Tag Archives: Opera de Montreal

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Mother Nature’s Son

Ambroise, iii. l’air était si doux, la premi​è​re caresse go​û​te toujours la neige (Self-released)

My mother’s mother, Margaret, like me, was a writer.

Eschewing machines, she always wrote in longhand, never without a Bible nearby. She would frequently weave scripture into her work and allow it to guide her thought processes.

My grandmother’s writing wasn’t published, but she wrote tomes of what might be considered scrapbooks that she gave to her children and grandchildren. I cherish these books that my grandmother wrote just for me, and I’m grateful for her teaching me the practice of constant reading and writing.

Margaret was a member of a better generation that valued simple truths over valuable complexity. When the internet came around, she wouldn’t allow it in her house.

“Baba,” I said, “we can email each other now.”

But she never wrote an email. The pen was the sole tool of her craft — the pen, and maybe some Scotch tape.

And I’m glad. The things my grandmother wrote to me have an indexical connection to the person she was. Reading her words on the paper page, in a way, brings her back to life.

I know that she held the pen that drew the ink into those sentences, those sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into volumes. I still feel the rhythms of her heartbeat in every page that she wrote.

Paper is eternal. An inbox is evidence.

Katia and Marielle Labèque with the OSM, The Double Concerto for Two Pianos by Philip Glass, 8 May 2024, Maison Symphonique

Katia and Marielle Labèque take a bow at Maison Symphonique, 8 May 2024. Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. —Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, sisters Alexa and Alexie Grady, whom their father Delbert Grady murdered, haunt the Overlook Hotel through visions as seen by a young Danny Torrance.

Their manifestations in the movie, first in rapid clips and later in prolonged shots, are arguably among the most disturbing images in cinema history. The girls don’t appear in King’s novel, and why Kubrick chose to represent them visually in the motion picture is as much of a mystery as anything the enigmatic director might have done during his storied career.

In the film version, the sisters implore Danny to “come and play” with them “for ever and ever and ever,” apparently alluding to the afterlife’s infinite duration. On this earth, according to the principle of Samsara, we are born over and over again until we get it right and receive the go-ahead to reach the next level of existence. What that looks like, who knows?

Still, there isn’t much better two sisters can get than to be a pair of ivory-tickling prodigies. I’m sure I can speak for the entire audience in saying we could easily listen to them play on forever.

La Traviata, Opéra de Montréal, 9 May 2024, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier

The cast of La Traviata perform at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 9 May 2024. Vivien Gaumand for Opéra de Montréal.

“To be a woman is to be an actress. Being feminine is a kind of theatre, with its appropriate costumes, décor, lighting, and stylized gestures.” —Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging.”

It’s interesting how history shifts our perspective.

In Verdi’s day, it was considered an insult to pay a lady for her time. Now, it’s nearly an affront not to. Capitalism was kinder to the gentler sex when it was still tinged with a hint of aristocracy.

Funeral Lakes, with Hsein, and Princess Towers, Error 403, 4 May 2024

Princess Towers performs at Error 403, 4 May 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I’m proud that Canada persists in defiantly asserting its identity in the face of our evermore obnoxious cousins south of the border. Personally, I would be more embarrassed than ever to be American right now.

Neither side exhibits any vestige of virtue.

On the right hand, they have a misogynistic blowhard billionaire; on the left, a senile career politician about whom David Letterman’s 30-year-old jokes continue to land on the mark. One of my favourites, from a 1980s Late Night broadcast, talks about Senator Joe Biden reluctantly admitting that he wasn’t, in fact, the fifth Beatle.

In Susan Musgrave’s memoire, entitled You’re in Canada Now, Motherfucker, she muses that the United States is like “the guy at the party who gives everyone cocaine and still can’t get anyone to be his friend.”

Steve Albini (22 July 1962—7 May 2024)

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, motherfucker=redeemer. Recorded by Steve Albini.

Yanqui U.X.O., released in November 2002, might be Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s least loved and most legendary album. I contend that it’s partly due to Steve Albini’s anti-aesthetic.

Albini was the opposite of, say, a Phil Spector. Rather than having a signature sound, Albini had no sound at all — except for the sound of the band. That’s why he insisted upon relinquishing the title of producer, instead receiving the utilitarian credit, “recorded by Steve Albini.”

He never gated a snare. He didn’t construct walls of sound. Rather, Albini’s recordings all resembled something that might have been committed to tape in their parents’ garage on a 4-track Tascam. Thus, he gave every independent musician hope that they, too, might become the next Pixies, or PJ Harvey.

Yanqui U.X.O. was unloved for another glaring reason: an insultingly low rating on Pitchfork. The site’s founder, Ryan Schreiber, wrote at the time that the album sounded like “slogging through the mud every step of the way.”

Ironically, that’s what I love about the record: its barebones, insistent difficulty. Godspeed refused to pander to their listeners, much less to fickle critics.

Unloved albums tend to be niche albums, too, which puts them squarely in this publication’s purview.

Today, Albini resides in Rock & Roll heaven; Godspeed still tours the globe successfully, often triumphantly reproducing suites from Yanqui to enamoured and ever-growing audiences. And Schreiber now scribes for a subsidiary of GQ.

Funny how justice is always served in the end.◼︎

Cover image: Talise Trevigne as Violetta Valéry in La Traviata. Photographed by Vivien Gaumand for Opéra de Montréal.

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This Is Fine

ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT, 8 February 2024, La Sala Rossa

All Hands_Make Light photographed for NicheMTL.

Fire is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, fire illuminates. On the other, it destroys.

You can’t fight fire with fire. Because then all you have is orders, powers, magnitudes of destruction.

But if what you are attempting is to enlighten, starting multiple fires is integral, beneficial, vital.

La Reine-garçon, Opéra de Montréal, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 3 February 2024

French is the world’s fifth most frequently spoken language. By comparison, English is first, with roughly three to four times as many habitual speakers. (Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish sit between.)

67 countries around the world list English as one of their official languages, as opposed to only 29 that name French. It is safe to say that France is no longer conducting much colonial expansion these days — no one is, really, except of course for Russia — meaning that it is unlikely that any new countries will become French-speaking nations for the foreseeable future.

With regard to language, I wrote a book called Mad Skills once upon a time, about the history of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, otherwise known as MIDI. MIDI is a computer “language” — and a robust and long-standing one at that.

Even though they were marketplace competitors, synthesizer companies in the early 1980s agreed that creating a standard control protocol would be advantageous to growing their trades manufacturing and selling musical instruments. If you could plug a Yamaha into a Roland and make them work together, the theory went, musicians would buy more Yamahas and Rolands.

It was especially the Japanese CEOs — who had themselves learned to speak decent English — that pushed for what was initially called UMI, pronounced you-me — a Universal Musical Interface.

UMI eventually morphed into MIDI, and the rest morphed into music history. Artists from Depeche Mode to Devo to Run DMC adopted MIDI and ran with it. Today, everyone except for Jack White has a MIDI-enabled instrument somewhere in their collection, and Roger Waters would never have been able to mount The Wall singlehandedly and interminably without it.

More than 40 years on, MIDI is still far and away the most commonly used “language” with which digital musical instruments “communicate.” And though other machine control protocols still survive, MIDI became the de facto industry syntax, and a lot of wonderful music ensued.

Imagine if a standard musical language never existed, what kind of noise people would have made.

Hell is Paradise, 5 February 2024, Quai des Brumes

Hell is Paradise photographed for NicheMTL.

There is no sound out in space. Because sound requires air as a medium to vibrate through, the sounds that we hear are very much unique to this world. Therefore, language — or the vocal, audible form of communication that most people and cultures across the globe and even many animal species use — is a place-dependent phenomenon.

That place is Planet Earth. And depending upon the location, the people and cultures of this planet inhabit variously configured bodies and correspond through diverse and ever-evolving languages.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou wrote that there are only bodies and languages. Except that there are also truths. One truth, though, is that there are only bodies and languages here.

Bodies and languages don’t matter much if they’re relieved of their earthbound gravitas.

India Gailey, No Hay Banda, La Sala Rossa, 4 February 2024

India Gailey photographed for NicheMTL.

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. —Genesis 2:19

It is noteworthy that according to Judeo-Christian tradition, language is man’s creation, not God’s. God made the animals and gave Adam the privilege of naming them. Which begs the question: what language does God speak? Is there such a thing as Divine Language?

The American ethnobotanist Terence McKenna described his transcendent experiences with N, N-Dimethyltryptamine, commonly abbreviated as DMT, in illuminating and often hilarious terms. On a collaborative 1993 spoken-word album made with the electronic musician Jonah Sharp, otherwise known as Spacetime Continuum, McKenna recounts hallucinating under the drug’s influence a race of interdimensional angelic beings that he called “self-transforming machine elves,” which communicated in delightful utterances that McKenna imitated.

These beings instructed McKenna to talk as they did — “do it, use your voice to make an object,” they told him — forming lexical blocks out of word units constituting a simultaneously novel and ancient language.

Suddenly, from McKenna’s body, as if ex nihilo, foreign yet familiar tongues emerged. “Meaning and language are two different things,” observes McKenna. There is no inherent reason why we call a table a table. It’s not as if you slap your palm down on a table and it sounds like “table.”

Reality itself is constructed upon a series of reiterative symbolic systems, language being one of them. Language only means something because we repeat its words. The more times we repeat the language’s words, the more pregnant with meaning they become.

Until they cease to lose all meaning. If you have ever repeated the same word over and over in your mind, you will have experienced the uncanny sensation of language unfastening itself from sense-making.

Language is like the fruit of a tree. It can nourish or it can poison, depending upon the nature of the tree. No good fruit can come of an evil tree, and a good tree cannot produce evil fruit.

“The world is made of words,” McKenna astutely concludes, “and if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art, 8 February 2024, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore vernissage at the MMFA photographed for NicheMTL.

I treasure going to openings. It is one of the perks of writing — being invited to an exclusive opening.

The last exclusive opening I will ever attend will be that of my own casket. Unfortunately, the show will close the same day.◼︎

Cover image: patrons inspect Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Grey Cross on Blue” (1929) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, photographed for NicheMTL.

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How Do You Spell Holiday?

Enfant de Bohème: in conversation with Michel Beaulac

The Opera de Montreal’s venerable veteran Artistic Director, Michel Beaulac, has travelled the world and visited some of its most notable concert halls — Palais Garnier, La Scala, Teatro Comunale di Bologna among them. But his roots as a music lover are planted firmly in the working-class neighbourhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles.

“I like that section of Montreal. I have a lot of memories there,” says Beaulac on a phone call during the final weekend before five performances (another was added, by popular demand, on May 16th) of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly close out the company’s 43rd season. “Butterfly is certainly an opera that is always sold out because there is a connection there with the audience. People think it really is about a Geisha in Nagasaki, and her tragic story. But it really is so much more. It’s a denunciation of Imperialism. It’s a denunciation of power.”

Beaulac comes from a financially modest family. “In Pointe-Saint-Charles, that was really the rule,” he says. “Everybody was, not poor, but of relatively meagre means.”

When he was five, Beaulac’s favourite uncle, an Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist at Notre-Dame Hospital, who happened to be the preferred referral for touring singers performing in the city, gifted the family a phonograph and a few classical recordings. “The only records we had in the house were those my uncle had given us,” Beaulac recalls. “One was Casse-Noisette. And the others were Werther, and Carmen, with Raoul Jobin, which Raoul Jobin had given him because he had just seen him for throat problems.” Particularly, Carmen first caught Beaulac’s ear — and broke his heart.

“I used to sing the words,” Beaulac remembers, “not really understanding the story. And when Carmen died at the end, I would run over to my mother, because I had a cousin whose name was Carmen. I would always go to my mother and say, ‘Carmen is dead!’ And my mother would have to tell me, ‘no, this is just a story, Carmen is not dead. Your cousin Carmen is not dead.’”

By his mid-teens, Beaulac began attending performances that the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal co-produced, featuring singers like Shirley Verrett and Richard Verreault. And at 18, he saved up enough money working summer jobs to visit Europe’s most storied opera houses.

“That was just such an incredible experience,” Beaulac recollects. “I was still developing that fascination for the voice and for opera and I never thought I’d spend my life in opera. I never really hoped or even thought of it.”

Beaulac’s career took a roundabout path. He taught for ten years, and then studied sculpture and painting, before landing a job in communications at Opera de Montreal. “And that’s where it all started,” Beaulac laughs. “It was such luck. I mean, I began in communications and moved on. I had a good knowledge of space, and structure, and drawing, and colours. One day a set designer dropped out. The director at the time said, ‘we have a production in seven months and the designer just dropped out, do you want to do the sets?’ And I never say no, so I jumped in.”

Since, Beaulac has served as the OdM’s Artistic Director and shows no signs of slowing down. The company is already casting for its 2024-’25 season. “We’re starting to look ahead,” Beaulac says with genuine excitement. “We’re really starting to plan who I could have here in ‘25-‘26. It’s really rolling.”

As other high artforms like cinema, prestige TV, and video games seem to be losing their post-covid appeal amongst younger audiences, opera is gaining a new generation of aficionados. With the OdM’s world premiere of La Beauté du Monde, the composer Julien Bilodeau’s collaboration with Quebec dramaturg Michel Marc Bouchard, and Juno winner Keiko Devaux’s debut at the Darling Foundry in January of L’ecoute du Perdu, Montreal is emerging as the new world leader in a centuries-long tradition.

“Opera hasn’t just survived,” Beaulac affirms, “it has developed. Opera has become this formidable artform that is so complete — that brings art, and architecture, and music, and words, and drama, and dance, and movement. This is what is so fascinating about this artform, and why you and I are so taken by it. It’s a world unto itself. When I hear people in the tech world talk about the metaverse, I think that we had access to the metaverse before they did.”

In efforts to attract younger audiences, the OdM has experimented in recent years with opening up dress rehearsals to the public, showcasing performances in a more informal setting. Still, Beaulac finds that people are drawn to opera’s immersive, transformative potential, regardless of age.

“It’s kind of a magnet,” Beaulac explains. “Opera is an artform that we can express thoughts and feelings that are connected to today’s reality. New works do that. The audience, young and old, wants to be told stories. People love to be told a story. Especially if the music is carrying it. Time slows down. They get to that meditative state where they get into the story. When it’s well put together, and the artists are really communicative, and the story is presented to them beforehand so that they already have a grasp of what they’re going to see, or if they get to look it up on their phones, they love it.”

Just don’t ask Beaulac to select a favourite. “There are so many,” he says, “for different reasons. In the 15 years I have been here, even where I’ve got to pick and choose, there are still too many.”

Beaulac is especially proud, though, of his contributions to the 2014 staging of Porgy and Bess. “We got to work nine months with Trevor Payne,” says Beaulac, “who’s an incredible musician and artist, an incredible person, an incredible soul. We worked with the Montreal Gospel Choir, and that was a real community. And the consciousness of the Black community in Montreal, and the connection that the Montreal Opera forged with the Black community, it was one of the most riveting and fulfilling experiences. It was incredible.”

Beaulac is equally fond of his relationship with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. “We did several operas together,” Beaulac says of the Montreal native who is currently Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York City. “I gave him his first Bohème,” Beaulac beams, “his first Butterfly, his first Cosi Fan Tutti.” In 2018, Nézet-Séguin returned to lead a co-production with the Orchestre Metropolitain in a triumphant concert version of Beethoven’s only opera, the rarely performed and mythically regarded Fidelio. “Those are fond memories, Beaulac recalls. “Yannick is a great musician.”

When it comes to contemporary artists, Beaulac is most drawn to the classics, listing off The Beatles, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, before mentioning George Michael as a recent inspiration. I note that Michael is among the 2023 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees. “George Michael was phenomenal,” Beaulac approves. “He was very talented. He wrote beautiful music.”

Nonetheless, opera is the be-all and end-all for Beaulac. “I was literally brought up with opera,” a history pressed on albums made right across the canal at the RCA plant in Saint Henri, and spinning out on a gramophone likely manufactured just down the street at the Northern Electric factory in the Pointe.

“Pointe-Saint-Charles is very dear to me,” Beaulac says nostalgically. “Whenever I take my car out, I always go there, like on a pilgrimage. I see where I lived when I was a kid, and see the river, and Boulevard LaSalle. It’s always very moving to see that for me.◼︎

Madama Butterfly continues May 9th, 11th, 14th, and 16th at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier.

photo: Brent Calis

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One Perfect Shot

Marcus, 12 November 2022

As with all things Scorpio, birthdays are fraught with ruminations, existential angst, examinations of life, and preparations for the inevitable long winter sleep, whatever that may bring. No human being has ever experienced winter and returned intact, so it’s a surprise every time around.

This year, I treated myself to another mini Montreal staycation—a weekend sojourn at one of downtown’s fancier hotels, topped off with a solo Sunday dinner at Marcus. I was turning 45 and had no one special to spend the weekend with, so I took it upon myself to make my own day special. Although I could have paid for some company. The man staying below me did, and awkwardly, I heard their antics from dawn ‘til dusk all weekend long, complicating my writing schedule, and serving as a reminder that capitalism rules everything around me, including intimacy. Especially intimacy.

Later that evening, I sat by myself at a table on the third floor of the newish restaurant at the luxurious Four Seasons Hotel. I wasn’t entirely solitary. There was an Indian tech bro sat next to me trying desperately to impress his hot Asian date with talk of start-up ventures and his family’s business connections; there was a large party across the aisle with several well-dressed teenaged cousins sipping mocktails and bantering with their flirty middle aged aunties; there was the wait staff who very attentively served me a lovely meal of portobello mushroom with a perfectly done filet mignon to follow; and there was Leonard Cohen’s mural outside, haunting the place, mythical literary tradition veiling the foggy November city. All the while I felt extremely seen. None is as naked as a man dining alone.

As I finished my meal, which was characteristically exquisite (why, exactly, are there no Michelin-starred restaurants in Montreal?) the waiter asked if I had saved any room for desert. I said no, that I would just pay the cheque, and he coolly told me to take my time. A few minutes later, the very same waiter emerged again from the kitchen carrying a wedge of caramel chocolate cake and two sparklers, which he proceeded to place before me and ignite with a barbeque lighter. I am not sure how the restaurant knew it was my birthday. Maybe I had entered my date of birth into the online reservation system when I signed up. Maybe Big Data is thoughtful, after all.

The entire restaurant swivelled around to watch the sparklers sputter and spray sparks all over me, and the cake, and bounce onto the floor. The good teenagers at the party table smiled genuinely and wished me a happy birthday. The tech bro and his date made Leonardo DiCaprio-ish faces and raised their glasses in my direction. The sparklers continued sparking for an inordinately long time as I sat in place waiting for them to fizzle out, like the first 45 years of my life had just done—before my very eyes; too long and yet too short.

La beauté du Monde, Composer Julien Bilodeau; Librettist Michel Marc Bouchard, Opéra de Montréal, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 19 November 2022

I am fascinated by tourists who stop to take photographs next to the concrete slab of the Berlin Wall that is preserved for some reason in the atrium of the World Trade Centre in Old Montreal, when there are several other perfectly functioning walls the globe over—between Israel and Palestine; between the US and Mexico; between the COP 15 conference and the rest of Montreal—that still serve to divide nations and their natural citizens.

Like an opera meant to mythologize the abject horrors of World War II while another, realer war wages on in our midst, it’s too soon.

Mue, Télophases, Les Vasières (Halocline Trance)



What is it about modern ambient music that is at once relaxing and unsettling, simultaneously calming and tense, like a cup of third-wave coffee followed by a hit of some strong-ass indica? Les Vasières, by the Montreal electronic duo composed of Catherine “YlangYlang” Debard and Léon Lo, quintessentially captures this ambi-ambivalence, a slow and beautiful speedball of tortuous rhythm and melody.

Unruly Sun, Composer Matthew Ricketts, Librettist Mark Campbell, Orchestre Classique de  Montréal, Cirque Éloize, 1 December 2022

The English artist Derek Jarman left an indelible impression upon countless cultural scenes, from avant-garde film and music, to experimental literature, dance, photography, and painting. Now, a new operatic song cycle entitled Unruly Sun, inspired by Jarman’s journal entries during his final demise due to HIV/AIDS, serves to celebrate a man who helped pave the way towards awareness of sexual health and liberation. We’re not there yet.

Toula Drimonis in conversation with Leila Marshy, Paragraphe Bookstore, 4 December 2022

Nearing the end of a lively Q&A around the Montreal columnist Toula Drimonis’s excellent memoire, We The Others (Linda Leith Publishing, 2022), I decided to lob a rhetorical question: How many cultures are there in Quebec? Attendees immediately met me with incredulous responses like, “too many to count!” and “the more, the merrier!” All valid answers. I admit, though, that I was trying to tease the author and audience into acknowledging our basic assumption that there is such a thing as “Quebec Culture” in Quebec. It’s a kind of singular spirit or groove, if you will, that we expect others to get into when they come to call this place home.

The word “integration” is instructive. We often use integration in this province to talk about whom and how should best fit into Quebecois society—people from the Francophonie; refugees fleeing conflict; skilled workers; families, &c. Surely Quebec has more power than other provinces to pick and choose who is allowed to come here to stay, and integration is first and foremost on the minds of those who do the picking and choosing. The word presupposes a monolithic—or, at best, binary—Quebec society into which immigrants should integrate.

But Drimonis saw my rhetorical move coming up the 40 and adroitly made the important distinction between integration and assimilation. Of course Quebecois culture exists; it’s a mishmash of Indigenous, French, English, Irish, Greek, Ukrainian, African, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese, and myriad other nationalities, languages, customs, and worldviews. The government in power today would prefer that new and recent transplants assimilate into the French version of Quebecois society. But Quebec more broadly, and Montreal, specifically, has evolved, increasingly rapidly in recent years, into a truly international social mosaic, a mosaic for which integration is a more proper modus operandi. Integration is a journey, not a destination.

Acknowledging this means that even those of us who were born in Canada also need to integrate and reintegrate into our own society, a distinct society that nonetheless constantly ebbs and flows as new people come and go, raise new families, forge new communities, build new neighbourhoods, and remake society in a new and improved image.

I think that another sound metaphor for Quebec, or for any distinct society for that matter, is a vinyl record. Trick question number 2: How many grooves are there on an average LP?

One. There is one long groove that spirals around and around and around again. Within that groove, on any given recording, there are possibly many songs, many movements, and moods. But they all belong on that particular record together. It’s the groove that unites them.◼︎

@nichemtl

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Autumn Serenade

Janet Werner, STICKY PICTURES, Bradley Ertaskiran, October 15th 2022

Tucked in the back room of Bradley Ertaskiran — the old Parisian Laundry, and one of the finer gallery spaces in the city — was the book launch for Janet Werner’s formidable new publication, Sticky Pictures. People talked and drank wine and had their books autographed by the artist in attendance and pretended not to look at one another.

I adore the frequent subjects of Werner’s paintings — girls. And I revel in the pleasure of adoring them through Werner’s painterly gaze rather than my own sharp male one.

A joke about Andy Warhol’s desire not only to be a part of the art scene but to be seen being a part of the art scene was that he would even attend the opening of a drawer. I am such a space cadet for art in this city that I go to the launch of a book.

Il Trovatore, Opera de Montreal, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, September 13th, 2022

An open letter to my dear ex-wife of 43 years, the lovely Ms. Marlene Ssøørreennsseenn:

Dear Marlene;

It is with heavy heart that we must equivalently admit after trying to make things work despite having been divorced for over four decades that our 12-day marriage was a mistake. Had we children they might have given us grandchildren by now, but alas we were only wedded for a little less than two weeks in the late 1970s, and starting a family didn’t come up in conversation, as women’s liberation at that time socially forbade any unsolicited babytalk.

Suffice to say that we did not bring out the best in each other, what with the fourteen-year legal battle in the mid-‘80s over the fortunes from the fortune cookies following our second and final dinner date at Wings, which as you will apprehend is long since closed due to health violations.

With this Wing fortune, I thee forfeit the last scrap of our love affair, leaving you the worse luck, both figuratively and literally. Should the numbers on the verso ever win a lottery, I trust your solicitor to contact me forthwith with my fair share, as determined by concurrent legal precedent for post-nuptial fortune cookie winnings.

In closing, please forward any and all future correspondence to:
L. Oserfield

Heartbreak Hotel, room no. 237 (haunted)

Backxwash, with with LaFHomme, Morgan-Paige and Jodie Jodie Roger, October 28th 2022, Le Monastère

There is no doubt that Backxwash is the hottest hip hop artist in Canada. The crystalline concentration that comes with sobriety shines on HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING. This year’s Halloween weekend album launch was a triumph of both style and substance, fashionable and profoundly meaningful, profane and sacred.

Backxwash is the antithesis of mainstream rappers who self-aggrandize and court controversy, or make patent pitches for luxury products that their listeners can ill afford. A constant and self-reflexive state of awareness permeates the recording and was ever-present in its live performance, too. Refreshing is not the word because the album is akin to gargling with activated charcoal, but whatever the descriptor, it’s deeply cleansing.

Boris: His Life in Music, Orchestre Classique de Montreal, October 18th, 2022, Salle Pierre-Mercure

The loss of Boris Brott to Montreal’s classical music community is immeasurable. Still, the show must go on, and the Orchestre Classique de Montreal paid appropriate tribute to the verve of a man who lived for that orchestra. The OCM began its 83rd season by lovingly presenting some of Brott’s all-time favourite musical works.

Before the performance, a photographic montage of Brott cycled onscreen, images of the maestro with celebrities and dignitaries, clowning around, full of wit, wisdom, and life. What a life lived, and what a legacy Brott left behind, carrying dutifully on in the tradition of his musical family before him who dedicated their days to tuning the world.

Brott’s death seems all the more tragic considering its accidental nature, and after his miraculous recovery from the nastiest strain of covid at the beginning of the pandemic. However, as the saying goes, the man who dies in an accident understands the nature of destiny.

This Is Not A Scarf, Soha Zandi, Somaye Farhan & Elahe Moonesi, Place des Arts, October 30th 2022

In protest of the shocking human rights abuses taking place in Iran right now, a group of artists created an inspired imaginative response that took place on the steps of Place des Arts, without any fanfare or official permission from the usual authorities. They showed up with a pile of scarves and stood there waiting for passersby to tie them on in any fashion they saw fit. The result was a sincerely moving performance, which was a performance by virtue, but produced a spontaneous moment.

I was temporarily enlisted to stand guard next to a pile of camera equipment on the busy Saint-Catherine Street sidewalk when an elderly gentleman approached me inquiring, in French at first — a Quebecois accent from another time and place — what was going on. He appeared to be about sixty-five, tall, lean and cleanshaven, with an enviable headful of smartly styled salt-and-pepper hair. He had on a fitted black leather jacket and hanging around his neck was a comparatively outdated digital camera, an old Sony with a top-mounted viewfinder.

I apologized that my French was not as good as my English, but he was well-spoken in both languages and when I told him this was a performance art piece for Iranian freedom he looked at me for a moment, his face becoming very grave, and said, “I think this is the end of the world. But I won’t be here to see it. I’m eighty.” I was surprised by his candour and tried to nod knowingly as he took leave to photograph the happening.

Returning, he mused, “A lot of people in Quebec complain, but we are lucky to live here.” I knew what he meant. Peace activism begins and ends with peaceful activism, acting peacefully.◼︎

@nichemtl

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