Moishes, 5 November 2023

The hype was overwhelming.

Advertorials in all the major (and minor) newspapers — about the renovations; about how much money the chandelier cost; about the relocation of some storied Montreal institution. As if they had dismantled the entire Jacques Cartier Bridge and rebuilt it piece-by-piece on Square Victoria. Who wouldn’t want to try it out?

The first time I went to the new Moishes, the ambiance was over-the-top, a caricature of Montreal’s corporate and financial elite, drinking and dining and swine-ing in luxury, ironically adjacent to the site of Montreal’s Occupy Wall Street and Maple Spring sit-ins in 2012, and today looking right smack in the face of the masses who find it harder and harder to afford the basic quotidian necessities, never mind drop a hundred bucks on a steak.

I sat at the bar and ordered a filet mignon and fries. Directly across from me sat a gentleman of about sixty years of age, who was joined momentarily by, shall we say, a young lady of the evening — and then, a few moments later, by another. I might have been embarrassed, disgusted, and impressed in equal measure. The audacity.

But this is not about prostitutes. It’s about meat.

Moishes was supposed to do one thing and do it right: serve a perfect steak, preferably with fries. Perhaps they were still working out the kinks. But that day, my fries arrived cold, and the filet was hockey-puck overdone.

Moishes had apparently nailed every detail of absurd fine-dining opulence — the renovations, the chandelier, the guy with a hooker on each arm — except for the food.

Fortunately, though, this story does have a happy ending. I was invited back by an overly apologetic manager and am pleased to report that Moishes now has the food sorted, too. So, if you’re the kind of person who drives a dirty Lamborghini SUV in the wintertime and likes life a bit bloody, I cannot recommend the place highly enough.

Tribute to György Ligeti, Jean-Michaël Lavoie conducting musicians of the OSM, Bourgie Hall, 4 November 2023

Ligeti’s unsettling 20^th century Classical works have gained popularity in the public consciousness in part due to their inclusion in famous film soundtracks like 2001 and The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, and more recently, in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.

But Ligeti’s orchestral music is cinematic enough on its own to summon in the imaginary an interdimensional portal, or some deranged lunatic’s interior mind. They are enough to affect you on a visceral level, enough to make your stomach turn in sympathy with their wonderful cacophonous atonality.

Esmerine, La Sala Rossa, 2 December 2023

Esmerine was the first band I ever saw perform live in Montreal, in about 2004 or ‘5, at La Sala Rossa. It was to support the launch of their latest album, Aurora. The bar seemed vast to me at that time, and the band possessed a reverent mystique, percussionist Bruce Cawdron solemnly caressing a xylophone with cello bows, emitting a glass-like drone, conjuring an enchanted atmosphere in this surreal space.

You could still smoke indoors in those days. That might have been part of the effect.

This time around, nearly 20 years later, the air was clearer, but the room appeared smaller somehow, more intimate. The band was set up in front of the stage, not on it. I perched myself about six feet away and listened as they played me back in time to my first Montreal gig and a baptism of sorts into a very special scene of talented artists. I felt lucky to be there then. I still do.

Afterwards I spoke with Cawdron. I told him about the Aurora show 20 years ago and what it meant to me, and furthermore, that prior to Esmerine, I had never seen anyone play a xylophone with bows before. Cawdron, gathering XLR cables into neat coils, winked and said, “you still haven’t seen anyone play a xylophone with bows, because this is a marimba.”

Monnomest, Productions Supermusique, Espace Orange, 23 November 2023

Le Vivier showcases some of the nuttiest, wackiest, nichest contemporary music in Montreal, and although the group was founded in 2007, I had never heard of it before this year.

Maybe it’s because the English and the French experimental music communities don’t intersect much; maybe it’s because I simply wasn’t paying attention to anything until after the pandemic, when I started paying attention to everything. But still, it reminds me that there are always whole worlds in this city to discover.

Hidden Intention, Error 403, 25 November 2023

Loft parties are an integral part of Montreal’s fertile nightlife and Hidden Intention, the newish series of DM-for-address get-togethers organized by Nennan’s Amy Macdonald, is a promising continuation of that longstanding tradition. If you want something done, do it yourself.

Roger Tellier-Craig, Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, 7 December 2023

It’s high time that Roger Tellier-Craig is taken as seriously by Montreal as he takes his work. There is no more dedicated artist to the lineage, the craft, and the precision of an artform.

Tellier-Craig’s sounds are presented, aptly for this media-saturated and constantly distracted generation, suitably out-of-context. Some of them sound metallic and sharp; others wet and cold; others still seem warm, soft, and round. But none of them ostensibly have origins. There is no guitar to be found in there, no snare drum, neither rhyme nor reason, save for Tellier-Craig’s own immutable internal rhythms.

Handel’s Messiah, Orchestre Classique de Montreal, St. Joseph’s Oratory, 14 December 2023

As a child, I believed that justice existed independent of us. There was some universal set of rules that governed right and wrong, and sooner or later, those rules would be applied. If you committed fault, you would eventually face this thing called justice. You couldn’t just invade a sovereign nation, say, or commit genocide, because justice would prevent it.

As I get older, however, I have come to understand that justice is something we ourselves make or break. There may be some common, universal sense of right and wrong, but it is human people who have to interpret and apply it. If something unjust happens and nobody stops it, justice cannot magically step in.

Justice is not the light itself; rather, truth needs the light shone upon it to become just. In pursuit of justice, we either direct or misdirect that light.◼︎