But the times they are a-changin’. No longer does the world need the ho-hum efforts of student bakers; ours is an era for grand gestures. This is why I hope you’ll understand when I hold on to my coinage this week, and spend it at the CMETrust benefit this Friday, organized by Daraja McGill.

Daraja simply hit a soft spot with its pairing of an attainable, valuable goal (CMETrust’s funding of secondary school scholarships for 37 impoverished Kenyan students) to effective means – a quadruple-header concert with a $15 advance door charge.

It helps that the assembled line-up is the closest thing Montreal has seen to Band Aid, free of the embarrassingly Euro-centric jingle. The slated appearances by TONSTARTSSBANDHT and the Pop Winds – two bands that The Daily took every single opportunity to mention last year – alone justify the price. Meanwhile, my mouth froths at the idea that the others, Hollerado and Homosexual Cops, may capture my heart in the new year.

Sincerely hoping I did not hurt you,
Nick.

The post Dear Leacock bake sale activists appeared first on The McGill Daily.

This is not to deprive SPASM of its crossover potential. The festival’s main draw might just lie in its three short-film presentations, enticingly restricted to Quebec-made content. Divided into three categories – science fiction, suspense, and inclassables – these two-dozen or so short films will be screened over the course of three events, occurring between October 28 and 29.

Readers split between vague temptation and skepticism, meanwhile, may find the burden of choice easier lifted than once imagined. Simply browse through SPASM’s film selection. Bikini Girls on Ice; Cabaret Trash; Burn Paris Burn. I’ve never felt more tempted to judge films by their titles.

The post Cinematic SPASMs appeared first on The McGill Daily.

So you can understand how unnerving it’s been to read Bursting the Bubble these past few months, as its writers kindly suggest I grow up and abandon my idyllic fancies. The city they depicted was strikingly uniform. From east to west, they’d described the same decaying duplexes, the same gentrification, and the same cheap breakfast joints.

Needless to say, it wasn’t Montreal the way I’d gotten used to seeing it. There had to be some evidence of the city existing as a sum of organic parts.

Then I remembered Outremont, a perpetual safe-haven for all things snobby. Having spent a good third of my waking life in this enclave of French expatriates and Hasidic Jews – attending school, working various jobs – I’d forgotten how fascinatingly alien this part of town could be to new-coming Montrealers, the sense of otherness it exudes.

Vaguely put, Outremont is more of a microcosm than any simple neighbourhood, those living there preferring to stay put rather than ever venturing out. It’s roomy enough that they don’t need to: roughly speaking, it’s enclosed to the southwest by Cote St-Catherine, to the north by Van Horne, and runs east up to Parc. From the looks of it, you wouldn’t identify it with the rest of our city – and rightly so, until the 2002 merger.

Subtly colourful townhouses line its richer streets, tucked away behind lush greenery and rows of German cars. Its principal arteries – streets Bernard and Laurier – display an effervescent liveliness, in winter as in summertime, as the decked-out elderly folks and exuberant youths shop its boutiques, flaunting their luxuries in some of Montreal’s most reputable restaurants.

The little differences, too, point to a parallel universe of chic. Over there, they don’t have Provigo or Metro. They shop at “5 Saisons.” They don’t get ice cream at Dairy Queen – they eat sorbet at “Bilboquet.” Video rentals? They do those, but at “Passeport Video,” not at Blockbuster or Movieland.

Everything in Outremont, from the aesthetics to its inhabitants’ state of mind – not to mention its total lack of bars – is strikingly consistent, hinting to some underlying dynamic, one I wasn’t aware of until recently. It’s subtle, sure, but the signs are there for those who’re looking – most notably, its inhabitants’ effortless indifference to the cultural trends that reverberate through the rest of North America.

Its youth, for instance, shrug at the sight of hipsters, cherishing their own invented forms of social capital infinitely more. In that sense, it’s evocative of pre-Internet American indie culture, the popular kids having defined “cool” in their own image. Oddly enough, that implies an unlikely gangsta-gentleman thematic: a certain Victorian sense of decorum, matched to an altered French patois – N.W.A. by way of Jacques Brel – and a ready willingness to display often impressive street connections. Like everything else in the borough, it all points to a thoroughly constructed reality, an effort to inject self-importance into an otherwise protected existence.

It’s a drive that exists strongly within the richer strata of the township – in which we find famous Quebec entrepreneurs, retired politicians, and worn-out songsters – and stronger still in those budding beneath them. For the latter group, Outremont stands as an admission of defeat: the recognition that, short of achieving real renown, they nevertheless enjoy sharing space with those who have.

It’s that very sentiment, I think – this sort of significance by association – that’s responsible for the insularity, and this dynamic I could only describe as Cheers at village-scale, where everybody knows not only your name, but your livelihood and reputation as well. That the Outremontains keep to themselves is no indication of disdain; they’ve simply become unaccustomed to – and perhaps apprehensive of – walking the streets unacknowledged.

The obvious question, then, is whether this form of self-aggrandizement – where opening a boutique fetches you the sort of fame that’s usually reserved for astronauts and serial killers – merits any castigation. But, in essence, they’ve signed onto their rules, and they’re leaving us alone. At very worst, I can only see them harming themselves, settling for quiet notoriety over their realized ambitions. And – oh boy – what a shame that is.

Meanwhile, I’m left soaking in irony: if Outremont testifies to the existence of villages within cities, it’s certainly not for the reasons I’d imagined. It seems, then, that there’s nothing wrong with neighbourhoods bleeding into each other; it’s simply a fact of Montrealers getting along.

The post Bursting the bubble: Where everyone knows your name appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Not that the cast and crew haven’t been trying; in fact, they’ve been pulling out all the stops. But it’s an obvious struggle: how to get college students excited about nudity-free theatre – the cultural equivalent of non-alcoholic beer? Common sense suggests staging a high-profile public execution, but they’ve settled for the next best thing: a press stunt.

Indeed, the past two Wednesdays saw the cast, dressed in full 1920s regalia, attract student attention by enacting a fictive scene from the Leopold and Loeb trial, the historical event that Never The Sinner draws its story from. Though the happenings were poorly attended – some blame the cold, others our collective disdain for culture – the actors frankly expected as much, conducting the stunts primarily for their own amusement, and in hopes that it might give rise to some word-of-mouth action.

Be that as it may, the scene’s amusing era throwbacks (dopey haircuts, beige suits, the use of a notepad) and strident dramatics served as an excellent entrée to the main attraction, whose darker tones are offset by its endearing 1920s flair. That balance – between entertainment and art – is a hard one to strike, let alone maintain for two hours, but the cast pulled it off successfully: of all the laughs, only one felt guilty, and for all the dramatic lines, not a single one felt forced.

Deserving much of the credit, of course, is the playwright. John Logan’s extensive examination of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb – two brilliant young men, whose twisted, passionate love affair compelled them to murder – consistently refuses the path of least resistance towards condemnation. The play would prefer to understand the two killers. That it does so at such a fluid pace – cycling through 27 scenes in the span of two hours – is a remarkable achievement.

And there to give that achievement justice was Stephanie Shum’s direction, underpinned by Andrew Robert Martin’s (Leopold) and Peter Farrell’s (Loeb) striking interpretations of the two central characters. Sharing the stage throughout most of the play, the two actors displayed an exceptional chemistry, ably conveying the symbiotic relationship that united the killers.

In particular, praise to Farrell for skilfully skirting the overacting that Loeb’s extroversion – not to mention mood swings – sometimes prescribed. Robert Martin’s introverted Leopold, meanwhile, stood as the play’s strongest display of subtlety, making such bashful expressions as to make me wonder what his parents were like (I assume very nice).

Adding to their chemistry was Julien Naggar – succeeding against all expectations in portraying a 67-year-old Matlock figure – as well as Kyle Foot, who played the prosecution straight: bloodthirsty and righteous. And just as praiseworthy were Kate Sketchley, Rachael Benjamin, and François Macdonald, who each inhabited a whole panoply of stock characters with rare ease and fluidity.

But strong as the performances were, Never The Sinner achieved much of its success through its meticulous mise-en-scène, which firmly kept its audience absorbed by the play’s inquiries into human psychology. The lighting, elegantly handled, could alter the stage at a moment’s notice, turning the courthouse set-arrangements from a jail to a car – or anything else the script required. Meanwhile, actors would quietly slip from one scene to another, flashing back and forth through time, without losing sight of their roles or failing to keep our attention.

But not everything was perfect. Risks were taken with the seating arrangements, which divided the audience along both sides of the theatre – probably so as to overcome spatial constraints. Though it gave the players more room to move, and effectively created two focal points along the stage, it also offered both halves of the audience the chance to stare right at each other. I would recommend our most attractive readers to cover themselves up prior to attending, as they run the risk of distracting the opposite sex for the entire duration of the play.

Still, considering the strength of the performances and the engrossing quality of the production, it’s an issue that most will look past, and some may not even notice. Truth is, you’ll probably all be too busy questioning the moral character of the two killers, and the twisted Nietzschean ethics they weakly embody. It’s a consuming concern, one that holds the play together and – most importantly – ensures that the viewers will have a memorable time.

The post I could hate the sin, but never the theatre appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Rest assured, this seething contempt for Sting – shared by all those currently above drinking age – is nothing but a biological response to one of the most glaring instances of cultural appropriation in pop music history. That said, I regret to tell you that if the perpetrators of such crimes were always this ham-fisted, the entirety of pop music would likely drive us into a murderous frenzy.

The long and the short of it is: modern music is an edifice built from the un-credited violation of cultural boundaries, often with exploitative intent. But the theft goes both ways: while old colonial powers serve themselves to the developing world’s musical innovations, minority groups re-appropriate the resulting genres. Rock was appropriated from African-America in the fifties; Brazilian tropicalia, from Great-Britain in the sixties; techno, from Germany in the seventies. No nation on Earth has successfully kept its cultural traditions free of foreign footprints – not even seven-year-old East Timor.

But wait: surely I can’t be equating the mere enjoyment of a pop song – a gut pleasure if there ever was one – to Cecil Rhodes-ing all over Africa, Latin Amerca, and possibly even the Mississippi. After all, pop music – more than any other art form – functions as a common language; how could something as vague and arbitrary as one’s cultural identity tread all over humanity’s shared pleasure?

If anything, pop music’s power as a uniting force actually hinges on this cultural inbreeding. But I’d drive the point even further: had our ancestors been any more timid about pillaging each others’ cultures, we’d be left clubbing to the stilted sounds of modern classical. So let’s thank our lucky stars that morality rarely gets in the way of art; our music certainly stands richer because of it.

Still, there’s something intuitively wrong about Presley and McCartney making millions off the African-American invention of the boogie-woogie. Worse yet, it’s no isolated incident. Dominant cultures have repeatedly exploited minority groups’ musical innovations, sanding off their sharp edges, hiding them behind familiar faces, and running them into the ground. Elvis is one example, Sting is another, and – God almighty – so is Vampire Weekend.

But further complicating the issue is the fact that, for each act of exploitation, there are dozens more of genuine artistic (and occasionally humanitarian) impulses. It’s a long list, one in which we find Paul Simon, Brian Eno, the Beastie Boys, Eminem, and countless others. Peter Gabriel, love him or hate him, is almost single-handedly responsible for all our parents’ obsession with “world music.” So are we to indict all of them the same way we’d condemn the King of Memphis?

Of course not! And therein lies the middle ground: there’s nothing wrong with the crossing of boundaries in itself. By no means does my lack of African heritage determine whether it is right for me to dance to Afrobeat rhythms. By that same token, in no way is it wrong for an artist to appropriate cultural traditions whose meaning he cannot properly understand. The fact is, as art outlives artists – along with the culture that birthed it – these meanings dissipate, along with questions of cultural appropriateness.

The issue only becomes morally loaded as we begin to consider the artist’s intent. And when the latter consists of exploitation for commercial purposes – as can be said of Sting – then we can’t blame our gag reflexes for acting up. Put simply, it indicates a thorough lack of respect, and serves only to obscure where the real credit is due.

But don’t feel bad if the sight of white men getting jiggy with it fails to get your dander up. Artistic intent is a vague, muddled thing, forcing us to withhold judgment in most cases. And evil as artistic exploitation is, there’s very little we can do to stop it. If our unwitting enjoyment of exploitative acts breeds moral reprobation, so be it. If Missy Elliott’s irresistible, bhangra-aping hit “Get Ur Freak On” proved anything – and it certainly hasn’t – it’s that we’re quite better off sinning than living as saints.

The post We built this city on theft ’n’ fraud appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Sorry, that’s a load of shit. Public art, as it happens, isn’t anything most of us are interested in. And yet, were we to take the Museum of Fine Art’s word for it – as I did a couple weeks ago at the Public Art Symposium – we’d realize that public art is a lot more pervasive than we think.

For example, those two clashing rams right outside of Stuart Bio? The ones you have Facebook pictures of yourself straddling? That’s right: public art. And that searchlight circling above Montreal? Some might disagree, but Rafael Lozano-Hemmer – a clever, tech-obsessed public artist who resides in Montreal and spoke at the symposium – would characterize it the same way.

Considering his line of work, that doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. Billing himself as an electronic artist, his pieces tend to focus on the unlikely convergence of technology, art, and self-expression. Highlight piece Body Moves, for example, consisted of projecting the shadows of passers-by onto a building façade, the sizes of which were determined by the distance from the light projector. Anyone passing through would immediately find his silhouette projected, in monstrous proportions, onto that enormous white screen, along with those of other unwitting participants. Sure enough, city-dwellers caught on quickly, improvising strange forms of street-theatre, temporarily breaking free from what Lozano-Hemmer called the “increasingly homogenized urban condition.”

While one’s appreciation for Lozano-Hemmer’s broader agenda remains a function of taste, the sheer ingenuity of the artistic platform it put under city residents’ feet is harder to deny. Whichever way you look at it, his is an empowering form of art. One could imagine performance artists eventually making use of such an installation, obscuring its original meaning – and perhaps even expressing their own takes on municipal life, in all its communal and antagonistic glory. Art-enabling art, you could say.

But Lozano-Hemmer’s vision – democratic, expressive…expensive – seemed out of place at the symposium, whose by-and-for-public-artists focus struck me as somewhat of a missed opportunity. The other speakers – among them art historians, big-shot curators, and the incumbent Montreal mayor – seemed mostly interested in public art as urban ornaments, some of them going on at lengths about budgetary concerns while others masked shallow theorizing with elaborate diction.

As for Montreal’s public art development prospects, the symposium pointed to a promising future: private investments in such projects have been increasing, while the municipal government has decided to follow a Percent for Art program, dedicating one per cent of its public development expenditures on art.

But with respect to the artistic traditions it valued, the symposium seemed decidedly out of touch. For example, the presentation given by Lisa Graziose Corrin, former artistic lead of the Seattle Olympic sculpture park, was littered with Art History in-jokes and modernistic eyesores. There, as a boundless source of pride, was her subversion of the “plinth” as a guiding principle behind the park’s design. How fascinating.

Not to say that her heart was in the wrong place: as her presentation made clear, the Olympic Park’s design was upheld by startlingly inventive, democratic principles. Yet it’s not the intentions I’m indicting, but the highbrow cultural standards she seemed to impose on urban space. Given public art’s inbuilt audience – the general public – one would think it shouldn’t restrict itself to art-initiates.

Thankfully, the symposium’s Quebecois speakers seemed slightly more detached from that tradition, expressing their deep appreciation for Montreal’s unique heritage, which Mayor Gérald Tremblay promised would remain central in future public art projects. It was a reassuring thought, one that will hopefully prevent Montreal from importing artists’ visions wholesale, expecting the city to adapt to the art, and not the other way around.

In other words – post-modern worst-case-scenarios notwithstanding – the symposium gave ample reason to believe in our fair city’s artistic future. With Lozano-Hemmer’s democratic vision guiding the way, a more interactive, challenging public art landscape seems well within our reach. Just imagine the possibilities: unbridled self-expression, vibrant new venues for creative thought, and infinitely more opportunities for inane Facebook pictures. If that isn’t something to give a shit about, I don’t know what is.

The post Democratic, expressive, expensive appeared first on The McGill Daily.

But hey, cheer up. All that smut you’ve been missing out on, that whole universe, “the wild world of smut”…well, it’s finally opened up to you. And though it might seem a little scary at first, the fine folks at Lickety Split smut zine have got your back, supplying you with a kink kiddie-pool of sorts, an introductory step into the wider kink ocean.

It’s a role that the magazine’s publisher, Amber Goodwyn, takes care to imbue in each of the magazine’s pages. Rather unassuming herself – as it happens, kinkiness isn’t necessarily worn on one’s sleeve – she regards Lickety Split as a valuable venue for people to express all sides of their sexualities.

To that end, she prizes her magazine’s inclusive, sex-positive attitude – an understandable precondition for featuring pansexual (i.e. all orientations, even those you weren’t aware existed) content. But besides the underlying live-and-let-live ethos, there’s little tying together the sheer variety of material featured here, covering everything from prose to photography. For such a compact zine – its bi-yearly issues rarely exceed 70 pages – it sure packs a shitload of smut.

But as bite-sized and accommodating as this taster may be, prospective readers should still approach its content with an open mind and a lighter mood. Plainly put, don’t expect to keep a straight face flipping through its pages: depending on who you are, Lickety Split may shock you, put you off, or totally blow your mind. O magazine this is not.

And speaking for myself – an ardent vanilla-sex enthusiast – I must admit to having expressed dismay at some of the content. As much as I normally enjoy sex comics (very much), there’s something about regular artist Eric Hanson’s strips that strike me as oddly gratuitous and juvenile; smut for smut’s sake, if you will.

Nevertheless, impromptu campus polling would tell you that I’m just easily offended, and that the magazine isn’t going too far. Goldwyn tends to agree: “I think we have to give people more credit for what they can handle. I don’t think we’ve crossed anyone’s lines. But I guess people do have different sets of rules.”

Not that Goldwyn approves of all perspectives, expressing distaste at those who castigate her for exhibiting sexuality out in the open – not “keeping it in the bedroom,” as it were. Worse yet are double standards privileging dominant straight culture and chastising queer culture.

She’s not pointing fingers, though, which is something I appreciate. As a member of the dominant culture in question, I understandably don’t keep track of all the rights it sometimes unwittingly denies others. “I think the fact that you can kiss your girlfriend on the metro and not feel unsafe about it afterwards…” she argued, “it’s a huge amount of privilege,” implying that it should be a right.

But conscientious as its writers may be, Lickety Split somehow consistently avoids coming across as militant. Instead, each page (not to mention the Sherwin Tjia-drawn covers) points to some intimate tie between its creator and the oft-personal material they’ve chosen to contribute. “These aren’t magazines you tear through and throw out,” Goodwyn relates. “They’re more like yearbooks about peoples’ sexualities.”

And kitschy as that may seem, the sentiment still comes across very clearly, reinforced by the magazine’s do-it-yourself appeal – something we can perhaps credit to Lickety Split’s place within the Montreal underground.

Their forthcoming launch party, this Friday’s XXX Masked Ball, will see a performance by Goodwyn’s band Nightwood along with two other acts. Considering Goodwyn’s promises of a wild time, it’s something you might want to attend. Who knows, you might even discover something you didn’t know – or didn’t want to know – you liked.

Lickety Split’s XXX Masked Ball takes place this Friday, November 21, at La Sala Rossa. Doors open at 9 p.m. and the $10 entrance fee includes a copy of the latest issue of the zine. Visit licketysplitzine.com for more smut.

The post Out of the bedroom and into the world appeared first on The McGill Daily.

All he needed to do was beat Krypto – the almighty Krypto – and for all intents and purposes he just did. Only question was: why wasn’t Krypto fazed? He just stood there, emotionless, just waiting his turn, as though Lost Child hadn’t already killed it.

And when his time came, Krypto slid across the dancefloor on his head, his arms extended, his feet suspended in the air – spinning the entire time, feet to face with his opponent. The judges couldn’t believe their eyes, but there it was: Krypto’s legendary HeadSplide.

Lost Child flinched. He’d caught every second of it, and the memories would never fade. They were etched into his retinas: that perfect round, that sequence of pops and locks so pure, Christ himself couldn’t do much better. The look on his face – it was one of deep, metaphysical pain. It was the stuff Karate Kid sequels are made of.

Yet it all happened verbatim, on October 24, at Who’s Hungry – the Montreal breakdancing community’s yearly dance-off.

Leaping out of the woodwork and straight into our faces, these two-dozen-or-so b-boys spared no one. Leaving, we attendees were shocked, and felt different from when we came. The more ambitious amongst us vowed to take hip-hop dance classes; others felt content clutching their heads, yelling out expletives in gratitude.

It’s not that any of us failed to anticipate dancing, but this event so gracefully straddled the line between competition and celebration, between dualistic show-offing and friendly reunion…It was something I’d never seen.

And perhaps I can peg the reason why: weirdly isolated and solipsistic, their community seems happy just cycling 1974 through 1996, forever. In B.Sci. terms, they’re stuck in the past, although here, it might not be a bad thing. Still, that makes tracking them down a lot tougher. Excepting forum posts and YouTube, their Internet presence is virtually nonexistent.

But frustrating as that is, it certainly makes what little we catch of them briskly mercurial, not to mention endearingly local. Try as I might, it’s hard to brush their isolation off as self-protection – some ill-guided attempt to shield young b-boys from the corrupting influence of tight, dance-inhibiting jeans.

In all likelihood, they wouldn’t sweat us if we came. Their breakdancing culture is too perfectly self-contained: the extensive jargon (popping as different from locking; locking as different from whacking); the killer fashions (Dickies chinos, tailored headwear, and sweet kicks); the hilarious b-boy naming conventions (Krypto, Megatron, Scramblelock, Dingo…Raoul).

As a native Montrealer looking for something real, the experience hit me like a freight train. A great time, sure – the laughs were a-plenty, the oh-shit moments by the truckload, and the drama was there for those who could handle it – but Who’s Hungry held a lot more weight than that.

For one, it ripped me clean off of American youth culture. That terrible beast, too narrowly focused on the edge, exclusively on the hottest shit – the Lee Douglas remix, the Nom de Guerre sweater, the DJs at Coda. For such an exhaustive search, ours is weirdly aimless; the new constantly supplants the old as we progressively lose sight of the difference. In a word: empty.

But the b-boys’ culture is static, and that affords them the possibility to concentrate on things that matter: namely, the mastery of movement. Of course, there’s some consumerism here too – the Fubu ain’t cheap – but the fashions aren’t updated, which means that once a b-boy has his basics covered, all he has to do is dance.

It’s a refreshing environment, one that won’t pat a kid on the back until he’s achieved something. And if we could just get over ourselves for a moment, stop thrifting, and start high-fiving over actual accomplishments, maybe it’s one we could share.

To paraphrase Illmatic’s opening moments: there ain’t nothin’ out here for us. Or maybe there is – namely, Who’s Hungry.

The post Last night a b-boy saved my life appeared first on The McGill Daily.

My apologies.

But please, don’t stop reading – to our mutual benefit, my cluelessness isn’t an obstacle here. The fact is that “Le Coin” – an understated photo exposition of Montreal’s red-light district, on display at Le Monument National until mid-December – is less an art gallery than an exercise in public consciousness. Meaning: your appreciation of it won’t benefit from erudition as much as from a lifetime spent in the city. Really, all that these photos demand of us is a shared, unconditional love for Montreal and its dingy, fragmented ghetto: the Faubourg St-Laurent.

It’s a part of town that the three artists whose work is displayed here (Gabor Szilasi, Guy Glorieux, and Mia Donovan) are in an apt position to expose. As longtime residents of Montreal, they witnessed the city evolve, its once prominent street corners slowly resigning themselves to the effacing motions of gentrification. And while each artist uses this history to make sense of the decay, their vastly different approaches – one impressionistic, another documentarian, and the last, defiantly feminine – afford us three nuanced views of this shithole we often dismiss.

Not that you could tell that from Glorieux’s powerfully abstract landscape photography. Rather than simply scraping the dirt off the street, “St-Laurent, Ste-Catherine” washes it out in a sea of photonegative blacks and whites, transforming this sullied neighbourhood into a sprawling piece of post-apocalyptic geometry.

It’s a wonderfully simple piece, one that exhumes desolation with unusual grace. Accidental by nature, this sténopé –a long-exposure photograph taken with a pinhole camera – subtly captures the essence of the locale, as fortunate details such as the spectres of cop cars fill the monochromatic void. And as gimmicky as these pinhole cameras sound, one can’t deny Glorieux’s adept use of the technique as he pushes the idea of urban dystopia to an uncomfortable extreme.

No surprises, then, that his collaborators’ contributions are comparatively underwhelming. First glances at Szilasi’s slice-of-life photography, for instance, won’t yield much more than recollection of familiar sights.

But impressionism isn’t the point here. Comprised of two colour photographs flanked by three black and whites, his take on the corner is one held together by juxtaposition – the latter photos’ unending blandness contrasting the formers’ serene beauty. It’s a trick Szilasi makes able use of, revealing how our beloved Montreal re-appropriates depravity, turning it into another colourful, jagged piece of its sprawl.

Still, as far as takes on urban dilapidation go, perhaps Szilasi’s comes across as a bit too optimistic. How fortunate, then, that all excesses in that direction find themselves brutally offset by Donovan’s ribald point-of-view shots of a strip-club’s interiors.

Both uncomfortably subversive and sexual, Donovan’s voyeuristic depiction of a depraved peep-show paints women as both delicate beings and commoditized toys. Taking the point of view of a customer making his way through those aseptic stairways and halls, these photos afford us a look into an environment few of us dare step into sober, let alone get off in.

Yet bleak as the scenery may be, Donovan nevertheless manages to capture these women in an oddly empowered, dignified state. And considering the things they’re sharing space with – blood-red walls, plasticized caricatures of themselves, and intricate sex toys – that’s quite the achievement.

But all that said, “Le Coin” probably won’t make me visit the Faubourg any more often than I ever have – that is, rarely. But if my general aversion to decrepitude lingered after the exposition, at least there to complement it was a newfound appreciation for Montreal’s more notorious shitholes.

The post New takes on urban dystopia appeared first on The McGill Daily.

It was a classic PR bait and switch. The press release was utterly tantalizing, adorned with promises of unbridled intellectualism, delicious free food, and a titillating cast featuring at least one Pitchfork staffer – a rare breed I felt lucky to catch sight of.

And though I suppose it could have turned out much worse – as the food proved delectable and the Pitchfork staffer satisfyingly pasty – the intellectualism seemed mostly absent. To put it nicely, the panelists often mistook questions for dance classes, sidestepping issues as they were raised and barely distancing themselves from the organizations they were speaking for.

The problem comes into sharper relief when we consider the issues music journalism is facing these days. With music available for free and the means of communication fully democratized online, it might be worth asking why authoritarian music nerds continue to get paid. In other words: ousted from their ivory tower, what can critics do that amateurs can’t?

For Patrick Baillargeon, head of the music section in Montreal’s Voir, it’s a concern that strikes through his heart, right into his wallet. The “hyper-democratization of music,” as he puts it, isn’t just threatening his career – it’s driving print criticism toward extinction. The most music magazines can hope for, he says, is the sort of wildlife protection vinyl records are currently enjoying.

Yet one can’t help but think: in a cultural context where musicians have learned to rely on themselves to get exposure, music magazines like Exclaim and Magnet may well have lost their place in society, especially considering that thousands of bloggers already help fill their taste-making function for free. And excluding a fetishist fondness for the feel of newspaper, I can’t see why even the best free publications can’t run their operations online. As far as I, and perhaps many of you, are concerned, the salad days of full-time music criticism are over, and rightfully so.

But what does that leave our starving critics to do? Well, one of three things, should we listen to Pitchfork contributor Douglas Wolk. To make ends meet, for example, one may consider writing advocacy criticism – that cautious praise retail websites like Amazon use to help sell CDs. But as far as honest work goes, Wolk thinks young writers ought to hone their skills at generating critical discussion, something he’s convinced the Internet is lacking.

Worded a certain way, it’s a neat idea: music journalism would revolve around the exchange of controversial ideas in Internet forums and blogs, challenging our established aesthetic standards. But worded a bit differently – e.g. “massive Internet circle-jerk” or “unprecedented navel gazing” – the conversation idea loses some of its lustre. To put it bluntly, the only class of people benefitting from these conversations would be the critics themselves, to everyone else’s flagrant disinterest.

So with conversation ruled out, it seems like today’s aspiring critics are left with a single viable function: that of providing genuine, insightful criticism. As Wolk bemoaned, it’s something that has always been present in the industry in some form or another, but in perpetual short supply. And though there doesn’t seem to be anything to thank for it, recent times have seen a resurgence of this more constructive, less subjective variety of journalism.

Case in point, the 33 1⁄3 series of books – those short, systematic studies of legendary albums – and the success its enjoyed has indicated that the market for this sort of discussion exists. It’s a promising trend, one that has the potential to demystify the creation of music itself, disassembling great works into forms that non-musicians can understand and – perhaps – recreate.

On an endnote, it’s somewhat ironic that the hyper-democratization of means is less of a revolution than it is mouth-wash, ridding music journalism of its self-righteous critics and abject subjectivity. And though it seems like it’s ripping the practice apart at the seams, at least we’ll have something clean in its place.

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Brooklyn’s A Place To Bury Strangers is not one of those bands.

Though newcomers to the New-York revivalist scene, they’ve somehow managed to speed from total to relative obscurity in a matter of months, rekindling every Brooklyn hipster’s dream of short-order success: Pitchfork’s Best New Music accolade, a reputation as the “loudest band in New York,” a forthcoming tour with NIN, and God knows what next.

And though their formula has certainly attracted attention, the band’s unequivocal debt to artists before them is somewhat unsettling. Every guitar sound immaculately replicates early 80s shoegaze and industrial, their blasé vocalist exhumes boredom and detachment the exact same way The Jesus And Mary Chain’s did, and, worst of all, even their most sincere moments are lifted from the Cure’s mid-period discography. The result: a musical Frankenstein of sorts, each disparate part sticking out in oddly predictable ways.

Scandalous? As it stands, not so much. But there’s something more sinister at play here: I don’t think these guys ever cared to sell records. I suspect that their point and purpose, oddly enough, is to advertise their guitar pedals.

Now, while I can’t claim credit for the bulk of that accusation, I will however, turn your heads towards the one who can – Nick Sylvester, a New York culture critic as brilliant as he is maligned, best remembered for his short tenure at The Village Voice.

In Sylvester’s words: “There’s not a song on [APTBS’ eponymous debut] worth talking about, which is to say there’s no song that will get in the way of [frontman Oliver Ackermann] demonstrating to us all the different settings and kinds and configurations of distortion pedals he can put together.” As far as critical assessments go, this one’s pretty dismissive. Still, the man’s got a point.

Consider my first piece of evidence. On top of fronting, singing, and playing guitar for APTBS, Oliver Ackermann quadruples as an audio engineer, having founded Death by Audio, a Brooklyn-based guitar pedal workshop, in the early 2000s. And though the company’s sonic focus is rather narrow – having committed itself to replicating late 80s distortion and fuzz – the pedals do a terrific job, as evidenced by the band’s stellar sounds. For effects that musicians were cobbling together from cheap equipment in the 1980s, Death By Audio’s $150-$320 price range seems a bit steep – even withstanding the painstaking experimentation they take off your hands.

But that’s skirting the issue. That is, these pedals still overshadow the band’s song-writing at every turn. Case in point: each track on the album is distinguished not by its melody or structure, but by the specific pedal configuration the band has elected to demonstrate. And though this approach has produced impressive results in the past, the band’s insistence on writing actual songs, as opposed to abstract noise, means that their trite melodies only get in the way of their distorted artistry. In other words, relying on bad songs to sell good sounds has only undermined the advertising campaign these guys seem to be pushing.

Still, the fact remains that the band, seasoned noisemongers as they may be, has only released a single album. So, negativity notwithstanding, my hope is that by next time around, they’ll have learned to write pieces that revolve around sonic texture, instead of ones constrained by melodies they’re too lazy to write. All concerns for quality aside, they’d probably sell a lot more pedals that way too.

A Place To Bury Strangers opens for Shellac, one of the bands they openly pillage, at La Sala Rossa (4848 St. Laurent) on September 17. Tickets are $15.

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A lesson was learned: assessing cultural reappropriation is a tricky business. So you can imagine the bind that I was in, charged with reviewing Asia in Fusion – the concert sampling performers from the upcoming Access Asia festival – when my knowledge of oriental art starts and stops with Asian porn classics.

The name Asia in Fusion says it all: a showcase of expatriate artists combining Western and Asian traditions to push cultural boundaries and promote Asian art. But while my limited experience with Asian culture makes me liable to misread their performances and the traditions they’re working within, it’s also an asset, since in many ways I’m the festival’s target audience. Yet to my untrained eyes, these fusion artists were often ineffective cultural ambassadors. I couldn’t figure out whether they were trying to break free of their roots or just re-map them according to their own experiences.

At first glance, the first billing, the Taikonauts, seemed to scream orientalism at its worst. The band, including members of both European and Asian descent, took the stage in kimonos that just dared me to call them out on their cross-cultural bullshit.

But a second later, the gong resonating throughout the room stopped me in my tracks. I had jumped to an unfair conclusion based on their costumes, but their music immediately redeemed them.

The thunderous opening sound gave way to a chugging rhythm, as the band’s two drummers plugged away at their Taiko drums. Their movements were startlingly graceful and possessed a remarkable sense of economy.

Gradually, the structural dynamics of the Taikonauts’ music became evident. As one drummer kept the insistent beat, the other wrung melodies from a single drum, pounding you into hypnosis. The rising intensity eventually culminated in a momentous peak, which pulled the two into raucous unison. Intermittently, this pattern of tension and release was pushed aside by the band’s flautist, whose placid, oriental-tinged melodies gave the audience a chance to breathe, if nothing else.

Their music is fiercely tribal – think Drum’s Not Dead-era Liars, stripped of the noise and enhanced by a technical virtuosity that held emotional resonance. And much like that album, the resulting sound is alien, breezily transcending the band’s homage to Japanese culture.

Yet the cultural debt, it seems, is only part of the story. Shortly after their segment, I caught up with one of the drummers – a petite, white woman with a slight East-Montreal accent. All folkloric genres share common undercurrents in their appeal to an instinctual sense of rhythm, she told me, and Taiko is no exception.

Surprisingly, however, she insisted that the use of Taiko drums in their performance was distinctly un-Japanese. But her claim is reductive: the Taikonauts’ performance was the only time during the night that I felt privy to a fresh insight into Asian culture. They may have breached tradition from a stylistic point of view, transposing jazz forms onto Asian sonics, yet their use of folk instruments framed their innovations within a specifically Asian tradition. The Taikonauts’ fusions were certainly more effective than those of the other artists that night, whose performances drew on old stereotypes or delved into esoteric improvisations with no references to Asian forms.

Shanghai poet Shin Uet Wang spent his stage time speaking in a third language – French, incidentally – contrasting the experience of exile to dreams and nature by way of unwieldy metaphors. I’d hoped that his impassioned performance could’ve made up for them; it didn’t.

But neither he nor the remaining two acts could take away from the Taikonauts’ fantastic show. I’d recommend you go see them, but Google insists they don’t exist. Still – if anything – the Taikonauts’ fleeting nature makes their culturally transcendental performance all the more memorable.

Visit accesasie.com for more information.

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