Patrick Watson and the Orchestre FILMharmonique, Maison Symphonique, 21 November 2024

In the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novel Queer, Daniel Craig, of James Bond and Belvedere Vodka advert fame, stars as Burroughs’s protagonist, Bill Lee, an ageing junkie absconding in 1950s Mexico City to avoid a possession-related prison term in the U.S.

Burroughs based Lee on a thinly veiled version of himself at a time when drug use and homosexuality were widely considered outlaw behaviours. Nowadays, there is nothing more normie. Burroughs, were he alive today, may have been shocked with these twists of fate.

Shifting social mores notwithstanding, Guadagnino wanted the film to have an authentic aesthetic, especially in terms of its costuming. According to a recent New York Times article, all of the actors’ greasy apparel worn onscreen was of the period, sourced from vintage clothing boutiques and flea markets, with the costume designer, Jonathan Anderson, creative director of luxury brand Loewe, unearthing a treasure trove of 1950s underwear right here in Montreal. Because of course there is a Montrealer harboring a peculiar obsession with historical skivvies.

“An addict has little regard for his image,” Burroughs wrote in the novel’s introduction. Ironically though, the image makers here had to devote outsize attention to details which the story’s real-life subjects themselves ignored.

Distressed clothing has proven fashionable now for decades, with torn jeans and threadbare sweaters from high fashion houses like Balenciaga and Saint Laurent commanding higher market and cultural value than crisp new garments ever could. The 2001 film Zoolander satirized this with its hilarious plotline of an haute couture brand, Derelicte.

“The Ugly American” defines a stereotype of Americans travelling abroad — obnoxious, arrogant, ignorant, and unwashed. One of my favourite Burroughs lines comes from the David Cronenberg adaptation of Naked Lunch in which Hans, the German Black Meat manufacturer, observes, “You know how Americans are. They love to travel. But they only want to meet other Americans and talk about how hard it is to find a decent hamburger.” Two-time president Donald Trump himself has been known to extoll the virtues of “great American food.”

Immigration has become the center of heated political discourse on both sides of the 49^th parallel, the subject of tariffs and potential trade wars. But it must be said that of all the immigrant nationalities to Canada, Americans are the grimiest.

Dexter Barker-Glenn, Soul Manifest, Espace Maurice, 30 November — 21 December 2024

When I toured Cuba in 2007, Fidel Castro was still its leader. Americans were not permitted to visit the country. George W. Bush was still the worst U.S. president there had ever been.

Except for political propaganda, there was no Western style advertising anywhere. No Coca-Cola. No Apple billboards.

However, entering the capital, a gigantic mural relief of Che Guevara was visible against the side of Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior building in Havana’s Revolution Plaza.

Alberto Korda’s image has become a logo of sorts for revolution the globe over — so much so that Guevara’s visage is deflated of semiotic import, trapped in a t-shirt rather than elevated as an icon for social change. This is precisely where capitalism wants him.

Guevara wrote, “in moments of great peril, it is easy to muster a powerful response with moral incentives. Retaining their effectiveness, however, requires the development of a consciousness in which there is a new scale of values.”

Let’s call it “Acid Communism.”

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Habitat Sonore, Centre PHI, 21 November — 19 January 2025

Whenever I enter into an artist’s oeuvre late in their career, I feel like a dilettante. Such is the case with Nick Cave, whose music I was always peripherally aware of, but was never central to my experience. Being immersed in Cave’s latest album, Wild God, is enough to bring anyone up to speed and convert the most ardent non-believer.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, MTelus, 26 November 2024

Prior to the coronavirus crisis, I frequently fell ill whenever I travelled.

In 2018 and 2019, I attended the Unsound Festival in Krakow, Poland. And each time I returned home sicker than the sickest I had ever been. There must have been some wild Cold War-era bacteria floating around in one of those moody and disused old Soviet warehouses.

Everyone seemed to catch the bug, too. We joked that it was “Rave Flu.” But doubtless, festival settings where attendees are over-partied and under-slept, improperly nourished and potentially intoxicated, are cesspools of contagion and disease.

When it comes to convalescence, there is no place like home. Carl Rodd, Harry Dean Stanton’s character in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, relays a wise sentiment regarding tourism: “I’ve already gone places,” Rodd declares. “I just want to stay where I am.”

Paramirabo & Thin Edge New Music Collective, Chamberdestroy, Conservatoire de Montréal, 29 November 2024

“If we choose to recondition our interpretation system, reality becomes fluid, and the scope of what can be real is enhanced without endangering the integrity of reality.”
―Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming.

“[[ ]] Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.
Garbage time is running out.
Can what is playing you make it to level-2?”
—Nick Land, “Meltdown.”

The gamification of lived experience is a common theme of the postmodern multiverse narrative. Late 1990s movies like Open Your Eyes, eXistenZ, and of course the David Fincher film The Game presuppose that we must play in order to participate in reality. Win, lose, or draw.

A generation prior, the comedian Bob Newhart set a precedent with the brilliant series finale of his eponymous sitcom in which Bob Hartley, Newhart’s character from “The Bob Newhart Show,” his previous programme, awakens to discover that the antecedent eight years — and an entire TV series — had all been an elaborate dream.

Anachronistically, the Newhart writers could have just as easily conceived of the Chinese Waiter’s last line in Cronenberg’s eXistenz.

“Hey… aren’t we still in the game?”◼︎

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_{Cover image: Dexter Barker-Glenn, Spectre (2024), Blotting paper, hydrochloric acid, potassium chloride, alpha amylase, protease, lactase, copper. 7.5 x 7.5″. Photographed for NicheMTL.}