DRIVEN magazine - Oct 2008

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DRIVEN October 2008

The money issue

life.in.motion

Eating gold Burning money Daniel Craig blankcheque fc the rubin factor dollar world the $300 war and more

* t r a v e l

*

life.in.motion

m e n ’ s

l i f e s t y l e

Hockey’s $100,000,000 Man

Alexander

Ovechkin

The money issue

fall fashion the hunt is on

what’s Under the hood?

$100,000

performance sedan, $50,000 price tag Page 82

(See page 82)

The driven reader *exclusive Original fiction by Andrew Pyper

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Pure Performance

Absolute

P

w

Precision Pure performance. Absolute precision. Here at Breitling, we are driven by a single passion, a single obsession: to create ultra-reliable instrument watches for the most demanding professionals. Each detail of their construction and finishing is driven by the same concern for excellence. Our chronographs meet the highest criteria of sturdiness and functionality, and we are the only major watch brand in the world to submit all our movements to the merciless scrutiny of the Swiss Official Chronometer Testing Institute (COSC). One simply does not become an official aviation supplier by chance.

Superocean HĂŠritage Chronographe Re-edition of the legendary 1957 Superocean.

Officially chronometer-certified by the COSC.

On Bloor

reg t a.i lc e rol om 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 o4m - 80606 - 903-9015 1 6o.r9c2a5l l. 31 5 w w w. b r e i tFloirFn 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

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On the Cover.

Alexander Ovechkin Fashion Suit and shirt by Ralph Lauren; tie by Polo by Ralph Lauren; pocket square

by Paul Smith; courtesy of Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com) Car 2009 Hyundai Genesis Photography Stephen Voss and Richard Sibbald Styling Luke Langsdale

46

66 54 82

46 Red-Light Russian Pro hockey’s resident golden boy, Alexander Ovechkin, has garnered some serious accolades in his short career, recently signing a contract of Bill Gatesian proportions. The strong and silent left winger lets STEVE FEATHERSTONE get up close and (just a little bit) personal.

54 THE NEED FOR TWEED From stable to stallion, from field to pheasant, fall fashion explodes off the pages like buckshot.

DRIVEN’s Olde-English inspired selections prove that when it comes to autumn’s prevailing taste, much of the thrill is in the chase.

DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

66 CLICK CLICK, Bang bang Cyber warfare is cheap, devastating, sneaky and user-friendly—your computer might even be unwillingly involved as you read this. ERIC GRANT debriefs you on web-based war and assigns your next mission: Protect your local PCs, at all costs.

82 in the beginning...

And there came to be a vehicle that offered stylish looks and high-end performance for an entry-level sticker price. MARK HACKING drives Hyundai’s latest luxury sedan, the Genesis, out of the desert and into the new frontier of premium motoring.

Alexander Ovechkin photo by Stephen Voss; The need for tweed, by Richard Sibbald

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Departments 18 Personality Jeff Rubin 20 Flash Money to burn 22 Traveller What to buy for a wandering loonie 24 Vision Some actors are paid to stay off screen 26 Sound The priciest albums (n)ever heard 28 Words Stone angel? Our $1.25-million Gargoyle 30 Bytes Kahnawake serves up a dispute 32 Drink Luscious labels for lovely liquids 34 Food Have you eaten your karats today?

36 Sex Dangerous curves ahead 38 Tech Nuts, bolts and bytes: six quick picks 40 Personality Lucinda Williams

10 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

Automotive 84 2008 Targa Newfoundland 88 2009 Aston Martin V8 Vantage More 42 50 62 70 72 90 94 98

PROSPERITY PITCH Is big money bankrupting European football?

FICTION EXCLUSIVE Andrew Pyper’s “Security” BLONDE ON BOND Lunch with Daniel Craig, the dapper but deadly 007 not-so-dIRTY MONEY Canadian crime cleans up its act CIRCUS OF THE STRANGE Fashion freakshow TRAVEL Burgundy, France: More than wine to give you a buzz Petty cash in pETAWAWA A monetary mountain for a military town BIO-GRAPHICAL “The Notorious Byrne Brothers,” by Jeff Lemire

Circus photo by Richard Sibbald; Daniel Craig, by Karen Ballard; Bio-graphical, by Jeff Lemire; Mao, by Miles Smith

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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 intern Justin Couture Contributors Julia Aitken, Cameron Carpenter, Daniela Castro, Richard Crouse, Julia Deakin, William Denton, Steve Featherstone, Zach Feldberg, Murray Foster, Robert J. Galbraith, Jian Ghomeshi, David Giammarco, James Grainger, Eric Grant, Ian Harvey, Kevin Kelly, Jeff Lemire, John McFetridge, Mark Moyes, Ian Nathanson, Andrew Pyper, Richard Sibbald, Lenny Stoute, Micah Toub, Lee Towndrow, Stephen Voss, Elizabeth Walker, Robert Watson, Derek Weiler, 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

A MODEST PROPOSAL Money. It’s one of those terms to which we instinctively attach specific, blinkered meaning. The mere mention of the word leads to thoughts not of cents, dollars or even savings, but of quantifiable wealth. (In the same sense, we always think of good luck when we think of luck.) Nothing wrong with positive thinking, of course.

Or dreaming. Quoth a certain national lottery, “Imagine the freedom.” I’ve been known to be imaginative myself, a few times a year, for the modest price of a couple of loonies. I’ll probably keep trying.

Remove your blinkers, and money’s modest scale offers—in fact, demands—imagination, creativity and speculation. When Microsoft went public in 1986, five shares cost slightly over $100. (I recall buying a bunch of books and vinyl records that year; I might have a couple of them in the basement somewhere.) Anyone astute or imaginative enough to have invested in Microsoft at that time, still holding the shares today, is sitting on close to $40,000.

For what it’s worth, as they say.

Speaking of which, money also has perceived worth. Canada’s 50-cent piece was our first domestically minted coin, originally made almost entirely out of silver. A century later, while the coins are still in use, the Royal Canadian Mint makes very few each year. People hang on to them, thinking they’re worth more than meets the proverbial eye, not knowing that the pieces are now mostly fashioned out of nickel-plated steel.

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This is where it gets interesting, because when worth, perceived or actual, is removed, money ceases to be money. Consider the penny. The Mint produces 800 million of them each year, accounting for 60 per cent of its total coin production. What this means is that consumers are taking pennies out of circulation. (For what? It’s not as if a penny can buy anything—not even a single piece of Bubbaloo for Alexander Ovechkin.)

A 2007 report estimates that it costs $130 million/year to keep the coin in service. Put another way, each Canadian pays $4/year in taxes for the privilege of having something to throw in water fountains and lose under car seats. Pity the poor little penny: It’s money that has ceased to be money.

A modest proposal: remove the penny from circulation. Alas, the math isn’t so simple. This kind of forced retirement won’t actually put $130 million back into the coffers. Still, it gives us pause for thought, given what is clearly a case of waste and missed opportunity.

The release of DRIVEN’s annual “Money” issue comes at an interesting time, to say the least. Global financial markets, teetering on the brink, dominate the headlines despite looming elections in both Canada and the United States. Decisions that will reshape our political landscape are being made. But the penny possibly dropping? That will always be more important.

Thanks for spending the time.

Gary Butler

Finance and administrative director Patricia Petit, 866.631.6550 x227 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 #24 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.

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Photo by Richard Sibbald; styling by Luke Langsdale

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Steve featherstone A writer and photographer from Syracuse, N.Y., Steve Featherstone (“Capital gain,” p46) has been published in outlets such as Granta, Saturday Night and The Walrus. His military tech essay “The Coming Robot Army,” from the February 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine, won a 2007 Best American Essay award, and last month, Harper’s published his 8,000-word feature about a new U.S. Army unit called the Human Terrain Team, which he shadowed for a month in Afghanistan. Profiling a sports celebrity like Alexander Ovechkin is a far cry from writing about the war overseas, Featherstone admits, but there are a few notable similarities. “For one, there’s a lot of waiting around followed by a few intense minutes spent trying to make conversation with people who’d rather be doing anything else except talking to an American reporter who doesn’t speak their language.”

14 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

andrew pyper In various airport terminals from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, during the Canadian leg of a tour in support of his recently released best-seller, The Killing Circle, Andrew Pyper wrote an exclusive short story for DRIVEN (“Security,” p50). He garnered many a curious onlooker along the way, and people in the Victoria and Winnipeg airports kindly offered to buy him drinks.

Pyper has also written The Trade Mission and The Wildfire Season—both best-sellers—the short-story collection Kiss Me, and the Arthur Ellis awardwinning Lost Girls, which joins The Killing Circle in feature-film development. He holds a BA and MA in English Literature from McGill University, as well as a law degree from the University of Toronto. He lives in Toronto.

david giammarco Journalist and television reporter David Giammarco (“Quantum lead,” p62) is no stranger to the spy world, both real and fictional. He has spent time with the CIA’s infamous E. Howard Hunt, and his extensive research of both the Cold War and the assassination of John F. Kennedy has been included into the historical record at the National Archives in Washington. A few weeks after wrapping Quantum of Solace, Giammarco and a still badly bruised James Bond—Daniel Craig, actually—met for a myth-busting London lunch to discuss the man behind the man behind the martini. Giammarco’s film book, For Your Eyes Only, uncovers four decades behind the scenes of the 007 series. Experience gained? “I’m pretty sure I can diffuse a bomb in less than seven seconds,” he laughs. Ah—but with his eyes closed?

nathan whitlock Despite growing up in the shadow of CFB Petawawa, an armed-forces career was not in the cards for Nathan Whitlock (“War & Mortgages,” p94), though he did work as a cleaner on the base for a few months after high school. Green isn’t his colour anyway and he’s mightier with a pen than he is with a sword. Whitlock’s writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Toro, Maisonneuve, Saturday Night, Fashion and various other places.

His acclaimed first novel, A Week of This, was published earlier this year. Though he currently lives in Toronto with his wife and two kids, Nathan is still never far from Petawawa—in fact, he’s doing a reading at the local library later this month, where he’s certain to field a few opinions about this issue’s economical article.

Andrew Pyper photo by Jennifer Rowsom; Nathan Whitlock, by Gary Campbell

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Soon

By Jian Ghomeshi Carmina Burana

Music Quintron and Miss Pussycat Biltmore Cabaret October 18 Vancouver, B.C. quintronandmisspussycat.com Basia Bulat Halifax Pop Explosion October 21-25 Halifax, N.S. halifaxpopexplosion.com To suggest Basia Bulat has had a groundbreaking year is an understatement. The Toronto-based singer-songwriter’s debut record, Oh My Darling, was released

Turned up to eleven When Jack White from the White Stripes, The Edge from U2 and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin assemble at a party held in their honour, you just know It Might Get Loud. Davis Guggenheim’s same-named documentary screened Sept. 5 at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.

DRIVEN was proud to be the official men’s lifestyle media sponsor of the after party, which was held at the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel’s Senses Bar & Restaurant. Dress was black and White Stripes; air guitar optional.

internationally on the legendary Rough Trade label and nationally through fellow songwriter Hayden’s Hardwood Records.

Accenting gently strummed acoustic guitars are strings, galloping drums, ukulele and warbling vocals; the album garnered her a Polaris Music Prize nomination.

How the West was cooked You’ve seen celebrity chefs prepare gourmet meals on TV, but there’s nothing quite like watching an edible masterpiece come together right before your eyes, not to mention seeing firsthand where the ingredients come from. This year’s Taste Culinary Series—hosted by the editors of Ciao!

Magazine—highlighted Winnipeg’s local suppliers (including a ranch, a winery and some organic farms), and was complemented by a meal at the region’s finest restaurants. Attendees were shown how Canadian cuisine is really done in the Prairies. This office’s love affair with Kraft Dinner is officially over. Sante!

A ‘Masters’ without a Tiger One of the world’s most prestigious equestrian events, the ‘Masters’ Tournament boasts $2 million in purse money, making it also one of the richest. Hosted at Calgary’s Spruce Meadows, this

Young Rival, with The Bicycles Zaphod Beeblebrox October 23 Ottawa, Ont. youngrival.com thebicycles.ca

year’s competition ran from Sept. 3 – 7, attracting riders and steeds from around the world and across this country, notably Quebec’s Eric Lamaze, Canada’s latest show-jumping Olympic gold medalist. Lamaze finished in a tie for second place, bringing home $350,000—a fine showing, as far as we’re concerned.

Raptor loose at Harry Rosen!

The Toronto Raptors’ president and general manager, Bryan Colangelo, is one of the NBA’s best-dressed employees. It came as no surprise to this motley bunch that Harry Rosen invited him on Sept. 3 to help unveil the upscale menswear store’s newly renovated Toronto location, as well as Ermenegildo Zegna’s exclusive in-store boutique.

TSN’s Rod Black conducted an interview with the Raptors’ front-office style guru as the rest of us enjoyed hors

Seen

By DRIVEN staff

d’oeuvres and specialty cocktails.

And no, Colangelo didn’t budge about whether Steve Nash might one day end up in Hogtown. Even so, we’ll bet you a Zegna suit that he’ll be on the team before the end of his career. Remember, you read it here.

Austin Clarke

Erratum In our September issue, the following credits were overlooked Editor’s letter: photo

by Richard Sibbald, styling

by Luke Langsdale; Haute capture: makeup and hair

by Danny Morrow (Judy Inc), models, Kzenia and Adam, (Elite Models); Another side of Hugh Dillon: styling: Luke Langsdale, makeup and hair, Danny Morrow (Judy Inc).

Basia Bulat

Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks Pyramid Cabaret October 27 Winnipeg, Man. stephenmalkmus.com Ladyhawk, with Attack in Black The Pawn Shop October 30 Edmonton, Alta. ladyhawkladyhawk.com attackinblack.com Matt Mays + El Torpedo Pump Roadhouse October 30 Regina, Sask. mattmays.com Matt Mays knows how to channel old-school, straight-driving rock and roll. While the Brooklynbased, Nova Scotia-born guitar slinger sounds like a northern version of Tom Petty hooks and Bruce Springsteen growls, don’t mistake this working man for just another standard rocker. Mays’s last national tour displayed a creative multimedia artist unafraid to bring ambitious orchestrations of his musical vision to the stage. He’s currently touring his new record, Terminal Romance, after spending some time in the summer opening for Detroit cowboy Kid Rock.

You’ll let us know if Mays picked up any bad habits along the way.

Performances, Festivals & Films St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival Until October 18 Various venues St. John’s, Nfld. womensfilmfestival.com Austin Clarke WordFest Until October 19 Calgary, Alta. wordfest.com With over 60 events, WordFest is a six-day literary festival that takes place annually in the Calgary, Banff and Bow Valley regions.

This growing Cowtown literary festival currently features over 75 authors and artists from almost a dozen countries. Attracting more than 12,000 individuals each year, it is considered one of Canada’s top three literary festivals.

Austin Clarke—Giller Prize winner, Member of the Order of Canada, author and poet—is just one of the many authors slated for this year’s fest.

Carmina Burana Royal Winnipeg Ballet October 22-26 Centennial Concert Hall Winnipeg, Man. rwb.org Miniatures Compagnie Flak (José Navas) October 23-November 1 l’Agora de la danse Montreal, Que. flak.org

Jack White photo by Kelly Kirkpatrick; Carmina Burana, by David Cooper; Basia Bulat, by Bobby Bulat; AGO, by Gehry International Architects

International Festival of Authors Harbourfront Centre October 22-November 1 Toronto, Ont. readings.org Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival Opening Gala November 6 Gladstone Hotel Toronto, Ont. www.rendezvouswithmadness.com The Faerie Queen Ballet BC November 6-8 Queen Elizabeth Theatre Vancouver, B.C. balletbc.com Art Exhibits Heritage Portraits Royal Alberta Museum Until November 2 Edmonton, Atla. royalalbertamuseum.ca

Flight Dreams Art Gallery of Nova Scotia Beginning November 15 Halifax, N.S. artgalleryofnovascotia.ca Evidence: The Ottawa City Project The Ottawa Art Gallery Until November 16 Ottawa, Ont. ottawaartgallery.ca

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

Grand Opening Art Gallery of Ontario November 14 Toronto, Ont. ago.net Starting mid-November, the fully transformed Art Gallery of Ontario will open to the public with three days of free admission. Celebrated architect and Toronto-born Frank Gehry’s first Canadian building, the new AGO will unveil 110 light-filled galleries featuring more than 4,000 new and perennial favourite works of art.

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personality *

The Econoclast

Dollars and sense with Jeff Rubin, Canada’s economics Nostradamus

By George Zicarelli

Hearing Jeff Rubin speak shatters any pre-conceived ideas you may have about economists. Never dull and never cautious, the chief economist and chief equity strategist of CIBC World Markets has garnered himself a reputation as a financial Nostradamus, making audacious predictions that have come true more often than not.

Consider Rubin’s late-’80s contrarian forecast of a huge 25 per cent drop in Toronto house prices (coupled with double-digit declines on average across the country), called when the surging market showed no signs of abatement.

Dismissed by over-leveraged home owners and financial commentators alike, the prediction proved true. Suddenly, the ears of the business community started perking up.

Rubin and the CIBC are a philosophical match. The firm allows him the freedom to decipher the world of commerce as he sees it—even when his views put him in the minority.

“We are not a consensus forecast shop,” he says. “We have helped to move the goalposts for the profession.”

Relocate the goalposts, more like. The man is anything but conservative and, more than any of his forecasts, he’s known for making aggressive calls on the price of oil. In early 2000, he questioned OPEC’s supply reassurances. With oil tracking at $20/barrel, he forecasted a rise to the $50 range by 2005. When the price easily crept to $50, Rubin warned that the steep rise had only just begun and that $100/barrel oil would quickly become the norm.

Bear in mind that at the time, these were sensational forecasts. Consumers now are relieved to find oil back in the $100 range, after nearly touching $150 this summer.

Couple the penchant for predictions with a knack for quotability—“You know you are at the bottom of the ninth when you are schlepping a tonne of sand to get a barrel of oil” (Canadian Business, 2007)—and it’s easy to see why the financial media are constantly clamouring to interview Rubin. “I’m a recognizable guy in the financial district, but less at my son’s Double-A hockey game,” Rubin laughs. “Just as well.” The people who watch him, he says, are “far more concerned about their portfolios than they are about me.”

Still, his visibility has ruffled the starchier collars in the staid business world. Detractors accuse Rubin of being a publicity hound, attempting to repair CIBC’s image in the face of its Enron and U.S. sub-prime mortgage exposures.

“It’s always been the issues that attract publicity,” he respectfully disagrees. Oil prices going up or housing prices going down, “those were about the story, not about me. I was the guy who broke the story, but the fact was, they were issues that no one was talking about.”

Of course, in the world of prognostication, you’re only as good as your latest call. In April, Rubin startled the financial community more than usual with an apocalyptic forecast of $200/barrel oil by 2012, with a corollary of 10 million fewer cars in the U.S. “The greatest mass exodus of vehicles off America’s highways in history,” he’s calling it.

In September, as the price of oil retreated—briefly—to under $100/barrel, Rubin repositioned his forecast a bit, but still maintained that oil prices will swell. Typically confident,

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he says that adjusting his opinion is not tantamount to being incorrect.

“We’re going to make calls that don’t work out, but that’s just par for the course,” he says. Business as usual, then. To mix the sports metaphors: hits and misses, though more of the former. “On our broad track record, getting up on two decades, we have a pretty good batting average and we’ve been known to hit a few grand slams.”

Is “business as usual” even applicable in a profession that Rubin defines as the art of distinguishing “what is ephemeral and what is fundamental”? He agrees that his entire community is finding it difficult negotiating the tug and pull of financial forces amid a tumult not seen since the immediate post-9/11 days. “Right now, making economic forecasts is difficult,” he says. “But that’s not going to stop us from making calls.” D

Photo by Lee Towndrow

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flash *

Legal tinder

How to set fire to Canadian paper currency, without breaking the law By George Zicarelli Anyone with swelled coffers can buy a shiny car, a big-box home or enough jewels to flash signals up to the international space station, but only the fattest cats can afford to flaunt their wealth with a good old-fashioned bank-note burning.

Besides being ridiculously clichéd, burning money can earn perpetrators a heap of trouble in the United States, where putting flame to any greenback is punishable with a fine and up to six months in jail. Canada’s laws aren’t as clear—no one has actually gone to jail or been charged for

doing it here, presumably because we’re better adept at recognizing money’s inherent usefulness.

And take heed, citizens: When asked about money burning, the Bank of Canada said, “We don’t recommend it.”

If you really want to know what it feels like to turn cash to ash (sans stock-market investment), get some “Handmade Money” paper, $7 a sheet, and have your own private bon(d)fire. Montrealbased paper-mill St. Armand purchases bags of shredded bank notes, taken out of circulation

by the Bank of Canada, and uses the scraps of currency to make the stylized paper. The process is mostly done by hand, making each sheet snowflake-unique. Fireside at DRIVEN, we caught a glimpse of Sir Robert Borden’s earlobe and Queen Elizabeth II’s eyelash.

Working solo, a paper-maker at St. Armand can produce about 120 of the 55.5 by 76 cm sheets in one day. With the flick of a Zippo, one sheet will burn in about two minutes—time enough to light that Robusto.

Pre-penny dreadfuls Before cash was king in Canada By Murray Foster For our forebears in pre-Confederation Canada, currency was whatever a man could get his hands on. In the early 16th century, items of practical finery—such as furs and wampum— served as legitimate currency in the North American wilderness.

A severe shortage of hard currency in the 17th century continued to hobble commerce in the new world. The colonists of New France conducted business transactions with a combination of barter and a French coin called the 5-sol, although these coins were often used by merchants to purchase European goods and thus constantly trickled back across the Atlantic, and essentially out of circulation.

In 1685, colonial authorities had become so desperate for currency solutions that they began paying soldiers by scribbling salaries on the backs of playing cards—a practice that 20 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

was banned 30 years later, after decades of an entrenched and very different level of “cheating at cards” brought the system down.

The period between 1700 and 1867 saw the coming and going of a grab-bag of European currencies, including the Mousquetaire, Double Sol and the Gold Louis. In the early 1800s, desperate Prince Edward Island authorities resorted to punching out the centres of Spanish American coins; in true British-descendant fashion, they christened the resulting donutted sections oneand five-shilling pieces.

In 1867, the central government of the new Dominion of Canada put an end to all of this confusion by issuing one-, five-, 10-, 25- and 50-cent coins. But it’s somehow reassuring to think that if the Mousquetaire had successfully become our currency, instead of loonies, we would be spending...moose.

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traveller *

The buck shops here Think globally, spend loonily—with one Canadian dollar

By Eric Grant

H

Gaza, Palestinian Authority One bottle of alcohol-free Taybeh beer (with a Hamas-friendly green label) or one hour’s surf board rental.

Florence, Italy An excellent cup of espresso or a bag of seeds to feed the poor, poor pigeons.

São Paulo, Brazil A single fare on the most complex urban bus system in the world or almost 15 minutes of shopping-mall parking for your luxury car [see Daslu, opposite page]

New York City, USA Two zesty pickles from Guss’ Pickles at 85 Orchard St. on the Lower East Side or 0.01 milliseconds of advertising time during Superbowl LXIII from NBC’s offices at 30 Rock.

Caracas, Venezuela Two bags of toasted plantain chips or 33 litres of government-subsidized gasoline.

22 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

Toys photo by Eduardo Girão; espresso, by Trufflepig; gas pump, by Peter Ede; Gold Coast, by Las Vegas News Bureau; pickles, by Cia Bernales

Las Vegas, USA The opportunity to nibble a lifesaver off of a “suck-fora-buck” T-shirt, worn under duress by a tipsy bride-tobe during her epic stagette or all-you-can-bowl between midnight and 8 a.m. at the Gold Coast Hotel and Casino.

igh-school economists surely recall the Guns and Butter Curve, illustrating one of the most important principles of commerce and industry: opportunity cost. Using only two sample commodities, the Guns/Butter example purports to show the production options of a given national economy. But any kid with a loonie to waste at the variety store understands the dilemma instinctively: If you buy the chocolate bar, then you can’t get the can of pop, but if you buy the can of pop… This made us wonder what one Canuck buck buys around the world these days? If opportunity cost knocks, we figure we can be open-minded.

By Daniela Castro Cu Chi, Vietnam The chance to fire one bullet from an AK-47 assault rifle at the Cu Chi Tunnels War Memorial Museum firing range or one vit lon, a popular Vietnamese dish consisting of a boiled duck egg containing one fetal duck.

Jaisalmer, India One night’s accommodation in a private room or one anti-malaria pill.

Beijing, China A musical Chairman Mao lighter or a packaged CD-ROM that falsely claims to contain the complete Windows Vista operating system.

Balkh, Afghanistan A sheet of hashish the size of your palm or two U.S. military issue Meal, Readyto-Eat (MRE) rations.

The Internet “Biscuits and Butter” by the Beastie Boys or “Pistol Packin’ Mama” by Bing Crosby. Even on iTunes, it still comes down to guns vs. butter.

Daslu photo by Eduardo Girão; lighter, by Miles Smith; MRE, by Kinton Connelly; war museum, by Mark DiPaoli

Do you

S

Daslu?

een from the outside, it resembles a Roman palace—a gigantic, city block-wide, Roman palace.

Residents of the Brazilian neighbourhood in which Daslu is located call it “the bunker,” as the building seems to have been carefully constructed to keep them out. Within the bulwarked perimeter sits an opulent designer department store that houses arguably everything one might require in order to survive a nuclear strike in the height of style: top fashion labels and plenty of champagne.

One of the world’s most exclusive shopping spots, the truly unique Daslu is located in São Paulo, Brazil’s richest city. Opened in 1958 by Brazilian aristocrat Lucia Piva Albuquerque, it began as a small but exclusive female boutique—a store for women and by women, where the grand dames of Paulistan high society could gather to chat, take tea and, of course, shop. The Daslu brand has evolved significantly over the past 50 years, notably profiting from a ’90s market upswing in the sale of luxury goods, which led to 2005’s relocation to the sprawling, neoclassic complex it occupies today. The profemale agenda carries on: women-only areas are change room-free—as there’s no need to worry about male gawkers— and 85 per cent of the 1,000-person staff are women.

How exclusive is Daslu? Quite possibly, trop belle pour toi. It’s actually impossible to walk in—access is restricted to automobiles (to guarded parking garage) and helicopters (as below, so above). Daslu customers are clearly selective, but to no uncertain extent the very process of entry renders them, technically, selected.

Once accessible to middle-to-upper middle-class citizens, the contemporary Daslu is for the Super VIP crowd only.

Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo shops there, as does supermodel Gisele Bündchen. Surprise of surprises, Paris Hilton has been photographed too, making Daslu “official.”

What to buy? The usual suspects: Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry, Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc. Daslu also offers its own in-house brand— featuring celebrity model-cum-designer Naomi Campbell—which accounts for some 60 per cent of the store’s sales.

And if you’ve already got all of the latest designer labels, Daslu can sell you a luxury automobile, as well as some international real estate.

As per developing customs throughout Brazil’s high-end fashion markets, espresso, tea and sparkling water are doled out free of charge. What sets Daslu apart from the Neiman Marcuses of the world is service that is undeniably white-glove. The staff of 20 young Dasluzetes—sharply dressed uniformed saleswomen—eagerly assists with patrons’ purchases, while bellhops are on hand to carry the packages out. Parking rates seem like a comparatively good deal, at less than $5 per hour—until one remembers that shopping malls traditionally offer free parking.

The building is unabashedly opulent—seen from the inside, that is—but much attention has been drawn from the fact that the block on which it resides, is not. Located within the Vila Olímpia commercial district, Daslu is flanked on one side by the dead river Pinheiros, and sits directly within one of the city’s many shanty towns.

It’s certainly a sight to see…if you can get in.

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Money for nothing And your cheques for free. Here’s a great act: getting paid to not show up By Micah Toub

Men are from Mars, Ymir is from Venus Stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen created unique worlds and monsters on film, one frame at a time. A new three-flick box, cumbersomely and unimaginatively titled The Ray Harryhausen Collectible Gift Set, presents a trio of his earliest works, restored. They’re viewable in the original black and white and, for the first time, colourized—impeccably so.

The first two films—It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955) and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956)—stand as worthwhile, if unremarkable examples of Cold War-era sci-fi exploitation movies. In each case, Harryhausen’s innovative work elevates what would have been forgettable, no-frills cheapies to cult classics. In an extra for Flying Saucers, Tim Burton rightly points out that the special effects wiz was able to get more personality out of the titular UFOs than director Fred Sears did out of the actors.

The crown jewel of the set is 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957). Harryhausen made his name on this film with his beautiful rendering of the Ymir, an outer-space creature brought back to Earth by the first manned flight to Venus. In the film’s most striking sequence, the baby Ymir, looking somewhat like the love child of a bodybuilder and a dinosaur, hatches from a gooey space egg. A masterful scene finds the infant rubbing its eyes as it gets acclimated to the strange new world. It’s King Kong meets E.T., deftly showcasing Harryhausen’s trademarks—beauty, compassion and imagination.

Rich with fascinating extras—FX guru Rick Baker talks about a friend’s mother who was convinced the Ymir was actually a shaved squirrel—and the inner-child-friendly bonus of a Ymir figurine, this DVD/Blu-ray set is the definitive word on Harryhausen’s early career.

—Richard Crouse

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Will Smith, HOLLYWOOD’s so-called “hardest-working” man, topped this year’s Forbes list of highest-earning actors, pulling in $80-million from June 2007 to June 2008.

While DRIVEN applauds such productivity, we also look on in awe at the following thespians, who managed to make wads of cash without doing anything at all.

John Cusack once said about choosing roles that he makes “one for Them, one for Me.” This explains how we end up with an actor of his caliber in cheesy date flicks, like Serendipity or Must Love Dogs, in between his otherwise witty, pop-culture infused date flicks, like High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Blank.

So what happens when Cusack opens his schedule to make Stopping Power for “Them” and the movie, about a man chasing down his daughter’s kidnapper, gets cancelled? Cusack sues for the $5.6 million he’s owed for his pay-or-play, a contract stipulation where a studio promises to pay the actor no matter what.

(As of the printing of this issue, the case is still outstanding.) The scenario is something Cusack might recall from starring in the 1993 film Money for Nothing, about a man who comes across $1.2-million in cash and doesn’t know what to do with it. Unlike that character, Cusack would surely know how to use such a bounty; fingers crossed we get High Fidelity 2. Or at least, Must Love “Me.”

Back in 1998, the sideshow fan in all of us was breathless to see Nicolas Cage don Superman’s cape, until Warner Bros. decided it was unhappy with Tim Burton’s script (having already scrapped a treatment by Kevin Smith). Eight years passed before we ended up with...some other guy playing the world’s strongest man, in Superman Returns. Cage and Burton walked away with $20 million between them. Warner managed to end up in the green after making one of the most expensive movies ever. The world is still waiting to see how freakish Nic Cage looks in blue tights.

When Brian De Palma asked a certain actor to play Al Capone in the 1987 film The Untouchables, Robert De Niro felt it was an offer that he could refuse. He later changed his mind—except De Palma had already promised British actor Bob Hoskins the role. Ah, but De Niro gets what De Niro wants. And he got it. Hoskins found out about the switch in the newspaper, and later received a note from De Palma in the mail that said, “Thanks for your time. Love, Brian.” By way of proving this love, De Palma enclosed a cheque for $200,000—a payoff that would make Capone proud. Hoskins told an interviewer that he phoned De Palma immediately and said, “You got any other movies you don’t want me to be in, I’m your boy.”

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reviews Sebastien Grainger & The Mountains S/T (Outside)

Bohren und der Club of Gore Dolores (Ipecac)

AC/DC Black Ice (Columbia/Sony BMG) Keep it simple. It’s a formula that has always worked for AC/DC and it’s still being plied on Black Ice, the band’s first new effort in eight years. Crunchy and hook-laden riffs, airguitar-inciting solos, a rock-steady rhythm section and sandpaper-raw vocals—it’s certainly all here, yet again. “War Machine” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Train” demonstrate it best, respectively as familiar and welcoming as anything off of Back in Black or The Razor’s Edge. Yet this late-career release lacks many of the signature hooks of brothers Angus and Malcolm Young, settling instead for some very ZZ Top-meetsCCR swamp rhythms (“Anything Goes,” “Stormy May Day”).

Further, there’s nary a lyrical call for danger or hellacious partying; the few examples of such are found in the song titles “Spoilin’ for a Fight,” “Skies on Fire” and “She Likes Rock ’n’ Roll.” Still, at the end of the day, we’re talking about AC/DC and if the hard rock caravan admittedly skids on Black Ice, it nonetheless stays on the road.

—Ian Nathanson

It’s tempting to find a catchall to describe the haunting compositions of German instrumentalists Bohren und der Club of Gore. “Horror jazz,” some have said.

Maybe. Handy labels have never appealed to this ex-metalhead quartet, which has been churning out atmospheric, doomlaced soundscapes since 1994. On Dolores, the core Gore recipe remains at the fore: the shimmering Rhodes keys, the languid sax, the deliberately spare rhythm section. With this sixth release, though, Bohren explores textures and moods less bleak than those heard on 2002’s irresistible Black Earth.

There’s a glimmer here, however faint. The slow swell of opener “Staub” switches seamlessly into the comparative sparkle of “Karin,” which glows in a fashion reminiscent of Bohren’s marginally sunnier contemporary, experimentalist F.S. Blumm. Even the eerie “Orgelblut” (trans: organ blood) offers playful reeds and vibraphone over leaguesdeep bass notes before fading into the smooth, warm brass of “Faul.”

All of which makes this release a welcome speck of light in a darkly intriguing body of work—despite being named after a Teutonic term for sorrow.

—Zach Feldberg

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Buena Vista Social Club At Carnegie Hall (Nonesuch/Warner) Ten years ago last summer, the Buena Vista Social Club played Carnegie Hall in New York City, a symbolic triumph for a collective of elderly Cuban musicians riding a surprise hit album. The group’s cultural moment has since passed—indeed, three key members are now dead—so the timing of this release, a double-CD document of that Carnegie Hall gig, seems curious. At Carnegie Hall offers the usual tradeoff of the live record: you give up a little studio polish, you gain a little immediacy. Sure enough, there are occasionally some richer tones here; in particular, Ruben González’s languid piano work gets more room to stretch. The set list also includes a handful of non-album tracks (including the pop standard “Quizás, Quizás,” better known to English listeners as “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps”), while BVSC faves like the stately opener “Chan Chan” remain as beguiling as ever. But it’s not like the band is reinventing the songs or anything, and only the most diligent fans should feel the need to venture beyond the original record.

—Derek Weiler

It’s arguable that Sebastien Grainger is Canada’s alt-fringe answer to Dave Grohl. As with the former Nirvana drummer and current Foo Fighter, Grainger has stepped out from behind the drum kit, slinging a guitar. After an acrimonious split from Death From Above 1979 partner, Jesse Keeler (now a sought after re-mix producer, and half of MSTRKRFT) it seemed like the huge potential of DFA would all be for naught. Copping equal amounts of Cheap Trick, Journey and Raw Power-era Iggy Pop, Grainger and his current band, The Mountains (he vows to change the line-up with each album), for the most part rock. The references hark back to the ’70s, but there is nothing retro about this record: “American Names,” “Love Can Be So Mean,” “By Cover of the Night (Fire Fight)” and “I Hate My Friends” all chug along at a modern-rock pace. Standing out like a snow-capped peak, the ever-building ballad “Love Is Not a Contest” may be the disc’s most memorable track. A couple of songs hint at DFA, and the CD closes with “Renegade Silence,” previously released as a 7-inch in the U.K. under Grainger’s alias, “Rhythm Method.”

Go ahead and take a chance on Sebastien— his record certainly wasn’t afraid to.

—Cameron Carpenter

Kaiser Chiefs Off With Their Heads (Universal) After repeated plays of the third Kaiser Chiefs album, the reason why I have always liked this band finally made itself clear: they remind me of the criminally underrated Sparks (minus Russell Mael’s soaring falsetto). The Kaiser collective’s latest roars into high gear with “Spanish Metal,” were Dick Daleinspired surf guitar seamlessly plunks itself in the middle of a spaghetti-western soundtrack. Obvious first single “Never Miss a Beat” sports calland-response vocals that bring to mind The Beatles at their playful best. Other nods to the Fab Four are, ahem, peppered throughout the record, notably the Revolver-ish “Remember You’re a Girl” and “Tomato in the Rain,” a charming little number that could easily have come from a Ringo solo album. In times when artists are only as good as their last single, Off With Their Heads has the audacity to be a collection of 12 pure pop singalongs. Blimey.

—CC

Banked notes

Guns, roses, cigarettes and bloody valentines—these albums were recorded but never released. Yet? Welcome to the junkheap By Zach Feldberg Oasis Dig Out Your Soul (Big Brother/Warner) Two albums, here, by two bands: the real Oasis and a bunch of slacker-schooled wannaBeatles. You’d think that by the seventh album the band would have that latter problem polished off—or at least polished. Dig Out Your Soul lives up to its attitudinal title; alas, that title is only half the story, because the unfortunate balance of the proceedings should be called (Dig Out Your) Souled Out. The proper album delivers the Britpop Sturm und Drang upon which this crew built an epic rep. Lead single “The Shock of the Lightning” is indisputable proof that the brothers Gallagher still have it, and the wickedly hooky “Falling Down” will quickly become a fan favourite. But as to all the watered-down, po-faced neo-psychedelia studded with ambient sound… The suckily heavy-handed “I’m Outta Time” only embarrasses itself by adding a spoken-word Lennon snippet. And it would take a heart of stone not to be moved to laughter when Liam earnestly schools us on “The Nature of Reality” (which “Is only in your mind,” just as “Belief does not existence make/It’s only in your mind”!) Half-assed, albeit with one cheek covered in ragged glory. Business as usual for Oasis, really.

—Lenny Stoute

Snow Patrol A Hundred Million Suns (Polydor/Universal) This Brit Award-nominated quintet shrugged off constant Coldplay comparisons with the success of 2006’s Eyes Open. Truth be told, though, past melancholic alt-soft rock hits “Run” and “Chasing Cars” found these Northern Irelanders more musically in tune with England’s Keane and perhaps Portland’s Death Cab for Cutie, and their fifth album sets them somewhere between the two whispery piano- and guitar-led comparisons.

“Set Down Your Glass” echoes Meddle-era Pink Floyd, while “The Golden Floor” is reminiscent of Radiohead Amnesiac. Alas, the drawn-out three-part finale, “The Lightning Strike,” becomes an inadvertent argument for reviving the ’70s prog movement—in hopes of spicing up the hopeless snoozer. Frontman Gary Lightbody’s poetic, lovelorn prose finds a better home against a backdrop of pulsating U2-isms (“If There’s a Rocket Tie Me to It,” “Take Back the City”), soaring “ooohs” and synth effects (“Engines”) and the album’s sole rocker (“Disaster Button”). Never consistent, this band—which is perhaps its most consistent quality.

—IN

In the digital age, it’s hard to imagine such a thing as any music that is unavailable. The web being what it is, scarcity is the exception to the rule.

Strange, then, that some of the most costly recordings in history are also some of the very sessions that even money can’t buy.

When My Bloody Valentine netted £250,000 (about $500,000 Cdn) from Island Records in 1992, no one would have guessed that the band would blow it on a faulty studio in suburban London. The shoddy building led frontman Kevin Shields— who refers to the situation as “a catalogue of disasters”—to madness.

The follow-up to the massively influential Loveless LP remains incomplete, though Shields recently commented that he had listened to the tapes and been surprised at the quality.

Madness notwithstanding, those Valentines have nothing on Guns N’ Roses when it comes to cash. Chinese Democracy, quickly becoming one of the most beleaguered albums of all time, has reportedly cost an estimated $13 million to date. Tracks have been leaked and tweaked since, well, forever, but despite the latest promise of a release date—end of this year—we’ll believe it when we hear it.

Axl Rose could, of course, follow Pete Townshend’s lead and turn his pricey passion project into a collaborative web portal. Such was the fate of Lifehouse, which was intended as a follow-up to The Who’s Tommy, but instead became an online music generator. Pieces of the sci-fi rock opera—given its early ’70s inception, an oddly prescient yarn about a world

united by a global network—have appeared on some of the group’s studio albums, but its original vision as an interactive stage show never came to pass, the budget having long run dry.

Prince, who hasn’t seen a dry day in his life, prepared an estimated eight albums’ worth of material during the Sign ‘O’ the Times sessions—and released just one double LP. Hundreds of studio hours begat hundreds of songs, and the much-bootlegged Crystal Ball and The Black Album, but Warner balked at the former, and Prince nixed the latter, saying, “Let The Black Album fly. Spooky Electric was talking, Camille started 2 cry. Tricked... He had allowed the dark side of him 2 create something evil.” Everyone got that?

Perhaps Spooky Electric is also to blame for stealing the completed master tapes of Green Day’s lost 2003 album Cigarettes and Valentines, which was never recovered—even if the boys did enjoy a pretty good return on investment after starting anew with what became the career-revitalizing American Idiot.

All told, if there’s one safe bet in the modern-day music scene, it’s this: Money talks, but it don’t always sing.

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The Davidson Code Survival of the fistest Advancing a career in literature, seven digits at a time By James Grainger

If a picture really is worth a thousand words —a ratio that may be a little inflated for this post-bail-out economy—what’s the going rate for a word these days?

A dollar? Two bits? A plug nickel?

The price depends on who’s selling those words and who’s putting up the money to publish them. To fill some column inches in a newspaper, a freelance journalist in this country can expect about $0.45 for every “exclusive,” “buzz” and “hot” they can cram in. For the tonier glossy magazines, that rate climbs to a $1 or more.

When the words are destined to rest between the sheened covers of a Canadian literary novel, the going rate may be lower than most readers think. We’re not talking pennies per, here; you’d have to resurrect the old Imperial currencies of farthings and ha’-pennies.

Consider the numbers.

A Canadian novel is deemed a major success if it sells 5,000 copies. Nationally. If the book retails for $32 and the author gets 10 per cent of the retail sticker price (the typical contracted rate), then that author can expect a payday of $16,000.

Sixteen grand doesn’t even sound like a good haul—but it gets worse when we consider that sum as a per-word rate. If we take the average novel length as somewhere in the 325-page range, and if each page contains approximately 300 words (for a total of about 100,000 words), that means that our ink-stained wretch earned his $16,000 at the paltry rate of $0.16 a word.

28 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

Bearing in mind such miniscule numbers, it’s easy to understand why the publishing world was in a tizzy when Winnipeg author Andrew Davidson landed a $1.25-million advance this year, for the American rights to his first novel, The Gargoyle. (Not that something as mundane as plot should have anything to do with the economics of this short essay, but: it’s the story of a hospitalized burn victim—and ex-porn star—who may or may not be rekindling a fantastically romantic love affair with a woman he knew in another life in medieval Germany.)

Davidson’s American advance set a record for the most cash ever ponied up for a debut Canadian novelist. He has so far received an additional $1.25 million from 19 other international publishers.

No matter what happens in the bookstores—The Gargoyle is sitting high place on the fall best-seller lists—Davidson’s word rate is heady indeed. Weighing in at almost 500 pages, the book has already earned its author somewhere in the neighbourhood of $16.50 per word. That rate applies to every “if,” “and” and “but,” by the way, as well as more high falutin’ words favoured by Davidson’s hyperbolic style.

Ever wonder what a sixteen-dollar-andtwo-bits-a-word novel reads like? Here’s a sample: “The sibilant sermons of the snake as she discoursed upon the disposition of my sinner’s soul seemed ceaseless.”

I’d buy that for a dollar—or not, as the case may be.

Mike Knowles Darwin’s Nightmare (ECW)

Crime writer Mike Knowles is a real-life Hamilton, Ont. elementary school teacher, and from the looks of his dust-jacket photo, we’re guessing the students don’t give him any trouble. The Principal, either.

Darwin’s Nightmare, Knowles’s first novel, is a violent noir set in Steeltown. How violent?

Wilson, the narrator, shoots a grandmother.

(But she shot him first.) (But he was beating up her grandson.)

Thief-slash-killer Wilson is employed by the city’s top gangster for jobs he doesn’t want his own people to do. The book starts with our anti-hero robbing a courier of a bag at the Hamilton airport. The owners naturally come looking for it, the Russian mob gets involved, and soon enough Wilson finds himself caught up in a gang feud.

The basic plot is too simple to sustain a novel, so Knowles uses flashbacks to pad it out and develop Wilson’s character. There is an unnecessary chapter about a bartender who refuses to pay protection and goes on a rampage, and while Hamilton is a great setting for a story like this, the city isn’t as real as John McFetridge’s Toronto in Dirty Sweet.

Darwin’s Nightmare is a fast, tough story nevertheless, filled with gun battles, smashed teeth, and gang warfare. A new if not yet wholly original voice in Canadian noir is welcome and this is a good first novel, particularly as a counterweight to the often flaccid mysteries this country produces. Crime fans will enjoy the book and should watch for his next offering; ECW has him scheduled for follow-up releases in fall 2009 and 2010.

—William Denton Andrew Davidson photo by Deborah Feingold

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Fort ’hawks

Are the hosts of Kahnawake’s online gambling servers playing with a stacked deck, or were they simply dealt an unbeatable hand? By Mark Moyes

About 15 kilometres past downtown Montreal, on the south side of the St. Lawrence River, sits the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake. It’s a community with its own government, laws and peacekeepers. The council does not pay taxes to the provincial or federal government. It is, ironically enough, the closest thing to a “sovereign nation” the province has ever known.

It’s that claim to sovereign status—in addition to a declared “inherent Aboriginal right” to regulate gaming, protected by section 35 of the Canadian Constitution—that allows Kahnawake to operate the only online gambling servers in North America.

Most e-gambling servers are located offshore, where international treaties don’t apply, or in countries like Costa Rica, where online gaming is legal. But in Kahnawake, a tightly secured building [pictured] houses more than 400 virtual casinos, making it the HTTP engine that drives the local economy, with net revenues of $17 million US in 2005.

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The hosting business is named, with or without a knowing wink, MIT: short for Mohawk Internet Technologies. It runs the hardware that keeps the casinos humming along. It doesn’t offer software, which, in a real-life equivalent, means it doesn’t build the casinos or provide the roulette tables.

What it does provide, neutrally, is operation space for outside companies, from Canada, the U.S. or elsewhere.

A regulatory body called the Kahnawake Gaming Commission (KGC) takes advantage of the community’s legal no-man’s-land to issue gambling licences to companies for use on MIT’s servers. In Canada, only provincial governments have the right to issue casino licences. But by arguing its sovereign-nation status, the Mohawk community has been able to neatly sidestep the issue, claiming that it does not need permission.

The question of native sovereignty is highly political, and has made it virtually impossible for Canada to address the issue

of online gambling without bringing up treaties hundreds of years old. Canadian law-makers and enforcers have effectively had their hands tied. And although Quebec police raided the Montreal offices of Cyber World—a KGC-licensed company—in September 2007, no charges related to online gambling have ever been laid against any person or entity in Kahnawake.

And yet, Canada may be re-evaluating its hands-off approach. Counsel for the Department of Justice hinted in May 2007 that it was working on more restrictive online gambling measures. These could be similar to the 2006 U.S. laws, which allow the government to stop banks from issuing money to i-gambling companies.

Add to that indirect pressure from horseracing outfits, which have basically had a monopoly on gambling in Canada for years.

In February, Roy Cullen, a Greater Toronto Area MP (Etobicoke North), said that he was giving thought to introducing a private Photo by Robert J. Galbraith

“In Kahnawake, a tightly secured building houses more than 400 virtual casinos, making it the HTTP engine that drives the local economy, with net revenues of $17 million US in 2005.”

member’s bill that would include prohibitions similar to the U.S.’s.

Cullen did not hide that he was advocating on behalf of Woodbine Entertainment Group, which operates a racetrack in his riding.

Kahnawake’s woes don’t end on Canadian soil. The United Kingdom has repeatedly blocked Kahnawake—and, as a result, all companies that operate from its servers—from advertising in the U.K. The British Gambling Commission (BGC) hasn’t provided a reason for the exclusion from its unfortunately named “white list.”

The snub may be political: It’s possible that the BGC is refusing to recognize Kahnawake’s sovereign status. That’s bad enough, but the alternative is worse—that the BGC doubts Kahnawake’s ability to regulate its clients and protect participating players from fraud.

In the past year, two sites hosted on Kahnawake’s servers

have been accused of insider scams. (The most recent one involves an $80-million suit against the Canadian firm that provided the software to Kahnawake’s licensees. According to an article on MSNBC.com last month, it’s the largest known case of onlinegambling fraud.) In both scams, players—not Kahnawake regulators or law enforcement agents— noticed unusually high winnings for specific users, who were later revealed to be ex-employees abusing software exploits.

At this point, things get odd.

Both licensees—Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker—are owned by the same company, Tokwiro Enterprises. (According to Tokwiro, the offending players worked for the sites’ previous owners.)

Stranger still: Tokwiro Enterprises may be partly owned by Joseph Norton, a former Kahnawake Grand Chief. Norton also hap-

pens to be co-founder of Mohawk Internet Technologies.

Not surprisingly, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission wants to distance itself from the scandals. An independent monitoring-investigation team has been hired to perform a “full forensic audit” of Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet, but the murky legality that permits KGC to operate allows its licensees to swim in the same grey area. As a result, although the audit of the original Absolute Poker scam concluded months ago, the guilty party’s name was never released—one of the conditions of a private settlement agreement.

Kahnawake’s server facility employs 200 people in high-tech jobs and generates millions in revenue. But as more and more external pressure comes to bear, we may find out just how robust MIT’s servers are.

( ( ( ( ( ( Sound ethics ) ) ) ) ) ) Remixing the downloading dilemma

By Murray Foster Since the advent of Napster in 1999, the music fan has been faced with an ethical decision: pay for music or download it for free.

Since it’s almost impossible to prosecute illegal downloaders in Canada (a situation which may change with the controversial Bill C-61 looming post-election), this decision is de facto a private one. For now, the difficulty isn’t the law. It’s simply the conscience.

Although causes beyond illegal downloading are at play—notably, video gaming’s rise—what remains certain is that the music industry is hemorrhaging both money and jobs. From 1999 until 2005, retail sales of CDs dropped 41 per cent in Canada, translating to a loss of almost $550 million. In 2006, sales dropped 12 per cent against the previous year. In the first quarter of 2007, they dropped a staggering 35 per cent.

With the money went the work—it’s estimated that half of the jobs in the Canadian music industry have vanished in the past 10 years.

If every user paid for every downloaded song, the drop in retail sales wouldn’t be an issue, as legal revenue from recognized downloading services like iTunes would fill the gap. Last year saw 1.3 billion illegal Canadian downloads, compared to 20 million legal ones—a 65-to-one ratio. If people paid the industry standard of one dollar per song for illegal downloads, projected revenue would exceed 1999 levels.

That said, these statistics don’t paint an accurate picture. They don’t reflect the number of people who download a song illegally and then go out and buy the CD, rendering the download irrelevant in terms of revenue. They also don’t reflect people who steal a song, but then buy a ticket to see the artist perform, which hurts label revenue (labels have no cut of ticket sales) yet provides a net benefit for the artist.

None of this makes the actual act of music piracy more ethical, but the music fan who

steals a $1 song and then attends a $30 concert probably sleeps just fine. A lot less defensible is the idea that downloading major artists isn’t really stealing because they’re already “rich and famous.” In both cases, downloading is seen more as borrowing—ethically neutral—and the moral line moves to whether the borrower gives something back.

In the end, music piracy is still piracy; any ethicality it claims is populist rather than purely philosophical. Thus the real question for the “ethical” downloader becomes not “Are you stealing?” but “Are you doing something to compensate those from whom you steal?”

Perhaps a “yes” to both—amounting to an admission of guilt coupled with an admission of responsibility—represents the best first step toward a new ethical paradigm around the decade-old downloading controversy. Here’s hoping we can rebalance the scales in less than another 10 years.

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Sticker shock Quoth a certain American brewer, it’s what’s inside that counts. But sometimes, it’s perfectly okay to judge a bottle by its cover By Julia Aitken

Black Sheep Brewery in north England brings us Monty Python’s Holy Grail (approx. $3.50/500 ml), specially commissioned to commemorate the comedy troupe’s 30th anniversary in 1999. The full-flavoured premium ale is refreshingly dry. How dry?

Who knows. It probably has something (completely different) to do with hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma, which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.

Named for the legendary fighter plane that helped stave off Germany’s aerial assault of Britain during the Second World War, Spitfire Kentish Ale (approx. $3.50/500 ml) bears a deceptively conservative-looking label. Here is a beer with serious attitude.

Brewed in the southernEnglish county of Kent, Spitfire enjoys playing fast and loose with its heritage.

Consider a favourite ad tag line: “Downed all over Kent—just like the Luftwaffe.”

The mushroom cloud on the label is a clue. Ontario microbrewery Trafalgar Ales and Meads calls its Critical Mass India Pale Ale (approx. $2/200 ml ) “very strong.”

No kidding. At 14 per cent alcohol by volume, dark and malty Critical Mass packs a bigger punch than most beers available in Canada.

Note: you can purchase it only at its Oakville, Ont., brewery.

Trust a Californian winery to boast in-your-face packaging. Mendocino Wine Company’s Big Yellow Cab (approx. $19/750 ml) sports a striking 1940s-style taxi on the label of what’s actually a big red cab—Cab Sauvignon, that is. Where to, bud?

A big grilled steak or hearty pasta, of course.

Labels are so last year. Voga Pinot Grigio (approx. $14/750 ml) comes in perhaps the chicest of bottles. So sleek, so understated—so Italian—it hardly matters what the wine tastes like.

But it’s surprisingly smooth, fresh and lively; a great aperitif in a container that’s almost too lovely to toss in the recycle bin.

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St. Peter’s English Ale (approx. $3.50/500 ml) is an organic brew from eastern England. Its hefty and uniquely shaped bottle, modelled after one developed for a Pennsylvania innkeeper in the 1770s, contains lightly carbonated traditional ale made from spring water and organic hops. Aesthetically pleasing, sure, but also deliciously conscience-salving.

You already wear his cologne, or wish you did.

So why not drink his wine? Loris Azzaro might have become a celestial couturier in 2003, but his name lives on in his classic clothes and fragrances, and in Azzaro Syrah (approx. $15/750 ml), which teams well with grilled meat, cheese or tapas. The bottle is designed to look like it’s wearing a tie. Trust the French to always dress for dinner.

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Gold turkey For a metal that’s considered precious, gold has long suffered under man’s desire to subjugate it to whimsical ends. The application of gold to monetary exchange and jewellery was obvious; less so, dentistry (gold fillings), electronics (gold wiring), photography (gold toners) and sports (gold medals).

But humanity came up with these essential usages anyhow; such is our indomitable, creative, evolutionary spirit.

Consumption has taken on an entirely literal meaning now that the world of food has embraced gold. In 2004, New York City’s tony restaurant Serendipity marked its 50th anniversary by adding to its menu the Golden Opulence Sundae—a $1,000 dessert containing edible 23-karat gold. Two years

“

later, an Italian chef based in Scotland created the Pizza Royale 007, topped with edible 24-karat; he auctioned it off for $2,800—that’s $350 a slice. (For simpler tastes, Toronto’s Magic Oven offers a large pizza, also topped with edible 24-karat gold—for a reasonable $108.)

Gold is actually quite soft, non-allergenic and, most importantly, approved for eating by food safety organizations in Europe and North America. But unlike other metals such as iron and calcium, our physical well-being does not, in fact, require us to ingest gold.

This is perhaps a good thing—when gold’s spot price hit $1,000 per ounce this past year, a pound of edible gold leaf could be had for $16,000.

By all means, dig in. And if your conscience should get in the way, just keep reminding yourself, “You are what you eat.” Solid gold.

Dessert was this big, hand-carved chocolate mountain thing, and on the top of the chocolate was a real sheet of real gold. Tasteless, odourless gold—to eat!! And I thought, Wow, if that isn’t the ultimate ‘Fuck you!’ to poor people, I don’t know what is. That is an awesome gesture of, ‘Fuck you, poor people!’

—David Cross, from It’s Not Funny (2004)

34 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

” David Cross quote reprinted with permission, ©SubPop

Gold photo by Robert Watson; hair & makeup by Tiffany Boychuk; model: Kristina, NAM Personal Management Inc.

Tastes great? Less filling By George Zicarelli

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Standing ovation

Why men love legs, in almost all shapes and sizes

By Elizabeth Walker

Last year, a lucky scientist got a plum job: study what makes a woman’s legs attractive. He screwed up, and he screwed up royally. Judging by the results, research began in a lab instead of the nearest cozy bar (where the most important science is launched).

According to the study, unforgettably titled Adaptive preferences for leg length in a potential partner and published in January 2008, a woman’s measurable legginess indicates her sexual maturity, since her legs are proportionally longer than those of a child (to be dismally exact, 1.4 times the length of her “quantifiable torso”).

Additionally, the scientist writes in his notes, he noticed that the female legs form vectors pointing towards her, ahem, fulcrum.

I have to step in and declaim at once, how like a scientist to seek simple answers, drawing bald, straight lines from surmise to conclusion. Indeed, how crude.

Attraction is more than the sum of its parts. Legs hold 36 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

sway over a man’s imagination because their sheer sexiness can be measured in anticipation, not inches.

Our scientist could learn from ancient Greek sculptors, whose chisels delineated a line of beauty that inscribed serpentine desire on marble as surely as a hand on the yielding softness of flesh. That line is called the S-curve.

Women’s legs are not straight lines. Rather, they are composed from a series of gentle, sinuous S-curves, softened by the swell of calf and thigh, punctuated by the sharp curls of ankle and knee.

Tell the scientist to instead measure the point of intersection between the arch of muscle and the hollow of bone—where strength and grace meet. Maybe he could learn something real about a woman’s legs this time.

Legs are not mere vectors. The most charming legs signal delicious promise—and perhaps to the next nervous scientist who approaches a woman, dangerous curves ahead.

Photo by Lee Towndrow; makeup by Tiffany Boychuk; model: Rachel R., NAM Personal Management Inc.

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By Ian Harvey

Sony Walkman NWZS736F with Flight Noise Cancellation: $150 With all the fuss around the iPod it’s easy to forget that Sony invented the concept with the Walkman in 1979. Of course, the kids clamouring for iPods today have probably never seen a cassette tape; such is the domination of digital media. Sony’s resurgence into the category with the all-digital, four-gigabyte Walkman NWZS736F, involves technology those early adopters never even imagined: noise-cancelling headphones, the option of plugging into an airplane’s entertainment system (to enhance inflight sound quality), 40-hour audio battery life and video playback at 30 frames-per-second. All this in a package just 7.5-millimetres thin.

Nikon D3: $5,350 Minolta may have been the first manufacturer to market with a Single Lens Reflex camera (SLR), but no one has defined quite it like Nikon.

The legend continues with the leap to digital. The D3 is the king of the castle; it sports a magnesium-alloy

38 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

body and frame that’s as rugged as it is light, and offers a 12.1-megapixel image and 11 frames-per-second shooting. Add in all the technical details, like state-of-the-art metering, flexible control over image size and sensitivity and internal processing, and it’s easy to understand that this is no mere point-and-shoot toy, but the apex of technology and art.

Apple iPod touch 32GB: $430 Same case, same colour, same touch screen—the new iPod touch is everything but an iPhone. Flip through pictures and videos with your fingers, play games, listen to tunes and surf the web anywhere there’s an accessible Wi-Fi signal. Alas, it comes only in one colour, unlike the nine shades of the newly launched nano, if such grey areas are important to you.

Sony AIRSA20PK S-AIR: $400 Streaming music from your iPod to wherever you are in your home is the future tech that should have been here a while ago. Talk about worth the wait: The Sony AIRSA20PK is the

ultimate multi-room wireless audio system. Compatible with iPhone, touch, nano, mini or classic, it streams wirelessly, up to 50 metres. Speakers are connected via any standard outlet. The result: clean sound, with no interference from or to your wireless Internet signal or cordless phone. For another $130 a pair, you can expand the system for a maximum of up to 10 speakers, to include places like the kitchen, deck, garden, garage office, bedroom or bathroom.

Bose QuietComfort 3: $400 While earbud-style headphone tech has improved substantially over the years, there’s no substitute for fullsized, on-the-ear “cans.” The latest generation of the Bose product line, QuietComfort 3 headphones bring a couple of new features to the table.

Smaller than the QC 2’s, they also fold flat, for ease of carrying. With noise-cancelling technology on top of the leather ear pads, it’s a fully insulated auditory experience. They also come with a case and an adaptor kit for in-flight movies or music.

Alienware Area-51: From $1,550 Don’t let Dell’s ownership of Alienware confuse you. Alienware remains its own division, still targeting hardcore gamers who demand the fastest processors, the latest add-ons and the best sound and graphics cards.

It’s the added features that separate Alienware products from the standard boxes selling in retail stores at one quarter of the price (consider liquid cooling, sound dampening and superior components, for a start).

Area-51’s are workhorses that won’t buckle under the pressure of rendering large files, which makes them ideal for recording and editing video, sound or massive image files. They look wicked too, with a choice of wild colours, unusual design and even an option to add LED lights to the case.

While they start at $1,554, adding a few essentials will quickly push the price over $2,300 for the box alone.

If that doesn’t get you cranked, go for the Ferrari of desktops, the Area-51 ALX, which has all this and more; it starts at $4,866 and can reach upwards of $9,000.

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personality *

Mo Honey, Mo Problems Lucinda Williams may be in love, but that doesn’t mean she has to be happy about it By Zach Feldberg Somewhere, Lucinda Williams must have some secrets, just a few, that nobody knows about— but we might well assume that the lady simply

40 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

hasn’t come up with their melodies yet. Thirty years into a storied career—her latest album, Little Honey, drops this month—Williams has

a hard-earned reputation for baring all and sparing pretty much none, constantly sacrificing her private life and opinions in the name of country, blues and rock, the key tenets of her famously affecting ballads.

The three-time Grammy winner, now 55, wears her age and experience well, treading through heartbreak with what amounts to old-shoe comfort and easy sophistication. Speaking to the native Louisianan, it’s clear that while candidness has taken some toll, the woman has no interest in changing her ways.

A vocal Obama supporter, for example, Williams is quick to criticize her nation’s state of affairs, despite a deep-rooted love for the country that she calls home. “I’m so concerned with the upcoming election—I’m terrified,” she says, her raspy southern voice equally sultry and cool. “It’s like Saturday Night Live, it’s like a joke. Some of these good ol’ boys are going, ‘Man, [Sarah Palin] is hot! I’m not voting for the black guy, I’m voting for this hot chick.’ These people are insane. I was talking about moving to Dublin [if Obama loses].”

Williams is equally candid about affairs of the heart—often enough, founts of inadvertent inspiration. She mentions a man from her years in Nashville, back at the top of the millennium.

“He was quite a bit younger. Typical bad boy rock guy. Four or five songs on World Without Tears were written about that relationship,” she remembers. “Word got out. And he got all, ‘Boy, watch out if you get too close to Lucinda Williams.’”

Was Williams shocked? “Oh, probably a few people have said that. But that’s the writer’s prerogative, I think.”

One can only wonder about the entitlement behind “Come On,” a howling ode to sexual frustration that appeared on last year’s masterful West, Williams’ darkest album to date. “That could be about a number of guys, let me tell you…”

Luckily for would-be suitors, Williams has since fallen in love—to the point of getting engaged, anyhow. Tom Overby, a former marketing executive, now does double duty as her fiancé and full-time manager. While newfound good cheer has helped brighten Little Honey’s rollicking sound, Williams hesitates to say that it’s reflective of a new phase, or a new self. “I’m still heartbroken,” she states. “I’m just in a better place. You’re always gonna have a part of you that’s gonna feel sad when you think back on things. From the day we’re born, we suffer, because life is made of so many things that create so much suffering all around us. Life’s kind of about just being able to dig through that and create some sort of happy place to be, but I don’t think we really know how to be happy.”

Sounds familiar. If we lived in a world without tears, how would bruises find the face to lie upon? How would scars find skin to etch themselves into? (“World Without Tears,” 2003) For all of Little Honey’s optimistic paeans to a new, happier life, from the bracing album opener “Real Love” to the affirmative “Plan to Marry,” the record is by no means devoid of scorn.

Williams turns her spite to self-indulgent musicians in “Little Rock Star,” a song inspired by the notoriety of Amy Winehouse, Ryan Adams, Kurt Cobain and Pete Doherty. “I don’t know Pete Doherty,” she admits, “but he represents that kind of bleak, tortured little rock star, going down the drain… Now I’m all worried because I haven’t even met the guy. He’s probably going to say, ‘Who the fuck is this Lucinda Williams chick?’”

Either that, or at least: Boy, watch out if Lucinda Williams gets too close to you. D

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Billionaires are making “the beautiful game” unsightly. Murray Foster argues that the pitch is too rich, and that football will never again find truly common ground

The boot of all evil?

Hardcore fans of football—the European game with the round ball, not the American game with the pointy one—have heard a sucking sound coming from London and Manchester recently. It’s the sound of the wealthier teams in those cities Hoovering up the best footballing talent on the planet, tilting the playing field not just in the English league, but in the global game as well. No surprise to learn that what’s driving this development is money.

With few exceptions, there is no salary cap in international football. Teams in the wealthy European leagues vie on equal footing for players in the international marketplace. This creates a bizarre parity between the leagues, not just of money but also talent: wealthy owners of Italian, Spanish, German and English teams compete with each other to procure the services of the same

42 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

players. Through the magic of the free market, it somehow works.

That is to say, it worked.

On Sept. 1, Abu Dhabi United Group for Development and Investment (ADUG), a consortium backed by the United Arab Emirates royal family, purchased Manchester City Football Club, a team that languished in the third tier of English football just a decade ago.

The purchase came a mere 24 hours before the closing of the international player transfer window. In that short time, ADUG turned the world of international football upside-down. They broke the British record for player transfer fees by buying Brazilian superstar Robinho for around $60 million and continued to lodge bids for the game’s other top talent, including a rumoured blank-cheque offer to Spanish league champions

Real Madrid for the team’s top scorer in 2007, Dutch strike Ruud Van Nistelrooy. Clubs are under no obligation to sell players, though, and Real Madrid refused.

Still, few teams can resist such disproportionate offers, and ADUG is ready, willing and eminently able to bankroll this ‘Blankcheque FC.’ Dr. Sulaiman Al-Fahim, ADUG’s chairman, says Manchester City set its sights on Ronaldo, the world’s best player, despite Manchester United calling him ‘unavailable at any price.’ “We are going to be the biggest club in the world, bigger than both Real Madrid and Manchester United,” warned Dr. Al-Fahim in a BBC interview. “Our board feels that money is no object.”

Manchester City isn’t the first money-talks team in world football. In July of 2003, the world’s 15th-richest man, Roman Abramovich, bought

Chelsea Football Club, a London-based squad in the English Premier League. They immediately signed some of the game’s best international players (notably German national captain Michael Ballack), at unmatchable prices. The payoff on the field was immediate: Chelsea won the 2004/2005 Premier League title, the team’s first in 50 years, and then won it again the next year. Over the next four years, the team won five domestic competitions—more than any other English club—and became the most feared outfit in Europe.

Abramovich poured over $1 billion into Chelsea over five years. In the same league, a mere $50 million will buy you all the players on Stoke City, one of Premiership’s consistently lowest-ranked teams. Many fans were infuriated at the sight of Abramovich sitting in the Chelsea owner’s box with a bemused look on his face while his team conquered the football world. Suddenly in English football, heart, skill, cunning or blind luck didn’t win championships—money did.

Money can’t buy you love but in football, it can certainly buy success. The English Premier League’s “Big Four” clubs in terms of budget and worldwide fan base—Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United—almost invariably fill the top four league spots at the end of every season. With Manchester City entering the billionaires club, many fans feel that the age of the Big Five has dawned.

Other deep-pocketed owners of football clubs have tried to buy success in the past. In the 1970s, the New York Cosmos

Goalie and fan photos by Phil Noble/Reuters

of the upstart North American Soccer League signed superstars Franz Beckenbauer and Pelé, while earlier this decade, Real Madrid assembled a collection of world-class players that the media dubbed the “galacticos.” What has changed is that billionaires currently looking to buy teams are buying English teams. The Premiership is the most-watched league of any sport in the world, with a typical televised match seen by almost 80 million people in over 200 countries. It pulls in more revenue than its closest football league rival, the German Bundesliga, by a margin of nearly two-to-one.

Despite these numbers, the international billionaires swallowing up English football clubs are making lousy investments. Abramovich has lost around $200 million a year, and Chelsea doesn’t expect to break even until 2010. Even if the club’s value doubled in 10 years, it’s hard to imagine Abramovich making his money back.

It turns out that, for the über-rich, football teams are neither investments nor status symbols—they’re a means for billionaires to rehabilitate tarnished images. Abramovich is the perfect example: He was once arrested for theft of government property, and has admitted to dishing out billions of dollars in political favours to help consolidate his oil and aluminum fortunes. The purchase of Chelsea is Abramovich’s attempt, largely successful, to recast himself as a laddish football fan. Because really, if a guy is willing to pump that much money into a team, how bad can he be?

DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com 43

Even Canada is feeling the effects. Expansion club Toronto FC’s first-overall pick in its first year, Maurice Edu—who was expected to anchor the team’s midfield—was bought by Scotland’s Rangers in July for $5 million, the first step in an almost inevitable move to an English team.

44 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

The people of ADUG are by no means disreputable. The worst that can be said is that they’re playing fantasy football with real players and real money. Their comments upon buying the club reveal both a naïveté about football and a belief that the power of money is absolute. Hardly unique in the pantheon of sport-team owners.

Now, the person from whom ADUG bought the club, Thailand’s former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra fits the Abramovich mold. Back home, Shinawatra and his wife face charges of tax evasion, corruption and abuse of power. After the couple skipped bail in August, Shinawatra’s personal assets were seized by the Thai government, whereupon he was forced to sell his controlling interest in Manchester City— because he no longer passed the “fit and proper person” test, a prerequisite for owning an English football team.

With this new concentration of money in the English Premiership, every other league in the world has moved one step closer to becoming its farm system. The pipeline has become worldwide, but the talent moves in only one direction. (In the soccer-crazed countries of Brazil and Argentina, for example, players in their mid-teens are being lured away by lucrative overseas contracts. Meanwhile, the influx of foreign talent into Great Britain has led to fewer opportunities for English-born players to compete at the highest level, a development many have indicated as the reason England failed to qualify for the 2008 European Championship.)

Is money killing football? It’s hard to say that it’s killing English football. The arrival of billionaire owners seems to have only exacerbated a pre-existing inequity. Even with all the money flowing into the league, Manchester United fans will still expect to win it all every year, Fulham fans will still dream of finishing 10th, and fans of Stoke City will simply pray to not get relegated.

Money certainly isn’t adversely affecting English football’s popularity. Revenues are up, merchandise sales are up, viewership is up—worldwide, the Premier League brand is stronger than ever.

If anything, money is killing football everywhere except England. Poorer continents like Africa and South America, where football passion is arguably the strongest, must content themselves with watching domestic leagues stripped of the best local players.

Money may also be killing the balance between the European leagues, a balance that existed for decades until only a few years ago. The annual Champions League is wildly successful, not only because the best league teams in the continent compete against each other, but also because at least seven different countries have a realistic shot at winning. With all the money flowing into the English league recently, there has been a noticeable shift. Last year, three of the final four teams in the competition were English, and the eventual winner was Manchester United.

Now that Manchester City’s new owners, with their $400-billion kitty, have vowed to field the most successful team in the world, the odds of Serbia’s Red Star Belgrade ever again winning the Champions League just disappeared over the event horizon. There’s nothing technically unfair about ADUG’s chessboard-via-chequebook strategy; the definition of “offside” does not include a player’s arms, nor, alas, his owner’s wallet. D

Photo by Paul Giamou

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apital gain

By Steve Featherstone Photography by Stephen Voss On location, Kettler Capitals Iceplex

Styling by Luke Langsdale; for details, see “Buyer’s Market” on page 97

Alexander Ovechkin lets the money do the talking

“

Y

ou’re a pro hockey player. Your team is holding a captain’s practice today, three days before the official start of training camp.

Attendance is optional.

Do you go? Wait—let’s complicate things a little. You have the richest contract in the history of the National Hockey League. Your record-breaking performance last season helped haul your team out of the cellar and into the playoffs for the first time in five years. And you didn’t just break records.

You also busted your nose (for the fifth time) and your front tooth got knocked out in the first game. Nobody is going to begrudge you an extra day or two goofing off with your buddies on a beach in Turkey, or hanging out in Moscow with Miss Russia.

So, do you show up for practice? Before you answer that, plug this into the equation: Today’s your birthday.

48 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

All sports superstars have puritanical work ethics. that’s why they’re superstars. but ovechkin approaches challenges like a soviet tank—he just rolls over them.

”

If you’re Alexander Ovechkin, there’s only one possible answer: Da. You always show up, even when you don’t have to, even on your birthday, because hockey is your life.

That’s the impression I got watching Ovechkin at the Washington Capital’s practice rink one sunny September afternoon. The other veterans chatted and lazily whacked pucks into the Plexiglas. But Alexander Ovechkin skated alone, chewing gum—Bubbaloo, strawberry, individually wrapped pieces, devoured by the handful—with an intensity that could only be called peculiar. During a pass-and-shoot drill, he darted toward the goal, his

blades biting into the ice with a heavy chuk-chuk-chuk.

He dipped his shoulder and flicked his wrists. The puck ricocheted off the crossbar with a loud metallic ka-ping, like a sledgehammer hitting a railroad spike.

Nobody in the NHL scores more than the Cap’s #8. Last season Ovechkin became the first player ever to win all of the following trophies in the same year: the Hart (league MVP), the Lester B. Pearson (MVP voted by fellow NHL players), the Maurice Richard (most goals: 65) and the Art Ross (most points: 112). If they awarded a trophy for pure, unbridled enthusiasm, Ovechkin would’ve won that one, too. He burns more energy in celebrating goals—leaping into the boards, blowing kisses, pin-wheeling his arms and pumping his fists—than most players expend just attempting to score.

But when Ovechkin shuffled out of the locker room after practice, he was guarded. The Caps’ P.R. guy had warned me that, off the ice, this star was still getting used to shining. So the wary gait wasn’t a surprise; still, it was something to see.

With his thick, furry brow, crooked nose and mop of wet, unruly hair, Ovechkin had the rugged appearance

of a Neolithic hunter who had been frozen deep in some Alpine glacier and thawed out in time to attend a swanky cocktail party. He wore a bespoke pinstripe suit that stretched tight across his wide shoulders. He fumbled with his purple tie for a moment, then gave up and let someone else knot it for him as he pointed his scruffy chin toward the ceiling. Without a stick to grip, his big hands dangled helplessly from the cuffs of his suit coat.

“Look over here, Alex,” the photographer coaxed.

A muscle in Ovechkin’s jaw twitched. “Great!” t the end of the photo session, Ovechkin breathed an audible sigh of relief and asked for something to eat. This was the spread laid out for the NHL’s first $100million man on his 23rd birthday: a snack-sized bag of Lay’s and two roast beef sandwiches that looked as if they’d fallen off the back of a lunch truck, placed ignominiously on top of a garbage can. Ovechkin didn’t care. Keeping the suit spotless was his first priority. He plucked a chip from the bag and daintily popped it into his mouth. The photographer motioned him over.

“Let’s go,” Ovechkin said, brushing the salt off his hands.

When the session finished, I sat down to interview Ovechkin for exactly 15 minutes while the photographer set up the next shoot. In between bites of sandwich and a stream of Russian text messages that kept his cellphone buzzing, Ovechkin fielded questions with one-sentence answers that adhered to a rigid theme: His job was to score goals and help win games for his team. “That’s my thing,” he said and shrugged.

I pointed out that his “thing” also happened to be the job of the NHL’s other wonder boy, Sidney Crosby.

But Ovechkin was reluctant to draw any comparisons.

“I can’t say what I can do better than Sidney.”

“Are you more physical?” I asked him, recalling a gruelling game that Ovechkin had played against Montreal last January, where he’d broken his nose, sliced open his lip and scored four goals, including the game winner in overtime. Ovechkin wasn’t merely a sniper firing from afar that night, he was a one-man cavalry regiment, galloping fearlessly into opposing double-teams. He led his team in goals and hits for

A

three years running. Impressive, undeniably. Ovechkin was nonplussed.

“Everybody have own style, like somebody can fight,” he said. “I don’t like fight. I like play hockey.

I like score goals.”

No kidding. Wayne Gretzky believes there’s a 90-goal season in the kid’s future. “Ovechkin has the release and hands that Bossy had,” The Great One recently told the Edmonton Journal. “He’s got the quickness that Kurri had. And he’s got the toughness that Messier had. He’s the whole package.”

At a time when we prefer our celebrities to be empty vessels for our own fantasies, Ovechkin is a throwback to another era. Sure, he dates beautiful women and drives fast cars, but he’s also an unabashed family man. He still lives with his mother and father (after Ovechkin fired his agent, it was his

mother who helped negotiate his record-setting paycheque). He clucks over the Russian rookies, inviting them to his house for home-cooked meals. And he views his teammates as members of an extended family who live in a 20,000-seat American hockey arena.

“I don’t want to change nothing,” he said when I asked if he was tempted to play in the new Russian super-league, the KHL. “I don’t like change team, I don’t like change my teammates. I like to stay all the time here, here, here.”

All sports superstars have Puritanical work ethics.

That’s why they’re superstars. But Ovechkin approaches challenges like a Soviet tank—he just rolls over them. When the other kids laughed at him because he couldn’t skate backward, eight-year-old Ovechkin skated backward every day until he was exhausted.

Three years ago, he could not speak a word of English, but he refused to get a Russian translator, thinking that it would slow him down. As for American-style celebrity, he’s getting used to it only because he has no choice. But he still doesn’t like it.

“I don’t want to be cover page, or somewhere, picture of my face,” he said with a gap-toothed grin.

“I don’t like to be superstar fancy guy, like playboy. My job, my thing is play hockey.”

For the last session, the photographer wanted me to talk to Ovechkin while he shot a series of informal portraits. The idea was to get Ovechkin to act natural.

Ovechkin slouched on a bench in the locker room wearing a black T-shirt from his new line of street clothes, but the change in dress didn’t make him more comfortable. With each question I fired at him, Ovechkin seemed to grow more agitated. Finally, I asked if he thought he might one day surpass Gretzky’s record of 92 regular-season goals.

“No way,” Ovechkin muttered. “Can I go now?”

Hmm…tough question. Tough guy, too. Think this over for a minute.

You’re a reporter for a men’s magazine. You’ve been assigned to write a cover story about Alexander Ovechkin, the player with the richest contract in NHL history. You have less than 20 minutes of a taped interview that’s mostly an incomprehensible collection of clichés and banal platitudes and your subject is about to bail on you. Do you ask him more questions, hoping for just one unvarnished anecdote, a single unrehearsed remark? Before you answer that, let’s complicate things a little. Today is Alex Ovechkin’s birthday. He wants to go home and have a steak dinner with his family. And he’s a genuinely nice guy.

What do you do?

“I’ve got everything I need,” I said, and with that, Ovechkin nodded, and bolted for the door. D

DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com 49

fiction *

Security

By Andrew Pyper

Illustrations By Julia Deakin

I

first saw her doing shoes. Two lines over from me. Helping this jumbo American mouth breather slip the Hush Puppies off the feet he probably hadn’t seen, let alone grappled with in a decade or three. But she was kind to him. You could see that right away. How she guided him over to a chair, her long-fingered hand cupping his elbow, smiling at the undoubtedly lame joke he mumbled at her. Teeth white, small and sugary, like rows of the marshmallows they put in kids’ cereal. And then, when she’d inspected his loafers and confirmed, for the eight millionth time since I started working here, that no, this passenger had not tucked explosives under his Dr. Scholl’s, she wished him a pleasant journey.

This is what did it. Not her politeness (we’re instructed to be courteous, though in practice, most of us figure they don’t pay us enough for a whole lot of that). It was what she communicated in the Have a good trip I saw her lips

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say when I should have been studying the x-ray screen of passing purses and raincoats.

Have a good trip, she said, but also, I’m sorry we live in a time where an obese but, I’m sure, essentially decent man like yourself has to have his socks sniffed by a pretty, looks-EastIndian-but-born-in-Mississauga woman, but we’re all in this together, and one day I believe there won’t be a need for metal detectors or no-fly lists or hair gel confiscations, and people will simply board their planes, brothers and sisters of the world.

You can understand how a fellow could fall for someone with a farewell like that.

I’m in Security. I’ve been trained to be suspicious. This can have an effect on your personal life, trust me. (“Trust me”: You know how often my ex-girlfriend in Baggage said that to me before taking off with some gift shop prick who sells those moose and beaver plushy toys over at Terminal Three? Every damn day we were together.)

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his is why relationships among the inspection staff never last long. Not that there’s any shortage of sex, mind you.

I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something about working in airports that makes people reckless and horny.

I asked Chari, my supervisor, about it one day. I suggested it might have to do with the romance of being surrounded by the promise of departure all the time, the possibilities of adventure. He thought it was because there were so many cheap hotel rooms within a five-minute drive.

Whatever the reason, the people who wave that beeping wand over your body or ask to see your boarding pass or if you’ve got any keys in your pocket—they’re all corking each other like monkeys.

But love?

I blame the job. But maybe love is a slippery fish no matter what you do for money. Maybe everybody is in the suspicion business these days.

Her name is Jaspreet.

Not that I’ve introduced myself, not that we’ve spoken. Dave told me. I don’t really like Dave, but pretend I do. Dave knows things. Like when

I asked—off-handedly, I thought—what he knew about the new hire doing shoes, he instantly offered up her name, age, single status. And then, inevitably, Dave finished with a Dave-ish query.

“You gonna do her?” he asked, grinning to show me the egg salad mulch on his tongue.

Jaspreet.

I would never tire of a name like that. I could say, Jaspreet, I’m yours and What a kind thought, Jaspreet and Jaspreet, let’s just go. Forever.

Outside of the examples they showed us in the training course, I’ve never seen a bomb in a suitcase. I spend the hours of my work day looking at carry-on bits and pieces, strangers’ make-up and paperbacks and underwear. Terrorists? Not one.

But I’ve seen enough rubber dicks and deflated dolls to last a few lifetimes.

I’m planning to quit. Everyone in Security is planning to quit. There is so much lunch room talk of going back to school or getting a real estate license or simply not showing up the next day that there is nobody left to point out that none of this ever happens.

My particular plan is a road trip. But instead of embarking on an odyssey, for the past four years I’ve been driving out to Pearson from a basement apartment in Mimico to perform spot checks on garment bags.

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fiction *

Then Jaspreet took a job in shoes. Now I think I’ll stay.

Keep the world safe long enough to see if she’d be into dinner at the Red Lobster after work sometime.

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ll the people who pass through the check lines are going places, and I am not.

Yes, some of them are rich.

And yes, there is a satisfaction in watching them sweat when I ask them to open their bag, and I call Chari over, making sure the passenger hears me when I whisper behind my hand, “Think we got something here.”

But such pleasures don’t last long. And they come with an aftertaste of shame, an increasingly detailed foreshadowing of the man I will become if I stay out here. An airport lifer.

For once, I’d like to be the one getting on a plane. Jaspreet in something bright and silky, a bon voyage sari. We would walk alarmlessly through the metal detector, happy to show our boarding passes, our Mumbai or Vegas or Costa Rica destination. I don’t care where. I just want to go.

And I want it to be with her.

She’s been here a week. Today I’m going to say hello.

The thing is, I’m shy. If you could see me, you’d know

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why. Maybe you have seen me, having been asked to ditch your Evian and dump your personals into a conveyor-belt bin, impatient to get through Security, grab a latté, move on with your BlackBerry life. That’s me: the avocadoshaped guy in the polyester uniform with the worst kind of male pattern baldness (it’s coming out in islands, an ugly archipelago).

But I’m making a point of not looking in the mirror this morning. I’m concentrating on Chari’s advice, that nugget of girlie pop song wisdom he offered when asked what I should do: Be yourself. Sure, great. Who is that? If you lay me down on the belt and slid me through the scanner, what would be revealed? An empty shell? A bomb?

Be yourself.

But my job is to spot those who are not being themselves. Stolen identities. False passports.

There she is. Jaspreet. Rolling up her sleeves, readying herself for the shoe onslaught. Smiling at the guys working her line.

Now looking over here. Smiling at me.

“Where you going?” Chari is asking, and it’s only the search for an answer that allows me to see that I am going.

Leaving my post. Striding through the lines, the passengers stepping aside to give me room. In fact, everyone’s watching me now. Chari, Dave, all the wand and shoe guys and gals. Including Jaspreet. Who sees that she’s the one I’m moving toward. Who steps my way to meet me.

For a moment all is quiet in Security. No beeps or buzzers. No demands to have belts removed or laptops turned on. No borders.

It’s just us. Brothers and sisters of the world. *

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The

�unt Photography Richard Sibbald

Fashion Styled by Luke Langsdale Art Direction Kelly Kirkpatrick Grooming �Hair Tiffany Boychuk Models Adam, Peter, Connor & Fergus NAM Personal Management Inc. Location Coffey Creek Farm, Caledon, Ont. coffeycreekfarm.com Where to Buy? For details, see “Buyer’s Market” on page 97

Details on page 60

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On horseback Jacket Polo by Ralph Lauren Pants Polo by Ralph Lauren Vintage Riding Boots available at Klaxon Howl Riding Crop Hermès

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Previous page Shirt Polo by Ralph Lauren Pants Polo by Ralph Lauren Tie Brunello Cucinelli Jacket Brunello Cucinelli Boots Hunter Pocket Square Dion This page from left to right Jacket Polo by Ralph Lauren Pants Polo by Ralph Lauren Vintage Riding Boots available at Klaxon Howl Riding Crop Hermès Shirt Polo by Ralph Lauren Pants Loro Piana Vintage Polo Vest Stylist’s own Jacket Barbour Bow Tie Hermès

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Clockwise from top left Pants Brunello Cucinelli Shirt J.P. Tilford Neck Scarf Hermès Cashmere Scarf Altea Pocket Square Dion Vintage Duck Boots available at Klaxon Howl Vintage Belstaff Belt available at Klaxon Howl Pants Façonnable Shirt Bamford & Sons Tie Altea Jacket Bamford & Sons Cardigan Michael Kors Boots Hunter Axe Gränsfors Bruks Pants Brunello Cucinelli Scarf Johnstons Cashmere Boots Hunter Vintage Cartridge Belt available at Klaxon Howl Bag Stylist’s own Pants Loro Piana Boots Gucci Bomber Jacket Loro Piana Leather Jacket Coraggio Kollections Cap Paul Smith

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“I’m still amazed that Ian Fleming wrote a James Bond who smoked 60 Morland’s cigarettes a day— that truly will kill you before any villain could.”

Photo by Greg Williams/Eon Productions

Quantum Lead

Straight to the slightly stumpy point: Daniel Craig’s world is his Bond

By David Giammarco

“If you’re not getting bruised when you’re doing Bond, you’re not doing it properly,” quips Daniel Craig. He’s sporting a bandaged, splintered index finger, injured while shooting the latest James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. “I basically sliced off the end of it during a fight sequence,” he says, rolling his eyes. “The press has made such a big deal about it.”

A few weeks since filming wrapped, over lunch at London’s posh Landmark London Hotel, Craig is noticeably relaxed, if not downright giddy. He reflects on a half-year of 18-hour days and six-day weeks, all in the name of making what he promises will be the most physical Bond film in the franchise’s 46-year screen history. “Believe me, Casino Royale was a walk in the park compared to this one,” he chuckles.

Conservatively dressed in a powder-blue dress shirt, navy cardigan sweater and grey pants, Craig is the definition of relaxed comfort, which makes it all the more surprising to see him cringe visibly here and there. It’s almost one month post-wrap, and he’s still nursing various cuts, lacerations, scars and bruises. In the big picture, this only makes sense: The 40-year-old actor—and the sixth Bond—endured intensive fight sequences, sometimes coupled with elaborately-staged

Photography by Tktk

stunts, in five international locations—Chile, Panama, Spain, Austria and Italy. Although Craig allows stuntmen, he does try to personally execute as many physical feats as he can manage.

For Casino Royale—not just Craig’s debut as Bond, but also a reboot (a second debut, if you will) for the actual character of 007—the actor pumped a great deal of weights and purposely bulked up. “I wanted to look like someone who just dropped out of the Navy and was Special Services,” he says. Of course, muscle tone is no substitute for comporting oneself with an eye to personal safety, which is practically a contradiction in a Bond film. Craig pulled his Achilles tendon early on in that production “and ended up limping around a lot—I was in major pain through a lot of the shoot.”

Things have changed for Quantum of Solace. “Now, it’s a whole new set of injuries,” Craig laughs wryly. The story is set shortly after Casino Royale, and finds Bond on a personal vendetta related to the previous film’s events. This time out, Craig explains, he wanted Bond to be leaner and lither: no longer a freshly promoted ‘00’ agent, but an active one. To effect the slight physique tweak, Craig significantly upped his running and stamina exercise regimen. “But because I’ve been even more

Fleming’s Bond is an emotional character; he’s not just a robot. physically involved, well,”—he waves his flat fingertip in the air—“accidents were bound to happen.”

Producer Barbara Broccoli refuses to believe that an accident could happen to Craig; she refuses to believe that anything about the man could be accidental. Sitting in her Pinewood Studios office, a few steps away from the legendary 007 soundstage, she describes Craig as “a committed and disciplined actor who never really stops.” She marvels at a regular endurance workout that she finds frankly unimaginable: “[He’s] in the gym six days a week, and on his day off, he’s always in fight and stunt rehearsals...he just never stops.”

Flash back to 2006, and this writer wonders if perhaps Craig acquired his dogged restlessness during Casino Royale’s difficult filming, where he was required to dodge not just bullets, but quills. When I interviewed him on-set in the Bahamas that March, he pointed out, half-jokingly, that though 007 had tangled with the world’s most megalomaniacal madmen, Bond’s most ruthless nemesis seemed to be the modern-day media. SPECTRE, SMERSH, Auric Goldfinger and Ernst Stavro Blofeld—all mere paper tigers compared to the Fleet Street tabloids. With Craig locked firmly in their crosshairs, they were taking pot shots at the classically trained stage actor on an almost daily basis. Hounded by the scathing and highly personal critiques of his seeming lack of necessary Bondian attributes—shock of shocks, Craig was the first blonde Bond—the man was trying his best to take it all in stride.

“Quite honestly, I did not expect this [backlash],” said Craig, whose only recognizable film in North America at that point was Steven Spielberg’s Munich. “I mean, I’ve been acting for a while now. I’ve been in some big movies; certainly nothing near this level. You can’t believe the bad stuff, but you still take it in. I’m trying to ignore it. I have to.”

Call the man an optimist. Craig speculated that the furor back home in Britain—agent 007 is as much of a British institution as afternoon tea, the Queen and The Beatles—was helping him up the ante on his

64 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

performance. “I’ve been giving 110 per cent from the very beginning. After all this criticism, I’m trying to give 115 per cent,” he said. “Once it’s all done and dusted, once the movie is out, people can say whatever they want. They can bloody criticize it then.

But it’s so silly to attack what we’re doing when nobody has seen it!”

The tides quickly turned once critics and audiences did see it: Casino Royale was a critical and commercial success.

Craig recalls sighing in relief as the box-office figures started rolling in while he, Broccoli and co-producer Michael G. Wilson sat at a hotel bar in Switzerland during the film’s November 2006 opening weekend.

“The studio was texting numbers to us, and they kept going up and up and up,” he recalls. He remembers finally feeling vindicated—politely so. “There was never a point where I punched the air. There was no, ‘See, I told you so!’ I just always kept saying, ‘We’re making the best movie we possibly can...just wait.’ Thankfully, it worked.”

Boil that strategy down to Craig’s strong-and-silent demeanour, which is completely in keeping with his take on 007. While Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan each brought a charming panache to Bond, Craig made the character dark, dangerous and menacing. Having proven himself worthy of the trademark tuxedo, Walther PPK, and licence to kill, Craig is now considered by many to be the heir apparent to Sean Connery’s brutal and brash—and strong and silent—version of the iconic superspy.

Craig sidesteps the Connery comparison with aplomb. “It’s very nice of people to say,” he allows, then pauses to reflect. “Not everybody thinks that,” he adds. “Believe me, I know.”

This refusal to take success for granted is less a function of selfdoubt than one of simple pragmatism: Craig treats Bond as very serious business. He repeatedly stresses the need to push this 21st-century

Photos by Karen Ballard

reinvention of the series even further.

“We owe it to the people who loved Casino Royale to give them something different,” he says. “Quantum of Solace can’t just repeat what we did last time, otherwise, we really will fail.”

Craig admits that he often refers to the original source material as inspiration for his take on Bond. He read Ian Fleming’s entire canon when shooting Casino Royale, and then re-read the novels during Quantum of Solace. “Fleming’s Bond is an emotional character; he’s not just a robot. We tried to get more of that into the movie. We already know that he has a genuine love for life’s best—good food, beautiful locations and beautiful women. But he’s also very ruthless. Those two things together are interesting aspects of his personality that bounce off each other.”

That said, some of Bond’s notorious habits haven’t survived the evolution.

“I’m still amazed that Fleming wrote a Bond who smoked 60 Morland’s cigarettes a day—that truly will kill you before any villain could,” laughs Craig, who opted to quit smoking himself while shaping up for Casino Royale. “I wouldn’t have been able to run three miles down a road and then be tearing through the jungle and jumping over walls.”

Mind you, by no means has 007 gone politically correct. “The drinking is still there, that sort of ‘Dutch courage’,” Craig says, and laughs as he remembers a scene in the novel Moonraker that involves Bond heading out to play cards in a club, and knowing that he will run into a counter-agent. He brings along some MI6-issue Benzedrine—basically, the drug, speed—and mixes it with Dom Pérignon. The kicker is that the cocktail is meant not for his opponent, but for 007 himself. “That’s how Bond starts the night. During the evening he talks about how jagged he’s getting because he didn’t get the mix right!” Craig laughs in disbelief. “I absolutely love that, because it plays into the fact that the guy is flawed.

Sometimes he gets things wrong; there

are weaknesses in him. Those are the kinds of things that are interesting.”

Craig also uses the books to remind himself—and his scriptwriters—that brutality must be given context, which Fleming always managed to do but, alas, the same cannot be said of all the Bond films (the pre-Craig Bond films, that is).

Quantum of Solace, he promises, remains faithful to Fleming’s work, in that core sense. “With the violence, it’s important that we show the consequences,” he says.

“We take it very responsibly—glamourizing violence is wrong.”

Then again, it’s James Bond, and Quantum of Solace is, at the end of the day, a film about retribution—Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye, violent retribution.

“Violent stories about violent people,” he shrugs. “Yes, that is what these films are all about, plain and simple.”

Here’s hoping that Craig doesn’t decide to go after a plain and simple fingertip for a fingertip. D

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The $300 bundled blitzkrieg: Welcome to the World Wide Warzone

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lip a loonie into your money sock every morning and in less than a year, you’ll have enough cash to buy a little something special, say, an iPod touch, perhaps a cashmere cardigan. Or, according to cyber terrorism expert David Gewirtz, you could purchase a weapon with the potential to cause more damage over time to a country’s infrastructure and economy than would a nuclear warhead.

You probably already have one such device in your home. In his provocative 2008 report Digital Defense: The Coming Cyber War, Gewirtz argues that the weapon capable of causing this much harm is a simple home computer. A strippeddown PC is available to just about anyone for

66 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

a little over $300—a price somewhere in the neighbourhood of an AK-47 assault rifle. But the PC has a potential global range, and it is subject to neither arms treaties nor gun control laws.

When you consider that the U.S. Department of Energy requested $6.5 billion dollars for its 2008 nuclear weapons budget, the expense involved in a little cyber rattling seems sublimely frugal.

This summer’s military flare-up between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia is a shining example of this new kind of catchpenny web-based blitzkrieg. Russia’s conventional military invasion coincided with, and was supported by, an Internet-launched attack on the websites of the Georgian government and on

By Eric Grant

private Georgian financial, communications and transportation companies.

In other words, this was the first full-fledged cyber war. It will assuredly not be the last.

The cyber strike took the form, in part, of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, in which many disparate Internet-connected computers continually send junk packages of information to targeted websites—in this case, Georgian sites. The purpose of a DDoS attack is to clog a site’s bandwidth and overwhelm and crash its servers and other systems.

The Georgian attacks crippled the local government’s ability to communicate with its citizens; worse, it delayed appeals for support from allies and the international community.

The distributed nature of the cyber strike made it practically impossible to say whether the main thrust of the attack was initiated by a wing of the Russian military, Russian citizens spontaneously acting on their anger against Georgia, or a combination of the two. (In that third scenario, Russian military interests would seed the idea and the tools for the cyber attack on the Internet, while motivated civilian hackers would do the grunt work.)

There are few to no publicly known protagonists in cyber attacks; anonymity is a hallmark of this specific kind of aggression (cyber attacks are not necessarily terrorism—the Georgian incident, for example, does not fit the definition).

The majority of “black hats” responsible—individuals hacking with malicious intent—have no desire to unmask. But the identity of one Georgian-attack participant is known: Evgeny Morozov, a Belarussian new-media journalist, and founder of the news aggregating site, Polymeme. In his Aug. 14 article for Slate.com, entitled “An Army of Ones and Zeros,” Morozov described how easy it had been for him to join the anti-Georgia DDoS brigades—only for a few seconds, and only as an experiment (he denies any political motive). Participating in the assault required no special technical knowledge, he said, neither of computer programming nor of the target of the attack. Indeed, in order to participate, Morozov only needed to visit a few

easily found websites and follow some simple instructions.

We know that Morozov enlisted voluntarily and briefly in the attack on Georgia. But what about you, reader—were you conscripted? You say you weren’t? How do you know?

The nature of cyber warfare makes it all too possible that your computer, or your coworker’s computer, or that of your mother, son, neighbour or friend, was press-ganged into the Georgian assault without the owner’s knowledge. While the DDoS attacks on Georgia undoubtedly involved a legion of angry Internet lone gunmen operating only their own home PCs, it is likely that remotely controlled “botnets” (short for robot networks, a group of computers that work together to manipulate a single computer application or program) were also involved. Unidentified hackers—current evidence points to servers both within the Russian government and connected with Russian organized crime—created botnets by using spam e-mails and other means to infect hundreds or thousands of vulnerable computers across the Net, essentially hijacking them to participate in the assaults.

Any insufficiently protected computer is vulnerable to this kind of viral manipulation. While covertly installing software to create a botnet is nowhere near as easy as Morozov’s experiment, it is still well within the reach of just about anyone with minimal programming know-how,

or connections to a garden variety cyber scammer. Hollywood-style computing genius is not required for this kind of stunt.

It is tempting to believe that the nation of Georgia, a former Soviet republic, was relatively unprepared in terms of cyber security.

It is equally tempting to believe that Western governments and corporations are well aware of the present Net threats, and fully prepared to defend themselves from such nefarious online shenanigans.

“The expert group of people working on [North American cyber security] are pretty competent,” says Gewirtz, cyber terrorism advisor to the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals. “The problem is that there are so many people out there without any barrier of entry that there may not be enough smart people to go around defending against it.”

Gewirtz’s Digital Defense: The Coming Cyber War report points out that compared to conventional military, criminal or terrorist tactics, cyber-warfare techniques are both easy and cheap, making them irresistible to anyone with a motive—or a mere urge—to cause mayhem.

It seems that we really are living in a cyberpunk world, where governments, corporations, activists, terrorist organizations—Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the LTTE have boasted of their cyberwarfare wings—criminals and bored teenagers DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com 67

“We are no longer talking about what if hackers try to interfere with critical infrastructure systems. We are talking about next time.” all enjoy pretty much equal access to the tools to hack, or attack, just about anyone’s electronic systems.

Mark Fabro, president and chief security strategist for Lofty Perch, a Markham, Ont.-based information security consulting company, says that the dangers posed by hostile hackers are by no means limited to the kinds of DDoS attacks that interrupted information flow in Georgia. While the impact of a website temporarily crashing can range anywhere from a minor nuisance, to a propaganda victory, to a virtual financial blockade, much more serious security threats loom on the horizon. Fabro warns that all over the world, critical infrastructure systems (controlling and distributing fuel, power, food, water, etc.) are made vulnerable by technology convergence.

“It’s hard for the majority of people to understand that the type of technology on which Facebook or chat software sits [on their home computers] is the same underlying type of technology that can help drive power grids, train stations and refineries,” Fabro says.

He adds that two factors—guards, gates and guns, and “security through obscurity”—have both historically worked to protect critical infrastructure systems from outside interference.

The controls for, say, a power plant, were kept isolated in a physically secure facility, accessible only by people with proper credentials. A saboteur who did manage to sneak into the plant would still need specific, expert knowledge of how to “drive” the system, otherwise he could accomplish very little.

In 2008, that’s no longer the case.

These days, with critical infrastructure systems communicating over the Internet, there are many potential points of access for cyber saboteurs. Even though these systems are built with strong electronic safeguards, consider that a worker’s laptop computer could easily become compromised on a non-secure home network or through coffee-shop Wi-Fi, and then be brought in behind the security firewall of a chemical

68 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

factory, refinery or water treatment plant. Fabro points out that modern infrastructure controls are built on the same operating systems everyone uses, making it much easier for a potential attacker to understand what to do.

Fabro has a high degree of confidence in the people, like him, who work to protect these systems, but the “white hats” in the security community are always in an arms race against malevolent “black hats,” who have started to make some of their tricks not only accessible, but also user-friendly. Referencing a specific code published online this past summer that can easily be plugged into a widely available hackers’ toolkit (a set of programs and tools used to examine and test computer systems for vulnerabilities), Fabro says that we have reached a benchmark.

“We are at the ‘point and click’ stage. If someone has access to a critical infrastructure system, they now have at least one simple exploit that will allow them to take control of that system.”

Indeed, in January of 2008, the CIA’s top cyber security expert, Tom Donahue, told a trade conference in New Orleans that his agency had information proving incidences of hackers invading the control systems of power utilities (not in North America, but overseas) and issuing extortion demands. In at least one of those cases, power failures gripped several cities.

For security reasons, Donahue was deliberately vague about the details. This is standard practice both within governments and corporations, as it is generally considered bad for both security and business to advertise failures, or

to deal in specifics about responses. Still, the cyber-security community found it notable that someone from the CIA would speak even this openly about such a high-level incident.

This much is clear, though: We are no longer talking about what if hackers try to interfere with critical infrastructure systems. We are talking about next time.

“From a researcher’s perspective, I’m comfortable in saying that the next five years will continue to show us extensive growth in cyber becoming a weapon when attacking infrastructure,” Fabro agrees. “I can’t even imagine any sort of modern conflict that would be devoid of cyber.” He adds that, in that same time frame, Internet experts’ ability to observe cyber attacks as they occur will also grow, which will contribute extensively to their ability to understand how, why, when and (hopefully) who is executing the attacks.

While Gewirtz’s report demonstrates that the same tools that evil-doers use for electronic fraud can be applied to electronic warfare, he also told DRIVEN that by the same token, the steps taken to protect something as obvious as a credit-card account can help protect the power plant across town. For about $100, homecomputer owners can defend themselves and their country by installing the latest anti-virus and security software and a hardware firewall; keeping all security patches up-to-date and neither responding to spam nor opening suspicious e-mail attachments. If these practices are widespread, then the world of tomorrow could become a safer place, immediately.

“We’re going to see cyber attacks in the next five years,” Gewirtz says. “But I’m hoping that as the IT community and the political community become more and more aware of the issues, we’ll see more and more defences built up to prevent a catastrophic result.” D

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pot of gold Canadian crime-fiction author John McFetridge sorts through the light, dark and very, very green areas of our country’s black-market economy

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hese days, so many movies, television shows and crime novels focus on forensics and the science of crime, with a particular fascination for its darker, psychological side. But as an author of Canadian crime fiction who bases the events of his books on fresh-from-the-headlines criminal activities, years of research have taught me that with this genre, as with most things, the best way to find a good story is to follow the money.

And there’s a lot of money in crime.

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According to Havocscope, an independent data and information provider, the global black market was worth over $809 billion last year. Of that figure, $32.3 billion was generated in Canada. Though it’s less than five per cent of the total, it’s good enough to rank us fifth—ahead of Germany, the U.K. and surprisingly, Russia, but behind America, Japan, China and Mexico.

It may not surprise you to learn that the biggest single source of the near-trillion-dollar contraband economy is marijuana, whose

estimated annual exchange margin weighs in at almost $150 billion. Canada plays a significant part in its trade; you have possibly heard of “B.C. Bud,” which was not named for the availability of a certain American beer in Vancouver.

For a bud in a different sense, marijuana is definitely a true pal to the black marketeers in British Columbia. According to the Organized Crime Agency of B.C., an estimated minimum of 100,000 people work full- or part-time in the province’s dope business. Just over half that

number, some 55,000 people, are employed in the slightly less lucrative (but certainly legal) natural-resources sector, primarily in logging, oil and gas, and mining. The statistics play out such that dope probably accounts for at least five per cent of B.C.’s current GDP. The rest of the nation is just as swept up.

At the turn of the decade, Canada’s marijuana economy was estimated at $7 billion—three times the amount of what wheat crops bring in, and a sizeable chunk more than the $5.2-billion cattle-farming industry. o who is the driving force behind the marijuana economy? The days of the local dealer named Dave are all but gone; the types are still around, but firmly relegated to the foot of the hierarchy. Aside from the cut the dealers take, the profits fuel organized crime.

How organized? According to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), more than 900 gangs call Canada home. They range in size from a few guys running a basement grow-op, to allegedly the biggest national traffickers of marijuana—the biker gangs.

Organized crime’s profits are being cannily reinvested into other criminal activities, including high-tech crime (software piracy, mortgage fraud), meth labs, human trafficking and the manufacturing and importing of counterfeit goods. If it’s a plot point in crime fiction, you can bet they’re already doing it.

Not all of that money is lost. Unlike tax evaders, organized criminal gangs want to get as much money as possible into the legitimate economy. When I was researching money laundering for my novel Dirty Sweet (2006), I discovered that many online gambling and

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porn sites are really just shady fronts that are not required to make profits; nevertheless, they sometimes do. A senior RCMP narcotics officer told me that, “the biggest problem these guys have is finding places to put all their money.”

And they do have problems. At least, they did—because these were the kinds of problems that gave organized crime a bad name. Inevitably, “disorganized crime” comes to mind.

In the late ’90s, police were alerted to a biker gang’s drug-distribution centre, set up in an East Montreal apartment, when neighbours complained they were being kept awake all night by the money-counting machines. During the same period, another “disorganized” arrest was made in Saint-Léonard, Que., involving drug dealers who regularly dropped off truckloads of cash-stuffed hockey bags to an area bank after-hours (a bribed manager would distribute the deposits over many accounts, covering the trail). The system broke down on the night that a bag full of money was left behind—propping open the back door. The summoning of the bomb squad followed, to “explosive” results.

While all of this makes great material for crime novels—at least, Jimmy Breslin-style comic-crime novels—things have changed. It’s not disorganized anymore, and it’s certainly not funny.

It’s interesting to note that both of the above examples involved Quebec. Sources told me that when eight members of the south-western Ontario-based Bandidos biker gang were executed in April 2006, effectively wiping out the chapter (in fact, the Bandidos no longer have a toehold anywhere in Canada), it was not just a matter of a rival gang eliminating its competition. Much more importantly, a message was being broadcast, in the broad light of day, to the Canadian criminal underworld: A single gang had moved its head office from Montreal to Toronto and taken over the entire province.

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This was a hostile takeover in the truest sense: mergers and acquisitions, with guns. rime may be the one area where all those good-on-paper theories about market deregulation and free trade actually work. Especially when the players are this cutthroat.

In just one decade, crime in our country became profitable enough to attract professional management. Our criminals are now officially, efficiently, unmistakably organized. And practically untouchable—as are their billions in profits—which isn’t good for our economy.

Tracking down leads for my book Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (2008), I found myself returning time and again to marijuana profits.

Dope is being grown everywhere in Canada: suburban houses, high-rise apartments, even an abandoned brewery (in Barrie, Ont.)—nothing is surprising, no place off limits. In my novel, a laker freighter is turned into a giant floating grow-op; even that doesn’t seem far-fetched now.

Strategically, perhaps legalizing marijuana is actually a good place to start fighting organized crime. Consider the ongoing situation regarding illegal music downloads [see page 31—Ed.]. Years of rampant piracy led to legal accommodation; online piracy still exists, but legitimate sales are at least an option. The issue hasn’t been solved, but that proverbial bite has been taken out of crime. Put simply, if consumers of illegal marijuana were accommodated in a highly regulated and taxed manner, it would result in the most serious blow to organized crime in this country that we could ever imagine.

Coincident to the time of writing this article, the U.S. economy has imploded. Three of the top five American investment banks fell prey to a sub-prime crisis. Congress is debating the biggest financial bailout in U.S. history. Troubled times are expected ahead.

Canada’s economy has proven to be resilient thus far. Still, a few extra billion in our treasury, and a little less crime in our streets, wouldn’t hurt. It might mean fewer true-to-life leads for my next crime novel, though; somehow, I think I can live with that. D

DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com 71

Circus of the

Strange starring Photography Richard Sibbald

Fashion Styled by Luke Langsdale

Makeup & Hair Natalia Zurawska, Judy Inc.

Art director Kelly Kirkpatrick

Dancers Coco Framboise & Mina LaFleur of the Voulez-Vous Peepshow

Model Kristopher, Elmer Olsen Models

Car 2009 Hyundai Genesis

Location The Fermenting Cellar in the Distillery Historic District, toronto

Where to buy?

For details, see “Buyer’s Market” on page 97

him.

Shirt Versace Jacket Versace Pants Versace Tie Versace Shoes Dolce & Gabbana Mina LaFleur (left) Costume Corinthia’s Coco Framboise (right) Costume Christina Manuge 73

The Ventriloquist Shirt Prada Cardigan Prada Pants Prada Tie Prada Glasses Cutler and Gross of London

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The Juggler

Tie Hermès Shirt Prada Belt Prada Pocket square Harry Rosen Suit Dolce & Gabbana Shoes Hugo Boss

Shirt Etro Tie Etro Waistcoat Etro Suit Etro Pocket Square Etro Bag Etro Shoes Salvatore Ferragamo

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The Magician

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him.

Shirt Dolce & Gabbana Pants Dolce & Gabbana Jacket Dolce & Gabbana Tie Dolce & Gabbana Shoes Dolce & Gabbana coco.

Costume Christina Manuge 77

The Lion Tamer him.

Shirt Helmut Lang Leather Jacket Helmut Lang Pants Helmut Lang Tie Dolce & Gabbana coco.

Costume Christina Manuge

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The Knife Thrower Shirt Dolce & Gabbana Suit Dolce & Gabbana Tie Prada Knife Calphalon

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The Wheel of Fortune him.

Shirt Alexander McQueen Waistcoat Alexander McQueen Pants Alexander McQueen Boots Gucci Knife Calphalon Mina.

Costume Corinthia’s

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2009 Hyundai Genesis Original spin By Mark Hacking

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.—There must be some misunderstanding. There must be some kind of mistake. I was standing in the desert for hours. It was a Hyundai.

More specifically (and less lyrically, apologies to Phil Collins and co.), it was the new 2009 Hyundai Genesis, the car the Korean manufacturer expects will elevate its brand to a higher level, particularly when it comes to public perception. We were gathered at Buttonwillow Raceway Park, a track situated smack dab in the middle of the California desert. An unusual place to stage a car launch, to be sure.

The scenery was as barren as barren can be—all tumbleweeds, dust and rattlesnakes.

The temperature at the track was simmering around 50 C; even opening your mouth to speak required immediate post dictum hydration. The setting offered no palm trees for shade, no cappuccino bars for caffeine, no moist towelettes for comfort—in effect, no respite whatsoever.

Another thing: While the drive north and east from Santa Barbara through Ojai to Buttonwillow was a winding and pleasant one (and the Genesis proved a quiet and smooth ride over said roads), arrival at a racetrack 82 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

of any type or description signals a distinct change in tone. It sends a very clear message to a pack of ego-fuelled journalists: We have a car that is track-ready and we expect you to thrash this car around this track.

And so it was.

The thrashing was going according to plan for much of the day. On one part of the track, the V8-powered Genesis proved to be quicker in a straight line than a BMW 750i. Elsewhere, the Hyundai displayed surprising alacrity through a tight slalom course; no, it wasn’t carving around pylons like a Yorkshire Terrier at the Westminster Dog Show, but for a big sedan, it proved reasonably agile. Finally, there was the road course, a smooth and relatively flat piece of tarmac upon which to sample the car’s acceleration, braking and handling, all in one fell swoop.

Lap one: The warm-up. The chance to feel how well the car sticks in the corners, jumps out of the corners and slows down approaching the corners. Everything is copasetic. Lap two: Time to ratchet up the pace, see how well the Genesis handles a bit of aggression and the less-than-perfectly smooth use of the steering wheel, the gas pedal and the brake pedal.

All seems fine, and the Hyundai shows a great ability to hunker down after negotiating bumps in the track. Lap three: the qualifying run, the melding together of the lessons of laps one and two into one super-smooth, super-fast tour.

In other words, controlled banzai—or whatever the Korean equivalent of “banzai” might be.

On lap three, as I crested the only hill on the course and punched the throttle towards the final turn, warning chimes sounded and the Hyundai went into limp-home mode. Something was not right, so I crept around the final turn and headed directly to pit lane. Once stopped, the six-speed automatic transmission refused to shift out of drive—it was locked. It turns out that the transmission had exceeded its threshold for operating temperature and had shut itself down to prevent damage.

Given the track temperature and the way the car was being driven, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Still, there were lessons to be learned: Forget that the Genesis has a 4.6-litre V8 that creates 375 horsepower and 363 lb-ft of torque (the base model sports a 3.8-litre V6 with 290 hp). Dismiss the fact that it’s a rear-wheel drive sedan with a four-wheel, fully independent multi-link suspension system

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derived from racing. And set aside the knowledge that, with the traction control turned off, the car can easily handle rear-wheel drifts.

Forget all of this, because the Hyundai Genesis is no sports sedan; rather, it’s a luxury sedan with sporty elements. All of which is perfectly fine, more so given that the car represents such massive value—base price for the V8: $43,995—when compared to its pricier competitors, particularly Lexus.

In fact, with the Genesis, Hyundai is offering what I’m going to call “Lexus lite”: heaps of comfort, a whisperquiet interior, numerous luxury features (including an optional audio system by Lexicon, a brand otherwise

available only with the Rolls-Royce Phantom) and rocksolid build quality, all wrapped up in a nondescript exterior package. I defy the average onlooker to distinguish the Genesis from, say, a Lexus ES 350 at 50 paces.

Some 20 years ago, Lexus came to North America and quickly established a faithful following by offering people a car with comparable quality to Mercedes-Benz at a fraction of the price. Given the current economic climate, there’s no reason to believe Hyundai won’t be able to pull a similar trick in 2008 with the all-new Genesis—i.e. lure the average Lexus customer away by offering comparable luxury at a less-than-luxury price. Is the Hyundai Genesis the smart-money alternative, then? You bet. * DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com 83

By Mark Hacking Photography by Gordon Sleigh

2008 Targa Newfoundland

Rally on The Rock—a rough and rugged ride

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T. JOHN’S, Nfld.—Motorsport is a business full of tough competitors. At every level, you find men and women with the single-mindedness needed to block out any thinking that’s even remotely related to the unthinkable.

You find competitors who are strong in their belief that the car will run perfectly at all times and that all the decisions made behind the wheel will

prove unfailingly correct. In essence, you find people whose love, obsession or affliction with travelling at high speed surpasses all else.

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Since it first appeared on the racing calendar back in 2002, the five-day tarmac car rally known as Targa Newfoundland has quickly become a favourite of diehard racers, a pure test of both man and machine, an event that rewards immaculate preparation and punishes anything less. Over the past seven years, the rally has only become tougher and faster. Competitors have responded in kind, bringing a more professional approach to what is an unquestionably gruelling rally. ere are the details: five days and 2,200 km, 500 km of that distance being Targa stages conducted over closed public roads. The roads are inherently challenging; although the course is run entirely on pavement, that pavement leaves much to be desired. Potholes, gravel cuts, ripples, tears and cracks are the norm. The joke among competitors is that the rally organizers bribe the local communities not to patch their roads.

There are two different kinds of Targa stages: the tight town stages, which see racers flash past all manner of obstacles including fences, houses and the Atlantic Ocean, and the more rural stages, littered with blind hills, long straights and incredibly fast sweeping turns.

In towns like Brigus, Fortune and Clarenville, spectators line the streets to watch the rally teams toss their cars—just this side of disaster—in a race against the clock. Through the glorious countryside surrounding Gooseberry Cove and Harbour Mille, teams easily reach the mandated speed limit of 200 km/h—and, at times, blast right past it. In case it hasn’t become obvious by this point, here’s the not-so-subtle theme of this particular story: Competing at Targa Newfoundland is neither for the faint of heart nor the light of foot.

But beyond the speed and the danger—far beyond, in fact—there are certain elements of Targa Newfoundland that make the event truly special.

There are the fans that show up at the stages or the evening car shows held in local hockey arenas, the children whose faces light up at the smallest gesture—like an autograph from a heretofore unknown rally hero scrawled across a hero card. They are, generally, a shy bunch, hesitant to approach the car or ask for anything other than a closer look. When you respond with an offer to lift a youngster into the driver’s seat for a photo, the gratitude leaves you feeling, all at once, both humbled and content.

There are the competitors themselves, a haphazard bunch of speed freaks from all corners of the globe; racers who are, at times, portrayed as playboys with no regard for anything other than their own self-gratification. On the surface, this may appear to be true; for example, one of the better-funded teams, Pacione Motorsport, shows up every year with a fleet of race cars, a massive motorhome and a private chef. If any team was deserving of the motto “nothing exceeds like excess,” this would be that team.

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But Pacione also happens to raise significant amounts of money for charity, most notably through its “Racing Against MS” program. In this way, the team has become an indelible part of something called the “Targa community.”

As tough as the competition may be, the vast majority of the people racing at Targa Newfoundland are a similarly special breed deserving of inclusion in this community.

There may be grudges among certain racers and there may be an intense desire to win, but it is not a case of win at all costs. Most competitors advocate a “bring your best game and see how it stacks up” approach; most of them do not wish to benefit from the downfall of a fellow competitor and many of them will go out of their way to help a rival make it to the finish. use the word “most” because, in every group, you find people who choose another path. People who hear about a car that has crashed and whose first thoughts do not immediately spring to the safety of the driver and co-driver, but rather to what position this unfortunate occurrence has elevated them in the overall standings. It’s regrettable that such people are out there, but it offers iron-clad proof that the Targa community is a microcosm for the world at large.

This year, my fourth in competition at Targa Newfoundland, was fraught with challenges of the mental, emotional and mechanical kind. It served to crystallize in my mind how difficult an event that combines endurance with speed can be, yet it also cemented a place for me in the Targa community.

Coming into the event, our team was as prepared as possible, but there were caveats. We were set to be the first race team in the world to campaign a 2009 Mitsubishi Lancer Ralliart. Little was known about how well the car would withstand five days of relentless punishment.

The car was a pre-production model, an advance version of a vehicle that does not go on sale until later this year.

But the Ralliart is also a Mitsubishi, a brand built on giving as much as it gets in even tougher events, such as the Dakar Rally. In two previous years of driving for Mitsubishi at Targa Newfoundland, here’s what I’ve learned about its cars: They are tough, tough, tough.

Another thing: This would be my first time competing alongside a new co-driver, Toronto Star auto writer John LeBlanc, a serious car nut and all-around easy-going fellow. John co-drove a Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8 to a top-10 finish in 2006, so he had experience with a much faster and scarier vehicle. We jumped in with both feet. ay one was tougher than expected. For the entire day, our rally computer was not calibrated properly, so John was unable to accurately predict the turns coming up in the route. A fully functioning computer is essential for success at Targa Newfoundland; the route book provides information on (most of) the turns on the

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stages and the co-driver then tells the driver what to expect, for example, just over that blind crest we’re approaching at a brisk 170 km/h.

Despite the wonky directions, we managed to match our target time on every one of the day’s first four stages. Normally, the pace at Targa Newfoundland ramps up gradually over the course of the week, so scoring zero penalty seconds on the first day is attainable for many of the 70 teams.

But the rally organizers adopted a slightly different approach this year, lulling the teams into a false sense of security and then dropping the hammer when least expected. This year, the hammer dropped on the final stage of the opening day: the times were tougher to meet and all but 14 teams, ours included, dropped time.

We ended the day in 15th place overall, one second out of first place.

In retrospect, our strong performance on day one may have engendered in me a severe case of over-confidence. If this was true, the opening two stages of the second day didn’t help: Run under damp conditions, we aced these two as well, dropping no additional time. The Ralliart thrived under the slick circumstances and the rally computer’s accuracy was improving—we were looking good.

Then, on the third stage of the second day, I tossed the car into a ditch.

John had warned me about the turn—a crest that fed into an immediate hard left—and the road was slick, but I didn’t slow down enough and we slid off at about 70 km/h. The first words out of my mouth: “John, I’m so sorry.” My first thoughts: Was he hurt? The car had landed on top of some relatively soft shrubs and small trees, but it had also landed on the passenger side.

John was faster to react than me; he was unhurt, out of the car and up the road to warn following teams of our off-road excursion. I gave up on attempting to reverse out of the ditch—it turns out that the right front wheel was crushed and none of the other wheels were anywhere near the ground. My door was jammed shut by the trees, so I climbed out the passenger side and joined my co-driver on the sidelines.

The competitive aspect of our rally was over. Fail to complete a stage and the penalty time you accrue knocks you so far

86 DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com

down the order, you never get back up.

We set our sights on a new target: survival, pure and simple. We convinced the rally organizers to drag us out of the ditch with their motorhome and called our service crew on the radio to rescue us. he crew raced to the scene of the accident and replaced the broken wheel, swapped out a bent suspension arm and straightened a tie rod, in about 45 minutes flat. It was incredible; we were back on the road through the hard work and undeniable skill of Aaron, Doug, Hollywood and Vadim. We knew then

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and there that it was our job to complete the rally, a small gesture in honour of our crew—and we would do so even if it meant loading all the remaining parts in a wheelbarrow and pushing it across the finish line.

Given that our sights had been lowered, we expected that the rest of the rally would be far easier. This belief lasted for only about another hour before we learned that our brother-in-arms, veteran auto journalist Jim Kenzie, had also crashed on an earlier stage. His accident had been much more severe than ours; along the ultra-fast Leading Tickles stage, the MINI piloted

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by Jim and co-driver Brian Burbonniere had left the road at an estimated 160 km/h, flipping over multiple times and landing in the woods.

Thankfully, both men were unhurt, a testament to the incredibly high safety standards to which rally cars are built. We saw Jim and Brian at the car show that night; they looked pale, but otherwise fine.

Jim has forged a hard-earned reputation at Targa Newfoundland for tidy, mistake-free performances, so his crash gave everyone pause—everyone except Brian: “Jim has never scared me once with his driving, including today.” Both of them vowed to return next year.

Over the course of the final three days, we endured still more challenges. The combination of driving a pre-production car and some residual damage from our crash had left many of the systems on the Ralliart functioning at less-than-full capacity. Knowing this, we pushed the car to some decent stage times when we thought it would do no further harm and adopted a more conservative approach when it appeared something or other was acting up.

It was tough slugging, particularly as this year’s rally proved unforgiving from start to finish. On the final stage of the last day, two cars went into the ditch, including the Porsche 911 driven by the Faster Pastors, the Reverend Edison Wiltshire and his lovely wife, Marg-O. As we passed their stricken car, my heart went out to them even after they gave us the okay sign. To go out so late in the game was a cruel blow. (Afterwards, the Reverend would say: “Our crash proves that God doesn’t play favourites.”)

Ultimately, our battered and bruised Mitsubishi Ralliart made it to the end.

We crossed the ceremonial finish line at the waterfront in St. John’s, received our medals for finishing the event and immediately passed them on to Aaron and Doug, the guys who built our car in the first place and effectively rebuilt it after our untimely encounter with the Newfoundland landscape.

To people outside the sport, a rally such as Targa Newfoundland must seem a senseless pursuit: the inherent danger, the cost, the reckless use of finite natural resources. But I love racing—always have

We knew then and there that it was our job to complete the rally, and we would do so even if it meant loading all the remaining parts in a wheelbarrow and pushing it across the finish line.

and always will. I love the challenge of this rough and rugged event, what it demands from the individual and the team. I will be

back at Targa Newfoundland, better prepared and armed with more respect for this event than ever before.*

Special thanks to Mitsubishi Motor Sales of Canada, Alpinestars USA, Arai Helmet Americas, SIRIUS Satellite Radio Canada and our crew.

DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com 87

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2009 Aston Martin V8 Vantage Style maven, power monger By Mark Hacking

SAN FRANCISCO—For all that has changed on the 2009 incarnation of the Aston Martin V8 Vantage, perhaps the biggest news is what remains unaffected: the look.

Recognizing that the original Aston Martin V8 Vantage was by no means an aging Hollywood beauty in need of cosmetic enhancement (it’s only three years old, but that’s about five in car years), the Aston design team made a somewhat bold decision and left the exterior of the 2009 model almost completely untouched.

The only visible changes to the V8 Vantage are the addition of parking sensors on the bumpers and new 19-inch alloy wheels as standard equipment. C’est tout!

This grand touring automobile so closely resembles its more expensive brethren that even savvy car observers will have difficulty distinguishing the V8 Vantage in an Aston Martin crowd.

The point being, wildly expensive as the vehicle may be (starting at $139,700), the most cost-efficient Aston in the fleet (the DB9 is some $60,000 costlier, the DBS another $80,000 on top of that), in coupe or roadster form, still looks like a million bucks, give or take the sales tax.

Underneath the Vantage’s sleek aluminum and steel epidermis, though, it’s a different story. The V8 Vantage is not as powerful as the DBS or DB9, but it’s not exactly chopped liver in the performance department, either.

This second-generation model showcases a new 4.7-litre V8 engine that is not just a steroid-infused version of the original’s 4.3-litre V8; it features all manner of technical upgrades, including revised pistons, connecting rods, intake valves and a racing-derived dry sump lubrication system. The net result of all these enhancements: an 11 per cent gain in horsepower (to 420 hp) and a 15 per cent gain in torque (to 346 lb-ft).

The car’s acceleration has also improved. The previous Vantage was rated at 5.0 seconds in the sprint from 0-100 km/h, but the new version accomplishes the task in just 4.8 seconds. Top speed has also increased from 282 to 290 km/h, signalling

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Photos by Craig Pusey

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that prospective owners might want to flameproof the ol’ driver’s licence, just in case.

The increase in horsepower and torque has served to strip away the slightest hint of flab from the Vantage, leaving in its place one very serious driving machine. The new engine also produces a mighty roar, something made more enjoyable when driving the roadster with the soft top tucked away. (A voluptuous ride, to say the least.)

The V8 Vantage comes with the choice of two transmissions, a six-speed manual and an optional six-speed Sportshift semiautomatic. The manual sports a new, lighter clutch pedal, while the Sportshift boasts revised software that allows for shifts in as little as 200 milliseconds.

As to personal preferences, it’s a close call.

The Sportshift features a comfort mode for easy cruising and a sport mode for more spirited driving sessions; manual shifts are accomplished by paddle shifters mounted on the steering column.

While the Sportshift is reasonably speedy—hey, what’s 200 milliseconds between friends?—it still pales in comparison to the latest generation of double-clutch gearboxes, notably the new transmission in the 2009 Porsche 911. (This is significant, because the Porsche is a direct competitor and the benchmark for this class of car.)

For sheer entertainment value, then, the six-speed manual is the transmission of choice—it’s on par with class leaders in

terms of feel and slick-shifting capability. The lighter clutch does take some getting used to but, this time, familiarity breeds contentment.

In terms of handling, the original Vantage V8’s racy double wishbone independent suspension system has been made even sportier, with stiffer springs and the addition of Bilstein dampers. An optional sport pack

features retuned Bilsteins, lightweight forged five-spoke alloy wheels and (for the coupe only) a stiffer rear anti-roll bar. Motoring around downtown San Francisco and up the Pacific coast, the suspension system (all variations) proved equally adept at handling pothole-strewn roads and holding on in fast turns.

The combination of the vehicle’s rear-wheel drive platform and the front mid-ship mounted engine has created a very neutral-handling vehicle, one that is a genuine blast to drive up or down a windy road.

The steering on the V8 Vantage is weighty and precise, while the grip from the wide Bridgestone Potenza tires is unquestionably reassuring. Even with the traction control disabled, neither the coupe nor the roadster ever stepped out of line unexpectedly.

Inside, one of the key complaints about the original car—its somewhat cheaply adorned interior—has been resolved with the addition of a swanky new centre console, lush Alcantara-style headliner and sumptuous leather seats.

The V8 Vantage also gains a crystal and stainless steel key (called ECU, for Emotional Control Unit) that slots directly into the dashboard.

The ECU is a nifty little bit of technology first seen on the Aston Martin DBS. And sure, the DBS is the vehicle of choice for the world’s most debonair secret agent, James Bond. Yes, the manufacturer’s next most exclusive car, the DB9, may be the basis for its fleet of 24 Hours of Le Mans racers. But the 2009 Aston Martin V8 Vantage has an undeniable appeal all its own.

A stately improvement on what was already a fantastic car, it’s a near-perfect blend of style and substance.*

DRIVEN October 2008 * drivenmag.com 89

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Bois de Bourgogne Burgundy: drink it all in

By Johnny Lucas

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ou might know the region of Burgundy better than you suspect. Its joys are subtle, but plentiful. Chances are very good that you’ve already had your nose in this province of France, tasted it and held it (in a glass) in the palm of your hand. And if you did, it’s almost certain that you liked it.

Vine photo by Alain Doire, Burgundy Tourism

The region has a hold on everyone who passes through, especially those who appreciate wine. As with most of the really great things in life, it’s all in the details. The best of Burgundy is the countryside of small villages scattered loosely among the woods, the farms and, of course, the vineyards.

There are as many restaurants as vineyards; a few have Michelin stars, others

simply maintain the traditional of Burgundian cuisine. There are ample hills and dales to keep walkers and bikers as busy as they choose to be. The motorways that connect to Paris in the north west, Lyon and Provence to the south, and Switzerland and Germany to the east are mostly very well tucked out of the way of the vistas of vineyards and deep quiet of the dark woods.

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he saviour of Burgundy’s ancient character has been high land values.

Its real estate is worth more for viniculture than for housing—it’s certainly too valuable to allow roads to be built all over it. It is hardly a perfectly preserved movie set of an ancient French province but progress has been gentle over the years and the regional character is now protected by strict zoning.

On my most recent pilgrimage to Burgundy, I was driving a very nice BMW X6. While paying my respects to the most hallowed vineyards of the Côte d’Or, I parked near the 1.8-hectare plot that produces La Romanée-Conti. All serious wine lovers have heard of this wine, but it’s generally accepted that most mortals will never taste it. With the price of the bottle determining the value of the land, I was aware that the beast I was driving would sell for less than the few square metres of countryside upon which it was parked.

If you know the right people, you might be able to scoop a bottle of this year’s La Romanée-

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Conti for as little as $3,000. It will be good to drink in six to 30 years. Unless you have a long-standing relationship with the families that own this gold mine, you’re unlikely to be offered the opportunity to buy so cheaply. A few international wine merchants can quench your thirst for perfection. I found a nice bottle of 2003 online for $16,000. It’s still available.

You can of course buy wine that is produced on similar soil a 10-minute walk away for 1/1000th of that amount. No one is saying that La Romanée-Conti is a thousand times better than a $16 Côte de Beaune.

The wine I’ve enjoyed in this region has ranged from good to amazing—I have never had a bad or boring Burgundy, when visiting. Lifetimes of pleasure await

Landscapes by Alain Doire, Burgundy Tourism; BMW X6 photo by Johnny Lucas

hen I visited Burgundy in the late summer, I was driving a BMW X6. The 700-km drive in from Munich was long but effortless; the BMW’s navigation system automatically steered me away from congested traffic.

This vehicle was easily stylish enough to take to dinner at Chez Guy in the village of Gevery Chambertin, recommended by an English wine merchant as the best restaurant in the area for under $200 per person. I had the superb beef cheeks. Despite believing that I already knew Burgundy reasonably well, the X6 opened up new roads in the semi-public farm lanes that traverse the Côte and the region behind it. (On my previous visit to Burgundy, I was driving an M6— definitely not an off-road vehicle.) Later, in the tiny parking lot in the town square of the medieval hilltop village of Châteauneufen-Auxois, the X6 looked as if it were there to eat the other cars. We sat at the small outdoor patio for lunch with locals and visitors from all over Europe, who very correctly pretended not to notice us or the great shiny beast in which we arrived. An erratic driver circled the area and I said rather too loudly, as is my habit, “Don’t hit my car.” The ears of almost everyone on the patio perked up; people chimed in, “No, not that car,” “Stay away from that nice BMW” and “Don’t let that maniac get near it.” With the ice being thus broken, I spent the next half hour giving the assembled United Nations tours of the X6’s interior while reading aloud from the owners’ manual. The X6 is not the Pinot Noir of cars, it’s more a big muscular Shiraz. And like Shiraz, the X6 proved that you don’t have to be delicate and subtle to be admired, even in the heart of Burgundy.—JL

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the person who decides to get to know Burgundy’s range of Pinot Noir.

The more you know about wine, the more you know that there is to know. There’s always another weird and wonderful tasting attribute to identify, such as wet cardboard, mousey or kerosene.

There’s always an upstart bottle taking a prize over a venerable favourite, and a new vintner poised to make a mark.

One of the many facets of wine knowledge is terroir—what the location gives to the vine. Burgundy’s geography lavishes its grapes in the same hospitable environment it provides for its visitors: mild summers, misty mornings, long, gentle, refreshing evenings, and exquisite autumns stretched over many weeks and made more glorious by hillsides covered in vines turning colour. The Côte d’Or is not called the golden slope because

Vineyard photo by Alain Doire, Burgundy Tourism; window, by Johnny Lucas

of the value of the wine that’s produced there, but because of the way the changing colours of the vines light up the hillsides in a blaze of gold on a clear autumn day. It’s magnificent, subtle and complex. And it’s oh so easy to love.

The famous Côte is really just one long hillside, 50 km in length, 20 km at its widest point and not even 100 metres wide at its narrowest. It faces east, so it warms up early with the morning sun then enjoys gentle, slanted rays during the hottest part of the day. It’s the perfect natural environment for the fussy Pinot Noir grape, but most any farmer would take a look at the soil and throw his hands up in despair: there are gravel pits with less rock in them than the pricey land of the Côte d’Or. But it is not just any rock. It’s a particular limestone that seeps minerals into the roots and the grape while giving the vine enough

of a challenge to grow that the plant thinks its life is in danger and so puts all its energy into making grapes. (My own guess is that the vine wants to make great grapes that will be snapped up by a bird, which will transport the seed to a less challenging environment.)

Land in Burgundy that’s not in grape production is not the best farmland. It’s hilly, there are deep woods, farms broken up by streams, the Canal de Bourgogne, and by rocky outcroppings that are best left alone by agriculture. This moderately rugged character, along with the villages that have shouldered their way into the landscape over the last few thousand years, make for a very human-size environment—perfect for a summer amble by car, bike or on foot.

On a visit to Burgundy, the traveller drinks in the place—in all meanings of the phrase. More than any other grape, Pinot Noir is known for absorbing the character of both its environment and its year. If you missed visiting Burgundy in any particular summer, or want to revisit it without having to board a plane, its essence has been bottled just for that purpose. Of course it’s best to go in person a few times and absorb it all directly. Don’t be shy: Stand in a vineyard for a while. Pretend you’re a Pinot Noir vine. D

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War & mortgages Now is a good time to be “in the red” in Petawawa, Ont.

By Nathan Whitlock On Canada Day this summer, the place to be in Petawawa, Ont., was at the Centennial Park Waterfront. The park is in a kind of natural bowl, at the bottom of which is a small, semiartificial lake created by the partial damming of a turn in the Petawawa River. Everywhere, parents chased little kids, retired folks stared out from shade-perched chairs, young couples strutted along the paths and conspiratorial groups of teens and ’tweens huddled together or were on the move. At the beach, a replica voyageur canoe gave short rides while the heads of swimmers bobbed up and down. It was an almost clichéd picture of a small-town celebration, right down to the balloons slipping from children’s hands every few minutes and making a wobbly dash for the sky.

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There were a few details that set this particular party apart, however—details that set Petawawa itself apart. The most obvious one was the colour of the shirts the majority of people were wearing: red. Over the past couple of years, red shirts—along with yellow ribbons—have become a symbol of support for the men and women of the military. A small town about an hour and a half northwest of Ottawa, Petawawa is located right next to CFB Petawawa, one of the biggest military bases in the country and, especially since the beginning of Canada’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan, one of the more high-profile bases.

As many in Petawawa will attest, the relationship between town and base was once very much one of “us” and “them.” That this is no longer the case has much to do with a concerted effort

Photos courtesy of CFB Petawawa Base Imaging

“I hate to use the term ‘recession-proof,’ but it’s not like some other major industries where, if there’s a downturn in the economy, they lay the nightshift off. They don’t lay soldiers off.”—Bob Sweet, Mayor of Petawawa on the part of successive base commanders to open up the base and its services to the town, as well as to do more community outreach.

Indeed, included with the usual Canada Day activities at Centennial Park was a mock training course set up by a delegation of soldiers, wherein civilian kids and grown-ups dragged the stuffed body of a “casualty” over hay bales and through obstacles. Also, as is the case in the town itself, “Support the Troops” was a sentiment expressed everywhere in the park. One booth, for a local tanning salon, bore a bumper sticker that read, “If you won’t stand behind the troops, feel free to stand in front of them.”

Some of these sentiments are inevitable in any military town—especially during a period when so many local personnel are part of a

To some degree, it has always been thus, but a spike in military spending over the past five or six years has made that reality not only more acute, but more visible. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, military spending in Canada is at its highest point since the Second World War. Budgets have jumped nearly 30 per cent since 9/11 put a renewed emphasis on security and a more aggressive foreign policy. Bigger spikes are expected.

Four years ago, the number of military personnel serving at CFB Petawawa hovered around 4,900. Today, that number is pushing 5,500, with between 800-900 new personnel expected over the next four to five years.

Factoring in the families that many of those soldiers will bring with them, and given the

conflict as muddled and dangerous as that in Afghanistan—but the conflation of civic pride with support for the military has not always been the case in Petawawa. The change is as much economic as it is cultural.

Both the town’s mayor, Bob Sweet, and base commander, Lt. Col. Bill Moore, estimate the base’s economic impact on the surrounding area at around half-a-billion dollars. The area’s number-one employer, it far outstrips its closest rival, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., about 30 minutes up the highway, in Chalk River.

fact that Petawawa’s total population currently stands at just under 15,000 (with more than a third of that group under 30 years of age), added to the fact that the overwhelming majority of military families live off the base, it’s not hard to see why the town supports the troops.

More and more, the troops are the town.

Booms in military spending and activity are not unusual here, though. Local musician and journalist Ish Theilheimer is the publisher of StraightGoods.com, a left-leaning independent online magazine. He feels that CFB Petawawa

may even be less active now than during the 1970s, when, he says, “the base was really hummin’.” He suggests that if anything, the base has less impact now than when Petawawa’s Airborne Regiment was active. “They were a bunch of crazy guys.” (The regiment was disbanded in 1995 after a series of scandals relating to the death of a teenager in Somalia and the public exposure of some racist and degrading hazing rituals.)

The signs of the current boom are all over the town. Hundreds of new homes have been built, new subdivisions keep cropping up, and a 66-room hotel is under construction. (The town’s only other hotel is a small one, next to the bus station.) Plans for three new schools have been announced. Property assessments in the town and surrounding county are poised to jump by 37 per cent. (The provincial average is 18 per cent.) Even traffic is a problem: one main road cuts through the town, leading right to the gates of the base. Town councillor Treena Lemay estimates the number of cars on that road at about 17-18,000 per day. Long lineups to get on or off the base at rush hour are now a fact of life.

Paul McGuire, a real estate agent who specializes in selling homes to soldiers, feels that, compared to places like Edmonton or Calgary, Petawawa “didn’t do anything. Really, we just took a little hop.” Still, he admits that the newsubdivision homes are selling faster than he’d expected. Not to mention that, on the day we spoke, he had just completed a sale for a home that went for almost half-a-million dollars—a pretty shocking figure for a small town nearly two hours from the nearest urban centre.

This prosperity brings certain challenges.

One is in simply keeping up with the rate of expansion. “If we were planning the ideal community, we wouldn’t have what we have now,” Lemay admits. She points to the lack of medical services (Lemay serves on the board of the recently opened medical centre) and the lack of a commercial core as two things to which the town must give careful consideration as more and more people and money come into the area. “I don’t think there were any great ideas that Petawawa would become a commercial centre,” she says. “It was almost like a stopping-off place.” Though retail has not yet caught up with real estate, Lemay says she

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is hopeful that the Wal-Marts and Costcos and their ilk will move in soon. When asked whether she gets complaints from residents about the pace of change, Lemay says that most of what she hears is that the place isn’t changing fast enough. “We need more stores” is apparently a quite common refrain.

There is also the issue of having all your economic eggs in one basket, particularly when all those eggs are painted olive drab.

Soldiers receive a sizeable bonus for serving in Afghanistan; as well, their regular income becomes tax-free while they are serving their tours of duty. Bart Neville, who runs a real estate agency in town, and who calls soldiers his “bread and butter,” says that a lot of these men and women are “coming back with a chunk of change.” In some cases, where both parents are in the military, grandparents move in so that mom and dad can serve overseas at the same time, doubling the bonuses and doubling the buying power.

Few would begrudge a soldier getting the money or buying a home with it, especially given how dangerous the Afghan mission has become. On a larger scale, though, economic

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self-interest has a sneaky way of narrowing political and cultural attitudes. For one thing, despite being a Liberal stronghold for most of the last century, over the past decade Conservatives have tended to win handily at both the federal and provincial levels.

“Red Fridays,” wherein much of the town wears red T-shirts to show support for troops overseas, have become another symbol of this narrowing of attitudes. The idea originated in the U.S. but came to Canada through the efforts of two military wives in Petawawa. Though it is officially non-partisan, signs of its politicization are not hard to come by: Prime Minister Stephen Harper has addressed Red Friday rallies in Petawawa and Ottawa, in both cases making thinly veiled jabs at some of his political opponents. On a less lofty level, there was an outcry a couple of years ago when the Tim Hortons on base would not allow its employees to wear red shirts over their uniforms. Almost immediately, there were calls to boycott the store and even cancel its lease. An Ottawa radio station got involved. Within days, the policy was changed.

Given that, it’s not surprising that concerns over the extent to which the town is reliant

on the base are hard to come by. “If the base was gone, it would be a huge disaster [for Petawawa],” says Greg Lubimiv, who works at the Phoenix Centre in Pembroke, which, among many other things, counsels the families of soldiers fighting overseas, as well as the soldiers themselves, especially those battling posttraumatic stress disorder. “This is a spoiled community in many ways, in that it hasn’t gone through that need for retrenchment and have to say ‘My god, the base is being taken away or reduced to half the size, and we’ve built all these homes and all these roads, and we have schools that are expanding...’ Etc., etc.”

Mayor Sweet is aware of this very possibility, but doesn’t let it trouble him. “I hate to use the term ‘recession-proof’,” he says, “but it’s not like some other major industries where, if there’s a downturn in the economy, they lay the night shift off. They don’t lay soldiers off.”

For now, most of the town shares the mayor’s enthusiasm. And lest anyone forget the source of this newfound wealth, there are always reminders: one Petawawa car dealership attaches balloons to all the vehicles on the lot.

The colour? Support-the-troops red. D

buyer’s market*

DRIVEN

Style guide for October Cover Story Alexander Ovechkin (Cover & Pages 46, 48-49) Polo by Ralph Lauren shirt, Ralph Lauren suit, Polo by Ralph Lauren tie and Paul Smith pocket square, all available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com).

Ovechkin Streetwear collection (Page 47) from CCM (ccmsports.com).

Fashion The Hunt, from left to right (Page 54-55) Brunello Cucinelli pants, J.P. Tilford shirt, Altea cashmere scarf, Dion pocket square available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com).

Vintage Duck Boots, Vintage Belstaff Belt from a selection at Klaxon Howl, 877 Queen St. West, Toronto (647.436.6628).

Hermès neck scarf available from Hermès (details below).

Loro Piana pants, Loro Piana cashmere jacket available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com). Paul Smith cap, Gucci boots available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com). Coraggio leather jacket available at Coraggio Kollections, 114 Dunkirk Rd., St. Catharines, Ont. (coraggioleather.com).

Brunello Cucinelli pants, Johnstons Cashmere scarf, Hunter boots available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com).

Vintage Cartridge Belt from a selection at Klaxon Howl, 877 Queen St. West, Toronto (647.436.6628). Bag is the stylist’s own.

Bamford & Sons shirt, Bamford & Sons jacket available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com). Altea tie, Michael Kors cardigan, Façonnable pants, Hunter boots available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com). Gränsfors Bruks axe available at Lee Valley (leevalley.com).

On Horseback (Page 56) Polo by Ralph Lauren jacket, Polo

by Ralph Lauren pants available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com). Vintage riding boots from a selection at Klaxon Howl, 877 Queen St. West, Toronto (647.436.6628). Hermès riding crop available from Hermès (details below).

Gents, from left to right (Page 57) Hugo Boss shirt available at Harry Rosen

(harryrosen.com). Polo by Ralph Lauren pants available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com). Vintage riding boots from a selection at Klaxon Howl, 877 Queen St. West, Toronto (647.436.6628).

Hermès silk scarf, Hermès saddle available from Hermès (details below).

Paul Smith cap, Prada jacket available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com). Adam Derrick boots from Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com). WWII chinos from a selection at Klaxon Howl, 877 Queen St. West, Toronto (647.436.6628).

Gränsfors Bruks axe from Lee Valley (leevalley.com).

(Page 58) Polo by Ralph Lauren shirt, Polo by Ralph Lauren pants available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com). Brunello Cucinelli tie, Brunello Cucinelli jacket, Dion pocket square, Hunter boots available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com).

At the Stables, from left to right (Page 59) Polo by Ralph Lauren jacket, Polo by Ralph Lauren pants available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com). Vintage riding boots from a selection at Klaxon Howl, 877 Queen St. West, Toronto (647.436.6628). Riding Crop available at Hermès (details below).

Polo by Ralph Lauren shirt available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com). Loro Piana pants available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com). Hermès bow tie available from Hermès (details below).

Barbour jacket from a selection at Klaxon Howl, 877 Queen St. West, Toronto (647.436.6628). Vest: stylist’s own.

Four Hunters, clockwise (Page 60) Bamford & Sons shirt, Bamford & Sons jacket available at Holt Renfrew (holt-renfrew.com). Altea tie, Michael Kors cardigan, Façonnable pants, Hunter boots available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com).

Gränsfors Bruks axe available at Lee Valley (leevalley.com).

Brunello Cucinelli pants, Johnstons Cashmere scarf, Hunter boots available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com). Vintage Cartridge Belt from a selection

at Klaxon Howl, 877 Queen St. West, Toronto (647.436.6628). Bag: stylist’s own.

Loro Piana pants, Loro Piana cashmere jacket available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com). Paul Smith cap, Gucci boots available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com). Coraggio leather jacket available at Coraggio Kollections, 114 Dunkirk Rd., St. Catharines, Ont. (coraggioleather.com).

Brunello Cucinelli pants, J.P. Tilford shirt, Altea cashmere scarf, Dion pocket square available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com). Vintage Duck Boots, Vintage Belstaff Belt from a selection at Klaxon Howl, 877 Queen St. West, Toronto (647.436.6628). Hermès neck scarf available at Hermès (details below).

Fashion Circus of the Strange, from left to right (Page 72) On Mina LaFleur Costume by Corinthia’s (corinthias.net).

On him (Page 73) Versace shirt, Versace jacket, Versace pants, Versace tie, available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com); Dolce & Gabbana shoes available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com).

On Coco Framboise Costume by Christina Manuge (manugeettoi.com).

The Ventriloquist (Page 74) Prada shirt, Prada cardigan, Prada pants, Prada tie available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com); Cutler and Gross of London glasses available at Spectacle (spectacle-eyeware.com).

The Juggler (Page 75) Etro shirt, Etro tie, Etro waistcoat, Etro suit, Etro pocket square, Etro bag, Salvatore Ferragamo shoes available at Harry Rosen (harryrosen.com).

The Magician (Page 76) On him Dolce & Gabbana shirt, Dolce & Gabbana pants, Dolce & Gabbana jacket, Dolce & Gabbana tie, Dolce & Gabbana shoes available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com)

On Coco Framboise (Page 77) Costume by Christina Manuge (manugeettoi.com).

The Lion Tamer (Page 78) On him Helmut Lang shirt, Helmut Lang pants, Helmut Lang leather jacket, Dolce & Gabbana tie available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com).

On Coco Framboise Costume by Christina Manuge (manugeettoi.com).

The Knife Thrower (Page 79) Dolce & Gabbana suit, Dolce & Gabbana shirt, Prada tie available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com). Calphalon knife available at Calphalon Culinary Institute, 425 King St. West, Toronto (calphalon.ca).

Wheel of Fortune (Page 80) On him Alexander McQueen shirt, Alexander McQueen waistcoat, Alexander McQueen pants, Gucci boots available at Holt Renfrew (holtrenfrew.com). Calphalon knife available at Calphalon Culinary Institute, 425 King St. West, Toronto (calphalon.ca).

On Mina LaFleur (Page 81) Costume by Corinthia’s (corinthias.net).

Hermès: Toronto (416.968.8626), Montreal (514.842.3387), Vancouver (604.681.9965) Tech (Page 38) Sony Walkman NWZS736F and AIRSA20PK S-AIR, Sony of Canada Ltd., 115 Gordon Baker Rd., Toronto (sony.ca); Nikon D3, Nikon Canada Inc., 1366 Aerowood Dr., Mississauga, Ont. (Nikon.ca); Apple iPod touch 32 GB, Apple Canada Inc., 7495 Birchmount Rd., Markham, Ont. (apple.ca); Bose QuietComfort 3, Bose Corp., The Mountain, Framingham, Mass. (bose.ca); Alienware Area-51 desktop computer, Alienware Corp., 14591 SW 120 St., Miami, Fla. (alienware.com).

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