Maria Chávez, Victoria Shen, & Mariam Rezaei with Lori Freedman, No Hay Banda, La Sala Rossa, 25 March 2025

“Complexity is not difficulty, but mess, toxic waste, genre disorder.”
—Nick Land, No Future

Torus with Orchestroll, fdg., CMXE, & Musicfriend, Église Saint Denis, 22 March 2025

“The monastery was the first place in history where time was measured. Benedict added a seventh period to the devotion of the day, and in the seventh century by a bull of Pope Sabinianus, it was decreed that the bells of the monastery be rung seven times in the twenty-four hours. These punctuation marks in the day were known as the canonical hours, and some means of keeping count of them and ensuring their regular repetition became necessary.”
—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

“The social and technical relations that uphold our current economic order are the same relations which structure our experience of time in periodisation of life, that is, length of the working day, or the time spent producing value for capital. Time — in the view of capital, the sense that dominates our reality — really is money, and so keeping track of the time in which one’s investments in the purchase of labour power play out is paramount.”
—Introduction to Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs

A minor uproar occurred online this week when the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on Wednesday donned a Rolex worth $50,000 for a photo op at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Centre.

Known as CECOT, the prison, which has the capacity to house 40,000 inmates, is being used as a waystation for deportees under the new American administration’s initiative to crack down on illegal immigration. Noem’s choice to wear such an ostentatious symbol of conspicuous consumption some saw as in poor taste.

However, whether intentional or not, the watch was the perfect prop. The handcuffs on the prisoners’ wrists are the underbelly of Noem’s legitimate incarceration by the constructs of hypercapitalism and neofascism that Trump’s regime exemplify.

Time, not space, is prison.

Stimulant Vol II Launch Party, St. Kevin’s Parish, 22 March 2025

An unignorable throughline exists between U.S. Presidents Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy.

The two alleged assassination attempts on Trump in 2024, as well as his appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, have fastened a link between the Trump and Kennedy brands. More recently, Trump’s release of thousands of declassified Kennedy assassination documents has renewed their association in the popular consciousness.

On the surface, Kennedy and Trump couldn’t be less alike: Kennedy was a Democrat, anti-war, anti-racist, resolutely left-of-centre on the American political spectrum.

Still, for fans of the author J.G. Ballard, for whom Kennedy’s death was an object of persistent fascination in works like Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, Trump’s deliberate fixation with Kennedy is more easily decipherable. It is not so much ideological as it is libidinal.

Kennedy’s death was a moment charged with intense subconscious eroticism. Particularly, frame number 313 of the Zapruder film undeniably depicts a symbolic orgasm, the final bullet’s impact producing an eruption of biological matter exploding uncontrollably all over the First Lady’s double-breasted raspberry pink suit. It is pure snuff porn.

The fact that the Presidential limousine was already in a sense “decapitated,” and equipped with “suicide doors” — which swing both ways — deepens its auto- and homoerotic thematism. Not to mention that the car was a Lincoln, christened after another famously assassinated American figurehead. Surely, aside from automobiles, sex and death are the Western world’s most fundamental drives.

Nonetheless, Kennedy was the utopian President America would never get back. Whereas Trump is shaping up to be the dystopian leader they will never be rid of.

1985. Image-Worlds, Centre VOX, 28 March — 21 June 2025

“You can’t be fond of living in the past
‘Cause if you are, then there’s no way that you’re gonna last.”
—Gordon Downie

Simon Chioini, “Rivière 4,” Montréal rivières, Myriam Boucher, Gabriel·le Caux, Simon Chioini & Antonin Gougeon-Moisan (Label formes – ondes)

I went this week to The Bay at Carrefour Angrignon to buy bedclothes and bath towels.

It has been widely reported that Hudson’s Bay Company is currently liquidating its stock and consolidating operations into six stores, including Montreal’s flagship location at Sainte-Catherine Street and Phillips Square. At least that iconic block will be spared.

In addition to the bluster from south of the border about tariffs and soft annexation, the demise of Canada’s oldest retailer, founded almost two centuries before the country’s Confederation, feels like yet another blow to what constitutes Canadian cultural identity. Regardless of our national disagreements, we all agree on what we are not.

But a sale is a sale.

As I perused the goods on offer, a profound sense of sadness overwhelmed me, along with the renewed realization that capitalism’s zombie endgame is ultimately to consume itself.

Under our absurd socioeconomic system, constellations of products are overproduced as cheaply as possible, maximizing at every stage the creed of shameless exploitation, in order to stock shelves that the consuming public greets largely with indifference.

Nobody really wanted these piles of haphazardly folded yet perfectly wearable beige pants that some sweatshop worker in Bangladesh stitched together for marginally more than slave wages. And still, nobody wants them at 40 percent off.

In the linens department, I pick out two towels, two washcloths, two bathmats, and a set of crisp white bedsheets, taking them to the checkout to pay. A middle-aged man with tired eyes processes the purchase, bagging my new items while reciting the store’s return policy. I ask him what he is planning to do now. He says blithely that he is looking for another job.

I wanted to buy a pair of those ugly beige pants, too, just to rescue them from the loneliness of arbitrary and unnecessary existence.

But as the saying goes, you have to put on your own mask first before assisting others.◼︎

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_{Cover images: Detail of the exhibition 1985. Image-Worlds at Centre VOX. Photographed for NicheMTL.}