No Hay Banda, BEAM SPLITTER with Anne-F Jacques & Ryoko Akama, La Sala Rossa, 29 September 2025

The 2006 Canadian film Monkey Warfare, starring the Torontonian writer-director Don McKellar and his late partner Tracy Wright, centres on an ageing couple of radical political militants who spend their days smoking pot, listening to The Fugs, foraging for antiques to peddle online, and ruminating over their heyday committing soft acts of left-wing domestic terrorism.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s most recent feature, One Battle After Another, displays remarkable similarities to McKellar’s film: handlebar-moustached male leads with flawed personalities and difficulties maintaining relationships; attempting to outrun previous misdeeds; the hope bestowed upon a new generation of notably female operatives.

Although their politics align, these films’ ultimate morals could not be further apart. The necessity of violence is the definitive subject at the heart of every revolution.

Don Giovanni, Opéra de Montréal, Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 30 September 2025

“…the more consciousness a man possesses the more he is separated from his instincts (which at least give him an inkling of the hidden wisdom of God) and the more prone he is to error. He is certainly not up to Satan’s wiles if even his creator is unable, or unwilling, to restrain this powerful spirit.” —Carl Jung, Answer to Job.

We are constantly at war — evidently with each other, but more frequently with ourselves. We fight to resist our base impulses. We struggle to transcend our animal instincts and become human. Foregoing indulgences and pleasures of the flesh is an archetypal fight. It is not only a moral but furthermore an existential conflict. We battle our inner demons which seek to lead us astray from the straight and narrow path.

Consciousness, then, is an archetypal paradox: consciousness is necessary to discern the difference between what is wrong and what is right; but it is also consciousness that sensibly represses nature’s divine intelligence.

POP Montreal presents Do Make Say Think with Kee Avil, Rialto Theatre, 28 September 2025

The problem of why we repeat is a fundamental philosophical question. Once something is done, why bother to do it again?

There are a number of answers, including, but not limited to, compulsion, addiction, and inevitability.

I might be compelled, say, to have lunch even though I had lunch yesterday because food keeps me alive and I love life. I might drink a cup of coffee even though I drank a cup of coffee a few hours ago because caffeine is a habit-forming substance and I am a creature of habit. I might go out to see a beloved band perform again even though I have seen them perform before because I am opportunistic and cannot avoid exploiting any occasion to do so.

Our impulse to repeat is at odds, though, with the longing for novelty and the desire for freshness of experience. And so, we disguise our repetitions. We have a ham sandwich for lunch today because we had a tuna fish sandwich yesterday. We order an espresso in the morning and an allongé in the afternoon. And our favourite bands subtly alter our favourite songs in order to inject them with a sense of surprise, even though we know very well the verse and the chorus.

“We do not disguise because we repress,” writes Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, “we repress because we disguise, and we disguise by virtue of the determinant centre of repetition.”

Ensemble Urbain, Origines, La Sala Rossa, 21 September 2025

I have often wondered why, if there is so much vacant space in the world, people feel the need to occupy the same zone.

Humans congregate in cities like magnets draw metal shavings. Everyone wants to live in Paris or London or Berlin or Moscow or Montreal. Fewer people are drawn to Saint-Joseph-de-Sorel.

“New York City,” said the departed comedian Phil Hartman, “is a testament to man’s desire to be stacked on top of other men.”

Africa Fashion, McCord Steward Museum, 25 September 2025 – 1 February 2026

A fool’s mouth is his destruction, and his lips are the snare of his soul. —Proverbs 19:7

Beauty, wisdom, virtue, justice, and truth seem to be the predominant preoccupations of the world’s religious doctrines.

About a decade ago, we entered into an historical era that the media dubbed “post-Truth,” in which objective facts took a supporting role to individual opinions and emotional appeals. This new epoch coincided with the first election of the Orange Cheeto in the United States and Britain’s exit from the European Union across the pond.

The universality of truth is implied by its most frequently used form, in the singular. We don’t instruct our children to tell multiple truths. Rather, we implore them to tell the truth. One.

Conversely, falsehoods are plural. Lies. Practically infinite iterations.

Monotheism is the creed that there is only one God. The concept developed in opposition to polytheism in which adherents worshiped multiple deities that governed various aspects of nature and reality. The term originates from the mid-1600s when Henry More, the English theologian, devised it to designate preferential religions and reject substance dualism.

In the 21^st century, we tend to perceive and interpret reality through a series of interconnected actors, actants, and networks. This perception encourages an assumption of complexity that the understanding of a singular truth bypasses entirely. The austerity of one truth, one God, and one administration of justice has an inherent and minimal beauty to it. But it does not reflect the structure of the organic world around us, and particularly the world we have constructed.

Multiplicity characterizes technological postmodernity and diversity represents biological fortitude. Both of those assertions are observably true — and they seemingly contradict the world’s religious doctrines.

The notion of multiple truths presupposes that facts are a little different for everyone, like a universal version of Rashomon. Reality has apparently bifurcated exponentially since the turn of the millennium, and those divisions have accelerated following Trump, Covid, and Trump 2.0.

Are we never ever getting back together?◼︎

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_{Cover image: Gallery view of Elvis, part of Africa Fashion at the McCord Stewart Museum. Photographed for NicheMTL.}