Category Archives: 999 Words

NicheMTL’s best essays, interviews, and op-eds in 999 Words.

999 Words

Listening to History: notes on Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony

When my grandfather boarded an ocean liner destined for Quebec City in the spring of 1929, he must have been terrified.

He was only 19 years old and had no formal education. He spoke neither English nor French, just Ukrainian. He had no idea what awaited him in the new world.

His older brothers had gone to school and received an education, but William Diduck was considered stronger than he was smart, and so he was kept home to work on the family farm, where his hands grew calloused from tilling the wheat fields. He didn’t play and laugh and have fun like other children. Even as a kid, he was a gloomy and solemn and hard-working sort.

As terrified as he might have been crossing the Atlantic, his experience probably wasn’t as terrifying as the fate that met his older brothers who stayed behind. When the Russian army swept through Ukraine in the early 1930s, they showed no mercy. Those who opposed them were dealt with harshly, swiftly.

Two of William’s brothers were shot and buried in mass graves, and a third was sent to Siberia to work in a forced labour camp. It is unlikely that my grandfather knew what happened to them at the time, as communication was limited to hand-written letters that would have taken months to arrive — if they arrived at all.

By 1939, Hitler had invaded Poland and was moving Westward, and Ukraine was stuck between two forces of evil: the Germans on one side, and the Soviet army on the other. Within a few short decades, famine and war decimated an ethnicity one thousand years in the making.

William was spared this fate. He lived. But his culture was lost, too.

He was also forced to work by colonial masters in another country that was foreign and, at times, no less hostile. He went from Quebec to the Northwest Territories where he worked in a Uranium mine and was beaten for speaking his mother tongue. And the mine would eventually cause his death from silicosis.

“The Battle of Stalingrad is regarded as among the bloodiest in all of warfare.” Antoine Saito for the OSM

Dmitri Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony was completed in the Summer of 1943, immediately following the Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad. Hitler was adamant about capturing the city for its strategic importance; Stalingrad was the largest industrial center in Russia and sat along the Volga River, a major transportation hub for provisions, troops, and oil. But Russia, throwing all of its might into the combat, ultimately prevailed.

The Battle of Stalingrad is regarded as among the bloodiest in all of warfare. Estimates of casualties range from 1.25 million to over 4 million people.

Russia commemorates the Battle of Stalingrad on February 2nd each year in one of the country’s most celebrated in its Days of Military Honour. These ‘Days’ serve as a significant propaganda tool to glorify the Soviet empire, and still today, Vladimir Putin uses this particular battle to drum up national pride.

Nazis were unconditionally bad, and Russia beat the Nazis, therefore, Russia must be categorically good. But after the battle was won, the Soviet Union embarked upon decades of repression against their own people, as well as of the citizens of the annexed Soviet Socialist Republics. Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony was banned from public performance until 1956.

What Russia did in Ukraine in the 1930s horrified even the Germans. Holodomor, or the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide, killed more people than the Holocaust did — and in much messier fashion. Grain was deliberately destroyed in order to drive up its price on the international market, and in the process, millions of ethnic Ukrainians starved to death.

As borders were closed, there was simply nowhere else for people to go. The Breadbasket of Europe was emptied on purpose. My family’s once abundant wheat fields were first stolen, and then intentionally destroyed. Nearly 100 years later, that land once again is drenched in blood.

How is it possible for a culture to endure genocide twice in one century?

The only way is the mass erasure of history. Because, as Winston Churchill said, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. And if we are repeating that history, then the worst is yet to come.

Our global amnesia is picking up pace. Just two years ago, the front page of The New York Times declared in horror that Russia was using torture and rape as weapons in their war to take Ukraine. Now, those same headlines report that Hamas weaponized sexual violence against Israeli hostages on October 7th, 2023.

The U.N. certified the Ukrainian invasion as genocide; now, there is no denying that genocide is occurring in Gaza, too. Meanwhile, the West, as it did during Hitler’s Polish conquest, is sitting on the sidelines, appeasing evil, arguing over whether or not and how to intervene. If history is any lesson, there will soon be no choice.

“How is it possible for a culture to endure genocide twice in one century?” Antoine Saito for the OSM

Listening to Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony is a stark reminder of history — the history of repression during the Soviet reign; the history of genocide that Russia inflicted upon Ukraine, and the history of fascism reincarnated in its own ancestral victims.

It is impossible to miss the tragedy audible in every note that the USSR censored, in every crash of the cymbal, in every drumbeat. And it is vital to hear those notes again in the context of today’s conflicts, which portend to spiral into another World War.

Putin has already threatened to use nuclear weapons to destroy the globe’s communications satellites, and now he has straightforwardly said he is prepared to use them against earthly targets as well.

In the Ukrainian language, ‘diduck’ refers to a sheaf of wheat bundled together. It also means ‘grandfather spirit.’ My grandfather, William, was stronger than he was smart. But he was smart, too. He was smart enough to educate his children, and his children’s children — to study music, to appreciate art, and to learn from history.

The history embedded in Shostakovich’s tremendous work is everyone’s history. Listen closely, lest it again become our future.◼︎

The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal performs Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony March 7th and 10th, 2024, at Maison Symphonique.

Cover image: Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal

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999 Words

The Orchid Thief

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. ­–Psalm 104:24

All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. –Isaiah 40:6

There is a scene in Spike Jonze’s 2002 film Adaptation in which Nicolas Cage — who plays real-life screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his fictional twin brother, Donald — classifies a roomful of women at an orchid convention like the various blossoming species they are there to admire.

“One looks like a schoolteacher; one looks like a gymnast; one looks like a Midwestern beauty queen,” Cage observes.

“One has eyes that dance; one has eyes that contain the sadness of the world.”

Adaptation is among the quintessential “meta” texts of the early 21st century, a story within a story, a film that ingeniously incorporates its own author, in the tradition of Federico Fellini’s 8½, or Seinfeld.

As the name suggests, it adapts for the screen the 1998 novel, The Orchid Thief, which the journalist Susan Orlean herself adapted from her own article for The New Yorker, entitled Orchid Fever, about John Laroche, an American horticulturalist who was prosecuted for illegally removing endangered wild orchids from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in Florida.

Layers of fiction and fact intertwine across an enchanting narrative about Kaufman struggling to transform Orlean’s prose into a brilliant script, wanting to do justice to her freewheeling style while living up to the cult success of his breakthrough 1999 hit, Being John Malkovich, and ultimately choosing to weave in himself and his own frustrations as a vehicle to bring Orlean and Laroche to life.

The movie version of Kaufman declares that he wants to “create a story where nothing much happens, where people don’t change, they don’t have any epiphanies,” he says. “More a reflection of the real world.”

There are many fine books written about them both, no doubt, but I don’t know much about Georgia O’Keeffe, and even less about Henry Moore. I know that they both created artistic works that drew heavily upon natural forms: stones, bones, and especially orchids.

I also know that the shapes O’Keeffe and Moore created tend to look a lot like pornography, a connection they both apparently denied. Nonetheless, it is there, and their respective eroticized mythologies endure as a part of popular culture. “Not surprisingly,” Orlean writes in Orchid Fever, “orchids have all sorts of sexual associations […] even other creatures find orchids alluring.”

The thing about orchids, and in fact all living things, is that they do change. They may not have epiphanies as such, but orchids have a very short window of remaining alluring. Many of them appear unremarkable, even ugly, when not in bloom.

And they die. Eventually, a flower’s sensual petals and stems wither away into dust. Surely, that is why O’Keeffe and Moore found purpose reproducing through painting and sculpture these fleeting and mortal structures — to preserve them for posterity, to transfigure their earthly beauty into some more durable state.

During a recent visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, I found myself attempting to take some original photographs of O’Keeffe’s and Moore’s works. But it was a Friday afternoon, and the gallery was quite busy, meaning that other people were getting in the way. Many of them were themselves attempting to snap the perfect picture, presumably, to share elsewhere. I decided to lean into the obstacle, realizing at once that the people were just as interesting to look at as the artworks were.

One looked like a Tiger orchid; one looked like a Lily of the Valley; one looked like milk thistle growing between the cracks of the pavement.

I began to notice that there is a certain way that people look at art, a kind of awe in a moment of repose that occurs naturally and cannot be helped. You see the subtle transformation in people’s posture, their composure, an instant of awareness, of recognition and insight.

That instant is as ephemeral as an orchid’s flowering phase. It’s there and then it’s gone.

I continued through the rest of the gallery more content to look at people looking at things than at the things the people were looking at. Their subtle transformations changed me, too, and reminded me that I was a part of this blossoming and annihilating cycle. Like an orchid and its pollinating insect, custom-built to attract an analogous companion, the museum’s patrons appeared to be reflected in the artworks.

Human beings are very adaptable — that’s one of our greatest strengths as a species. We can learn and grow and adjust to extremes. We can adapt our environments to suit our needs and desires. We can learn new languages and ways of doing things and establish new networks of survival. We can even produce artificial climates called greenhouses, and others called museums.

More perilously, we can also adapt to stasis, the reiteration of regression. Over the past two years, we have become accustomed to hearing about battlefield deaths in two spiralling global conflicts. Two years before that, we were constantly adapting to the new normal of pandemic-era restrictions. Two decades before that, at the turn of the millennium, we adjusted to an ambient environment of global terror and surveillance the likes of which put George Orwell to shame.

Change is not a choice that we humans can make. “If you begin collecting living things,” Orlean writes in her New Yorker piece, “you are pursuing something imperfectible, and even if you manage to find them and then possess them, there is no guarantee they won’t die or change […] To desire orchids is to have a desire that can never be fully requited.”

To want to preserve something — a flower, a language, an entire nation — is strictly vanity. If you love something, you have to let it go. Not because it will ever come back to you in some idealized form, but because at some point, everything must go.◼︎

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art continues through June 2nd 2024 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1380 Sherbrooke Street West.

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Body Language: in conversation with Erika Angell

“People go into art for very different reasons,” says the Sweden-born, Montreal-based musician, Erika Angell. “Some people,” she scoffs at the imminent punchline, “are actually interested in earning money.”

We speak over the telephone about Angell’s life, and of her remarkable career — as a multi-linguistic Canadian transplant; as a frequent collaborator, notably with the likes of Patrick Watson, Liam O’Neill of SUUNS, and her husband, Simon Angell, of Thus Owls; and now, as an experimental electronic artist in her own right with a solo album forthcoming, entitled The Obsession with Her Voice. The recording carves out a daring and singular sound, and the contemporary vocalists that Angell aligns with most — Jenny Hval, Karin Dreijer, Scott Walker — are decidedly specialized.

Our conversation invariably heads straight for the heart of the matter: what art does, what art means, and what it means to be a true artist.

“Some people are interested in standing in the light and being adored,” says Angell. “I don’t want to criticize that. But it’s not what I’m doing with art. I like art that challenges me, when it makes me have new thoughts, and it makes me take a step forward in some new direction. It’s this spiritual travel for me, music. Whenever I try to do other things, it seems so meaningless.”

Angell arrived 12 years ago in Montreal from her native Sweden, not necessarily intending to settle down in the city. “It was more like an adventure,” she says, “to get to know what it’s like to live somewhere else.” But it’s clear that Angell has built a creative home here, rediscovering the most basic, fundamental form of music-making, using her voice as her primary instrument.

“This is one of my earliest memories, singing in nature,” Angell recalls. “My mom was a musician and a music teacher. And I was always a part of her choirs when I grew up. My mom was very invested in the community. There was always lots of music happening. It was mainly Swedish folk, or from a Classical tradition. But she also invited modern contemporary composers to write for our choir, so we did a lot of modern contemporary pieces, too.”

Angell’s distinctive vocal style indeed takes its inspiration both from traditional and more contemporary sources, with an especially European flair. “My first idol was Nina Hagen,” Angell reveals. “That was my first musical influence that I picked myself, out of the record collection at home. It was just so fascinating to me how she used her voice. I was three years old, and I listened over and over.”

That preoccupation with the theatrical spontaneity of performance would continue to guide Angell creatively and personally. “The feeling in the moment, when I’m singing in a particular way, is why we all exist,” Angell exclaims. “And we find it in all kinds of ways. But I’ve never found any place in life where I’m better than singing. That’s where I can access it and share it the most with other people. Being in the process of creating is a wonderful and extremely painful process, too. You doubt everything you do, and at the same time, you’re creating magically through that. At some point it just becomes fluid, as if you’re not aware of when it’s happening. It’s just happening.”

This groove is where artists strive to be. But it doesn’t come easily; it takes courage, practice, and complete dedication. “The focus that you can reach in the creative process is too good for human beings, somehow. When you can achieve that with an audience, it is so powerful. If you’re lucky, you’re able to touch people’s hearts, truly. It’s an enormous gift, and I’m extremely grateful for whenever that happens. I try to do that every time, always,” Angell muses.

After more than a decade in Montreal, Angell feels that she’s finally found her cultural footing. “I have more awareness of what I should be doing, and what I want to be doing, and why that’s important,” she says. “I feel that it kind of snuck up after awhile that I realized a lot of things in myself as a person. Questioning. To constantly feel like an outsider without even noticing that that’s happening. That just becomes your habitat.”

It took some time for Angell to navigate not one but two second languages, and the linguistic divide that stubbornly agitates this province. “Being in Quebec, it was shocking to me in the beginning that this was actually an issue,” she notes. “I’m so jealous of everyone who grew up speaking English and French. How could that not be seen as the most beautiful gift, to live in a place with access to that? I still don’t quite understand it.”

Nonetheless, Angell is here to stay, having become a Canadian citizen last April. She says that two things particularly touched her during the swearing-in ceremony. “The judge who spoke to us took one minute to think about all the people who have gone through a lot to even be here,” Angell recounts. “And second, she said ‘thank you for choosing our country.’ It just hit me that that had never happened before, that someone said, ‘thank you.’ That turned my perspective a lot.”

“We’re constantly with all these masks in front of our faces. We’re asked to be a lot of things, too.” Erika Angell photographed by Tim Georgeson.

It’s our gain, and to that of our cultural fabric, that Angell and artists like her choose this city to call home. Because what they bring with them is more than just their bodies or their language. There is also an essential virtue to their stories. And Angell is not finished writing hers.

“What I’ve always been seeking, and what I love as an artist, is that there is some kind of truthfulness,” Angell confesses. “To be completely honest in front of other people. Which is so difficult because we’re constantly with all these masks in front of our faces. We’re asked to be a lot of things, too. And it’s really difficult to just stand straight up in front of a bunch of human beings and speak from your heart. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”◼︎

Erika Angell launches The Obsession With Her Voice 12 March 2024 at Fika(s) – Ausgang Plaza, 6524 Rue St-Hubert.

Cover image: Tim Georgeson

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999 Words

Minor Fall, Major Lift: notes on notes

The multiple meanings of the word “note” are themselves noteworthy, especially given that NicheMTL habitually subtitles these articles, “notes on” this or “notes on” that — not least including this latest note, which is self-reflexively subtitled: “notes on notes.”

First, there are literal notes, to which the subtitle refers. The written word is defined as a note. Notes scribbled in class. Notes stuck to the fridge, or the calendar. Notes in passing. The subtext of using “notes” as opposed to, say, an essay or a report, is its fleet-footedness and improvisatory character, like notes jotted during a lecture, or in a police interrogation. Quickly, efficiently.

Then, there are musical notes. These notes are also written forms — that is, notational — which are audible and understood to us as discrete sounds, the note of middle C, or G#, for instance. We conventionally speak of these notes as sitting on a chromatic scale of twelve distinct units, the notes on a piano, the notes upon which the vast majority of Western music is composed.

Notes describe smell and taste, too. Coffee, for example, is often thought to exhibit a “note” of chocolate, or vice versa. Certain flavourful notes, just like certain audible notes, complement each other, and others seem dissonant. We never know, however, which notes are going to taste or smell pleasant, or harmonize, until we put them together in resonance with one another.

This presupposes the singularity of notes. We think of notes — whether olfactory, flavourful, audible, or legible — as individual units of dimension, infinitely divisible, but irreducible, beyond being constituent of more notes.

A note scrawled on a blackboard has a definite quantity of information, just as a piano note corresponds to a definite musical frequency. Yet, as isolated as notes appear, we only define them in relation to other notes, one note in opposition, or conjunction, or relation to another. Therefore, no one note ever exists alone, a reassuring thought in a world comprised of seemingly solitary, remote parts.

I started thinking again about notes this past week, during the first of two sold-out Alexandra Stréliski concerts at Place des arts, a flawless performance at which there seemed to be no false notes. But what is that anyway — one false note? How can any note be considered wrong?

There are eighty-eight notes on a traditional piano keyboard. That is, eighty-eight keyboard keys which trigger one of twelve notes across a little more than seven octaves.

Obviously, there are no wrong notes on a piano. It depends upon the song. Although some notes are far more frequently used than others. The extreme notes, resting at the ends of the spectrum, are played only seldom and very deliberately. We have modified standard pitches over the years as well, tuning slightly upwards over time.

The scientific measurement of a note is one hertz, equal to its wavelength per second. In other words, a note depends upon its place in space and time, like a pyramid of cards, supporting and warping itself simultaneously.

In fact, infinite notes must exist, because there is always another note between notes. This is not the case, however, with linguistic notes. There is a finite number of letters in the alphabet. An exact number of words in a language. And yet, the combinations are endless.

Pleasant combinations of musical notes are what we call chords. So, it was apt that Stréliski invoked a “crack in everything”, the famous quote by Leonard Cohen, another noteworthy Montreal artist who filled the same auditorium with pleasant notes. In his most well-known song, “Hallelujah,” Cohen sings of a “secret chord that David played, that pleased the Lord.”

What does this mean?

David was the harpist introduced in the Book of Samuel, who banished King Saul’s supposedly evil spirits during spells that we might today consider on a sliding scale in severity, from panic attacks, to epileptic seizures, to paranoiac fits.

Something about the melody of David’s harp managed to calm the king’s disturbed mind. Just as something about the combination of Cohen’s words has struck a profound chord in millions of people, comforting troubled souls in troubled times. Just as Stréliski’s notes struck a chord last Wednesday night for thousands of fortunate Montrealers who were in the same place, on the same wavelength, at the same time.

The Book of Revelation is the ultimate of the Bible’s “notes,” so to speak, which describes in allegorical language the world’s destruction and redemption. It, too, is a combination of notes that inspires and terrifies its readers.

In Chapter 14, the text tells of a “new song” that redeemed people sing, which precedes the end of God’s wrath on Earth. I could not help but hear this new song in every note of Stréliski’s performance, in each chord that cleansed the air and saturated it with such pleasant sounds that for one moment it seemed as if peace on the planet was possible, within reach, that all it would take was the right combination of notes, of words, hammered out from a keyboard, revealing the secret chord that might deliver us from evil forever.

I wrote about the centrality of the keyboard to Western music in my book, Mad Skills, coining the term “Claviocentrism” to define the phenomenon. Why we have chosen the piano and its particular frequencies to gather ‘round is arbitrary, mysterious, but nonetheless real. For reasons unknown, or unexplainable, we resound most with the piano, an instrument with a remarkably limited number of notes that it can reproduce. But their combinations are familiar and novel all at once. We recognize them, and yet they delight us every time.

There is no such thing as a dishonest note. And nothing false about any individual frequency. We merely have to strike the correct chords.

There is no such thing as a wicked word. And nothing false about any literary unit. We merely have to find the right combination of them, the precise notes, the hidden hallelujah chorus.◼︎

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Truth & Consequences: notes on the assassination of John F. Kennedy

Frame number 313 of the grainy eight-millimetre strip of motion picture celluloid that we now commonly refer to as the Zapruder film is particularly shocking viewing.

It reveals the precise moment of direct impact from a sniper’s bullet that apparently caused then President of the United States John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s head to explode.

Against the unassuming cool green backdrop of an adjacent lawn, and competing for attention with the First Lady’s hot pink pillbox hat, an aerosol spray of blood-red organic matter bursts unmistakably from Kennedy’s right frontal lobe, splashing several feet into the air and onto his Lincoln’s rear seat and trunk. The blast jolts Kennedy’s body back and to the left, slumping lifelessly into his horrified wife’s lap.

In the subsequent frames, Jacqueline Kennedy recoils, screaming in shock, climbing unconsciously over the back of the Continental limousine to collect pieces of her husband’s brain. The cursed movie is further possessed by a haunted aura, the low-resolution film stock imbuing its images with additional dispassionate ghostliness.

Scarcely had a more grisly scene been captured on camera — and of such an important historical event.

The sprawling consequences of John F. Kennedy’s assassination are still felt in today’s politics and culture. And though doubts abound around who actually committed the murder, and why, there is virtually no doubt that crazed, lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald was not the sole culprit.

Intuition, inquisitiveness, and logic dictate that there is more to this story.

No shortage of speculation circulates theorizing the conspiracy that would have necessarily existed given a second sniper. Oswald acting entirely alone remains the sole argument against conspiracy, and that story’s increasing unlikeliness — and the US government’s persistent doubling down on it — gave credence to skepticism about Oswald’s possible guilt, innocence, complicity, allegiances, and whether his was the shot from Frame 313.

©️ Sixth Floor Museum

The director Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK presented a fictionalized version of the only real case for conspiracy around Kennedy’s murder to be brought to trial in the US: Louisiana District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation of the prominent New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw. When Garrison’s spending of taxpayer funds was called into question, he began financing his operations through a shell organization of wealthy patrons called Truth and Consequences Inc. Surely only another conspiracy can effectively identify a conspiracy.

Oliver Stone’s epic picture not only posited a conspiracy theory; it postulated every possible conspiracy theory — from the FBI, to the CIA, the US military, the American mafia, and even anti-Castro Cubans all on some level involved. The movie became a parody of itself, a stand-in for conspiracy, the subject of Seinfeldian satire.

Nonetheless, Stone followed up his blockbuster in 2021 with a deep-dive documentary series called JFK: Destiny Betrayed. In it, Whoopi Goldberg and Donald Sutherland doggedly narrate audiences in painstaking detail through every facet of Stone’s original movie, providing confirmation, with little self-congratulation, that he was right.

Chillingly, he was right.

Oliver Stone’s 1991 film might be the finest film ever made about another film. Because even though JFK features memorable performances by a who’s who of A-list Hollywood actors — the legendary Willem Dafoe shows up to deliver one solitary line — the Zapruder film is its real star.

The public in the 1960s was only vaguely aware that this key piece of evidence existed, which Time-Life held in its secret vault, and which required no expertise to examine, and which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was more than one shooter.

Due to the film’s chronological nature, it was obvious that two shots occurred too closely together to have originated from the same rifle. And because of its camera position, it was incontrovertible that the bullet that killed Kennedy, the strike exposed in Frame 313, originated from the front and to the right.

Now, 60 years later, another documentary which interviews the surviving Parkland Hospital doctors, who were the first to attend in Dallas to Kennedy’s fatal wounds, is the latest piece of media to show us what we already knew. An entrance wound was discovered and then quickly refuted in Kennedy’s trachea, indicating shots fired from the front.

In the Zapruder film, we can clearly see Kennedy clutching his throat moments before the fateful Frame 313 flips by. Add now to the laundry list of experts who have contradicted America’s official story the front-line workers who tried first to save Kennedy’s life. Yet another conspiracy to prove the conspiracy.

The question as always was neither who nor how, but rather, why: Why was John F. Kennedy killed? As history slumbers on, it becomes all the more evident.

Kennedy was pushing for the normalization of diplomatic relations with Russia, and Cuba; he was planning on defunding the Central Intelligence Agency and had terminated three of its key leaders; he was busy negotiating the return of combat troops from Vietnam; he opposed colonial rule of the Belgian Congo, and Algeria; he supported the Civil Rights movement and equality for Black Americans; and Kennedy encouraged a free and autonomous Palestinian state. He might not have been the perfect US president. But by all indications, John F. Kennedy, had he lived, would have been close.

Though no family name is more synonymous with conspiracy, one of the measures of a public figure’s endurance is the number of buildings, monuments, and boulevards named after that person. West of Saint-Urbain, one block Montreal-south of Sherbrooke, we have our own President Kennedy Avenue. It stretches past Place-des-arts and skirts the lower end of McGill University, winding up behind the bookstore Paragraphe, where it abruptly ends.

The upshot is that anyone can abruptly end. Kennedy’s assassination was not only a message to America, but to the rest of the world, too. Any leader, of any nation, no matter how democratic, capitalistic, fair, or free, can be liquidated.

Where murder prevails, chaos replaces reason. Until reason is restored, there can be no true democracy, and there will be no peace.◼︎

Cover image: Andy Warhol, Jackie (1964), detail, © The Andy Warhol Foundation.

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Matter Out Of Place: in conversation with Michelle Bui

The sumptuous images of the Montreal photographic artist Michelle Bui expose complex systems at work: Natural and artificial systems; human and nonhuman systems; ordered and chaotic systems; digital and analogue systems.

Then, there are the objects and materials that Bui chooses, which often defy identification. But they speak nonetheless through their selection. And as yearbooks or family photos would, they reassemble stories of resemblance and social agency.

“The selection process is really important to me,” Bui says, as we examine her newest works collected in a stunning exhibition, entitled Affinités poreuses, on view at McBride Contemporain in Montreal’s iconic Édifice Belgo. “It starts with two images that trigger another image. Then, I know that meaning will come — the poetry of it will come through.”

Bui’s lyrical works can be categorized as still-life photographs, but there are sculptural, textual, and ideological features to them, too. Her images have been reproduced at enormous scale and recontextualized into metropolitan environments — as in her 2022 Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery show, Mutable Materialism — which redrew the borders between commercial and public space.

“There’s the idea of advertising sometimes in my work,” Bui explains, “and it’s nice to see it competing with other advertising that is there. We’re taking up the space of advertisements.”

Left: String of pearl beads’ coating, bean thread noodles, 60×48. Right: Cadmium green chiffon, blue recycling bag, 60×48. McBride Contemporain.

In addition to the abstraction of consumerist desire, there is an ASMR-like quality to Bui’s most recent photographed assemblages. They elicit an autonomic, almost affective response, on one hand because of their abstractness, and on the other due to their familiarity. “There’s something democratic about the objects that I use,” Bui reveals. “There’s a keen interest in finding objects that we can all relate to, and how they’re all presented together.”

Bui habitually integrates items from her garden, the back alley, and particularly rubbish. “I can go through the trash, basically, and look for those objects that are usually thrown away,” she confesses, laughing. “It’s another way of looking at art. There’s always a discovery to be made, a flower to be discovered, or a colour that can strike you when you stop on your way. That’s how I see the images I build — those elements that have stopped me on my walks before. It speaks of my direct environment.”

Describing herself as a “true Montrealer,” Bui is a graduate of the customary Dawson, Concordia, UQAM route to Fine Arts. During her Master’s degree, though, she attended the Beaux-Arts de Paris, and returned home with a more streamlined artistic vision. “It’s a different way of working over there,” Bui says of her European instruction. “It’s like an atelier, and it’s about the reduction of your art, simplifying what you want to project.”

Though a sharp sense of focus characterizes her body of work, Bui arrived circuitously at artistic practice. “It was a long path of understanding,” she recalls. “It wasn’t something that was presented in my family — they are immigrants from Vietnam. So, as you know, art is never the most practical thing to show your kids. But for so many reasons, and for my own interest, and also the way our family works, I think I was kind of pushed towards art. It was a steady path. I’m like a marathoner.”

Left: Bellflower petals, scented plastic bag, 60×48. Right: Abalone shell, mica powder, salmon scales, 60×48. McBride Contemporain.

Bui came of age steeped in images from across art history, her father frequently taking the family to the library to read up on Greek and Roman antiquity. But it wasn’t until her teenage years that she experienced more transcendent encounters with contemporary art.

“I remember seeing Nan Goldin in 2003,” Bui says, “and Jean Cocteau at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. I was about 16 at the time. I just remember the velvet red curtains and that whole experience of intimacy. It was the same thing with Nan Goldin. Such a powerful but intimate exhibition. I was like, ‘okay, I want to do that. I don’t know how, it doesn’t make sense right now, but I’ll follow that.’”

Bui places herself within a tradition of artists who collect and assemble such sundry items that reflect upon our systemic and interconnected worldview, specifically citing the German artist Annette Kelm. “She has a really rational approach to photography,” explains Bui. “They go beyond the signification of what they are. She talks all about the history of those objects, the patterns that she uses, and thinks a lot about capitalism. I think I touch on that in my work.”

The local ceramics artist Celia Perrin Sidarous rates highly for Bui, too. “I think she is an influence on many artists in Montreal, actually. The way I work is like being in the kitchen, so there’s lots of gestures and materials that are borrowed from everywhere. Sometimes it’s more painterly. Other times, it’s more about the archive of the objects. It all goes in, meshes in.”

Left: Bone, silk sea sponge, 68×48. Right: Dried orchid, peach flesh, 68×48. McBride Contemporain.

I can’t help but discern a wealth of dichotomies emerging from Bui’s keen camera eye. There’s the ever-present tension between hygiene and disease, purity and pollution, the selected and the discarded, and what is valuable versus what constitutes waste.

The multiplicity of everyday and exotic objects that Bui curates into her still-lifes communicate meaning through the contagion of pleasure prior to identification, the virality of sheer sensation, and the infection of juxtaposition. An apt description for Bui’s oeuvre might be the British Sociologist Mary Douglas’s definition of dirt — as an “omnibus compendium which includes all the rejected elements of ordered systems.”

Still, for Bui, it’s about patiently awaiting a feeling from her images, some singular awareness in the viewer that’s arrived at through the careful and intentional collection and presentation of seemingly miscellaneous aesthetic artifacts.

“I am always seeing an emotion. And if I don’t get it, I get very frustrated in front of the camera. There’s something that I’m always reaching for. But I recently left that behind. Now, I just go with the process and let the images unfold over time. I don’t know,” Bui shrugs. “Maybe I’m more confident in the imagery of my work.”◼︎

Affinités poreuses continues through 28 October 2023 at McBride Contemporain, 372 Saint Catherine Street West Suite 414.

Cover image: Jill Schweber.

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999 Words

Into The Wild: notes on Zelensky, Intertextuality, and Sean Penn’s “Superpower”

A benefit concert for Ukraine at the Notre-Dame Basilica was among the first post-covid public events I attended, in March, 2022. Abruptly, we went from not being able to leave our homes after 10 p.m., to gathering together in a cathedral with 600 others in support of a developing skirmish on the other side of the planet — a surreal twist for surreal times.

The event’s organizer, introducing the evening, spoke passionately about their fundraising efforts for the work ongoing inside Ukraine. She praised everyone for coming; she praised the musicians for offering their talents to perform; she praised the graphic designer for printing up the programmes so quickly, saying it was a “miracle” that they could get the job done in time.

I thought to myself: no, a “miracle” would be if Trudeau and other heads of state had instituted a crucial no-fly zone over Ukraine that the feisty young President, Volodymyr Zelensky, had requested the month prior; if the world had agreed to shut down to prevent actual deaths by war just as the world had shut down to prevent coronavirus deaths; if a madman megalomaniac didn’t need to prove to a small but influential group of Fletcher Memorial Homeowners that he was the most tyrannical leader the globe had ever seen. Ridding Russia of Rootin’ Tootin’ Vladimir Putin — now that would be a genuine miracle.

Just as we had emerged from an unprecedented pandemic, we found ourselves facing an unprecedented violent conflict the likes of which had not been witnessed since World War II. Yet, given all the combat metaphors that we had collectively endured in relation to covid — battle zones, front-lines, hidden enemies — all we had to do was tweak the rhetoric. Weapons were no longer vaccines; they were actual tanks and heavy artillery. Soldiers were no longer healthcare workers; they were real people in fatigues, with grenades and machine guns.

The dead, however, were still the dead.

At the time, newly elected American President Joe Biden had offered President Zelensky safe passage from Kiev to avoid engagement. As we now know, Zelensky replied defiantly with the most admirable ever riposte: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” The West has been arming Zelensky ever since. And one of the West’s most powerful weapons is the screen.

Superpower Official Trailer

Volodymyr Zelensky was an immensely popular T.V. personality throughout the Post-Soviet world before he became Ukraine’s stoic wartime President. He even played the President on Servant of the People, a satirical television show in which Zelensky portrayed a Ukrainian everyman suddenly foisted into that role.

Then, like a Russian Doll emerging from another Russian Doll, Zelensky won voters over in a bonafide election by promising to fight the kleptomania and corruption that characterized Ukraine after gaining autonomy from the U.S.S.R. Following decades under Communist rule, Ukraine was finally moving westward, both culturally and politically.

Zelensky’s election attracted the producer Aaron Kaufman and the Oscar-winner Sean Penn to make a human interest documentary about his unlikely rise to power. But once again, the story pivoted. Just as Penn and Kaufman travelled to Kiev to interview this oddball sensation, Russia attacked, and Zelensky’s leadership priorities transformed in an instant from madcap to deadly serious.

Directed by Penn and Kaufman, known previously for producing Robert Rodriguez’s recent projects via Troublemaker Studios, Superpower is superficially conventional Vice Media-style fare, affording the material an extra layer of narrative urgency with rapid edits, accelerated pacing, and a constantly moving camera. The obvious comparison to make here is to Oliver Stone’s 2017 Putin Interviews, in which that venerable director travelled to Moscow to talk with Russia’s strongman autocrat, for whom Stone displayed a fanboy-like reverence. Stone played this same fawning role in the 2003 HBO film, Comandante, in which he interviews the late Fidel Castro in Havana, pitching the revolutionary Cuban leader one softball after another.

Viewed against Stone’s directorial prowess, Superpower is undoubtedly second-rate. However, Penn is a better director of attention than is Stone, who has yet to express a moral stand against this war. Whenever Penn is asked why he takes on subjects like Zelensky, he invariably gives the same answer: Penn wants to use his celebrity to attract good attention to just causes the globe over. It’s an admirable project. Plus, Penn’s Superpower seems less about displays of cinematic craftsmanship and more about producing an important record of an unparalleled time in modern human history.

After years of moral bankruptcy that saw the lad-era magazine publish edgy articles like “Can Vegan Bros Eat Pussy,” and photo shoots based on famous female authors’ suicides, Vice Media, the production company behind Superpower, is now financially bankrupt. I’ve had perennial problems with the Montreal-born Vice’s jokey approach to the news, as if the world were one big frat boy prank. And though Penn exudes that same devil-may-care ethos, films like Superpower represent significant turns towards adulthood for Vice. It is ironic that going broke might have been precisely what the company needed to transform itself from hipster doofus bible into the vanguard of underground broadcasting — a baptism by fire.

Before their untimely deaths, both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, America’s greatest critics, considered Sean Penn to be among America’s greatest actors, especially high praise from two rigorously smart and righteously opinionated men who seldom agreed on anything. Surely, an actor as convincing as Penn would gravitate towards another actor like Zelensky, whose Vasiliy Petrovich Goloborodko character must resurface regularly now in Ukrainians’ minds.

It is an intertextual trip following real-life Penn and real-life Zelensky through a war-torn nation, as the audience catches consecutive glimpses of Penn’s most memorable fictional roles: look, it’s First Sgt. Welsh of The Thin Red Line! Wait, now it’s Meserve from Casualties of War! And isn’t that Bobby Cooper of Oliver Stone’s U Turn?

Penn’s rehabilitation from naughty Hollywood celebrity into Vice’s most virtuous investigative journalist is nothing short of miraculous. Still, the real miracle would be peace for Ukraine.◼︎

Superpower is streaming now on Paramount+.

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