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.

Should writers of fiction review the work of colleagues? I avoid it personally, and my rational for doing is the basis for my side of a debate that was part of the CBC Literary Smackdown series a couple of years back. The other side of the issue was taken by esteemed Victoria-based novelist and nonfiction writer Robert Weirsma, who also writes a lot of fine reviews.

I enjoyed the discussion because I enjoy talking to Robert. But I knew going in that arguing my side of the resolved was a thankless proposition. That’s because I was arguing that the prevalence of competitiveness and envy in our culture and economy – magnified incredibly, in my view, by the migration of that culture and economy from offline to online – makes the review that one writer writes of another writer highly suspect. Consciously or unconsciously, in other words, insider reviews (positive or negative) end up being strategic, designed in their subtle and not-so-subtle ways to serve the purposes of the reviewer. Better that the writer withdraw from this toxic maeltsrom of mutual appraisal and measurement (as exemplified in our hysterical interest in our own online profiles) and leave reviewing to “professionals”, people who write from within literature but not within the writing community.

Robert’s argument for reviewing was from the standpoint of empathy. As a novelist, he could empathize more with the writer being reviewed than could a non-writer. Empathy, in this analysis, provides the novelist/reviewer with insights into the writing process and the significance of the literary accomplishment as it’s ultimately delivered (or not) on the page.

That point is interesting because it shows that Robert and I come to our respective conclusions in response to our observation of what are closely related human capacities. Empathy, after all, is the mother of envy.

Here’s Martin Amis putting his finger directly on the button in The Pregnant Widow:

“It was only Nicholas, his male flesh and blood, that Karl really envied. And envy, the dictionary suggests, takes us by a knight’s move to empathy. From L. invidere “regard maliciously,” from in- into + videre “to see.” Envy is negative empathy. Envy is empathy in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

That’s a very powerful idea: that “to see into” someone (their work, their tastes and tendencies, their condition) might “by a knight’s move” lead us to “regard maliciously”, wanting what the other has and quite possibly wishing them ill.

The French existentialists were good at this same bit of reasoning. They used the term resentiment to characterize a variety of hostility that is targeted on the person considered the source of one’s frustration.

Frustration. Being frustrated. Being prevented from getting where you’re going. If we understood that we were prone to resentiment, that would be a powerful understanding.

Powerful, but as I said, thankless. Who wants to hear that the French existentialists think they’re prone to some toxic mix of envy and resentment? That would be self-recrimination of the worst kind, flagging a provisional quality in us. And since we prize independence of mind and the idea of personal autonomy perhaps above all other things in our culture, that very idea that we are vainly comparing ourselves to others and finding ourselves wanting is bitterly distasteful.

Of course, my whole argument was also an abstraction. I wasn’t saying Robert specifically was envious and therefore a strategic reviewer. I was making a point that is as inwardly directed as it is outwardly.

In an interesting Facebook disscussion that sparked to life after Canada Writes posted the essays, the downsides of taking my position were immediately plain, as I was asked to produce my evidence and provide an example from Robert’s reviewing of the envy that I felt prohibited the novelist/reviewer from effectively reviewing a colleagues work.

Fair play. I was in the realm of abstraction. And while I won’t take on Robert’s work, I’ll happily take on my own. Consider this review I wrote of Jason Anderson’s 2006 novel Showbiz, published by ECW. It ran in the Literary Review of Canada, and I now regret writing it. Not because I don’t stand by the points I made, but because I can hear my own strategic positioning in it. I was writing about celebrity myself quite a lot at that time. (The Blue LIght Project was in the works.) So I had criticisms of Anderson’s approach. Far more important is the fact that Anderson and I were doing the same thing at the time. Literarily speaking, we were after the same prize. We were undifferentiated competitors.

Call me a wimp, then, but I still feel icky about that review. Maybe I even withdrew from reviewing books by colleagues because of it. But the story ends well, because in a turn worthy of, I don’t know, Flaubert, my own 2006 novel, Story House, was then bitterly trashed and stomped only six months later *in the same publication* by a reviewer named Adele Freedman.

Story House is about architecture. Freedman is an architecture critic. And she tore me a new egress, to put it politely.

Let’s agree to call that karma.

When Chef Michael Robbins auditioned for Top Chef Canada, he stressed in his audition video that he was an “extremely competitive person”, like a promise of what might come. All the more painful an irony that he ended up cut first, before even preparing a complete dish. That was a loss for the judges and show. I was convinced of that at the time, having eaten at the Oakwood Canadian Bistro, where Robbins had a relaxed neighborhood room that still produced plates with high-volume flavours and high-wire techniques.

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.

—

Thanks everyone for being here. And thank you Shelly Rosenblum and the Belkin Gallery for inviting me.

I’ve only been full-time faculty here for 18 months or so. And one thing I didn’t know to anticipate were these cross-disciplinary conversations that were possible on-campus. Last week I enjoyed listening to novelist Camilla Gibb talk at the Peter Wall Institute about empathy and anthropology. Today I get to talk with UBC History professor Carla Nappi about Ai Weiwei. This is a great pleasure.

I’m going to avoid saying anything that might be mistaken for art criticism today. It’s not my field. What I’m going to do instead is draw on my own practice area – both in journalism and writing novels – and talk about the narrative that these images suggest to me.

I feel encouraged to do this by Ai Weiwei himself, who didn’t really consider this collection of photos to be a work of art in themselves. This will seem counterintuitive, I realize. Ai WeiWei is one of the most recognized contemporary artists in the world today. He curated this selection from 10,000 original pictures and took the time to put them in a particular order. And of course it’s hanging in an art gallery, so it must be art.

But what he actually said about this collection is: “I would not consciously have called it art. It’s just the activities in my life. Becoming more conscious of my life activities, that attitude was more important than producing work.”

The attitude Ai Weiwei was speaking about was the conviction that he was indeed an artist, a belief that everyone who wants to practice in the arts must somehow attain. Not trying to be an artist. Not planning. But being. With these photographs, Ai Weiwei seems to be telling us, he wasn’t making art, he was making himself as an artist, which is never easy.

As a storyteller, I find that very interesting. Narrative comes to life when three elements first combine: (1) character, (2) desire (for concrete or abstract outcomes), and (3) obstacles that prevent the character from merely claiming what is desired. That’s the juice of narrative right there.

And as I look at these photographs, that’s what I find myself seeing. The beginning of a narrative about Ai Weiwei’s movement towards an objective. He may be a superstar now. But these pictures offer a glimpse of Weiwei at his crucial moment of becoming. 25 years old, out of China for the first time, and for the first time also engaged in a fully autonomous way with his own dreams and desires.

So who was this young man, before becoming the famous man?

History is relevant here. Born in 1957 in Beijing, Ai Weiwei arrived just a few months after his father, the well-known poet Ai Quing, had been denounced by authorities, banned from writing or publishing. And the family had been sent to a work camp in Northeast China. The cultural revolution in 1966 arguably made things worse for them. And without dwelling overly on this history, just consider that Ai Weiwei as a nine year old boy saw his father publically and ritually and repeatedly humiliated. He saw posters with his father’s image and defamatory statements. He saw his father force-marched through the streets, chanting confessions to crimes he hadn’t committed, while children threw stones. In a particularly vivid memory, the artist remembers when his father was denounced as a “reactionary novelist” by people who knew nothing about his father’s writing – he was a poet, and had never written a novel – and these people then doused his father’s face in black ink. Since the couldn’t afford soap, his father’s face remained black for many days.

The end of the Cultural Revolution didn’t heal everything either. “After 20 years of injustice,” he said. “We were given only these words: it was a mistake.”

They were back in Beijing however, and more free than ever before. Ai Weiwei joined the Beijing Film Academy in the Set Design department, where he was going to learn how to paint. But almost immediately he began producing work so outrageous to his instructors that they declined even to consider it for grades. Ai Weiwei eventually quit and applied to study abroad in the US.

So that is the young man who arrived in the East Village in 1981, working part time jobs and by his own description, not really having any solid idea what he was doing there. He speaks of just leaving his apartment in the morning and wandering, without direction or agenda.

But he did have a vision of himself as an artist. And so a crucial triangle takes shape: a character, desire, and all the many obstacles that you might imagine for a broke, new immigrant, shortly to be an illegal immigrant, who has this most impossible of dreams.

Luckily for us, he also had a camera with which that narrative beginning might be captured.

Not immediately, however. But it seems that around 1985, or 1986, the photos really started to accumulate. This documenting of himself doing the thing he’d dreamed of doing.

Here’s the son of a poet who was forbidden to write for twenty years. Here’s an artist declaring himself to be subject to no such powers.

“I started my own life, in which I was very clear about my own decisions. Before that, I was a student and all the decisions were made by common requirements – you study at school, finish your studies, and then try to become an artist. Then I realized that I am an artist and that it’s my life and that’s the way I choose to live. So I started to take some photos… excited about this new life and this kind of attitude.”

No surprise then that Ai Weiwei developed what you might think of as the proto-selfie. Here he is at the MOMA

Here he is on West Fourth Street, where Ai Weiwei and other Chinese artists would paint the portraits of passersby.

The artist here is in the process not so much of examining himself as gathering the supporting evidence to prove himself, something this shot into the mirror really captures.

That’s Ai Weiwei recording Ai Weiwei in the process of becoming Ai Weiwei.

In the Facebook era, there is a tendency to dismiss this as self-promotion: fatuous and transparent. But here is a man raised on the edge of a northern Chinese desert, exposed for the first time to the possibilities of the individual. I find this mirror shot makes a lot of sense in that context.

Of course, it’s important to understand that he wasn’t an isolated loner as these images might suggest. Selfies run the risk of suggesting total self-absorption. But this doesn’t appear to ahve been the case. In fact, Ai Weiwei seems to have been a social magnet during this time, constantly in touch with people, exploring, listening, exchanging ideas. One imagines the conversations to have been very lively.

Artist and intellectuals:

A film student from Taiwan.

Here’s the well-known Chinese poet Bei Dao visiting with Ai Weiwei in 1988.

Bei Dao is the most notable representative of the Misty Poets, a group of Chinese poets who reacted against the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution. Dao would go on later to write a book of essays about his time in New York called Midnight’s Gate which includes a cloaked reference to Ai Weiwei.

In a piece in Artforum, Philip Tinari writes: “Everyone in Bejing knew that his basement apartment on East 7th Street had become an unofficial embassy for the avant-garde in exile.”

As you might expect, in that case, he was friendly with Allen Ginsberg and Harry Smith

Smith was one of the Godfathers of the beat movement, an artist and experimental filmmaker and bohemian mystic. He was also a fanatical collector of paper airplanes, Seminole textiles and Ukrainian Easter eggs. He would have been living with Ginsberg at this time, having run out of money, an arrangement Ginsberg’s doctor eventually put an end to, the story goes, because Smith was giving Ginsberg high blood pressure.

Ai Weiwei met Ginsburg at a poetry reading at St. Marks In-the-Bowery. Ginsberg knew Weiwei’s father and had met him in Beijing. In the New Yorker, Weiwei describes Ginsberg reading his poetry aloud including White Shroud, which Ginsberg wrote for his mother. “I didn’t quite understand it. But he loved reading it.

If there was a kind of narrative bump, or turning point in this material, this collection of photographs, to me it seems to be the Tompkins Square Riot photos of 1988.

As some will remember, New York had a series of riots in 1988 relating to housing and public parks access. Tompkins Park had itself become a squatters camp which then Mayor Koch famously criticized for being filthy before acknowledging he’d never been there. A curfew was imposed. And on August 6 and 7, police tried to clear people out of the park in what was later referred to as a “police riot”.

This is the front of Christodora House, which is on Avenue B on the east side of Tompkins Park. This is kind of ground zero for the whole dispute. Originally part of the American Settlement House Movement, Christodora House was built in 1928 to provide “low-income and immigrant residents food, shelter, education and health services.” It had a pool and a gym, and was sort of like a private rec centre with social housing. It was in financial difficulties by the 40’s and was sold to the city, who seem to have more or less left it for a couple of decades. During the 60’s it was full of squatters and was reportedly the National HQ of Black Panthers as well as serving as a set for porn films. Wiki tells me that both Iggy Pop and Vincent D’Onofrio at one point lived here.

In 1975, the city sold the property for $62,500 and within a decade the developer began to convert the building to condos, which cause further friction in the area. During the Tompkins square riots crowds broke in and trashed the lobby yelling “Die Yuppie Scum”.

Imagine how angry people would have been if they’d known that in another 20 years, 25 years, a 1400 square foot one bedroom in Christodora would run around $2 million.

Later there would be other protests in Washington Square Park Protest 1988, and Ai Weiwei would be there too.

And the following year would be the year of ACT UP AIDS protests.

I think what we’re seeing here is the shaping of a world view, shaping of a sense of skepticism about power. Here’s a young man marked by the cultural revolution, adrift in America, in the process of proving himself to be what his imagination told him he could be… It is probably critical to note that these protests here would have been followed in months by events in Tianamen Square.

Here’s an artist intensely, ferociously engaged I think. Taking stock.

“We were young at the time and soon identified with the values of the free world because of our recent history. We hated totalitarian society very much and longed for the so-called free world. Later, we  became more critical of the US when we found out the country didn’t have as much freedom as it claimed.”

Did Ai Weiwei feel hopeless though? One suspects not. Because woven through the difficult images are always people acting, people (like Weiwei, but in their own ways) claiming themselves.

For every act of suppression, and act of expression.

After 1989, although I haven’t counted them, it seems to me the selfies begin to get less frequent. Ai Weiwei is still present in all of these, but we sense the process of self-discovery is now past its beginnings, that something like conclusions or at least convictions are shaping themselves in this young man.

The future beckons.

The Godfather of Beat Generation, Harry Smith dies

Smith had a heart attack in Room 328 of the Hotel Chelsea. He died in the hospital later in the arms of a poet friend who reported that he was “singing as he drifted away”.

I find myself thinking that Ai Weiwei had an ironic glint in his eye as he selected this as the last of the series.

End credits. Cue the violin. The artist has left the building.

“My experience in the US was the most important experience of my life. There I learned about personal freedom, independence, and the relationship between the individual and the state, as well as the power structure of that society – and art, of course, I learned a lot.”

I want to return to the poet Bei Dao for a moment to close.

This is a short excerpt from Bei Dao’ book Midnight’s Gate about his time in New York. Note that he does not name the artist friend that he meets, but you be the judge who he’s talking about…

“The first time I visited New York was in the summer of 1988. We went to the East Village to look for W…

He’d been living illegally in New York for eight years. People have different reactions to living illegally. Some people live as if they’re walking on thin ice, while others take to it like a fish to water. New York remakes people like no other place.

This man who was a good student – a sophomore in film school – had completely transformed himself. His eyes were gloomy, his face fatter, and his ears bigger.

He was now full of New York slang. As he walked down the street all sorts of people walked over to greet him, their faces full of respect. At that time, the East Village was a land of the homeless, drunks, drug dealers and those suffering from AIDS. He would always grunt a response, but would not say much, just pat them on the shoulder, or stroke their bald heads, and miraculously, their enraged, crazy spirits would calm instantly.

I asked him how he made a living, and he said he painted people’s portraits on the street. He then got out his painting tools, hailed a taxi, and dragged us to a section of West Fourth Street, where a number of other Chinese painters were already trying to drum up business. Unfortunately, luck was not with him that evening as he waited two hours with no one even inquiring about prices. When someone suggested he go to Atlantic City for a little gambling, he immediately closed up shop and sailed off.

I’ll let Ai Weiwei have the last word, a quote which I find resonating in each of these photos. It seems to me that if these photos do one thing, taken all together, it is to show Ai Weiwei reaching this conclusion:

“Creativity,” Ai Weiwei wrote in 2008, twenty years after that visit with Bei Dao… “is the power to reject the past, to change the status quo, and to seek new potential. Simply put, aside from using one’s imagination—perhaps more importantly—creativity is the power to act.”

My mother passed away Mar 31, 2006, almost exactly seven years ago at the time of writing. Memories of her are still with me powerfully. And the story of how she met my father is one of those genesis-legends that I now understand to have shaped me crucially: my love of Vancouver, my affinity for travel, and maybe most of all, my writing.

On April 3, 2013, I’ll be speaking at Sam Sullivan’s Public Salon and talking a bit about my mother’s life as a refugee and afterwards, also about the remarkable, unlikely way in which she ended up meeting my nomad father. Between the refugee and the nomad, they had tens of thousands of miles of travel under their heels at that moment of their first dance at a house party in Guayaquil, Ecuador. And they weren’t quite done yet.

Sam Sullivan’s Public Salon, 7:30PM to 9:00PM, April 3, 2013

Vancouver Playhouse, 600 Hamilton (at Dunsmuir)

First published in Canadian Art Winter 2013

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…

To continue reading, please visit Canadian Art

A Facebook friend, Canadian television host Carolyn Weaver, posted a link to a fascinating 60 Minutes episode in which CBS correspondent Scott Pelley interviews “Mark Owen” (pseudonym), a retired Navy SEAL who was in the room when Osama bin Laden was killed in his compound in Abbottobad, Pakistan. Owen has just published a book about his experiences during the raid. It’s called No Easy Day.

Although I didn’t really have the time (deadlines!) I ended up watching the entire thing, and I’m glad I did. The story may be familiar from its wide coverage in the press at the time it happened. And Owen himself doesn’t reveal anything he considers to be secret. So there’s no real insight into intelligence operations that preceded the raid or even much about the tactics used by SEALs when the hit the ground on assignments such as this one.

What CBS has done instead – on purpose or by accident – is offer an insight into the psychology of these ultra-elite hand-picked soldiers. Owen isn’t cold, exactly. But he is incredibly controlled. In one passage, he describes how the movies get it wrong by always depicting operations like the one in Pakistan as loud and fast. Instead, he tells us, when SEALs do their jobs, they do it slowly and quietly.

“We have a saying,” Owen remarks at one point: “Don’t run to your own death.”

While all that is fascinating, I found watching that I experienced something like mounting dread. Working on a piece about PTSD for Harpers has perhaps put me in this mindset, but I could not help but wonder at the toll his work would ultimately take on Owen.

He betrays very little, it has to be said, until almost his final words of the program. In that moment, he’s describing the emotion he experienced in visiting the 9/11 memorial in NYC. Pelley comments: over three thousand people died there. Owen nods. He’s well aware of it, of course.

The raid avenged those people, Pelley suggests. And here Owen agrees.

It is a chilling moment. Because we sense that Owen’s awareness of the raid as an act of vengeance may not sit with him quite as easily as it appears to sit with Pelley, who makes the comment as if to balance the books, as if to establish that in the wake of the raid, ammends had been made, peace restored.

Owen, to my eye, does not seem so sure. He says instead that he realized in that moment, at the memorial, that it was time for him personally to move on. And then he says the words.

“Full circle,” the former Navy SEAL says, with no trace of satisfaction.

How rich, insightful, and devastating is that casual formulation. The full circle, of course, returns us to the site of our departure, as if we had never left. What will Owen do with this understanding? I can’t speculate, only to say that it seems to me, in that room, he glimpsed the expediency and (maybe) even the practical necessity of an act that would yet necessarily only perpetuate itself in further violence, further requirements for vengeance, further full circles spinning on up into the unknowable future. Spinning and escalating.

But maybe the more important question is what should we do with that understanding?

I’m asked quite frequently to lecture on nonfiction long form journalism, of which I do a lot. The picture here and below is a sub-lecture in itself. I remain bad for forests in what I do, because for these more intense features – like the one I’m presently writing about Fred Herzog for Canadian Art, I find it impossible to actually write without all my research laid out for visual access. Six monitors would probably work as well, but there are cost issues associated with that.

What’s notable about this is that for all the research, at this stage in the process the article is quite entirely unwritten. I’ve populated this information environment, but nothing has really happened in it. I liken what happens next more or less to how one of Herzog’s most ardent collectors desribed the photographer’s own work. Herzog knows how to construct a scene, or a setting (in the compositional sense), but ultimately he has to wait in that environment to encounter the content as it happens, what Cartier-Bresson would have called the perfect moment.

I’m not sure every Herzog picture incorporates that blend of construction and encountering, but many do notably this one below, the shooting details of which I’ll describe in the piece.

Of course, one thing I’m quite sure Herzog (or Cartier-Bresson) never did in that waiting period between construction and encountering is blog about the experience. But such is the self-exposing, content-hungry nature of our networked day and age.

In any case, on the more prosaic level, what’s laid out here are each of my interviews plus an index of everything quotable organized under topical or thematic headings. As I start to write, this messy constructed environement is relied on to release content for me to encounter.

Or at least, that’s the best laid plan.

Update: 28 August 2012

The editors at Harpers have assigned the story. So this piece will be appearing in an upcoming issue of that great magazine. We’re very much interested in the story of PTSD and how it is illuminated by Christian Ellis’s story and the remarkable opera inspired by his experiences. That’s both sides of the story: what makes battlefields ever more virulent breed grounds for the types of trauma that induce the syndrome, but also what cultural evolutions in contemporary civilian life contribute to the problem when the vets return home.

It’s a thorny issue. And some recent online posts I made about PTSD prove that feelings are very strong on the topic. It touches more people than I realized. But that only makes the potential for this article greater, and I’m glad to be working on it.

Thanks to Jeremy Keehn at Harpers for the assignment. Great to be working with him again.

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I had coffee with a fimmaker friend John Bolton recently, who’d been hired to video a remarkable event: the Vancouver City Opera’s full rehearsal of an opera based on the combat and post-war experiences of gay former Marine Seargent Christian Ellis.

The opera, called Fallujah, isn’t remarkable because Ellis is gay or even because he was a Marine. It’s remarkable because, in writing this work, Iraqi/American Heather Raffo and Canadian composer Tobin Stokes (with crucial support of Charles Annenberg and his Explore.org foundation) have done something that nobody has previously. They’ve written a musical work about the Iraq War and what is arguably its most deadly inheritance: Post Trauma Stress Disorder (PTSD).

PTSD is a huge and increasing problem for nations engaged in modern conflict. Read “A Veteran’s Death, A Nation’s Shame“, written by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times earlier this year, and you may be horrified to learn that there will be a suicide by a veteran every 80 minutes in 2012. Yes, you read that correctly. 25 times the death rate of soldiers in actual conflict.

I mention this story because I’m developing a magazine feature about Ellis. And I’ll say more on that project, hopefully, as weeks go by.

But in the meantime, I wanted to mention how — just after a recent discussion with a friend about Ellis and his story — I found myself sitting at my desk, trying to get my mind back on other assignments, and I had the strangest sensation.

I thought I could hear music.

Of course, I laughed at myself, thinking this was a brain image carried over from my conversation, something that Ellis’ story had somehow burned onto my imagination.

After a moment or two however, the auditory reality of what I was hearing could not be denied. Somebody, somewhere, was playing a brassy, orchestral tune, that was dancing along the light Vancouver breeze, from somewhere down on the streets, and was wafting up in strands and disconnected phrases to me, at my computer, in my office overlooking the city.

I went downstairs to investigate.

And it turned out: I hadn’t imagined the sound. In Victory Square there were a dozen plus horn players, a couple of percussionists and a conducter. And they were rolling through an improvisational jazz number that I learned later was the work of long time Vancouver jazz player Brad Muirhead.

The piece is called “What’s the Idea?”

So beautiful. I was glad to be there, glad to be alive.

Thanks Brad Muirhead. And if you want to hear it yourself, the show rolls again Tuesday July 10th at noon, and again on Thursday July 12th at 5pm.

What’s the Idea? Here I’ll go all romantic on you: the idea is music in the city, in the psyche, in the wind, in the heart.

1. The Blue Light Project is published in paperback at the same time as being selected as a contestant for a reality-television-styled vote-based Bookie Award.
2. The Red Gate artists’ collective has found a potential new home, but needs City of Vancouver approval to move in as the City owns the property.

The connection is forged by my knowledge that The Blue Light Project might never have been written were it not for the Red Gate.

This is the piece of art that started my whole creative process. 

It’s called Rise Fly Land and the day I first saw it, I stood in that alley for a good twenty minutes staring at it. At that point in my exposure to graff and street art, I didn’t know enough to recognize that signature at the bottom, which is that of the legendary Canadian graff writer (and almost equally legendary train-rider) Take5. All I knew was that there was something mysterious and entire in the image. Rise. Fly. Land. There is a echo of eternity in the phrase. A bass note of wisdom, of peace.

I had only very recently seen Les Blank’s oddly captivating film Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe in which Herzog makes the following slightly enigmatic statement: “We need adequate images. If mankind doesn’t develop adequate images, we’re going to die out like the dinosaurs.”

Somehow standing in that alley off Hastings Street, I felt like I was confronted with an authentic attempt at an adequate image. It was a moment both warming and chilling, if that makes any sense.

Of course, like I said, I had no idea who had made the piece. Until I talked to Jim Carrico at the Red Gate, that is. And he introduced me to Take5 who then told me that he and the artist OTHER had made Rise Fly Land. Take5 also gave me my first glimpse into the world of the street artist in a long and fascinating conversation in the original Red Gate location. From there, literally branching out from the Red Gate and into this hidden community of artists, my interest in the area and my ideas for the book began to surge and take shape.

The Red Gate always was a chaotic place, with no particular central plan or manifesto. But it was from that environment that came the sparks of original idea.

When the Red Gate was threatened with shut-down last year, I lamented the prospect in a Vancouver Review essay called Chaos and Planning. In that piece I argued that the Red Gate was the source of creative chaos that all cities need. Kill these sorts of institutions – out of some hyper-vigilant sense that everything has to be planned centrally in coordination with official messages – and you kill the organic creativity on which all cities depend.

My article didn’t help. The Red Gate lost it’s fight and were evicted. It was a real loss to the city.

Now we come to another turn in the story. The Red Gate has a chance to reopen. The building they want to use is empty. They’re willing to pay rent. And the whole situation is in the hands of the City of Vancouver, as they own the building.

Is it possible that our civic leaders will miss for a second time the contribution that the Red Gates of this world make to the cities where they’re found?

On the cover of the paperback Blue Light are three eyes, by the artist Rich S. For awhile prior to the Olympics in Vancouver, these could be found widely through the downtown east side. I loved those eyes. What a lot they managed to say in one image about the hovering reality, good and ill, of our governments and leaders.

What will our leaders in Vancouver do now?