Hi! If you’re new here, this is a thing I do every month, where I provide a roundup of all (or at least most) of my writing that has been published in the preceding month.
Explaining Nardwuar: How a former guerrilla journalist became an unlikely icon
(Paste, February 4, 2026)
By just about anyone’s standards, Nardwuar the Human Serviette had a most extraordinary year. As if throwing out the first pitch at a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field in June wasn’t enough—to say nothing of having Nike release a Nardwuar-themed sneaker collaboration in early December—the man born John Ruskin bid adieu to 2025 by receiving one of Canada’s highest civilian honors.
On December 31, Nardwuar was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada. This means that he is entitled to put the letters “C.M.” after his name, should he choose to do so. More importantly, it is formal recognition of his status as not just a Canadian cultural ambassador, but a global pop-culture figure of real significance. When speaking to Paste, Nardwuar admits that he doesn’t know who nominated him for Order of Canada membership, or how he ultimately got selected. “I can’t even explain myself, so I can’t imagine how people would explain me to the committee,” he says.
In truth, explaining Nardwuar is no easy task. His unlikely ascendance from local college-radio gadfly to revered celebrity interviewer is seemingly at odds with the fact that he comes across, at first glance, as strikingly weird, with his hyper-caffeinated demeanor and a personal style that raises pattern-clashing to an art form. You can’t not notice the guy, to say the least…
Zero Input Enclosure Movement challenges the idea of noise as unwanted sound
(Stir, February 5, 2026)
WHEN STIR gets AO Roberts on the phone to talk about Zero Input Enclosure Movement—an installation and performance piece that the Winnipeg-based multidisciplinary artist brings to Vancouver on Valentine’s Day—the first question is perhaps an obvious one: What the heck is a Zero Input Enclosure Movement, anyway?
“It is an eight-channel sound installation, at base,” Roberts says. “When you look at it, you would see eight pipes hanging on metal stands, and you would hear sounds being played through speakers that are installed inside the pipes. And then connected to that is a series of mixing boards and pedals, and they’re basically creating sounds that don’t exist.”
Roberts explains that the “zero input” part of the title (which we will henceforth shorten to ZIEM for the sake of our character count) refers to the fact that the sounds generated are fed back into the system, thus creating a feedback loop that evolves over time…
House of Folk revives a Canadian cultural touchstone at the Firehall
(Stir, February 6, 2026)
In the 1960s and early ’70s, Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood was inarguably the epicentre of Canadian counterculture. Oh, sure, here in Vancouver you might have been able to catch a double bill of the Seeds of Time and Mother Tucker’s Yellow Duck at the Retinal Circus, if you were hip enough to have read about it in the Georgia Straight beforehand. (And if you didn’t see it in person, you might have been lucky enough to watch it on TV after the fact.)
Yorkville, on the other hand, was where the bohemian action really was. Its legendary folk scene was a magnet, drawing artists from all over the country—including Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Neil Young, Ian and Sylvia, Murray McLauchlan, and Bruce Cockburn—to the stages of coffeehouses like the Penny Farthing, the Purple Onion, and the Riverboat.
Those venues are long gone now, replaced by the upscale consumerism of the so-called “Mink Mile”. For Vancouver theatre artist Tracey Power, that lamentable reality presented a practical hurdle when she set about creating a show set in Yorkville’s ’60s heyday…
(I also reviewed this show, and you can read my review here.)
Bilingual Montreal tunesmith Aleksi Campagne carries on a family tradition
(Stir, February 24, 2026)
SOMETIMES, THE BEST pathway to finding new inspiration is to tap into an older way of doing things. When Montreal’s Aleksi Campagne set out to write songs for the follow-up to his debut album, 2023’s For the Giving/Sans rien donner, he did what any other young tunesmith would do.
“Last year I did a month of creation to try to write songs and I decided to go into archives in Quebec to immerse myself in Quebec fiddling music, which was really interesting,” Campagne tells Stir in a telephone interview. “So I was learning fiddle tunes with the purpose of writing new songs.”
Okay, so maybe hitting the archives isn’t what most songwriters would do at all, but Campagne has already established himself as an artist uninterested in following the standard operating procedure…
John Lucas 
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