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Bookish

This Montreal Manifesto: notes on Melissa Auf der Maur at the Blue Metropolis Festival

If you aren’t familiar with Melissa Auf der Maur, her story fits almost perfectly into the archetypal Hero’s Journey.

Auf der Maur is a photography student and bassist in Montreal when she’s asked to join Hole. She refuses the call but meets Courtney Love who becomes a sort of mentor. From there, Auf der Maur embarks upon her 1990s rock adventure of glamour, grime, addiction, grief, and Dave Grohl love. She is transformed and eventually “retires” from the music industry and public life to start a family. She reemerges with her memoir, entitled Even the Good Girls Will Cry, and on her book tour, makes a glorious return to her hometown, with her family seated in the front row.

I love these kinds of stories. They feel so epic and mythical. At her launch, held 30 March at the SAT as part of the Blue Metropolis Festival, Auf der Maur acknowledges this: “I call myself ‘Grunge Cinderella,’” she says, “because it doesn’t make sense that I was at Bifteck and a week later I was on stage at Reading Festival in front of 65,000 people.”

There’s an exciting contradiction that surrounds Montreal’s successful international cultural exports — Céline, Leonard Cohen, Arcade Fire, Grimes, Denis Villeneuve, Cirque du Soleil — which lends to their reverence and ubiquity. Montreal might be a big city, especially by Canadian standards, but it’s actually quite cozy. My friend’s new boyfriend was taught by my mother in elementary school; another friend grew up playing hockey with Sophie Nélisse; a past interview subject is currently dating someone I went on a date with; I recognize Instagram mutuals doing background work in Montreal productions; and almost everyone in Montreal has a Xavier Dolan story. (I’m waiting for mine, Xavier.)

This is reflected in our tight-knit creative industries and communities, which display remarkable resourcefulness and talent. There is gossip, rivalry, and drama, but also consistent efforts for collaboration, mutualisation, and solidarity. Discussing her parents’ adoption of Montreal and their life-long devotion to its culture, Auf der Maur tells the crowd, “I saw that life is about what you do with everyone. It’s not just your family or just your plan.”

A performer gestures towards a screen displaying a historical black-and-white image, while standing on stage in a theatrical setting.
“There’s something that is happening here where you protect who you are.” Melissa Auf der Maur photographed by Nadia Trudel for NicheMTL.

Like in many other places, opportunities here are limited, especially for the monolingual anglophones who have long been drawn to Montreal’s cheap rent and cultural cachet, following their mass exodus in the late 20th century, along with the city’s economic dominance. There is a ceiling to what can be achieved in Quebec — lower than the Canadian ceiling which is of course lower than the seemingly non-existent ceiling of American cultural hegemony.

Canada is a small country in a big body, and Quebec is its limb that survives amputation, developing its own star system and maintaining its French. Auf der Maur fittingly writes in her memoir, “In many ways, Montreal has stayed fixed somewhere between 1942 and 1982.” At her book launch, she seems to elaborate on this thought. “There’s something that is happening here where you protect who you are,” she says, “which is obviously deeply Quebecois.” Maybe that’s why Montreal has served as a place of transition for so many.

This transition space is depicted in Chandler Levack’s new movie Mile-End Kicks, which follows Barbie Ferreira as an aspiring music critic from Toronto who spends a summer in Montreal circa 2011. Soon, Ferreira’s Grace finds herself wondering, “Why do French people hate me?” as Devon Bostick’s Archie explains that Montreal is a place for young people to be poor artists and students before leaving to get serious, grow up, and contribute to society. They don’t make efforts to learn French so they can’t work. They depend on money from their parents. They take, and take, and take, leaving as soon as the city has nothing left to offer them. They will then paint the city as quaint or exotic — from elsewhere.

I’m a native Montrealer. I grew up in Anjou and then Ahuntsic. I went to school in Rosemont, St-Leonard, and NDG. Now I live in Ville-Marie. I used to bike to work at SSENSE’s office in the historic garment district and I used to take the entire orange line to get to my job in the industrial sector near the Orange Julep, where I once chaperoned a bride at the end of the night.

My dating history was born in the Old Port and has featured dangerous post-picnic driving down Mont-Royal, trespassing into stadiums and abandoned buildings, and even a tour of the West Island. I hiked up to the Oratoire St-Joseph and visited the cloistered nuns for my confirmation. Now I visit my great-grandparents in the Mont Royal cemetery and I only go to church for drag brunch.

I grew up next to the oldest church on the island. The sounds of Friday prayer from the mosque next door have replaced the comfort of its bells. When I turned 18, I went to the Village, taking the same bus at the end of the night as I’d take in the morning to get to my internship at Maison de Radio-Canada. Time marches on.

Two women seated on stage, engaged in conversation with a microphone. Behind them, a large screen displays abstract shadows. The stage is dimly lit with blue lights.
“There’s a world where in Montreal, you can have a better life.” Melissa Auf der Maur photographed by Nadia Trudel for NicheMTL.

I love Montreal deeply. I’m trying to build a life, a career, and relationships here. This has meant looking abroad for paid freelance writing opportunities, sacrificing travel to pay my rising Montreal rent, and trying not to get too attached to the Canadian, American, and French expats that surround me.

Coming-of-age narratives are largely capitalistic — they dictate constant growth: I’m already in a relatively big city so I should move to a bigger one with more opportunities to work in media or publishing.

Sometimes I resent these successful Canadian exports, bemoaning that their abandonment hinders the progression of our own cultural sectors. I wonder what would have happened if our country’s comedians didn’t leave to form the foundation of American comedy. There’s a sense of inferiority that infects Canadian culture. It creates stars who grind their way into American, European, and now Asian markets, and it nurtures a stubbornness for those determined to be successful in Canada.

In Montreal, however, there is a self-assurance that prospers thanks to our increased cultural distance. We’re outsiders and we rejoice in it. As Auf der Maur tells the crowd, “I was in Chicago when I explained Montreal to people who don’t know it. I explain that these are people in love with life. They are not working for the man. They were freelancers, and there’s a world where in Montreal, you can have a better life.”

To love Montreal is to love all its flaws and shortcomings as a big city that isn’t too big, with cultures that taunt and flirt with their divide and a transience that’s as tragic as it is thrilling.  Within its confines and embrace, you can be an artist, but you couldn’t sell your soul even if you wanted to.◼︎

The Blue Metropolis Festival runs 23-26 April 2026.

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Amethyst Deceivers

Esse Ran, “Mind Scanner,” Off Program (Humidex Records)

Félix Gourd aka Esse Ran performs at Parquette, 11 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.”
―Edgar Cayce

“Don’t let the little fuckers generation gap you.”
―William Gibson

Sooner or later, newer iterations will replace everyone.

The next generation has traditionally been understood as a de facto improvement upon its predecessors. But other than The Godfather Part II and Fletch Lives, what sequels have exceeded the quality of their originals? The film franchise of the American presidency is a case-in-point that 2.0 does not indicate a progression towards perfection.

The inevitability of replacement is cause for perennial concern as we fret over posterity. Fortunately, the future of techno, still the most forward-oriented musical form, seems to be in capable hands.

Irene F. Whittome, I am Here, Fondation Guido Molinari, 9 October – 10 December 2025

Irene F. Whittome « Histoire naturelle » (detail). Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well.”
—Leonard Cohen, “If It Be Your Will”

Recognizing patterns is a fundamental survival strategy. Remembering, for example, where food is found, or what the air smells like before a storm, can guide and protect us. All of life fits some pattern; there is no such thing as a random event. Zoom out far enough and you will see that what we perceive as chaos or chance is in fact divine design.

Daniel Lanois, Théâtre Maisonneuve, 5 October 2025

Daniel Lanois performs at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 5 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Flesh is the surface interface of a complex and messy machine known as the body. It at once conceals and reveals what lies beneath it. Being our largest organ, skin is the site upon which corporeal operation is located.

We conceive of and make our machines accordingly, knobs and buttons functioning as smooth superficial control panels for intricate and impenetrable devices. Who knows what goes on beneath an iPhone screen?

The only time carnal and machinic background processes rupture the exterior is when they malfunction. The glitch is a confrontation with restless activity and existential agitation.

Brahms & Dvořák: The Splendour of Romanticism, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal with violinist James Ehnes, Maison Symphonique, 25 September 2025

James Ehnes performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 25 September 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying,
Neither shall there be any more pain:
For the former things are passed away.
—Revelation 21:4

On a recent trip to Prague, I had the opportunity to visit the tomb of Antonin Dvořák. It is located at Vyšehrad Cemetary, a short walk from the Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul, an impressive neo-gothic edifice constructed in the late 19th century, which the Bohemian King Vratislaus II founded 800 years earlier. The grounds of Vyšehrad are immaculately manicured, evidence of attention to detail over the course of millennia.

In North America, we simply don’t have that kind of history. Ours is really Indigenous history, which Europeans sought to obliterate when they arrived on this continent roughly 400 years ago.

Indigenous history was never intended for preservation. Native Americans were largely nomadic and their monuments, like Totem poles, for instance, were deliberately imagined to fall back into the earth. Eternity is a European concept, whereas Indigenous people favoured infinity.

Observing Dvořák’s grave inspired me to theorize why we commemorate the dead, especially those whom we revered in life. Vyšehrad Cemetery contains a large population of notable Czech interments. Somehow, even though I failed to recognize most of the names on the list, this knowledge filled me with an extra sense of reverence.

In the Christian tradition, the conception of Purgatory defines the intermediate state between the death of the physical body and the soul’s salvation. Purgo, the Latin verb, means to cleanse. Purging is a form of purification, and also, when taken to extremes, a compulsive disorder.

Prayer for the dead implies a belief in resurrection, or at least in some kind of afterlife. Almost every culture in the world implicitly assumes that death is not the end. It follows, then, that our universal understanding of time is cyclical. How life after death might occur is a matter for the imagination.

We might rise from the grave like some cheesy zombie movie. Or we might live on in other organic forms, transubstantiating into another kind of matter: flesh decaying into soil; soil nourishing a flower; nectar feeding bees; and honey sweetening someone else’s imminent cup of tea.

Pay your respects to the vultures for they are your future.

Autechre with Nixtrove and Mark Broom, Société des arts technologiques, 24 October 2025

Autechre performs at the SAT, 24 October 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“During the paleotechnic period,” wrote the American historian of technology Lewis Mumford in his foundational book Technics and Civilization, “the increase of power and the acceleration of movement became ends in themselves: ends that justified themselves apart from their human consequences.”

What human consequences could Mumford have imagined from generalized acceleration?

The clock measured time and thus transformed it into an arbitrary unit of exchange.

The railroad enabled movement through space in a condensed period of time, quickening a passenger’s arrival in a new place, thus altering the natural experience and rhythms of travel.

Automated factories sped up the pace of production of consumer goods like cotton and sugar, bronze and steel, oil and gas, regulating the inventory of these commodities in the modern marketplace, thus making their value subject to temporal manipulation.

In the 21st century, we don’t remember or even consider a time before the evaluation of time. We only experience hints of organic duration in the form of unignorable biological cycles. After a period without food, we grow hungry. After a term of pregnancy, new life appears. After a season, snow falls.

The rest of the time, the railway, the factory, and the clock standardize time with increasingly granular precision, producing power by time’s spontaneous creation, and call attention to what Mumford described as the “maladjustment of function.”

More than autumn leaves or breaking glass, nothing makes you aware of the passage of time quite like a ticking metronome.◼︎

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: Félix Gourd photographed for NicheMTL.

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Big Shiny Tunes

Sloan with Econoline Crush, Peachfest, Penticton BC, 9 August 2025

Sloan perform in Okanagan Lake Park, Penticton, BC, 9 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.”
—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

I spent some time in English Canada this summer and in doing so had the opportunity to see a band I’d never seen, Sloan, the celebrated Canadian alternative outfit that dominated MuchMusic throughout the bulk of the 1990s.

I was surprised, despite having never owned a Sloan recording, that I was able to identify hit after remarkable hit. Apparently, these earworms had made an indelible impression upon my memory merely from hearing them over and over. In a time before the internet, before streaming became the dominant way of consuming cultural products, repetition worked.

The archive of the internet in many ways erases or at best flattens memory. Just because every record ever made is available to access at any given second does not mean that we do. And if and when we do, we seldom remember them in the same ways we did during the physical media age.

There exists a theory, Freudian in origin, that archiving is the subconscious reaction to a morbid fear of death. But what to make of the impulse to archive without the intention of ever accessing the archive? Imagine the sheer volume of music that nobody ever listens to filed away on the web. In the record-store days, we called it dead stock. On the internet, let’s call it zombie inventory.

What good is preservation without repetition?

Orchestre Metropolitain at the foot of Mount Royal, 30 July 2025

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the OM at Parc du Mont-Royal, 30 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…the music of a well-ordered age is calm and cheerful, and so is its government. The music of a restive age is excited and fierce, and its government is perverted. The music of a decaying state is sentimental and sad, and its government is imperiled.”
—Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Gustav Holst, The Planets, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 15 August 2025

Rafael Payare conducts the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 15 August 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Many cultures believe that the world was created with sound.

“In the beginning was the word,” the Apostle John writes in the opening to his Biblical Gospel. Notably, it wasn’t nature’s noise that heralded all of Creation. It wasn’t a clap of thunder or an explosion. It was a human sound.

But neither was it a grunt or a cry. It was a word. And it wasn’t just any old word; it was the word. Word itself.

Words imply meaning. And thus, according to John, the beginning of the universe was also the beginning of language, frequency, harmony.

Christian Richer with Lowebrau, La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines, 2 August 2025

Christian Richer’s musical equipment setup at La Chapelle, 2 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If we are to read any era by its music, then surely conflict and chaos must characterize the present one. There is no dominant set of aesthetic criteria to describe contemporary music as there has been in nearly every preceding generation.

We can listen back to almost any historical time and say with relative confidence that this style or that theme characterized its day’s music. Romantic, baroque; pop, punk, &c. Even during the so-called postmodern period, postmodernity exhibited some consistent defining characteristics: assemblage, palimpsest, irony.

We are living in an age when everything and nothing is true — facts are contested; falsehoods are simply data — and therefore everything and nothing characterizes our post-postmodern music. Music today is ambient in the truest sense — it is omnipresent, a constant hum that emerges to the fore only when it is observed, like a fridge that seems to start buzzing when you notice it.

In addition, today’s music is ambivalent, of multiple traditions, hybrid, non-binary. However, cultural production that advances in simultaneous directions does not imply a lack of direction. And the speed with which music manifests ex nihilo, almost spontaneously, indicates more about the present era than any aesthetic measures.

Forwards or backwards, we’re going nowhere fast.

VISIO & Orchestroll with Cecilia and Samuel Gougoux, Société des arts technologiques, 14 August 2025

Cecilia performs at the SAT, 14 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

They flutter behind you your possible pasts
Some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost
A warning to anyone still in command
Of their possible future to take care
—Roger Waters, “Your Possible Pasts”

There’s a common assumption, generally unchallenged, that the past is behind us and cannot be altered, whereas the future is in front of us and can. This might not be correct. I’m not just making some clever semantic argument here, either. I am, rather, talking about fundamental ways in which the past can be materially reformed, and the future is a foregone conclusion.

When you dwell on the past, it constitutes your future. Every morning is greeted with history. The past becomes the medium in which life is lived — like water for fish or air for us humans. If there is nothing that we can change about the past, then it is pointless to ruminate over it. And yet, the contemplative impulse exists. Why?

I claim that it’s because the past can be changed, has been changed, is changing constantly.

The further objects are away in space, the more slowly they appear to move. It’s called parallax — the apparent position of an object in relation to its line of sight. This also holds for objects in time. Our memories of things morph and mutate with each passing day, sometimes appearing clearer, sometimes disappearing completely.

The future, on the other hand, is something that the forces of capital would prefer to set in stone. “Futures” in financial terms, for instance, are standardized contracts that can be bought and sold.

Markets function on predictability. One way to reliably produce predictability is to induce instability. Therefore, anything that ensues following a period of disorder looks comparatively stable, in part because of the parallax effect. In this way, the past is broken, and the future is fixed.

If we repair the past, perhaps the future will again become unknowable.◼︎

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: Rafael Payare photographed by Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed

Hesaitix with Laced and Amselysen, Espace SAT, 31 May 2025

Laced performs at Espace SAT, 31 May 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Look at me and watch yourself
Everyone is someone else
When you speak the echoes chime
The voice is yours, but the words are mine.
—Nomeansno, “Machine”

Perhaps the reason that everyone is so fascinated with the spat between the Orange Cheeto and Tech Bro Numero Uno is that we recognize the lowest form of petty squabble magnified and reflected in the behaviour of the world’s most powerful people. Reality TV has migrated to Truth Social and the network formerly known as Twitter and returned full circle back to reality.

In the beginning, God created man in His image. Now that man is in charge, we are finally free to fashion the Gods we deserve.

The Womb is a Room in Another Person, dir. Catherine Machado, Mission Santa Cruz, 4 June 2025

Lynley Traill (left) and Mariana Jiménez Arango (right) star in The Womb is a Room in Another Person. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I’m living in an age that
Screams my name at night
But when I get to the doorway
There’s no one in sight.
—Arcade Fire, “My Body Is a Cage.”

Practice makes perfect. So be careful what you practice.

Since 1957, Alan Belcher, Galerie Eli Kerr, 7 June – 24 July 2025

Eli Kerr (left) and Alan Belcher (right) at the vernissage for Since 1957 at Galerie Eli Kerr, 7 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Why shouldn’t everything we’ve constructed be deconstructed? What’s so special anyway about some abstract concept like democracy, or liberty, or justice? What’s so special about art when a crypto billionaire spends $6.2 million on a banana duct taped to the wall?

Later, that same crypto billionaire might spend $40 million on meme coins to attend a private dinner at Trump National Golf Club, effectively buying an audience with the leader of the so-called free world. Influence peddling is the highest artform of our era, an artform that requires highly specialized skills, and abundant material resources.

Ours would not be the first toxic civilization to fall away, and likely won’t be the last. Anyone who has seen the original Planet of the Apes knows that composition is inevitably followed by decomposition. It doesn’t matter whether these are good times or bad times or in between times. They won’t last.

Shapes with Thee Soreheads, Caniche, and Shunk, Van Horne Underpass, 7 June 2025

Shunk perform at the Van Horne Underpass, 7 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The other day I was searching for a CD amidst a pile of them that was taller than I am. Crouched on the floor trying to locate the spine of the album I was looking for, I raised my head just in time to see the entire stack come crashing down on me, one sharp plastic jewel case after another — Tom Waits, These New Puritans, Roger Waters — colliding with my forehead. It was slapstick. I walked around for three days with a discernible bump on my brow, wounded again by music.

I recounted this story afterwards to Gary Worsley, the proprietor of Cheap Thrills, to which he replied, “Good thing you don’t have much heavy metal in your collection.”

Superposition, Jinny Yu, Fondation Guido Molinari, 5 June – 24 August 2025

Marie-Eve Beaupré introduced Jinny Yu at the vernissage for Superposition at Fondation Guido Molinari, 5 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

You’ll never live like common people
You’ll never do whatever common people do
Never fail like common people
You’ll never watch your life slide out of view
And then dance and drink and screw
Because there’s nothing else to do.
—Pulp, “Common People.”

The last time you were here, walking hurriedly southward on Rue Dézéry from Métro Prefontaine, the snow was knee-high and it was Nuit Blanche and you were on your way to the same place that you are on your way to now, Fondation Guido Molinari, on the east end of Sainte-Catherine, a converted Spanish Bank in Hochelaga that housed the artist’s studio and living quarters while he was alive and now serves as a monument to his substantial legacy.

The air was painfully cold then, and the sidewalks were not cleared, except for the worn pathways of footprints that carved meandering makeshift snow trenches which deceived every second step into a potential broken ankle. The lamplight illuminated a sepia scene, and icicles hung from the most European of balconies in Canada, and you thought to yourself that you were fortunate to be living here in a city that prized arts and culture to such an extent as to celebrate Nuit Blanche with nighttime events at places like this.

Today, though, it is late spring, and the air is soft and warm and mild as baby’s breath — either the plant or the respiration — and songbirds are singing you on your way to your destination. Black girls in skin-tight spandex and white girls with naked tattooed arms sprouting from flowing sundresses walk before you down the one-way street, and beautiful girls’ backsides bounce on bicycle seats when they ride by, and you are grateful for Montreal’s crumbling and bumpy roads. An elderly woman in a purple robe and matching hair walks twin Scottish terriers on two lime-green leashes, smiling at you as she ambles past.

The scent of lilac overwhelms your olfactory sense, intermittently interrupted by the acrid stench of compost, because it is garbage day and the garbage collectors have left the tops of all the receptacles open to air out. You can smell the accumulated age of the neighbourhood, this time superimposed upon all the eras that came before it, the decomposing wood and musky tobacco fumes belching from open doors of flats with no air conditioning and out onto the sidewalks.

An ambient breeze carries puffs of pollen lazily through the park, where old men ride on reduced mobility scooters with high visibility vests wrapped around their seats. They smoke and are unshaven and sift through garbage cans gleaning empty beer bottles and cigarette butts that they can roll by hand back into smokable form.

It is 6:17pm and you are 17 minutes late. But it doesn’t matter right now because you feel alive and particularly present in a way that you haven’t in some time. You want to elongate everything about this moment, to remember the detail of every discrete sensation, to capture them as they wash away like grains of sand on some faraway beach.◼︎

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: Alan Belcher, Carbonara (2024), Carbon drawing on canvas with imported pancetta stagionata, egg yolk, pasta water, pecorino romano, agricola due leoni, olive oil, and black pepper. 18″ x 18″ x 2.25″

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The Dark Canuck

Nico Williams, Bingo, Fondation PHI, 23 April — 14 September 2025

Nico Williams at the Bingo vernissage, Fondation PHI, 23 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Americans say no to drugs. Canadians say no thank you.”
—Susan Musgrave, You’re in Canada Now, Motherfucker.

I flew in July 2006 from Montreal to Victoria and drove from there in a rented Toyota about 25 kilometers south to a small municipality called Metchosin. The purpose of this trip was to interview one of the most famous incarcerated Canadians, the bank robber-turned-author Stephen Reid.

Reid at the time was a ward of the William Head Institution, known colloquially as Club Fed, a minimum-security correctional facility constructed at the lonely end of Vancouver Island’s southernmost tip.

Originally built as a 19th century immigration quarantine station, William Head might have been among the most picturesque sites for a prison, a remote and rugged stretch of oceanfront property perfumed with Douglas Fir and the saline breeze.

Reid was imprisoned, this time around, for the brazen robbery of a Victoria bank in 1999. But he had already earned a storied reputation as a member of The Stopwatch Gang, a crew of Canadian career criminals who had in the 1970s and ‘80s successfully pulled heists throughout the United States, making off with millions.

The gang earned their nickname in the newspapers because they carried stopwatches instead of guns, completing their jobs in under 90 seconds and escaping gracefully before law enforcement could respond to the 211.

What could be more Canadian than non-violent larceny? Reid told me they never failed to say ‘thank you’ to the guards as they strode out the door carrying Yankee Doodle’s hard-earned dough.

Catch Step HYA remix featuring Lunice (with EENO T and Magnanimous), La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines, 22 April 2025

EENO T and Magnanimous. Clémence Clara Faure for La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines

“By walking I found out
Where I was going.”
—Irving Layton, “There Were No Signs.”

Over the past several months, and intensifying during the Federal Election campaign, Canadians of all political stripes have been engaged in some deep soul-searching to define specifically what characterizes Canada as a sovereign nation.

“Not American” is of course the most obvious answer. But we can’t simply identify ourselves by what we are not. We must, rather, assert Canadian-ness as a series of distinct and affirmative characteristics.

It may be a surprise to learn that the Scottish have a version of poutine appropriately called “chips and cheese and gravy.” The British are also known for being polite. So, what makes Canadian poutine — or politeness — any different?

African-American Sound Recordings with SlowPitchSound and Dumb Chamber, Société des arts technologiques, 27 April 2025

Dumb Chamber performs at the SAT, 25 April 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A Canadian is someone who drinks Brazilian coffee from an English teacup, and munches a French pastry while sitting on his Danish furniture, having just come from an Italian movie in his German car. He picks up his Japanese pen and writes to his Member of Parliament to complain about the American takeover of the Canadian publishing business.”
—Campbell Hughes, 1973.

Canadians pride ourselves on our inclusivity and the doctrine of multiculturalism enshrined in social policy since the first Trudeau’s term in office. We congratulate ourselves with the fact that slavery was never legally practiced in Canada, that ours was and continues to be a safe-haven nation for people escaping bondage and other forms of systemic oppression.

As opposed to the American melting pot, Canada is a mosaic, a puzzle that doesn’t just scramble disparate identities into one uniform nationality but instead incorporates each of them into a rich and panoramic tapestry.

Still, just because Canada never practiced slavery doesn’t mean that racism and discrimination didn’t exist here. They did — and continue today as we strive to shake the legacy of colonialism and reconcile historical injustices perpetrated on Indigenous land.

And yet, the present condition requires evermore nuance because Canada is not only composed of colonizers and the colonized.

My ancestors, for instance, were displaced in the late 1920s when Russia was actively colonizing the Indigenous people of Ukraine. First-person accounts by the first wave of Ukrainian immigrants, collected in a book called Land of Pain, Land of Promise, are filled with stories of gratitude for Indigenous peoples’ assistance adjusting to life in Canada.

An underlying monstrosity remains, however. The American writer William S. Burroughs described this irrepressible abomination as “The Ugly Spirit.” Righteous retribution for genocidal expansion from coast to coast to coast.

The Ugly Spirit is a stateless entity, unrestrained by borders, floating northward like a ghost or a virus, the immigrant to end all immigrants. Thinly veiled beneath the respectable surface of unblemished bureaucracy, white linens and starched shirts and sunny ways, peace, order, and good governance, savagery lurks.

Oscillating Spaces launch with curator Anneke Abhelakh, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 24 April 2025

Gallery view of Oscillating Spaces, CCA. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Canadian history could be a drug-free alternative to anaesthesia.”
—Mike Myers, Canada.

One of the most frequent adjectives used to describe Canadians internationally is “nice.” Nice isn’t boring, although we are known as that, too. Nice isn’t kind, although kindness could be considered a constituent component of being nice.

What nice really means in practice is milquetoast. When threatened, we tend to back down. When attacked, we prefer to concede defeat than to offend our aggressors with a fight.

There’s nice and there’s naïve. The most extreme example of the perversion of niceness is the departed Canadian author Alice Munro’s apologetic acceptance of her daughter’s sexual abuse. Munro would rather have overlooked horrible transgressions against her kith and kin than to upset the larger family order in protest. In her own mind, was she just being nice?

Tolerance is one of Canada’s most admirable virtues. But when we tolerate violence against us, we should discard our national reputation for being nice and adopt a tough and just disposition. In significant ways, the Orange Cheeto’s 51st state rhetoric is forcing Canada to grow a backbone, to stand our ground, even if it means abandoning some of our soft-touch image.

Così fan tutte, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 23 April 2025

The cast of Così fan tutte performing with the OSM, Maison Symphonique, 23 April 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“‘Cause in the forget-yer-skates dream
You can hang your head in woe
And this diverse-as-ever scene
Know which way to go.”
—Gord Downie, “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken.”

It is appropriate that the “Elbow’s Up” rallying cry galvanizing Canadians originates from hockey, Canada’s undisputed national pastime.

There was no question which country I was in when, during the intermission at an opera, the woman seated next to me leaned over and asked if I knew the score in the Habs game. On the ice, playing arguably the most brutal organized sport, is where Canadians exchange our mannerly habits for altogether snottier, bloodier, and more dangerous conduct.

Unlike baseball, which participants can play overweight and drunk, hockey demands strength, skill, speed, guts, grit. Like revenge, hockey is best served cold. The rink is the site of inspiring Canadian victories over both doppelgänger superpowers Russia and the United States.

Interviewing Stephen Reid in jail in 2006 was like playing in the Stanley Cup final for a writer and lover of good stories. Reid was simultaneously terrifying and charismatic, cunning and cultured, a formidable conversationalist and true Canadian captain on our proverbial national team.

Goal-scoring could be considered analogous to bank-robbing in the sense of slipping one past the authorities, armed with little more than will and determination, and grace, too.◼︎

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: Nico Williams, Uncle, 2023, 10/0 Japanese glass cylinder beads and 11/0 seed beads on thermally-fused/braided polyethylene thread, mother-of-pearl buttons, 124,5 x 73.7 cm. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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After The Future

Jan Jelinek with Roméo Poirier and Racine, Society for Arts and Technology, 15 November 2024

Racine performs at SAT, 15 November 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“From now on there can be no unpolitical prophecies.”
—John Berger, “The Moment of Cubism.”

In 2016, when Donald Trump was for the first time elected U.S. president, the online discourse-o-sphere kicked into overdrive with comparisons to various dystopian narratives, both historical and fictional.

Political theorists like Henry A. Giroux and Robert Paxton cited similarities to the unholy trinity of World War II-era fascist dictators. The New Yorker cartoonist Paul Noth likened Trump to the archetypal wolf tending his flock of sheep.

But none was as pervasive as Trump’s apparent correlation to Biff Tannen in Back to the Future Part II, leading the 1989 film’s screenwriter, Bob Gale, to confirm that he indeed modelled Tannen’s character on a caricature of Trump.

However, the blowhard billionaire archetype is no longer an exaggeration, nor does its application implicitly affront Trump or his supporters.

On the contrary, a loudmouthed misogynistic bully who appears impervious to criticism is the epitome of heroism for the new generation of disaffected and desensitized Americans who voted for him. Scorn only empowers them further; shame, paradoxically, is their badge of honour.

These incongruities have led many of us to observe, like the Back to the Future sequel’s plot, that we are living in the worst of conceivable timelines. But I’m afraid that it’s even worse than that: we’re going through the worst timeline again, like taking that pathological second whiff of a carton of spoilt milk.

This is Back to the Future Part II, part two.

NPNP with Anna Mayberry and Hidden Attachment, Lamplight, 14 November 2024

Listeners gather for NPNP’s “Harmony in a Vacuum” launch, 14 November 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Deception counts less as a measure of realism than as evidence of magicianship, and is a highly atypical mishap.”
—Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art

If works of art reflect the cultural zeitgeist, then we are clearly in a state of general disarray. Deconstructed music is only the latest structurally homologous current indicating the lack of structure and void of solidarity evident in society.

For instance, rigidly rhythmic electronic music of the 1980s and ‘90s fairly accurately echoed late modernity, the perfect and predictable thump-and-clap of the cybernetic age.

At the turn of the new millennium, arrhythmic trends exemplified by Autechre’s off-the-grid programming, and further, by Burial’s beat-mismatched hauntological loopscapes, anticipated the increasingly fragmented post-Fordist modes of production emerging under hypercapitalism.

Of all the 20th century musical inventions, the synthesizer sonically represented futurism best. But by the early 21st century, it had quickly flipped into an instrument of nostalgia, reminding us of the squandered potential of possible futures past.

Now, in an era of heightened precarity, remote and always-on labour, forever wars and forever chemicals, we are confronted with alienating and longform musical (de)compositions that reject almost any semblance of structure, and in which moments of traditional melody and chance harmony are at best incidental.

The recto of this verso is the retromaniacal return to thinner and thinner slivers of musical historicity, reliving, repeating, and recombining ever-shrinking aesthetic precedents in a rapidly decaying orbit, reducing entire cultural currents and oeuvres to a “vibe” or a “mood.”

This is neither a good nor a bad thing — but it is undisputedly nonetheless a thing.

La grandiose Symphonie alpestre de Richard Strauss, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Bruce Liu Piano, Rafael Payare Conductor, Maison Symphonique, 13 November 2024

Bruce Liu performs with the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 13 November 2024. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

“The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the whole.”
—Susan Sontag, “On Style.”

There are a handful of writers to whom I always return in troubled times, among them William S. Burroughs, Slavoj Žižek, Mark Fisher, Susan Sontag, and Woody Allen. All of these at alternating points in their lives experienced ecstasy and despair, the heights of fame and the trials of misfortune.

Burroughs, for example, murdered his own wife, ostensibly an accident from which his creative conscience likely never fully recovered. Woody Allen has now defiantly spent half of his career under the long shadow of popular cancellation. Fisher succumbed to his own diagnosis that there was no alternative to capitalism — other than the exceedingly unlikely possibility that we would all take psychedelics and fall madly in love with modernity again.

I make no claim for any of these thinkers, nor apologies for their misdeeds, nor explanations for their failures or successes. However, their words provide me a profound sense of comfort, a path forward, like sets of deep footprints in freshly fallen snow.

Russell Banx, Gaze and Gesture, Pangée, 14 November – 21 December 2024

Russell Banx, Across the Lake, 2024. Graphite on paper. 57 x 44 in. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun”
—R. Buckminster Fuller, “No More Secondhand God.”

My generation and every generation after it mainly fall into two problematic categories: those who were never taught how to fight, and those who were only taught how to fight.

The progeny of hippies were erroneously told that love would conquer all. This is false. Love in fact conquers very few things, not even love itself. Hatred is often stronger than love.

If conquering is the goal, the most valuable tool is violence. The trick is to fight lovingly, to commit violence with love.

Déliquescence, Fonderie Darling, 26 September – 8 December 2024

Installation view, Déliquescence, Fonderie Darling. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly, and this inexactitude or injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

The work of art in the age of its artificial reproduction immediately raises the question of its authenticity. Can art conceived of and made by a complex computer program genuinely be called art? Or is the art perhaps the A.I. itself?

If it is, human beings are not the artists; God is. And all of creation is His, well, creation. We are not the medium but the form.

The opposite of artificial intelligence is not human intelligence but rather divine instinct.◼︎

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 subscribing.

Cover image: Russell Banx. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Paradise Now

L Con with Miel and Tenses, Marché des Possibles, 24 August 2024

Miel performs at Marché des Possibles, 24 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In Paradise Now, the Oscar-nominated 2005 Palestinian film directed by Hany Abu-Assad, two lifelong friends, Said and Khaled, are recruited to carry out a suicide bombing mission in Tel Aviv.

At the time, the film was criticized for humanizing terrorism, potentially eliciting sympathy for radical acts of religious and political extremism, and concurrently praised for realistically characterizing the circumstances that lead to such desperate ends.

In the film, Jamal, the operation’s mastermind who represents a nameless guerrilla organization, convinces Said by telling him that a man who is unafraid of death is in true control of his life. Though the pair require little convincing, believing that martyrdom will imbue their ostensibly meaningless existence with a sense of higher purpose, this is the twisted logic that seals the deal.

19 years ago, when the film made its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, the United States was still reeling from the September 11th attacks. Acts of terror were considered rare and isolated incidents. Today, we in the West are living under a climate of ambient terror in which the threat of localized destruction is low, but the mediation of war is ever-present.

The realities of combat — and the carnal horrors of violent death — are things that happen elsewhere, but never too far, dematerialized and yet ubiquitous. Their impressions upon us are both visceral and virtual. We cannot help but be traumatized and anaesthetized at once.

Luke Painter, Moving Images, Patel Brown, 29 August – 5 October 2024

Luke Painter gallery view at Patel Brown. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Following 9/11, the footage of the airplane striking the second tower played and replayed on an apparently endless loop via 24-hour news channels, producing what I call the “consensus image.” This establishing master shot became something like a brand, or better yet, a logo, immediately recognizable, transmissible, consumable.

Even eyewitnesses who were present that day in Manhattan described what they saw as like a scene from a disaster movie. The event itself was somehow less real than its replication, its proliferation, like the sting of a stubbed toe that’s only painful when the brain finally receives and decodes the message.

‘Ah yes, this is supposed to hurt,’ our nerves inform us, well after the initial shock of impact. This temporal interval is what creates the sensation of progression.

Cinema was composed of a series of still images that flickered like a flip book to life in real-time. Television is composed of a series of moving pictures, dancing electronic images that in their simultaneity and overabundance produce the impression of stasis.

Panorama: I’m Feeling Lucky, Timothy Thomasson & Tatum Wilson, SAT, 27 August 2024

In Slavoj Žižek’s extended 2002 essay on the September 11th attacks, entitled Welcome to the Desert of the Real, he predicts, alarmingly accurately in retrospect, what 21st Century warfare would come to look like.

“We are entering a new era of paranoiac warfare,” Žižek writes, “in which the greatest task will be to identify the enemy and his weapons. In this new warfare, the agents assume their acts less and less publicly … forming an ideal breeding-ground for conspiracy theories and generalized social paranoia.”

Jean-François Lauda, Eli Kerr, Vernissage, 13 September 2024

Jean-François Lauda gallery view at Eli Kerr. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the Lord. —Proverbs 21:31

“Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.” —C.P. Cavafy

The purpose of war in every century previous to our own seemed to be a paradoxical one: to prevent an even worse conflict.

The Second World War, for example, was justified to put a halt to the Holocaust and Hitler’s ruthless expansion into Eastern Europe. The Cold War was viewed as a deterrent to a larger and possibly nuclear war — surely a far harsher fate. As the old ideological axiom went, to secure peace, we must prepare for war.

However, war in the 21st Century appears to have only one goal: to perpetuate conflict, while guaranteeing its manageability at a purely bureaucratic level.

Just keep the temperature up while ensuring the water never boils out of the pot. As long as the explosions continue on the accepted field of battle — i.e. Ukraine, Gaza — war poses no problems and indeed yields dividends to the political and capital powers that reign today.

Particularly in the U.S., it won’t matter whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins the presidency. Either one would benefit from a permanent state of war abroad.

The battles that rage now are designed not to end. Otherwise, they never would have begun.

Yves Charuest, out into, Interzone Editions (2024)

“In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.” —Theodor Adorno

As he approached his final years, David Bowie’s compositions became evermore chaotic, wilder, influenced increasingly by disrupters and experimenters.

Bowie was always known as something of a vampire, feeding off and making palatable the avant-garde zeitgeist. In the late 1960s it was Syd Barrett and Marc Bolan. In the late 1990s it was Goldie and Trent Reznor.

However, in 2002, Bowie released arguably his most confounding album, Heathen. Superficially, the record sounded like an artist shifting into a more adult contemporary phase, adopting the vernacular of acolytes like Dave Grohl and The Pixies, whom he covered on the recording. But beneath the surface, it was apparent that Bowie was wrestling with something more profound, spiritual, and in doing so, discovering his own original voice, perhaps for the first time.

On his ultimate album, entitled Blackstar, Bowie consciously conjures the mythical archetype of Beethoven in late life — deaf, isolated, insane — abandoning any airs of pleasant or acceptable pop music.

The Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said wrote in his 2006 book On Late Style: “Beethoven’s immobilized and socially resistant final works are at the core of what is new in modern music of our own time.”

Bowie’s final works are at the heart of what is postmodern in ours.◼︎

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 subscribing.

Cover image: Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber, Animal Shapes (2021) Acrylic and ink on MDF, 24 x 24 in. Patel Brown. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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