Photo Credit Byron Dauncey

I’ve covered a fair amount of sports as a journalist over the years. I saw Tonya Harding’s first professional fight. I saw Mike Tyson’s almost-last. I’ve watched English football with long time supporters and interviewed a jockey or two in my day. It’s been no surprise to learn that the athletes are all individuals and as different as any of us are one from another. But the ceremony of sports and sports fandom has always struck me as having something singular and binding about it, a ritual designed to accomplish bigger ends than merely a final score.

This piece ran in Eighteen Bridges a number of years back.

***

David Brooks wrote a sports-related column in The New York Times in February of this year. I took special note of it because I was thinking a lot about sports at the time. In fact, days before the Brooks piece was published, I’d been in Boston watching the Super Bowl with rabid New England Patriots fans. I was watching them watch the game, in effect. Brooks happened to be writing about basketball, NBA star Jeremy Lin specifically. But he would have been wide of the mark no matter what sport he was talking about.  “Jeremy Lin,” he wrote, “is anomalous in all sorts of ways. He’s a Harvard grad in the N.B.A., an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports.”

Since religious pro athletes are literally everywhere—the NFL playoffs themselves had for a time been dominated by coverage of the Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, whose take-a-knee moments of prayer had spawned their own epi-phenomenon referred to as “Tebowing”—Brooks got dogpiled online for being a pencil-necked geek who obviously didn’t understand anything about pro sports. Deadspin blogger Tom Scocca replied to Brooks with a post headlined: “David Brooks has written the dumbest Jeremy Lin column so far.”

But what my visit to Boston had proven to me was that Brooks’ bigger error was his central thesis, which came a little further down the column. “The moral ethos of sports,” Brooks wrote, “is in tension with the moral ethos of faith.”

I had to sit back after I read that, because I found myself wondering if Brooks had ever spent time with real hardcore fans. He certainly couldn’t have done what I had just done, sitting with those Pats fans in the blue and flickering light of The Fours bar in the Gardens area of North End Boston, all of our faces upturned to the hanging monitors above the bar as they meted out the information we craved about the very immediate future. What will happen? Brooks couldn’t possibly have spent any quality fan time in The Fours—or in any of the other sports bars scattered through the area: McGann’s Irish Pub, Boston Beerworks, Hurricane O’Reilly’s—because if he had he would have seen that sports in fact reveals and arouses something deeply and innately religious in fans, something that has nothing to do with the world’s official religions, with Tebowing, or with thanking your preferred saviour after hitting a three-pointer to win. In The Fours, what was reflected in all those upturned faces was something small “r” religious in structure, something crystallized in what is asked of fans and what they get back for their allegiance, hunkered over burgers and beers in sports bars and living rooms across the world. All holding their breath.

Of course, sports bloggers might well take offense with this idea, too. But I’m convicted, ladies and gentlemen. I went to The Fours, and I believe.

 ***

 Boston wasn’t my first whiff of this idea, that sports might reach past reality into moments beyond. It had been simmering for at least a decade, during which time I’d written dozens of magazine pieces about sports, from boxing to football (soccer, that is) to auto-racing. In fact, the very first time I sensed something inherently religious in sport was in October 2000. I was at the Mohegan Sun Casino, in Uncasville, Connecticut, watching a fight: heavyweights Kirk Johnson and Oleg Maskaev. Johnson was a gentle-voiced and mild-mannered fighter from North Preston, Nova Scotia. I’d spent a little time with him over a couple of days, in sidebar conversations between the ritual waypoints  that precede a prize fight: the press conference, the weigh in, the pregame routines, the hand taping, the silent moments before the fighter’s names are called when, if you watch closely, you’ll see the combatant retire to an inner place where he is more truly alone than perhaps anyone who has not been a prizefighter will ever understand.

Johnson was a riddle in pro boxing at the time. At 6’2 ½” and 232 pounds, with enormous shoulders and long muscular arms, he was remarkably fast, able to combine punches in flurries more like a lightweight than a heavy. Yet something lingered over his reputation, a sense of “reluctance” in the words of ring announcer Jim Lampley just prior to the bell. When I button-holed famed boxing analyst Larry Merchant before the fight, he told me, “Johnson just seems like the perennially promising heavyweight. But people are waiting to see him beat a real, significantly ranked opponent.”

Oleg Maskaev fit the bill. Johnson had a couple of pounds on him and a few inches of reach. Maskaev’s numbers weren’t legendary either at 20 wins and 2 losses, with 15 knockouts to his credit. But the Russian born fighter, living in West Sacramento, had fought better opposition than Johnson. More importantly, he seemed to be improving. Less than a year before, he’d fought the 31-1 Hasim Rahman (a man who’d once KO’d Lennox Lewis). In the eighth round of his fight against Rahman, Maskaev, behind on the score cards, knocked Rahman clean out of the ring, through the ropes, where he crashed onto the ringside press tables in a pile of papers and computer monitors and scattering journalists.

Maskaev was proven tough, in other words. And he looked tough, with muscles like plates of armor and a head like an artillery shell. Merchant didn’t have anything bad to say about Johnson, but he spoke of Maskaev in graver tones. The 35 year HBO veteran told me, “Maskaev is exciting. And I took one look at that jaw and thought: here’s a guy you cannot knock out.”

Of course, boxing is supposed to be fifty percent mental. Cus D’Amato, who trained Mike Tyson in the early years when he was unstoppable, famously said: “In the last analysis, mind triumphs over matter, and the will to win is more crucial than the skill to win.”

In other words, Johnson could win if he desired it enough. But when I talked to him after the weigh-in, that seemed like an open question. He told me he was nervous. More than that, he was scared. “Oh yeah,” he said. “It goes up and down to the fight. Sometimes I just want to throw myself off a bridge.” He’d been praying twenty hours a day, from the time he got up until he went to bed. And when it came to strategy, Johnson merely shook his head and said, “Well I can’t slug with him. No way I’m going to knock him out.”

We went through the tape up. I watched that strange and intimate action between Johnson and his trainer Curtis Cokes, both men staring fixedly at the hands that might or might not do the job. And when Johnson knelt in the corner of his enclosure to pray one last time, a thin sheet hanging for this final privacy, I felt real anxiety. I liked the man for his honesty, his kind demeanor, for the way he pulled a younger family member close for a few words, those taped fighter’s hands so huge and ungainly as they shaped themselves for the hug. I was worried for Johnson’s family, who were there in large numbers. But I was more worried for Johnson.

Out into the thunder of the event itself, into the glittering shards of light, the strobe of cameras, the hail of noise and cries, boos and cheers, a maelstrom, a dervish, a tornado of senses. The first three rounds I stared so intensely from my seat at the press tables that I wasn’t sure I was even taking any of it in, although the story itself was plainly unfolding: Johnson was losing. Maskaev was stalking and closing, out-jabbing Johnson, snapping his head back with chopping right hands. When Johnson returned to his corner between the third and forth rounds, Cokes scolded him: “I need a little more work out of you!” To which the bewildered-looking fighter responded like a chastened schoolboy: “Okay.”

Out they came for the fourth and the sense was strong that the final punch was on its way. And it came quickly: short and sharp and brutal. Only it wasn’t a right hand in the end, but a left. And it wasn’t thrown by Maskaev, but by Johnson, fifteen seconds into the fourth round. A two-three combination, speaking technically, that is an overhand right hand then an upwards carving left hook that Johnson landed with laser precision to the tip of Maskaev’s massive jaw. But I doubt a single person present actually experienced it as a technical accomplishment. It was an event made instead of different stuff than training or mechanics, physical strength or mental calculation. It was something Johnson had created, forging it with brute will power out of literally nothing.

Bang-bang. The bullet proof Russian was down. He bounced up quickly, furious. He was still Oleg Maskaev, after all. But Kirk Johnson had become someone else. And that person stepped in and finished Maskaev, backing him up to the ropes, swarming him. Maskaev undone: unconscious first, then blown through the ring ropes, just like his victim Hasim Rahman those short months before. Maskaev crashed down through the collapsing press tables, papers flying, computer monitors toppling, only saved from hitting the concrete floor by a photographer who caught Maskaev and held him, the Russian’s head cradled almost tenderly in his arms.

Johnson stood in the ring with his arms raised, haloed in light, transfigured, transformed.

 ***

 What on earth had we just seen? Transformation. Something not quite of this earth, but visited upon it: something previously impossible made possible. A moment beyond.

That interpretation is plausible or absurd, depending on your world view. Cus D’Amato, who clearly believed in the potency of the human will to bend the future to its purposes—more specifically, the potentially lethal human agency embodied by the young Mike Tyson—would probably give you a different answer in this regard than American philosopher Alex Rosenberg, whose new book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is surprisingly germane to the discussion of what exactly is being experienced in watching sports and what it means to identify yourself as a sports fan. Rosenberg’s book isn’t only the latest title in a growing canon of new atheist writing, it’s the culmination of that canon, in that he blows past the hedging of previous atheist tracts and states the matter plainly: the universe is wholly and unapologetically material. Everything is matter, fermions and bosons specifically, and every event preceding or following us is explained and governed by the inviolable laws of physics in a way that is both causally closed and causally complete. Rosenberg’s universe, in other words, is wholly deterministic. Reality is nothing more or less than physics at work in all its glory. And physics just is. As a predetermined set of phenomena, past and present, none of what any of us are doing, or anything we experience, has any purpose or meaning. And given that, can there be free will or individual agency? “Not a chance!” writes Rosenberg.

Sports fans, religious or otherwise, might sense a difficulty in the brilliantly closed circle of this world view. Is it coherent? It is indeed. Rational? Supremely, I’d say. Does it, however, accommodate any of the fundamental particles of fan experience? Here we might have some problems. In a determinist universe, it’s not only free will that is a fanciful illusion. So too is desire, inspiration, even anxiety at the possibility of a bad outcome. Each of these is mere fancy in a world where matters are predetermined. Indeed, why talk at all of what is “possible” and “impossible” when the future is set? We are the billiard balls and the big bang was the break. What is possible this nanosecond is merely what was made possible the nanosecond before. Every particle, and so ultimately every planet and every person, moves in lockstep along this causal chain. There’s no swerving from the path much less any chance of creating new possibilities that didn’t exist previously. To argue otherwise, to believe that the future can in any way be affected by our conscious choices in the moment, is an essentially religious habit of mind, as Rosenberg takes pains to point out. It’s a world view dependent on nonmaterial particles, those which cannot be found in the physical realm, a crucial one of which, familiar to sports fans, would be hope.

Not all high-profile atheists measure up to this rigorous materialist standard, it has to be said. Christopher Hitchens clung to the idea of personal morality, if not absolute then relative. He even argued for the “moral necessity” of atheism. Hitchens was passionate in his views, another state of mind familiar to sports fans. But that he would think one set of ideas is better than any other, and that he would be gripped with the conviction that minds could be changed through persuasion, reveals a lingering faith in agency, reason and the possibility of change. Hitchens was never a pure enough atheist to understand what Rosenberg exhorts us to understand: that passion is pointless, that hope is a waste of time, that morality and sacred codes are a fiction, and that there are no moments beyond.

***

I wasn’t always a sports fan. I recall speaking up once when a junior high gym teacher berated our class for not signing up for intramural sports teams. I said: “Well, you know, not all kids are into sports. Some of us are more into academics.” That teacher carried a grudge that lasted the rest of my middle school years. “I’m going to give some team news now,” he’d say, glowering at me. “Feel free not to listen if you’re more into academics.”

Nevertheless, arriving at Queens business school some 10 years later, I suddenly discovered sports. The New York Giants, no less, who played out of Rutherford, New Jersey. They had a blue collar reputation and a blood and guts approach to the game. They were defined at the time by a linebacker named Lawrence Taylor, 6’3” and 245 pounds, who anchored a defense known as the Big Blue Wrecking Crew. Taylor was known for a cocaine problem and a frightening game-day intensity that allowed him to shred through offensive linemen enroute to tearing the opposing quarterback’s head off.

Queens B-school circa 1986 didn’t have much of a Lawrence Taylor vibe. It was the era of button-downs and power ties, ribbon suspenders and tassel loafers. And of course business students, especially finance students, were supposed to be too busy for sports anyway. But something had happened to me, arriving at Queens. I’d realized I didn’t want to be there. And I was acting out my disaffection. I was skipping classes, reading more fiction than finance. I was living way north of Princess Avenue (Kingston code for “wrong side of the tracks”) a detail about which I grew lopsidedly proud as  time when by. And that pride illustrates the relative game I was playing. Somehow out of step with the culture of B-school, I was opting to define myself contra B-school. But by revealing a keen interest in what other students thought about me, either way, the contrarian strategy was no different than being a copycat.

The decision to suddenly start caring about sports, I now understand, came about in exactly the same way. Only in sports there was an added catalyst: a new roommate. Like me, he was a B-school student just slightly out of step. But unlike me, at least in my mind, he carried this off with great élan. Against the pretensions of the era, he advanced an everyman persona on all fronts. He wasn’t going into finance (despite being a near-savant in math). He wanted a job in sales. He liked Creedance Clearwater Revival, dive bars, bourbon, and poker, which (believe it or not) was seriously infra dig in the mid-eighties. He was also, crucially, an NFL fan.

The truth doesn’t always flatter on the topic of desire. To think that we catch our interest in sports like we might a common virus seems somehow demeaning. But it’s quintessentially human. And here we’re in debt to the thinking of French philosopher and historian Rene Girard, a retired Stanford professor (now one of the 40 “immortals” who make up the elite Academie francaise), who argues that all non-instinctual desire is mimetic, or triangular. There is a subject (ourselves) and an object. But there is also a model, whose own interest in the object is what ignites the flame of our desire. In his seminal book Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Girard lays out how all the great novelists seem to have understood this dynamic: Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Dostoevsky. None of those writers wrote much about sports, as far as I’m aware. But the same principles apply.

My roommate liked the Chicago Bears, as I recall, whose awe-inspiring team had stomped their way to winning in Super Bowl XX the year before. But in the 85/86 season, the New York Giants were the story. And what a season they had. Taylor was sacking everything in sight. Tight end Mark Bavaro was proving himself to be the toughest man on the planet, at one point playing half a game with a broken jaw. I remember a game late in the season when Bavaro caught a pass from quarterback Phil Sims, then dragged seven San Francisco defenders down the field twenty yards, including future Hall-of-Famer Ronnie Lott.

How could any of these events have mattered to me? My thirteen-year-old self would have said they simply didn’t. My twenty-three-year-old self, I now realize, had started to see the benefits of allowing yourself to care. By submitting to mimetic effects – specifically my absorption into a communion of likeminded fans, bonded by these arbitrary cares – I had freed myself from the straight jacket of determinism that must otherwise have rationally prevailed. The sports fan embraces irrationality. I wouldn’t have said it that way at the time. But I think even then I appreciated that I was at a moment in my life when I was singularly disinclined to be rational.

So I was mimetically absorbed into that society of fans, I was assimilated into an essentially religious habit of mind that does not accept that passion is pointless, that hope is a waste of time, that sacred codes are a fiction and that there are no moments beyond. Fans screaming in their living rooms all over North America were not accepting a determined future. They were living instead in a universe shaped by non-material particles that, while undetectable in even the Large Hadron Collider, nevertheless responded to the force of human will. Events on those distant gridirons did indeed matter to me, they had meaning, but only because the guy who’d been raised a sports atheist had become a believer and had in the process, unconsciously or otherwise, accepted the utility of hope. And so I gathered weekly with fellow members of that society, ritually restating each Sunday morning of the season that we did indeed believe.  I gathered with others around that flickering flame of theoretical hope – Will Simms complete the pass? Will Bavaro make the score? – and so was wordlessly reassured that broader hopes in my life might have some grounding. Specifically, that business school might just possibly not be the end of my story.

French sociologist Emile Durkeim wrote: “There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and collective ideas which makes its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments.”

He was talking about the religious impulse. But I read that now and find myself thinking about a series of Sundays in 1986, all leading up to one really big game.

 ***

Of course, Super Bowl XXI was a great game: we won! We, because I’d absorbed the Giants’ desire to win and it was now my own. I was one of them. And what drama. We trailed the Denver Broncos 10-9 at the half but came storming back. There was a fake punt and a quarterback sneak. There were touchdowns for Bavaro, Joe Morris, Ottis Anderson and Phil McConkey. Simms came through big time, throwing for thirty second half points and completing eighty-eight percent of his passes (a Super Bowl record that stands to this day). I distinctly remember the feeling afterwards: it was as if order had been restored. As if in the frenzy of the contest there had lingered (all season and in that final game) a profound threat of the future going wrong. With John Elway’s Broncos vanquished—players literally lying on the turf, like union soldiers on the slopes of Bunker Hill—it felt both deliciously good and incredibly right. All Giants fans would have been joined in that moment.

Years later, Bill Parcells’ described the locker room feeling of that win in sacramental terms: “It’s like a blood transfer. You get theirs and they get yours.” The metaphor is intense, but perfectly apt. Sports are indeed a matter of the blood, but in two distinct ways. There’s the blood of the fans and the team, mingled through identification. Then there’s the blood of the opponent which must first be spilled before the mingling can deliver its communal benefit.

Girard is helpful here again as he points us towards an anthropological truth: that in virtually every ancient culture of which we’re aware, communities maintained internal harmony through the use of sacrificial rituals. Turning on one victim united everyone else and therefore served to keep the peace. Of course, we cringe to think about that today because we understand scapegoats to have been innocent of any real crime. Sacrifice offends our modern sense of individual freedom and equality, and concern for victims has arguably become the single moral certainty of our day.

But if we can’t use sacrifice and we don’t replace it with something, how will the blood of the community be mingled? How will we keep the peace? How will chaos be prevented? Girard argues that chaos isn’t being prevented, or not very well. History is getting more violent and conflicts more intractable around the world, in part because the efficacy of those archaic sacrificial rituals has been destroyed. Girard doesn’t want to re-invoke them. But others have certainly considered it. Hobbes, Nietzsche and Machiavelli each worried in their own way that the modernizing mind, while unleashing a sense of individual equality and freedom, also rendered ancient peace-keeping mechanisms (like sacrifice) ineffective. These thinkers believed that modern concern for victims was the legacy of Judeo-Christian narratives, something Girard agrees with. But unlike Girard, they also harbored ideas for a man-made solution to the problem of this inheritance. Hobbes’ absolutist monarchy, Nietzsche’s assertive superman, and Machiavelli’s bid to return to paganism shared a common root in this regard: they were bids to restrain the evolving modern mind, to keep its chaotic ideas about individual freedom and equality somehow in check, in order that the community might be more accepting of the rituals required to bind it.

That concept—the restraint of something modern in us which carries the seeds of chaos—has a name in mythology: the katechon. The Egyptian god Horus was called katechon drakonta, the binder of the dragon, an image that also shows up in the Old and New Testament of the Christian Bible. A katechon is, in essence, a mechanism that deploys episodic violence to contain the chaos that might result if ritual were lost entirely. A katechon, in this analysis, replaces sacrifice. The Spanish Inquisition was a katechon, as Dostoevsky discloses in The Grand Inquisitor, showing a church turned aside from a (politically anarchic) Christian message of individual freedom and equality, embracing instead a realpolitik of manipulation and control. The Roman Empire, Charles the Great, the 21^st century War on Terror…each of these have had a katechonic function, cathartic violence deployed (in cycles of increasing rapidity and seeming pointlessness) with the idea that peace might somehow be restored despite our modern tendency to turn aside from the rituals that previously sustained it.

This returns us to Bill Parcells’ blood transfer, which can’t complete itself without the spilled blood of the enemy. It will seem blasphemous to many to suggest that sports offers a secularized katechon to fans, serving up some kind of Sacrifice 3.0., but I think it does. We vilify the enemy in sports, something outsiders often observe as they watch fans watching the action. Chelsea fans scream abuse at Wayne Rooney just as MMA fans will know the feeling of hating a man who is in the process of pounding your favorite fighters face into a bloody pulp. That hate is not metaphoric. It’s real in the moment. It’s real and, more to the point, it’s permissible.

As Humber College philosophy professor and Girard scholar Kent Enns pointed out to me in an email: “Sports is one of the few domains where it is understood as intrinsically good to triumph over opponents/rivals…One need only imagine a (literary) author proclaiming himself to be ‘the best’ to glimpse the flip side of a culture that is simultaneously skeptical of excellence and (over-)achieving and which views the embrace of victims as one of the defining features of its morality.”

We still need our sacrifices, in other words, but we need them subtle. And in that, we reveal the surviving religious impulse. Girard writes: “Play has a religious origin, to be sure, insofar as it reproduces certain aspects of the sacrificial crisis. The arbitrary nature of the prize makes it clear that the contest has no other objective than itself, but this contest is regulated in such a manner that, in principle at least, it can never degenerate into a brutal fight to the finish.”

That sense of peace I felt after the Giants win in 1986 wasn’t permanent. My life hasn’t been, since then, governed by a sense of conflict resolved, balance restored, my actions and devotions aligned in perfection and perpetuity with a central purpose or community. But it was for a moment, perhaps even a day. Life was perfectly stable for as long as the sacrificial spell of the event lasted, until the rightness of my (our) victory was dispelled and made arbitrary again by the return of the world and my modern sense of self, free to desire, to envy, to dispute and escalate, to will myself into my own individually chosen chaos.

 ***

 The ritual depends on secret codes. And codes are always cracked. The Grand Inquisitor eventually lost his grip. Hobbes’ absolutist power was deployed in variations all over the world. But it’s a hard sell, lately, without brutal force, cracking in places we never thought it would, crowds of socially-networked free individuals marching through the world’s Tahrir Squares, a sense of justice and concern for victims flowering and spreading like Moon Vine and Morning Glory.

Sports, insofar as they depend on belief, will face oddly similar pressures. Not from the new atheists, or at least I doubt it. The determinist universe challenges our fascination, mocking human agency, aspiration and hope. But it’s so technical a construct—and quantum physics is adequately understood by exactly how many of us?—that sports fans will continue to live as if human will and autonomy do exist, no matter what the brightest and largest pulsing brains among us try to sell in books billed with all due humility as our “Guides to Reality.”

For some sports, instead, it will be that concern for victims that threatens the ritual. Brain scans will tell us that football and hockey players and boxers (and potentially MMA fighters) are dying from brain damage later in life, and I think most fans will immediately agree that the ritual is not as important as the individual. Legislation will change these sports. Meanwhile, all sports will continue to be decoded and de-ritualized by commerce. I almost hate to write that, so easily is it mistaken for the agenda of Naomi Klein, Kalle Lasn and Occupy. Corporations are not the guilty parties here, in my analysis. We’re all far more culpable that the Voltarian reading of consumerism allows. We all partake, through our own mimetic desires, and in doing so, we hold out our wrists for the cuffs those nasty corporations would snap into place. The more crucial undoing of sports by this means will be de-sacralization. If sports were ever sacred, ever able to mingle our blood with others, those powers will be undone by our uncanny current-day ability to turn any locus of human attention into a marketplace. You can’t have money lenders in temples. They tend to dissipate the sense of deeper meaning, of joined purpose, that ineffable (and religious) air of common spirit.

Phil Simms sensed that when presented with the new Disney campaign in 1986. He declined for weeks, remembering his resistance later: “That was messing with the football gods, the karma of the game.” But when the Giants won, the cameras were waiting. Simms said the words, again and again and again, his pretend-enthusiasm flagging: “I’m going to Disneyland!”

Everybody knew he wasn’t, which was no problem at all for Disney. But it was for sports fans, as the game was desacralized one increment further. Don’t blame Phil Simms. The world was moving around him. Go to a hockey game now and you can hardly see the ice surface for the thicket of sales messages. I remember interviewing Chelsea fans in a pub off Kings Road in London in 2005. They lamented the passage of the game from tribal to commercial (I was evidence of the commercial, we all understood—a Chelsea fan from half a world away). At the same time, one fellow noted, “… in the old days the stands were full of garbage and piss.” Plus, they could all agree, being bought by a Russian oligarch (no deep West London family connections there) was about to give them the first title they’d seen in fifty years.

What was unsaid, of course, is that the spectator endlessly lambasted from all sides with player salaries and trading prices, team payrolls and television viewership statistics, cannot help but come to interpret the game in easier and more material terms than previously. The blood transfers and moments beyond quietly fade. The ritual itself fails as it becomes a transaction. And when the community understands itself to be merely a customer, the jarring outcome may still produce intensely mimetic effects, but these won’t be positive. The blood will not be mingled. And in those moments we might well expect to see more generalized violence going forward, to see seemingly inexplicable bursts of all against all. Mailboxes through department store windows. Police cars burning outside the Vancouver Post Office.

In 2003, I went to Memphis to see Tonya Harding’s first professional fight. She stepped into the ring with Samantha “Booker” Browning, top fight on an undercard opening for Mike Tyson’s last win. A cheap transaction, that one. No ritual in it. But, in a way, I was glad to be there, to have the bookend experience to the one I’d had in the Mohegan Sun Casino three years prior. There were no believers in the Memphis Pyramid. We hardly blinked when Harding got her ass handed to her by the gal from Mantachie, Mississippi, who looked like she could handle herself well enough in fights that didn’t involve rings and gloves. Afterwards, Harding stood in the hallway talking to the smirking members of the press corps, and her thin lips trembled white with rage and indignation. She never believed the story would turn out any differently. Transformation had never crossed her mind or ours.

I visited with my ex-roomie from Queens that same trip to Memphis. He’d landed in the South, as I suspect he always wanted. He was perfecting a good ol’ boy routine and a mean technique for slow cooked brisket. We reminisced a bit, not overly. But we did touch on Super Bowl XXI. My ex-roomie remembered an interesting detail. He recalled how after Mark Bavaro’s touchdown, the tight end touched his knee to the endzone in a moment of prayer. The memory did not please my ex-roommate who said: “I never liked him after that.”

My admiration remains undimmed, however, as I think of that knee touch as something that all fans do internally anyway, whether they turn their face skyward to a god whose name we’ve heard or to some trace element left in the universe that still grips us, those non-material particles.

After B-school, I fell out with the NFL and the New York Giants. I missed entirely that the Giants won Super Bowl XLII in 2008 in a thriller that crushed Patriots fans, whose team would have finished the season an unprecedented 19-0 if they’d won the trophy. The game revolved around what surely would have been a “moment beyond” for those watching live at the time: the so-called Helmet Catch by reserve wide receiver David Tyree. Down 14-10 with just over a minute remaining, quarterback Eli Manning slipped three tackles before spotting Tyree up the middle. The pass was high, but Tyree climbed up and snagged it with one hand, pressing the ball to his helmet as he crashed to the turf. The drive was alive and New York went on to win 17-14 in what was considered an upset.

But this past season, I started watching football again like a lot of other non-active fans, because an overtly religious Tim Tebow grabbed the headlines for a while. Tebow took Mark Bavaro’s quiet moment to a whole new media-saturated level, irritating some, thrilling others. To me, he merely served as a reminder of what I think still struggles to be the heart of these games, despite safety concerns and the impingement of the commercial explanation: that act of the human will against what reason tells us the universe is supposed to allow. That we matter. I also noted, of course, that Tebow was a Bronco, that long ago foe whose defeat had once seemed so righteous and proper and personal.

The playoffs un-folded. Super Bowl XLVI rose on the horizon. The field winnowed out to two teams: the New York Giants and the New England Patriots. Once upon a time there would have been no question where to go watch with the hardcore, on-the-ground fans. But by 2012, I hadn’t been a New York Giants fan in 25 years.

So I went to Boston, where the fans pack in around the Gardens on Pats game days, into bars like McGann’s Irish Pub, Boston Beerworks and Hurricane O’Reilly’s. I went to The Fours, once rated Best Sportsbar in America by Sports Illustrated, where the history of Boston professional sports hangs on the walls and ceilings. Photographs and rowing shells, and jerseys of course, those talismans of careers gone by: Larry Bird, Robert Parish, Kevin McHale, Cam Neely. Before the game there was impressive craziness in the streets, a Celtics game just out and the most watched game in American television history about to begin. The police were putting up barricades already that would gate and corral us after the game down designated streets and away from any area where a large crowd could gather.

I took a seat at The Fours bar, ordered a burger and beer. I waited for the mimetic effects as they might unfold within me. Would I become a Pats fan, energized by the excitement of the fans around me? Or would something in my psyche recall 1986 and channel the requirements of that long ago moment?

Neither, as it turned out. Instead, it ended up being the strangest sporting event I think I’ve ever watched. I was not particularly vested. I was not bonded mimetically either to the desires of those around me or those 360 kilometers away to the south. But I was more alive to the force of human will than I’d ever been, released in a way by not being mesmerized myself. I could feel the will more purely somehow, for my own hopes not being aroused, my own blood not overly mingled.

You probably know the outcome, so I won’t dwell on recounting it. Only this: as the fourth quarter began, the Patriots ahead 17-15, there was in The Fours a palpable fear. Quarterback Tom Brady, who will surely go down as one of the great quarterbacks in NFL history, had been here before, leading the Giants in the fourth quarter in Super Bowl 2008. The question hung in the air, in each face turned upwards, reflecting that flickering blue light of the monitors: will history be overturned, or has some rigid pattern in history just now been detected? The room pulsed with the collective will for the future to be different this time than it was those four years prior. But it wasn’t to be. A turnover, a punt, another punt. And Eli Manning had the ball in his seemingly favourite position: deep in his own half with time running out.

The Giants won. I felt the moment for them, remembered the feelings I would have felt. But I didn’t cheer. I walked out with the defeated instead into the cold Boston air. Back across the North End to the Fairmont Battery Wharf where there was a Super Bowl party winding down, women in pearls and men in corporate casual, quietly considering how the future had eluded them. This time.

Manning was giving his interviews, telling people he was off to Disney, as I sat down to a lobster roll at Aragosta. The bartender said, “Yeah, we’re on suicide watch about now.”

I walked down Hanover Street later, taking the air. I heard voices all round me, strangled and angry. Someone yelled, an inarticulate garble of rage. Someone else. And then someone else. It was real, the air alive with genuine anguish. The voices were joined in the moment.

An hour later, the air had turned. Quiet descended. Peace and restoration. I thought of Kirk Johnson in the glittering halo of ring lights, transformed. Boston, in its loss, was transfigured, too. Super Bowl XLVI had passed. The new season had already opened ahead with its new potential for passion, for the mystery of its embedded codes, for hope. There was hope there in the smoky Boston air. New hope, from nothing.

Situated at the foot of North Vancouver’s Lonsdale Avenue, the striking new home of the Presentation House Gallery, a well-known local art space, is perhaps the most dramatic architectural gesture to be made on that stretch of British Columbia coastline since the opening of the Lonsdale Quay itself. Now called the Polygon Gallery, the building was designed by Patkau Architects (the husband-and-wife practice with a host of museum, library and other cultural projects under their belt) and is named after Polygon Homes (a property development firm and sponsor of the gallery). Appropriately enough, its inaugural exhibition, the magnificent show N. Vancouver, which runs through the end of April, consists of existing and commissioned works that ruminate on the shifting identity of the locale in which it sits.

For readers unfamiliar with the area, the waterfront in North Van, as it’s invariably known, has historically been industrial, the creosote-stained home to tugboat-maintenance facilities and fish packing plants, operations that at their peak depended on access to the bustling port waters of Burrard Inlet. (North Vancouver, a separate municipality of just under 53,000 people, sits across the inlet from Vancouver proper.) That’s mostly gone now. The North Van waterfront has shifted in focus to residential, retail and entertainment interests in which Polygon Homes has more than a passing interest. The gallery was designed specifically to sit at that most visible of our contemporary cultural intersections: the sonorous retreat of a sepia-toned history missed only in the abstract and the clamorous advance of an over-priced present that is frequently dreaded in its concreteness.

That makes for an architectural challenge that could be approached any number of ways. The City of North Vancouver, who donated the waterfront land, could have found its Baron Georges- Eugène Haussmann to entirely reimagine the area. But that’s not how we do things at this particular moment in architectural post-modernity. At this moment we strain to remember what once was (tugboats, canned salmon, affordable housing). And in paving over that which now appears irrevocably lost, we erect structures that self-justify with a guilty backwards glance.

When I asked John Patkau about this contemporary impulse, he good humoredly acknowledged it, noting that they had resisted the municipality’s original request to put up a history-themed mural on the north face of the building. “I would argue that this building isn’t historisist. It’s modern but acknowledges history,” he said.

In the case of the Polygon Gallery, this acknowledgment begins with the sawtooth roof. Gallery designers have used these before, of course. (The gorgeous Newport Street Gallery in London, by Caruso St. John Architects, has them.) And they make sense for the same reason they made sense for industrial applications: North-facing vertical glass panes provide for an even distribution of high light without shadows.

In the Polygon, the effect is a luminous blue that hovers in the airy spaces above the main exhibition space, light that serves the art without competing. The exterior cladding is a similar gesture: Open mesh metal grating used typically in nautical decking is applied here in a pattern that compliments the sawtooth roofline and makes reference to the nautical history of the site. If the vertical situation of these familiar textures is disorienting – as it was to this ex-Navy man who has only ever seen this material underfoot – the impact is compensated for by the reflective aluminium that’s mounted beneath and shifts in colour from slate blue to a deep and burnished green, much like the sea changes colour in different kinds of weather.

In these two features is captured what an architect friend referred to as a likeable “crispness” to the Patkaus’ structure. There is a completeness and wholeness to the building that is striking as you round the corner out of Victory Ship Way and see it glistening there at the foot of Lonsdale Avenue. It’s a building that creates a bigger visual footprint than its actual square footage, dominating the area and in a sense giving definition to structures that surround it. In a way not dissimilar to Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Patkaus’ Polygon Gallery is an art object in itself, hovering above its own pedestal, in this case speaking with uncanny authority both to history and to the shifting organic environment around it.

Perhaps ironically, it is precisely that success that gives the design its most inherent and notable internal contradiction. The pedestal in this case is glass. And the interior walls of the main floor are painted white, so as to almost disappear upon first viewing. The effect is to create a detachment of the building from its own situation, physically raising it to occupy space above the plane of the square. For a backwards glance, this is a lofty one, which is not to say that it is insincere, only that there is a self-awareness in the structure that belies its bid to integrate with area history. That to which I refer is entirely gone, the gleaming structure seems to announce, a feeling enhanced on entering, standing in front of those archival photos of a North Vancouver that few of us can even remember.

Effective? Strikingly so, if visitor traffic is any indication. The place was packed on the Sunday that I visited. On the main floor, with its large, dedicated space for the gift shop, a planned restaurant should only draw more in. Nowhere was the gallery’s intensity of focus more obvious, however, than on the outer decking upstairs. In a flourish that distinguishes the Polygon most strikingly from older-style art venues (such as, for example, the existing Vancouver Art Gallery), the exhibition space extends through glass doors to a wide south-facing deck that provides a sweeping view of downtown Vancouver. For a gallery, this is oddly anti-contemplative, drawing the eye away from the artwork and out towards the shining city view. It’s also a feature that needs to be blacked out in order to display art works such as Jeremy Shaw’s Best Minds, a brilliant video meditation on Straight Edge, the punk subculture. Overall, the architecture reflects a clash of missions in the space: Parts of it are perfectly attuned to the presentation of art, while others respond to the imperative of attendance, public engagement, a broader and more flexible idea of public coming-together than can be accomplished merely through curation.

And that, then, is the degree to which the Polygon succeeds in both occupying and defining the cultural intersection in question. Do we contemplate or consume art? Do our buildings reassure us or aspire beyond? In a region where affordability has receded to an abstract past, these questions are unanswerable. But this hovering, glistening building is to be commended for asking them.

For Cooking Light Magazine

It was while I was attempting to make “soil” that it occurred to me that my experiment with very difficult dinners might drive me insane.

This is edible soil, from the cookbook by René Redzepi, chef at the world’s most buzzy restaurant, Noma, in Copenhagen. Noma’s soil is sprinkled on a dish called “vegetable field,” which was the second course for a dinner party I was going to hold for friends in the small dining room of my home. The soil dish came after blueberries and onions, before oxtails in dark beer, and before the finale of potato chips dipped in chocolate and fennel seed.

Only the soil wasn’t working. I’d combined wheat, hazelnut, and malt flours, each weighed by gram on a scale. I’d pulsed these ingredients three times in the food processor while dribbling in five grams of beer. I’d baked the mixture at 195° for six hours, and still didn’t have soil. Instead, I had rock—a solid sheet of beige slate. Push through a coarse sieve to remove the thickest lumps, the recipe suggested, at which moment I felt like heaving Redzepi’s book across the kitchen. There’s no room for temper tantrums in a small home kitchen, though, with no staff to terrorize, no TV audience to entertain. I had a job to do: cook really, really complicated meals all by myself over a couple of weeks from five really, really complicated cookbooks. Then serve to friends.

You’ve no doubt flipped through these massive, exacting culinary tomes, with their gorgeous photos and lengthy text. They have always struck me more as impressive publishing artifacts than instructional documents. In the case of Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck Cookbook, for example, you won’t find a recipe until you’ve read 140 pages of restaurant history and culture notes. The other books on my list, besides Blumenthal’s, were Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine Volume 3: Animals and Plants, Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure, and Daniel Humm’s 11 Madison Park.

“Long” doesn’t begin to describe some of these recipes. One for roast turbot calls for 84 ingredients. One for Black Forest Cake features 16 subrecipes and a cross-section diagram of the cake that looks like an architectural rendering. This is food that relies on staff, commercial-grade pantries, specialty equipment, and patrons who pay through the nose. Can we even call these “cookbooks” in a meaningful way? Is a Noma recipe for soil really a recipe, or is it a note from a brilliant artist saying: Don’t try this at home, folks? I was wading into hot waters to find out.

I didn’t train in culinary school or work in a restaurant, but I do cook in a focused way. I spend an awful lot of time at the stove, and it’s not unusual, on a Saturday morning, for my waking thoughts to concern what I will be cooking for dinner. But I knew, after studying these books, that a new level of planning would be needed.

Quite a few recipes auto-eliminated for practical reasons. Some called for ingredients I couldn’t source, like goosefoot leaves or Västerbotten cheese. Others were impossible to fit into the time I had—like the 48-hour Noma walnut juice. And many recipes called for gear I didn’t own: flash freezers, high-pressure vacuum packers, Thermomixes, etc.

This raises a point about restaurant-grade prep for the home cook: Even if you avoid the most gear-intensive recipes, you’ll need to buy or borrow extra tools. Start with a gram-accurate kitchen scale, because virtually every recipe is measured out in precise units of weight. (How much is 75 grams of beer? Just over a third of a cup, it turns out.) You’ll need more whisks, more mixing bowls, more sieves in ultrafine mesh—because nothing, apparently, is ever made in high-end kitchens without one or more strainings.

Also, you’ll want more small saucepans. If you just have one you use to melt butter and such, buy more, because there isn’t a recipe of this ilk that doesn’t call for the preparation of numerous constituent parts to be made in advance and held until plating. Blumenthal’s Saddle of Venison? By the time you serve this, you will have previously prepared and be holding: venison consommé, frankincense hydrosol, frankincense dilution, confit of vegetables, tomato fondue, sauce poivrade, a gastrique, blood cream, celeriac puree, celeriac fondants, celeriac rémoulade, civet base, red wine jelly discs, venison medallions, red wine foam, grelot onions, chestnut tuiles, and a butter emulsion. Needless to say, I avoided that recipe. I’m not a maniac.[pagebreak]

PART 1: Hmm… I realize I need a week just to plan a recipe!

Chef Daniel Humm of 11 Madison Park is Swiss. His meticulous restaurant sits atop the New York food chain, up there in the clouds with Thomas Keller’s Per Se. His approach is continental/experimental; his insalata caprese consists of two sodium alginate–formed spheres—one of mozzarella foam, the other of tomato water—and tastes like insalata caprese.

Humm writes in 11 Madison Park that he does not experiment for the sake of experimenting, but almost everything I looked at involved preparations and ingredients I’d never heard of: apple snow, celery cream, daikon vinaigrette, basil gel, candied olives. I chose a two-course menu: langoustine with celeriac and green apple, followed by John Dory poached with citrus, daikon radish, and olive oil. Obeying the manifesto of the local, I swapped West Coast spot prawns for the langoustine and West Coast halibut for the John Dory. I believed these were approachable dishes, the appetizer essentially a ceviche, the main course evolved only modestly from dishes you might find in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I quickly discovered, however, that both were deeply complex and involved.

Lesson one: Read the recipe, say, a week before you intend to cook it. By the time I’d done my shopping and prepared a work plan—there were a dozen pages of itemized tasks taped to my kitchen cabinets at one point—I realized I had, at minimum, 48 hours of work ahead of me. The appetizer involved making a fish fumet as well as juicing three dozen green apples and freezing the seasoned juice overnight. The main course required dried citrus to be made from grapefruit and blood oranges, another 12-hour preparation.

Not all of these advance preparations worked perfectly. Citrus pieces left in my low oven overnight weren’t dried; they were petrified. The celery oil simply would not separate from the celery water and solids no matter how many hours I strained it through paper towels. I left it to cool overnight on a windowsill and extracted the oil with an eyedropper my wife had to run out to the drugstore to purchase. Twenty-four hours of effort for three tablespoons of product. This is where apprentices and line cooks come in mighty handy.

After 24 hours, I also had celery cream, a citrus beurre blanc, pickled daikon radish, blanched and shocked edamame beans, and a daikon vinaigrette. The final plating came together fairly easily. If you can endure, or even enjoy, this level of prep, and if you plate very precisely with one eye on the book’s gorgeous photographs, Chef Humm will make you look like a pro at the table.

I learned a valuable lesson from Humm: The elements of a complex dish may taste odd alone, but when they come together on the plate, magic happens. Alone, the celery cream was cloyingly rich and sweet. With fluffy apple ice folded in, it was beautifully balanced. The daikon pickle was so unpleasantly pungent I put it on the back porch until serving time. But when it was gently fanned out over the fish—which is poached in a thickened chicken stock strongly seasoned with garlic and thyme—the pickle cut the richness of the dish and harmonized with the beurre blanc and vinaigrette.

What does a cook live for but the reaction of his guests? They raved. They loved the intense combinations of flavors. Spot prawns with celery and apples: light, refreshing, salty, tangy, and sweet. And very pretty, too, all swirled with shades of green and that flash of pink from the shellfish.

As for the halibut, one guest actually said: “That might be the best thing I’ve eaten in my life!”

PART 2: It’s not pots & pans I need for these recipes. It’s laboratory equipment!

Two years ago, Nathan Myhrvold rocked the cookbook world by self-publishing a six-volume, 2,400-page set of cookbooks called Modernist Cuisine out of the Cooking Lab, his culinary research facility in Tacoma, Washington. For the series, his team included chefs who had previously cooked with British legend Heston Blumenthal, a man who is said to have milked a reindeer in Siberia to make ice cream.

After eliminating several options due to the absence of laboratory supplies (nitrogen, trisol, a centrifuge) or because the food did not look like anything I’d serve guests (fish paper, and also beetroot-fed oysters, which emerge from their shells looking like something that did not survive The Dawn of the Dead), I settled on a relatively simple menu that incorporated water-bath and pressure-cooker techniques. Both of these methods offer lessons on the transformative power of heat plus pressure. Both require machines, one of which my grandmother would not recognize—the sous vide machine. With a sous vide, you vacuum-pack food in plastic bags and then suspend it in a water bath, sometimes for many hours.

I made a sous-vided white fish with red wine reduction, served with potato crisps and green beans (swapped in for the sea asparagus I couldn’t source in the time allowed). The fish was the biggest surprise. Cooked in 102-degree water that barely scalds to the touch, and only for 20 minutes, it should have seemed raw. But it was silky perfection, entirely done, and moist as could be. As I fussed with my new sous vide machine, however, I neglected and then “broke” the red wine reduction on the stove and got a gritty-looking sauce—a classic first-year cook’s error that would have had me clouted about the ears with a wooden spoon in any restaurant kitchen. But overall, the dish was a success.

The next night I tried another Modernist meal: pressure-cooker carnitas with achiote; some crazy-rich Joël Robuchon mashed potatoes; and vacuum-packed sweet caraway pickles. Again, solid results: each dish vibrantly flavored and, this time, no major mistakes.

Did Modernist Cuisine teach me anything useful for my home cooking? Yes. Vacuum packing the pickles delivered wonderful, intense flavors in just 24 hours. Cooking pork shoulder in a pressure cooker is a great technique for getting pulled-pork tenderness in about an hour and a half. Sous-viding peeled potatoes with their peels, before tossing the peels and then boiling and mashing the potatoes, contributed to a more potato-y flavor. And the sous vide fish is also a keeper. To never dry or undercook a fish again is a revelation worth the price of the machine.[pagebreak]

PART 3: Suddenly realize that I don’t have any dirt.

The 11 Madison Park and Modernist recipes had been a hit but introduced me to a new level of kitchen concentration that was mentally and physically exhausting. With Noma, by the time my dirt had turned to rock, I was contemplating outright failure.

I had a rather odd-looking jar of pickled shallots in blueberries in the fridge. I’d failed in my quest to find edible spruce shoots, despite a surfeit of spruce in the Vancouver area. I still had to prep and blanch my carrots, radishes, baby leeks, and sunchokes; mash some potatoes; blanch and separate white onion leaves; blend parsley oil; bone the eight-hour braised oxtails; reduce a sauce that would later be infused with verbena leaves; make potato chips and dip them in chocolate and sprinkle with seeds. Oh, and mustn’t forget the apple gel, which I was improvising with a recipe from 11 Madison Park (using agar-agar) because I could not find the gelling agent required by Noma, called Gellan. When I contemplated my solid sheet of “soil,” it felt as if my whole dinner could come apart at the seams.

I took a deep breath. Dinner was still two days away! According to my planning charts, 48 hours was just enough time. By the afternoon of my party, the blueberry pickled shallots for the first course were getting quite intriguingly flavored: sharp and sweet, with a zing of acid. The parsley oil dressing was maybe less promising, tasting to me quite a bit like pureed lawn clippings. But my veggies were blanched and shocked and looking colorful for my “vegetable field.” The mashed potatoes sat fluffy and light in their butter. And the oxtails for the main course were smelling spectacular. Who knew verbena could make demi-glace taste refreshing? Apple gel garnish, ditto: Perfect discs of apple-y goodness. There was a moment of satisfaction and calm, followed immediately by the realization that I still didn’t have any dirt.

Dirt! One cannot serve up a Noma vegetable field without dirt. No time to think. Just make something, I said to myself. Which is how I learned a secret. You can spend two days following Redzepi’s recipe, and perhaps it will work for you, but you can also make fabulous dirt in 15 minutes in a skillet stovetop by browning the malt and hazelnut flours with a bit of sugar (I used caramel-brown palm sugar). Shake and scrape over decent heat. Moisten with melted butter and … my dirt was better than his dirt: golden brown, sweet, crumbly, and clumpy.

The bigger surprise came when the guests sat down. They ate in silence. Then they cheered. I mean about everything. Blueberries and onions in a swirl of parsley oil might sound odd, but it tastes magical, foresty, and alive. The vegetable field was crazy good, the veggies peeking up out of the mashed potatoes, which were covered with the famous dirt. And the oxtails cooked overnight and sauced with verbena were remarkable, rich, and light. Afterward, everybody stood in the kitchen eating the leftovers: oxtail, veggies, soil, apple gel, pickled shallots. I’d been in the kitchen for three days. I wasn’t hungry anymore. But for all its pretense, Noma’s wacky food made people very happy. That was a take-away I won’t forget. I might never make dirt again. But I had learned that stretching almost to the point of panic in the kitchen can have its payoffs.[pagebreak]

PART 4: Ouch! I burn myself twice and drop a plate.

Having felt momentarily overwhelmed during the Noma meal, I planned even more obsessively for Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure, a book of sous vide recipes. Keller is the most revered practitioner of perfectionist restaurant cooking in America. Yet Under Pressure felt like the most approachable of the books I tackled. With the exception of the variety meats section—which serves up corned beef tongue with pain perdu, confit of calf’s heart, etc.—most dishes seem familiar: Spanish mackerel with serrano ham, for example, and blanquette de veau. Prime beef is served with spring garlic, glazed carrots, bone marrow, and bordelaise syrup.

This is white-tablecloth food, certainly, but it doesn’t appear undoable. Which is why you want to read these recipes very carefully before beginning. A humble-sounding new-crop onion salad appetizer requires eight hours if you don’t have more than one sous vide machine. A Rabbit and Bacon Pressé main course won’t work for dinner tonight, as it starts with a preparation involving boning rabbit flanks, chilling them, layering with bacon and transglutaminase, chilling them again, vacuum-packing, and chilling a third time for six hours, after which you still have to sous-vide the package for 12 hours, bring to room temperature, and then brown in oil. (There is also a three-hour rabbit liver mousse and a 12-hour poached apricot.)

Still, I did find a two-course menu that seemed challenging but doable. For the appetizer: caramelized fennel with almonds, orange confit, caraway seed, and fennel puree. For the main: glazed pork belly with Swiss chard, white wine–poached apples, and green mustard vinaigrette.

I started Thursday for a dinner party on Saturday. Thursday was shopping and putting the pork belly into a brine. Friday, the belly had to go into the sous vide, and Keller’s signature pork stock had to be made. Saturday, the apples, the chard stems, and the fennel (in three batches) each had to be sous-vided. Saturday afternoon I had to do the orange confit and the almond puree, cook and hold the chard, make the vinaigrette, and portion the pork. Just as guests arrived, I caramelized the fennel and browned the pork belly, which stuck and began to fall apart. I burned myself good, twice. I dropped a plate. My kitchen sink was backing up, and I ran out of pots. For the first time ever, I couldn’t find my knife.

I stepped back. I took a sip of a delightful Mission Hill Reserve pinot noir that I’d been saving for just this type of emergency. Then I plated.

Two things had happened along the way. At about the sixtieth hour of prep, I stopped measuring out the gram weight of everything. As I was turning to Keller’s book for the 900th time to check what amount of olive oil he demanded for reheating the chard (15 grams), it occurred to me that surely I could eyeball something so basic. I didn’t really care if the orange supremes were turned into orange confit by steeping in 250 grams or 750 grams of simple syrup. Did I trim the finished pork belly to ensure I had exactly 71.25 grams per serving? I did not. I cut and measured by eye. And dinner was good.

More than good: The salad of fennel was pretty and light. The pork belly, a bit more ragged than in the pictures, was densely, deeply flavored. And I took satisfaction in a bit of improvisation: The pork stock had seemed a little thin, even after being reduced, so I jacked up Keller’s sauce with a couple of cubes of oxtail glaze borrowed from the Noma dinner three nights before. It rocked. My guests loved it, and I slept nine full hours that night.[pagebreak]

PART 5: Enough already: I run out of steam.

I had pushed Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck Cookbook to the end of the challenge as a way of avoiding a rematch. You see, I’d done a Blumenthal cook-a-thon once before, three days of making a chili out of his book In Search of Perfection. I had pressure-cooked beans and brined beef short ribs, scoured the town for Devil’s Penis chiles for the nine-ingredient chili powder, made onion confit and roasted red peppers, mortared star anise, added the red wine, and generally followed every instruction until it was time to serve, at which point every person at the table said exactly the same thing: tastes like faintly chili-ed Asian beef bourguignonne.

My triumphs with Humm, Redzepi, et al. had left me with insufficient time to prepare the Saddle of Venison with 19 constituent preparations. Moreover, my eyes had glazed over. My legs were sore. My brain was foggy. I’d been doing the work of two dozen cooks, and I needed to sit down. I knew I was a different cook than I had been. Being forced into the mind-set of top-of-their-game professional chefs had pushed me to be more creative yet more methodical, to demand more from myself than the same-old same-old cooking I had been doing. But right now I needed comfort food.

So I made one of those family dinners I don’t serve to guests. It was my mother’s recipe and it, too, had constituent preparations, but you can buy them at the grocery store: a can of cream of chicken soup, a can of mushrooms, some Worcestershire and soy sauces. Brown ground beef with onions and a pinch of nutmeg. Combine with yogurt, et voilà!: hamburger stroganoff.

Heston and I did not meet over a main course at all. For dessert, though, I managed to eke out a Blumenthalian preparation: jelly two ways. One is derived from blood orange, the other from yellow beet. Blumenthal devotes two pages of deep thinking to this dish: “If memory can boldly (and incorrectly) assert that orange colour = orange fruit, what part do memory and expectation (and for that matter genetic programming and survival mechanisms and cultural conditioning) play in our daily interaction with food, in our adventurousness, in our likes and dislikes?”

Very good question, possibly, but not on my watch. Yes, after a couple of hours of preparation, the jellies basically worked, although the yellow beet preparation turned dark green, nothing like the photographs. But the stroganoff took 45 minutes and turned out perfectly. That is, it turned out exactly as it has turned out each of the countless times I’ve made it, as it had for my mother before me.

Calvin Ayre gained vast riches and notoriety as a gambling mogul, but ended up a fugitive from U.S. law. Now he’s made a big bet on bitcoin, the world’s most explosive cryptocurrency. Will this adventure have a happier ending?

—

I have to hand it to him. Ten years since the last time I saw him, and he’s the same Calvin Ayre. Does his gym time, I’ll bet; eats well. His eyes are a little bleary, maybe he drinks a few more than his doctor wants. But at 56, he still comes off like a young guy, a rebel, a force of change. He walks into Scott’s in Mayfair—fanciest fish joint in London, unless there’s another place selling Dungarvan oysters for $32 a six-pack. The place is pure London bling, with a tricked-out bar with tiled pillars and a mountain of ice studded with lobsters. There are paparazzi parked out front 24/7, waiting for Ronnie Wood or Elton John, Tamara Ecclestone, Tom Hanks. Scott’s is where Charles Saatchi grabbed Nigella Lawson by the throat a few years back. It’s that kind of posh.

Ayre strolls in wearing torn jeans and a grey T-shirt. His hair is shaved close on the sides, long down the back. Soul patch, glint of mischief in his eyes. The waiters swarm in their sharkskin suits, pulling out chairs and smoothing the tablecloth. They don’t know he’s the most famous son of Lloydminster, Saskatchewan, the only Canadian Prairie export to make the cover of Forbes’s billionaire issue. They’re thinking he’s a star they haven’t yet quite recognized.

“How ya doin’?” Ayre says, a big paw extended for a shake. I feel like I’m meeting up with a favourite eccentric uncle.

Last time I saw him, the mood was strikingly different. We were on the Playa Tambor in Costa Rica, Ayre sitting on an elevated chair, flanked by sullen models, watching a mixed martial arts tournament. He was an online gambling mogul back then. His Costa Rica–based website, Bodog.com, which he wholly owned, had revenues of more than $7 billion (all values in U.S. dollars unless otherwise indicated). Ayre had a mansion outside San José and a penthouse apartment in Vancouver worth $6.2 million (Canadian) at the time, easily double that today.

But there was also a distinctly dark air about the man back then. Bodog’s money was coming almost entirely from American gamblers, which put Ayre on the far wrong side of U.S. law. He wasn’t yet a fugitive from the Department of Justice, but he told me he was about to flee Costa Rica for extradition-proof Antigua. And the whole atmos-phere of our meeting had an end-times edge. All those fighters standing around flexing their muscles, girls in Brazilian bikinis smoothing lotion on one another’s shoulders. When I went to his mansion later, I was buzzed in at the front gate by security hiding behind one-way glass. I passed through the abandoned courtyards; the pool, with its swim-up bar; the barbecue pit; the outdoor gym. I found Ayre being photographed in a back room, spread out in a suit on a bed covered in red satin alongside a model in lingerie. Scarface came to mind, the final act. And when we spoke in his office afterwards, he was gruff, referred to the press as pigs, didn’t look me in the eye once, leaving that job to his framed portrait, unnervingly mounted on the wall over his shoulder, which menacingly stared at me throughout.

All gone. I mean the mob-boss bits. The bulletproof Hummer. Even Bodog itself is mysteriously distant—licensed, he says, to independent regional operators. Ayre himself disavows any current involvement. “Bodog is the name of my boat,” he tells me with a shrug. “I honestly don’t think about it otherwise.”

He’s still Calvin Ayre, make no mistake. And he’s still conscious of projecting a badass image. So he parades down Mount Street in Mayfair looking like one of the grizzled mechanics from Discovery Channel’s Vegas Rat Rods. He enters trailing a PR person and a Filipina named Candy, who sits opposite him throughout our lunch and utters not a single word. But his eccentricities have a distinctly lighter shade. If he had one eye over his shoulder before, he’s staring into the future now. So he really doesn’t want to talk about Bodog. He really doesn’t want to talk about his 10 years on the run from the DOJ, the last five of which he essentially couldn’t travel outside Antigua or Canada.

He wants to talk about his new thing: bitcoin.

—

Ayre may be reticent about the gambling backstory, but it’s important for understanding his position within the Wild West of planet Earth’s most explosively popular virtual currency. Bitcoin is either the biggest commodity bubble in the history of financial assets, or it’s going to revolutionize global payment systems and make somebody the world’s first trillionaire along the way. Or possibly both. But whichever description you’re drawn to, you can find confirmation in bitcoin’s near vertical trend line (it trades as BTC on dedicated online exchanges). Now there’s a chart that either ends in tears or tracks the biggest gold rush we’ve ever seen.

Ayre’s stint as a target of U.S. law enforcement underpins his interest in this realm. Back in 2006, 95% of Bodog’s business was reported to be with American customers. And while he claims to have backed out of online gaming shortly after, the DOJ wasn’t going to forget the billion dollars he’d amassed while he was still in it. United States prosecutors initially indicated that he could avoid indictment if he was willing to part with $350 million in fines. Ayre declined.

“He didn’t do what he was expected to do,” says Patrick Basham, director of the Democracy Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C., that has spent years tracking the online gaming sector. “The point of the U.S. action was to get Ayre to throw up his hands to avoid having his life taken away.” Ayre himself explained his demurral in a 2006 magazine interview when he paraphrased Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “I’m going to win this war without fighting battles.”

Ayre may not have wanted a fight, but the DOJ did. It indicted Ayre in 2012 on charges of operating an illegal online gambling operation that engaged in international money laundering. But the low point came shortly thereafter, when Ayre’s associates in the Philippines decided they could exploit his weakened position. Basham hinted at violence, so I probe Ayre for details at lunch.

“What was that all about in the Philippines?” I ask, as ceviche and potted shrimps, shellfish cocktails and scallops arrive.

Ayre puts down his fork and wipes his mouth with a napkin. “That was all about unscrupulous people trying to take advantage of my situation with the U.S. and steal my shit, basically.”

But what did they do? I press.

“Oh,” Ayre says, realizing I don’t know the details. He picks up his fork and starts eating with enthusiasm, talking with his mouth full. “They tried to kidnap me. A few times. But they…ah…they missed. So, lucky me! Candy, have you tried these? They’re yummy!”

Ayre was finally cleared of U.S. felony charges this summer. After 10 years of legal wrangling, it seems the government blinked. Maybe it was because Ayre really was out of gambling, as he claimed. Maybe it was the World Trade Organization rulings that repeatedly said the U.S. couldn’t go after Antiguan gambling interests, which is where Ayre was by then based. Ayre pled guilty to a single misdemeanour of being an accessory after the fact to the transmission of wagering information. The penalty was a year of unsupervised probation and a $500,000 fine. The end of the ordeal came in a conference call hosted by his lawyer in Vancouver in July 2017. But Ayre doesn’t view it as the key moment. That occurred shortly thereafter, when he arrived in London, free to cross borders without fear of being extradited for the first time in five years.

“That was cool,” he says, remembering. “Very cool.” Then he laughs. “London is the epicentre of online gaming and the epicentre of bitcoin. And that’s not a coincidence.”

—

Ayre’s bitcoin eureka moment came in 2010. He had already given up the Bodog operation, and a technology specialist working with him on a new venture (which he declines to name) presented the idea of a currency exchange for bitcoin. Ayre was only vaguely aware of the virtual currency, which had no commercial applications and negligible value at the time. But once he had the details—an international payment system involving encryption, distributed accounting, pseudonymity and no centralized control—Ayre started paying attention.

“I was like, this technology does what? Like, seriously, what?” Ayre recalls. “From the first moment I had it fully explained, I knew it was going to be huge.”

Given that Ayre was in the crosshairs of the most powerful government in the world, the fit was clearly good. After all, bitcoin is a fundamentally libertarian idea. The technology emerged from online discussions between a group of American cryptographers and a mysterious person (or possibly several people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi first formalized the bitcoin concept in the November 2008 white paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Then, following an online posting warning against using bitcoin to send donations to WikiLeaks, he abruptly disappeared. Speculation about Satoshi’s identity has become the digital-age equivalent of trying to uncover Deep Throat. In 2014, Newsweek famously found someone with the same name and turned his life into a circus before realizing they didn’t have their man. A couple of years later, a blustery Australian crypto-enthusiast and businessman named Craig Wright stepped forward, claiming to be Satoshi. GQ magazine hired cryptographers of their own and busted his hoax. But Satoshi’s spirit—a will to invisibility, to a perfectly preserved individual autonomy, to an absence of centralized control—informs the whole bitcoin project. And it has always appealed to people who have reason to distrust such control in the hands of government.

But Ayre was also starting to understand why others were talking about this currency like it represented a revolution. “You have to look at bitcoin as not just a payment. Payment is just the first usage,” says Shone Anstey, a Vancouver entrepreneur whose company, Blockchain Intelligence Group, designs software that law enforcement agencies use to track cryptocurrency transactions. “Bitcoin adds a trusted transaction layer to the Internet itself. It’s a very fundamental shift in the world. Once you understand it from that perspective, you start to see how big it’s going to get.”

The original motive of bitcoin’s inventors may have been to evade governments, banks and especially law enforcement, but in recent years the currency has been making inroads into mainstream consumer markets. This year saw an explosion in the number of users, which now hovers around 12 million. Today, dozens of companies offer software and hardware “wallets” to securely store the coins and exchanges on which to trade them. And companies ranging from Microsoft to spaceflight business Virgin Galactic will sell you their goods and services for bitcoins.

To appreciate the scale of this growth, consider that in mid-2010, the trading value of BTC was fractions of a penny. Users were mostly cryptographers experimenting with the protocol formalized in Satoshi’s white paper. In the most famous story from those days, Florida developer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC to have a couple of pizzas delivered, just to prove that the currency could theoretically be used in commerce. A few months after Hanyecz’s experiment, BTC took off. Within a year, it was trading at $30, making those pizzas worth about $150,000 apiece. But the steepest run-up is happening this year. As of early November, the value of 10,000 BTCs stood at $70 million. That makes Satoshi Nakamoto’s reported position of one million bitcoins (his founder’s stake) worth $7 billion. No wonder people still want to find him.

This growth may exhibit “irrational exuberance,” as Alan Greenspan famously characterized the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. It has also created a problem—the same one that plagued the early Internet, when its user base went from geek specialists to commercial entities: scalability. How do you grow the thing without breaking it? If you’re old enough, you’ll remember that some developers never thought the Internet would be able to handle images. Then it was video. And on it went. But techies—often working in porn, gambling and other shady reaches of the web—devised ever new ways to accommodate user growth and the emergent demands that those users put on the system.

In bitcoin’s case, as for any cryptocurrency based on “blockchain” technology (see “Crypto cheat sheet,” below), the growth will be constrained by the system’s capacity to process transactions. The exploding user base is already slowing down the BTC exchange systems, which leads to higher costs for those who maintain the system, which leads to higher transaction fees to users. Roger Ver, a Tokyo-based entrepreneur whose early championing of bitcoin has given him cult figure–like status and the moniker “Bitcoin Jesus,” tells me that the fees have gone from fractions of a penny per BTC transaction in the early days to about $10 now. Key BTC proponents are talking about average fees reaching $100 or even $1,000 per transaction, he says.

That reality has caused a proliferation of competing cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Dash, Ripple and Monero. Think of these nascent currencies as alternate routes that people start to seek out when the freeway becomes gridlocked. Some cryptocurrency enthusiasts—notably Calvin Ayre, Roger Ver, Craig Wright and anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee—have been voting with their feet by abandoning BTC and embracing a new currency launched on August 1 of this year. Called Bitcoin Cash (trading as BCH), it is expressly designed to speed up payment validation, lower system maintenance costs, and ultimately lower transaction costs to users. According to its proponents, BCH is a bid to get Bitcoin back to Satoshi’s original vision: fast, easy, cheap and reliable peer-to-peer transactions, with privacy for users and no central control.

Ayre grows animated as the topic of BTC scalability and the schism with BCH comes up. As the wine is poured and our mains arrive—lemon sole on the bone with sauce Bernaise, monkfish and tiger prawn masala—the judgement he renders is unequivocal.

“For Bitcoin to be successful, you need to have massive scaling, increased velocity of transactions, and low transaction fees. I firmly believe that. And so do the people we’re working with in this industry. BCH is Bitcoin. BTC might survive off in the wilderness as something else. But it’s not the real Bitcoin.”

Those appear to be more than words. In what may be the biggest gamble of his career, Ayre has pulled his cryptocurrency investments entirely out of BTC and put all that money into BCH. “You know what you should do?” he says, knife and fork in hand, getting ready to eat. “Twenty-five percent of your net assets. Put them in BCH. Don’t even let yourself look at it for a year. Then see what you have.”

So Ayre’s all in BCH. Or so he says. It’s hard to quantify his bet, since he won’t say anything about his net worth or where his money might be otherwise invested. For what it’s worth, when I ask Ver if Ayre is a big player in BCH, he laughs out loud. They’ve never met, but the first thing Ver wants me to know is that he’s honoured Ayre even knew enough about him to mention him positively in our conversation. That’s coming from Bitcoin Jesus. Then he says, “Any time a billionaire gets involved in your area, they become a big player. Yeah. Calvin’s a really big player.”

Ayre’s description of his battle plan suggests he’s moving on multiple fronts. He’s investing in fintech startups that relate to the cryptocurrency arena. He’s developing the capacity to verify BCH transactions, a process known as “mining,” and seeking cheap electricity to support the massive server farms that will require. He needs sub-5¢ a kilowatt hour, he tells me. Russia is looking promising. Ayre has also built a private commerce platform, based in Antigua, that processes cryptocurrency transactions globally both as a currency exchange and an intermediary for commercial entities.

“I’ve become one of the biggest private Bitcoin processors in the world today,” he boasts, leaning back as a waiter ghosts in to peel the skeleton out of his lemon sole in a single deft motion. “And when I say ‘private,’ that means I process only for people that I want to process.”

The last part of his plan, Ayre tells me, is become a spokesman for BCH. With the DOJ shackles off his travel, he can move around and talk to people. He’s purchased CoinGeek.com, a site devoted to cryptocurrency news, from which he can get the BCH message out. And, of course, he’s here in London eating lunch with me. “Yeah,” he says. “Part of the reason I agreed to this is that I want to work on polishing my own personal brand in the Bitcoin space. Our group needs more people like me, like Roger Ver. People willing to step forward.”

He has a habit of drumming his hands on the table to emphasize a point that particularly excites him. He does that now, either side of his plate: Badabadabada Bum!

Certainly, there is evidence of street-level excitement about BCH. Ver remains diversified, he tells me, holding a range of virtual currencies, but he now owns more BCH than BTC. Even more telling is his willingness to wager on the success of BCH, which he did recently with prominent BTC supporter Wang Chun, owner of the mining pool F2Pool. At the 2017 Shape the Future Blockchain Global Summit in Hong Kong, Chun suggested that BCH “will be short-lived.” Ver put $1 million on the table and gave Chun a two-year time frame.

Others are also stepping forward to back BCH. A couple of weeks after my lunch with Ayre at Scott’s, Craig Wright—the once would-be Satoshi Nakamoto—appeared in London to speak about cryptocurrencies at an event held in the basement of a pub. In a rambling, wine-fueled address to a room packed with more than a hundred people, mostly young men, Wright extolled the history-shifting virtues of BCH. “There is no need for a gold and silver of Bitcoin,” he said. One investment grade will do: “We only need Bitcoin Cash.”

If Ver’s wager and Wright’s zeal carry the day, then Ayre’s big gamble comes good. But it’s worth considering what might stand in the way. BTC market share has eroded with the emergence of BCH and other virtual currencies—Ver estimates that it’s down from 99% three years ago to less than 50% today—but there are still more proponents than critics of the original Bitcoin.

Shone Anstey of Blockchain Intelligence, whose software helps law enforcement agencies prevent activities such as money laundering or terrorism financing using cryptocurrencies, thinks BTC will prevail. “It has more computational power behind the network than BCH by a long shot.” More importantly, Anstey argues, BTC has reached the tipping point of broad acceptance. He reminds me of the acrimonious debates of the early internet, which also relied on an open network and architecture. “But the internet just kept motoring along and getting bigger and bigger, and eventually…there were so many users, so much momentum, that it became impossible to kill.” He believes that’s where BTC is now.

Investors choosing between BTC and BCH might do well to also consider which currency is more likely to garner the support of regulators, which are eyeing the currencies warily on both sides of the border. While cryptocurrencies in general remain inherently hostile to surveillance, such as would be required to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing, or even taxation, original Bitcoin is far safer in this regard. Anstey’s confidence in BTC is based partly on the fact that BTC transactions can be analyzed using software tools of the sort his company develops, which untangle the encryption and link individuals to suspicious transactions. Both the RCMP and U.S. Homeland Security are already clients.

BCH, in contrast, is touted precisely because it makes the tracking of suspicious activity more difficult. First, by increasing the size of the transaction blocks, the currency greatly raises the volume of data that authorities must be sift through, Ver explains. Second, with BCH’s much lower transaction fees, users can afford “mixing” services, which scramble transactions and make them harder to trace to individuals. And if these features disrupt efforts to curb money laundering and financing of terrorism, or even the national economic policies of nations, so be it. “People having more control over their money is a good thing,” says Ver. “So it’s bad that Al Qaida will have more control over their money too. But the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no putting it back.”

As our lunch draws to a close, Ayre ends up echoing Ver’s point almost exactly. He acknowledges that widespread adoption of BCH would represent a loss of centralized control, but he views that as a net gain. He brings up Russia again, as the government most likely to support the ideals of BCH and cryptocurrencies generally. “People talk about Russia shutting this thing down,” he says. “They won’t. Because it’s the one thing they have as a hedge against American control of the global financial system.”

So who invented Bitcoin? I ask. Who is Satoshi? Maybe GRU, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency?

He smiles at that, leans back. The waiters have cleared the table. Candy sits in silence, waiting for this long conversation to be over. The noise in the restaurant has been rising steadily since we arrived, all of posh London seemingly crammed into the same place at once, laughing and talking and clattering silverware. I can’t tell if Ayre had considered previously that Russia might have been behind this most recent of disruptive technologies. It wouldn’t be the first time Western libertarian impulses received support from those who used to peer at us over an Iron Curtain.

But no. He shakes his head. Satoshi was a group of people, that much is true, he tells me. To explain, he comes back his new Bitcoin commerce platform—that private service that he claims makes him one of the largest crypto-transaction processors in the world today and which he offers only to chosen clients. Like who? I ask. He leans in, lowering his voice. “Gaming sites,” he says. “Non-U.S. facing, of course. But here’s a little story I’m going to tell you.”

Satoshi: People say the big idea came out of the market crash of 2009 and the subsequent frustration with Wall Street. That wasn’t it, he says. “Bitcoin comes out of the gaming industry. The people who created it were online gaming companies responding to aggressive governments. There’s actually poker code writing in the original Bitcoin code. Did you know that? It’s there if you know where to look.”

Ayre is pleased to share this detail. There’s no way to confirm it, of course. And it certainly fits the narrative that Ayre seems eager to spin: of gaming companies as the heroes of independent enterprise, ingeniously overcoming hurdles erected by Big Government, just as Ayre himself has rounded the track, taking hurdle after hurdle, outlasting his pursuers, and ending up in a new place that can yet be seen to have emerged from the old. In orbit again around the planet Chance. Bets down. Outcome pending. A crooked smile on a gambler’s face.

Lunch is over. Ayre is on his feet. The expensive Burgundy he ordered has hardly been touched.

“We gonna take this?” he asks Candy. “We can drink it later.”

And with that, he’s off and out into Mayfair, bottle in hand.

I’m even more convinced now, having eaten at Robbins new place in Kits AnnaLena (named for his two grandmothers). There’s a playful and welcoming quality to this room too: rec-room chic bar, Lego light fixtures, Darth Vader alarm clock, casual but attentive service. Robbins himself has described his food as Modern Comfort Food. But cast your eyes upwards and note a crucial detail: high on a shelf, as if to say that direct reference to them is no longer required, a copy of the NOMA cookbook and all five volumes of the 2500 word mega-gastrotech-tome Modernist Cuisine.

That’s your cue that dinner will likely be more modern than comfort. And while I am almost invariably more comfort than modern myself, Robbins has nailed it at AnnaLena. Every plate pushed the boundaries, and in almost invariably the right way.

We started with a table of small plates. The grilled octopus is first sous vided, giving each bite a creamy tenderness with a background note of char. Finished with fingerling potato, sauce gribiche, dill fronds and lobster mayonnaise, it’s an umami wow. The buttermilk fried chicken has a similar complexity, with the twice-fried chicken thighs perfectly cooked, combining crunch with a sharp sweetness from the horseradish maple aioli, and the fantastic finish from salt and vinegar chicken skins. Every time I looked up, it seemed that three more of these were on the pass and whisked away. I sense a neighborhood standard being born.

Other small plates evoked that same approachable inventiveness. Cured tuna is combined with crisp sweetbreads, papaya salad with puffed wild rice, all this nestled down in a lime coconut broth with cilantro oil. Combine with wild garlic torn sourdough for dipping and there’s a taste of what modern comfort means.

None of these plates overly genuflect to their localness, an interesting choice on Robbins part at this moment in culinary history. But there was a spot prawn special. And Robbins had them whole peeled, tossed with pickled jalepenos, black garlic, toasted sesame seeds and nasturtium leaves. It’s a neat trick to pull off the overlay of saline ocean flavors with earthy and peppery notes. Great dish.

The larger plates extended these themes. Wagyu short rib is sous-vided and seared, served with peppercorn jus over sun choke puree, with peas, sun choke chips, radish and pea shoots, and tiny potatoes carved into tinier mushroom shapes, proving someone is still rocking the old school techniques back there. And if there were a climax to the meal, I’d name the pork belly. A potential gastro-cliché, here it is gets the Robbins treatment and is artful, surprising and complexly delicious from beginning to end. The grilled pork belly is marinated for 24 hours in tamari and served with roasted beets and pickled mustard seeds. And in a nod – unwitting or otherwise – to the similarly personal and innovative spirit of Dave Gunawan’s Farmers Apprentice, Robbins here elects to bind the elements of the dish with an oat porridge. What sounds horrifying is warmly comforting indeed.

Don’t skip desserts, because this team can do sweet with the same sensibility as the plates described above. Black pepper thyme ice cream is superb with the texture of nut crumble and meringue, and a spike of acid from the rhubarb compote and rhubarb gel. The salted caramel ice cream will be too salty for some – it was for me, not for my son who licked the plate – but combined with the chocolate custard, the sponge toffee and the lemon/bitter chocolate dust, you get again that surprising roundness in every bite for which this kitchen will soon be well known.

In another cooking show called My Kitchen Rules, the Australian judges like to comment on whether the dishes served really rose to the standards of a “competition dish”. For a guy who didn’t get his due on Top Chef, Robbins is knocking out exactly that at AnnaLena. Each dish vying for the top of the list.

Photo Credit: www.chicharestaurant.com

Continuing with my repost of restaurant reviews written for my friends at Vancouver Magazine… I confess that I’m torn about posting the bad ones. There have been a few. But I don’t know many food writers who enjoy speaking poorly of a place. And if you have to – because a place is pretentious or over-rated or just poor quality – then you do it once, and don’t necessarily want to repeat yourself.

As luck would have it, most of the new places I’ve tried in Vancouver in the past couple of years have been great. So I’m nowhere near running out of positives.

So I’ll stick with that, for the time being. Here’s my thoughts on the “modern Peruvian” restaurant Chicha, on Broadway over near Main. Excellent little place, well worth trying if you are in town.

——————————————————————————-

The term “white table cloth” as short hand for “fine dining” doesn’t mean much anymore. In keeping with roughly everything else going on in Western society, there’s no longer any agreement on the ceremony of the great meal. At the VanMag restaurant awards last month (2014), none of the restaurants shortlisted in the “Best New” category use table clothes at all. And one of them specializes in currywurst which is to German cuisine roughly what the Timbit is to ours: loved but not lofty.

Chicha on Broadway is the kind of eatery that happily flourishes in this liberalized dining space. Billed as “modern Peruvian tapas”, the Broadway & Main 40-seater is a category pioneer, and the décor gives few clues as to the dining experience in store. The room has a Lima backstreet feel with its Peruvian textiles, turquoise and black walls, cutlery wrapped in paper napkins and green tinted bottles of Pisco stacked behind the bar. But the Bin 942 legacy of chefs Shelome Bouvette and Allison Flook suggest a more polished culinary sensibility which is brilliantly manifest on the table.

These are approachable street-level dishes, make no mistake. Cassava fries with spicy Huancaina sauce (thickened with saltines traditionally, with bread here). Classic ceviche with lime, cilantro and corn. Antichuco skewers, smoky from the grill. Causa potatoes and empanadas in flakey crust with savory chicken filling. And service is impressively fast. We ordered a table of food on a night when the restaurant was slammed. Large extended South American families to our left and right. The housewives of Cambie Corridor crowded in around the bar drinking Margarita Patadas infused with jalepeno and Chilcanos made with ginger. Our food started arriving and didn’t seem to stop, a happy parade of bright flavours and fresh, colourful presentations.

Photo Credit: www.chicharestaurant.com

And here’s where the meal steps above its street-level inspirations. Those causa? It’s a cold mashed potato dish served with canned tuna in its most common form. At Chicha the potatoes are whipped to an airy texture, infused with herbs or beetroot or Aji Amarillo, topped with crab or black sesame crusted fresh tuna. Papas rellenas come perfectly crusted, paradoxically light for the carbohydrate payload, stuffed with fragrantly seasoned ground beef. And then the sliders. You could go to Chicha just for the Pan Con Chicharron and emerge with a full stomach and a solid idea what this place is all about. Not strictly Peruvian but deriving from the country’s long Asian associations, a sweet mouthful of glazed pork belly on a soft bun, red onion, a spray of radish sprouts: explosive culinary simplicity. That is one hell of a bite.

In the end, Chicha succeeds in marrying the aesthetics of the high and the low and in a room that buzzes with energy and enthusiasm. Here’s a menu of nailed flavors and innovations that rarely draw attention to themselves. Delicious and unpretentious, more or less my highest praise. Is the flavor profile of this food narrow? You could probably winnow these plates out to three main flavor groups: those deriving from red chili, those from Aji Amarillo, and those from a green herb described to me as the “Peruvian basil” which in fact bears resemblance to mint. But that would be to miss the flexibility of the trio as its used with different proteins and in different preparations. Those are the base notes of Peruvian flavor there. The melody and harmonizing is all Bouvette and Flook. And what a song they make together.

The name chichi may derive from the cocktail chichi morado,made with  purple corn, spices, pineapple, and citrus. I prefer the alternate explanation offered by the chefs themselves: “feminine and fun”. And who needs a white table for that?

Chef David Gunawan’s restaurant Farmer’s Apprentice was my first assignment on the job. He captures perfectly the inversion of culinary values in the foodie west over the course of the past 30 years or so.

In high end rooms, it used to be an almost unswerving devotion to three ideas:

1. Adherence to continental and North European culinary tropes.
2. A muted elegance of flavours.
3. The exotic foreign ingredient.

In contemporary foodie rooms, we now see an almost perfectly inverted set of values, derived I’d argue from the originals:

1. Innovation in technique and aesthetic.
2. Bold, bright, surprising flavours and combinations.
3. The exotic local ingredient, foraging, 100 mile etc.

So if you want to eat the contemporary culinary moment, so to speak, and you also happen to be in Vancouver, you won’t got wrong at The Farmer’s Apprentice, even if you will almost certainly be perplexed by some of what you’re served.

FARMER’S APPRENTICE

When Chef David Gunawan spoke at Pecha Kucha last year, just a couple of months after opening The Farmer’s Apprentice with partner Dara Young, he made a comment that got nervous laughs. He’d been talking about his desire to eliminate the ego in cuisine, to do away with pretension and fussiness — the crumb removal and expensive cutlery — and get at something more surprising. And he said: “We don’t want you to like everything about us. I find it boring to love all dishes. I’d rather have you like one, hate another, and find two okay, then have a dessert that’s amazing!”

Maybe chefs aren’t supposed to say that, but Gunawan did and good for him because The Farmer’s Apprentice is packed. Forty seats, including every available inch at the bar, and I was there twice and could hardly see the floor. An interesting room: equal parts hole-in-the-wall comfort station and mad scientist’s lair. There are simple wood tables, jars of pickles on shelves, a warmly lit sidebar with a turntable and a stack of vinyl. But then there’s the kitchen, which is so open that you feel like you’re eating in it. It pulses with energy as Gunawan and his cooks and dishwashers square-dance around the Rational oven and Kamado grill and a single prep table stacked with what would appear to be 800 plastic tubs of mise en place.

Keep reading here.

Illustration by Alain Pilon: www.thewalrus.ca

This march, I join my fellow citizens in the never-festive season of taxes—but what most people find familiar is actually quite novel to me. Since I quit my last real day job at the Toronto-Dominion Bank in 1991, you see, I have been an independent corporation. I have paid taxes, just not much on my personal income. That changed when I took a faculty position at the University of British Columbia last summer. For the first time in nearly twenty-five years, I started receiving an actual paycheque with deductions. March now has a weightier feel.

Weirdly, I relish it. Maybe it’s just because Canadian politicians, whom I find myself despising almost universally at this moment, all tell me that I should resist paying taxes. If Harper says, more or less, “No tax is a good tax,” and Trudeau and Mulcair have both ruled out tax increases for the middle class—as in ever—well, there must be something good about them.

That contrarian logic may lack robustness, but such is the state of our politics today. Virtually nobody campaigns on tax policy beyond saying taxes are bad. Here I find myself in agreement with a thoughtful new book of essays edited by Canadian civil servant and academic Alex Himelfarb and his son Jordan. Tax Is Not a Four-Letter Word attempts what could be among the hardest of hard sells: convincing people that they should be prepared to at least discuss taxes in the service of fairness, preservation of social programs, and ongoing economic health.

I might as well come clean here, at the top. From the standpoint of the conventional left-right spectrum (arguably defunct, more on that later), I’m not always on the same page as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, several of whose leading lights have contributed to the Himelfarbs’ book. At the risk of over-disclosure, my high school yearbook recorded my then pet peeves as “poodles, math, and socialists,” each of which I regret naming, though for different reasons and in varying degrees. However, I’m happy to concur with the ccpa in principle on this issue: we need taxation to become part of the agenda. My agreement with those experts, which defies the very idea of a political spectrum, draws attention to a critical point. Taxes represent more than just a political and economic discussion; they form part of a larger cultural one.

Cut taxes not defense,” read a sign that Alex Himelfarb once saw in the background of a Tea Party demonstration. Change “defense” to “education” or “health care,” or “snowplowing,” and you can Canadianize the sentiment and highlight the paradox in play: people have decoupled taxes from the services they receive. They no longer view taxes as payment but as punishment. It was not always this way, as ubc economist and tax expert Kevin Milligan points out; a complete sea change has occurred over thirty-odd years in how taxes are perceived by the public and used by government.

Himelfarb argues that it all began with economic neo-liberalism, as popularized by the Thatcher and Reagan administrations and later by Brian Mulroney in Canada—the principles we now all know: smaller government, lower taxes. I can testify to their seductive power, because I was studying economics at the University of Alberta during those very years. I have a distinct memory of the Laffer Curve first being trotted out for a political purpose. In a press photo, Stanford-trained economist Arthur Laffer stands with President Reagan in front of a blackboard with x and y axes plotting tax rates against revenue, the graph illustrating that tax increases only generate higher revenues up to a certain threshold, after which the relationship inverts.

Laffer did not put forward one magic, optimal tax rate. He suggested a theory, uncontroversial really, in which the taxable citizens, companies, and transactions in our economy resemble anything else in life on which we place demands—our knees, our spouses’ patience—in that increasing demand only raises returns up to a point, after which further increases result in your getting a lot less.

This was not implicitly an idea of the right, it should be noted. Laffer said he got it from the legendary British economist John Maynard Keynes, who is typically associated with the left, but this just shows that neutral concepts can be weaponized in politics. Reagan used Laffer to justify generalized tax cutting, part of the neo-liberal economic agenda to minimize government in favour of the market, and the concept hit what can be seen in retrospect as a political sweet spot. Margaret Thatcher won in 1983, pulling away with a 73 percent voter turnout. Ronald Reagan won in 1984 with one of the highest popular votes in American history. Meanwhile, in Canada that same year, Mulroney was elected with over half of the popular vote and no other party reaching fifty seats.

Neo-liberalism eased smoothly into the discourse because people welcomed it there. Western economies were in stagflation, and Canadian taxpayers were paying a quarter of every tax dollar toward interest on the national debt. In positing the antidote, which Himelfarb himself refers to as a “counter-revolution,” neo-liberal economics overturned an understanding of the relationship between citizens and their countries that had existed since World War II.

“In the decades after the war, taxes were the hinge that connected us to a common purpose,” Himelfarb says. “We were building a new society. Social and health policies came about during this time. Income inequality, which was huge before the war, was decreased. We created a middle class and progress both individual and collective was assumed.”

We defined an optimistic, progressive Canada during those postwar years, in other words, and Himelfarb would have us believe that with the dawn of neo-liberal economics we began to dismantle it.

Part of me wants to dispute the charge. As a young economics student—during a time, let’s say, when I hoped economics might explain everything—I was persuaded by the elegant simplicity and individualistic ethics of neo-liberal ideas. Yet I cannot deny the negative aspects of our situation today that derive from the three-decade project to get government out of our lives and rely as exclusively as possible on markets. Chief among these would be an endemic distrust and cynicism about political engagement. Admittedly, it is impossible to prove that big government, 1970s-style, would have avoided this outcome (even if we could have afforded it), but neo-liberal economics has proven to be an undertaking that eats itself on the occasion of its triumph. Tell people that government is evil for long enough, that it is wasteful and inefficient and obstructs our freedoms, and eventually they will believe you so thoroughly that it will impinge on the ability of you or anybody else to govern.

The economic legacies are perhaps even bigger concerns. While we are aggregately richer, the data is clear on the distribution of this greater wealth: real median incomes hover at around 1980 levels in Canada, and though low-income earners are probably no worse off than they were thirty years ago, the distance between them and the wealthy has grown vastly. Does income inequality matter? Well, for a long time conventional wisdom said it didn’t; pursuing income equality via redistribution was thought to reduce overall economic efficiency. Still, it is notable that the International Monetary Fund disagreed recently, writing in a 2011 report that “equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth.” As well, the research clearly shows that income inequality, to the extent that it contributes to poverty, has negative consequences on children and their futures.

In the end, intuition can probably guide us here. Sure, income inequality can serve as a motivator. It proves on one level that people can get rich under the right circumstances, and data does support the point that more poor people manage to become rich now than in, say, the eighteenth century. Eventually, though, income inequality contributes to a sense of futility, which neo-liberal economic thinking tends to exacerbate with its hard stance on how government and its redistributive efforts are a waste of time.

Here is where middle-income earners could contribute to the discourse, being neither fatalistically poor nor obliviously rich. Unfortunately, they are discouraged from doing so by the politics of our day, and by their own economic stagnation, which predisposes voters to reward politicians who offer tax breaks. Consider, suggests Milligan, that in the last federal election the Conservatives won on a suite of “boutique tax cuts”—for seniors, for working families, and so on—none of which meant much economically to either the government or the people receiving them, but all of which earned the Conservatives crucial votes. “A triumph of targeted political marketing,” Milligan says. Of course, everybody knew what the transaction was all about, and faith in government for the common good fell still further from the dubious toward the ridiculous.

And so we arrive at the contemporary paradox, a “social trap” in Himelfarb’s analysis. When pollsters call us, 72 percent of high-income earners will agree that, sure, we should probably pay more tax to narrow the income equality gap; 89 percent of us will agree that we should look at something like a millionaires’ tax; and 60 percent will answer yes over the phone to whether or not there should be a carbon tax. Nevertheless, on election day, in the privacy of that voting booth, we will all do the same thing we did last time: vote for the government we think will cost us the least.

How telling is it that right after admitting to smoking crack, Toronto mayor Rob Ford pledged to get back to work “saving taxpayers’ money,” as if amid all of the chaos there could be no more ardent statement of his commitment to his constituency. It was neo-liberal economics in tragic, red-faced emblem: a tyrant denying his abuse and wagging his finger at the straw man of big government. Promising, promising, while the ground shakes and the house burns down around him.

It is a pretty compelling formulation, yet one of Himelfarb’s own comments leads me to think that we require another dimension to describe the situation. Taxes were the hinge that connected us to a common purpose, he says, cutting to the heart of what they represent versus what they are, strictly speaking, collected to do. We pay taxes to build roads, to hire teachers and firefighters, to fund EI and income assistance. But we also pay to play, and the game in question is citizenship, membership, community. Surely nothing could highlight our vanishing willingness to meaningfully engage with one another in these ways than the experience of implementing the hst and carbon taxes in British Columbia, where Milligan says he encountered resistance, even among those who would receive full compensation.

“They would literally get a cheque every quarter reimbursing the taxes they had paid on coffee and gas,” he says of people who remained bitterly resistant. “What ratio of reimbursement to taxes paid would earn support? Three to one? Eight to one? ”

These were clearly not economic positions being staked; they were cultural statements about the willingness to contribute at all. Here is where, neo-liberal or Marxist or whatever we call ourselves, we should not be surprised. Citizenship, membership, and community are collective conceptions of the self, and our steady drift toward more individual self-conceptions has been underway for far longer than neo-liberal economics, and in ways that have nothing to do with the economy.

Viewed through the widest lens, we are in the late stages of what philosopher Charles Taylor has called “the great disembedding,” a process whereby we increasingly define ourselves independently of formal obligation to any matrix or hierarchy. Perhaps the writer who speaks most emphatically to this dynamic is Alexis de Tocqueville. In his nineteenth-century book Democracy in America, he directly addresses how these impulses played out in the North American context. He observed Americans to have a belief in “indefinite perfectibility,” which arose from their sense of equality. However, he also observed that in a society where all are equal and autonomous and endowed with a belief in self-improvement, we inevitably become less and less able to see ourselves as part of a larger narrative, one that involves our fellow citizens, as well as ancestors and descendants.

Tocqueville was not recommending a return to aristocracy, despite coming from Norman nobility himself. He recognized the potency of what was flourishing in America, with Canada not far behind as our links to the monarchy grew ever more symbolic: the will to seek individual freedom and attainment. What was alive in the souls of Americans and Canadians during that heady postwar run that Himelfarb understandably remembers with wistful fondness? A common purpose stimulated by the horrors of a recent war, yes, but also a surging, empowered individual, with newly acknowledged human rights and freedoms, and the seemingly boundless capacity for improving the world. Indefinite perfectibility. The 1960s and 1970s in particular, just before the neo-liberal counter-revolution, were a time of intense optimism and assertive individual flowering. Yet it would be a mistake not to connect the dots from the freed individual with inherent rights and value, to the me generation and onward, to such possibly perverted conclusions as “Greed is good,” or even the hyperbolic Thatcherism “There is no such thing as society.” The mistake is to ignore the Tocquevillian conundrum: that these impulses toward individual freedom and attainment also contain the seed of a selfishness that isolates and confines us, cutting us off from one another and from generations past and future.

In the earliest years of the neo-liberal counter-revolution, that selfishness may have seemed like the necessary fuel to power us out of economic malaise. Perhaps at that moment in history, a set of economic ideas was allowed to hijack the boat on which social justice might have otherwise sailed, but the evolution was not simply a shift from left to right. The culture as a whole was on the move across social as well as economic dimensions. Around the time that the Laffer Curve was first dusted off for political use, an epic hyper-liberalizing of both the self and the economy was underway, both born of the same impulse for freedom.

Maybe having a child has shaped me here in a way that my economics and business education could not have anticipated, linking me to something intergenerational, making concrete the idea of obligation, causing Tocqueville to resonate. Almost certainly, my time in the Canadian Forces had an effect, acquainting me (perhaps temporarily, but unforgettably) with how the civilian values of individual freedom and attainment both repudiate and yet paradoxically depend on the core military values of duty and sacrifice. You can’t have the former without the latter, as World War II proved to Alex Himelfarb’s generation.

Therefore, it would seem like an easy bit of reductionism to now blame Wall Street for everything (or poodles, or socialists), and what is easy is rarely best. An urgency exists here, I would argue, as we face something like a Tragedy of the Commons 2.0. Just as, in the original version, cattle farmers were observed to over-graze a shared field while sustainably using their private plots, we are failing to sustain a resource over which we no longer feel any obligation, that part of ourselves that was once embedded in citizenship, membership, and community. What is common among us—the environment, the education of our kids, just treatment for all citizens, the very idea of being Canadian—finds itself starved of investment. The damage, meanwhile, is there to measure: income inequality, a stagnant middle class, mounting distrust of leadership, and a corrosive, cynical political machinery that now competes for votes in a manner that is only semantically different from buying them.

We are good at individual rights and freedoms. We’re not so hot at duty and sacrifice. And that is not simply because of neo-liberal economics. It is because Tocqueville was right 100 years before Arthur Laffer was born.

Unfortunately, we can’t look to the past for solutions, because at no point in history have we been the people we are today. We can’t devolve socially and re-embed into constraining hierarchies, and we shouldn’t want to. Justin Trudeau’s admiration of China’s “basic dictatorship” is execrable on that level. Likewise the mayor of Vancouver, Gregor Robertson, for praising China’s ability to quickly implement environmental policies with the comment “You can question how worthwhile democracy is in a lot of countries right now.”

Trudeau and Robertson may question it, but we shouldn’t. Instead, we should urgently commit to thinking about how free, autonomous individuals can yet reconstruct the common good, such that citizens feel a genuine obligation to it, and that will entail putting taxes back on the agenda. We need to pay, but we also need to be ready to play.

The good news is that this is already happening, in a scattered way. The Himelfarbs have released their book. Susan Holt of the New Brunswick Business Council has recently called for the province to increase hst and corporate income taxes to help reduce the deficit. Last September, Missouri governor Jay Nixon vetoed a piece of tax-cutting legislation in his state that he argued would harm schools and mental health services. In California, Proposition 30 passed last November, permitting new taxes to fund education. Meanwhile, over at the Patriotic Millionaires website, you can find 100-plus people earning over $1 million a year who join billionaire Warren Buffett in calling for President Barack Obama to increase taxes on the rich, including themselves. Which returns us to obligation. None of this works if we don’t figure out how to feel the debt that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted we would struggle to feel.

“He willingly sets himself duties towards both [generations before and after]…and he frequently comes to sacrifice his personal pleasures to these beings who no longer exist or do not yet exist.” That’s Tocqueville on the citizen under aristocracy, something we might consider trying to duplicate using our necessarily more individualistic motivations. It may well seem like a stretch—a cultural change, an awakened sense of duty almost certainly reliant on a political leadership now non-existent—but then, nobody said this indefinite perfectibility business would be easy.

This appeared in the March 2014 issue of The Walrus.

As I wrote in Vancouver Magazine more recently, the double helix of the story is endlessly compelling. And the story has touched many, many people. I’ve been contacted countless times by people wanting to know more. And Haftlang himself has told me that people showed up at his place of work after the first article was published just to pose for pictures with him.

But it hasn’t all been sunshine and happiness. It perhaps never is for refugees and survivors of torture. Both Haftlang and Aboud carry haunting memories. And Haftlang has struggled to stay employed. He lost his auto-mechanics business in 2012, and is still looking for a job at the moment I’m writing this post.

All that said, Haftlang also isn’t a guy to give up easily. He’s written a memoir with journalist Robert Matas that’s looking for a publisher. He’s also planning an incredible walk to the United Nations (yes, from Vancouver to New York City, by foot) to raise awareness of both his story and the world’s urgent need to set aside war.

Some would say the idea is quixotic, romantic, idealistic. And it would certainly be easy to dismiss it in that fashion. Only it’s worth bearing in mind that this is a man who has walked exceedingly long distances before. He crossed a good part of Northern Iraq by foot as a boy soldier. And after his release from Iraqi POW camp in 1990, he walked across Iran on his return home. He doesn’t boast about any of this. In fact, when he tells me about those long walks, he shrugs and notes that the weather was good.

Walking to the UN would take over 100 days, and he’s solicited the help of various people to help him. He has a website up now, called Step For Peace, although the donation parts of the site were still under construction at the time of writing. He’s looking for sponsors now to help him finish these things and begin preparing. But he remains determined. And the last time I saw him, on Upper Lonsdale after lunch at a Persian restaurant there, he shook hands with a firmness that speaks to his commitment.

My hope for his future is that there are more “only in the movies” moments.And if you’re reading this and can think of a way to help… please visit Step For Peace.

Image: Hubert Kang Canadian Art

First published in Canadian Art Winter 2013

By Timothy Taylor

At 82 years of age, photographer Fred Herzog doesn’t move quite as quickly as he used to. But then, few people ever did. In his younger days, Herzog was the kind of guy who’d jump on his Norton motorcycle after lunch and ride back roads to the top of Mount Baker, 180 kilometres south in Washington state, then motor home in time for supper. “Not always at the speed limit,” he says now, with a sly smile.

When he wasn’t making a literal blur across the landscape—and when he wasn’t working full time as a medical photographer at the University of British Columbia (UBC) or raising his family—he shot pictures on the streets. And rather a lot of pictures, we now know, as a result of a series of high-profile solo shows in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, New York and Berlin over the course of just the past five years. Asked to estimate the total number of pictures he’s taken in his life, Herzog will admit to more than 85,000. Of course, those are only the ones he’s kept.

“I suppose I’m a bit of a workaholic,” he says, with a self-deprecating chuckling and a glint of mischief in his eyes. But then, immediately, he’s back to scanning the world around him. “Here,” he says, voice low. “Let’s look up this alley. There are often things here.”

We’re in Strathcona, Vancouver’s oldest residential neighbourhood, just east of the downtown core…

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