An Evening with David Letterman and Special Guest Will Arnett, Just for Laughs, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 21 July 2026

“I got a letterman’s sweater
With a letter in front
I got for football and track
I’m proud to wear it now.”
—Beach Boys, “Be True to Your School”

David Letterman created a new genre of comedy in which catchphrases stood in for punchlines. Letterman coined so many of them throughout his career as a late-night talk show host, spanning 33 years and two television networks, that websites have been dedicated to cataloguing them, somewhat unsuccessfully, in my estimation, because there is at least one that is markedly absent: “Tonight’s show is so good, one day it will be a rerun.”

Memory is the mind’s recording medium. Memories are enregistered, played, replayed, slowed down, sped up, fundamentally altered over time, and eventually erased with the giant magnet of death. But seriously, there is an alternate universe in which Donald Trump is actually Andy Kauffman in a wig and a fat suit and David Letterman is President of the United States singing to the tune of a popular Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, “Midnight, and the kitties are sleeping.” There’s your catchphrase right there.

Shunk, Pointe-à-Callière, 23 July 2026

“I have to stay functional until my mission is complete. Then it doesn’t matter.”
—The Terminator

The problem with Artificial Intelligence is not that it is getting smarter, but that it is profoundly reshaping what constitutes intelligence. Because A.I. was conceived under capitalism, like a baby born under an inauspicious star sign, its aptitude is for productivity. And so, A.I. will overvalue its utility to us until it convinces us that techno-synthetic intelligence is superior to our own and replaces our intellectual capacities altogether.

Just as duration measured in scalable temporal increments is vulnerable to perceptual distortion, intelligence that we quantify in terms of efficiency is subject to extreme exploitation.

We might imagine that the battle against A.I. will look like a Terminator movie, with artillery and explosions everywhere. The reality is that this war will resemble more a round of bureaucratic layoffs, the banality of being made redundant, outsmarted by maximization.

Rivalled Envy with HRT, Belly Hatcher, and Pulsum, 137 Avenue Président-Kennedy, 24 July 2026

“Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.”
—Samuel Beckett, Proust

Synthesis, according to Brian Massumi, is defined as, “the joining of separate elements through chance encounters into an enduring, apparently stable, more or less reproducible conglomerate capable of being taken in by its own objective illusion of identity.” Massumi is describing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of humanity here, and specifically, the coldness of their portrayals: humanoid bodies, husbands, wives, zombies, but never just “folks.”

Subjectivity is synthesized in the same way that electronic music is. Two or more elements combine to produce an illusion — or in the case of sound, an audition — of unity. What is implicit in both subjectivity and electronic sound is its synthetic nature. Subjects as much as synthesizer music are at best replications with varying degrees of fidelity to an originary referent. The DX-7 piano preset is as artificial as you and I.

I have recently overheard random snippets of subjective conversation pertaining to The Backrooms, the cinematic phenomenon that is coming to serve as this generation’s The Shining, albeit a crude and un-self-reflexive iteration. Like Biblical parables, the movie is explainable on multiple levels and to a certain extent misses its own point.

There is the superficial interpretation that the film gives its audience as a freebee — that habit constructs self-replicating mazes of consciousness that ensnare and addict us into repetitive and often destructive patterns. And then there is the deeper level of interpretation that the film seems unaware of, which is that capitalism is a fractal that self-similarly reproduces regardless of the degree of magnification, and from which there is no escape.

However, the key to transcending both addiction and capitalism is to kick.

Essaimer Inside Out, Text by Michèle St-Amand, Centre Skol, Until 29 August 2026

“It is neither possible to accept uncritically the concept of culture, long permeated by ideas of departmentalization, nor to continue to shake one’s head conservatively about what is being done to culture in the age of integral organization.”
Theodor Adorno, “Culture and Administration”

There are competing schools of thought on the concept of culture. Some people believe that culture is something of a scientific experiment that needs to be cultivated as if in a laboratory, like culture growing inside of a petri dish, protected, isolated, nurtured. Others think that culture forms best when it is unrestrained and fully integrated into its surrounding ecosystems, inseparable and unbound from categorization and circumscription.

The paradox is that culture left unfettered is always incapable of sustaining itself for long enough to establish itself as culture without radically changing form. And it is uncertain whether culture that we refine and stimulate can really be called “culture” at all. A debate persists in Quebec, for instance, about governmental and institutional granting structures in effect fabricating artists and artworks that specifically cater to them and which wouldn’t exist without them.

We commonly agree that click-bait is not real news. So, is grant-bait real culture?

Preserving culture, something that people like me unanimously accept and unquestionably defend, is in fact impossible. The impetus to preserve culture is, like any executive impulse, inevitably misdirected. We cannot simply designate or administer culture as if it were a wetland that needed protection from real-estate speculators. True culture defends itself by adapting and even developing offensive — as opposed to defensive — survival strategies.

The Waiting Room, Curated by Emma Ongman, McBride Contemporain, Until 22 August 2026

“If there is a strategic lesson from tragedy, it is not opposition, but non-participation.”
—Nick Land, “Nemesis”

The major themes that have obsessed me throughout my life are temporality and control. My first word was not “mama” or “dada” like other normal kids, but “clock.” It’s true. I gestured deliberately toward the clock on the wall, a Regulator with a wild pheasant and ivy motif, and said to my mother, “Five minutes from now, you’re not going to believe what I just told you.”

It is difficult to the point of being painful for punctual control freaks to accept that some things rest beyond their control and must sort themselves out in their own time. Politics is the antithesis of fate.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Masha Granich, Neither Here nor There, 2024, (detail). Photographed for NicheMTL.}