Leon Louder, Feast, Rockinghorse, Unfulfillment + Stranger Ways Recordings (2024)

In Western society, there are five general characteristics of successful people: you can be tough, cool, smart, beautiful, or funny.

Some combinations are possible. For example, you can be both tough and cool. Or cool and beautiful.

But some categories are mutually exclusive. Although you can be funny and smart, it is nearly impossible to be both cool and funny.

Many characteristics can be cultivated; others are inborn. You can work out and get tougher. You can even study and get smarter. But you cannot fake being funnier.

The best comedians aren’t tough or beautiful — or even remarkably smart. Clever, perhaps. Intellectual, not so much.

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld believes that comedy is as close as we can come to justice. This is why I most admire naturally funny people. They generally have to survive on their sense of humour alone.

Good Sine, with Holobody, Owen Gilbride, and Vivian Li, Cyber Love Hotel, 4 August 2024

O God, make me poor enough, to love your diamond in the rough, or in my failure let me see, my greed raised to mystery.

—Leonard Cohen

We are prone to despise any system that doesn’t benefit us — and uphold those that do. The jerks that picked on you in school are no longer jerks now that you’re one of them and can pick the one you pick upon. Capitalism sucks until you start to make the big bucks.

It’s not that one system is virtuous and another system vicious. Systems are systemically corrupt.

The OM at the foot of Mount Royal, with Alexandra Stréliski, 6 August 2024

The place that my paternal grandfather came from is currently within the borders of Ukraine. But when he left, it was part of Poland.

Likewise, my maternal grandparents originate from a region that, although it is now in Russian-occupied Ukraine, at various times was Austro-Hungarian, Romanian, and a Soviet Socialist Republic.

The French in Quebec neglect to recognize that the territory in which they assume the God-given right to speak French at one time not too long ago was home to neither the French nor God. In 100 years, it is doubtful that French will be the dominant language here, if it is now.

Tour guides love to lead gaggles of sightseers around Old Montreal pointing out with inflated authority the city’s first fort, first chapel, first bank. But who was really here first? And before that?

How long does it take for you to live in a place before you can confidently claim that you’re from that place? And what happens if that place changes hands? Where are you from then?

History is comprised of a series of replacements, none of them great. We are here today and gone tomorrow, when someone else will take our place. If times get tough, we can leave, or stay and fight and work to remake the place to our own liking.

We come from dirt, and to dirt we will return. In between, we garden.

Nick Bodoin, Akermus, 8 August 2024

Who is as the wise man? and who knoweth the interpretation of a thing? a man’s wisdom maketh his face to shine, and the boldness of his face shall be changed.

—Ecclesiastes 8:1

I think everybody should like everybody.

—Andy Warhol

When you first look at a person’s face, for an instant, you are looking back at your own reflection. We cannot help the reactions we experience when looking into other people’s faces. Attraction and revulsion, recognition and disregard, all at once.

I’m sure the Germans have a word for that perfect balance one feels between beauty and terror, awe and fright.

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The exercise, then, is to behold yourself as beautiful. Then, an unsightly face can never be seen.

Echoes IX, with Fiza, Xon, Sonic Malice, and Philippe-Aubert Gauthier, Ateliers Belleville, 3 August 2024

On 9 August 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb, its second and last to date, on Nagasaki, Japan, bringing World War II to its savage conclusion.

Just past midnight on 9 August 1969, Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel, known collectively as “the Manson Family,” took the lives of celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, the coffee heiress Abigail Folger, her lover Wojciech Frykowski, houseguest Steven Parent, and the film actress Sharon Tate at a Benedict Canyon mansion located at 10050 Cielo Drive, closing out a decade known for peace and love with mayhem and murder.

On 9 August 1988, Wayne Gretzky, the hockey player nicknamed “the Great One,” was traded from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings, ending an era during which Edmonton was regarded nationally as “the City of Champions.”

And on 9 August 2004, I relocated permanently from Edmonton to Montreal to attend the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University.

Reflecting on the past 20 years residing here, the city has changed almost as drastically as if it had endured a war, or a killing spree. Entire neighbourhoods like the Old Port and Griffintown have been redeveloped beyond recognition; the provincial government presently in power has slashed funding for arts and cultural activities. Of course, the Coronavirus crisis and its broad and sprawling effects on society weren’t good for anybody.

And yet a sense of solidarity has coalesced in areas like Pointe-Saint-Charles and the Garment District, where artist-run centres such as Bâtiment 7 and Ateliers Belleville have stepped in to serve underrepresented creative communities. Though Montreal hasn’t won an Oscar for Best International film since The Barbarian Invasions in 2003, or a Stanley Cup since a decade earlier, the city continues to be a magnet for excellence in art, academia, music, movies, and sport.

I like to think of the talented expats who decamp here as human transfer payments, replenishing Montreal’s perennially bereft coffers with cultural wealth.◼︎

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

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider subscribing.

_{Cover image: Listeners gather at the foot of Mount Royal to hear the Orchestre Metropolitain perform, 6 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.}