Fumerolles & A Picturesque Venus Transit, Ambient Music in the Park, Le Champs des Possibles, 19 May 2024

There are two only seasons in Montreal: winter, and “I’m out of the office and only have limited access to my email.” There are only two seasons in Montreal: winter, and “non, c’est fermé par lá lá.” There are only two seasons in Montreal: winter, and “are you in town for the conference, honey?”

Robert Jones Burdette wrote in his 1906 masterpiece of American humour, The Vacation of Mustapha, about a young man called Mustapha who was so overworked in the city that he took refuge to his Uncle Ben’s farm in the Valley of Rest for a few weeks of much-needed repose.

However, Mustapha found on the farm that there was even more work to do than in the city — loading hay, chopping wood, mending fences, shearing sheep, digging ditches — and so he slugged his Uncle Ben with an ax handle, returned to the city, and promptly died.

And at Mustapha’s funeral, his Uncle Ben eulogized him and lamented, with one eye blacked halfway down to his chin, that Mustapha “had no get-up about him” and was simply too lazy to live.

Yuki Isami, Rives album launch, Joseph-Rouleau Hall, 17 May 2024

The 1986 Ron Howard-directed comedy movie Gung Ho centers upon a fictional Pennsylvania auto plant that is taken over by a Japanese parent company with a clockwork-like work ethic.

Starring Michael Keaton as factory foreman Hunt Stevenson, the film satirizes a common American stereotype held in the mid-1980s: that rigid Japanese culture ought to loosen up and take a page from America’s leisurely lifestyle playbook.

At that time, Japan was rapidly surpassing America as the world’s most efficient industrialized economy, manufacturing and exporting everything from cars to home appliances and consumer electronics. Musical instruments in particular quickly came under the Japanese purview with the development in the early 1980s of MIDI, or the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, about which I wrote a book in 2018.

During my research into the two nation’s musical instrument industries, I found the corresponding stereotypes to be more-or-less correct: the Japanese companies, like Yamaha and Roland, were markedly more organized than their U.S. counterparts, such as Sequential Circuits and Moog, and the Americans for the most part favoured Pink Floyd and pot far better than rigid labour practices.

Both U.S. synthesizer businesses either went broke or were sold to Japanese conglomerates, and their founders embarrassingly ended up working as employees for their own companies.

Nowadays, neither Japan nor America is a manufacturing giant. And the punchline of Gung Ho: it’s a Chinese phrase.

Backlined Collective and Friends perform Julius Eastman, Casa del Popolo, 20 May 2024

On 7 December 2000, I was blessed to see the hardest working man in showbusiness, James Brown, perform live in concert in Edmonton. For more than two hours, Brown and his backing band of 16 musicians worked up a collective sweat onstage that could have flooded the banks of the North Saskatchewan river. I was tempted to blame climate change on that tour.

That is, until I saw Emmanuel Lacopo and the Backlined Collective entourage perform the works of Julius Eastman at Casa del Pololo on Monday. An all-star band consisting of, among others, guitarist An Laurence, Josh Morris, cellist of Ensemble Urbain, and conductor Amelya Hempstead, worked at least as hard as Brown, and required a mid-show dabbing down.

I have not seen a group as supreme since Godspeed reunited for the first time in 2011. It was a happening that I felt privileged to have experienced. There is no question that musicians can rearrange you at the molecular level and, ultimately, change the way you experience reality.

Lacopo, who previously studied at Yale, recently graduated from McGill with a doctorate in music performance. You know what really heats up a room? Three degrees.

Les danses de mai, opus 2024, École de danse contemporaine de Montréal, Espace Orange, Until 25 May 2024

Sadly, a small group of anti-Israel protestors felt compelled to picket the EDCM graduation performance on Wednesday because one of the choreographers included in the programme was of Israeli descent.

Never mind that Ohad Naharin’s show, entitled Minus 16, was originally created in 1999, just another year that Hezbollah, Hamas, the PIJ, the PFLP-GC, and other Palestinian groups, backed by Iran, Syria, and Iraq, fired rockets from southern Lebanon at civilian targets in Israel.

Never mind that the piece featured heartfelt personal anecdotes from the graduating students and was less overtly political than, say, Shostakovich’s 8^th symphony, which the OSM performed earlier this year with no anti-Russian protesters in sight.

Never mind that, very clearly, nobody in the audience nor the company was pro-genocide and upsetting us only served to advance discord in the world rather than solve any real problems.

To be frank, I’m becoming a bit offended by some less nuanced discourse — for three reasons.

1: as a person of Ukrainian ethnicity, I’m offended that there were never and still aren’t any tents on university campuses protesting the past two years and counting of human rights abuses, sexual violence, and mass murder in Ukraine at the hands of Russia — the second in a century.

2: as a person of mixed Jewish heritage and a supporter of two states, I’m offended that protestors would target artists simply because of their nationality or religion.

And 3: as a comedian, I’m offended because the pro-Palestinian protestors are acting, for lack of a better description, pretty Jewy, with the constant kvetching and the belly aching and the what-fors and why-have-yous. Unlike Jews, though, they’re not hilarious.

To paraphrase Red Buttons, there’s only a minor difference anyway between Palestinians and Israelis: one year of high school.

Richard Mosse, Broken Spectre, Centre PHI, Until 3 July 2024

My grandmother, Margaret, a profoundly religious woman, worked every spring planting seed that would eventually become food throughout the summer.

By working the soil, we cultivate the sky.◼︎

_{Cover image: a graduating student of École de danse contemporaine de Montréal performs in Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16, Espace Orange, 22 May 2024.}