Eric Chenaux Trio with Markus Floats Ensemble, La Sala Rossa, 21 May 2025

“Now is the time to be famous or fortunate.” —Mark Carney, Value(s)

“The system-preserving power is no longer oppressive but seductive.” —Byung-Chul Han, Why Revolution is Impossible Today.

Power under capitalism is identified as the fulfillment of desire, the abatement of want, wanting and subsequently having. Yet, unless fulfillment can somehow be observed, it is not genuine power.

Here, desire must be distinguished from need. We need food, water, air, clothing, shelter, rest. Beyond those needs are non-essential desires. We desire gourmet food, bottled water, designer garments, sprawling mansions, lavish vacations. (One key difference between those with power under capitalism and those without it is that they enjoy better versions of the things we need.)

Still, power is displayed ostentatiously through the satiation of more and more frivolous wants, the invention of novel dreams conceived solely for the purpose of realizing them. Nowhere is this more evident than 21^st century libidinal desire. There are many more than 50 shades of gray today.

Doubtless, we all crave physical intimacy. But sexual desires have multiplied and proliferated, bloomed and blossomed into evermore niche categories and satisfying them has become a symbol of the utmost form of power. More often than not, sex these days is transactional.

Take for instance the Canadian case of the woman known as E.M. and the five former World Junior hockey players she has accused of assault.

A six-way erotic encounter is beyond what might be considered a reasonable intimate requirement. However, fulfilling that desire is a symbol of extreme power than only professional athletes or rap music moguls — or current U.S. presidents, probably — can accomplish. And capitalizing upon that desire is a uniquely post-modern specimen of seduction.

A perverse merger of humiliation and pride emerges when the satisfaction of aberrant desire is publicised — in the news, say, or in court. And the surplus byproduct of this publicity is pure power for everyone involved, the acute focus of extrovert energy. The more witnesses to libidinal depravity, the better.

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no evidence of a group chat at trial, did it really fall?

La Bohème, Opera de Montreal, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 13 May 2025

“That which Wisdom made into a crown for its head, these evil men made into sandals for their soles!” —Israel ben Benjamin of Bełżyce

In the first month of 1941, just on the cusp of America entering in earnest into World War II, then-U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a State of the Union address to Americans that the rest of the world has come to call “The Four Freedoms Speech.”

In it, Roosevelt outlined the cornerstones of modern liberal democracy as the freedom of expression, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. The artist and Saturday Evening Post illustrator Norman Rockwell depicted these freedoms in a series of famous paintings that adorned four consecutive covers of the publication in early 1943.

Each iteration is striking in its symbolism and characterization — and becomes naturally more so in light of the accumulation of the historical weight of subsequent global events.

I find the final image, Freedom from Fear, particularly fascinating. Rockwell depicts a nuclear family scene at bedtime, a typical Anglo-Saxon mother and father tucking in what appear to be sleeping twin boys. (The twins to me have come to represent the World Trade Center and the destruction of the doubling of the sign, although this is certainly an irrational and impossible interpretation.)

On the floor of the twins’ bedroom are two ragdolls (not 30, as there might have been had the painting been created in 2025). And in the hand of the patriarch — who remarkably resembles Sterling Hayden, who made his film debut that year opposite Fred MacMurray in a picture called Virginia, the name originally given in the late 16^th century to the entire colonial coastal region, from Maine to Bermuda — is a folded-up newspaper.

The visible portion of its half-obscured headline reveals the words “Bombings” and “Horror.” The peaceful scene that Rockwell conjures is ostensibly in ironic contrast to the new war raging in Europe at that time and furthermore echoes the attack on Pearl Harbour which would draw America into global conflict for a second time during the 20^th century’s first half.

There is undeniably a melancholic character to the image, what we might call “a vibe” that resonates deeply within the North American consciousness.

Schubert’s Famous “Trout” Quintet, Musicians of the OSM, Bourgie Hall, 9 May 2025

I should have been as though I had not been; I should have been carried from the womb to the grave. —Job 10:19

The common refrain of the past century has declared that there has never been a modern war on our soil. Of course, this ignores the genocidal annihilation of Indigenous populations as well as the Revolutionary and Civil Wars that soaked the land in blood during the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Nennen with Everly Lux and Boar God, La Toscadura, 16 May 2025

“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” —James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty

We generally conceive of capitalism as the economic system proper to democracy. And from democracy we extrapolate a transcendentalist conclusion of moral goodness, as if the majority always demonstrates that which is wise, right, and true.

But both capitalism and democracy are pervious to subversion which manifests in profound contemporary Western melancholia.

This sorrow is treated with the consumption of consumer goods and the collection of distracting experiences, tempered by a false sense of relief for the privilege of living in a precarious absence of violence.

All the while in the 21^st century, fear constantly stalks freedom.

Nicolas Baier, Mise au foyer, Blouin | Division, 10 May – 21 June 2025

That’s the way the pan flashes
That’s the way the market crashes
That’s the way the whip lashes
That’s the way the teeth gnashes
—William S. Burroughs & Tom Waits, “That’s The Way.”

The most dependable way to induce a Dark Age is to manufacture amnesia. Broadly speaking, there are two methods of accomplishing this.

The first is the brute method. Destroy archives. Eviscerate institutions of higher learning. Cut lines of communication and links to history.

The second method is more subtle and insidious. It involves the constant eradication and reproduction of states of normalcy, ideally to such an extent that the only constant is instability. No one remembers yesterday because they are too worried about what might happen tomorrow.

Two recent books — Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs and Henry A. Giroux’s The Violence of Organized Forgetting — forewarn of these strategies.

I know I have previously read them both but scarcely remember what they describe.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Gallery view of Nicolas Baier, Mise au foyer, Blouin | Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.}