Grand Concert Anniversaire UdeM x SMCQ, Salle Claude-Champagne, 15 November 2025

Is not Rome still Rome
Is not Los Angeles still Los Angeles
Are these really the last days of the Roman Empire
Is not beauty still beauty
And truth still truth
Are there not still poets
Are there not still lovers
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Time of Useful Consciousness

In advance of the publication of my first book, Mad Skills, my publisher Repeater Books and I devised a promotional campaign of publicity, ads, and memes to be deployed across social media. To that end, we designed a take on the popular “Galaxy Brain” meme, in which text captions accompany four image panels depicting increasingly illuminated human craniums.

The first caption read, “Discussing People;” the second one, “Discussing Events;” the third, “Discussing Ideas;” and the final galaxy-brain panel declared, “Discussing MIDI.”

2001: A Space Odyssey, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 19 November 2025

According to film historians Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, an earlier and much more explicitly absurd treatment for Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy masterpiece Dr. Strangelove set the movie’s beginning in outer space, recounting the story from the perspective of an alien species that discovers Planet Earth shortly after a nuclear holocaust has exterminated all human life. Had this version of the picture been made, the first title card to scroll onscreen would have read: “Nardac Blefescu Presents … A MACRO-GALAXY-METEOR PICTURE,” a nod to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Kubrick had originally titled the film The Delicate Balance of Terror, pilfered, apparently, from a paper of the same name that the American political scientist Albert Wohlstetter wrote in 1958 for the RAND Corporation. Kolker and Abrams note that Kubrick, regarded widely as a genius, had doodled a number of alternate titles for the film before registering Dr. Strangelove with Paramount Pictures — foremost among them, The Secret Uses of Uranus. Kubrick would incorporate these Sci-Fi Easter eggs into not only 2001, but also the ending of the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a story which Kubrick gifted to his friend and protégé Steven Spielberg.

Pulse Mag Issue #2 Launch, Cardinal Tea Room, 20 November 2025

The zombie apocalypse is not to be taken literally, as if the world should end up like a scene from some George A. Romero film, with the resurrected roaming the earth eating brains and defying death. Rather, the zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for capitalism, in which a non-living entity — capital — feeds on the planet’s life force, growing ever more powerful with the lives that it devours. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus refer to this as a “post-mortem despotism,” where an entity that has long-since died continues to exert authoritarian force over the living.

However, capital is not so much undead as it is never-having-lived and therefor can never be killed. Capital, like one of the all-time great cyber-zombie movie villains, on the order of the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, or the HAL-9000 in Kubrick’s 2001, has to be unplugged from its networks of command and control, neutralized. To execute capital, humanity will have to invent and implement radical economies of alternate value and exchange and slowly replace capital as our global operating system. Furthermore, we need to do this without capital reading our lips.

Impedance of the hyper-capitalist economy requires relentless activity in absence of a product, not destruction but non-production.

Hannah Claus, tsi iotnekahtentiónhatie (Tiohtià:ke), Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 19 November 2025 – 7 February 2026

Outsmarting A.I. is a fruitless strategy because we created Artificial Intelligence to mimic the human mind. The fact that there is an inherent competition between us and our progeny is indicative of the fundamental conflict present in the human dramatic narrative.

We are born to fathers and mothers whom we will replace, and neither side is entirely comfortable with the arrangement. We self-organize in the form of states and immediately rebel against authority. The authoritarian ruler is not free either, because he is condemned to subdue his subjects. Though capital is not alive in any biological sense, neither is it free. It is, in effect, a slave to its own slaves.

To prevail in the conflict against an artificially intelligent adversary requires becoming-beast, a return to an unsentimental, irrational, and savage, operative mode. The antidote to Artificial Intelligence is not human intelligence, but rather, animal instinct.

M For Mothland with Brainwasher, Boutique Feelings, Mulch, Yoo Doo Right, and Annie-Claude Deschênes, 21 November 2025, La Sala Rossa

There is a brief scene early on in Kubrick’s 2001, a seemingly throwaway shot in which a cougar attacks one of the apes. The simian is unsuspectingly drinking at a shallow pond when, out of the blue, the wildcat jumps from an elevated cliff and assaults the hominid, provoking it into mortal combat. Kubrick cuts the scene before the audience sees an outcome to this battle. But it must be assumed that the ape loses.

Ostensibly, this might be Kubrick’s way of reminding the film’s viewers that humans were not always, and may not be again, at the top of the food chain, without natural predators, safe in our domination over the animal kingdom. On a deeper level, it may signify the order of chaos and possibility that the monolithic object directly opposes in its geometric and determinate perfection. The monolith for Kubrick is undoubtedly no less violent than the wildcat, cast down from above onto its innocent victims.

The monolith of 2001 is not a screen. It is not an antenna. It is not a tablet. It is not a commandment. It is not a repository. It is not an archive. It is not a mirror. It is not a machine. It is not a product.

The monolith is pure machine, pure repository, pure product. It represents order over chaos, the ultimate, the infinite, the real structure of violence. That is why it fascinates and terrifies the apes.

It is not the work of an alien. It is a symbol of alienation, alienness.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Antoine Saito for Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.}