The Instrumentalization of Others

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

***_{Eric Chenaux performs at La Sala Rossa, 21 May 2025.}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_{The cast of La Bohème take a bow at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 12 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_{Musicians of the OSM receive a standing ovation at Bourgie Hall, 9 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.}

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

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

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

_{Boar God perform at La Toscadura, 16 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.}

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

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

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

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

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

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

***_{Nicolas Baier, Moderne, 2025, Inkjet print on aluminum, 106 x 142 cm.}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

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

Play Recent

Disintegration

Comedié regrettée, Racine, Comedia (Haunter Records)

“Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.” —Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie.

Casio Manufacturing Corporation, the US-based subsidiary of Japanese consumer electronics company Casio Computer, announced the construction of its first North American factory complex in Tijuana, Mexico, in December 1988.

Casio set up operations on a sprawling 14-acre property, nestled next to its new neighbours, Sony, Sanyo, and Maxell, constructing a 162,000 square-foot plant in the Mesa de Otay section of Tijuana, right next to the Otay Mesa US border crossing.

The facility would be responsible for making the Casiotone line of electronic musical instruments, cheap and portable synthesizers intended to compete with products from other companies like Yamaha and Roland.

Casio chose Tijuana because of its proximity to Southern California, the world’s largest electronics market at the time, and the location of the National Association of Music Merchants, North America’s trade association representing the entire musical instrument industry.

Of course, being able to pay its staff of 200 workers $1.25 per hour, a full $4 less than the concurrent minimum wage in California, likely factored into Casio’s decision.

Nümonia with DJ CPR Annie, Le Cheval Blanc, 5 April 2025

***_{Nümonia perform at Le Cheval Blanc for the launch of their LP, The Age of Nümonia.}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

America’s desire for cheap consumer goods fuelled a more than 20-year exodus of manufacturing from the United States, and from the west more broadly, beginning in earnest during the 1980s and reaching its peak around the turn of the 2000s.

General Motors laid off tens of thousands of factory workers in Flint, Michigan, leading to the economic devastation of the once vibrant auto manufacturing town about 100 kilometers west of the Canadian border, an era chronicled in the filmmaker Michael Moore’s 1989 debut documentary, Roger and Me.

GM was just one of hundreds of companies to move manufacturing facilities to countries with no minimum wage, lax labour laws, zero tolerance for union organization, lower corporate tax rates, nonexistent tariffs, and other financial incentives for business.

It became cheaper to ship products to America across long distances than to pay workers the salaries they began to demand — in order to afford the consumer goods that came to characterize modern middle-class Western life.

The Mivos Quartet presents Steve Reich’s complete string quartets, Bourgie Hall, 1 April 2025

***_{The Mivos Quartet performs at Bourgie Hall.}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

Did prices follow wages, or vice versa? Did demand stimulate supply, or was demand artificially produced to justify excess?

Certainly, in the case of electronic musical instruments, there was no existential necessity for synthesizers and samplers, drum machines or computer sequencers. Musicians had made melodies just fine for thousands of years using acoustic instruments that were crafted by artisans and luthiers rather than mass-produced in low-wage factories.

Electronic music became fashionable in part because of the media that consumer electronics — namely radio, recordings, and television — facilitated. “I want my MTV” was the rallying cry of a new generation. This equation is represented by a simple formula: media + technology = desire ♾️.

The problem is that earthly production cannot increase infinitely. Eventually, we run out of things.

Greetings, Mary Garden, Espace Maurice, 29 March 2025

***_{Christopher Gambino, “Louise quietly takes her exit” (2025).}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

“A base-level futurism is simply unavoidable. Radical scepticism — irrespective of its intellectual merits — does not offer a practical alternative.” —Nick Land, “Eternal Return, and After.”

Naomi Klein’s 2000 book No Logo was a manifesto that became the new millennium’s anti-globalist scripture. Suddenly, it was fashionable to reject fast fashion, disdaining name brands like The Gap and Old Navy whilst quoting low salary figures from regions like Southeast Asia and India, where many of their products were made.

Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Ralph Lauren, and Esprit were among the companies reportedly paying workers as low as 13 US cents per hour in China, where a living wage was only around 10 dollars a day. By contrast, garment factory workers in Germany in the late 1990s were earning an average of $18.50 an hour, according to Klein.

In the west, capitalism’s malaise manifested as melancholy exemplified by Radiohead’s weeping minotaur avatar, lost in a labyrinth that its own insatiable desires designed for and by itself. Buying or not buying Nike trainers produced equivalent but opposing measures of dissatisfaction. The libidinal pleasure derived from having dissolved because consuming assumed that others couldn’t.

However, instead of bowing to domestic pressure, multinational corporations simply doubled down on exploitative labour practices sensing that, like every trend, rejection of capitalism’s darkest impulses would melt away. And it did.

LEYA with Kee Avil and Deli Girls, Cabaret Foufounes Electriques, 9 April 2025

***_{Left: Kee Avil; Right: LEYA perform at Cabaret Foufounes Electriques.}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

A recent New York Times op-ed written by the author Patrick McGee estimates that an American-made iPhone could cost upwards of $3,500. Nonetheless, a worse problem presents itself in the dearth of highly skilled technical labour in America that would be necessary to manufacture something as complex as an iPhone. To coin a phrase, the Rust Belt is a little rusty.

It took at least two or three decades to offshore manufacturing to unscrupulous and hungry nations. So, it may take decades more for America to starve itself back to the bottom. Globalization, once vilified on the political left, neoliberals now view as necessary to an integrated and interdependent economic ecosystem, in spite of its exploitative tendencies.

The hard right has filled the vacuum that Michael Moore once occupied. Although there is more than a rhetorical difference between cultivating local markets and punishing foreign ones. Is it possible that cutthroat exploitation is better than actually having your throat cut?

lie down with holograms, David Armstrong Six, Bradley Ertaskiran, 13 March — 3 May 2025

_{Gallery view, lie down with holograms, David Armstrong Six, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.}

On 17 January 2025, the rapper Snoop Dogg DJed the first-ever Crypto Ball planned as a simultaneous inauguration party at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, just a few blocks away from the White House. The President-elect was notably absent, concurrently taking to his own social network to announce the $Trump coin’s launch, a cryptocurrency that would net the new president $350 million in fees.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump, not a musician, detunes markets.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

_{Cover image: Gallery view, lie down with holograms, David Armstrong Six, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.}

Play Recent

Objet petit a

Joyce Wieland, Heart On, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 6 February 2025 — 4 May 2025

*_{Joyce Wieland, O Canada, 1970, Lithograph in red on wove paper, 57.4 x 76.4 cm}*_._{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

“…there is no language in existence for which there is any question of its inability to cover the whole field of the signified…”
—Jacques Lacan, The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.

In the wake of the Super Bowl halftime spectacle that the rapper Kendrick Lamar performed on 9 February, which was, of this renowned un-Canadian sporting institution reportedly the most-watched edition, likely due to multitudes tuning in to see whether or not there would be a third and ultimately successful assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the catastrophic U.S. President and billionaire blowhard, a flurry of frothy media commentary emerged, the kind of chatter that passes in our intellectually insolvent neoliberal era as “cultural discourse,” regarding the intention and interpretation of the political statement the artist was apparently making in the act.

Lamar clearly designed the elaborate show to entice spicy takes.

Almost all of these observed Lamar’s lowercase ‘a’ on a diamond-encrusted chain and proposed what it meant: the Amazon logo, perhaps, or a nod to his production company, or another sly swipe at Drake’s supposed penchant for minors.

Still, none entertained the possibility that a deeper meaning should be discerned by delving into any unintended or subconscious reading.

_{Kendrick Lamar performs at the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show, Caesars Superdome, New Orleans, 9 February 2025. Gregory Shamus/Getty Images.}

Curiously, no hot take that I read invoked the 20^th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, which seems a glaring oversight, since obviously the chain at once signifies and is the signifier of Lacan’s “Objet petit a.” The pendant is literally a small ‘a,’ and as an object of desire, it also represents the anxious lack sought in subjective otherness. This to me screams peak America.

Did Lamar explicitly intend to elicit this analysis? I don’t want to underrate the dude. He did win a Pulitzer Prize. But I harbour my doubts.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t matter whether it was intentional or not. Because as any philosopher of art understands, poetry, and art more broadly, as Wimsatt and Beardsley observed in 1954 in The Verbal Icon, “is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.”

For Lacan, the “Objet petit a” is “what falls from the subject in anxiety,” and, more simply, “the cause of desire.” For the Buddhist, it may also be the source of all suffering.

HRT, Taverne Tour, La Sotterenea, 7 February 2025

***_{HRT perform at La Sotterenea, 7 February 2025.}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

“The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally.”
— Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament.

It is fascinating that Trump is the first sitting American president to attend a Super Bowl game, and highly symbolic to the neofascist form of politics that he represents. The Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 were central to Hitler’s display of power, too. The objectification of bodies in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia is as unambiguous as the marching columns of red, white, and blue, Black performers that formed and reformed around Lamar.

Doubtless Trump viewed this spectacle unfolding for his own personal amusement because Trump, with the exception of McDonalds cheeseburgers, is composed of pure unconscious desire, pure id.

L’enfant et les sortilèges, Opéra de Montréal, Théâtre Maisonneuve, 8 February 2025

_{The cast of L’enfant et les sortilèges onstage at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 8 February 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.}

“A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know.”
—Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

America functions on the libidinal drive. It is so repressed that it represses its own repression, which is only revealed to itself in fantasy and horror and violence. It is ironic that digital language is called hypertext, because the nation’s native language, rather, is subtextual. This is why artists like Lamar layer their true messages in code, and why critics fall all over themselves to attempt to decode them as if performing some elaborate reciprocal gymnastics routine. Of course, this process only produces more anxiety in the form of surplus unfulfilled desire.

It took Trump all of a few days to reveal his overt desires upon assuming the presidency for a second time. In addition to Muntzing (or should we now call it ‘Musking’?) the government apparatus as if he were pulling out circuit boards from a HAL 9000, Trump finally verbalized his imperialist impulses to territorially expand America as he had enviously seen Vladimir V. Putin doing for three years. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Trump called the move “genius,” and doubtless, he could scarcely wait to demonstrate his own, however unstable his cognitive processes had become.

Ravel and Prokofiev with Weilerstein and Payare, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 12 February 2025

***_{Alisa Weilerstein performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 12 February 2025.}***_{Antoine Saito for the OSM.}

“Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand rips away from need…”
—Jacques Lacan, Subversion of the Subject.

The Panama Canal, Greenland, and Canada are all in Trump’s crosshairs, and we would be wise to take the threat seriously, because Trump disguises his expansionist desires not as wants but as needs. America needs to absorb these sovereign territories for the sake of national security, or of economic security, or of restorative balance and retribution. These are the same excuses Putin used to invade Ukraine, and that Hitler used to invade Poland. But what they repress is the Objet petit a, that which Trump — and America — lacks, and which will never be satisfied.

Benjamin Appl & Eric Lu, Schubert’s Swan Song, Salle Bourgie, 13 February 2025

***_{Benjamin Appl & Eric Lu onstage at Bourgie Hall, 13 February 2025.}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

Of Children in Swaddling Clothes
“O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will have no understanding of our speech; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not have understanding of your speech nor will you understand them.”
—Leonardo da Vinci

The intentional fallacy extends past poetics and penetrates into politics. There were far graver motivations, for instance, for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan than to prevent terrorism and root out weapons of mass destruction. There were generational fixations that served as factors.

And there are much more sinister explanations behind, say, Musk’s double Nazi salute following Trump’s inauguration. Unlike Kendrick Lamar’s deliberate obscuring of overt political symbolism, Musk’s was laid bare for all to see — and immediately excused by him and his apologists as unintentional. For Lamar, what audiences had to decipher was its real message. For Musk, what they unequivocally witnessed was not.

If the time to be alarmed was not before 5 November 2024, it is certainly now, as Trump and Musk alternate at behaving on a national scale like sexually frustrated frat boys with GHB prescriptions. There is no critical or analytical skill necessary to crack their code, and no thinly veiled good intentions behind which to hide. The word ‘alarm’ comes from the French, à l’arms.

If Canada has any saving grace, it is that America, in its perpetual repression, already has a 51^st state — the permanent state of anxiety.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

_{Cover image: Installation view of Joyce Wieland’s Flag Arrangement, 1970–71, knitted wool.}

Play Recent

Being Boring

I’d bolted through a closing door, I would never find myself feeling bored. —Pet Shop Boys, “Being Boring”

“Boredom is immanence in its purest form.” —Lars Svendsen

Good Sine, Group Drone, Cyber Love Garden, 26 January 2025

_{Luke Loseth and friends perform a group drone at Cyber Love Garden.}_{Video captured for NicheMTL.}

We express all ideology oppositionally.

We can either be progressive or conservative, right- or left-wing, for or against this or that.

Ideology is universally understood and yet difficult to define. However, its easiest explanation is itself in opposition — against violence.

Violence is the tool of the repressive state, whereas ideology is the apparatus of the apparently rational. We follow a rules-based order because of ideas rather than existential fear. And yet, when ideas fail, we still resort to violence.

Obedience at its limit is enforced with brutality. Wars, whether physical or economic, erupt at the margins of ideological control.

Horizons, Bradley Ertaskiran, 23 January – 1 March 2025

***_{Gallery views of “Le Grand Corail,” the solo exhibition by Bony Ramirez}***_{. Photographed for NicheMTL.}

In the 1991 novel American Psycho, the author Bret Easton Ellis represents postmodern ennui with matters of subtle distinction. The variance between brands of mineral water, for instance, or Huey Lewis’s albums, preoccupy Patrick Bateman’s fascination and stand in for legitimate concerns in an atmosphere that defies any sense of depth or retrospection.

Of course, when the difference that makes a difference no longer necessitates discernment, Bateman resorts to the most horrendous violence to rectify his dissatisfaction, oscillating wildly between granular control and broad viciousness.

Rash decision making is a key symptom of disorder. The inability to think through the possible consequences of one’s actions is characteristic of both stupidity and evil, which are the same, as the author Margaret Atwood points out, if one judges by the results.

In a recent New York Times op-ed entitled “The Six Principles of Stupidity,” the columnist David Brooks observes the current prevalence in the United States of the “Dunning-Kruger” effect, noting that “incompetent people don’t have the skills to recognize their own incompetence.”

The modulation of oscillations between hyper-rationality and violence, however, is not the metric of American psychosis so much as is its speed.

You don’t need a psychiatrist to know which way the wind blows. You only need an anemometer to measure its velocity.

Sarah Pagé & Patrick Graham, Littoral States, Envision Records (2025)

***_{Sarah Pagé and Patrick Graham perform with No Hay Banda at La Sala Rossa}***_{. Photographed for NicheMTL.}

Information and its significance are two separate things. There exists an overabundance of information today, in practically infinite forms — linguistic, numeric, subconscious. But most information doesn’t necessarily result in anything meaningful.

We can distinguish information and meaning in part by their rate of transmission and interpretation. Information nowadays moves at the speed of light. That is to say, binary code travels practically instantaneously around the world. Speed itself is speeding up.

Meaning, though, takes time, deliberation, and intelligence to decode. Interpretation may even define time anew in an era of informational instantaneity. When novelty is refreshed at ever-accelerating rates, and virtual mobility diminishes distance, what’s surplus is time.

Jaeyoung Chong & Anita Pari, In Darkness and Light, Banjaxed Records, 26 January 2025

***_{Anita Pari and Jaeyoung Chong perform at Banjaxed Records.}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

“All greatness is in assault!—an inaccurate translation of Plato or a paraphrasing of American forcing?” —Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics

Perhaps Norman McLaren’s most famous short film, Neighbours, as its name suggests, caricatures the devolving relationship between two next-door neighbours as they fight, mortally, over the rightful ownership of a flower.

At first, a fence is erected. Eventually, families are murdered — this is played for laughs — and ultimately, the pair die, killing the flower over which they fought in the process.

The moral of the story isn’t too deep or difficult to detect. The title card at the end of the typically Canadian vignette suggests, in multiple languages, to “love thy neighbour.”

Maybe McLaren’s film is overly optimistic, though. Because in addition to reiterating Christ’s empty commandment, which few have abided by in more than two millennia, the suggestion is that loving one’s neighbour will elicit reciprocation. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean they’ll love you back.

At the moment, we have a neighbour impervious to love, who demands fear, who provokes rage. And so, we might do well to observe Jesus’s other Golden Rule: do unto others as they do unto you.

Christian Gerhaher & Gerold Huber, Schumann Recital, Bourgie Hall, 28 January 2025

***_{Christian Gerhaher (left) and Gerold Huber (right).}***_{Nikolaj Lund for Bourgie Hall.}

There is an apt scene for this moment in the otherwise abhorrent 1993 McCauley Culkin film The Good Son.

The movie portrays Culkin as a psychotic child who behaves cruelly towards his cousin, played in the picture by a cherubic young Elijah Wood.

Early on in the story, Culkin and Wood’s characters are seated for family dinner when Culkin kicks Wood’s foot under the table. At first, Wood attempts to ignore Culkin’s sick little game. But he quickly becomes antagonized and finally kicks Culkin back. This provokes a masochistic grin on Culkin’s face, a smirk that speaks volumes about the nature and desire of violence.

Doing nothing is a luxury that most of us can no longer afford. And I’m not talking now about taking a day off or even powering the screen down and zoning out for a few hours. We haven’t been able to pry ourselves away from productivity for a long time already, with work increasingly colonizing our free time, disguising drudgery as fun, insidiously transforming leisure into labour.

I’m talking about doing nothing in the face of methodical provocation. When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, doing nothing simply wasn’t an option. There was no scenario in which inaction would generate the desired result.

Forcing a reaction is a textbook tactic of narcissistic personalities — whether in individual people or entire nations. Narcissists strike out primarily to be struck in return.

But another strategy has emerged in contemporary psychology to counteract narcissistic escalation. I first read about it in another New York Times piece with the intriguing title, “How to ‘Gray Rock’ Conversations with Difficult People.” What is ‘Gray Rocking?’ I wondered.

Incidentally, it’s just what it says on the tin: becoming as dull and unresponsive as a gray rock.

Sometimes, the best reaction is no reaction.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

_{Cover image: Nicolas Grenier, Flag Study (Sun), 2024-2025. Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 73.7 cm.}

Play Recent

Everywhere at the End of Time

Yoo Doo Right with VICTIME and We Owe, Théâtre Plaza, 6 December 2024

***_{Simone Provencher of VICTIME performs at Théâtre Plaza, 6 December 2024.}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” —Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” (1852)

David Letterman, the longest-serving late-night talk show host in television history retired on 20 May 2015 after 33 years hosting three programmes, across two networks, and 6,080 shows on the tube.

On 16 June of that same year, America’s favourite billionaire blowhard, Donald Trump, announced his candidacy as the Republican party nominee. Less than five months later, more than half of the American public would elect Trump as their 45^th president.

Trump was among Letterman’s most frequent guests, first appearing on Late Night in a videotaped on-the-street-style segment which aired 1 October 1986. At the time, Letterman was a much bigger celebrity than was Trump, reaching an average of 3,610,000 viewers who tuned in on any given minute of his nightly broadcast.

But gauging by monetary accumulation, arguably the more consequential modern metric, Trump was by far the larger success. In Trump’s second appearance later that year, on 22 December, and his first in Letterman’s hotseat, Letterman jokes to rapturous applause that Trump could afford to give each of his audience members one million dollars.

Later in the interview, Letterman needles Trump for potentially being drafted to run for president.

“Well, I guess a lot of people want to see this country…” Trump trails off. “It’s a shame what’s happening. Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait — they’re all taking advantage of the United States. People know that if certain people are running the country, that it won’t happen.”

Amidst a packed audience in Studio 8H, a twinkle manifests in Trump’s eye, perhaps for the first time foreseeing himself in the White House. “I think that people look at certain people — maybe me. If I were in a position,” he brags, naturally, “this country, believe me, would not be ripped off like it is.”

Cindy Hill with Jessie Myfanwy and Francis (fdg.), Centre CLARK, 5 December 2024

***_{Jessie Myfanwy and Francis Ouellette in conversation at Centre CLARK, 5 December 2024.}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

“Mr. Trump was the political-cultural equivalent of Poochie from The Simpsons: Whenever he was not onscreen, all the other characters were asking where he was.” —James Poniewozik, The New York Times, 14 December 2024.

Letterman made Trump a star.

Previous to his Late Night appearances, Trump was just another big-mouthed New York City real-estate developer. But Letterman saw a certain something in Trump, something unique, something special, something in his sly grin, his tsunami hairdo.

It’s possible that Letterman didn’t have the faintest inkling that he was making a monster that night. Nonetheless, it’s clear that, like a cheetah or a vampire acquires the taste for blood, Trump at 1am on 22 December developed an immediate hankering for the spotlight. Trump would proceed to appear on Letterman’s shows dozens of times over the course of decades, and start his own reality TV series, The Apprentice, on Letterman’s old network, in 2004.

Projet Cage with Geneviève Ackermann and Alina Herta, Mai/son, 1 December 2024

_{Geneviève Ackermann performs a rondo with film projections by Alina Herta at Mai/son, 1 December 2024.}_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

“In conditions of third (and fourth-order) simulacra, the giddy vertigo of hyperreality banalizes a coolly hallucinogenic ambience, absorbing all reality into simulation. Fiction is everywhere — and therefore, in a certain sense, eliminated as a specific category.” —Mark Fisher, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” (2004)

When Trump first took office in 2016, a palpable sense pervaded Western society that fiction had irreversibly crossed a line into reality. No longer was Trump just another character on TV; rather, Trump had become interchangeable with the medium itself. It was impossible to turn on the television and not see him, because not only was he a celebrity, and the president; he was America’s president-as-celebrity.

More than Ronald Reagan, who was America’s first movie star commander-in-chief, Trump was ubiquitous as a personality, a logo, a brand. Trump had transcended his function as a common media object and become a thing. His materiality jumped valence into the ethereal realm. He was everywhere.

Kirill Gerstein, Salle Bourgie, 7 December 2024

***_{Kirill Gerstein performs at Bourgie Hall, 7 December 2024.}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

“Saturday Night Live, Paul, when did they tape that show?” —David Letterman

On Saturday Night Live, the veteran actor Alec Baldwin portrayed Trump in sketch after spot-on sketch. Yet, unlike Phil Hartman impersonating Reagan, or Dana Carvey doing his George H.W. Bush caricature — sendups that skewered these respective presidents’ personalities — Baldwin’s Trump rendition only seemed to strengthen Trump’s character. Because hypercapitalism seeks not to suppress but rather to absorb and compress and even preordain subversive acts. In this operative mode, Trump became impervious to satire.

Elon Musk at around the same time achieved a similar bullet-proof veneer. The more criticism he received, the more his stock rose, especially on Musk’s preferred medium, Twitter, until, like some Victor Kiam doppelgänger, he bought the company. Just as Trump became television, Musk transformed Twitter into ‘X,’ the Ur variable, and likewise transubstantiated a once useful object into pure thingness.

The Pit launch, Studio of Sophia Perras, 14 December 2024

***_{Chloe Majenta and Mariana Jiménez of The Pit at their third issue launch, 14 December 2024.}***_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

When the Best is gone — I know that other things are not of consequence — The Heart wants what it wants — or else it does not care. —Emily Dickinson

If subversion and satire have been neutralized, and force is inadequate because there is always an equal and opposing energy, and fear is hopeless, and moreover, hope is fearless in its anachronistic naïveté, and denial precipitates obliviousness, and hatred only multiplies wickedness, what weapons have we left?

Two key 20^th century texts illustrate the path out of the labyrinthine Backrooms of an exponentially diminishing present. One is Back to the Future, in which Marty and Doc must constantly travel ever-further back in time to correct the errors of decaying immanence. And the second is The Shining, which concludes with Danny Torrance retracing his steps in a snow-covered maze in order to trap his murderous father.

It bears repeating a third time: the only way forward is back.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Justin Cober of Yoo Doo Right performs at Théâtre Plaza, 6 December 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.}

999 Words

Unprepared Piano

I haven’t contributed much to human history.

I don’t have children and may never do, if my perpetual singledom, unemployment, and financial poverty continue on their current trajectory. I’m not good at business, nor keen on new technology, nor fond of predatory capitalistic practices — generally the characteristics that ensure upward social mobility in today’s society.

I write words by hand, which is something that my AI assistant continually tells me I should improve, by breaking my paragraphs into smaller chunks, and adding subheadings in order to lead my readers. Ostensibly, Artificial Intelligence doesn’t think much of us. Surely within a decade, AI will render my profession unnecessary, if there is any necessity to it now.

However, before artful writing fell out of favour, I elicited a minor stir at the offices of The Quietus, in January 2013, when one of the site’s editors noted that a word I had used in an article celebrating the 30^th anniversary of MIDI came up a Googlewhack. That term was “claviocentrism” — referring to the centrality of the twelve-tone, clavier-style keyboard to Western musical traditions. My MIDI article constituted its first use. I knew this because I indeed invented the word, as none was previously sufficient.

This week, I had the good fortune to attend two very different concerts that returned the piano to my center of attention. No Hay Banda, the excellent Montreal-based concert series, which exists somewhere between a concept and a band, organized the first one, aptly titled “The Last Act of the Piano.”

The troupe’s three members — percussionist Noam Bierstone, keyboardist Daniel Áñez, and violinist Geneviève Liboiron — come from diverse backgrounds. But they somehow blend seamlessly in ethos, a veritable power trio of in sounds from way out.

No Hay Banda is renowned for staging exceptionally dramatic performances that push the boundaries of Montreal’s live music scenes. For better or worse, there is nothing else quite like what they do. It is impossible to overstate how challenging — even alienating — their concerts can be. No Hay Banda is truly art for art’s sake, audiences be damned. Easy listening, it isn’t.

Although, “The Last Act of the Piano” happily was both sonically and visually appealing, perhaps because No Hay Banda chose to focus upon Western music’s most familiar instrument, albeit in a profoundly experimental way.

The trio performed two pieces of 21^st century post-classical piano music that were at once delightful and rare to experience in a live setting: Jennifer Walshe’s 2008 composition, entitled “Becher;” and “101% mind uploading,” the 2015 piece by Elena Rykova.

_{Rykova’s score calls for the instrument to be prepared with magnets, Scotch tape, and an optional sticker of X-ray radiation. No Hay Banda photographed for NicheMTL.}

“Becher” is the contemporary equivalent of Mauricio Kagel’s post-modern 1970 album, Ludwig Van, reconstructing snippets of Beethoven’s compositions, running them through amplitude modulation and other forms of effects, intending to mimic the way that the composer might have heard his own compositions as his natural hearing deteriorated.

Jennifer Walshe, “Becher’s” author, stitches together borrowed scraps of popular piano compositions — from Beethoven to Coldplay and beyond — in a technique that emulates digital sampling, and which tests the virtuosity of any pianist performing the piece. But No Hay Banda’s Daniel Áñez tackled the task with incredible skill, doing justice to Walshe’s ambitious work, and doing so with the group’s signature David-Lynchian laconicism.

Without saying a word, all three members then donned medical scrubs and surgical gloves to perform “101% mind uploading,” which had the threesome operating upon the piano’s insides as if it were a patient undergoing an emergency appendectomy.

Rykova’s score calls for the instrument to be prepared with magnets, Scotch tape, and an optional sticker of X-ray radiation. No other band in Montreal would have the guts to rip out a piano’s guts in such theatrical fashion, and few other Canadian cities could muster enough of an congregation to support such an endeavour — a testament to both.

The week’s second claviocentric concert could not have been more different; comparatively speaking, more palatable to a wider patronage — the Russo-German pianist Igor Levit interpreting the works of Brahms, Mahler, and Beethoven at Bourgie Hall, on the venue’s recently acquired Hamburg Steinway grand.

Just being in the presence of this instrument was itself worth the price of admission, as evidenced by the sold-out crowd, who were enraptured with Levit’s shoeless performance. Apparently, he injured his foot days prior to the recital. But this lack of footwear in no way hampered his dexterity.

As I sat there recalling No Hay Banda’s wild concert, listening now to one of the world’s most celebrated pianists caressing this perfect instrument, it occurred to me that keyboards are devices that require human intelligence to bring out their best qualities.

The electronic musician Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, famously experimented with programming mechanical machines to trigger an analogue piano’s keys. A generation prior, the avant-garde composer Conlon Nancarrow produced player-piano reels that spat out extreme, impossible compositions. And MIDI, the computer protocol that digitally controls any imaginable instrument, has given rise to the niche genre known as Black MIDI, which attempts to pack the largest number of notes into the smallest time span.

The question, though, is why? Just because it is technically possible to exceed human skill doesn’t mean it should be done. And once it is, there is no reason to try and surpass it, as if in some robotic pissing contest. Less is more — in this sense, less machine means more human.

What I initially meant with the term “claviocentrism” was not what the word has come to mean to me recently. I coined it as a shorthand for a cultural logic that prefers pianos over, say, guitars, or drums.

But what claviocentrism means today is the ability of this wonderful instrument to gather people around it in something approaching harmony, something approximating peace, with an unmistakable timbre that is unquestionably beautiful, whether it is played with fingers, mallets, or magnets.

Maybe AI can parse information faster than we can. But can it invent useful words and innovate new musical forms? Is there still another act for pianists and writers?◼︎

Play Recent

At State’s End

Moishes, 5 November 2023

The hype was overwhelming.

Advertorials in all the major (and minor) newspapers — about the renovations; about how much money the chandelier cost; about the relocation of some storied Montreal institution. As if they had dismantled the entire Jacques Cartier Bridge and rebuilt it piece-by-piece on Square Victoria. Who wouldn’t want to try it out?

The first time I went to the new Moishes, the ambiance was over-the-top, a caricature of Montreal’s corporate and financial elite, drinking and dining and swine-ing in luxury, ironically adjacent to the site of Montreal’s Occupy Wall Street and Maple Spring sit-ins in 2012, and today looking right smack in the face of the masses who find it harder and harder to afford the basic quotidian necessities, never mind drop a hundred bucks on a steak.

I sat at the bar and ordered a filet mignon and fries. Directly across from me sat a gentleman of about sixty years of age, who was joined momentarily by, shall we say, a young lady of the evening — and then, a few moments later, by another. I might have been embarrassed, disgusted, and impressed in equal measure. The audacity.

But this is not about prostitutes. It’s about meat.

Moishes was supposed to do one thing and do it right: serve a perfect steak, preferably with fries. Perhaps they were still working out the kinks. But that day, my fries arrived cold, and the filet was hockey-puck overdone.

Moishes had apparently nailed every detail of absurd fine-dining opulence — the renovations, the chandelier, the guy with a hooker on each arm — except for the food.

Fortunately, though, this story does have a happy ending. I was invited back by an overly apologetic manager and am pleased to report that Moishes now has the food sorted, too. So, if you’re the kind of person who drives a dirty Lamborghini SUV in the wintertime and likes life a bit bloody, I cannot recommend the place highly enough.

Tribute to György Ligeti, Jean-Michaël Lavoie conducting musicians of the OSM, Bourgie Hall, 4 November 2023

Ligeti’s unsettling 20^th century Classical works have gained popularity in the public consciousness in part due to their inclusion in famous film soundtracks like 2001 and The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, and more recently, in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.

But Ligeti’s orchestral music is cinematic enough on its own to summon in the imaginary an interdimensional portal, or some deranged lunatic’s interior mind. They are enough to affect you on a visceral level, enough to make your stomach turn in sympathy with their wonderful cacophonous atonality.

Esmerine, La Sala Rossa, 2 December 2023

*_{Esmerine perform 2 December 2023.}*_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

Esmerine was the first band I ever saw perform live in Montreal, in about 2004 or ‘5, at La Sala Rossa. It was to support the launch of their latest album, Aurora. The bar seemed vast to me at that time, and the band possessed a reverent mystique, percussionist Bruce Cawdron solemnly caressing a xylophone with cello bows, emitting a glass-like drone, conjuring an enchanted atmosphere in this surreal space.

You could still smoke indoors in those days. That might have been part of the effect.

This time around, nearly 20 years later, the air was clearer, but the room appeared smaller somehow, more intimate. The band was set up in front of the stage, not on it. I perched myself about six feet away and listened as they played me back in time to my first Montreal gig and a baptism of sorts into a very special scene of talented artists. I felt lucky to be there then. I still do.

Afterwards I spoke with Cawdron. I told him about the Aurora show 20 years ago and what it meant to me, and furthermore, that prior to Esmerine, I had never seen anyone play a xylophone with bows before. Cawdron, gathering XLR cables into neat coils, winked and said, “you still haven’t seen anyone play a xylophone with bows, because this is a marimba.”

Monnomest, Productions Supermusique, Espace Orange, 23 November 2023

Le Vivier showcases some of the nuttiest, wackiest, nichest contemporary music in Montreal, and although the group was founded in 2007, I had never heard of it before this year.

Maybe it’s because the English and the French experimental music communities don’t intersect much; maybe it’s because I simply wasn’t paying attention to anything until after the pandemic, when I started paying attention to everything. But still, it reminds me that there are always whole worlds in this city to discover.

Hidden Intention, Error 403, 25 November 2023

*^{_{Ky (right) and Eejungmi (left) perform 25 November 2023.}}*^{_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}}

Loft parties are an integral part of Montreal’s fertile nightlife and Hidden Intention, the newish series of DM-for-address get-togethers organized by Nennan’s Amy Macdonald, is a promising continuation of that longstanding tradition. If you want something done, do it yourself.

Roger Tellier-Craig, Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, 7 December 2023

*_{Roger Tellier-Craig performs 7 December 2023.}*_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

It’s high time that Roger Tellier-Craig is taken as seriously by Montreal as he takes his work. There is no more dedicated artist to the lineage, the craft, and the precision of an artform.

Tellier-Craig’s sounds are presented, aptly for this media-saturated and constantly distracted generation, suitably out-of-context. Some of them sound metallic and sharp; others wet and cold; others still seem warm, soft, and round. But none of them ostensibly have origins. There is no guitar to be found in there, no snare drum, neither rhyme nor reason, save for Tellier-Craig’s own immutable internal rhythms.

Handel’s Messiah, Orchestre Classique de Montreal, St. Joseph’s Oratory, 14 December 2023

*_{The Orchestre Classique de Montréal performing Handel’s Messiah in the Crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory.}*_{Photographed for NicheMTL.}

As a child, I believed that justice existed independent of us. There was some universal set of rules that governed right and wrong, and sooner or later, those rules would be applied. If you committed fault, you would eventually face this thing called justice. You couldn’t just invade a sovereign nation, say, or commit genocide, because justice would prevent it.

As I get older, however, I have come to understand that justice is something we ourselves make or break. There may be some common, universal sense of right and wrong, but it is human people who have to interpret and apply it. If something unjust happens and nobody stops it, justice cannot magically step in.

Justice is not the light itself; rather, truth needs the light shone upon it to become just. In pursuit of justice, we either direct or misdirect that light.◼︎

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Tag Archives: Bourgie Hall

The Instrumentalization of Others

Disintegration

Objet petit a

Being Boring

Everywhere at the End of Time

Unprepared Piano

At State’s End