L Con with Miel and Tenses, Marché des Possibles, 24 August 2024

In Paradise Now, the Oscar-nominated 2005 Palestinian film directed by Hany Abu-Assad, two lifelong friends, Said and Khaled, are recruited to carry out a suicide bombing mission in Tel Aviv.

At the time, the film was criticized for humanizing terrorism, potentially eliciting sympathy for radical acts of religious and political extremism, and concurrently praised for realistically characterizing the circumstances that lead to such desperate ends.

In the film, Jamal, the operation’s mastermind who represents a nameless guerrilla organization, convinces Said by telling him that a man who is unafraid of death is in true control of his life. Though the pair require little convincing, believing that martyrdom will imbue their ostensibly meaningless existence with a sense of higher purpose, this is the twisted logic that seals the deal.

19 years ago, when the film made its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, the United States was still reeling from the September 11^th attacks. Acts of terror were considered rare and isolated incidents. Today, we in the West are living under a climate of ambient terror in which the threat of localized destruction is low, but the mediation of war is ever-present.

The realities of combat — and the carnal horrors of violent death — are things that happen elsewhere, but never too far, dematerialized and yet ubiquitous. Their impressions upon us are both visceral and virtual. We cannot help but be traumatized and anaesthetized at once.

Luke Painter, Moving Images, Patel Brown, 29 August – 5 October 2024

Following 9/11, the footage of the airplane striking the second tower played and replayed on an apparently endless loop via 24-hour news channels, producing what I call the “consensus image.” This establishing master shot became something like a brand, or better yet, a logo, immediately recognizable, transmissible, consumable.

Even eyewitnesses who were present that day in Manhattan described what they saw as like a scene from a disaster movie. The event itself was somehow less real than its replication, its proliferation, like the sting of a stubbed toe that’s only painful when the brain finally receives and decodes the message.

‘Ah yes, this is supposed to hurt,’ our nerves inform us, well after the initial shock of impact. This temporal interval is what creates the sensation of progression.

Cinema was composed of a series of still images that flickered like a flip book to life in real-time. Television is composed of a series of moving pictures, dancing electronic images that in their simultaneity and overabundance produce the impression of stasis.

Panorama: I’m Feeling Lucky, Timothy Thomasson & Tatum Wilson, SAT, 27 August 2024

In Slavoj Žižek’s extended 2002 essay on the September 11^th attacks, entitled Welcome to the Desert of the Real, he predicts, alarmingly accurately in retrospect, what 21^st Century warfare would come to look like.

“We are entering a new era of paranoiac warfare,” Žižek writes, “in which the greatest task will be to identify the enemy and his weapons. In this new warfare, the agents assume their acts less and less publicly … forming an ideal breeding-ground for conspiracy theories and generalized social paranoia.”

Jean-François Lauda, Eli Kerr, Vernissage, 13 September 2024

The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the Lord. —Proverbs 21:31

“Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.” —C.P. Cavafy

The purpose of war in every century previous to our own seemed to be a paradoxical one: to prevent an even worse conflict.

The Second World War, for example, was justified to put a halt to the Holocaust and Hitler’s ruthless expansion into Eastern Europe. The Cold War was viewed as a deterrent to a larger and possibly nuclear war — surely a far harsher fate. As the old ideological axiom went, to secure peace, we must prepare for war.

However, war in the 21^st Century appears to have only one goal: to perpetuate conflict, while guaranteeing its manageability at a purely bureaucratic level.

Just keep the temperature up while ensuring the water never boils out of the pot. As long as the explosions continue on the accepted field of battle — i.e. Ukraine, Gaza — war poses no problems and indeed yields dividends to the political and capital powers that reign today.

Particularly in the U.S., it won’t matter whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins the presidency. Either one would benefit from a permanent state of war abroad.

The battles that rage now are designed not to end. Otherwise, they never would have begun.

Yves Charuest, out into, Interzone Editions (2024)

“In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.” —Theodor Adorno

As he approached his final years, David Bowie’s compositions became evermore chaotic, wilder, influenced increasingly by disrupters and experimenters.

Bowie was always known as something of a vampire, feeding off and making palatable the avant-garde zeitgeist. In the late 1960s it was Syd Barrett and Marc Bolan. In the late 1990s it was Goldie and Trent Reznor.

However, in 2002, Bowie released arguably his most confounding album, Heathen. Superficially, the record sounded like an artist shifting into a more adult contemporary phase, adopting the vernacular of acolytes like Dave Grohl and The Pixies, whom he covered on the recording. But beneath the surface, it was apparent that Bowie was wrestling with something more profound, spiritual, and in doing so, discovering his own original voice, perhaps for the first time.

On his ultimate album, entitled Blackstar, Bowie consciously conjures the mythical archetype of Beethoven in late life — deaf, isolated, insane — abandoning any airs of pleasant or acceptable pop music.

The Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said wrote in his 2006 book On Late Style: “Beethoven’s immobilized and socially resistant final works are at the core of what is new in modern music of our own time.”

Bowie’s final works are at the heart of what is postmodern in ours.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber, Animal Shapes (2021) Acrylic and ink on MDF, 24 x 24 in. Patel Brown. Photographed for NicheMTL.}