Shunk with Born at Midnite and Flleur, La Sotterenea, 12 March 2025

“Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road.”
—Mark Fisher, “Accept like a curse an unlucky deal.”

“The damage today
They fall on today
They beat on the outside
And I’ll stand by you
Now”
—David Bowie, “Outside.”

“These guys would have been really popular in, like, 1980 or ‘81,” my friend Oliver who checks coats at La Sala Rossa, world-weary with arms folded, asides to me at the album launch on Wednesday night at La Sotterenea for Shunk’s hyper-retro, longer-than-extended but shorter-than-long-player, Shunkland.

It is true.

Oliver says this neither ironically nor with derision; rather, matter-of-factly, with reverence and astute observance that retromania has not ceased, more than 15 years after Simon Reynolds diagnosed and devoted a book-length study to this particularly 21^st century condition, to be an operative mode proper to postmodern cultural production.

More than nostalgia, more than cyclical fashion, time itself seems to have collapsed in on itself, every historical era occurring and recurring simultaneously in the present, flattening the entirety of existence into the always-already now.

Myriam Dion, Timelines, Blouin | Division, 15 February – 5 April 2025

Forward momentum is a thing of the past.

It is possible that futurity was always illusory, that memory was rare and in short enough supply to create the impression that each season was fundamentally different — the length, width, and hem of pant legs; KitchenAid’s colour of the year (it’s butter, by the way) — when time has never been anything more nor less than a flat circle.

But today, memory is cheap, if not free — you can’t even give it away — and forgetfulness is a sentimental luxury, like Polaroid film, heritage hipsterism, and paying with cash.

Pretending not to remember is a new form of conspicuous consumption, with half-recalled experience in place of a disposable product.

Two Readers and Music V, featuring Tara McGowan-Ross, Gwen Aube, and Aistis, 6 March 2025

If there is no now, then there is no then, and no will be.

More accurately, there are eight billion nows, in an age of siloed politics and niche media, protectionism and regional nationalism. And so, the future will ultimately be all the more fragmented and multifaceted. If cultural memory defies consensus, then so does cultural imagination.

However, contrary to the assumption that variety stimulates autonomy, increasingly granular diversity threatens collective solidarity and remains vulnerable to more totalizing control systems. Functioning society relies upon constructive group psychology. Deteriorating society conversely flourishes within an environment of its destructive inverse.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the failure of leftist political satire. The imperviousness to both ridicule and scorn that the right enjoys right now is a symptom of disintegrating unanimity owing to the “splinternet.”

In his book Post-Comedy, author Alfie Bown observes under technocratic hyper-capitalism “the creation of a closed circuit of didactic humour in which only those designed to experience it do, leaving its potential as a political tool for activism almost redundant.”

For people to find certain attitudes abhorrent or funny, there must exist a kind of ideological consensus. When none does, insults and sarcasm simply keep people and ideas current in consciousness, which paradoxically strengthens their dominance, if only due to renewed visibility.

It accomplishes nothing to skewer Elon Musk on his own social network. Making fun of the orange Cheeto doesn’t change any minds and rather strengthens his brand.

One of the more terrifying realizations circulating lately is that the billionaire class pulling the government’s strings will still be in power long after today’s or even tomorrow’s politicians.

Democracy is fragile now, but capital can resist forever.

For Everyone Stuck Chasing the Clock, dirs. Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau, La Chapelle | Scènes Contemporaines, 3-7 March 2025

As a child, my first word was “clock.”

It wasn’t “mommy” or “daddy” — you can ask them. As the story goes, I pointed in my infancy at the time-keeping device on the wall and distinctly articulated the word, “clock,” shocking and likely disappointing my parents. Because time was clearly already of the essence. I don’t remember my mindset, obviously, but I may have had an early inkling of the lengthy life sentence to which I’d been condemned.

At times, it seems that time is tight. At others, minutes appear to stretch into hours. It is always when we are aware of time — when we’re late; or when we’re waiting — that it behaves antithetically to our desires.

Back to the Future was one of my favourite movies as a kid. I was eight in 1985 when the film was released and was just beginning to understand the nature of time as infinite and our experience inside time as limited. I knew what death was. So, I understood that everything everyone does in one’s lifetime must somehow fit within time’s puzzle.

When you’re a child, time yawns out before you like a red carpet unfurling into the world. But as time marches on, you can see that roll getting smaller and smaller, and it becomes ever more apparent that the rug will eventually, inevitably, be pulled from beneath your feet.

This is both frightening and reassuring. Who would want to live forever? But also, who wouldn’t want another day when their time comes?

Duality, Persons, Ascension (Personal Records)

Haunting is one way to cheat time. Besides a supernatural extension, there are other methods to haunt the present. Chiefly among them is to make art. Or something of art’s ilk, that endures beyond death.

If as I am you’re obsessed with history, you’re bound to live amid ghosts. Some of them point to lines of flight. Others drag us down. Even the living can have a haunting effect.

Communing with ghosts is where we find ourselves.◼︎

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_{Cover images: Detail of Tile Mosaics (2024), Myriam Dion, Galerie Blouin | Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.}