Tag Archives: Montreal

999 Words

Word Virus: notes on post-literacy and crowd control

If you are reading this, congratulations. You are part of a shrinking segment of the population.

According to the cover story in this month’s issue of The Atlantic, which warns that we are entering not so much an illiterate but “post-literate” era, fewer than 16 percent of Americans queried in 2023 for a Time Use survey reported reading for pleasure.

The 2025 Canadian Leisure and Reading study estimates that that number is closer to one quarter of Canadians. Still, the trajectory is clear: fewer of us are spending sustained time with the written word. Engaging with books, magazines, newspapers, eBooks, even websites, is in rapid decline.

The Atlantic article’s author, Rose Horowitch, claims that people instead are bombarded nowadays with an “explosion of textual fragments” — texts, emails, social media captions, threads. And of course, video — in the form of television, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and the like — has been supplanting reading for decades. In other words, fewer of us are “on the same page,” as the old saying goes, with wide-ranging implications.

This doesn’t mean that we behave more individualistically. Far from it. Mass control is arguably easier in a moment when we are splintered into ever-smaller media niches, cobbling together information from modular combinations of more or less authoritative sources and forms.

We now know that algorithms are digital gateways that restrain us unless we pay our way out with some form of capital. Keenan Alboshi for Orchestre Metropolitain.

Alexander R. Galloway’s book Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, was written in 2004, at the dawn of social media as we now know it. We thought of social networks at that time as community configurations that were built and maintained largely through real-world connections.

In the ensuing 22 years, that notion has shifted significantly as we increasingly measure our social circles by our friend and follower counts on digital profiles and social apps. Galloway contended that the protocological character of computer code would replace the requisite for state force: “Protocol is to control societies as the panopticon is to disciplinary societies,” Galloway claimed.

Galloway wrote his book in the tradition of Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” The personal computer, Deleuze argued, had ushered in a new generation of Control society to follow the Foucauldian Disciplinary society. Older institutions like school, church, prison, hospital, and factory, were being substituted by digital simulations of these that at first appeared to express new freedoms but ultimately represented mechanisms of control that were “equal to the harshest of confinements.” We now know that algorithms are digital gateways that restrain us unless we pay our way out with some form of capital: labour; credit; currency; desire.

The circulation of information and the way we collectively behave based upon that information began to be conceived of differently in the wake of the 21st century’s digital social networks. Groups started to arrange and act less like humans and more like viruses. Clay Shirky, who now holds the post of Vice Provost for A.I. and Technology in Education at New York University, wrote in his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, that with the rise of newly powerful online social networks, people were “willing and even eager to come together and affect the world.” Digital social tools, Shirky maintained, “remove the obstacles” to collective action.

Whether that action, or the obstacles to it, are detrimental or beneficial is irrelevant to its protocological formation. Freedom or bondage are understood contrarily when protocol rather than physical force is authority’s governing mechanism. Individuals and groups behave fundamentally differently when the fear of physical violence is abstracted. We might, for instance, carefully watch our words in a public space when we could get punched in the nose for saying something offensive. But that same offensive remark is effectively managed online because of the algorithmic regulation of protocological code. Friction produces engagement.

Maybe Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s baton has the power to conduct not only the orchestra but its listeners as well. Tam Photography for Orchestre Metropolitain.

It is interesting to observe anecdotally that real-world social organization seems to have attained new levels of efficiency and effectiveness in the years since digital tools “removed the obstacles” to collective conduct. It is as if protocol has trained us en masse to behave all the more orderly offline, too.

I noticed this phenomenon this week at the Orchestre Metropolitain’s annual outdoor concert held in Montreal each summer. In previous years, I have observed far more chaos from the crowd of fifty or so thousand people that congregate at the foot of Parc Mont Royal. This year, it almost appeared as though people acted like bits of data defragmenting on a hard drive, self-organizing and compartmentalizing discretely like some unseen social algorithm governed them. It was possibly the most orderly case of crowd control that I had ever seen.

Maybe this could be put down to the type of mass activity — unity around classical music rather than, say, a sporting event that tends to divide its audiences. Maybe Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s baton has the power to conduct not only the orchestra but its listeners as well. But this is magical thinking. What I actually believe is that mass control has gone viral in protocol’s wake. Fear of state discipline has not been removed like some obstacle to collective action. Rather, protocological discipline has shored up and reinforced it.

“We have created an infinity of variety at the information level,” wrote William S. Burroughs in The Third Mind, “sufficient to keep so-called scientists busy forever exploring the ‘richness of nature.’” Burroughs’s “routines,” living on the border of science-fiction and revelation, were the inspiration behind Deleuze’s conception of Control society. Burroughs also imagined technical code as a virus, a “word virus” that when released would infect every individual imperceptibly. “Universal literacy with a concomitant control of word and image,” Burroughs noted, “is now the instrument of control.”

Our digital social tools, which train us to envision ourselves as immaterial, and that encourage us to read less deeply, less collectively, paradoxically fortify our social corporeality with explosions of textual shards embedding into our consciousness like shrapnel from a cluster bomb, virally infecting us and making us mutually susceptible to the subtlest forms of social control.

The post-literate age lives and dies by the word.◼︎

Cover image: Yannick Nézet-Séguin by Tam Photography for Orchestre Metropolitain.

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All Dressed

Between Two Worlds: in conversation with Emna Mâaref

“The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well…”
—Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“Do you come here?” I ask the Tunisian musician Emna Mâaref as we sit down together at a table for two at Caffè Italia. (I invite everyone to meet here. It is Montreal’s interzone.)

“All the time,” Mâaref says, telling me that there is a natural affinity between Tunisia and Italy. Only a sliver of the Mediterranean Sea divides these two nations, on two distinct continents.

“When you feel lost, you just go eat something from your home country,” she explains. “When you deeply feel alone, when there is no sun, there is no sea, just a sandwich helps.”

Mâaref, 31, is dressed in a black baseball cap and black t-shirt, the sleeve of which she rolls up, rubbing her bicep like an amateur boxer as she sips from her coffee cup and settles in. Her countenance connotes a gravitas. She is undoubtedly atypical, an individual with a rich backstory that she alternately guards and reveals in rounds of dialogue that feel both precious and carefree.

Mâaref has lived in Montreal for only three years, having immigrated to Canada to complete a master’s degree in political science at UQAM. But she is also an accomplished Oud player, the fretless stringed instrument that signifies Orientalism to the Western ear.

And she has already established herself in fewer than 36 months as an integral member of Montreal’s music community, collaborating with some of the city’s most beloved artists, including Jessica Moss, Patrick Watson, and Radwan Ghazhi Moumneh, who recorded Mâaref’s first long-player, Ama Lel Hawa / أَما لِلهَوى, at his renowned studio, Hotel2Tango.

The album, released through the local collective Interzone Editions, is comprised of ten largely improvised compositions for solo Oud. “The instrument is not like playing guitar or playing piano,” says Mâaref. “Oud is so specific — it’s really so specific.”

Notes exist between the 12-tone scale and outside the regular time signatures that regulate western classical music. Nâaref’s in a double sense is truly a non-binary mode of music making. Although it doesn’t intend to be, Ama Lel Hawa / أَما لِلهَوى is an anachronism in Montreal’s cultural scene. Within its contemporary context, it serves as an antidote to all the algorithmic artifice and dubious slop typical of practically every genre of modern music today.

There are a few overdubs, Mâaref concedes, but the bulk of the album was committed to tape in one day with Moumneh serving as producer and “big brother” to the virtuoso musician. “This was a dream, to record this kind of record,” Mâaref tells me. “This is what I needed to express certain emotions.”

Aching sentiments of displacement and longing anchor the weight of these arresting songs. Our world is one that has collapsed distance and time by virtue of telecommunications and technology. But the human soul has yet to catch up to the speed with which people and ideas circulate around the globe. Ama Lel Hawa / أَما لِلهَوى speaks precisely to that lag.

“I’m feeling all the time that I’m not here, but also not there,” Mâaref confesses, torn between a new phase in Montreal and her preceding chapters lived in Tunisia.

“Sometimes when I walk on the street here, I’m experiencing a whole life, a new direction — buildings and people and everything. And at the same time, I keep thinking about everything there. I keep thinking about what’s happening, and the past, and imagining the future. It’s so heavy. I imagine I have the possibility to go home anytime. But I imagine refugees, people who don’t have the right or access to their homeland. All those feelings come together on this album.”

“Sustainability is for real artists.” Emna Mâaref photographed by Nick Jewell for Interzone Editions.

Mâaref was raised in the Sousse Governorate of Tunisia and moved to Tunis at age 18 to study law. Her first impressions of music were of Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian diva. “My family was obsessed with her,” Mâaref says. “This is why I started playing Oud — so I could play Umm Kalthum songs. This was my childhood.”

As a teenager, along with more traditional Middle Eastern artists like Kulthum and Fairuz, hip-hop and electronic music began to influence Mâaref’s aesthetic sensibilities. “I had a metal phase in my life, of course,” she laughs. “But pop music was internationally available. I looked for jazz and blues to know how it started, this evolution. We had a lot of vinyl from the ’70s, and my parents were so supportive of everything I was doing.”

Mâaref began producing and DJing dance music, giving up the Oud for periods because of its cultural connotations. “I was hating the sound and hating all this heavy moral value, and the heritage,” she recalls. “But when I came here, I had a totally different feeling because the Oud was the only thing I had a memory of — this world, the past. It changed somehow. The album is reflecting all of that. Reflecting how much I’m not there and not here either.”

Composing music for film and soundtracking contemporary art installations also interests Mâaref, having worked previously with Milton Riaño, the Columbian new media artist, on an installation at OBORO entitled Eclosions.

“My experience is more with sound design than composition,” she says. “I love cinema. It’s one of the arts that inspires me so much. Hopefully I can work on future films. I would be so happy. It’s an amazing experience, when you work in the cinema. It’s an unbelievable feeling.”

“It’s given me a lot, so I am grateful to this city.” Emna Mâaref photographed by Nick Jewell for Interzone Editions.

While electronic music is still vital to Mâaref, it represents another form of political expression. “It is democratic as a tool,” she contends. “Everyone can play electronic music on a mobile app or something. But what is important is what you’re going to play with this kind of music — what you bring, what’s your touch, what’s your colour, how to recognize you from all this world, what is specific, and aesthetically, what your voice is. Sustainability,” she argues, “is for real artists. You have to have patience. And be patient.”

I notice that Mâaref and I don’t so much converse as study one another. Her character is compelling and betrays remarkable wisdom and intelligence. We talk at length about technology and innovation, improvisation, composition, what stimulates creativity, the limits of political economy, and the fundamental constituents of national identity.

“Do you feel at home here?” I inquire.

“Wow, such deep questions,” she says, pausing to consider her response.

“I’m starting to feel at home here. When you start having your people around, real people who share everything and support you in every situation, you start to feel at home. It’s given me a lot, so I am grateful to this city. This is what I’m looking for at this moment in my life. I found it here.”◼︎

Ama Lel Hawa / أَما لِلهَوى is released via Interzone Editions.

Cover image: Nick Jewell for Interzone Editions.

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Be True to Your School

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

David Letterman waves to the audience at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“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

Shunk perform for a Pop Montreal afternoon event at Pointe-à-Callière. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“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

HRT perform at Red Roof Church at an event organized by Nights of Worship. Olympia Dairaine Grimaux for NicheMTL.

“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

Gallery view of De quoi a-t-on besoin pour guérir?, 2026, by Fenyx Florentiny & Eva-Loan. Photographed for NicheMTL

“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

Josi Smit, Early Morning in Late April, 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“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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NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

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

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Luxury Communism

“Don’t stay in a bad place where they don’t care how you are.”
—David Bowie, “Everyone Says ‘Hi’”

I am not a happy camper.

My earliest memories of being on holiday as a child are of camping with my mom and dad, the three of us crammed into a six-man army tent made of heavy olive-green canvas.

Whenever it rained, which was always, there was nowhere else to go but back inside the tent. Hours spent playing Monopoly on a warped board or just staring out into the lack of space. You could easily lose your balance inside the tent, too, accidentally leaving a perfect palm print on the inside wall that would immediately begin leaking rainwater in the shape of your hand, a wet slap in the face.

To me as a kid, there was something haunting about the notion of six soldiers trying to sleep in that tent, maybe somewhere in Vietnam in the ’60s, or Korea a decade earlier, a canvas tarp their only shelter from monsoon season and never-ending artillery fire, nights spent much like their days, in constant discomfort, in constant fear for their lives.

I could imagine nothing worse than that — except, of course, for us piled together in the pouring rain in the tent the six of them eventually died in. That is not how I spell holiday.

This is why I don’t hate a posh hotel. And there are many in Montreal to choose from.

It’s called a ‘staycation’ — when you can’t quite afford a flight to some tropical destination, but you can afford a few nights of hospitality in a place that isn’t your crappy apartment. It might even be just down the street from your crappy apartment. You don’t have to go very far to go on vacation in this city. Especially if you live here, all it takes is a minor shift in perspective and Montreal comes to you.

For regular readers, you may be asking yourself, is this the same Ryan Alexander Diduck who liberally quotes Mark Fisher and habitually hates on capitalism as if it were the devil personified? Yes.

“Montreal, and any major city, is a different place when viewed from above.” Hôtel Birks photographed for NicheMTL.

On my birthday four years ago, I decided to take a room at the Birks Hotel on Square Phillips and Sainte-Catherine Street, overlooking what used to be The Bay. I imagined Leonard Cohen checking into a hotel somewhere exotic in the 1980s, unloading an Underwood typewriter onto the desk and setting a few packs of Benson & Hedges near the ashtrays that used to come standard in hotel rooms back in those days.

I no longer smoked, nor drank, nor did anything fun, and my Underwood was a MacBook Air which I nonetheless set up at the window, proceeding for the next three days and nights to drink Nespresso and sparkling water and write the first few articles that would become NicheMTL. Those rare days at the Birks Hotel restored me more than a week on the beach drinking Singapore Slings in Tahiti — or Tahiti Treats in Singapore.

Montreal, and any major city, is a different place when viewed from above. The quotidian assumes a poetic resonance. At any given moment, you can witness someone making a mess, and someone else cleaning it up. A child dropping an ice cream cone on the pavement; a dog scratching behind its ear; a woman’s hat blowing away in the breeze. These flashes when viewed from the 6th floor of a luxury hotel become events, with everyday life making a more meaningful impression.

The ceiling at Brasserie Henri, the restaurant in the Hôtel Birks, is sculpted with the shining visages of cherubim and seraphim — although I can never remember which are the ones that hang from the roof of the cave. There is a Parisian elegance about the place that only American tourists can ruin. But if you squint your eyes, you can imagine yourself sitting in another era, when people read newspapers instead of scrolling through screens, when Montreal was romantic and new.

“Hotel art is usually an afterthought.” SonoLux photographed for NicheMTL.

Closer to the present time, I was walking down Saint-Jacques Street a few months ago and noticed that an historic edifice that had been under construction for several years was now open. I wandered in and marvelled at the ambiguous surroundings. Not quite a café, a restaurant, or a bar, but neither a traditional hotel lobby, generative videos projected on the walls like the office of Number 2 in The Prisoner, I wondered, ‘what the hell is this place?’

It turned out to be SonoLux, a new hotel/restaurant/lounge/contemporary art gallery that had recently soft-launched in Old Montreal. This is an unlikely but decidedly niche combination of endeavours, ambitious in execution, especially in the post-pandemic era when Airbnb shuttered the nearby St. James Hotel, and conceptual lodging companies like Sonder went bankrupt. SonoLux, though, is doing something different.

36 identical and minimally appointed rooms. LUMI, a gastronomy-lovers paradise with dishes that executive chef Graham Hood designs and prepares. Subterra, a basement bar with a vinyl-centric hi-fi DJ booth that JoJo Flores and Fred Everything programme. Installations on each floor displaying surprisingly interesting works of visual art — the first show curated by Cheryl Sim of Centre PHI and soundtracked by local experimental electronic duo Mue.

Hotel art is usually an afterthought, not much more than royalty-free images stuck in prefab frames found at Bed, Bath & Beyond. It is refreshing, then, that a place of lodging would position art front-and-centre in the traveler’s itinerary. Amidst all the corporate galleries that populate the neighbourhood, SonoLux is actually a destination, along with Centre PHI and Fonderie Darling, on the map of exhibition spaces worth visiting. And you can stay overnight.

Still image from An Inheritance/A Threat/A Haunting by Kosisochukwu Nnebe at SonoLux. Photographed for NicheMTL

SonoLux and the Birks Hotel offer polar opposite but nonetheless very Montreal experiences. Neither is a franchise; they are singular places with unique features. They offer old- and new-world extravagance. They are both ‘immersive’ without feeling as if you’re submerged in a vulgar or generic atmosphere. They both pay incredible attention to detail. And they both are ideal quintessential staycation destinations for discerning Montrealers.

I love my parents for showing me the beauty and serenity of the great outdoors, for instilling in me an admiration of nature nurtured for weeks on end in our nation’s campgrounds. But I don’t miss waking up soggy and smelling of campfire smoke and insect repellant, rainwater dripping into my sleeping bag, a coin-operated shower the only indulgence.

I once asked Slavoj Žižek when we met in 2008 at the Telluride Film Festival how he could justify writing about socialism while essentially travelling from one luxury hotel to another, and in his characteristic lisp, he said, “Ryan, in order to create revolution, you must be comfortable!” The notion of the starving artist is illusory and only benefits the ruling class. Artists create best when they are fed and watered, rested and ready. And nothing rests and readies the creative mind quite like sojourning in a place like the Birks, or SonoLux.

A plush hotel, especially in your own city, for even a night or two, is enough of a vacation to recharge your batteries and give you a fresh perspective on life. There is no place for a holiday quite like home.◼︎

Cover image: LUMI at SonoLux photographed for NicheMTL.

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Down With Love

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

Chef Graham Hood’s first of two desserts with the new summer 9-course tasting menu at LUMI, Hôtel SonoLux. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“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

St. Vincent performs at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier with the Montreal International Jazz Festival. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

“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

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Frédérique D. Oberland perform at La Sala Rossa with Suoni Per il Popolo Festival. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“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

Diana Krall performs at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

“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

Christian Richer and Frédérique Duval perform as Preoptic Ridge at Le Système, 2 July 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.

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.”◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

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

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All Dressed

Day For Night: in conversation with Jennifer Alleyn

Montreal is known as a 24-hour city. The metropolis shines brightest in the shadows.

The two decades between 1960 and 1980 saw nightlife explode with cultural hubs like social and dance clubs that welcomed and nurtured bohemian subcultures. At the same time, the city became a destination, attracting immigrants from around the world with a cosmopolitan atmosphere supported by bilingualism and multiculturalism. Particularly the Plateau and Mile End neighbourhoods assumed an international character, an island within the island.

The Montreal-based artist and filmmaker Jennifer Alleyn came of age in this milieu.

“This was my ‘hood,” Alleyn tells me as we sit beneath a staircase on the patio at Café Myriade on St. Denis, escaping the blazing sunshine of an early summer afternoon. “I grew up in this neighbourhood. There was Warshaw, there was Schwartz, there was a Polish bakery, there was a Greek shoe repair, there was the Hungarian meat place. When I was a kid, I believed that everybody came from elsewhere.”

The street bustles and buzzes with midday traffic and extrovert energy. But Alleyn’s latest film, Kairos, is a more introverted and contemplative affair. Kairos tells the story of Emmanuel, portrayed by the actor and playwright Emmanuel Schwartz, a fictionalized version of an actor amidst a midlife crisis who finally lands a gig hosting a late-night talk radio show and establishes unexpected connections with the callers who tune in nightly.

“We were looking for places that were a bit more deserted,” Alleyn explains of the Montreal locations that populate the film. “Those tiny lights that are not in the midst of the noise of the day. Even the visual noise. I adore the silence,” she says, “the quiet of night.”

Nocturnal reveries are effectively supporting characters in Kairos. The film lingers on beautifully framed Antonioni-esque architectural cinematography and delicate drone panoramas of apartment exteriors with a nod to Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Kairos constructs a dream-like version of Montreal that doesn’t quite fit together, allowing the viewer to fill in real and imaginary spaces: the Farine Five Roses sign; the rooftop studio in the Cooper building on St. Laurent Boulevard just below Duluth; the tiny cafe in the lobby of 10 Avenue des Pins.

Via email, I reach Emmanuel Schwartz, who explains, “The Montreal of this movie feels like a cross between Leonard Cohen’s, Amir Kadir’s, and Kim Thúy’s Montreal. The great thing about a city, about identity, is that it’s always becoming, isn’t it? That’s what’s beautiful about this place,” says Schwartz, “that we are free to change, to be a whole bunch of things, some we can’t even name.”

Conceived during the depths of the pandemic, with Schwartz in mind as the lead, Kairos captures and communicates urban alienation and longing for connection that characterizes life in post-modern cities — particularly Montreal, which is traditionally described as a pas de deux of two solitudes. “We really have something like a twin mind,” Alleyn says of Schwartz.

“The great thing about a city, about identity, is that it’s always becoming.” Emmanuel Schwartz. Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Alleyn.

The movie version of Emmanuel curiously finds companionship in the disembodied telephonic voices, people from elsewhere, who tell their stories with an intimacy that can only be achieved over the phone.

“He’s seeking exchanges, real exchanges,” Alleyn tells me. “The technological society tends to erase these conversations because it’s such a capitalist way of interacting, in a way. To me, there is such a connection with the voice. It’s a heart-to-heart. It relieves all the possible preconceived images that we can build when we meet a stranger. It is direct access to a human being.”

That experiential access transcends language, nationality, and identity. Radio, too, plays a role that harkens back to a kind of social media that existed before the internet, paradoxically fostering a closer form of community. “All the walls fall,” says Alleyn, “all the preconceived walls fall through the radio.”

Alleyn is the daughter of Edmund Alleyn, the celebrated Quebec visual artist known for experimenting with form and mixing various media, incorporating abstraction and technology, and often using his works to commentate on the radical transformations Quebec society underwent following the Quiet Revolution. Coming of age to an extent in her famous father’s shadow, Alleyn more deliberately cultivated her confidence and unique creative voice.

“It’s true that it was very rich to witness the arts in the making,” Alleyn recalls. “But my father was a very strong figure. When I was young, it was very impressive. People tend to think that this could have opened up the possibility for me more than someone who has a doctor or a mechanic for a father. He really was a confirmed artist. He had a vocation. At 14 he did paintings and was like, ‘this is my life. This is what I’m meant to do.’ And it was clear, and it came from the sky. For me, to believe that I could also have this artistic capacity or sensibility, it took me a lot of time because it’s a really big thing to confront. I was a shy child.”

Jennifer Alleyn found that photography offered a way into making images that were not immediately associated or compared with her father’s. “I had my little camera when I was 10,” remembers Alleyn. “I see better behind my camera. I go closer to people with my camera. Cinema is my territory.”

“Cinema is about immorality.” Jennifer Alleyn on the set of Kairos. Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Alleyn.

She became renowned first as a documentary filmmaker with My Father’s Studio in 2007, a touching portrait of Edmund that received the prestigious Gémeaux Award and was named best Canadian film at Montreal’s International Festival of Films on Art. Her preceding film, Svanok, based upon a dream her father recounted to her, won a more meaningful award: his approval. “I did it with a tiny crew,” says Alleyn, a broad smile emerging on her face. “And when he saw it, he was really happy. And he said, ‘this is cinema.’”

We talk at length about the differences between cinema and photography. “I don’t like the word ‘shooting,’” Alleyn proclaims. “You’re killing time when you’re shooting. Cinema is about immorality. That’s why long takes are so wonderful. Then, you really have encapsulated time. That’s what makes cinema very alive. It’s true that cinema is most powerful when time becomes alive again.” She pauses and proclaims, “It is something that you retrieve from the terrible bulldozer of time.”

This image sticks with me: time as bulldozer, indiscriminately razing all of human experience, and the camera and its operator trying desperately to preserve some semblance of it. It is a delightful metaphor. The Greek word “Kairos” is distinct from “Chronos,” chronological time that unfolds linearly. Kairos means seizing upon decisive moments, those windows of opportunity that present themselves within time’s relentless march.

The sunlight creeps around the staircase that Alleyn and I sit beneath, chasing the shadows.

“You save some moments,” she contends, “and you can survive time.”◼︎

Cover image: Jennifer Alleyn photographed by Justine Latour.

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Play Recent

Midnight Indigo

Fondations, Pur Pasteur, Fondations (Self-released)

Pur Pasteur performs at White Wall Studio 22 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”
—Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

Montreal is a city known for its nightlife. The inky blue sky that appears in the summertime between midnight and dawn is the dome under which much of Montreal’s arts and culture is incubated. “The productive hours,” an artist friend recently defined it.

I prefer to preserve a sanitized image of the urban night, a city of late-night strolls and romantic encounters. But Montreal’s nighttime economies have come under fire at the policy level since at least Expo ’67, when the SPVM, QPP, and RCMP established a joint task force in 1966 to counter the rise of illegal activities that often unfolded under the cover of night.

Matthieu Caron, author of Montreal After Dark, writes that the tabloid media at the time amplified perceived crises like drug abuse and sex work, “to create panic regarding security and moral standards.”

Montreal’s unofficial nightlife ambassador Sergio Da Silva argues on the contrary that nightlife cultivates community and culture. Da Silva pointed out during his municipal candidacy campaign in 2025 the incongruity of noise regulations aimed at loitering bar patrons in neighbourhoods that greenlit major residential construction projects. And ironically, many of those apartments now sit unoccupied.

Montreal’s new mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada on Friday announced at a press conference, to phoney fanfare, that Montreal will contribute $540,000 to renovate 45 vacant housing units for “vulnerable residents.” Meanwhile, roughly 25,000 immediately inhabitable rental units remain vacant as moving day approaches, in part because landlords are legally allowed to significantly increase rents on units that have not had a tenant for more than 12 months.

Short-term rentals, too, are notorious contributors to the seamier side of Montreal’s nightlife and also eat into the availability of affordable housing. An investigative analysis that The Globe & Mail published on 22 June exposed a human-trafficking ring that lured teenagers to Montreal bars only to be ensnared into the skin trade through interprovincial networks of short-term rental units.

It is possible that the Airbnb next door might be the source of the rattling mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

Vent bleu, Maude Arès, Guido Molinari, Anne-Marie Proulx, Fondation Guido Molinari, Until 23 August 2026

Guido Molinari, Vent bleu (1995), Acrylic on canvas, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec collection. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“When, with an expression so ill-bred as to be fatherless, I enjoin a small offensive fellow to ‘fuck a duck,’ I don’t mean he should.”
—William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry

It is disappointing when it rains on a parade, to which we might say, ‘fuck this.’ It is disappointing when the metro leaves just as you arrive at the station, to which we might say, ‘fuck that.’

But nothing is as disappointing as another person, a celebrity or someone in a powerful position, especially someone whom you might once have admired, respected, even loved, behaving in an unbecoming manner, to which we might say, ‘fuck you.’ Petty, spiteful, unclassy, envious, vainglorious — these are ugly characteristics that come into focus in the light of a 10,000-degree Kelvin day.

They say that revenge is a dish best served cold. And it might be tempting to blow a cool blue invective toward someone who has wounded you. But the best revenge is no revenge at all. The most effective remedy for the blues induced by another person’s private hell is not to add more blue, but to become a gray rock.

Character is revealed in distress tolerance. Let disappointing people be, to live out their life sentences imprisoned by their own miserable existence, immersed in a blue cocoon.

Max Richter with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 26 June 2026

Max Richter introduces The Blue Notebooks at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 25 June 2026. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

“Pay blue—Pay back the blue you stole and bottled and doled out in eye droppers of junk—pay back the blue you stole for your police uniforms—pay that blue back to sea and sky and eyes of the earth—”
—William S. Burroughs, Nova Express

Max Richter, the German-born British composer performing on Thursday night at Place des arts with the Montreal Jazz Festival, explained to the audience that he wrote The Blue Notebooks in response to U.K. complicity with the U.S.-led 2003 Iraq invasion, whilst contemplating philosophically how to treat others and how best to exist in the world.

Creative pursuit is one answer. For every monstrous act, it seems that there must be an immense and equal and opposite outpouring of beauty and goodness and justice. The form this justice takes is different in every instance, but most often it manifests in works of righteous art. The Sorrow and the Pity, for instance, would not exist without French Nazi sympathy.

Kaïros, dir. Jennifer Alleyn, Cinéma Moderne, 24 June 2026

“Blue is a noose strangling a vulnerable sky.”
—George Elliott Clarke, Blue Elegies, for David Odhiambo

Air fluctuates differently at night. The city’s oscillations and its corresponding pulse appear to slow to a gentler rhythm. This is when those with acute sensitivity can rest, or feel at peace, or feel more comfortable inside their own skin.

There is something about darkness that is paradoxically revealing, as if another kind of light manifests in the shadows. Our contours blur into obscurity, uniting us.

Remembering Gabor Szilasi, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 13 June 2026

Attendees gather to view an exhibition of Gabor Szilasi’s photographs after the Celebration of Life ceremony in his honour at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 13 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“More lights
Blue signs
All gold
All new
So small
So high
Down there
Tonight.”
—Brian Eno, “A Different Kind of Blue”

Nearly a half-century after Susan Sontag wrote On Photography, it is still difficult to explain what makes a good photograph. Photos are “praised for being subtle,” Sontag wrote, “or interesting, or powerful, or complex, or simple, or — a favourite — deceptively simple.”

To this list we might add sentimental. A photograph that evokes melancholy either in its subject matter or its materiality is bound to elicit an emotional response in the viewer. Identification — if we recognize the person or the location or the situation that the image depicts — contributes to the perceived quality of a photographic image as well.

Unsentimental photographs, however, have their own virtues. Surveillance photos that are void of any aesthetic considerations, like lighting or composition, possess a certain documentary charm. Ruined photos that flaunt their mechanical flaws, or in which an errant thumb appears, or that cut their subjects off mid-face, or are hopelessly out of focus, also frequently make for good snapshots.

These glitchy kinds of images defy easy identification, capturing every part of the moment in interesting and powerful and complex ways, yet with deceptive simplicity.

Intelligence is measured in the acceptance of ambiguity.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Max Richter and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble perform at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 25 June 2026. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

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