Sarah McLachlan with Feist, Place Bell, 20 June 2024

Nowadays, the first thing that we do when a performer appears onstage is pull out our phones and start snapping photos. To the extent that it’s become cliché, people don’t watch or listen to concerts anymore, preferring instead to capture and replay and transmit them.

Photographs, the American critic Susan Sontag wrote, “do not explain; they acknowledge.” Before Sontag, the photographer Diane Arbus observed that “a photograph is a secret about a secret.”

When we share photographs online, or take them for ourselves for posterity, we’re revealing the most quotidian secret — that we looked at something without seeing it. We listened to something without hearing it. We experienced something simultaneously from a place of aesthetic interest and safe emotional distance, the camera eye within the eye of the storm, looking out.

Photographs freeze moments, only to be thawed out moments later.

Yoo Doo Right with Shunk and Aspirateur, La Sotterenea, 12 June 2024

Owning the means of production used to be a surefire antidote to capitalist exploitation.

But, like a virus, capitalism demonstrates strategies that after hereditary reiteration become impervious to resistance. One such tactic is to devalue the product, making the means of production irrelevant.

Musicians, for instance, benefited in the 1980s and ‘90s from the advent of home recording equipment and the explosion of “prosumer” electronics. Rather than rely upon expensive instruments, major labels, and costly studios, bands could produce professional-sounding records domestically with cheap gear, burn them themselves to CD, and distribute these CDs within independent retail networks.

Then, musical recordings became untethered from media, making it unnecessary to buy CDs. In absence of the product, costs fell, and value evaporated.

What value was left over moved up the productive chain to the platform’s manufacturers — computer and software makers, namely. First Apple, then Spotify, extracted value out of the physical product. Now, artificial intelligence is extracting every bit of residual value from virtual products, too.

With nothing to continue to produce it, and nobody left to consume it, capital can only cannibalize itself into ultimate starvation. Capitalism prioritizes its own survival over that of even its own participants, dooming it as a societal model.

There is nothing cheaper than infinite wealth.

Maureen, Concordia University MFA Grad Show, Ateliers Belleville, 12 June 2024

The first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell was Dolly, the sheep. It is indicative that those who thought it would be smart to clone animals should have chosen such a symbolic inaugural species as sheep — to keep the slaughterhouses in business, I imagine. They’re not going to start by cloning wolves, are they?

Backxwash with Quinton Barnes and Magella, La Sala Rossa, 21 June 2024

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. —Peter 5:8

In his landmark metaphorical novel, The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison warns against smoking marijuana.

“To see around corners is enough,” Ellison writes. “But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action.”

The time for action is upon us. Still, in Canada, we spend half our lives hibernating from extreme cold. Now, we’re spending the other half hibernating from extreme heat.

However, as Ellison reassures us, “A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”

Une Vie à l’Opera: Hommage à Joseph Rouleau, Orchestre Classique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 18 June 2024

As a child, my mom used to sing me a little song. Its words went like this:

“I have two apples and I am glad / you have no apples and that’s too bad / I’ll share my apples ‘cause I love you / and now you have a nice apple, too.”

Anything can replace “apples” in the lyrics.

The moral of this song, of course, is to teach children that one is enough, especially when your neighbour has none.

What I didn’t realize as I got older is that literally nobody else knows this song. When I went to school and started to share my proverbial apples, the other kids snatched both of them and said, “what else you got?” So, I took to hoarding apples, building walls around the orchard, not letting my pies cool on the windowsill.

Though recently, I’m beginning to remember the wisdom of that song. It’s not about teaching kids to share apples or whatever. It’s about love as life’s true motivator.

The only way for us to survive as a species is to give more and accept less. We’re told that that’s counterintuitive, but intuition is precisely what instructs us that incessant accumulation cannot possibly prevail. That little voice inside, what once was called “conscience” or “ethics,” is the suppressed sixth sense.

Erika Angell with Sarah Rossy and Kahero:ton, La Salla Rossa, 17 June 2024

In the David Lynch-directed 1997 film Lost Highway, the saxophonist Fred Madison and his wife Renee receive a series of mysterious surveillance videotapes delivered anonymously to their doorstep. The recordings become increasingly vexing as each new tape reveals more and more of the couple’s private lives.

The police officers whom the Madisons call in to investigate these unexplained occurrences immediately begin to suspect that Fred himself may be responsible for producing the recordings. They ask him if he owns a video camera, to which Madison responds in the negative. He refuses, Renee confirms, to keep one in the house.

“I like to remember things my own way,” Madison declares.

The flatfoot persists and Madison elaborates, “How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.”

The German author W.G. Sebald’s first novel, Vertigo, written in 1990, opens with a similar theme. A young French officer in Napoleon’s battalion, Marie Henri Beyle, finds in his recollections as an older man that the engravings of fine views that he collected on his youthful conquests began to stand in for his actual memories. Beyle’s impressions “had been erased,” Sebald writes, “by the very violence of their impact.”

It seems as though media — whether early 19^th century engravings or late 20^th century videocassettes — serve to fix our memories of places, faces, and events in time. We assume that the past, unlike the future, is already written, unalterable, especially in the presence of material evidence. Courts certainly favour photographs over testimony, for instance, as two people’s accounts often differ, sometimes wildly, depending upon their varying perspectives.

Is it possible that in absence of images, history can be as vertiginous as the road ahead, that detours through the past are conceivable, that just as we can’t anticipate whatever may be around the next corner, the unexpected works both forwards and backwards?◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider subscribing.

_{Cover image: Erika Angell performs at La Sala Rossa for the Suoni per il Popolo Festival, 17 June 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.}