Hesaitix with Laced and Amselysen, Espace SAT, 31 May 2025

Look at me and watch yourself
Everyone is someone else
When you speak the echoes chime
The voice is yours, but the words are mine.
—Nomeansno, “Machine”

Perhaps the reason that everyone is so fascinated with the spat between the Orange Cheeto and Tech Bro Numero Uno is that we recognize the lowest form of petty squabble magnified and reflected in the behaviour of the world’s most powerful people. Reality TV has migrated to Truth Social and the network formerly known as Twitter and returned full circle back to reality.

In the beginning, God created man in His image. Now that man is in charge, we are finally free to fashion the Gods we deserve.

The Womb is a Room in Another Person, dir. Catherine Machado, Mission Santa Cruz, 4 June 2025

I’m living in an age that
Screams my name at night
But when I get to the doorway
There’s no one in sight.
—Arcade Fire, “My Body Is a Cage.”

Practice makes perfect. So be careful what you practice.

Since 1957, Alan Belcher, Galerie Eli Kerr, 7 June – 24 July 2025

Why shouldn’t everything we’ve constructed be deconstructed? What’s so special anyway about some abstract concept like democracy, or liberty, or justice? What’s so special about art when a crypto billionaire spends $6.2 million on a banana duct taped to the wall?

Later, that same crypto billionaire might spend $40 million on meme coins to attend a private dinner at Trump National Golf Club, effectively buying an audience with the leader of the so-called free world. Influence peddling is the highest artform of our era, an artform that requires highly specialized skills, and abundant material resources.

Ours would not be the first toxic civilization to fall away, and likely won’t be the last. Anyone who has seen the original Planet of the Apes knows that composition is inevitably followed by decomposition. It doesn’t matter whether these are good times or bad times or in between times. They won’t last.

Shapes with Thee Soreheads, Caniche, and Shunk, Van Horne Underpass, 7 June 2025

The other day I was searching for a CD amidst a pile of them that was taller than I am. Crouched on the floor trying to locate the spine of the album I was looking for, I raised my head just in time to see the entire stack come crashing down on me, one sharp plastic jewel case after another — Tom Waits, These New Puritans, Roger Waters — colliding with my forehead. It was slapstick. I walked around for three days with a discernible bump on my brow, wounded again by music.

I recounted this story afterwards to Gary Worsley, the proprietor of Cheap Thrills, to which he replied, “Good thing you don’t have much heavy metal in your collection.”

Superposition, Jinny Yu, Fondation Guido Molinari, 5 June – 24 August 2025

You’ll never live like common people
You’ll never do whatever common people do
Never fail like common people
You’ll never watch your life slide out of view
And then dance and drink and screw
Because there’s nothing else to do.
—Pulp, “Common People.”

The last time you were here, walking hurriedly southward on Rue Dézéry from Métro Prefontaine, the snow was knee-high and it was Nuit Blanche and you were on your way to the same place that you are on your way to now, Fondation Guido Molinari, on the east end of Sainte-Catherine, a converted Spanish Bank in Hochelaga that housed the artist’s studio and living quarters while he was alive and now serves as a monument to his substantial legacy.

The air was painfully cold then, and the sidewalks were not cleared, except for the worn pathways of footprints that carved meandering makeshift snow trenches which deceived every second step into a potential broken ankle. The lamplight illuminated a sepia scene, and icicles hung from the most European of balconies in Canada, and you thought to yourself that you were fortunate to be living here in a city that prized arts and culture to such an extent as to celebrate Nuit Blanche with nighttime events at places like this.

Today, though, it is late spring, and the air is soft and warm and mild as baby’s breath — either the plant or the respiration — and songbirds are singing you on your way to your destination. Black girls in skin-tight spandex and white girls with naked tattooed arms sprouting from flowing sundresses walk before you down the one-way street, and beautiful girls’ backsides bounce on bicycle seats when they ride by, and you are grateful for Montreal’s crumbling and bumpy roads. An elderly woman in a purple robe and matching hair walks twin Scottish terriers on two lime-green leashes, smiling at you as she ambles past.

The scent of lilac overwhelms your olfactory sense, intermittently interrupted by the acrid stench of compost, because it is garbage day and the garbage collectors have left the tops of all the receptacles open to air out. You can smell the accumulated age of the neighbourhood, this time superimposed upon all the eras that came before it, the decomposing wood and musky tobacco fumes belching from open doors of flats with no air conditioning and out onto the sidewalks.

An ambient breeze carries puffs of pollen lazily through the park, where old men ride on reduced mobility scooters with high visibility vests wrapped around their seats. They smoke and are unshaven and sift through garbage cans gleaning empty beer bottles and cigarette butts that they can roll by hand back into smokable form.

It is 6:17pm and you are 17 minutes late. But it doesn’t matter right now because you feel alive and particularly present in a way that you haven’t in some time. You want to elongate everything about this moment, to remember the detail of every discrete sensation, to capture them as they wash away like grains of sand on some faraway beach.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Alan Belcher, Carbonara (2024), Carbon drawing on canvas with imported pancetta stagionata, egg yolk, pasta water, pecorino romano, agricola due leoni, olive oil, and black pepper. 18″ x 18″ x 2.25″}