LUMI, 9-course Tasting Menu, SonoLux, 9 July 2026

“Venus de Milo, who said to Colonel Sanders, ‘Mmm, this is finger lickin’ good’ … never got a dinner.”
—Red Buttons

Even folks of my parents’ generation might have trouble remembering the Borsch Belt comedian Red Buttons, who achieved modest fame following World War II as an early television pioneer and recording artist with, among other niche successes, a minor hit in the double A-side, “Strange Things are Happening.”

Born Aaron Chwatt to Russo-Polish Jewish immigrant parents in Manhattan, New York, in 1919, Buttons struggled harder than his contemporaneous comedians, like Jack Benny or Bob Hope, to gain a foothold in emerging media.

To put it generously, Buttons wasn’t handsome. He didn’t possess natural charisma. He resembled a garden gnome, with his stout physique and shock of ginger hair. And he garnered a reputation for being impossible to work with, having fired more than 80 writers from his eponymous General Foods-sponsored variety programme, until the company and his network, CBS, publicly cancelled him in 1952.

Buttons enjoyed a second life in the 1970s as a regular panelist on The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, a series of T.V. specials in which famous actors, singers, and politicians would take a kicking in the form of insult comedy from their peers. Don Rickles might have been the master of this genre. But Red Buttons developed a routine, a rhythm, a pattern that he would apply in 19 episodes to such celebrities as Frank Sinatra, Muhammed Ali, and Betty White, leaving his fellow panelists, like Orson Welles and Milton Berle, in stitches.

Buttons would question why host Dean Martin should honour so-and-so when so many other notable historical figures “never got a dinner.” He would then list off a litany of famous personalities followed by one-liners like, “Lot, who said to his wife, ‘salt I’ve got, it’s popcorn I need!”

The one-liner is an underrated device that contemporary comics have largely abandoned in favour of more topical humour. But jokes dependent upon current affairs don’t enjoy the shelf life of a timeless and politically incorrect Buttons witticism like, “Adam, who said to God in the Garden of Eden, ‘I’ve got more ribs, have you got more broads?’”

St. Vincent Symphonique with Ruby Plume, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 28 June 2026

“Well, some people try to pick up girls, they get called assholes
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
The girls would turn the color of a juicy avocado
When he would drive down their street in his El Dorado
He could walk down your street, girls could not resist his stare
So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
Not like you.”
—David Bowie, “Pablo Picasso”

A recent New York Times op-ed titled “Go On, Date Your Co-Workers” pricked up my attention, for obvious reasons.

The increasing estrangement between women and men, what has newly been termed “heteropessimism,” was the subject of Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast only a few weeks prior. And Magdalene J. Taylor, senior editor at Playboy, astutely noted in her own guest essay in May: “Gender relations are tense to the point of hostility these days.”

In this post-#metoo moment, something that was once considered as innocuous as inviting a colleague or even a stranger to dinner can carry the risk of wild accusations and potentially devastating consequences.

It is no surprise that a woman wrote the Times article encouraging inter-office romance. Because along with the carpet-bombing condemnation of even an inkling of male desire, female sexual prowess has been concurrently rebranded in our era as overdue feminist empowerment. A woman can behave like Don Draper from Mad Men nowadays and rather than being called “Jian” or getting dragged on social media, she is simply asserting her long-sublimated femininity. You go, girl.

There is no shame in sluttiness — nor should there be. But sexual intercourse is not necessarily the be-all and end-all of associating with people, regardless of sexual identity or gender normativity. Maybe, and this may be a radical suggestion, hanging out with someone of the opposite sex without the expectation of sex can go some way to bridging the perilous gender divide.

“The best relationships — the ones that last — are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship,” writes Gillian Anderson, best known as X-Files it-girl and author of We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere.

“The person who was just a friend is … suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.”

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh & Frédérique D. Oberland with Jessica Moss, La Sala Rossa, 27 June 2026

“In every modern country that is Christian or post-Christian, women are the beautiful sex — to the detriment of the notion of beauty as well as of women.”
—Susan Sontag, On Women

We don’t tend to describe men as “beautiful.”

Men, especially in Montreal, known for its packs of man-bunned buttoned-down jeans-and-sheux-wearing walking Adam’s Apples, are “handsome” or “dapper” or “dashing,” qualifiers that are more often associated with sartorial style than with physical charm. Heaven forbid a fellow be beautiful, lest he is effeminate, or an adolescent — Björk’s archetypal “Venus as a Boy.” Especially a man of a certain age can never be described as beautiful.

At the same time, masculinity has become the purview of the manosphere, of incel subcultures, dangerous radicalism, repressed testosterone, Louis C.K. apologism, and right-wing hysteria. These are ugly qualities, not beautiful ones. The modern man might instead do well to aspire to a beauty in spirit in order to overcome any lack or loss of aesthetic splendour.

Beauty is regrettably constrained when it is beholden to the eyes, or age, or the fairer sex, only.

Diana Krall with Anaïs Cardot, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 26 June 2026

“I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, ‘I’m going to pee…’”
—Charles Bukowski, Women

Man, I love a beautiful woman. I think of Nicolas Cage’s soliloquy in Adaptation — “one has eyes that dance; one has eyes that contain the sadness of the world” — or sometimes of Cheech Marin’s infinitely more vulgar inventory in From Dusk till Dawn that has no place in polite company.

Summer is the season to “try with pleasured hands,” as The Zombies’ Rod Argent wrote; “Un beau jour c’est l’amour et le cœur bat plus vite,” according to Françoise Hardy. Tell me more, tell me more! All I can say is, if loving a beautiful woman is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Quinton Barnes with Preoptic Ridge, Le Système, 2 July 2026

I hope I’m not telling tales out of school by recounting that the hip-hop artist Quinton Barnes and I had an insightful and in-depth conversation the other day about the complicated relationships between gender and race and economics and culture.

A beautiful man if ever there was one, Barnes lamented that modern Black music, in North America at least, has historically been the oyster from which white pearls have been plucked since the age of negro spirituals, when the likes of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis mined Juke Joints for what came to be known as Rock n’ Roll.

Of course, “rock n’ roll” originated as a Black euphemism for sex that over the years became deracinated and sanitized to the point that any Catholic nun can say she loves rock n’ roll without getting her habit ruffled.

Another example of a phenomenon co-opted from the Black community is the term “cancelled,” which according to my deep dive, has its earliest origins in the sense that we use it today in the 1968 Brunswick recording by Erma Franklin, Aretha’s sister.

“Like a credit card that ain’t been paid,” Franklin sings, “you’ve been cancelled.”◼︎

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_{Cover image: Quinton Barnes performs at Le Système, 2 July 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.}