Confrontation, Toninato & Lecours, Homeostasis (Self-Released)
“It’s useless to wait — for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.”
—The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection
Canadians have long enjoyed an international reputation for being nice. Niceness can encompass a variety of favourable characteristics: kindness, positivity, honesty, fairness, good faith. These are admirable traits to attribute to our sense of national identity.
But niceness can also manifest as toxic avoidance — submission in response to violent aggression, deference in the face of unreasonable conflict. We would rather be agreeable than confrontational, even when it means acceptance of, or even complicity in, injustice.
A recent Leger poll found that Quebec is Canada’s happiest province and Montreal the country’s second happiest city. That so many local residents would examine the state of the world — ongoing genocide, economic disparity, environmental collapse — and the plight of our own metropolis — crumbling public infrastructure, astonishing cost of living, linguistic and cultural hegemony — with such relentless positivity is a testament to our congenial cognitive dissonance.
On old adage espouses that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. But the best time to sow the seeds of discontent amongst a comfortable Quebec citizenry is right about now.
Place Publique with Alex Tatarsky and Gui B.B., Fonderie Darling, 18 July 2025
“If the guy was running Dairy Queen, he’d be gone. This guy couldn’t work at The Gap.”
—David Letterman on Donald Trump
The biggest threat to Donald Trump in the 2015 U.S. election was not the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, nor Jeb Bush, nor any of the other potential Republican nominees running against him. Trump’s most worthy adversary was the late-night talk show host David Letterman, the man who in the 1980s made Trump a media personality in the first place. It seems like a lifetime ago and a million miles away, but until 2015, late-night talk show hosts held more sway with American popular opinion than did Trump.
On October 1st, 1986, Donald Trump appeared for the first time on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman in an on-the-street-style segment in which Letterman visited Trump’s offices in midtown Manhattan, joking about how he must have had nothing better to do. Dozens of subsequent appearances across the next three decades and two networks prepared Trump for his ascent from cutthroat blowhard New York City real-estate tycoon to international celebrity.
Letterman was the only talk show host on equal footing with Trump, at times giving him the edge and at others eviscerating him, as in their year-long feud after Letterman accused Trump on-air of racism for demanding that Barack Obama produce his birth certificate. Trump subsequently refused to appear on Letterman, denying him his favourite guest. Recall, the best that Jimmy Fallon could muster was tussling Trump’s hair to determine if it was really attached.
David Letterman frequently remarked that the path to the White House went straight through The Ed Sullivan Theatre. Trump must have felt that a righteous kicking from Dave would surely have revealed any political aspirations Trump might have held for exactly what there were: first as tragedy, then as farce.
When David Letterman signed off as host of CBS’s Late Show in May 2015, it cleared the last remaining hurdle for Trump to announce without a hint of irony his bid for the Republican party nomination — which he did precisely one month later — and ultimately, to win the United States presidency that November. In effect, David Letterman ushered Donald Trump into the public eye and then vaulted him in absentia into the world’s highest office.
Sikutsajaq, Mary Paningajak, Centre Sanaaq, 15 May – 23 August 2025
The Building Canada Act was passed on 26 June 2025 to fast-track the approval of major infrastructural projects deemed to be in the national interest. While the government has not produced a list of prospective projects, it is likely that it will include pipelines for fossil fuels to traverse the country. It seems improbable, however, that a wall along the 49th parallel is in the works.
In addition to insulating ourselves from an increasingly threatening southern neighbour, it would be advantageous if some of those major projects benefitted Indigenous communities, and not just financially. Building with an eye to the seventh generation will assuredly serve us all.
Fall and Spin, Bradley Ertaskiran, 17 July – 20 August 2025
“I don’t want knowledge, I want certainty.”
—David Bowie, “Law (Earthlings on Fire)”
We reap what we sow.
In my experience, I have found this to be one of the most dependable truths. The only thing separating the seeding and the harvest is time.
There is seasonal time and there is epochal time. In many instances, the fruits of our labour don’t grow immediately or discernibly. Or they can grow overnight when we’re neither prepared nor in need of their bounty. Wisdom like fruit seems to arrive frustratingly in abundance or not at all.
Faith is more than the power of positive thinking. It is the authority of indifferent inevitability.
“The Lord is good unto those that wait for Him,” says Lamentations 3:25, “to the soul that seeketh Him.” Waiting is challenging in our artificially accelerated and instant-on age. “The world would not be moving so fast,” write The Invisible Committee, “if it didn’t have to constantly outrun its own collapse.”
Organ Intermezzi with Áron Sipos, The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, 17 July 2025
The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.
—Job 33:4
It occurred to me this week as I was offered a tour of the largest organ on the island of Montreal, an instrument with more than 7,000 pipes, that the biological body is composed of organs, and the mechanical organ comprises a living body.
More than any other element, air is the most divine. It is what binds and completes the Holy trinity. It is at once invisible and material, immediate and eternal.◼︎
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Cover image: Mary Paningajak, Untitled (2013), Linocut Print, Avataq Cultural Institute Collection. Photographed for NicheMTL.
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