Traceable, Nubian Néné, MAI, 15 January 2025

Great art makes space for ideas.

It might be interesting to learn about an artist’s personal life, or to consider the cultural context within which their artwork was conceived. But what is actually important about any work, whatever medium or form it takes, is whether it cultivates deliberation.

After the affective impact is experienced, what is left are trace elements of contemplation.

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony with Payare, Maison Symphonique, 16 January 2025

Comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin. There is always a drop, like the yin and the yang, of one inside the other. It is impossible not to recognize the sadness behind a frantic laugh, or to find calamity a bit hilarious.

An apocryphal story that circulated about Twin Peaks concerns the pilot episode’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in 1989. At the most devastating moment, when Sarah Palmer learns of her daughter Laura’s death, the audience apparently erupted in laughter.

The tendency toward cascading misfortune is a source of particular humour. Whenever a situation deteriorates from bad to worse, we cannot help but be amused. It’s a specific kind of schadenfreude, the discovery of a perverse sense of pleasure in regarding the pain of others.

Yolk, Two Readers and Music IV with Ashley Mayne, Gloriah Amondi, and James Player, 9 January 2025

So-called “smart” technologies often aren’t.

Why would you want the door to your washing machine to automatically lock as a childproofing feature? What if your child was locked inside the machine?

As I write this article, Microsoft Word has restarted of its own volition and automatically enabled something called “Copilot.”

Copilot, ostensibly, is Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence integration that can answer questions and summarize sentences and compose calls to action, as if every piece of writing should be some listicle about 13 restaurants you need to try whilst visiting Montreal. Or whatever.

The worst part about Copilot is that I can’t seem to figure out how to disable it. Every time I start writing a new paragraph, there it is, a little icon blinking at me, like Clippy on cocaine, prompting me to click on it, and by clicking on it, to train it to think like I do.

Get this through your artificially intelligent simulation of a head, Microsoft: the only copilot I need is God.

Janis Rafa, Landscape Depressions, Centre Vox, 17 January — 1 March 2025

It may come to pass that animal intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence in the form of instinct.

We have begun to rely so heavily upon machines to do our thinking for us that inherent flaws are compounding and multiplying in our own faulty faculties. We are failing to recognize that within the systems of machinic control with which we have surrounded and propped up ourselves, there is an unseen disciplining apparatus at work that imprisons our physical and even our mental gestures.

The only escape may be to lean on intuition, relaxing our fingers on the Ouija board gadget and allowing the machine to exorcise its own ghost.

Alexandra Streliski, Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, 17 January 2025

The standard piano has twelve notes across seven and one quarter octaves on only 88 keys.

That’s a surprisingly small number of sounds for an instrument that sits at the centre of Western musical composition. But limitation is paradoxically liberating, permitting virtually infinite combinations.

There are no wrong notes on the piano. It just depends on what song you’re trying to play.

David Lynch (20 January 1946—15 January 2025)

“Experience the joy of doing. And you’ll glow in this peaceful way.” —David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish

David Lynch, aside from being one of the most compelling filmmakers in the brief history of cinema, was also a painter, a photographer, a musician, a furniture maker, and a proto internet pioneer.

Before there was such a thing as social media, Lynch sold monthly subscriptions to his website, davidlynch.com, whereupon he would post what we now call “content” — absurd short videos of Japanese girls talking about bananas, and people in domestic environments wearing enormous rabbit masks, and Lynch himself delivering daily weather reports from his home in Los Angeles. He also sporadically responded to questions that his subscribers would email in.

To say that I was a David Lynch fan in the early 2000s is an understatement. I was determined to become an artistic Renaissance man just like him. I had sought out and seen all of his films. I had watched every documentary and read every book about him that I could find. I even paid for a subscription to his website. And thinking that he might hold some sort of secret to becoming a brilliant artist, or at least a key to how to get into film school, I decided to send him a question.

A few subscriptions cycles later, Lynch thoughtfully answered it. I was thrilled to hear my hero acknowledge my existence, much less offer me some sage advice.

Soon afterward, I went out and made a film, moved from Edmonton to Montreal, attended and graduated from film school, continued on to complete a master’s degree and Ph.D., pivoted from filmmaking to writing, and launched a niche publication that combines cultural criticism with narrative nonfiction in hopefully novel and creative ways.

None of these things made me rich or famous. But they fulfilled me nonetheless and continue to do so in large part because I never strayed from the core of Lynch’s guidance, which was simply to learn by doing — and to be the best me that I can be.

My opinion of David Lynch’s movies has shifted in 25 years, since good drama is always about change. But my gratitude to Lynch as an artist has only grown.

Because in addition to being the kind of artist who more than anything inspired ideas to flourish, Lynch’s greatest artform may have been to encourage other artists to keep making their art.

That, I believe, is Lynch’s eternal legacy.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Nubian Néné performs at MAI, 15 January 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.}