Errance, with Joël Lavoie, and Philippe Vandal, La Sotterenea, 25 April 2024
“What good am I if I know and don’t do,
If I see and don’t say, if I look right through you,
If I turn a deaf ear to the thunderin’ sky,
What good am I?” —Bob Dylan
In The Divine Comedy, the well-known fourteenth-century Italian trilogy by Dante Alighieri, the poet Virgil leads the author through Hell and Purgatory.
Finally, Dante is pointed toward Paradise by Beatrice di Folco Portinari, a character symbolic of God’s loving grace.
It seems that Beatrice got the cushy job, while Virgil drew the short straw. Not only did “Bice,” as she was known amongst her squad, manage to avoid the underworld’s mud and blood and beer, but she also served as tour guide to just one — and obviously the best — of the three divine realms.
Virgil, on the other hand, had to pull a double shift in the Infernal rings and the apparently never-ending drone of Earthly life. Plus, there were no unions back then, so going on strike wasn’t an option.
Sara Mericle, Infinite Vessel, Ateliers Belleville, 22 April 2024
Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put into a bag with holes. —Haggai 1:6
Steve Bates, with Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, Mark Molnar, Timothy Herzog, and Sam Shalabi, Casa del Popolo, 29 April 2024
From an ocean of noise, harmony differentiates itself.
Though noise and harmony are not mutually exclusive. Noise contains every frequency. Like sculpture, all that is necessary to reveal Heaven’s eternal song is to chisel the extraneous bits away.
Bourgie Hall’s 14th Season Launch, Bourgie Hall, 30 April 2024
“THE TEMPERAMENT — MIDDLE — Circling and circling, I mold my temperament, urging the unruly into balance. Each interval must blend with the next interval, which must blend with the next … and back to the beginning. In the center we make a secret well together, this piano and I, to drown the leftovers. It is Nowhere.” —Anita T. Sullivan, The Seventh Dragon.
Beethoven’s Poetic Fourth Piano Concerto, Maria João Pires with The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 24 April 2024
The clavier-style keyboard is a standard that brought music to the masses.
Yes, it’s a compromise. There aren’t any notes between its twelve tones, and there is a sense of bureaucracy about sitting down at what is essentially a musical desk, typing out a tune.
But the gift of portability and universality that the keyboard has given to the world is worth orders more than its conciliatory limitations. There is no other instrument that can bring a place to life, to fill a space with joy, wonder, and magic, quite like a piano.
A piano in the right hands is just enough of a music machine, no more and no less than perfect.
Quiet Night, 163 Av. Van Horne, 26 April 2024
“Happy are those who have what they need and no more.” —Saul Ha-Levi Morteira
In a time of war, famine, and death, it is vanity to seek out greater abundance when others are struggling for basic survival. But if one pursues only bare necessity, they will invariably find more than what they were looking for.
Such was the case last Friday evening when I attended what was billed as a “Quiet Night,” organized by Illy Duval in a cozy loft space on Van Horne. I arrived to find the room packed to the rafters with standing room only, except for a seat on the armrest of a battered old couch.
« Confortable? » asked the girl sitting next to me, smiling.
« Pas pire, » I replied, my legs awkwardly splayed akimbo.
Though I felt claustrophobic and couldn’t help but think, with scores of burning candles inserted precariously into empty bottles, of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire, I stayed and immensely enjoyed the music and the scene for as long as possible and ducked outside during an intermission.
Beneath the Van Horne overpass, I watched a group of skateboarders smoking weed and doing ollies and rail slides and was grateful for having had a reason to leave — both my house, and the gig I’d come to see.
Sandeep Bhagwati, How to inhabit these different temporalities?, Museum of Fine Arts, 21 April 2024
“People don’t know what they want any more. People are only sure about what they don’t want. The current processes are processes of rejection, of disaffection, of allergy.” —Jean Baudrillard, “The Violence of Indifference.”
The tyranny of mediocrity despises competition, finding every possible means to suppress it. The resistance of excellence, however, welcomes competition as the essence that makes the good better, the great greater still.
Lolina, with Man Made Hill, Tenses, and Please, Brasserie Beaubien, 27 April 2024
We might imagine Hell as the past, Purgatory as the present, and Heaven as the future.
Certainly, there is an implied chronological teleology to history, where life is supposed to get better with time, progress bringing more knowledge as some ultimate form of truth emerges victorious.
This process appears to have reversed. Time is running backwards as the present reiterates Hellish precedents.
Alice De Visscher & Evamaria Schaller, Le Centre CLARK & Le lieu, Ateliers Belleville, 2 May 2024
Alchemy is most commonly conceived as the transformation of lead into gold. But alchemy according to philosophers is understood as a spiritual process of transformation, embracing those parts of ourselves that we might think of as weaknesses and converting them into strengths.
Gold is the most precious of all earthly metals, superconductive, malleable yet solid, ambivalent, associated with the sun, the celestial body where universal life originates. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote, “Just as the physical sun lightens and warms the universe, so, in the human body, there is in the heart a sunlike arcanum from which life and warmth stream forth.”
Springtime represents the return of the sun, and thus accelerates matters of the heart.
Spring Symposium, Librairie Saint-Henri Books, 25 April 2024
My idea of Heaven is a place surrounded by all words, where no thought or feeling is misunderstood, where there is total communication, a way to say everything.
My idea of Heaven is also a place where there are no words, where nothing requires understanding because all is already known, and language is an obsolete technology.◼︎
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Cover image: Sara Mericle, Sun Bleach (2023), porcelain and glaze.
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