Heith with Orchestroll and Audréanne Fillion, Espace SAT, 12 July 2024

I know a lot of people who want to quit doing the things that they know are bad for them. Smoking, drinking, eating crap food, taking drugs, toxic relationships — these kinds of things.

For some reason, many of these people come to me as if I have answers for them. Maybe it’s because I have stopped doing all of these things myself, and they believe that I can magically ladle them out of that thick soup of addiction.

Sorry, I can’t. Nobody can.

These people think that there is some light that will switch on, or off, when someone like me shows them the secret, or some useful doctor prescribes the right antidote, or recommends replacing one compulsion with another. They try to change their friends, or their work, or move house. They think that by rearranging everything around them, something inside them will be altered, too.

People ask me if I feel better now.

No. But I feel. My sense of feeling has improved, both pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow.

So yes, I suppose that technically speaking, I do feel better now. And yet I still don’t know how to feel.

Learning to feel again is the opposite of riding a bike. Once you learn, you immediately forget. It’s like being a goldfish, swimming forever around the castle in the feelings fishbowl.

There is no sage advice, no magic formula. The sole equation that exists, which is rather quotidian, is Life + Time = X.

The only advice I can offer for people who want to stop, for instance, smoking, is just to stop smoking. Stop putting combustible sticks in your mouth and lighting them. And keep stopping doing that. Stop lighting combustible sticks in your mouth until you don’t feel like lighting combustible sticks in your mouth anymore.

And even after that, keep stopping. Never go back. Just stop for good.

The worst thing anyone can do who wants to stop doing something is to start doing that thing again. You cannot reward yourself for an extended period of abstinence with short bursts of indulgence.

If there is one weird trick to quitting anything, it’s to learn to enjoy not wanting, say, cigarettes, or alcohol, or smack, or your crazy ex, or whatever it is that you so badly want. Learn to love unconsummated longing, and suddenly, you will find fulfillment in absolutely everything. And nothing.

The less you need to satisfy yourself, the freer you will feel.

What then? Then you die. Full-stop.

Music & Nature, Private home of Nabil Fawaz, 13 July 2024

Among the first films ever made is a short by the Lumière brothers called “Feeding the Baby.”

It depicts in documentary form precisely that: Auguste Lumière and his wife, Marguerite, feeding their infant daughter, Andrée.

Still, the subtext of this film is noteworthy. Cinema feeds its audiences the images that form our consensus.

There is a reason why our timelines are called “feeds” — and the text at the bottom of a newscast is coined “the crawl.”

A Nearly Tangible Fiction, Patel Brown, Until 17 August 2024

A fundamental difference exists between galleries and museums.

Generally, curators run art galleries with a passion for art. Galleries have to make money, too, because operating a gallery is labour, like any other kind of labour. And labourers deserve to be paid. Art labourers work hard finding art.

Art museums, on the other hand, are far more monetarily concerned. We mistakenly believe that curators run art museums, too. This is false.

Art museums are run by PR and marketing teams who work two days a week and meet over Zoom, or Zoom over Teams. Art museums are run by risk management departments and accountants who devise and revise ever-shrinking budgets on ever-expanding Excel spreadsheets. Players more than workers run museums.

If ever there was an artist as original and talented today as a van Gogh, even if he or she or they crawled into the museum bloodied and overdosing and earless, the players who run them would never take notice.

They’d be too busy counting Instagram followers like sheep and unconsciously refreshing their newsfeeds, looking everywhere except in front of their faces for the next big thing.

Museums are where great art gets lost. Art galleries are where great art is found.

Vagabond Shoes, McBride Contemporain, Until 17 August 2024

We are taught to forgive those who trespass against us, for they know not what they do. Most people, when they do us harm, feel a sense of remorse. So, it’s easy to forgive. If someone apologizes for their trespasses, it inclines exoneration.

But what happens when people who trespass against us aren’t sorry, when they don’t feel a sense of remorse, when they know precisely what they do?

There’s less teaching for that.

Jessica Moss with Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Frédéric D. Oberland, Hotel2Tango, 20 July 2024

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. —Genesis 9:13-15

There are no coincidences.

Not because everything happens for a reason. But rather, because we alone manufacture the often-arcane meanings we ascribe to concurrent or successive events.

These meanings are only meaningful insofar as they are collectively felt, or whether we are capable of communicating and convincing others of their circumstantial, synchronous significance.

Take, for example, the full-horizon double rainbow that occurred over the Van Horne underpass about an hour before Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Frédéric D. Oberland, and Jessica Moss were set to perform at Hotel2Tango.

There is nothing inherently meaningful in a deluge of summer rain and the natural prismatic phenomenon that occurs just afterwards. There is no symbolic significance to rainbows taking place before a gig — or for that matter at any given time. There is only scientific significance to light refracting through water.

Nonetheless, it was a coincidence. Know what I mean?◼︎

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