Ambroise, iii. l’air était si doux, la premi​è​re caresse go​û​te toujours la neige (Self-released)

My mother’s mother, Margaret, like me, was a writer.

Eschewing machines, she always wrote in longhand, never without a Bible nearby. She would frequently weave scripture into her work and allow it to guide her thought processes.

My grandmother’s writing wasn’t published, but she wrote tomes of what might be considered scrapbooks that she gave to her children and grandchildren. I cherish these books that my grandmother wrote just for me, and I’m grateful for her teaching me the practice of constant reading and writing.

Margaret was a member of a better generation that valued simple truths over valuable complexity. When the internet came around, she wouldn’t allow it in her house.

“Baba,” I said, “we can email each other now.”

But she never wrote an email. The pen was the sole tool of her craft — the pen, and maybe some Scotch tape.

And I’m glad. The things my grandmother wrote to me have an indexical connection to the person she was. Reading her words on the paper page, in a way, brings her back to life.

I know that she held the pen that drew the ink into those sentences, those sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into volumes. I still feel the rhythms of her heartbeat in every page that she wrote.

Paper is eternal. An inbox is evidence.

Katia and Marielle Labèque with the OSM, The Double Concerto for Two Pianos by Philip Glass, 8 May 2024, Maison Symphonique

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. —Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, sisters Alexa and Alexie Grady, whom their father Delbert Grady murdered, haunt the Overlook Hotel through visions as seen by a young Danny Torrance.

Their manifestations in the movie, first in rapid clips and later in prolonged shots, are arguably among the most disturbing images in cinema history. The girls don’t appear in King’s novel, and why Kubrick chose to represent them visually in the motion picture is as much of a mystery as anything the enigmatic director might have done during his storied career.

In the film version, the sisters implore Danny to “come and play” with them “for ever and ever and ever,” apparently alluding to the afterlife’s infinite duration. On this earth, according to the principle of Samsara, we are born over and over again until we get it right and receive the go-ahead to reach the next level of existence. What that looks like, who knows?

Still, there isn’t much better two sisters can get than to be a pair of ivory-tickling prodigies. I’m sure I can speak for the entire audience in saying we could easily listen to them play on forever.

La Traviata, Opéra de Montréal, 9 May 2024, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier

“To be a woman is to be an actress. Being feminine is a kind of theatre, with its appropriate costumes, décor, lighting, and stylized gestures.” —Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging.”

It’s interesting how history shifts our perspective.

In Verdi’s day, it was considered an insult to pay a lady for her time. Now, it’s nearly an affront not to. Capitalism was kinder to the gentler sex when it was still tinged with a hint of aristocracy.

Funeral Lakes, with Hsein, and Princess Towers, Error 403, 4 May 2024

I’m proud that Canada persists in defiantly asserting its identity in the face of our evermore obnoxious cousins south of the border. Personally, I would be more embarrassed than ever to be American right now.

Neither side exhibits any vestige of virtue.

On the right hand, they have a misogynistic blowhard billionaire; on the left, a senile career politician about whom David Letterman’s 30-year-old jokes continue to land on the mark. One of my favourites, from a 1980s Late Night broadcast, talks about Senator Joe Biden reluctantly admitting that he wasn’t, in fact, the fifth Beatle.

In Susan Musgrave’s memoire, entitled You’re in Canada Now, Motherfucker, she muses that the United States is like “the guy at the party who gives everyone cocaine and still can’t get anyone to be his friend.”

Steve Albini (22 July 1962—7 May 2024)

Yanqui U.X.O., released in November 2002, might be Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s least loved and most legendary album. I contend that it’s partly due to Steve Albini’s anti-aesthetic.

Albini was the opposite of, say, a Phil Spector. Rather than having a signature sound, Albini had no sound at all — except for the sound of the band. That’s why he insisted upon relinquishing the title of producer, instead receiving the utilitarian credit, “recorded by Steve Albini.”

He never gated a snare. He didn’t construct walls of sound. Rather, Albini’s recordings all resembled something that might have been committed to tape in their parents’ garage on a 4-track Tascam. Thus, he gave every independent musician hope that they, too, might become the next Pixies, or PJ Harvey.

Yanqui U.X.O. was unloved for another glaring reason: an insultingly low rating on Pitchfork. The site’s founder, Ryan Schreiber, wrote at the time that the album sounded like “slogging through the mud every step of the way.”

Ironically, that’s what I love about the record: its barebones, insistent difficulty. Godspeed refused to pander to their listeners, much less to fickle critics.

Unloved albums tend to be niche albums, too, which puts them squarely in this publication’s purview.

Today, Albini resides in Rock & Roll heaven; Godspeed still tours the globe successfully, often triumphantly reproducing suites from Yanqui to enamoured and ever-growing audiences. And Schreiber now scribes for a subsidiary of GQ.

Funny how justice is always served in the end.◼︎

_{Cover image: Talise Trevigne as Violetta Valéry in La Traviata. Photographed by Vivien Gaumand for Opéra de Montréal.}