Fondations, Pur Pasteur, Fondations (Self-released)
“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”
—Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Montreal is a city known for its nightlife. The inky blue sky that appears in the summertime between midnight and dawn is the dome under which much of Montreal’s arts and culture is incubated. “The productive hours,” an artist friend recently defined it.
I prefer to preserve a sanitized image of the urban night, a city of late-night strolls and romantic encounters. But Montreal’s nighttime economies have come under fire at the policy level since at least Expo ’67, when the SPVM, QPP, and RCMP established a joint task force in 1966 to counter the rise of illegal activities that often unfolded under the cover of night.
Matthieu Caron, author of Montreal After Dark, writes that the tabloid media at the time amplified perceived crises like drug abuse and sex work, “to create panic regarding security and moral standards.”
Montreal’s unofficial nightlife ambassador Sergio Da Silva argues on the contrary that nightlife cultivates community and culture. Da Silva pointed out during his municipal candidacy campaign in 2025 the incongruity of noise regulations aimed at loitering bar patrons in neighbourhoods that greenlit major residential construction projects. And ironically, many of those apartments now sit unoccupied.
Montreal’s new mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada on Friday announced at a press conference, to phoney fanfare, that Montreal will contribute $540,000 to renovate 45 vacant housing units for “vulnerable residents.” Meanwhile, roughly 25,000 immediately inhabitable rental units remain vacant as moving day approaches, in part because landlords are legally allowed to significantly increase rents on units that have not had a tenant for more than 12 months.
Short-term rentals, too, are notorious contributors to the seamier side of Montreal’s nightlife and also eat into the availability of affordable housing. An investigative analysis that The Globe & Mail published on 22 June exposed a human-trafficking ring that lured teenagers to Montreal bars only to be ensnared into the skin trade through interprovincial networks of short-term rental units.
It is possible that the Airbnb next door might be the source of the rattling mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.
Vent bleu, Maude Arès, Guido Molinari, Anne-Marie Proulx, Fondation Guido Molinari, Until 23 August 2026
“When, with an expression so ill-bred as to be fatherless, I enjoin a small offensive fellow to ‘fuck a duck,’ I don’t mean he should.”
—William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry
It is disappointing when it rains on a parade, to which we might say, ‘fuck this.’ It is disappointing when the metro leaves just as you arrive at the station, to which we might say, ‘fuck that.’
But nothing is as disappointing as another person, a celebrity or someone in a powerful position, especially someone whom you might once have admired, respected, even loved, behaving in an unbecoming manner, to which we might say, ‘fuck you.’ Petty, spiteful, unclassy, envious, vainglorious — these are ugly characteristics that come into focus in the light of a 10,000-degree Kelvin day.
They say that revenge is a dish best served cold. And it might be tempting to blow a cool blue invective toward someone who has wounded you. But the best revenge is no revenge at all. The most effective remedy for the blues induced by another person’s private hell is not to add more blue, but to become a gray rock.
Character is revealed in distress tolerance. Let disappointing people be, to live out their life sentences imprisoned by their own miserable existence, immersed in a blue cocoon.
Max Richter with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 26 June 2026
“Pay blue—Pay back the blue you stole and bottled and doled out in eye droppers of junk—pay back the blue you stole for your police uniforms—pay that blue back to sea and sky and eyes of the earth—”
—William S. Burroughs, Nova Express
Max Richter, the German-born British composer performing on Thursday night at Place des arts with the Montreal Jazz Festival, explained to the audience that he wrote The Blue Notebooks in response to U.K. complicity with the U.S.-led 2003 Iraq invasion, whilst contemplating philosophically how to treat others and how best to exist in the world.
Creative pursuit is one answer. For every monstrous act, it seems that there must be an immense and equal and opposite outpouring of beauty and goodness and justice. The form this justice takes is different in every instance, but most often it manifests in works of righteous art. The Sorrow and the Pity, for instance, would not exist without French Nazi sympathy.
Kaïros, dir. Jennifer Alleyn, Cinéma Moderne, 24 June 2026
“Blue is a noose strangling a vulnerable sky.”
—George Elliott Clarke, Blue Elegies, for David Odhiambo
Air fluctuates differently at night. The city’s oscillations and its corresponding pulse appear to slow to a gentler rhythm. This is when those with acute sensitivity can rest, or feel at peace, or feel more comfortable inside their own skin.
There is something about darkness that is paradoxically revealing, as if another kind of light manifests in the shadows. Our contours blur into obscurity, uniting us.
Remembering Gabor Szilasi, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 13 June 2026
“More lights
Blue signs
All gold
All new
So small
So high
Down there
Tonight.”
—Brian Eno, “A Different Kind of Blue”
Nearly a half-century after Susan Sontag wrote On Photography, it is still difficult to explain what makes a good photograph. Photos are “praised for being subtle,” Sontag wrote, “or interesting, or powerful, or complex, or simple, or — a favourite — deceptively simple.”
To this list we might add sentimental. A photograph that evokes melancholy either in its subject matter or its materiality is bound to elicit an emotional response in the viewer. Identification — if we recognize the person or the location or the situation that the image depicts — contributes to the perceived quality of a photographic image as well.
Unsentimental photographs, however, have their own virtues. Surveillance photos that are void of any aesthetic considerations, like lighting or composition, possess a certain documentary charm. Ruined photos that flaunt their mechanical flaws, or in which an errant thumb appears, or that cut their subjects off mid-face, or are hopelessly out of focus, also frequently make for good snapshots.
These glitchy kinds of images defy easy identification, capturing every part of the moment in interesting and powerful and complex ways, yet with deceptive simplicity.
Intelligence is measured in the acceptance of ambiguity.◼︎
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Cover image: Max Richter and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble perform at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 25 June 2026. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.
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