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

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

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)

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

“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

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.◼︎

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