My old friend Ron Kensley used to say that there were two types of people in the world: people from Verdun, and people who wish they were from Verdun. I’ve often said the same thing about Montreal. Regardless, if you’re not from around here, you probably don’t know what a dépanneur is: a “dep” is a kind of all-purpose convenience store that sells everything from beer, wine, smokes, and lottery-tickets to milk, bread, hummus, cheese, toilet paper, toothpaste, and tampons. Since they sell basics people need and consume daily, there’s a dep on every street corner, and people tend to go to the dep closest to them.
But deps can’t be too close to each other. For instance, when Frank’s dep at the corner of Rue Roy and Avenue Laval burned down a few years ago, we switched to the Mastrocola mural dep at the corner of Avenue des Pins and Avenue de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. Took years, but the insurance claim finally came through for Frank; and, as a consequence, the dep at the corner of Roy and Laval is being rebuilt. This worries the owner of the Mastrocola mural dep. Big time. Because when deps are too close to each other, it’s a zero-sum game: your competitor’s gain is your loss and visa versa. The same is true, to a large extent, of gas stations. But it’s not true of bridal shops.
The vast majority of the bridal shops in Montreal are clustered together on a few blocks of Rue St-Hubert. Do they compete with each other? Sure. But the benefits of coöperation far outweigh the costs of competition if you’re running a bridal shop. If you live in Montreal, and you’re looking to buy a wedding dress, most people go to Rue St-Hubert first. And one of those bridal shops makes a sale, more often than not. Why waste hours and hours running around the city when you can find everything you’re looking for in one place?
If you’re an artist or a writer or a musician, you’re much more like a bridal shop owner than a dep owner. J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t steal my attention away from other fantasy writers when I was a teenager; he made me want to read more fantasy fiction. Tony Hoagland didn’t steal my attention away from other poets in my mid-twenties; he made me want to read more poetry. And Aaron Haspel and Nassim Nicholas Taleb didn’t steal my attention away from other aphorists in my thirties; they made me want to read more aphorisms. If you’re working within the same genre, the benefits of coöperating with other artists far outweigh the costs of competing with them.
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2016)
Getting sucked into the insanity of the 2016 election was like getting sucked into an ancient myth. One minute you’re living your life, next minute you’re a character in Homer’s Odyssey. Seriously, I feel like I should write a sequel to A. J. Jacobs’s The Year of Living Biblically (2007) entitled The Year of Living Homerically (2017). Were we not, like Odysseus’s men, turned into swine? Were we not, like Odysseus, bewitched? Did we not lose track of time, trumping till two, night after night? Waking up this past weekend, after a thoroughly unhealthy, year-long obsession with American politics, I felt like disoriented Odysseus, coming to his senses on the Island of Ogygia.
Oh Leonard, sweet poet, sweet priest, thanks for teaching me how to find reverence in an irreverent age; thanks for teaching me how to slow down and take the world seriously; and thanks for teaching me how to take off my shoes and remember, that this place, the place where you are, is always sacred ground.
Because he’s a household name they didn’t make, a self-made man who slipped in through the backdoor, crashed their private party, and made fools of them all. Because he’s a self-owned man who can’t be bought or sold on the auction blocks of L.A. Because he scrawled “OH CANADA, BITCHES!” (in permanent marker) onto The World Map of Hip-Hop. Because he tattooed “DRAKE WAS HERE” onto the industry’s sleeping fat ass. Because he proved, once and for all, that Toronto’s reputation for being the capital city of The Republic of Boring is about as outdated as Pluto’s reputation for being a planet, and Bill Cosby’s reputation for being a nice guy.
Having recently trolled the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and a certain Google co-founder, Kanye seems poised to become the Black Lives Matter movement’s answer to Donald Trump. Pathologically incapable of doing as he’s told, he’s made misogyny more plentiful on TLOP than anywhere else in his corpus. But as the recent father and apparently dedicated husband that he is, I don’t buy any of it. Misogyny is to Ye as homophobia was to Eminem in the early 00s, and now just as much as then people don’t seem to catch on. (Hint: it’s a middle finger to the coercively totalizing PC discourse of safe spaces and ‘n word’-style censorship by omission, a phenomenon marvelously satirized by the last season of South Park.) Here Kanye finds himself in decent form: he achieves sublimity at the outset by dint of some Chance grace, unleashes a moment of pure joy while sampling “Bam Bam” on “Famous”, and establishes his allegorical bona fides on “Wolves”. In contrast to the compressive tension which wound Yeezus into a sobering sonic boom, there is significant dithering here – and even a few forgettable tracks. Thankfully, Ye’s sense of humor thrives in the self-aware self-sendup “I Love Kanye”. And he’s not so much out of his mind as he is hell-bent on pretending that he is. In the alleged megalomaniac’s own words: “Everybody gon’ say something / I’d be worried if they said nothing.” B+
Hailed as manifestly id, Yeezy’s zero-fucks-given art album has plenty of ego – not to mention superego to spare, as when he convincingly fuses the political and the personal on “New Slaves” by calling out the CCA and then promising to fuck a shareholder’s spouse. Less a primitive attack than a chest-beating demonstration of the indomitable spirit he so luxuriously represents, this kind of sexual braggadocio is common through the album’s terse ten tracks but never feels trite. Abrasive at first blush, the strident production tricks gradually reveal an aesthetic which sonically unites 808s & Heartbreaks and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – except that the latter’s excesses and the former’s bathos are here muted in favor of darker, more confrontational, more contrarian excursions reified by the numerous descents into dancehall. As the rhythmic and melodic turns and screeching halts unravel, Justin Vernon’s signature Auto-Tuned pleas provide the link, like the Holy Ghost beckoning to Yeezus. A
Corporate corruption of the art world is an ever-present possibility, something to keep an eye on. But corporate sponsorship isn’t nearly as problematic as many seem to think it is. I suspect that we see corporate sponsorship as deeply and necessarily problematic because we’re still living in the shadow of the “art for art’s sake” movement, and many of the artists we know are living off of government grants. Regardless of the reason, it remains a thoroughly unrealistic standard. Rarely in history were artists independently wealthy; they’ve always had to pay the bills one way or another. During the Italian Renaissance, that meant painting religious themes for the Church or hagiographic shit for a Machiavellian prince; today, it might mean painting a mural which employs the colors found on some corporate logo. Is this really such a big deal? I think not. We’re part of the world, friends. There’s no getting around that. We’re all inextricably enmeshed in a thick web of relationships that enrich and delimit our action in the world. Now, as always, power and privilege afford a small minority of artists the freedom to do as they please. Some of these fortunate few produce timeless work, sublime work, but, let’s face it, most of them produce forgettable garbage. Art, like philosophy, is usually at its best and most vital when it’s in conversation with the messy world most of us live in.
During casting for The Godfather (1972), Francis Ford Coppola got into a huge fight with his producers over who to cast in the central role of Michael Corleone. It was an epic battle that nearly cost Coppola his funding. The producers wanted blonde, blue-eyed Robert Redford to play Michael Corleone, whilst Coppola insisted that this was absurd. Corleone’s character is Sicilian; and, as he put it, “we need to see the true face of Sicily on the screen.” And that meant someone who “looked the part”, someone whose appearance resembles that of the average Sicilian: black hair, olive skin, brown eyes. Eventually Coppola prevailed and cast Al Pacino in the role of Michael Corleone. That role made Pacino’s career what it is today.
Some say that the bizarre video for Röyksopp’s “What Else Is There?” was inspired by LSD. But the profoundly personal nature of the imagery suggests otherwise. Listen carefully, the sirens of solipsism sing softly and sweetly throughout. What’s more, the storytelling is way too lucid, and the richness of the detail smacks not of the psychedelic but of the idiosyncratic, the eccentric. If it was LSD-inspired, this video wouldn’t feel so forbidding and foreign. If it was LSD-inspired, surely we would’ve run into a few familiar faces among the freaks—you know, those poorly-paid extras that people the crowd scenes in the movie of your life, the usual suspects, those popular projections of the public mind, trusty testaments to our shared cultural imagination, other known as the Jungian archetypes. If this was LSD-inspired, the greasy fingerprints of our collective unconscious would be on every glassy frame. But they’re not. In fact, comforting clichés are few and far between in this filmic fantasy.
Watch it again if you must. Dust it for prints if you will. Doubt you’ll find anything that’ll interest the DEA, but you’ll find much that’ll interest those who place stock in the interpretation of dreams. What gives “What Else Is There?” its preternatural strangeness is that it consists, in large part, of raw dream data which has yet to be refined, filtered, processed, and rationalized. It’s a wild dream, a dream that managed, against all odds, to break free, to spring forth, straight out of a human mind, a wondrously whitmanesque mind. Witness the stunning specificity, the haunting lyrics, the absence of visual clichés. What can we say of the capacious soul that gave birth to this hypnotic hymn? This person contains multitudes.