Jan Jelinek with Roméo Poirier and Racine, Society for Arts and Technology, 15 November 2024

“From now on there can be no unpolitical prophecies.”
—John Berger, “The Moment of Cubism.”

In 2016, when Donald Trump was for the first time elected U.S. president, the online discourse-o-sphere kicked into overdrive with comparisons to various dystopian narratives, both historical and fictional.

Political theorists like Henry A. Giroux and Robert Paxton cited similarities to the unholy trinity of World War II-era fascist dictators. The New Yorker cartoonist Paul Noth likened Trump to the archetypal wolf tending his flock of sheep.

But none was as pervasive as Trump’s apparent correlation to Biff Tannen in Back to the Future Part II, leading the 1989 film’s screenwriter, Bob Gale, to confirm that he indeed modelled Tannen’s character on a caricature of Trump.

However, the blowhard billionaire archetype is no longer an exaggeration, nor does its application implicitly affront Trump or his supporters.

On the contrary, a loudmouthed misogynistic bully who appears impervious to criticism is the epitome of heroism for the new generation of disaffected and desensitized Americans who voted for him. Scorn only empowers them further; shame, paradoxically, is their badge of honour.

These incongruities have led many of us to observe, like the Back to the Future sequel’s plot, that we are living in the worst of conceivable timelines. But I’m afraid that it’s even worse than that: we’re going through the worst timeline again, like taking that pathological second whiff of a carton of spoilt milk.

This is Back to the Future Part II, part two.

NPNP with Anna Mayberry and Hidden Attachment, Lamplight, 14 November 2024

“Deception counts less as a measure of realism than as evidence of magicianship, and is a highly atypical mishap.”
—Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art

If works of art reflect the cultural zeitgeist, then we are clearly in a state of general disarray. Deconstructed music is only the latest structurally homologous current indicating the lack of structure and void of solidarity evident in society.

For instance, rigidly rhythmic electronic music of the 1980s and ‘90s fairly accurately echoed late modernity, the perfect and predictable thump-and-clap of the cybernetic age.

At the turn of the new millennium, arrhythmic trends exemplified by Autechre’s off-the-grid programming, and further, by Burial’s beat-mismatched hauntological loopscapes, anticipated the increasingly fragmented post-Fordist modes of production emerging under hypercapitalism.

Of all the 20^th century musical inventions, the synthesizer sonically represented futurism best. But by the early 21^st century, it had quickly flipped into an instrument of nostalgia, reminding us of the squandered potential of possible futures past.

Now, in an era of heightened precarity, remote and always-on labour, forever wars and forever chemicals, we are confronted with alienating and longform musical (de)compositions that reject almost any semblance of structure, and in which moments of traditional melody and chance harmony are at best incidental.

The recto of this verso is the retromaniacal return to thinner and thinner slivers of musical historicity, reliving, repeating, and recombining ever-shrinking aesthetic precedents in a rapidly decaying orbit, reducing entire cultural currents and oeuvres to a “vibe” or a “mood.”

This is neither a good nor a bad thing — but it is undisputedly nonetheless a thing.

La grandiose Symphonie alpestre de Richard Strauss, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Bruce Liu Piano, Rafael Payare Conductor, Maison Symphonique, 13 November 2024

“The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the whole.”
—Susan Sontag, “On Style.”

There are a handful of writers to whom I always return in troubled times, among them William S. Burroughs, Slavoj Žižek, Mark Fisher, Susan Sontag, and Woody Allen. All of these at alternating points in their lives experienced ecstasy and despair, the heights of fame and the trials of misfortune.

Burroughs, for example, murdered his own wife, ostensibly an accident from which his creative conscience likely never fully recovered. Woody Allen has now defiantly spent half of his career under the long shadow of popular cancellation. Fisher succumbed to his own diagnosis that there was no alternative to capitalism — other than the exceedingly unlikely possibility that we would all take psychedelics and fall madly in love with modernity again.

I make no claim for any of these thinkers, nor apologies for their misdeeds, nor explanations for their failures or successes. However, their words provide me a profound sense of comfort, a path forward, like sets of deep footprints in freshly fallen snow.

Russell Banx, Gaze and Gesture, Pangée, 14 November – 21 December 2024

“for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun”
—R. Buckminster Fuller, “No More Secondhand God.”

My generation and every generation after it mainly fall into two problematic categories: those who were never taught how to fight, and those who were only taught how to fight.

The progeny of hippies were erroneously told that love would conquer all. This is false. Love in fact conquers very few things, not even love itself. Hatred is often stronger than love.

If conquering is the goal, the most valuable tool is violence. The trick is to fight lovingly, to commit violence with love.

Déliquescence, Fonderie Darling, 26 September – 8 December 2024

“God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly, and this inexactitude or injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

The work of art in the age of its artificial reproduction immediately raises the question of its authenticity. Can art conceived of and made by a complex computer program genuinely be called art? Or is the art perhaps the A.I. itself?

If it is, human beings are not the artists; God is. And all of creation is His, well, creation. We are not the medium but the form.

The opposite of artificial intelligence is not human intelligence but rather divine instinct.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Russell Banx. Photographed for NicheMTL.}