Category Archives: 999 Words

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

999 Words

Swimming With Sharks: notes on (not) missing the movies

Swimming With Sharks is a twisted black comedy film released in 1994, starring Kevin Spacey as Buddy Ackerman, the archetypal high-powered Hollywood movie mogul from hell, and Frank Whaley as Guy, Buddy’s long-suffering assistant. Guy increasingly bears the brunt of Buddy’s relentless abuse, only to rise ironically at the picture’s end to the role of abuser himself.

Michelle Forbes portrays Dawn Lockard, a tough-talking producer working at Buddy’s firm, and Guy’s eventual girlfriend. The veteran Lockard schools Guy on how to negotiate Buddy’s temperament and disturbingly winds up murdered herself. The movie plays this for laughs.

Early on in the story, Lockard asks Guy why in the world he would want to put up with Buddy’s unconscionable behaviour. Why such a desire to swim in Hollywood’s proverbial shark tank? To which Guy replies, “All my favourite memories have been of movies.”

It’s at this time of year that I, too, have frequently felt nostalgic for the last picture show. From 2005 to 2011, I worked every Labour Day long weekend in Colorado as a projectionist for the Telluride Film Festival  — alongside Venice, Toronto, Sundance, and Cannes, one of the world’s five foremost showcases for the cinematic arts.

I learned how to “string up” a projector there. I learned that those dots in the corner of the screen every 20 minutes are called “cues,” not “cigarette burns,” as Tyler Durden would’ve had us believe. I learned a complex skill — an artform, even — that for decades provided a career for thousands of people working in movie houses around the world.

Although after 2011, it no longer made financial sense for a Colorado film festival to fly me from Canada on a temporary work visa to run the projectors when projectors as we knew them were on their way out. With the arrival of digital cinematic projection, the Telluride Film Festival could more easily and economically hire a kid from Boulder to drive into town to push a button.

I’ll always remember the opening-night screening from my last year as a Telluride projectionist. The film was The Artist, the mainly silent black-and-white French-American co-production that would go on to win Best Picture at that year’s Oscars.

The plot concerned an ageing — and foreign-sounding — silent film star anxious about the fate of his career amidst the coming of the “talkies” in the late 1920s. It was impossible not to draw connections with the coming of sound to the nacency of digital cinema and its inevitable replacement of celluloid.

As a projectionist, I got the picture. My little gig, itinerant as it was, was about to disappear. Film was becoming history.

Phonetic sign on the wall of the projector booth, Mason’s Cinema, Telluride, CO, USA.

In the dozen or so years since, a number of analogous digital technological replacements have occurred. The internet has become the largest distribution network for motion pictures, supplanting theatres. Animation today is so realistic, and deep-fake technology so far advanced, that it’s possible for any actor to deliver any line in any movie that anyone could imagine. Not to mention A.I. programmes that can effectively replace roomfuls of writers.

These and other modern tech issues are at the root of the twin writers’ and actors’ strikes keeping many of the film industry’s most essential workers from meaningfully participating in a rewarding part of their jobs: attending film festivals, considering each other’s work, and socializing as humans around cinema.

The movie critic Roger Ebert was an avid Telluride attendee. And among Ebert’s favourite insults of films he didn’t like was that they could have been made by computers. He said it about dozens of Hollywood formula pictures throughout the ’80s and ’90s on TV with his partner, Gene Siskel. Ebert even declared it about Quentin Tarantino, characterizing Pulp Fiction in his initial review as “an explosion down at the old movie genre factory.”

This brand of aggregate self-awareness signalled some Barthes-esque death of the auteur kind of shit for cinema. Tarantino had already in the ’90s acted like some sort of proto-artificial intelligence, obsessively cataloguing and regurgitating movie history, novelty coming more through the assembly and sequence of generic cinematic elements than innovation within them.

Audiences as well began developing artificial tastes, relying more and more upon algorithms to recommend entertainment they might enjoy, based upon the habits of millions upon millions of media consumers.

Technology appears to be completing its own circuit, like some bionic ouroboros, both producing and consuming itself at once. It’s almost a Hollywood cliché — the classic Frankenstein monster theme: don’t fuck with the natural order of things, and the natural order of things won’t fuck with you.

Still, what are we really missing with Hollywood on hiatus? It’s conceivable with the amount of filmed entertainment that already exists out there that a longer-than-average human lifespan could be spent watching end-to-end TV and movies, and still, the library of content wouldn’t be exhausted.

That’s not to say that just because there are more books in the world than anyone could spend a lifetime reading, new books shouldn’t be written. It’s just that cinema is simply bankrupt right now of new ideas. Do we really need humans writing more Star Wars and Marvel sequels? Let the upstart A.I. software take a crack at that. The audience isn’t real, so why should their entertainment be?

In the 20th century, cinematography achieved the seventh and highest artform. But it has returned full-circle in the 21st to the nickelodeon, a cheap, automated peepshow. The novel had hundreds of years to develop as a cultural form before new technologies remediated books. Film is the youngest and most impressionable artform and may not survive its digital competition. To be sure, its stereotypical culture is nothing to preserve. Kevin Spacey’s real-life character is more suspect than Buddy’s, and Harvey Weinstein produced The Artist.

In my time in Telluride, I was privy to Swimming With Sharks-style antics. I saw temper tantrums at Spacey-level pitch. I saw doors slammed, assistants berated, and hamburgers thrown at walls. I witnessed misogynistic harassment that would have made working for Fallon seem like an afternoon at Disneyland. The only reason his staffers complained is probably because Jimmy’s hangovers interfered with their own.

Then there’s Rust. Maybe it’s time to take a pause when, in some perverse Yakov Smirnoff-like reversal, the actors start shooting the cinematographers. Is this the marketing campaign to resuscitate Hollywood’s inhumane image? Should real people die to produce such synthetic junk?

I haven’t been missing the artificial memory-making machine. The remembrance of screens past seems less relevant in retrospect. Anyway, why attempt to remake real life — the perfect film? Let’s not forget that the shark always looked fake.◼︎

Cover image: The director Werner Herzog and the author photographed at the Telluride Film Festival, 12 September 2009.

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999 Words

50

A coincidental number of acquaintances have recently and independently remarked to me — matter-of-factly, candidly, disturbingly — that they plan to kill themselves when they hit a certain age.

50 seems to be the consensus. On my 50th birthday, I’m going to find a nice, high cliff and let the birds feast on me, or some variation of that theme is a combination of words I never thought I’d hear — much less with blasé regularity nowadays.

What is it about marking the half-century milestone that makes it a window or a wall for so many people?

Maybe it’s the fact that cultural epochs are measured in hundred-year cycles. One hundred years represents a clean century, and also a celebratory lifetime for select remarkable individuals. The celebrity who makes it to 100 always receives special attention. Who would forgo that? Giving up at 50 seems like quitting halfway through the race.

One needn’t look far for reasons to feel defeated.

Media index bad news and relay it to us worst first. Political, social, economic, and environmental upheavals seem to occur beyond our abilities to react to them, much less control them.

Add to that the lingering malaise that two years of rollercoaster coronavirus measures wrought. And the most deadly conflict since World War II is taking place just on the European Union’s outskirts, threatening to break quarantine.

Not in nearly a hundred years have things been this crazy.

It was at the end of the 1920s when Stalin began an official campaign to artificially manipulate the world’s wheat prices, destroying it by the ton, and, in the process, segregating and starving millions of ethnic Ukrainians. The plan came to be called the Ukrainian Famine Genocide, or Holodomor, and was among the cruelest of the 20th century holocausts. Even the Germans disapproved.

Putin is taking a page directly from Stalin’s playbook, holding Europe’s breadbasket hostage, driving up food prices, and deliberately depriving millions upon millions of people of their daily bread — literally.

After World War II ended, the West said, ‘never again,’ and ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ History, however, is not a cautionary post to maniacal powers like Putin; it’s a blueprint.

Like a facsimile or a franchise, history in the 21st century doesn’t so much repeat as reiterate. Putin is our generation’s Stalin; Covid-19 is our Spanish Flu epidemic; Taylor Swift our Mae West. This is the Moscow McDonald’s version of Holodomor, a genocide that arrives blurred and on curled paper. That’s also why everyone is walking around in flood pants and bowl cuts — because it’s about to be the Great Depression again.

It isn’t enough to remember the past, though, to prevent its reverberations from echoing through time. We have to change its course. But to alter history’s trajectory, we need stories about where we want to go, in addition to stories about where we came from, and to which we never want to return.

That is one reason that artists, intellectuals, and writers are targeted. The myth of cultural imperialism loses power when it confronts well-told truths.

The Ukrainian author Victoria Amelina on June 27th 2023 was killed in the Eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk when a Russian missile struck the restaurant where she was dining with a Columbian delegation. She was 37, and one of 13 civilian victims who died in the attack — just another incident in an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation that is gradually escalating into a standoff between Russia and the Western world.

According to The New York Times and a number of other news sources, Amelina was working at the time of her death on her first non-fiction book, tentatively titled War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, to be published in English.

Amelina was born in Lviv, the city nearest to my own ancestral home, where my grandfather left for Canada in 1929. As an author and Ukrainian Canadian, learning of Amelina’s death hit home for me in multiple ways.

Amelina didn’t have the opportunity to finish her book. She didn’t even have the opportunity to finish dinner and the doubtless extraordinarily interesting conversation she might have been having with her Columbian compatriots when a Russian missile exploded into an otherwise quotidian scene: twin 14-year-old sisters and another teen taking selfies on a bustling restaurant patio; a waiter serving coffee; a woman petting her husky.

Amelina also didn’t get the chance to take her own life at 50. She was robbed of the choice to give in to despair. She was too busy chronicling it.

Amelina’s death has become emblematic of the absurdity of this war, and war writ large. It is an assault on normal life, bringing destruction to creativity, goodness, and truth. It is an attack on freedom by forcing the victim to act in defence or suffer death. Two 20th century World Wars should have taught us this.

If only we remembered. But not only are war’s horrors being normalized through the media, there are fewer and fewer people to write their stories. The world has barely slowed down, as if passing the scene of a horrendous car crash on a busy highway. We need to get back to normal after the coronavirus pandemic; we need to fix climate change; we need to go on strike; we don’t have time to fight your war.

This is NicheMTL’s 50th post and it is dedicated to Victoria Amelina — and to every civilian who has been murdered in the crossfire of pointless power struggles fought by cultural somnambulists.

The lifestyle we have enjoyed in the West has resulted in the ultimate freedom, that of ennui, and we must not take it for granted. Amelina’s death has reminded me every day since that our lives are not our own to take.

We are nearly one quarter through this still-new century. What will our collective story be in 2050? What will the view look like from that nice, high cliff?◼︎

Photo: Daniel Mordzinksi

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After Hours

On my way to a recent event, I found myself in a car being driven by a professional driver. It was a man, a guy, a bro, a Quebecois fella, middle aged, kind, professional.

The car was quiet for some time. Then, as we hit an open stretch of road, as if he were skating on eggshells, he broke the silence and said, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. I don’t know you, you don’t know me, and I don’t mean anything by this, but you smell great.”

It was one of those awkward moments where two dudes chat nonchalantly in a car about beautiful things. Like perfume. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Perfumes have consumed me lately and I have been trying to find my own exact right scent that consists of a few pre-existing perfumes mixed together. Apparently, I concocted alchemy this time because this man exclaimed, “that scent is you!”

It turned out that he was seriously fascinated with perfumes, too, and we talked for the remainder of the journey about his history in the scent world. He told me that he had been searching obsessively for a fragrance that he’d smelled at an after-hours club in his youth. What I was wearing was as close as he’d come since, he said.

I told him about a few choice places in the city that carry unbelievable scents: Maison Margan, an upstart boutique at Place Royale in Old Montreal that makes perfumed body oils; and Etiket, the little-known cosmetics shop west of Guy on Sherbrooke. I told him about the rare, small-batch scents they specialize in, many of which are unavailable anywhere else.

Of course anyone can go to SSENSE or Holts and find something that smells wonderful. But Etiket is where they bring in the best, strangest, and most niche scents — perfumes I have never seen nor heard of (not to mention smelled) anywhere else. He asked me what happens if he finds the perfect scent and it’s discontinued. I suggested that he be grateful to have smelled it once.

I arrived at my destination, a private residence in Pierrefonds to which I was invited for a piano recital: or, the fanciest house show on the island. Two pianists would perform dualling concertos on two grand pianos set up side-by-side in the home’s drawing room. I’d attended two of these concerts last summer and they were the most memorable musical performances of my year.

The events were conceived during the pandemic to recreate the spirit of pre-20th century musical salons in which musicians played privately for interested audiences. In a time before the ubiquity of recorded music, hearing musicians perform with their instruments would have been the only way to hear music. Listening to musicians play live is one of the most simultaneously banal and extraordinary experiences. Like a sunset — something everyone has seen a million times, but never ceases to inspire awe and persuade a pensive mood.

At this event, I had the dubious honour of being the first to arrive and was given a reusable plastic wine glass by a hostess with the number one on it. I sipped San Pellegrino all evening from my number one tumbler and hoped that there might be someone in attendance — a single lady, let’s say — who might also be impressed with my perfume, possibly even with the person wearing it. But no such luck. The event was small and although I greatly enjoyed meeting and conversing with every guest, and they quite possibly enjoyed me, I left as I had arrived, alone.

On the way home, a different professional driver drove me silently back into the city. He was listening to music on the car stereo, and after a few AM radio hits, the song “One” by Harry Nilsson popped on.

“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do / Two can be as bad as one / It’s the loneliest number since the number one.”

Arriving back at my apartment, I decided not to go inside right away. I was still all dressed up and my perfume had dissipated pleasantly. I walked through Place d’armes square and watched as travellers milled around in the warm summer air.

A busker sang soft covers of folk songs. Folks huddled together smiling and snapping selfies in front of the Basilica. A war could have been raging somewhere but you would never have guessed it from the carefree ease of the evening.

I ventured up St. Paul Street and stopped into a café for a cup of tea. It was nearly 11 and I was surprised by how busy it was — as busy as a typical lunch rush. The lineup was three people deep. A woman in front of me bought strawberry ice cream and madeleines, and I took my tea to go, walking toward Pointe-à-Callière. I thought there might be the possibility of meeting someone there.

I stood and sipped hot tea and watched folks come and go. The skeleton of the charred edifice that had burned only months prior kept watch over Place d’Youville. I prayed for the seven souls who lost their lives there and could not enjoy a cup of tea on a muggy summer night.

At that moment, a beautiful girl in her mid-20s and her mother sat down right next to me. The girl was wearing blue jeans torn at the knees and a black t-shirt. On a white paper plate she had a slice of pizza. Her mother sat in an armchair and smoked a cigarette while her daughter wolfed down her pizza wedge.

I could see that the girl saw me, too. She might have smelled me. When she finished her meal, she walked through my airspace, discarding her paper plate into a trash can. As quickly as they’d arrived, they were gone.

We didn’t speak to each other. Nevertheless, I have no choice now but to be grateful to have seen her even once.◼︎

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The Real Thing: in conversation with No Hay Banda

“There is no band.”

I walk myself into this obligatorily cheeky response, I suppose, when I ask the three core members of No Hay Banda — the Montreal contemporary music collective / band / events organizer / community builder — if they are a band, or what.

Violinist Geneviève Liboiron, pianist Daniel Áñez, and percussionist Noam Bierstone operate under the mysterious Lynchian moniker as a contemporary classical power trio that’s more art than any one facet of it. As the name suggests, they keep their operations deliberately vague.

“There are fine lines all over the place,” Áñez tells me at the group’s rehearsal studio near the D’Iberville metro, which also functions as an artist’s residence for travelling musicians. “What is contemporary? What is experimental? What is musical theatre? What is electronic? We have not yet put lines, but we’re inside those genres.”

No Hay Banda began in 2016 as a concert series held at La Sala Rossa, the landmark Plateau neighbourhood venue that serves as the collective’s exhibition space, and lends the proceedings its red-curtain vibe.

Since, the cooperative has dabbled in expanded performance; founded a record label called No Hay Discos, upon which they released their own impressive double-album debut; and are now producing a two-night show at the Chapelle de La Cité-des-Hospitalières, the historic chapel attached to Hôtel-Dieu, premiering an opera entitled Body Without Organs (With Organ) by the acclaimed Japanese experimental vocalist Tomomi Adachi. “He’s incredible,” Liboiron says.

Throughout the pandemic, No Hay Banda, along with vocalist Sarah Albu and guitarist An Laurence, recorded a serial opera by Adachi called 51 Short Pieces for Soprano, Violin, and Guitar, releasing one video daily online.

“Some of them are like five seconds,” Liboiron says, “super theatrical, super short, one or two notes.” The project carried the trio through the depths of quarantine, and also forged an enduring relationship with Adachi that brings him to Montreal for a 10-day residency and various performances affiliated with the Suoni per il popolo festival.

“Adachi asked us if he could write us his second opera,” says Bierstone. “So it’s a semi AI-created opera. A lot of the text is AI-generated, but I don’t think any of the music is.”

“How would we know?” jests Áñez.

Each of the two performances features different local openers, encouraging audiences to return for round two. On June 16th, the harpist Sarah Pagé plays an electronically manipulated Koto against percussionist Patrick Graham. On June 17th, the duo of Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau celebrate the release of their new album, The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum, on the No Hay Discos imprint.

“We’re super happy to have them in our label,” Áñez says. “All of our shows have two artists, two sets. Like a local set and an international set. No Hay Banda has ambitions to be a place of exchange that has eyes inside and also has eyes outside.”

The trio often talk in nebulous ambiguities like this, and it reminds me of the way the niche American filmmaker David Lynch discusses his work — obliquely and in metaphors. “We love David Lynch,” says Liboiron.

The name No Hay Banda is borrowed from the striking scene in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in which the protagonists attend a surreal theatrical performance that is one part Vaudeville, one part acid trip.

“We started all the concerts with that scene from the movie,” Liboiron explains. “People are just having drinks, listening to the music, and when this would start, it was the cue that the show was about to begin. And also we are producers that are sometimes playing. So in all the dimensions of the scene, David Lynch was matching our aesthetic, we felt.”

“It’s come up more,” adds Bierstone, “in situations we didn’t expect. Like this Adachi piece: there is a lot of lip syncing and faking and playing with the public’s perception. We don’t pick pieces because they are very David Lynch, but it just happens.”

Áñez elaborates: “We also found somewhat of a manifesto in this idea. Because the text says, ‘There is no band, il n’y a pas un orchestre, it’s all a tape recording.’ And then there’s all these performers on stage in that scene in the movie where they’re faking that they’re playing and then they show that they’re not playing. It’s all part of that concept of alternative performance that we try to bring into our concert series. We are not blinded by it. Like, sometimes we have concerts where there is just a pianist playing the piano. But there’s this idea of a new way of playing and presenting yourself.”

No Hay Banda is insistently blazing fresh tracks in the Montreal contemporary experimental music scene, and slowly, steadily creating a new constellation of affiliates.

“I would say it’s been very hard since the pandemic to bring the public back to the halls,” Liboiron concedes. “Even before, it’s always been really hard for doing contemporary experimental music, to have a huge public. But we know there are a lot of people in Montreal and around that would love to see these shows. It would be really nice to meet all of them.”

“We’re pursuing this artistic path of alternative performance, so we touch the public that goes to experimental theatre. And we touch the public that goes to experimental dance. The shows that No Hay Banda puts together rejoin this wider public that is interested in fucked-up-edness,” says Áñez.

In that specificity, something universal emerges out of No Hay Banda’s creative project, which is augmented by their perplexing air of obscurity. Like a David Lynch movie, there are no simple explanations for what these or any artists do, no Hollywood endings that wrap up the plot.

“Leaving things open and vague allows us to develop in ways we would have been too restricted to had we said we were just a concert series,” Bierstone says.

What to expect from their Adachi collaboration?

“It’s hard to know,” teases Liboiron, “what it is going to be.”◼︎

Tomomi Adachi & No Hay Banda perform 16 & 17 June 2023 at Chapelle de La Cité-des-Hospitalières.

Cover image: Noam Bierstone photographed by Robert Del Tredici.

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New Saturday Night

On any given weekend, there are seemingly limitless things going on in Montreal. Springtime is the beginning of a lively festival season, and since the pandemic formally ended, cultural events are rushing back to auditoriums — and audiences are returning, too. In unexpected places and in well-established venues, something for anyone awaits everyone.

I love finding two very different things to do at weekends, to maximize the variety of experience that this great metropolis has to offer. Dichotomy characterizes Montreal more than most cities. There are the French and the English Montreals, of course. But there are also the disreputable and respectable Montreals, the underground and the established, the vicious and virtuous.

Take nighttime and daytime Montreal. There’s Saturday night Montreal, which shamelessly sniffs questionable substances in graffitied bathrooms, and then there’s Sunday afternoon Montreal that sings in the church choir and serves soup afterwards. Respectable Montreal likes to prance around pretending that Montreal of ill repute isn’t lurking just beneath its surface, waiting to emerge like a werewolf in Paris-lite, beneath the gleam of a silvery moon. But it’s there. These two Montreals need each other, they feed off of each other, they benefit from this delicate cultural dance.

Last weekend began on the decadent side, with a bloodbath. Not an actual bloodbath, mind you; rather, a daylong event called Cyber Market organized by Bloodbath Montreal, the local promoter. A gritty loft space on Saint-Laurent boulevard provided the location for the day’s festivities, which featured a creator’s marketplace and pop-up tattoo parlour. Throughout the day, about a dozen musicians and DJs graced a transient squad of attendees, and the evening culminated in a performance by the rapper and artist, Emma Rose.

Emma Rose performs at Cyber Market, 27 May 2023.

I was certain that I was the oldest person there, until a man in his mid-50s approached me and introduced himself as Rose’s father. I told him it was cool of him to come, to wade through the sea of early twentysomethings drinking vodka and cranberry juice and vaping. “You’ve got to support your kids,” he stated. He asked me for a business card and I mentioned I was thinking of having some made. “Cards, stickers, get ‘em, put ‘em everywhere!” he said, slapping nearby surfaces, offering sound advice, as dads are wont to do.

Bloodbaths, or “Taurobolium,” were common in the Roman Empire between the second and fourth centuries and were connected to the cult of “Magna Mater,” the Great Mother, known to the Greeks as Cybele, the Goddess of Phrygia, located in present-day Asian Turkey. The Christian poet Prudentius detailed the bloodbath ritual in unflattering and hyperbolic terms, describing a brutal baptism — technically more of a blood shower — in which a pagan priest was drenched in the plasma of a sacrificial bull.

Despite transubstantiation being a core tenet of communion, blood rituals came to symbolize paganism and were rejected by an increasingly Christianizing Rome. But their influence still exists — in Marina Abramović’s works of art, for instance, or Red Bull’s corporate mythology, the energy drink whose key ingredient is the stimulant, Taurine.

One might imagine that an organ concert at Maison Symphonique the following Sunday afternoon would be the heavenly flipside to this Montreal weekend of extreme duality, the redemption after the massacre. The Latvian organist Iveta Apkalna performed rotating pieces composed by J.S. Bach and Philip Glass, spanning centuries in moments with the angelic sound of the Grand Orgue Pierre-Béique.

This music was nothing like the DJs and rappers of the evening prior. It was stunningly beautiful, technically perfect, like a holy waterfall washing away all the froth and grime of the night before. Yet virtuousness is mere veneer, dependent upon historical context and perspective.

Early Christendom didn’t approve of organs, either. No bloodbaths in the second to fourth centuries, but definitely no Bach or Philip Glass. Musical instruments of every kind were considered too tempting, in fact, too sensuous, potentially leading to the commission of all manner of sin. If one wanted to sing God’s praises, the voice had to suffice. A recent tabloid article suggesting that the L.A. Philharmonic produced a patron’s climax seems to support the rationale that any form of music is indeed the devil’s music.

As I was leaving the crusty loft on Saint-Laurent the night before, I ran into Rose’s dad. He ducked out and into the night, turned and waved and shouted, “I love you, man!” It might have been the cranberry juice talking, but those were words I had not heard for years from my own father, accompanied by a sentiment so offhanded for him and yet so meaningful to me. That emotion carried itself into the subsequent afternoon as I sat staring at the ceiling trying to keep the tears welling in my eyes from spilling over whilst listening to Apkalna alternate between Bach and Glass on the Maison Symphonique’s unholy musical instrument.

After the OSM concert, I fortuitously bumped into Iveta Apkalna, the organist, who was walking hurriedly through the Complex Desjardins. She evidently left the building faster than Elvis Presley, but absent of any security detail. Not even a valet, just a pair of precious hands and the woman to whom they belong, and crystal blue eyes still high on performance, a white whale swimming upstream, clutching her own garment bag. All the unions in Quebec and yet no one to escort this starlet from the auditorium, to keep at bay those of us who’d bathed in blood the previous evening. Apparently, her father did not come to the show.

I pondered back to the Cyber Market and wondered what Apkalna would have thought of the kids’ music, and what the kids might think of an organ recital. How to resolve these two realities? They each have their virtues. And they’re not all that different. They both concurrently glorify creation, and are sexy as bloody hell.

Again, it’s all about perspective. In a Montreal that often seems split down the middle, one person’s Sunday afternoon is another one’s new Saturday night.◼︎

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Eternalize the Drive: notes on orchestras and orgasms

A story in The New York Post about a woman apparently having what patrons seated nearby at the Los Angeles symphony described as an orgasm senza sordino pricked up my ears for obvious reasons.

Lifted from an L.A. Times article, it’s just the sort of spicy content the Post adores. Titillating tabloid clickbait. Yet I paid particular attention to this story because I, too, recently attended an otherwise pleasing orchestral concert, entitled Rafael Payare: from Andalusia to the Plains of Venezuela, at the OSM. I won’t embarrass the woman who was sitting with me, only to say that she did not achieve screaming climax. The orchestra did all they could. I also offered.

But seriously, folks.

The invasion of gratuitous extreme sexuality into public space really should sound more worrying. This is not, as it superficially may appear, a cathartic expression of creative sexual liberation, or some Reichian reclamation of the repressed libidinal order; this is the sudden erosion of social mores that evolved over centuries and are the foundation of civil society.

An orgasm at the symphony is not a beautiful expression of passion; it is a public sexual assault, full-stop. Even if there was consent involved in the act, none was granted in its publicity. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for coming to the orchestra. Just not cumming at the orchestra.

In October, 2022, as Ukraine was preparing for the foreboding winter ahead, amidst the threat of nuclear annihilation, a group formed in Kiev to organize an orgy in which hundreds of participants enlisted to have every kind of public sex. One partaker characterized the event as “the opposite of despair.”

Radio Free Europe covered the story. Then Vice. Predictably, The Post picked up on it, ‘orgy’ being one of the publication’s top ten keywords. Next, Žižek wrote an op-ed applauding the sexual revelers, employing the argument that a pleasurable orgy was justified in the face of more horrific uses of sex and sexuality — namely, the evidence of genocidal rape.

Žižek might know. Members of the Bosnian Serb Army were convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for using sexual violence as part of an ethnic cleansing policy during the Bosnian War. The public nature of those terrifying crimes and their seeming routineness shocked their victims and the world.

Russian soldiers are using the same tactics. To the victims of these kinds of sexual violence and others that remember, a public orgy would function as another trigger as effective as a land mine in inflicting trauma. An orgy in Kiev in a time of war is arguably another form of sexuality weaponized against its own people.

In the West, we have been shedding our supposed sexual inhibitions at an alarming rate over the past century or so. This is one of the key differences between classically capitalist and communist societies: attitudes toward sex. For Westerners, embracing every new niche identity and accompanying sexual practice was a sure sign of the freedom of liberal democracies. To Russia, it became the ultimate confirmation of our bourgeois decadence. Fighting fire with proverbial fire, Russia paradoxically utilizes genocidal rape as a strategy to combat that moral decay. Yet the West seems less shocked now than we were during the 1990s Bosnian conflict.

One reason is precisely the fascination that a woman having a screaming full-body orgasm at the symphony arouses. A culture obsessed with absorbing the cultural shock of public sexuality is one which has eternalized the drive and made desire itself the object of desire. No longer is the goal to pursue when pursuit becomes the ultimate goal, when fixation on sexuality is itself the new form of sexuality. The libidinal drive is furthermore displaced fully away from both its natural procreative and symbolic revolutionary potential. An orgasm at the orchestra renders the most explicit the most quotidian. Just another boring dystopia. Social decay porn.

Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, Western liberal society has been preoccupied with defanging the old Foucauldian disciplinary enclosures — school, hospital, prison, institution. But Deleuzian Control societies replaced them, as protocol usurped discipline, and digital technologies more and more began to organize and regulate modern life. The private and public spheres became disputed terrain, too, as social networks over the past two decades increasingly encouraged the publicizing of our once-private lives. No Baby Boomer ever accidentally encountered boudoir photos of their friends — or worse, relatives — on Facebook.

But we’re still subjects. And as subjects, we’re still subject to being subjected to Control. We just lived through extreme enclosure in which our own homes were transformed into prisons from which we were granted conditional and fluctuating release. And now that we’re back out, we’re all the way out.

In an effort to release ourselves from our restrictive disciplinary enclosures, we in the West have eradicated discipline, but not the enclosure. So we are instead left enclosed with the undisciplined.

Sexual exhibitionism is shocking because it should be shocking. When it ceases to be, then other forms of violence — like an attack on a sovereign nation — appear all the more acceptable, too. We must resist the creeping acceptance of every form of violence: sexual, physical, psychological, economic — all of it.

A common English-language phrase when everything seems to be going wrong, is: ‘fuck it all.’ That saying has taken on a grim literality, as it appears more and more people nowadays are choosing to say fuck everything, in every way, including being properly fucked. But what differentiates us as moral creatures is our ability to choose not to fuck it all. Even though we could, we don’t. It’s what separates us from animals. It’s what makes us human.

There must be some places in which we are not bombarded with casual sex of varying degrees of disturbance. But most of all, I don’t want to wonder if something is wrong every time my date doesn’t have a screaming full-body orgasm at the symphony.◼︎

Photo: Antoine Saito

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999 Words

Bonjour High Drama: in conversation with Michael Martini

In 1985, “Running Up That Hill” was an obscure synthpop single by Kate Bush, an artist relatively unknown outside of a certain very artsy and very English crowd.

Cut to 2022 when the popular series Stranger Things included the song in its soundtrack and catapulted it past Harry Styles to become the most streamed track on Spotify, introducing Bush to an entirely new generation of global fans. It’s what might be described as the ‘new normal’ of popular culture, in which a new context breathes new life into a work of art.

“I felt like I was fighting a battle or something, but now because of that TV show, everyone’s into her,” says the Montreal playwright, Michael Martini — whose latest work entitled Landscape Grindr premieres this week at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines — of his own Kate Bush obsession. “I feel finally very redeemed. She’s not a terribly well-kept secret, but I’m glad that the baton is being passed, in a way.”

Although Martini is among the last group of graduates of Concordia’s now-discontinued Playwriting programme, he draws creatively more from cinema and music. “I don’t really enjoy reading too many plays,” Martini admits. “I’m not into what I would call ‘TV theatre,’ with lots of dialogue and really psychological characters.”

Still, Kate Bush was one of his earliest inspirations: “I just fell in love with her taste for cacophony,” Martini says, “and key changes, and time signature changes, and narratives that weren’t about falling in love at the club, which seemed to be so ubiquitous, otherwise. That’s when I started writing — little songs and stories at first, and eventually, plays. I also had an ‘aha’ moment with the films of Robert Altman. Like Nashville, where characters are more or less improvising, and Altman is creating layers out of those improvisations, and then suddenly somehow everything comes to a boiling point.”

Montreal’s hottest new production, Landscape Grindr is an interdisciplinary piece and Martini’s most ambitious work, incorporating aspects of video and dance and expanding upon conventional notions of drama.

“The language of the show is not strictly the codes of theatre,” Martini explains. “We’re aware of how different artistic audiences are encountering this work. It is a longer show — it’s about two hours long — and it’s carried forward by a text that I’ve written and that people are enacting. The show is about connections between environmental justice, the #metoo movement, and personal questions of sexuality. Those three different aspects all hinge on questions of: What is nature? What is violence? What is change?”

Martini has been steadily carving out a niche in Montreal for his singular style of satirical yet poignant theatre. Though Martini originates from west of the Quebec border, where he developed a love for a certain absurdist humour.

“My family is from Pickering Village,” says Martini, “the historical part of Ajax, Ontario. It’s quite bizarre. It looks like a ski village made out of cardboard. But it is directly beside a farming community called Greenwood, where they have lots of little pioneer villages and old historical churches and homes. When I first started as a teenager, I was doing English pantomime. There were these plays put on by our community in kind of a Monty Python spirit. Lots of puns, lots of audience interaction, and very DIY. And I think when I look back, that’s really stuck with me. These little plays that were done in pioneer villages around Christmastime. That spirit is still with me.”

Although Martini has enjoyed the support of MAI’s Alliance program and of the Playwrights Workshop Montreal, staging Landscape Grindr has required patience and persistence.

“The timeline of theatre is very tricky,” explains Martini. “It’s very rare that it’s very fast that things happen. In the case of this show, I started writing it in 2017. I did little things here and there with it, trying things out, reading things aloud. But I didn’t have a real full-length script until 2019. And finally, by 2021, I was able to get a technical residency to explore the show. Through all that, it was booked for 2023. So that is a huge challenge, not just logistically. It’s fine when things run at a slow pace. But artistically, I find it a huge challenge to connect to material that starts to collect age, to remain interested in the same things, to honour the ideas you had.”

“I’m moving forward with a sense of humour and kind of a social energy,” says Michael Martini. Photos: Félix Bonnevie

Nonetheless, honouring ideas is what brings them to fruition, and Martini is determined to share his vision with the Montreal community that has supported him through thick and thin.

In 2021, Martini lost nearly everything to a devastating apartment fire. Fortunately, he and his two roommates escaped unharmed, but the majority of Martini’s belongings, including years of writing, were destroyed. In response, the city’s theatre community rallied around him, starting a Gofundme campaign that exceeded its fundraising goal, and assisting with the enormous monetary and emotional toll. This feeling of camaraderie buoys Martini and keeps him excited to share his latest piece with an audience. “I’m moving forward with a sense of humour and kind of a social energy,” he says. “It’s a pretty DIY atmosphere. Everyone’s welcome.”

Landscape Grindr is the culmination of nearly five years of work, and catapults Martini into a completely new context. “You can feel that energy when you are waiting to do something and share something you’re proud of,” he says. “It takes up real estate in your head. And it’s a huge release to share something. I love the community that you build when you’re working on a show — with the people who are in it, but also the people who are interested to come and see it. There’s a really unique sense of conviviality. I love that feeling of a little huddle before a show. I think it’s really beautiful. That certainly carries me forward.”◼︎

Landscape Grindr runs April 11th, 13th, 14th, and 15th at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines, 3700 Saint-Dominique Street.

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