble frequencies are accounted for. He also rids the recording of unwanted noise and tape hiss. “Our job is to make the recording, mixing and mastering processes invisible to the average listener,” he says. “You don’t have to labour too much on a particular artist. You deal with them for one day only. You put a lot of work into it for that one day. It’s pretty rewarding.” After putting in seven years as a member of Canadian indie-rock outfits hHead and Noah’s Arkweld, Mintz’s transition from the front of the mixing console to twiddling its knobs was seamless. Since 1996, he has mastered hundreds of records, but is perhaps best known for his work on releases by Pitchfork Media darlings Broken Social Scene, Hayden, The Dears, The National and Constantines. “When hHead albums were mastered, it was a one-day process, which we paid a lot of money for,” he says. “Business-wise, it seemed like the perfect thing [for me] to get into.” In terms of getting into another kind of perfection, Mintz recommends the following recordings as examples of impeccable mastering: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors, Hayden’s In Field & Town [full disclosure: that is a Mintz album –Ed.] and Feist’s The Reminder. At the opposite end of the mastering spectrum, Weezer’s Make Believe, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication and pretty much the entire Céline Dion discography (“Not a comment on her music,” Mintz says) all generate “a wall of loud, fatiguing, distorted sound that never stops.”

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bytes *

Twitty banter

Micro-blogging’s ascent into the Internet status-phere By Mark Moyes If you’re one of those people who bemoans the Internet’s effect on how we read and write, take a deep breath. A new trend called micro-blogging is about to further threaten your attention span. The latest suspects in The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Online Content are applications like Twitter and Tumblr, two blog-like interfaces that encourage quick, off-the-cuff updates. Twitter is essentially a cross between blogging, instant messaging and Facebook’s status updates. It limits messages to 140 characters (about 27 words) and is designed so that you can update and track contacts from your cellphone, although using the web or a stand-alone interface is more popular. With over two million users (or, indeed, “twits”), the application has either just hit mainstream, or is just about to, depending on who you talk to. Although Tumblr also allows updates via cellphone, it looks and acts like a more traditional blogging platform. It doesn’t impose word limits, and it gives you more options, including click-of-a-button audio and video uploads, and built-in players. It cultivates its micro-blogging aesthetic through its ease of use. Posting sketches, links and random conversations is so quick that Tumblr pages tend to look more like scrapbooks than anything else.

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The result is a distillation of the best and the worst of blogging. Updates can be random—“Hey, bird outside my window, shut up!”—or functional (Twitter broke the news of the earthquake that killed thousands in China’s Sichuan province before traditional media outlets). Twitter, in particular, is brilliant at mobilizing people: The L.A. Fire Department used it during the 2007 California wildfires, and Barack Obama’s campaign uses it to send info about his appearances to over 50,000 users. Forget the admitted usefulness of short-form blogging. As the polished writing on sites like The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Gawker re-establishes hierarchy and pulls blogging into a more traditionally commercial publishing realm, micro-blogging really is creating something new. The shrinking of content means that people are recording thoughts without filtering—and that, according to experts, is one of the secrets to creativity. The next step is to explore these thoughts, even the bad ones. (Consider that Isaac Newton’s notebooks are filled with dead ends.) So don’t treat micro-blogging as discardable: treat it as a playground for inspiration. It might not land you a book deal, but it might spark the idea that does.

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words *

“

Blizzard of Klos

the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

Life sentences

”

A writer’s word is his voice. Here, a trio of the loud and the lively By James Grainger

There’s an obligatory scene in the first reel of any movie about the writing life. Our hero—an ink-stained wretch, stung by his early failure to put to the page the perfect novel/play/poem—slaves away in his garret room, knee deep in crumpled sheets of paper. Then: eureka! The orchestra swells, and a beam of sunlight shines through the grime-caked window. The Muses have set this budding Hemingway’s mind on fire and, seized by inspiration, his life’s work furiously pours out through possessed fingertips. From inspiration to polished manuscript in two easy steps, fini. Yes, well. In reality, authors are consummate craftspeople, obsessive sculptors of phrases who fine-tune words until they hum. For novelists especially, design is the key. If writing is a prison, here is some heavy sentencing from a few of DRIVEN’s favourite lifers. Elmore Leonard, Be Cool (2000) “There’s more quiff in this town per capita, you take into account all the broads hoping to get discovered. They act or they sing, mostly bad, either one. Turn around and take a look––walking her dog, the skirt barely covers her ass. Look.”

he recreated himself as the snob’s snob. In this elegiac, ornate Brideshead Revisited passage, Waugh displays his familiarity with a place and social milieu far above his own semi-humble origins at the same time as he laments the passing of the British aristocracy’s glory days.

In a few crass but jazzy lines of dialogue, Leonard establishes the cracked world of Wise Guys turned media mavericks Tommy Athens and Chili Palmer. Tommy is filling his buddy Chili in on Hollywood’s limitless pick-up possibilities, while Leonard is cueing the reader to how far the star-making executives have come since their days of hustling in the tough streets of New York.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996) Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945) Oxford—submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding in—Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. Waugh hailed from somewhere in the middle of Britain’s rigid-as-iron class system but in both his novels and personal life,

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Palahniuk has made a career out of slicing open the tortured psyches of low-lifes, gutter snipes and lunatics. Still, Fight Club gave readers one of his most compelling characters: an average middle-class Joe with a soul-destroying white-collar job, who throws himself into a world of violence, camaraderie and terrorism. In these arresting opening sentences, the novel’s anonymous narrator summarizes his bizarre transformation from middle manager to co-terrorist in Tyler Durden’s messed-up and messianic cult of bare-knuckle justice.

Chuck Klosterman Downtown Owl (Scribner) Renowned for being very wry, far from dry and totally me-myself-and-I, Chuck Klosterman has turned snarky pop-culture diarist essaying into a nerd-chic cottage industry, as chronicled in rambling works like Fargo Rock City and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, as well as columns in Spin, ESPN and GQ, among many. Ramble on, Chuck. Almost inevitable, the man’s debut work of actual fiction has arrived, and it’s called Downtown Owl. Setting the ‘action’ in the made-up town of Owl, North Dakota, Klosterman interweaves the mundane lives of three complete strangers: underachieving teen student Mitch Hrlinka, depressed history teacher Julia Rabia, and senior citizen-cumcoffee drinker Horace Jones. Outside of their geographical location, they have nothing in common—until one of the deadliest blizzards to ever blanket the Midwestern U.S. finds the three struggling to survive. Three quarters dark humour and one quarter tragedy, the book reads pretty much as expected, which is to say, it’s brimming in Klostermania. Notably, that means references to rock and roll—“Inside her skull, words and sentences sounded like side three of Metal Machine Music, an album she had never heard of”—and sports—“Somehow, Zebra had managed to score four points despite playing less than one full minute of the game. Athletically, he used mathematics as a weapon.” Considering that the author grew up in an equally small town, the depictions of Owl and its residents prove to be his saving grace, because they read and feel authentic. Funnily enough, Klosterman once said that virtually any phrase becomes factual if you add the qualification, “to a certain extent.” A valid point, and in the spirit thereof, Downtown Owl is a great novel…for the most part. —Jamie Hunter

graphics *

Draw ‘M’ for murder How Jon J Muth developed a most curious film-to-comics experiment By Nathan Whitlock

Basing a comic book on a well-known film is by no means a new idea. But New York-based author and illustrator Jon J Muth’s early ’90s four-issue comic series was not about continuing the adventures of Luke Skywalker or pitting a certain Alien against a Predator. (In fact, the AVP franchise was created by comics. But I digress…) Muth’s ambition was to interpret, in the graphic format, Fritz Lang’s very dark and very infamous 1931 film M, based on true events and starring a creepily frightening Peter Lorre as a serial killer hunted by the police, the mob and his own internal demons. To create the comic, Muth didn’t simply draw his own version of the film’s images—he physically recreated them. He sourced locations in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he grew up, collected together props and costumes, assembled a cast of friends and neighbours and started taking black-and-white photos. He then painted the prints, in photo-real style, adding moody shading and expressionistic touches. The process, which took two years to complete, was a kind of improvisation; as these were the days before digital photography, Muth didn’t even know if anything from any day of shooting would be usable until he got the pictures developed. Sometimes the photos weren’t so great; he’d use those, too. Why use such a convoluted, laborious process to create the imagery? “I wanted to remove my personality,” Muth says now, on the occasion of the limited-edition comics being collected as a deluxe graphic novel. As an artist and as a fan, Muth is drawn to work that is subtle, and that leaves room for the viewer to fill in the gaps. “There is a kind of audience that wants to see every bolt in Iron Man’s leg,” he says. “And I do understand that. But I think it kind of misses the point.” In the nearly 20 years since the original comic books came out, Muth has become a father. His son was born shortly before the final issue of M was completed. He never looked back, moving from comics firmly into the realm of children’s books, where he is well respected and much in demand. It wasn’t easy to re-enter the world of M, either emotionally or artistically. It was “tough going” he admits, and he chose not to make any serious changes to the work. “Altering the images would be such a quagmire” he says, so he approached the project as something more akin to “remastering a film.” Remastering a comic book made from paintings of photographs based on a 70-year-old movie inspired by a real-life child killer—talk about a six-step program! One can easily imagine why Muth was grateful to get back to making books for kids. Still, his M experiment made an important artistic statement, even if he isn’t quite sure what it is.

DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com 29

fitness *

I’m gonna jog those splints right outta my shins Better yet, read this article By Scott Rankin For most guys, the quest for total body fitness includes jogging. It’s convenient. It can be done virtually anywhere at anytime and it is an effective way to improve cardiovascular health as well as burn calories and control body weight. But the painful truth about pounding the pavement (or treading the mill) is that it puts a strain on your joints and muscles. If not done properly, it can cause injury and derail your training. The most common injury to plague joggers is the shin splint, commonly described as pain in the front of the lower leg. The pain stems from inflammation due to the rubbing of the lower leg muscles against the sheath of tibia, or

the lower leg bone. This friction can result from a variety of reasons, but is most commonly the by-product of poor form. Erika vanPoorten, a physiotherapist with Totum Life Science in Toronto, has worked with numerous marathoners and triathletes over the years. She believes that “prevention is the best tool,” and adds that it is crucial to vary your running terrain as well as wear shoes that are bio-mechanically correct for your feet. That pair of North Stars you’ve hung on to since 1978? Sell them to the sneaker pimps, pal; the Beastie Boys are still collecting, last I heard. It’s also essential to make sure that you stretch before and after runs, to keep muscles

1. Preparation

This is the beginning phase of the stride that occurs right before the foot hits the ground. It should be dorsiflexed (toe up to sky) and the middle of the foot should be under the knee. The foot strike should occur at the mid-forefoot area (not on the heel); it should also occur on a slightly bent knee just ahead of your body weight (not too far—not so it feels like you’re reaching).

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as healthy as possible. If you do start to experience pain, remember that the sooner you get it looked at, the faster you will be back out there on the trails. The way to avoid shin splints is to make sure that your form is proper. In terms of correct running mechanics, the body must go through four phases, described below. Start by incorporating each of them into a slow jog for five to 10 minutes and gradually build up from there.

2. Propulsion During this phase, ev-

erything should be moving forward and your upper body should be quiet, versus moving up and down. The power to move forward while running is generated by hip, knee and ankle extension, so flexibility in the muscles of these areas is important.

Illustrations by Michael Costanzo

Seams be gone Blister-free running, courtesy of the Reebok Premier Smoothfit By Derek Kreindler Shin splints and soreness aren’t the only afflictions suffered by joggers. Blisters are an even more common problem, and your pricey pair of high-tech sneakers might be the inadvertent cause. Reebok’s new Premier Smoothfit ($130) might not be able to repair your bad knees, but no footwear can. On the other…foot, the shoe’s more modest goal of eliminating blisters is certainly achievable. Blisters are usually formed when the foot slides around inside the shoe, creating an opportunity for seams and various markings to rub up against the skin. Unlike other shoes, the Premier Smoothfit utilizes a seamless upper, which means that there are no obtrusive surfaces to chafe against your feet. Mesh fabrics circulate air to help keep the skin cool. While blisters may be a thing of the past, Reebok makes no claims about eliminating foot odour. Instead of visiting your sports doctor after your next run, consider making an appointment with Dr. Scholl.

The best thing to do in order to analyze your form is to get someone to video you running, and then analyze it yourself to see the areas that need work. If all else fails and you can’t escape the shin splints, there are a variety of ways to treat and take care of them so you can continue training:

3. Push off It is important during the push- 4. Pull through This is easily acoff phase to be at near maximum knee extension as well as full range of ankle plantar flexion (up on your toe), because this is what drives you the furthest horizontally. As the toe leaves the ground, the stride enters into the pull-through phase.

complished by remembering: heel up, toe up, knee up. All three of these dicta are basically happening at the same time, and emphasis should not be placed on one over the other. As you push off your toe, the heel is up. The toe push-off causes you to drive your knee through to accomplish the running motion, while the toe itself is brought upward, in preparation for ground contact.

1. Take a load off: Resting will allow the injury to heal. 2. FREEZE IT: Ice should be placed on the sore area in the early stages of pain to reduce inflammation. 3. Stretch it out: The tibialis anterior and calf muscles are the two main muscles of the lower leg that need to be stretched. 4. ROLL yourself: Self Myofascial Release (SMR) with a foam roller can be conducted on the muscles of the lower leg.

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drink *

the ’tender touch Distinguished drink-mixing tools that raise the bar Few sights make men salivate more than a well-stocked bar. The right drink-making tools are also de rigueur. While it’s well and fine to simply pop the top and pass your pal a cold one, the proper host must always be able to mix a martini, deliver a daiquiri and shipwreck a scotch (put it on the rocks, that is). Effective bar tools combine brilliant design and top-quality materials, but they also need to be practical. Here are five that qualify on all counts. By Thomas Weston

MARTINI JUG Even if you’re of the “stirred, not shaken” crowd, you’re probably swirling your booze and ice together in a cocktail shaker anyway, just because it’s handy. Instead, unleash your inner Hammett with this elegant crystal and silver-plated martini jug, which makes enough for a round with your friends. Fill with ice, gin or vodka, and a hint of vermouth, use a long-handled spoon to get everything toothshatteringly cold, pour into chilled glasses and realize why James Bond wouldn’t settle for anything less. $225, exclusively at Birks.

CHAMPAGNE BUCKET Nothing says “party” like a couple of bottles of fine champagne, tucked into ice and just waiting to be popped. French copperware maker Mauviel hammers copper into an oval bucket with stainlesssteel insert and brass handles. In a world of smooth and sleek, its old-world craftsmanship makes a stunning statement on any bar. If the party’s less formal, use it to chill your suds in style. About $345 at Williams-Sonoma.

MARTINI SPOON Once you have the martini jug, you can’t use just any old spoon for stirring (admit it, you were looking at the wooden one at the back of the stove and shame on you for that). This matching silver-plated spoon features a long handle and small bowl to get right to the bottom and set up the “tornado” in the pitcher, which is essential for maximizing the booze-to-ice exposure that gets a drink really cold. $75, exclusively at Birks.

COCKTAIL SHAKER Created by American designer Fred Bould, the Nambé Twist cocktail shaker spirals its way upward to the point that forms its lid, and holds up to 14 ounces of liquid. Sensual design, but functional: the sculpted sides make it easy to hold while you’re shaking. It can be chilled in the freezer, but add ice anyway; you always want a little bit to melt and dilute the drink to bring out the flavour. Once everything’s cold and mixed, strain into matching Twist cocktail glasses. About $145.

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CORKSCREW Really, there’s nothing cooler than opening a bottle of wine with a waiter’s corkscrew, but that deceptively straightforward device requires considerable practice to get it right each time. For those who like a simple, foolproof cork puller, the LM400 from Screwpull looks fabulous, works effortlessly and guarantees a clean, swift extraction, no matter the would-be sommelier’s experience or the cork’s age. Best of all, the LM400 is meant for the increasingly common synthetic corks (although it’ll work on the genuine article also); those extra-dense plastic corks can eventually stretch and ruin the screw on a regular puller. About $150.

LED astray? Hardly. The digital watch has returned, with its dignity quite intact By Carol Besler

Let’s get

digital Photography by Robert Watson

When something goes out of style, the general rule is that if you keep it in your closet long enough, it will eventually come back in vogue. After 2001: A Space Odyssey inspired the original digital watch—a 1970 Pulsar prototype—digital timepieces faded into a fashion black hole. They are now back. There’s still a space-age cachet attached to the isotopic glow of that LED readout. In case you didn’t keep your vintage version, some of the world’s most sophisticated chroniclers of speed and time zones have released updated versions of the digi, deftly combining performance with conventional analog functions, and adding more functions than a Swiss Army knife.

1. Breitling Air Wolf Chronographs were invented not only for auto racers but for pilots who had to navigate manually in the days before instrumentation panels. Breitling, an aviation-technology pioneer, keeps that spirit alive with the Air Wolf. It has all the usual chronographic bells and whistles: alarm, 1/100th of a second timer with split and add times, countdown, perpetual calendar and dual time zone with independent alarm functions. This one is C.O.S.C. certified for performance and accuracy, which means it has passed a battery of torture tests imposed by a panel of fussy Swiss watch experts. About $4,300.

2. Raymond Weil RW Sport This watch is like Johnny Depp. It has a lot going on but never looks particularly busy, thanks to a single digital readout. It tracks hours, minutes, seconds, day/date/year, as well as a second time zone. It has an alarm function, a chronograph timer to 1/100th of a second and a battery life indicator. When the digital readout is in function mode, you can check time the old-fashioned way on the central analog dial. A quick press of the crown lights everything up like Paris. About $2,600.

3. Citizen Eco-Drive Promaster Split Second Timing This souped-up lap timer can track times within 1/1000th of a second accuracy as well as recalling the best time out of 20 laps. It also tells the time of day in 43 world cities and, in case you need to calculate the precise angle of that hairpin, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a rotating slide rule. But the real genius of this watch is the photovoltaic cell on the dial. A full charge of sunshine or artificial light can power the watch, even in the dark, for up to six months. About $800.

4. TAG Heuer Aquaracer Chronotimer Like cramming a dozen people into a phone booth, squeezing seven separate functions onto a conventional analog makes for a crowded space. This multi-tasking digital packs it all into a single readout bar. Functions include a 1/100th of a second chronograph, countdown timer, alarm, diary reminder, perpetual calendar, second time zone and backlighting to ensure you can read it all in the dark or even underwater. The watch is water-resistant to 300 metres and has a unidirectional bezel for timing dives. About $2,800.

5. Tissot T-Touch Expert This watch does everything but mix a batch of margaritas and remind you when itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time to go to the dentist. Tissot led the way in the return of digitals a few years ago with the groovy T-Touch, distinguished by its easy-to-use touch-panel setting capability. The latest model raises the bar, with 15 functions, including an altimeter, weather forecaster, split-seconds chronograph, compass, two alarms, thermometer, perpetual calendar, second time zone and, of course, hours, minutes and seconds on 12 and 24-hour scales. About $1,200.

Pure Performance

Absolute Precision

Chronomat w w w. b r e i t l i n g . c o m

On Bloor 416.925.3500

The benchmark selfwinding chronograph. Officially chronometer-certified by the COSC.

sex *

Chicken-scratch fever A cocky video by Montreal’s Thunderheist proves that sex appeal is about more than just a gratuitous breast, leg or thigh By Ed White “Elegance is what you leave out,” said the jazz great Duke Ellington. The same goes for sex appeal, which is all about the power of suggestion. Lingerie, remember, is all about what you don’t see. The latest video by Canadian electro hip-hop duo Thunderheist serves up raw sexuality, but with nary a nude in sight. “Jerk It” opens to a barrage of animal-print flashes intercut with a club-cool girl. Coolly and defiantly facing the camera, she suggestively shakes to the beat in slo-mo. Eschewing what might easily have been a tacky take on the suggestive-enough title (which, admittedly, practically begs for tried, true and oh-so-tired T&A), directors Noel Paul and Stefan Moore, a.k.a. That Go, cleverly went in the other direction, casting against the Playboy centrefold type. The dancer is a credible person, not too hot, not too cool—just right. The mostly

38 DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

up-close camera, meanwhile, focusses on the sensuality of the often seen: a perspiration-beaded collarbone, a flushed face, a pulsing bicep, a clenched fist. It all makes for heady, intimate stuff. Then there’s the matter of the raging rooster that bookends the proceedings, whose icy-cool handling on the part of the, ahem, unflappable dancer, places the video somewhere between absurd and sublime. “We wanted to be a little animalistic, but not in a nasty way,” explains Paul. “Sexy, but not obscene. Funny, too—the lyrics are pretty silly. Which is not [me being] disrespectful, they just have some humour.” The red-hot result? Coffeetable sensuality with just the right amount of feral sass. Elegant as Ellington, and sexy as hell. JERK IT: that-go.net/jerkit.html

tech *

Slim pickins

Bigger is rarely better when it comes to tech, whereas thin is always in By Ian Harvey

The Toshiba Portégé R500-S5007V makes the 1.36-kilogram MacBook Air look positively chubby. It also comes with peripherals that the Air doesn’t, such as an optical drive. How does Toshiba do it? For one, the 128-gigabyte hard drive is solid state, meaning it has no moving parts, and boasts less weight, less power consumption and longer-lasting batteries. It weighs in at 0.979 kg and it has a slightly smaller screen at 12.1 inches to the Mac’s 13.3 inches. You’ll pay handsomely for this beauty, though; its $3,300 price tag is heftier than the Mac’s $2,750.

Televisions are trending toward bigger screens, with the sweet spot for LCD/plasma hedging around 42 to 46 inches. That said, the future of big-screen TV is represented by the Sony OLED XEL-1. Immediately noticeable is just how small and thin this little TV is; next, how big the $2,500 price, for an 11-inch screen. You’re paying for a new generation of flat-screen technology: that screen is just three-millimetres thick, with exceptional contrast and picture quality, thanks to Sony’s Organic Light Emitting Diode. The technology sends electricity through a layer of organic material sandwiched between a glass screen and back plate to create luminescent light. With no backlighting, as in a standard LED, the result is deeper blacks and sharper images. The XEL-1 is the forerunner of what could be the shape of screens to come, if the technology can be expanded to larger, wall-sized models (which will move units and lower the cost). We’ll be watching.

40 DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

Photography by Eric Forget

Desktops are downsizing, too. Dell’s Studio Hybrid was announced this past Earth Day by founder and CEO Michael Dell, who touted it as the “smallest, most personalized and environmentally friendly consumer PC.” Aside from the cuter-than-a-puppy outward design, it also uses up to 70 per cent less energy, generates less heat and is quieter than a standard desktop. At 2.8 inches high, 8.3 inches deep and 7.7 inches wide, it’s also 80 per cent smaller. The base model starts at $529, but fully loaded with bamboo exterior, the choice of seven interchangeable finishes, top-of-the-line Intel Core Duo T9500 processor, four gigabytes of RAM, 320-GB hard drive, TV tuner, Blu-ray burner and various other goodies, it’ll run close to $2,000.

While it’s been said that digital technology will never replace books, portable readers like the Sony PRS-505 may change that way of thinking. The PRS-505 is one of several such gadgets on the market, but it is the only winner of the prestigious 2008 Red Dot award for design. The screen technology has nearly the same reflective qualities as paper, making it readable even in sunlight. It holds up to 160 books internally and even more with a memory stick. For $300, it offers students a viable alternative to textbooks; for the rest of us, an interchangeable cerebral escape from reality.

For capturing life’s precious moments, the choice usually leans digital SLR with interchangeable lenses, but lugging all that gear around can be a literal pain. Slimmer, smaller digital cameras can finally boast a large leap in quality. For just $450, the Panasonic DMC-FX500 offers a (comparatively) large 3.0-inch touch screen LCD, and captures 10.1-megapixel images through a 5x optical Leica zoom lens. It boasts HD-quality video, and a slate of onboard software such as face recognition and intelligent scene selection. And it’s still compact enough to fit into your shirt pocket.

The Sandisk Extreme Ducati Edition USB flash drive is one of those easy-to-overlook gadgets, but for $150 you get more than just a shiny red case and the Ducati name. The Italian racing legend is built in Bologna, smack dab in the middle of Italy’s Terra Di Motori (land of the motors) and home to such marquee names as Ferrari and Lamborghini. Just as a Ducati is no grocery-getter, this USB key is no stash for standard trash like the odd Word or Excel document. With four gigabytes of storage and a 20 megabyte-per-second transfer rate—probably three times faster than your home Internet connection—it’s just the tool for siphoning off your buddies’ music libraries or movie stash. It looks just as good on the outside, too, all dressed up in Rosso Corsa—Italian racing red.

DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com 41

015_DR

personality *

Phil White

Tunnel visionary

By George Zicarelli

Every few months, Phil White and his crew of high-tech designers make the 3,500-kilometre trek from their Toronto office to the wind tunnel at the San Diego Air and Space Technology Center. Inside a proving ground more commonly associated with aerospace engineering, the team works 12-hour days in four-week stretches to preserve the reputation of White’s company, Cervélo, as the manufacturer of the fastest bicycles on the world market. It’s a meticulous quest upon which that White and his business partner, Gerard Vroomen, embarked when they founded Cervélo—a hip hybrid of the Italian word for brain, cervelo, and the French for bike, vélo—as engineering students at McGill University in 1995. “We wanted to make faster bikes,” White says. “That’s what kick-started us: to see what makes the most sense for the rider.” The most sense, to them, meant building bicycles that could be easily manoeuvred through a pack yet still remain stiff when the rider wanted to put the power down. It’s a game of compromise between weight and strength, and the wind tunnel probably helps with the physics. Still, at the same time the engineers are tunnelling in San Diego, composites experts in Toronto and California model more efficient uses of carbon fibre. Cervélo bike frames are some of the lightest around (at their best, 790 grams, or about the weight of a dictionary), yet they’re also the highest-rated performance frames, as determined by independent fatigue tests. White’s engineering team is a hodgepodge of wizards specializing in everything from aeronautics to motor sport. “They’re guys who get pissed off when they lose—or when they didn’t think of an idea first,” as he describes them. By limiting its marketing budgets to focus resources on a small product line of technically advanced road and triathlon bikes—14 Cervélo engineers work on just 10 models—the company has become the outfitter of choice for cycling’s greats, including this year’s Tour de France winner, Carlos Sastre of Team CSC. The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games saw one 42 DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

other notably successful Canadian squad: Cervélo bikes powered over 45 athletes from 18 nations to three golds, 10 medals overall, including a notable four out of six in the individual time trails. Cervélo works closely with its top athletes. Customers—super-serious recreational and amateur competitors who are simply drawn to the highend technology—appreciate the ability to buy what the pros are riding. Bikes range in price from $2,000 to $8,500. “One thing we never really understood is, why do companies that sponsor a top-ranked team make special bikes [for their athletes] yet continue to offer slop to everyone else?” he says. “When we learn something from our pro tour guys, we feed it back into the bikes that people like you and I buy. Because we’re all going to be better off.” It’s this corporate battle cry that helped Cervélo balloon first-year revenues of $25,000 into a company worth over $25 million by 2005. Sales growth since has been tracking between 40 and 70 per cent. White remembers when Australian cyclist Stuart O’Grady signed on to the Cervélo-sponsored Team CSC a few years ago. The Olympic gold medalist rode a Cervélo to victory in the 2007 edition of the prestigious Paris-Roubaix road race, and played a supporting role in helping his team capture this year’s Tour de France championship. Both achievements please White to no end, but what he really remembers was the first thing O’Grady told him, at the top of the 2006 season. “He said, ‘You know, I can’t believe the shit I’ve been riding for the last few years. I can’t believe how good this bike is.’ “And that was the base model we first gave him.” Photography by Simon Cittati and Jay Prasuhn (top)

015_DR0405_17_Ford_lincoln.qxd

7/23/08

5:02 PM

Page 2

Postmodern

moose From antlers to iPods, neo-Canadian designers are ready, willing and eminently maple By Stephanie Boridy

t’s really no coincidence that Jason Miller’s “12 Antler Chandelier” is the best-selling item at Ministry of the Interior, Toronto’s ‘It’ spot for cutting-edge Canadian design. A minimalist space located in the hip Queen West area, the shop features singular décor items that combine to create a visually compelling experience, not unlike that of a museum. The environment invites browsing, not to mention reconsidering the everyday. Flush with artistic undertones appealing to cult tastes, modern design embraces a broad spectrum of conceptual products ranging from wallpapers to clocks and the ubiquitous chairs, lamps and tables. Call it nationalism,

44 DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

but one of the hottest trends in Canuck design is pieces that reference the Canadian hinterland and its iconic species. “We have always had a very strong connection with our environment,” says Jason MacIsaac, Ministry of the Interior’s owner, who points out that 12-antler Miller describes his own vision as ‘nature made better.’ Another example of the organic theme in action is Thout’s “holeySTUMP,” a gloss-finish cedar stool with large holes bored into it (the effect is reminiscent of worm-caused cavities). Paying heed to growing environmental concerns is the Castor design group, which is seeing a great deal of international success over its recycled fluorescent lights (burnt-out tubes bound around a fresh bulb, simulating functionality, and looking good).

While quintessential Canadian design talent indisputably extends beyond the natural provincial wonders, there’s always a keen interest in works that hone a modern feel while resonating with our broader cultural identity—rather, identities. One-time Nike collaborator Andrew Ooi’s “Sonobe Lights” drew inspiration from the Japanese paper-folding technique of origami. Montreal-based Samare collaborated with Huron Natives to create a simplistic series of 50 chairs. “Territory Chair” and “La Chaise Capitaine” both incorporate babiche—a time-honoured weaving technique so exclusive that today no more than a handful of artisans practise it. Beyond the multicultural there is the multipurpose. Double-duty demand fulfillment is becoming a modern standard, what with the practical requirements of the everexpanding big city/small spaces

condo generation. Consider “ForkedUP” (Thout), a wall tile that stores cutlery vertically. It’s easily one of the top contenders for saving space and turning heads. Tristan Zimmerman uses ceramic to create the latest internationally sought-after iPod speaker. Combining modernday function with lyrical form, “The Phonophone” (released by Charles and Marie) is a nostalgic nod to the gramophone. It’s a functioning speaker that serves as a dock and a visual statement. “Cult” may be one of the buzz-words of contemporary design, but pieces that boast impulsiveness and exquisite attention to detail remain essential.

DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com 45

With some efforts to redirect mainstream biases, Canadian design is thriving and its designers are chasing global recognition. “We’re all sort of working with the same notions of pop culture and politics,” MacIsaac says. If the world is, as Marshall McLuhan famously stated, an electronically interdependent global village, it’s also an eclectically integrated one. “Canadian design is definitely on the forefront.” f dollars make sense, then MacIsaac’s correct. Shops recognized around the world for representing the best in innovation and limited-edition now sell Canadian pieces and are keeping up with our latest trends. Whether it’s Mint in London or Matter in New York, curiosity abounds. “The owners of these shops ask me what’s new,” he says. “There is definitely an interest in our work and identity.” Whether or not Canada is on the heels of Europe remains to be seen. In the meantime, homegrown designers are building a truly true-north movement.

46 DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

whopper Choppers A trio of showpieces from Canadaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s up-and-coming V-twin design masters By George Zicarelli Photography by Kevin Kelly

Shot on location at The Great Canadian Motorcycle Auction (auctionwire.ca/buildoff)

Watch enough bike-building programs on television and it’s understandable that you’d come away thinking that custom-motorcycle designers are chrome divas prone to hissy fits over something as simple as a bent fender. Throw in the traditional image of an unkempt tough-guy biker living on society’s fringes and it’s clear that bike culture is in serious need of a makeover. Time to challenge those notions; no better place to start than with the following Canadian designers and their V-twin de Milos.

Tony Gullia

Silver Lining

t was just two years ago that Tony Gullia, of Sinister Cycles in Newmarket, Ont., thought he could do better than the blow-torching, fit-the-part-at-allcosts ethic that prevails on contemporary bike-building shows. “Most of the guys I saw on TV had no education in mechanical engineering; they were garage-based fabricators,” he says. “When I saw that they were actually creating cool bikes, I thought I’d give it a go as well.” A graduate of the Automotive Tooling program at Toronto’s George Brown College, he then set to work on his first custom motorcycle—Silver Lining. Before dirtying his hands on pieces of metal, Gullia spent over a month in front of his computer, using CAD to design every component on Silver Lining so that when it came time to construct the beast, each part had been measured and computer-simulated for exact fit and operation. The result is a sporty V-twin with clean, flowing lines that looks like it rolled straight out of the factory doors.

From the wheels and frame to the aluminum swingarm billet, Silver Lining was constructed entirely at Gullia’s in-home design studio. The bike garnered Gullia an award at this spring’s Toronto International Motorcycle Show and is valued at an impressive $100,000. “My heart and soul is in it,” he says. “I don’t build something just for the money. I will build it again and again until it is just right.”

DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com 49

Georges Thomas

Alien

ith Alien, Georges Thomas, of Concept and Design Cycle, claimed the 2007 Canadian Biker Buildoff contest, clinching the competition with an innovative design cue. The Mirabel, Que. native pioneered a cohesive frame and swing-arm design that gives Alien a hard-tail look—frame-mounted seat positioned just above the rear tire—yet provides a more comfortable soft-tail feel—cushioned ride for the body, suited for long rides. “My style is high-quality craftsmanship of bikes that are above all, rideable,” Thomas says. “They’re not just for show.”

50 DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

The soft-spoken former Super Comp factory drag racer for General Motors has spent 12 years building choppers. He says his clients are “real bikers” from all walks of life, forking over anything from $5,000 to upwards of $150,000 for one of his easy-to-ride creations.

MICHAEL LONG

The General Lee

f Canada can boast a celebrity in the bike-building world, then Michael Long, of Zeel Design in St. Pie, Que., deserves red carpet treatment. A former chief of engineering at Bombardier Recreational Products, Long honed his mechanical engineering talents on everything from Sea- and Ski-Doos to ATVs and the recently launched Can-Am Spyder three-wheeled motorcycle. Encouraged by a friend to build a custom motorcycle, Long claimed the prestigious Rat’s Hole Best of Show Award at the 2005 Daytona Bike Week with his maiden creation, Phenom. Later that year, he followed up that success with a victory in the inaugural Canadian Biker Buildoff contest. “The phone started ringing off the hook after that,” he says. Long was the first international builder to be featured on Discovery Channel’s Biker Buildoff show in the U.S. and in just under four years, Zeel Design is now established as a premiere design shop for on- and off-road vehicles. Long employs a team of 10 engineers, designers and machinists, using the latest technology to not only build custom motorcycles, but also provide consulting services for engineers. They also effect automotive modification in the film industry, including recent work in Death Race and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

“My clients are typically white-collar types: vice-presidents and lawyers,” he says. Indeed, all of his creations run in the six-figure range. “I seem to attract high-end customers who wear a shirt and tie during the week, but become weekend warriors in denim and leather.” The General Lee ($100,000) finds its inspiration in the Duke brothers’ 1969 Dodge Charger RT. It has a carbonfibre body, a notably long, near 10-foot wheel base and a meaty 360-millimetre back tire; yet it employs a single swing arm. The bike rises and lowers through hydraulic points near the front and rear tires. The headlights are discreetly tucked away behind the front grille, giving the bike a car-like front profile. Not only is the General Lee a show stopper, the bike has also been ridden for 2,000, trouble-free miles. Bo and Luke should be so lucky.

another side of

Hugh Dillon By Derek Weiler

Photography by Finn O’Hara

There’ve been two Hugh Dillons jostling around in my head lately. First there’s the spiky-haired rock and roller who fronted the Headstones. In my memory I see them racing through a set at a dive bar in Waterloo, Ont. in 1993. Dillon snarls and spits, swinging the mic stand, singing about digging up his baby at the cemetery, while the band slams through power chords behind him. Then there’s the Dillon who’s been on TV all summer, playing a police sniper on Flashpoint. Poker-faced and taciturn, slow to smile. He’s in fit, fighting shape: his head is shaved, his body always tense with checked energy. He crouches on a rooftop and his eyes narrow as he draws a bead on some lunatic waving a gun.

n a café patio on a hot August morning in downtown Toronto, a third Dillon takes shape: the rising actor with the hit TV show, backed by the veritable star machine. Cautious and image-conscious, but still proud of his rough edges, this one displays a curious mix of humility and bravado, coupled with the star athlete’s habit of dropping ready-made sound bites. (On the intensity of his performances: “Life is intense, except when it isn’t.”) To be fair, Dillon has earned some bragging rights. After premiering in July, Flashpoint, which centres on a Toronto emergency response team, scored solid ratings both on CTV here in Canada and—more improbably and, Dillon admits, more importantly—on CBS in the States. It isn’t Dillon’s only TV cop gig, either. He also stars in the dark drama Durham County, playing a Toronto homicide detective who moves out to the suburbs to escape big-city violence, only to be caught up in a serial-killer case.

54 DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

Dillon actually dabbled in acting throughout his Headstones years, most memorably in Bruce McDonald’s 1996 cult classic, Hard Core Logo. He played Joe Dick, a down-and-out punk singer driven by rage and desperation; the role seemed to barely stray from his own stage persona, and he says, “I had no desire to do it at all.” McDonald finally convinced him. When Quentin Tarantino saw the movie and asked Dillon to audition for Jackie Brown (the part went to Michael Keaton, though Tarantino did release Hard Core Logo on DVD stateside), it was clear that McDonald had been right. “[Bruce] is one of those guys, there’s no hidden agenda—they just see something in you that you don’t see in yourself.” By 2003, Dillon could see his potential, and started chasing screen time in earnest. The Headstones had split after five albums, and he’d married his longtime girlfriend, Midori Fujiwara. He’d also kicked a long-standing heroin habit. “You realize that you can no longer put your family through that kind of torment,” says Dillon, who was five years

“

I was leaving as Rome was burning, I had a smile on my face. It’s like my spaceship crash-landed in Los Angeles.

clean and sober this past summer. “You realize that you’re going to die.” He credits Fujiwara and his sisters with convincing him to get help—and admits he didn’t make it easy.“The denial is fucking outrageous,” he says. “Especially being in a rock band, where that’s what you’re supposed to do.” Determined to reinvent himself as an actor, Dillon moved to L.A., land of bit parts and waiters. (Sound bite: “I started over; I like starting over.”) Here’s the twist: after moving to the States, Dillon landed breakout parts in two made-in-Canada productions. Another twist: in both of those roles, the rock and roll animal and former junkie is playing, well, The Man. Not that Dillon considers it a stretch. “These guys have an incredible job and nobody ever gives them credit,” he says. For him, cops have been humanized since before the Headstones hit, when he worked as an orderly at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and saw police in action on a regular basis. The result, he says, is that he learned to “see them on a different level, as opposed to just authority figures.”

”

To prepare for Flashpoint, Dillon hung out with ATF officials in the U.S., took weapons training and studied the Israeli hand-to-hand combat technique Krav Maga. (Sound bite: “You’ve got to totally invest. If you’re not invested, what can you expect?”) He still keeps in touch with some of the cops by phone, and says that “a lot of them don’t like cop shows, don’t watch them, and this show they like and watch.” The emphasis on prep is no accident: Dillon has to work hard at acting. (Sound bite on Flashpoint’s success: “It just makes me work harder.”) Music, on the other hand, always came naturally. The quick release of writing and playing songs still tugs at him. “There’s no thought put into it, and that’s the joy of it,” he says. “It is the art, because it just happens.” Not that there weren’t compromises along the way with the Headstones, and Dillon admits that “there might have been a record that we weren’t thrilled with.” (DRIVEN elects Nickels for Your Nightmares.) But the group went out strong with its 2002 swan song, The Oracle of Hi-Fi. “We recorded an outstanding rock record,” says Dillon. “We walked away with our heads held high.” Characteristically, he also takes a little punk-rock glee in the fact that the Headstones’ major-label ride coincided with the near collapse of the record biz. “I was leaving as Rome was burning,” he says. “I had a smile on my face. It’s like my spaceship crash-landed in Los Angeles.” He may have escaped the major-label machine and found his niche on the small screen, but Dillon isn’t ready to give up on rock. “I’ll do music my whole life,” he says. “I’ll always write songs.” That’s no idle boast. His second post-Headstones album, Works Well With Others, is about to come out. And if Dillon feels pressure about his acting (sound bite: “You put that pressure on yourself”), when it comes to music, the pressure is now definitely off. “I’m older, I don’t have as much to prove,” he says. “I’m not writing songs for a paycheque, or a record company, or to fit into a genre, or other people’s perceptions of who they think I might be.” Dillon’s hoping to get a few live gigs together this fall in support of the new album, but his time is in high demand these days. After finishing out the summer filming Flashpoint’s initial 13-episode run, he’ll spend the fall shooting Durham County’s second season in Montreal, joined by new cast member Michelle Forbes. Her credits include Homicide: Life on the Street—one of the few cop shows Dillon admits to liking—and Dillon says the second season will be “very, very sophisticated, darker than the first one.” (For the record, season one was already quite dark.) After that, he expects to be back at work on Flashpoint in the new year (although at press time, CTV had not yet confirmed details on a second season). Beyond that, he’s open to whatever comes his way. (Sound bite: “There’s no neutral. You’re either going forward as a performer or just backwards. And for me there’s never been any backwards, either. It’s just forward.”) He and Fujiwara divide their time between L.A.’s hip Silver Lake district and their house in Toronto’s Danforth area. Dillon’s recent success seems to gratify him for her sake as much as his own. “She’s somebody who never gave up on me, even when I gave up on myself,” he says. “My life is what I want it to be. It’s been a long haul.”

DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com 55

fiction *

by Kenneth J. Harvey

Ron kinson

56 DRIVEN September 2008 * DRIVENmag.com

Ducky. THE MAGAZINE FOR CHICKS

mmett Dodd was born with a splotched purple birthmark covering a third of his face. The birthmark was thick and raised as though a second slab of skin had been grafted over the first. Emmett Dodd was born with his left leg nudged out of his hip socket, the In si de deficiency remaining ho ug hT in undetected until it was an a’ S THE MAGAZINE FOR CHICKS too late to be realigned. HisEdition! hair was a mass of rusty-orange, lop-sided Special curls and his lips were swollen and veined. His & Free stretched eyes—seemingly too large for his Hair and Makeup face—shifted easily, assigning him a look of perpetual expectation. Emmett Dodd rarely ventured outside his The buck apartment. When he was in need of socializing, he limped downtown to the Capital Lounge, get dragging his gimp leg while his great eyes this season’s flitted about in warning, checking passing cars look for drivers who might be watching, searching toward windows for parted curtains, meanly bikinis for every squinting at playing children who dared to halt body their merriment to regard him with curiosity. Turn to page 312 The patrons of the Capital were seasoned drunks who welcomed anyone; theirs was the brotherhood of hard luck. Those who sat alone at their dim tables were concerned only with their own misdeal of heart-breaking, head-shaking sorrows, their own flagrant self-consumption where they stared into the blackness of their hearts and wished the blood to pump blacker. Emmett saw them all as shadows, as smears of charcoal that he would later draw from memory. Emmett Dodd had learned that people never approached him without ulterior motive. Growing up, he was invited to parties for a single purpose: so that people might be permitted the nosy pleasure of staring at his deformity or purposefully not staring at his deformity, which was even worse. Occasionally, a boy or girl might attempt to befriend him at the coaxing of their well-intentioned parents, who wished their children

to be sympathetic Christians. “Why not try talking to that Dodd boy?” they might suggest. “He could use a friend.” This sort of behaviour made no one nicer, Emmett decided, only deceitful, their true motives a selfish mystery. Deceive the poor crippled freak into believing that he was cared for, and God would be happy and hand out rewards in the afterlife. As a child, Emmett spent most of his free time charting his revenge upon the world. His imagination played out the means by which he would dismember anyone who challenged him in the slightest way. He would set these plans to paper. Elaborate and artistically-adept diagrams how to of guns and knives and scrawled drawings of make a stumpy people with hacked-off limbs or bullet difference holes dripping the blood of red ink. at home Emmett’s favourite subject for rumination was his father, who had left Emmett in the care of his Christian aunt, Louise. Just for her, he drew a picture of his father on the cross, eyes to Heaven, side torn open, thick lips blubbering, dark markings on his wide face. He brought the drawing to Aunt Louise and told her he wanted it framed. For SprIng “It’s my father,” he explained. Aunt Louise had cleared her throat and cautiously praised the aesthetic merit. However, secretly, she was puzzled by how much the figure resembled Emmett. She wondered if the drawing might be an act of blasphemy. Regardless, she assured Emmett that she would buy a frame, then gently slipped the drawing from his thick fingers while “hmmm”ing and pretending to examine its details, until Emmett wandered off. After that, Emmett never asked about the frame and his aunt never produced one. The drawing had been conveniently misplaced. Emmett Dodd lived on welfare money plus the cheques he occasionally received from his father on the mainland. His mother had left his father after Emmett’s delivery, wanting nothing to do with the horrifying baby she had given birth to. Emmett’s father then left Emmett in the care

Ducky.

Sexy

Sassy made easy:

May 2008

GiRl PoweR

325 FreSh LookS

Ron kinson

Ducky. THE MAGAZINE FOR CHICKS

of Aunt Louise and scurried off to work for a margarine manufacturer, in a packaging plant on the mainland. He sent along whatever support money he could afford. The cheques arrived wrapped in long greasy letters explaining to Emmett the unimpressive events of the man’s daily life. Emmett would carefully study the contents of the letters with a morose expression and then stand, limp toward the wastebasket in the cupboard beneath the sink and toss the letters away. In his mind, his father was a pathetic loser, covered in the yellow scum of margarine. Emmett would hold the cheque in his huge, thick-fingered hands and think of his mother. For some reason the money always reminded him of his mother, as though she were really the one out there mailing him the dollars, still secretly caring about him, not ashamed at all, but kept away by some unfortunate circumstances that made her life so tragic and perfume-sweet. He imagined her face to be the most lovely thing in the world; that was why she had left. Because of her own astonishing beauty, she could not bear the grotesque sight of Emmett. The contrast was simply too burdensome for a woman of such resplendent elegance. In si Emmett believed that his mother had gasped de ho ug with shock when she first strained a birth-weary h in an T a’ look down at him, raised from between her legs. S THE MAGAZINE FOR CHICKS With the air on his wet skin, his wide eyes starSpecial Edition! ing up, he heard, in the pristine hollows of his & Free ears, the sound of his mother gasping in the deHair and livery room, and the nervous silence all around Makeup as he was escorted through the new air and laid on a blanket on a side table for everyone to Thecalmly buckexamine. And she was right to be so startled, he asget sured himself, so disappointed. Her being so this ravishing. No doubt she spent her evenings in season’s shimmering evening gowns, her long blonde look hair combed silkily along her back. Parties that bikinis b ikinis went on well into dawn. She was stupendously for every body rich. Yet he suspected with a quiet, encouraging Turn to smile that she was not happy, that in her heart page 312 she pined for her Emmett, her lost son, wondering what had become of him, staring through the window of some Gothic mansion on a manicured hill, her eyes longingly searching the mist-enshrouded landscape as she sat in her scarlet gown, dead in her heart because Emmett was lost to her. Emmett was well aware of the disadvantages associated with looking the way he did. But he was also equally familiar with the privileges. The briskness with which he was dealt in stores and at government departments could only be attributed to his appearance. He was often given immediate attention as though his condition was critical, terminal; he might perish with the next tick of the clock. At the social services office, there was never a question as to whether he deserved welfare. The clerks merely looked at his face, his shoddily-dressed, meaty body, his stubby-fingered slow-moving hands, and understood his distress. The probing tone that he had heard

from other clerks in connecting cubicles was never used on him. He was forgiven all his sins, brought into this world of silent gazes to be perfectly excused. In addition to detailing his acts of retribution, he rounded out his time by reading women’s magazines. He admired the styles of the latest clothes and the women who wore the fashions so expertly, the compliant look in their eyes, the longing, the intrigue. He pilfered the magazines from the doctor’s office where he went to have his face inspected, his leg and hip looked over, rotated, but never adjusted. Surgery was the only alternative, but in Emmett’s mind such procedures would only make a further mess of him, and he could not bear the thought of scars, more thickening deformity. Years ago, shortly after his twenty-eighth birthday, a young doctor had informed him that his limp could have been avoided by a simple procedure. “They never checked for the dislocated leg back then,” the doctor disclosed. “Now, they rotate the legs when the babies are born. You feel a little click. All that’s needed is to double-diaper the baby for the first few months. If that doesn’t work, then braces are fitted.” The doctor had outlined all of this to Emmett as though Emmett were the father of a newborn that required attention. “Simple as that,” the doctor said, snapping his fingers, thus how to further embittering Emmett in a way that scalded make a his eyes. difference The doctor had put out his hand, and Emmett at home had taken it, not knowing why, yet absorbed by the feel of warm casual flesh against his. The sentiment had brought tears to his eyes, making him turn away from the perfect doctor, who spoke with such ease and clarity about misfortune. On cheque day, Emmett would venture down to the Capitol Lounge and drink until he was drunk. With each bottle of beer, he bathed For SprIng more gloriously in the tragic smoky air of the bar. Old country and western tunes played on the scratchy juke box, lamenting the loss of a woman. He drank to his mother. He even, after a dozen or so, drank to his father. The people in the Capital were like family to him, and he was the father, the king, the high and mighty. He almost didn’t hate them. The booze convinced Emmett of this. Perfectly drunk, he’d then muster the courage to move on to the dance bars up on George Street where the fashionable men and women socialized. The doormen or owners, catching sight of Emmett limping toward them, would groan and mutter to each other, yet never bar him. They pitied Emmett, or feared charges of discrimination, a lawsuit or an enquiry from the Human Rights Board. Often, Emmett was even allowed in without having to pay the mandatory cover charge. As the night progressed, he might end up in an argument with someone who flagrantly regarded him, a sporty man’s gaze that caught on the absurdity of Emmett’s lop-sided hair style and then his chunky face, the purple swell

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Ducky. THE MAGAZINE FOR CHICKS

of the birthmark, and—once Emmett began to move—the stuttering of grace that his limp endowed him with. Poking at someone, eyes wide, he would demand, “What’re you looking at, buddy?” Emmett Dodd would be asked to leave, yet was permitted to return, for he was not always so disagreeable. Most nights, Emmett would simply sulk in a corner, taking out his notepad and pen, and drawing while he watched the young men and women chatting and dancing. He sketched them as barnyard creatures tangled in perverted rituals. When he was done, he’d hand the drawing to a dancing woman, then leave. Thursday night, and Emmett Dodd had exhausted his money. He was stumbling home alone, despising the pebbles beneath his feet, kicking at them and cursing the cloud of dust that rose. He had gone from despondency to alcohol-fuelled encouragement, to carefree bliss, to crashing, bile-pissing In s i Glancing up at the dark sky, he saw the gloom. de ho uthe moon, face of the moon and—recognizing gh in T a it—henawondered on its stupid existence. ’S THE MAGAZINE FOR CHICKS “Who needs moon an’way,” he mumbled as he Special Edition! shuffled across the parking lot toward his apart& Free ment building. He yanked one arm from his Hair and jacket as if to face someone antagonizing him. Makeup Punching the air with a threatening shout, he trod heavily into a deep pothole, twisting his anThe kle buck and losing his balance. Tilting and crashing sideways, he instinctively attempted to cushion get his fall with his extended arm. The gravel dug this against his palm and he heard the dull snapping season’s of the bones in his wrist, yet felt little discomfort look due to his near-blind intoxication. bikinis b ikinis Lying on the asphalt, he noticed a dull, irritafor every body ble panging that slowly gained ground, but did Turn to not prevent him from dropping off to sleep right page 312 there in the parking lot. Hours later, waking to the chill, he made his way into his apartment and collapsed on his bed. He slept uneasily and was finally awoken in the early morning by a bothersome pain. The pain grew so intense it delivered him to consciousness, and he was forced to mopishly sit up in bed and search through himself, localizing the discomfort while he shifted on his bed, his hands against the mattress, his wrist pierced with stabbing pain. His hand shot up in front of his slitted eyes and—groggily, suspiciously—he studied the swelling; his skin ballooned in a way that mirrored the feeling in his brain. Glancing at his lap, he saw that he was still dressed in his jeans and a blue and black plaid shirt with a stain of something orange, perhaps pizza sauce, along the front. And so, seeing that he was prepared, he stood without further thought. Near smothered by the grey pasty shroud of pain and hangover, he grimaced from the pressure applied to his wrist, then left for the hospital, shaking his head at his eternally rotten, merciless, God-forsaken luck. The woman doctor at St. Claire’s set his wrist in a cast and told him he would require physiotherapy once the cast was removed. Emmett

nodded at the information, his eyes lingering on the tile of the hospital floor. Doctors were often overly concerned about him; their profession dictated that they take a professional interest in his condition. Of all the people he knew, he hated doctors with a rage that brought a flush to his cheeks and sucked black acid up from his stomach. They were so certain of themselves and well off and had nice things, pretty families. Children who had everything. He imagined having children, a baby that did not resemble him. A tender, warm baby. He’d seen them in supermarkets, bundled up, had caught the whiff of them in passing, an odour that weakened the space behind his knees. No, he hated babies. Babies were the things he hated most, next to doctors. He nodded quietly at what the doctor was telling him and then glanced up at her curious eyes, scanning his birthmark with a look of speculative involvement. Emmett Dodd stood from the examination table and limped toward the door without a word. He left the hospital and crossed the street, then turned to pin the building with a punishing stare. “Stupid place,” he said, spitting on the sidewalk. “Can’t fix anything.”

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he cast was removed and another fixed in place. Emmett Dodd went for three more fittings until the final cast was sawed For SprIng away and his wrist was thin and pale and seemingly weightless, like some frail bird attached to his clumsy, rooted self. He was given a note by the doctor and told to visit the physiotherapy clinic in the basement. “If you don’t get this looked after, it’ll stiffen up on you,” the doctor cautioned, sensing Emmett’s stubbornness. She spoke plainly so that Emmett might understand. “It won’t work properly again.” Emmett accepted the note with a mannerly nod. Leaning away from the doctor, he pushed off, limped out into the out-patients lobby where those seated on plastic chairs watched Emmett with eyes that listlessly studied his face, then his limp, wondering which of his afflictions might amount to the end of him. “Wha’s dat on yer face?” asked the old woman seated beside Emmett. Emmett shuddered with fear. He broke out in a running sweat. His knees trembled, slightly at first, but then more fiercely until they knocked violently against each other. The old woman—hunched with some sort of degenerative spine ailment—leaned forward and stared up into his eyes.

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Emmett jerked away, his eyes on the wall. Fortunately, the door beside him opened and the physiotherapist, a pear-shaped woman with a British accent, announced his name while she straightened her glasses. Emmett glanced at the physiotherapist and saw the momentary look in her eyes. At once, he cast his gaze at the floor, rising to follow her into the room. The room was outfitted with three examination tables enclosed by long white curtains that could be pulled around for privacy. On the ceiling, toward the back of the room, there was a grid of metal bars with pulleys and dangling harnesses waiting to be fitted onto twisted people. “Let’s have a look,” the physiotherapist said, motioning toward one of the examination tables. “Tell me what seems to be troubling you.” Emmett skipped his next appointment, but soon his wrist began to pain him. He had exIn si hausted d e his supply of pills and so he admitted ho u g should continue with his treatment. He that ihe na hT na waited ’ Suntil the very last moment before stepTHE MAGAZINE FOR CHICKS ping into the basement clinic for his reschedSpecial Edition! uled appointment. & Free The old woman was seated there, straining Hair and a look up at him with her wrinkled face and Makeup giving him a grin and a nod, as if expecting his return. Her spine was curved so badly that The she buck had to struggle against the pull of her neck muscles to regard him. get “Hello, me duckie,” she said, her narrow face this toothlessly and knowingly grinning. season’s Emmett ignored her, decided not to sit. Inlook stead, he limped and shifted down the hallway, bikinis lingering without purpose in a way that made for every body him feel even more out of place. Turn to “Dey gone on dere break,” the old woman page 312 said, staring up the hospital corridor after him. “Dey’ll be back a quarter of four. Oh, da clock’s right tuday. Gives a different time ev’ry day.” Emmett turned away, read the washroom sign, studied the arrow that pointed toward a cinder-block wall painted yellow. His heart was beating faster. He was thinking hard on leaving when he noticed movement in the corner of his eyes and saw the old woman edging up by his side. Stooped forward, she laboured to look up into his face. “I’m seven’y-eight year old,” she said. “Wha’s dat on yer face?” Emmett shook his head once. “Wha’s it?” The old woman squinted impatiently. “Birthmark,” Emmett mumbled. “T’aught so.” The old woman nodded and continued staring. “Well, gentle Jaysus, dat’s somet’in’.” She chuckled, whistled and winked. Emmett smirked uncomfortably at her. “Ye be da blessed wid’ a mark like dat.” Emmett stared at her wizened face. “Ye ’av sum special purpose in dis life. Ye be marked fer it.” She nodded profoundly and gazed into Emmett’s eyes. “Look at me fingers,” she said, holding up her hand, gently cradling it in her other palm. Emmett

saw the sharp, bony fingertips pointing away in different directions. “Art’ritis, me luv. Wha’s da madder wit’ ye?” Emmett did not know if she was asking about his face or why he was at physiotherapy. He shrugged and so she scanned him up and down, shuffled nearer, pressing against his side. “My wrist,” he mumbled. “Ohhhh,” she exhaled, her mouth remaining posed in a wrinklelipped, oval shape. Emmett turned when he heard the squeak of sneakers coming up the corridor. “Good afternoon,” said the physiotherapist. “Poor ol’ t’ing,” the old woman said to the physiotherapist. “Back frum yer break ah’ready. No real rest is dere, me duckie?” The physiotherapist curtly laughed off the comment, unlocked the bolt and smartly swung open the wide door. Emmett always avoided looking at himself in the mirror while he attempted to pull a comb through his wiry hair or stood brushing his teeth. But today he stood and stared, hearing the old woman’s how to make a words, “Wha’s dat on yer face? Ye be marked.” difference Yes, I am marked, he told himself. If it could at home only come off. He glanced down at the cover of a beauty magazine on the floor beside the toilet. He wished the girl on the cover never existed. His mind played over the possibilities. He saw her with a huge swollen birthmark covering her entire face, one leg shorter than the other. He imagined her with her two front teeth missing, the fingers missing from one hand. He saw her in a For SprIng wheelchair, on crutches, her jaw wired together, a patch over one eye, her arm in a sling, her head twisted and set on an angle, her head missing both of its ears. He saw her as the old woman, bent and deserving of everything life had dished out to her. “Dey gave me a board wit’ a backing on it, so’s I could put da slice of bread up against da board ’n butter me bread wit’ one hand. But it don’t work. It’s right useless. I got a machine dat stretches me fingers. Bunch of nonsense. I’m seven’y-six year old.” Emmett thought a moment on her age, believing she had given him a different number the last time. “Wha’s dat on yer face?” she asked. “Birthmark,” he said, more soundly than before. “Ahhh.” The old woman stared down at the floor, her mouth open in contemplation, before she said, “Dat must give ye a pile o’ grief.” Emmett regarded the woman’s tiny head, the soft white hair barely covering her scalp. “Ye were here before,” the old woman said, looking at him. “Ye be da blessed one.” Emmett nodded, then glanced away, studied his boots and saw that there was mud on them.

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“Somet’in’ like dat changes da whole works,” the old woman proclaimed, pointing at his face with her twisted fingers. She gave one sharp indisputable nod. “Changes yer eyes. Ye see now, don’t ya? Ye knows how ta see.” “Good afternoon.” The physiotherapist sauntered up the corridor, her keys jangling as she searched out the correct one to fit into the lock. “How are we today?” she asked. “Finest kind,” said the old woman, slapping Emmett on the knee and rubbing her twisted hand back and forth. “Ain’t we, me duckie?” She winked at him while Emmett stared at the woman’s misshapen hand resting there on his knee. The following day Emmett Dodd was a half hourInearly for his appointment. He waited si d for thehoueold woman to walk in. As each sound gh in a n Thim from the door down the short correached a’ S THE MAGAZINE FOR CHICKS ridor, he jerked his head that way and stared to Special Edition! see if it was her. & Free Finally, the old woman arrived, a few minutes Hair and later than usual. “Miserable ol’ day,” she said as Makeup she slowly sat with a grunt, peering at Emmett’s face with profound interest. “Fine marking. TheNever bucksaw one fine as dat before. Lovely shade of purple, like a ripe plum. Good enough ta eat.” Emmett noticed that the old woman’s face get this was wet. He anxiously reached into his pocket to season’s give her his handkerchief. look “Christly weather,” she said, gripping the bikinis handkerchief, yet unable to raise it to her face. for every Emmett grabbed the handkerchief back body Turn to from her and waited a moment, an apologetic page 312 expression overcoming him. He searched the old woman’s fluidy eyes while he dabbed at her face, until it was completely dry. All the while, the old woman shut her eyes and smiled. “T’anks, me luv,” she said, blowing out an exasperated breath, her bright eyes flashing at him in appreciation. Emmett pushed the handkerchief into his pocket. His thick, orange eyebrows clumping nearer in wonder. He took a deep breath and muttered through fleshy lips: “How are you today?” “Wha’ were dat, me duckie?” the woman enquired, her deformed fingers shakily straightening her hair. “I must look a fright,” she laughed outright. “Like somet’in’ da cat dragged in.” “How are you?” Emmett shyly repeated, and the old woman smiled softly and patted him on the knee.

“Ye poor ol’ t’ing,” she laughed again, this time offhandedly. “Ye must be some miserable.” At home, Emmett sat at his table and drew a picture of the old woman. He had hurried home and now sat without taking off his jacket. He sketched the old woman with her back bent more than usual. He curled her fingers into claws and gave her face the semblance of a rotten apple. He stared at this image and snickered. Look at the old woman, he told himself. She’s old and bent. She’s horrible. He raised the drawing closer to his eyes, brought it nearer and nearer to his face until the paper touched his lips. He did not know why he did it, but he kissed the paper. Then, in a fit of anger, he crumpled the image up and threw it in the garbage beneath the sink. The next week, he sat beside the old woman, wondering if he might muster the courage to show her the sketch he had rescued from the garbage and smoothed the wrinkles from. He wanted her to see it, despite the fact that it might make her feel bad. how to “I did a drawing,” he blurted out. make a “Wha’s dat?” The old woman leaned toward difference at home him, resting her body fully against his and inclining her ear towards his face. “I did a drawing of you.” “Cripes, ye be an artist?” she asked, her appearance stunned and hopeful. “Ye got it dere wid’ ye?” Emmett hesitantly reached inside his jacket where he had tucked away the folded sketch. He For SprIng thought twice about showing her, but then pulled it out and held it in his hand. “Open ’er up.” Emmett unfolded the paper, and the old woman gasped, delighted by the vivid wash of colours that gleamed up at her. “She be a beauteous vision,” she said, studying the joyful image of the young woman detailed on paper. “Dat be da spittin’ image o’ me when I were a young maid.” The old woman slapped his knee and chuckled with glee. “I knew ye had da gift. Ye draw such beauteous pictures.” Dumbfounded, Emmett stared at the black and white sketch of the twisted old woman that he had made even uglier than intended. “Talent ta burn,” exclaimed the old woman, tapping the side of her head with her gnarled fingers. “T’were only da mind ta find it.” *

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Haute Capture the heist of a lifetime

Photography by Finn Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Hara Fashion styled by Luke Langsdale Story by Kelly Kirkpatrick

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Icon of the Autobahn 72 DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

Photography by Markus Leser

2009 Porsche 911 Carrera S

From Here to Eternity By Mark Hacking

The Porsche 911 always makes the cut

Stuttgart, Germany I blame the car. The car’s colour, really. It was a 2009 Porsche 911 Carrera S painted bright yellow—specifically, by the spec sheet, “Speed Yellow.” So, what was I to do? Especially with 30 kilometres of unlimited-speed autobahn stretching out in front of me like the veritable (speed) yellow brick road? My hands were tied. To the steering wheel. And to the buttons on said wheel, used to manipulate the revolutionary new dual-clutch transmission, Porsche-Doppelkupplungsgetriebe, dubbed PDK for short. Make no mistake: I’m a purist. I’m all about the manual transmission, particularly the type found in the 911. Six forward speeds, a weighty clutch, a shortthrow shifter and the pleasure of a perfectly executed heel-and-toe downshift. Magic, pure and simple. But while I thoroughly enjoyed my time behind the wheel of the Carrera S fitted with the 6-speed manual, I quickly learned that the optional 7-speed PDK is capable of whole new levels of trickery. As with most things Porsche, this slick bit of tech has come straight from the track. First seen on the company’s 956 race car in 1983, the PDK transmission has been fine-tuned to suit the discriminating tastes of the average Porschephile and to deliver shifts in a fraction of a heartbeat. To put it another way: Porsche’s engineers should’ve labelled their new transmission “PDQ” instead. (Pretty damn cool, too, apart from the shift buttons—a lame design quirk introduced by Porsche in 1995 and something it steadfastly refuses to change.) On the autobahn, the Carrera S lived up to its promise. Scrolling up through the gears, the 3.8-litre flat-6 engine—now with direct fuel injection and 385 horsepower—kept right on motoring towards its theoretical top speed. The digital readout set within the analog speedometer told the tale: 200 km/h… 220… 240.

Drops of rain appeared on the windshield, but the Porsche held fast to the smooth pavement. This served to highlight the reasons why cars like the 911 are so expensive: a shape that carves through headwinds and resists crosswinds; steering that communicates the slightest variances in grip; tricks like a rear spoiler that automatically deploys to increase stability. This all costs money; so, too, does a sports car capable of venturing beyond 240 km/h to 260, then 280. (You get the picture.) At 280 km/h, 30 kilometres of road gets chewed up in a big hurry. So when a road sign warned of my exit, it was time to dispense with thoughts of hitting that theoretical top speed (300 km/h), bring the optional ceramic composite disc brakes into play and make a decisive move to the right. But when confronted with a long line of trucks all jockeying for position, it was time to pull one last trick out of the PDK bag. I slotted the central gear lever into the fully automatic position and the transmission duly picked seventh gear: overdrive. I jammed the accelerator to the floor and the system automatically dropped down to second in an instant. Thus engaged, the Porsche sprinted ahead of the pack, merging into the exit lane with ease. (Now, it’s no huge feat to pass a line of trucks with a Porsche—it’s just the way this Porsche passed that line of trucks. So quick, so effortless.) Whenever the assignment is to drive a latest-generation Porsche 911, there’s no question of whether the car will be good or not. It will be good. It will also represent an incremental improvement over the previous model—in the case of the 2009 edition, this means more power, more torque, better fuel economy and reduced emissions. But every once in a while, the latest generation Porsche 911 will also represent a major leap forward from a technological perspective. This is that time and the PDK is that technology. DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com 73

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2009 Porsche 911 Carrera 4/4S Perpetual Performance Machine By Jamie Hunter

Berlin, Germany It’s not every day that an automotive aficionado is actively encouraged to push one of the world’s premium sports cars—the Porsche 911—to its achievable limits in the very same country where it was pieced together. Rarer still is the opportunity to put the full Carrera 4 range through its paces, from rural roads to the racetrack, skid pad to the straightaway. DRIVEN recently had the pleasure of tastefully abusing Stuttgart’s latest high-performing export, the 2009 Porsche 911 Carrera 4, and we’re still trying to revert back to life in the slow lane. Because outside of the new 911, nothing seems fast enough.

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We left the courtyard of the Schloss & Gut Liebenberg (about 45 minutes outside of Berlin) in a blue Carrera 4S en route to the Michelin Driving Centre, where we were promised that “the new 911 Carrera 4 models will offer virtually everything you wish to enjoy.” Our enthusiasm for this latest incarnation of the legendary 911 kicked into overdrive as soon as we left the gates of our hotel-castle and reached the German countryside. Taking advantage of the polizei’s seeming absence, we gave the accelerator its first official wake-up call. Mated to a 3.8-litre, 385-horsepower engine, the new dual-clutch PorscheDoppelkupplungsgetriebe (PDK) gearbox ripped through the seven available gears without the slightest interruption in performance. (The base Carrera 4 features a 3.6-litre, 345-horsepower engine; a 6-speed manual is standard with both engines.) Fully 60 per cent faster than the Tiptronic automatic transmission it replaces, the PDK can be operated manually with steering-wheel mounted buttons or by the central gear lever. But the new PDK shifts so flawlessly in full automatic mode, the buttons serve as a gimmick at best. Whether we were churning up dust on the curvy country roads or cruising with the top down through tiny Teutonic towns, the all-wheel drive Carrera 4 took full ownership of the environs. It tackled challenging corners with ease and provided a comfortable ride throughout.

When we finally reached the Michelin test facilities, we were able to get fully acquainted with two features of the new Porsche that can’t safely, let alone legally, be assessed on public roads: the launch control program available with the Sports Chrono Package Plus and the Porsche Traction Management (PTM) system, available exclusively on the Carrera 4 models. The launch control is an impressive—and imperative—option best suited for those who plan to log some serious track time with their Porsche. Launch control is activated by pressing the SportPlus button in the centre console, after which a lightning-quick racing start is dead easy: hold down the brake pedal, push the accelerator to the floor, rev the engine to 6,500 rpm and then release the brake pedal. The transmission and PTM system adjust automatically to compensate for wheel spin, enabling the 911 to set off with maximum traction and acceleration. Numerically speaking, you’ll hit 100 km/h in an estimated 4.6 seconds in the Carrera 4 and just 4.3 seconds in the 4S. In both instances, your upper body will be pressed to the back of the seat as if you’re riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at an amusement park. The next standout feature of the new Carrera 4 is the PTM system. Borrowed from the thrilling 911 Turbo, the system combines the driving pleasure of a rear-mounted engine and rear-wheel drive with greater stability, increased traction and more agile handling. A slalom course was set up on a wet surface. In both the 4 manual and 4S PDK, the PTM system corrected understeer, oversteer and kept the vehicle from spinning out—all within 100 milliseconds of recognizing the driving conditions. (This is faster than even the most alert driver could ever react.)

The new Carrera 4 and 4S—whether in convertible, coupe, manual or PDK incarnation—are a pleasure to drive on public roads and at the racetrack. A completely versatile sports car, it proved just as enjoyable cruising through the Liebenberger countryside as it did when being pushed to the limits of adherence under controlled conditions. As such, the latest Porsche 911 provides the best of both automotive worlds, neither of which you’ll ever want to leave.

the Porsche profile Forever Flat-out By Mark Hacking

Here’s an odd name for an engine: “flat.” In fact, Porsche’s famous flat-6, which has powered the 911 since the vehicle transformed the sports-car world overnight 45 years ago, is far from flat in all regards save one: its appearance. To be more specific, the flat-6 is comparatively flat—say, in relation to an inline or V-shaped engine. This is because the flat’s pistons are positioned on their side, ready to move across a horizontal plane, and primed to generate explosions of power. This layout also gives rise to the engine’s other monikers: “horizontally opposed” and “boxer.” While I’m not diametrically opposed to calling this engine horizontally opposed and I certainly won’t fight calling it a boxer, I prefer flat just for the sheer oddball irony. As in: Hey, your engine is flat, it sounds off, feels down on power, seems like it might throw a con-rod or blow a gasket—you should get that checked out. What a strange way to refer to the crafty bit of thinking responsible for this miracle of internal combustion! The flat engine shouldn’t have been able to withstand the technological advancements that a half-century of relentless progress have wrought. Yet, that’s precisely what has happened. Over the years, the flat-6 has grown in size and increased in performance, but

apart from that still-controversial switch to water cooling back in 1998, it has remained true to its heritage. It has also remained in the back of the car, an area where other manufacturers would never dare to place an engine—particularly one capable of producing up to 530 horsepower in twin-turbocharged form. In the early days, a flat-6 in the back of a Porsche 911 was a mechanical bull ride with the dial Krazy Glued to 11. Did you think you could be on the throttle halfway through that fast sweeper and then suddenly decide to back off? Correction, Poindexter—and by the way, how was your backwards meeting with the outside wall? While amateur racers scratched their heads in an attempt to bend the laws of physics associated with driving such a diabolical car, repair-shop mechanics rubbed their axle grease-stained hands with glee. Since then, these challenging characteristics of the rear-engine layout have been tempered by improvements to the chassis, suspension and weight distribution of the Porsche 911. Electronic guardians aplenty have also helped us all keep this automotive icon on the straight and narrow. But the thrill remains, and always will. So…flat? Yes, but never.

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the Porsche profile

Design of the Timeless By Jamie Hunter Never has there been a more apt pairing than rock and roll and fast cars: the sound, the danger, the sex appeal and, last but certainly not least, the design. Consider the Gibson Les Paul guitar, which debuted in 1952. A work of immediately recognizable perfection, it has never deviated from the bubbly curvature and single bottom cutaway of the original, to which it remains as true today as it has over the last half-century. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it—unless it’s a guitar string, that is. Since its own introduction in 1963, the silhouette of the Porsche 911 has remained equally unmistakable. From the perfectly circular headlights to the gracefully sloping rear window, the storied vehicle has never veered far from the design aesthetic that debuted with that classic first edition.

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In fact, apart from a slight misstep—the infamous “fried egg” headlight treatment (1998-2004, on the 996 model)—the 911 has never been anything short of a pure automotive design icon. The 2009 version is no exception. Exterior changes on the new 911 are subtle, yet effective. In fact, the company’s sole “drastic” modification involves…the rear tail lights. The brake-light clusters have been enhanced and outlined with LED bulbs that amplify the car’s prominent rear end. To distinguish between the all-wheel drive Carrera 4 and the rear-wheel drive Carrera 2, the former features a characteristic red strip connecting the two sets. In the front, the somewhat larger air intakes give the new 911 a beefed-up appearance, while standard bi-xenon front headlamps with

LED daytime driving lights round out the list of glaringly obvious enhancements. This paltry group of changes signifies the Porsche design team’s sense of deserved confidence in moving forward without turning its back on tradition. In a deep sub-basement of Porsche’s headquarters in Stuttgart, surely there must be an official document outlining the specific reasons why the 911 has never really changed in appearance over the years. On the other hand, perhaps the answer involves something far less formal. Maybe a design-team think-tank that meets every four years or so, on a late Friday afternoon, in a brew pub, at a corner table, over weiss beer. A toast is raised, glasses clink and some suds spill on a cocktail napkin, upon which is scrawled, “Why mess with success?” Now that’s rock and roll.

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2009 Mazda6

Hustle and flow By Mark Hacking Westlake Village, CA Spare a thought for those poor car-designing souls holed up in some bright and airy studio somewhere in sunny southern California. Sure, they may get to play Guitar Hero during office hours and stage lengthy “brainstorming sessions” at the local Coffee Bean. They may have the option of taking afternoons off to catch some gnarly waves or ’board some gnarly moguls. They may even possess all the highly-desired accoutrements of the left-coast creative set, including designer threads, a personal trainer, a macrobiotic diet and a home within striking distance of the Pacific. But they do have it rough—particularly those designers responsible for the high-volume passenger cars that dictate whether a manufacturer makes money or loses it.

The reason being: For all their supposed creative freedom, automotive designers are bound by increasingly stringent crash-test regulations, which dictate that cars must reside within a set range of dimensions. Those needs satisfied, the engineers then get their hands on the design and start making requests in search of, say, improved aerodynamics. Then there’s the question of where to place the design on the sliding scale of edginess—in other words, go conservative or go radical? To top it all off, this entire process starts well before the car is scheduled to hit production, so designers have to take a stab at predicting what consumers will want years down the road. As a result, everywhere you turn, you see cars that look just like other cars. Or, vehicles that are so fugly,

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you wonder how they ever made it past the corporate approval process. But once in a while, you see a gem. While the 2009 Mazda6 cannot be considered a radical rethink of the original 6, it nevertheless manages to be a slick reimagining of what is already a very slick and popular car. The 6 design process became more fraught than most when Mazda decided to develop two distinct versions: one for North America and one for the rest of the world. Under the watchful eye of chief designer Youichi Sato (a.k.a. The Dude), design teams in four global locations set about helping make the new 6—a larger car than the one sold overseas—a hit on our shores. But the team in California bore the brunt of the responsibility, so they parked their game controllers, drained their Ice Blendeds and applied their collective brainpower to bringing to fruition what The Dude calls “the emotion of motion.” Within this precept, three guidelines were provided: yugen, or harmony with nature; rin, dignity; and seichi, meticulous attention to detail. No surprise, then, that the evidence of their success in designing the new Mazda6 is in the details. The sedan 78 DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

boasts clean lines and broad shoulders; the vehicle is athleticism without all the performance-enhancing drugs. The front fenders are surprisingly bold, but only when viewed from certain angles; in some instances, they blend into the overall design, while at other times, they break out à la the more muscular Mazda RX-8. The 5-point front grille—a staple of current Mazda design—doesn’t possess the overt brashness of other manufacturers’ noses, but neither is it a shrinking violet with a deviated septum. Plus, the grille leads the eye seamlessly to the hood, displaying the harmony between sharp angles and curved surfaces that was written in bold face in The Dude’s design brief. The way the hood cutline is so close to the edge of the front fender is particularly impressive—very cohesive, very Zen. So: a pretty face. But what lies beneath the surface? Well…a drive through the canyon roads in and around Malibu quickly proved that the engineers had their fair share of influence on the Mazda, too. Powered by a 3.7-litre V6 engine, the Mazda6 offers a decent amount of power, 272 horses, and a healthy

degree of torque, 269 lb-ft. (A 4-cylinder engine comes standard on the base Mazda6.) The V6 is linked to a 6-speed automatic transmission that, sadly, doesn’t offer the option of racy paddle shifters—a feature that’s fast becoming expected in this segment. The Mazda is by no means lightningquick, but it’s still enough to generate some honest grins on a bendy road. Meanwhile, the bends highlighted an even more impressive aspect of the new car: the revised suspension. Changes at the front (objective: improved stability when cornering, even on uneven pavement) and back (objective: reduce body roll when cornering, reduce dive under braking) make this front-wheel drive sedan’s handling sublime. Despite all that power being transmitted via the front wheels, the Mazda6 is entirely composed, even in extreme situations. Example: stability control switched off, second gear selected, gas pedal matted coming out of that 180-degree hairpin turn and a dump truck in the oncoming lane. Result: no drama whatsoever, just acres of control and refinement.

If the handling is a certain success, the revised steering is less so. The goal here was to create a more linear feel; while this has been accomplished when the 6 is tipped into a given corner, the steering wants to snap back to centre too abruptly coming out of the corner— it’s like a rubber band stretched too tight. (Back on the bright side, the car’s turning circle has been reduced by a full metre, providing more ammunition for those parking lot throwdowns.) All things taken into account, the 2009 Mazda6 must be considered a winner. From a performance standpoint, the car does the business. In terms of design, it displays grace and originality, qualities that are definitely lacking in this all-important segment. The next possible challenges (which may already be in the works) are a hatchback, a wagon and a higheroutput Mazdaspeed version of the sedan, likely with allwheel drive. For the moment, those poor car-designing souls in southern California can go back to their diversions—because for now, The Dude abides. DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com 79

Somewhere in a parallel universe, cars are running on an endless supply of fuel, cleaning the highways as they go by emitting distilled water instead of carbon dioxide. This alternate Earth has purer air than ours, and people drive big, luxurious vehicles, free of all feelings of guilt. It sounds like the stuff of myth, yet the technology found in the experimental BMW Hydrogen 7 just might bridge that gap between fiction and reality.

BMW Hydrogen 7 Hydrogeneration next By George Zicarelli

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t the heart of the enviro-friendly BMW Hydrogen 7 sedan is its dual-fuel engine, which shines brighter than other green automotive technologies, notably the more common gas-electric hybrids. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and when it’s burned in the BMW, only particulate-free water is produced from the tailpipes. This program dates back 25 years; the Hydrogen 7 is a flag-bearer of this technology’s promise. A revised version of the luxury 760i sedan, the Hydrogen 7 can replace gasoline with hydrogen in the internal combustion equation. The driver can access either the gasoline or hydrogen fuel tank on the fly with the flick of a steering-wheel mounted button. The transition from one type of fuel to the next is completely seamless in terms of sound, feel and performance. The regular fuel source is premium unleaded gasoline, while the eco-friendly option is liquid hydrogen (chosen by engineers over gaseous hydrogen because it contains 75 per cent more energy per volume). Storing the fuel poses a challenge though, as hydrogen finds its liquid form at temperatures approaching absolute zero. The solution: tucked behind the rear seats of the vehicle, a hyper-insulated storage tank that maintains a consistent temperature of -253 C. So effectively does the design limit heat loss that a snowball placed inside the tank would take 13 years to melt, and piping hot coffee would need almost three months of cooling before you could drink it. (Consider the latter when shopping for your next Thermos.) Alas, outside of a few boutique stations in green-andkeen places like California, the infrastructure for refuelling does not presently exist. BMW supports its Hydrogen 7 test models, 100 in all, via a mobile refuelling station that uses a cryopump—similar to what Formula One teams use. With pressure- and temperature-proof couplings, this gasand-go (so to speak) station can fill the vehicle’s 7.9-kg tank in less than eight minutes. It may sound high-tech, yet the driver’s experience is identical to that of a regular pit stop. Future Hydrogen 7 drivers won’t even need to leave the car, as BMW plans to develop a fully automated process whereby sensors at the station recognize a vehicle stopped for refuelling and automatically connect a hose to a bottommounted nozzle. Granted, the last big-ticket hydrogen-powered vehicle, the Hindenburg, did not fare so well. Despite the disaster taking place over 70 years ago, the image of the airship bursting into flames remains firm in our collective conscious. But the mistakes made Car photography by Eric Forget

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then—including the decision to allow a smoking room inside a wildly flammable flying machine—will not be made again. If anything, BMW has over-engineered the safety aspects of the Hydrogen 7, building in numerous redundant systems to ensure that the odourless, colourless gas is handled with kid gloves every step of the way. Hydrogen detection systems throughout the car monitor any potential leaks, and the door-lock buttons will glow red in the event one is found. If the temperature inside the hydrogen tank is compromised and pressure starts to build, gaseous hydrogen is released through two safety valves: one on the roof connected by pipes running through the C-pillars and, in the event of a rollover, one built into the undercarriage. As a technology-in-progress that won’t see production anytime soon, the Hydrogen 7 does give hope that once we’ve exhausted all the world’s oil, cars and trucks will chug along as always. With this knowledge to comfort us, perhaps we can all breathe a little easier. DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com 81

Advertorial

In a Klasse of Their Own Cars by Mercedes-Benz, clothing by Hugo Boss, timepieces by TAG Heuer and mise en scène by Montreal DTM’s Bruno Spengler photographed exclusively for DRIVEN magazine by Wolfgang Wilhelm

uebec’s Bruno Spengler left Canada for Europe at the age of 17 in search of auto-racing glory. He found it in his award-winning Formula Renault rookie season, at the end of which he was signed on by Mercedes-Benz Motorsport. For the last two seasons, Spengler placed second overall in the highprofile Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters (DTM). Given that DTM is one of the most competitive series in the world, racing success at the most pres tigious level is arguably just around the corner.

During a break in the 2008 DTM season, Spengler returned home to relax in the paddock at the Canadian Grand Prix. Just as Mercedes-Benz Motorsport has been grooming him to perhaps eventually compete in Formula One, Mercedes-Benz and co-sponsors TAG Heuer and Hugo Boss groomed the 25-year-old rising star for an exclusive fashion shoot in downtown Montreal. Deutsch treat, so to speak.

Opposite Page Car: Mercedes-Benz SLK350 with sport package ($67,100), 3.5-litre DOHC 24V V6, 300 horsepower, 266 lb-ft torque Clothes: HUGO Suit ($1,395), HUGO Shirt ($185), HUGO Shoes ($395), HUGO Tie ($125) This Page Car: Left – Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG ($63,500), 6.2-litre DOHC 32V V8, 451 horsepower, 443 lb-ft torque; Right – Mercedes-Benz CLS550 ($93,500), 5.5-litre DOHC 32V V8, 382 horsepower, 391 lb-ft torque Watch: TAG Heuer Aquaracer Chronograph ($2,500) Clothes: BOSS Black Suit ($995), HUGO Shirt ($195), HUGO Tie ($125)

Advertorial

Car: Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG ($63,500), 6.2-litre DOHC 32V V8, 451 horsepower, 443 lb-ft torque Watch: TAG Heuer Aquaracer Chronograph ($2,500) Clothes: HUGO Suit ($1,095), HUGO Shirt ($195), HUGO Shoes ($450)

Car: Mercedes-Benz SL550 with sport package ($128,500), 5.5-litre DOHC 32V V8, 382 horsepower, 391 lb-ft torque Watch: TAG Heuer Link Calibre S Chronograph ($3,200) Clothes: HUGO Jacket ($695), BOSS Black Shirt ($175)

Advertorial

Car: Mercedes-Benz SLK350 with sport package ($67,100), 3.5-litre DOHC 24V V6, 300 horsepower, 266 lb-ft torque Watch: TAG Heuer Link Automatic Day-Date ($3,200) Clothes: HUGO Suit ($1,395), HUGO Shirt ($185), HUGO Shoes ($395), HUGO Tie ($125)

Photography by Jeff Vergara

Appetite for Construction

Is Dubai’s seemingly unstoppable population boom leading to a city-planning bust? ‘Embedded’ Canadian real-estate consultant Neill Michael Nagib wonders if the writing is on the sky

If you build it, they will come. So promised a popular late-’80s film starring Kevin Costner and a cornfield. Almost twenty years later in the decidedly farm-free Arabian city of Dubai, the reverse comes to mind: If they come, we will build it.

hey are coming in droves. A tiny, prestigious and affluent desert emirate on the Persian Gulf, Dubai has been welcoming an estimated 4,200 new residents per week since the start of 2008. For the most part, the émigrés are drawn in by the tax-free wages, burgeoning new industry and, as compared to neighbouring Saudi Arabia and Iran, relatively benign cultural attributes. This is not to suggest that Dubai is the Las Vegas of the Arabian Peninsula, because it

does not have the type of laissez-faire attitude found in Vegas (or Monaco, or the Virgin Islands or, for that matter, any major Canadian city). Dubai is more Western-leaning than any other Islamic country—up to a certain point. The rules are simple: no nudity, no public displays of affection and, it should go without saying, no blasphemous statements regarding any of the Abrahamic faith traditions. The Economist puts Dubai’s current population at 1.48 million, up some 200,000 since the last official census, taken in 2005. To put it in

perspective, roughly 60 per cent of that threeyear swell occurred in the last six months. Not surprisingly, the steady influx of new residents has spurred on a globally unprecedented construction boom. Without doubt, development activity in Dubai has resulted in some of the world’s most innovative and unique architecture. Since the completion of its inaugural signature tower, the Burj Al Arab, in 1999, designers, architects and developers have engaged in an egoistic competition to deliver ever more adventurous skyscrapers.

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Dubai has in many ways become an architect’s playground, where quirky creativity is often rewarded and nothing is impossible. ubai is daring, bold and blindly obsessed with the superlative—the largest, the tallest. Not to mention the unique—the first, the only. Thus far, the audacious collective imagination has paid immense dividends to developers. The city is ever in the midst of grand transformation—economic, social and

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aesthetic. For the most part, it’s really quite marvellous to behold. Still, beneath the cladding of some of the world’s most talked about architectural structures lurks systemically poor interior design. Dubai’s iconic skyline is visually impressive, but a lot of that is window dressing, because the floor plates of many of the buildings limit the internal use of space. This is particularly true of oval and circular residential towers, where off-shape spaces present a decorator’s nightmare despite fulfilling a designer’s dream.

To make matters even more bizarre, this supply-and-demand housing issue has allowed developers the luxury of selling their properties in an off-plan capacity. The “off” plan involves (admittedly reputed) developers offering their projects for sale at the purely conceptual phase—sometimes before the have even obtained physical possession of the land. Buyers in Dubai basically have to purchase property on offer from a rendering and a brochure that promise little more than a lifestyle. Common enough in North America,

show units are an absolute rarity in Dubai, although some of the more thoughtful developers offer mockups in their sales centres. The sole advantage for the consumer in the off-plan scenario? A purchase price discounted by comparison with the prevailing market. The many shortcomings? Impossible to number; where does one start listing the possibilities for things going wrong in a unit that barely exists as an abstract? Construction crews in Dubai often work gruelling shifts to complete projects; however, the frustrated demand for space in the emirate—not to mention the pressure to deliver, deliver and deliver—has undeniably

comprised final-product quality. While most developers earnestly aspire to provide luxurious living environments, in the final analysis, all but the rarest exceptions fall far short of the mark. For example, Jumeirah Beach Residence, developed by Dubai Properties, is plagued by constant vertical-transportation issues. Residents complain about out-of-service lifts, strange smells on numerous floors and general water leakage. At Marina Promenade (developer, Emaar), there are noticeable slopes in the floors of all the guest powder rooms. Neither are retail complexes immune—an architectural column recently fell in one of the many courts at the kitschy Ibn Battuta Mall (developer, Nakheel); miraculously, no injuries were reported. While Dubai’s residents recognize these disappointing shortfalls, they have

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become fairly resigned to the notion, “that’s just the way it is in Dubai.” This is truly a shame. Dubai’s arrival on the world stage has been impressive, and it has certainly delivered on promises of glamour and wealth. The city developed into a major metropolis seemingly overnight—loudly, proudly and very brightly lit—in an effort to attract multinational companies and financiers. The strategy has been working, to a fair extent. Many of the bulge-bracket investment banks have moved to Dubai, hoping to cover off the entire Islamic region by using it as a hub. There are also efforts underway to build state-of-the-art teaching hospitals, universities and tourist destinations. The good intentions are there and the roads are ever being paved. It remains to be seen where those roads will lead.

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espite all of this progress (or, depending on your perspective, rampant growth), Dubai has a long way to go before becoming a mature metropolis. Construction is expected to settle over the course of the next five years. Once Dubai achieves its strategic objectives—if it can identify them—it will undoubtedly stand out as one of the world’s most architecturally important cities. The real challenge for Dubai in the next decade will be to think from the stairwell outward, rather than from the skyline inward. Build buildings, not dreams.

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Will the circles be unbroken?

A tale of two roundhouses shows that urban planning can also be urbane—at least, in one case By Ivor Tossell

On the north shore of Vancouver’s False Creek, tucked inside one of the biggest condo developments the country has ever seen, there sits a roundhouse. It’s the oldest building on that tract of land—in fact, it’s the oldest original-location building in the city. The Vancouver roundhouse has cannily survived not only the death of the railway lands that once surrounded it, but also repeated attempts to tear it down, the coming and going of a world exhibition and the latest waterfront condo boom. A roundhouse is a rare and fantastic thing, a unique construct from a bygone era. And yet, thanks to a bit of foresight, Vancouver’s is as relevant as ever—but in an entirely new way. For a decade now, the building has been home 94 DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com

to the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre, a gathering place that, at last count, commanded 345,000 visits a year. Now flip across the country to Toronto, right to the base of the CN Tower. There, tucked at the edge of another one of the biggest condo developments the country has ever seen, sits another roundhouse. Like its Western cousin, it’s a survivor, and until recently, it, too, was looking for purpose in the 21st century. Last year, it found one. Set to open in 2009, the roundhouse will greet the future as the home of a Leon’s furniture outlet. “Vancouver good, Toronto bad” is a refrain heard so often in city-building circles that it’s become a hoary stereotype. But there’s a grain of truth in there, and you don’t have to look any

further than the debacle of Toronto’s last roundhouse to see why this grain keeps flowering. There are only a handful of roundhouses left in Canada. Vestiges from the heyday of steam power, they were essential because steam engines were never particularly good at going backwards. Built around giant turntables that could swing an engine around, roundhouses provided a place to both store and service locomotives, with a minimum of backing up. In a very real sense, they were the heart of the operation, the point at which all the tracks converged, the Rome to which all rails led. Roundhouses went into decline with the arrival of diesel engines, which could just as capably move forwards or backwards. A second blow came when the railroads started pulling up the tracks that once dominated bigcity downtowns, and most—but not all—were demolished. That’s how Toronto and Vancouver were saddled with a curiously similar legacy: a vintage roundhouse, marooned from the tracks that once led to it, surrounded by a growing downtown and facing an uncertain future. The former railway lands in both cities are being developed into twin skyscraper communities of unprecedented size. Toronto’s Concord CityPlace and Vancouver’s Concord Pacific Place will each be home to tens of thousands of urbanites, with whom come concerns about whether a collection of high-rise towers can be knitted into a real community. An answer can be found in Vancouver’s roundhouse. Built in stages between 1888 and 1940, heritage enthusiasts saved it from demolition when the railway lands were cleared to make way for Expo 86. It was re-purposed as a pavilion, and when Concord arrived with its mega-development, it was designated for use as a public amenity.

The developer, however, had its own notion of “public amenity,” which it liberally defined as a mini-mall of premium boutiques. It was only with strenuous efforts from the city and surrounding community that Concord was persuaded to foot the hefty nine-million-dollar tab for a community centre. Funding today is divided between the City of Vancouver and a charitable society that raises money to program the centre and run events. In this condo-addled age, “community centre” increasingly seems to be a euphemism for “the gym,” perhaps with a few tacky amenities and a squash court added on for good measure. Vancouver’s Roundhouse Community Centre, on the other hand, offers everything from acting to Aikido, first aid to fencing and pottery to piano lessons. It maintains artist-inresidence programs, and stages performances—perhaps most ingenious of all, the turntable pit has been transformed into a stunning theatre-in-the-round venue. To bring it all full circle, so to speak, the engine that pulled the first steam engine into Vancouver is preserved in a pavilion outside. If only the same could be said about its cousin down east. The Toronto roundhouse languished for years, as plans for conversion into a railway museum were mooted but never acted on, even as historic locomotives gathered dust within its walls. The tracks leading to the main line—which a museum could have used for historic train rides—were pulled up, and the land along which they ran was sold. In 1997, the roundhouse was partially disassembled to facilitate the building of the city’s underground convention centre; when it was put back together, about a third of the rebuilt space was occupied by the Steam Whistle brewery (which, at the very least, brews decent beer). Different visions about what to do with the remainder of the space competed, but last year, the City of Toronto announced that a tenant for much of remaining space had been found: Leon’s Furniture Inc. A longpromised railroad museum would be sandwiched into the middle of the building, between the brewery and the furniture store. To put it in perspective, the roundhouse was originally divided into stalls (or “bays”) for 32 engines. In the end, the museum will occupy a grand total of three, though it will also spill over into a side-building and the surrounding park grounds.

Reaction to the plan was less than enthusiastic. “How do you spell creative bankruptcy? R-O-U-N-D-H-O-U-S-E,” declared the Toronto Star. “I find this the most pedestrian approach to the use of heritage that I think I’ve ever seen,” Adam Vaughan, the local city councillor, fumed at the time. “The thing is a total disaster,” Jane Beecroft, a noted Toronto historian, told me recently. “This thing is a gift to the city, and they’ve blown it.” The Toronto Railway Heritage Association is in charge of the truncated museum (which, like Leon’s, is still readying itself to open). The group is doing its best to give the situation positive spin, pointing out that a privatesector tenancy is the only way to finance restoring such an old building. One bright spot is the fact that the historic turntable in Toronto has been brought back to working order, even if it doesn’t connect to a railway. And, as Heritage Toronto’s conservation committee points out, the alterations to the building are designed to be reversible. “Without the two tenants, we wouldn’t have a museum,” says TRHA president Orin Krivel, who notes that he couldn’t imagine asking the City of Toronto for $12 million when community centres and pools are being threatened with closure. “We’d be skidded out of council chambers so quickly our clothing would ignite.” He might have a point, but it’s a continuing pity that Toronto’s imagination should prove so limited. As the Vancouver experience has shown, there are options other than handing heritage spaces over to the private sector, shrugging that it’s better than letting them collapse from neglect. It’s true that both the brewery (which includes a popular event space) and the furniture store are public spaces in their own right. It doesn’t negate the fact that it amounts to a colossal wasted opportunity. In their day, roundhouses were the heart of their railway lands. Now they sit at the heart of Canada’s downtowns, where the question has gone from how to move people across the country, to how to house an increasingly urban nation. The roundhouses’ very design makes these buildings focal points—and what a city puts in such key places reflects what it values. Alas, here we are again: Vancouver good, Toronto blah. DRIVEN September 2008 * drivenmag.com 95

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DRIVEN

Style guide for September Cover Hugo Boss shirt, Ferragamo shoes available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com); Dolce & Gabbana suit, Prada tie available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com); Gucci belt available at Gucci Toronto, 130 Bloor St. West; and Gucci boutique, Hotel Vancouver, 900 W. Georgia St. (gucci.com)

On Her Donna Karan dress, Jimmy Choo shoes, Brunello Cucinelli bag available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com) “Have a seat”—On Him White cotton boxers available at Banana Republic (bananarepublic.com); Hermès shirt available at Hermès Toronto, 130 Bloor St. West, and Hermès Vancouver, 755 Burrard St. (hermes.com)

Fashion (Pages 62 – 71) “Drive my car”—Tom Ford glasses, Alexander McQueen scarf, Donna Karan dress available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com); Hermès shoes available at Hermès Toronto, 130 Bloor St. West; and Hermès Vancouver, 755 Burrard St. (hermes.com)

On Her Roberto Cavalli dress, Diane von Frustenberg shoes available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com); Chair by BarberOsgerby available at Ministry of the Interior, 80 Ossington Ave., Toronto (ministryoftheinterior.net).

“Trunk bonds”—Dolce & Gabbana suit, Prada shirt, Prada belt, available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com); Dion pocket square, Hugo Boss shoes available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com); Hermès tie available at Hermès Toronto, 130 Bloor St. West; and Hermès Vancouver, 755 Burrard St. (hermes.com) “Walk this way”—On Him Alexander McQueen coat available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com); Brunello Cucinelli pants, Burberry shirt, Dion pocket square, To Boot shoes available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com); Gucci belt available at Gucci Toronto, 130 Bloor St. West, and Gucci boutique, Hotel Vancouver, 900 W. Georgia St. (gucci.com)

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“Breaking loose” A.P.C. jeans available at Nomad, 431 Richmond St. W., Toronto (nomadshop.net); Prada boots available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com); Michael Kors shirt, Brunello Cucinelli tie available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com); Jacket available at Klaxon Howl, 877 Queen St. West, Toronto (647.436.6628) “The Getaway” Etro scarf, Ralph Lauren Black Label shirt available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com); Brunello Cucinelli jacket, Burberry trench, To Boot shoes, Roda pocket square available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com); Corduroy pant available at Klaxon Howl, 877 Queen St. West, Toronto (647.436.6628); Filson bag available at Nomad, 431 Richmond St. W., Toronto (nomadshop.net)

“In a Klasse of Their Own” (Pages 82 – 87) Hugo Boss available at HUGO Store Toronto, 18 Hazelton Ave., and HUGO Store Montreal, 2021 Peel St. (800.263.2677, hugoboss.com) Watches (Page 36) Breitling, distributed by Grigoros Canada, 40 Hayden St., Toronto (416.595.1900), available at Las Swiss (laswiss.com); Citizen, available at People’s Jewellers (peoplesjewellers.com); Raymond Weil, available at La Swiss (laswiss.com); TAG Heuer available at Birks (birks.com); Tissot, distributed through The Swatch Group Canada (416.703.1667), available at Birks (birks.com) Tech (Pages 40 – 41) Portégé R500-S5007V laptop, Toshiba of Canada Ltd., 191 McNabb Street, Markham, Ont. (toshiba.ca); OLED XEL-1 screen and PRS-505 reader, Sony of Canada Ltd., 115 Gordon Baker Road, Toronto (sony.ca); Studio Hybrid harddrive, Dell Canada, 155 Gordon Baker Road, Toronto (dell.ca); DMC-FX500 digital camera, Panasonic Canada, 5770 Ambler Dr., Mississauga, Ont. (panasonic.ca); Extreme Ducatti Edition flash drive, SanDisk Corp., 601 McCarthy Blvd., Milpitas, California (sandisk.com)

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