The age of national culture is over. Forget about tired nation-states, their ineffective governments and surly citizens. Great art is to be found in cities with strong flavours. At the top of my list is Chicago, just over an hour from Toronto by air, where a vibrant theatre scene is offering the best play I’ve seen in years.

The Chicago Shakespeare Theatre is located on Navy Pier, a Disneyesque promontory sticking out into Lake Michigan. Drawing eight million visitors a year to a children’s museum, a glittering midway, several bars and a slew of boat cruises, Navy Pier is the last place you’d expect to find a jewel of a classical theatre, but the six-storey playhouse with two performance spaces is world unto itself. The 500-seat main space is an ingenious blend of London’s Globe, with several stories of seats built in a steep U around the performance space, and a combination proscenium and thrust stage reminiscent of Canada’s Stratford Festival thearre. Theses are references only; the CST playhouse is an original. A surprisingly intimate space, even cosy, it is surrounded on three sides with glass reception areas offering a spectacular view of the waterfront.

During a brief visit to Chicago in early January, I saw Timothy Findlay’s play Elisabeth Rex, starring two Canadian Stratford stalwarts, Diane D’Aquila and Stephen Sutcliffe, directed by the CST’s founder and artistic director, Barbara Gaines. A magnificent play written by a great, late Canadian, it was staged with feeling and finesse, a breathtaking mixture of pathos and comedy. After opening in late November to rave reviews, it was selling out in the last weeks, meaning a Broadway transfer could well be the next stop. Such moves are common on the Chicago theatre scene, which boasts an excellent transfer record.

Set during the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, the play imagines the Queen descending into a draughty barn where Shakespeare and a few of his leading actors are spending the night. Elizabeth has condemned her former lover, the Early of Essex, to death for fomenting an uprising, and turns to the theatre crowd for distraction. Ned Lowenscraft, a gay actor who has spent a lifetime playing women’s roles, is days away from succumbing to venereal disease. Their night is a long argument about the true nature of womanhood and manliness, the issue resolved after an emotionally wrenching battle of wits. Between them, Shakespeare, in skullcap and bathrobe, is reading Plutarch and taking notes for his next play, Anthony and Cleopatra, which he is basing on the Queen’s tormented love life. Rich, imaginative and intense, the play is a masterpiece, and very well served by the theatre’s formidable production.

The Chicago Shakespeare Company is celebrating its quarter century anniversary this year, and much ground covered since Gaines launched the venture upstairs at the Red Lion Pub 25 years ago. I had a chat with creative producer Rick Boynton, one of four who make up the artistic staff of the company. A former actor and casting agent, Boynton acts as liaison between the artists and an accounting department with an annual budget of $13 million, half of which comes from box office. He also nurtures new projects, such as the Sondheim musical Follies, launched last fall to great acclaim.

How does a company with Shakespeare in the name dare programme a true blue American musical? “Our mandate is to do Shakespeare, his contemporaries and other plays inspired by his brilliance,” Boynton explained. The definition clearly works. Currently he’s developing a hip-hop adaptation called Othello the Remix for the Globe-to-Globe festival coming up in London, the only North American theatre invited to present work at an event featuring dozens of foreign-language productions of the bard’s plays.

Later this season, the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre is presenting a 3-actor rift on The Tempest, using masks along with 651 pounds of driftwood, 38 feet of chain, a gramophone and an ax, followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Timon of Athens.

Getting to Chicago is painless and, if you plan ahead, relatively cheap thanks to Porter Airlines which flies directly from Toronto’s City Airport (located on the island, a hop from downtown.)

New York it isn’t. I won’t say its better, as such claims are meaningless. But Chicago is definitely the American city I will turn to first for a fresh-water breath of creative air. Don’t get me started on the food, music and architecture. See for yourself, asap.

www.chicagoshakes.com

Marianne Ackerman is the publisher of The Rover.

There’s a great line in a George Walker play about growing older. A character, somebody’s crusty mother, remarks that as we age, we either get more like ourselves, or less. “I’m going for the more,” she snaps. Me too. Is there really any other choice?

Take for example, my tendency to live in the future, create a plan and head for it doggedly, paying only scant attention to the blur of time passing. For years, I’ve tried to change and failed, consoling myself that at least the flaw promotes productivity.

Recently, though, I’ve begun to see living for the future as a sophisticated form of procrastination. The present becomes a litany of small duties, leaving larger goals sitting on a far-off horizon. And so I resolve to …

But surely making New Years resolutions is a form of living in the future.

Last night my daughter told me she likes to spend New Year’s Eve (her favourite holiday) looking back on the past year, an act of consolidation. We’re spending the night together here in Vancouver, where she lives, so I’ll be perusing my agenda for evidence of where 2011 went.

Meanwhile, let me tell you about our plans for next Christmas. If all goes well, the theme will be Russian, the location, Berlin. My husband’s daughter Rhiannon has just accepted a position in Potsdam, on the outskirts of the German capital; her brother Rhys will be moving to London; Fiona (my daughter) and her husband are planning to spend a year in Berlin, living near her father. The Russian theme was proposed by Rhys, reached us by Skype from Johannesburg this year.

Theme Christmas started last year when all three of Gwyn’s children joined us for the holiday in Montreal: a vegan, vegetarian, a gluten-allergic vegetarian, a guy who doesn’t like fish, and me – the cook – who will eat and apparently cook anything. Other years I’ve offered a traditional meal with an elaborate chestnut loaf (glamourized turkey stuffing) for the vegetarians. Instead, Rhys declared we should wipe away the past and embrace somebody else’s tradition. The Greeks won out, and so we had three different kinds of Moussaka, surrounded by various Hellenic delicacies available right in Mile End.

Imposing a new layer of drama to Christmas is one way of papering over the cracks in a tradition that – as Rover writers have so ably described over the past week – is in serious need of makeover in our secular, multi-ethnic, consumption-obsessed culture and complicated blended families.

Still, certain old chestnuts remain, and I cherish them. For example: the Christmas fight. The moment when my husband blows up at me and declares a line has been crossed. It simmers during a meal, and erupts after we go to bed, when he announces he is sleeping on the couch. I follow him and the blanket into the living room, accuse him of wrecking Christmas, and drag him back to bed for a vigorous, whispered argument which ends in mutual derision and giggles.

Our most memorable Yuletide fight dates from 2004, La Roque Alric, France. It was New Years Eve. Gwyn, his daughter and I were sitting around the fire drinking wine, the two of them speaking Welsh (I haven’t managed to learn). When I slipped away to the bathroom and drew a hot bath, he was furious. The upshot was his proposal of marriage, followed by a champagne breakfast.

This year’s argument was over a (perhaps too lengthy) account at dinner of my travels in Poland, and how my “friendship” with a certain esteemed Polish theatre critic had inspired me to write plays about Quebec history. I told this story because we had a young woman of Polish origin present, and I wanted to draw her into the feast of anecdotes.

Later, I was criticized for having withheld important information during an otherwise quite happy courtship and marriage. “I’m sorry,” I pleaded. “I didn’t know literary influences were part of full disclosure.” The argument pretty well collapsed when I told him I’ve also won the Nobel Prize, but chose to keep it to myself, out of respect for the male ego.

Seriously, though, whether we realise it or not, we are all as 21^st Centurians, doomed to re-invent Christmas. That’s how the season survives. Wild, whacky, personality-driven family gatherings are essential fodder for novels, mid-life crises and other pivotal human events. They are all better in the telling than reality.

I was shocked and thrilled this year when Rhiannon (on Skype from London) told her father (in Welsh) that last year’s Greek Christmas was the best yet. I thought it had been a fantastical shambles, what with her protracted career crisis and a blow-up over her brother’s choice of a double-breasted suit jacket for a James Bond-themed birthday dinner at which the birthday boy chose to wear pyjamas and the menu was eggs benny. But that’s another story.

Well. Enough looking back on 2011.  Apparently the 12-course traditional Russian menu is completely vegetarian.

Marianne Ackerman intends to focus on creating revenue streams for Rover and completing two books in 2012. All donations to Rover sincerely appreciated. See www.roverarts.com.

If Vincent Van Gogh were alive and creating dance theatre in Montreal, he might well make work like Dave St. Pierre’s. Both artists display sure flashes of genius embedded in frantic energy, as well as a voracious will focused unflinchingly on the creation of terrible beauty.

Van Gogh painted virtually all of his masterpieces in a little more than two years, before a combination of wretched health and despair did him in. St. Pierre has been steamrolling European stages and packing Quebec theatres for seven, fighting physical ailments as serious as the painter’s. Fortunately, he lives in a time when medicine can work miracles. Diagnosed at 17 with cystic fibrosis, an incurable, degenerative lung disease, St. Pierre has worked against the clock for more than half his life, finally undergoing lung transplants two years ago.

During the brief rehearsal for Le cycle de la boucherie, currently playing at Théâtre La Chapelle, he was back in hospital again with an intestinal infection, directing actors with the help of video recordings. Hemorrhoids and shingles made his presence at rehearsals excruciating, but none of this backstage turmoil showed on the night I caught the performance.

As audience chatter settled into silence, St. Pierre was planted firmly in the centre of the packed audience. He began by holding auditions for nine actors seated on folding chairs arranged along the back wall of the stage, calling each forward, asking banal questions about their backgrounds. The painfully funny session seemed aimed at destroying their confidence and reducing expectations. Finally, having chosen his line-up, he orders them to strip naked.

Knowing it was all part of a rehearsed piece hardly dampened the frisson of shared embarrassment. Not only does St. Pierre break down the proverbial fourth wall separating audience from performance, he draws us into the action, needles us into taking the actors’ sides, sharing their discomfort. Of course, the cast follows his dictates and demands with superhuman ease. But so clever is the transition between rehearsal banality and polished performance that the imaginative leaps are easy to take.

St. Pierre struts around the stage, working cues from his laptop planted on a table to the side of the stage, reading from notes scribbled on his clipboard. A tiny, compact guy in black sneakers, non-descript pants, and a white shirt fastened with a bow tie, he exudes a kind of Chaplinesque charm, barking directions and opinions directly at actors or at the audience, with the house lights sometimes raised to full glare.

The heart of the piece consists of two scenes reworked from previous shows: one involving a mock tragedy set in a clownish McDo ad, the other a searing erotic pas de deux that turns bloody before it becomes tender.

A stunningly theatrical finale welds it all together. Le cycle de la boucherie has both the loose feeling of a work-in-progress and the dense aroma of something that has been simmering for ages.

At one level, it’s theatre about theatre, a dubious idea, but it does work. Following the journey is a riotous experience. Many moments veer off into cringe-territory, only to swing back and settle into awesome symmetry.

When St. Pierre’s troupe played Sadler’s Wells Dance Theatre in London this past summer, several British critics were horrified to be assaulted, pestered and driven to distraction by nude actors “waving their willies” in the faces of people sitting close to the stage. (The Telegraph gave it a zero star rating.) Others were blown away by innovation and sheer imaginative power.

Apart from a few bottles of ketchup splashed over the naked chest of a dancer playing Ronald McDonald’s death scene, there is nothing palpably disgusting or particularly offensive about this work; a binging scene with apples and fat girls is shockingly beautiful. Wild mood swings between hilarity, harangue and tenderness abound. Ultimately, this is a work of profound generosity, compassion and audacity.

At 37, St. Pierre has already joined a pantheon of boundary-breaking Québécois talents emerging from unassuming backgrounds to conquer world stages. In the past few years, he has won major prizes and accolades in Europe, a route paved by Marie Chouinard, Robert Lepage and Wajdi Mouawad, to name only a few.

Experiencing his work is exhilarating, breathtaking. And yet for anyone struggling to keep believing in theatre, it’s also disconcerting. Dave St. Pierre is, to be sure, inimitable. He raises the bar. His existence is bad news for timidity in our midst.

Le cycle de la boucherie continues at Théâtre La Chapelle through December 17. Additional performances have been added. Box office: 514-843-7738. For more information and to see video excerpts, go to www.lachapelle.org.

The Van Horne Terminal Iron Works is a graceful brick block dividing northern Mile End from the railroad tracks. It started out as the name of sculptor Glen LeMesurier’s storefront studio at 135 Van Horne, but has since become synonymous with the whole fabulous building, just east of avenue du Parc.

A creative home to a large number of very good Montreal artists, not to mention the best antique cum bric-a-brac store I’ve ever visited, it’s also the location of the second annual Rover Art Fair, taking place December 1-4. Fourteen artists are offering close to 100 works to the shopping public, a wide range of painting, art photography, sculpture, drawing, collage and marionettes. Proceeds split between the artists and Rover.

Why an art fair as fundraiser? The jaded might say it’s hard enough to run an online arts magazine like Rover without jumping into the murderous world of selling fine art with the hope of paying our bills.

Makes perfect sense to me. Rover should have two or three such events per year, curating and bringing to the public gems from the vast quantity of unsold artistic creation in this glorious city.

You’ve heard it said before: Montreal has more artists per square foot than any other city in Canada, and yet the local market for all this talent is woefully underdeveloped. The same 500 people are solicited over and over again, while a huge number of cultured, affluent people know only the names of those who’ve made it somewhere else. And yet, they (you, we) do love to dine out on the truism that Montreal is a hotbed of creativity.

Well, time to get specific. Meet an artist. Listen to his/her story. Look at the work. And if it hits you as a memorable must-have, take it home.

Check out the catalogue of work available at www.roverarts.com/artfair2011.

The opening night party is FRIDAY Dec 2nd, 6-10 p.m.: a catered reception created by the talented Rouge Lefebvre, Glen LeMesurier’s new flame.

Read the story of their romance at:  Love and art anchor the heart.

As artist studios go, Michael Harrington’s is vintage man-cave. An arch between two yet-to-be-gentrified houses on an unfashionable Ottawa street leads into a weedy courtyard. At the back, a cinderblock building on its last legs. The windowless two-room suite on the second floor is crammed with guitars on stands, various packing crates, iffy furnishings, paint-splatted pallets and other accoutrements of the working artist. What can’t be found in this studio is much art.

On the day I visited, he’d just received news that of ten new works he’d recently shipped off to Montreal’s Galerie de Bellefeuille, all but three had been sold, and the exhibition doesn’t formally open for three weeks. He was sweating over how to fill the order again.

In his mid-40s, Michael Harrington is in the enviable position of knowing that everything he paints will find a buyer, sooner rather than later. Part of what makes him good and popular is the absolute convergence of who he is and what he paints.

Tall, solidly-built with silver hair and broad shoulders, he’s wearing black rimmed glasses and a tweedy hat which he never takes off, but keeps readjusting throughout our conversation, running his fingers through his hair as though it’s falling out of place, which it isn’t. Guessing his line of work, you might say PR or advertising or sales, which in a sense it was until he turned to art full-time 12 years ago.

What he paints is mainly men, cars and flowers, an ever-shifting combination of the three in moonlit fields, fluorescent-lit parking lots, gaudy hotel rooms and lobbies. His colours are vibrant – red, yellow, a lot of black, leavened by a masterful use of light. The worlds he captures are edgy, mysterious; full of pathos, menace, sometimes humour.

Each painting could be a moment from a play in progress. You don’t know what came before, and wonder what will happen next. Although based in realism, an otherworldly atmosphere predominates. Full of grownup toys, interesting hats and costumes, they are manly pictures, risking the ridiculous, achingly beautiful and executed with immense conviction.

As it turns out, Harrington is articulate about the origins of this splendidly wrought vision of mankind. Born into a large, Irish-origin family, he spent five years of his childhood living in a hotel in Williamsburg, Ontario (pop. 547), which his father bought in hopes of breaking away from a 9-to-5 job. The town had once boasted an internationally-famous foot doctor, hence the existence of the hotel, but by the time the Harringtons came on the scene, he was gone. They had a two-channel TV and little outside entertainment apart from occasional paying guests. His father often took the boys to movies. He recalls seeing Five Easy Pieces when he was in grade six, a vivid introduction to the world he would someday paint.

In the mid-’80s, he did a stint at the Ontario College of Art, planning to become an editorial illustrator, and was published in GQ magazine at 26. Then the recession hit and his career collapsed, so he went to work for his father’s personnel agency.

“I met a lot of men older than me, out of work, a bit desperate,” he recalls. “My job was putting people together, figuring out what each side wanted. I’m all for feminism, it had to happen. But a certain kind of man easily becomes invisible. Take a guy who’s sold truck tires all his life and at 45 or 50 is out of work. Not everybody’s a winner, but that doesn’t mean they’re losers. They’re just getting by.”

After starting to paint seriously, he eased out of his day job gradually, which may be why the world of needy people seeking connection remained so strong. Gradually, he dropped female figures from his pictures, since their presence tended to focus discussion on gender issues, and that isn’t what he’s about.

His favourite author is Flannery O’Connor.

He regularly visits his father in Florida, a recurring landscape in his work.

“I heard somebody on the CBC the other day say that everything we do is about procreation,” he tells me, as we sit in the dark looking at images of old works on his computer screen. His paintings capture the anxiety behind that potential fact. They do it with humanity and brio.

Catch Michael Harrington’s next exhibition at Galerie de Bellefeuille (1367 Greene Ave.), beginning Nov. 26

His work can also be found at Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in Toronto and the Ellen Miller Gallery in Boston

For most of the 20th Century, authors were blissfully removed from the means of production. A vast enterprise of publishing and media undertook (and profited from) disseminating writing. Now all that’s collapsing. Expozine helps fill in the cracks in the architecture.

Founded by novelist, publisher (the pioneering zine Fish Piss figuring prominently), musician and Distroboto inventor Louis Rastelli, Expozine Montreal has grown into one of North America’s largest small press fairs. The tenth edition is happening this weekend, Nov. 25- 27.

This is artistic entrepreneurship of a high order. Hundreds of writers have gotten their start this way. The burgeoning genre of graphic novels was greatly nurtured by just such events. The romantic tradition of the gentleman/woman author who only emerges, like the proverbial groundhog, to catch a glimpse of its shadow at the book launch, is fast becoming a thing of the past. These days, a book launch is hardly more significant than the author’s birthday party – a gathering of friends, a private event.

Not so Expozine. Some 270 creators of publications ranging from books to zines and graphic novels (in English and French) will congregate in the cavernous basement of l’Église Saint-Enfant-Jésus (5037 St-Dominique St.), while thousands of shoppers will nudge their way through the packed event. Somewhere between a bazaar and a huge block party, Expozine attracts exhibitors from across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. It’s an important showcase for small publishers and self-published authors.

The tenth anniversary kicks off Friday night at a launch party hosted at the Drawn and Quarterly bookstore (211 Bernard St.), starting at 7 pm. The fair itself (which is free) is open from noon until 6 pm Saturday and Sunday. There’s a party Saturday night at Casa del Popolo (4873 St-Laurent Blvd.).

Expozine at l’Église Saint-Enfant-Jésus (5037 St-Dominique St.), Nov. 25- 27

For more information, check out the Expozine website at http://www.expozine.ca/en/

Like peering through the windows of a stylish bar on a Saturday night, Safari 1 invites viewers to become voyeurs. A seven-minute video co-directed by filmmaker Denys Arcand and visual artist Adad Hannah follows the dream-like actions of eight bar habitués, projected on six TV-sized screens suspended from the ceiling. In the centre, the bar itself – a flower-shaped, faux leopard skin sofa – remains empty.

Veteran filmmaker Arcand (The Decline of the American Empire, Jesus of Montreal) and 40-year-old video artist/photographer Hannah, whose growing slate of international clients includes Elton John, are among 20 Quebec artists from a wide variety of disciplines, including graphic art, performance and circus arts. Called Big Bang – to evoke the beginning of creation theory – the large-scale free exhibition at the Musée des beaux arts has Montreal’s arts media reaching for new superlatives.

Collaborations produced some of the most successful works, including 2000 and One Realities, a haunting score composed by Pierre Lapointe, played in a chapel-like room created by architect Jean Verville from 2,000 white plastic lawn chairs, stacked in columns. The centerpiece is a podium holding an elegant, leaf-green seat from French designer Patrick Joudin’s limited edition series, meant to evoke the solitary experience of a concert performer.

Museum director Nathalie Bondit says the project was designed to “revitalize the museum’s collection” by putting living artists to work. Some top names were given carte blanche, with one stipulation: that they select as their inspiration one of two items from the museum’s vast collection, most of it locked away in storerooms.

Choreographer Marie Chouinard’s meditative creation centres around a tiny Japanese incense box, set in the middle of a square of white sofa benches, with large photos of her dancers hung on four walls. The museum-goer’s comfort also inspired Collectif Rita. The design duo who used the colours and shapes of Lawren Harris’ oil-on-canvas masterpiece Morning, Lake Superior to create a bank of comfortable benches facing the painting.

Hannah and Arcand say the chance to meld their two very different styles was one they’d been trying to arrange for sometime. The process, Arcand says, was “refreshing.”

“Let’s say we both had to put a little water in our wine,” he quipped during the recent opening. The budget did not allow hiring professional actors, so they cast members of the museum’s administration staff, dressing them up in stylish ’80s stepping-out garb. Arcand abandoned his linear storyline for a series of tableaux vivants depicting themes of sex, drugs, AIDS and solitude.

The resulting short film, Safari 1, alternates between Hannah’s trademark static shots, focusing on performer/models who pose self-consciously, and action sequences including copulation, the sudden departure of a pensive woman, and a gay couple collapsing into a Pieta-like death scene.

Hannah, who often shoots with a handheld camera and no crew, says working with Arcand was a valuable learning experience. “For Denis, there’s always the ‘best shot,’ ” he says. “He knows how to bring out great performances. There was a lot of back-and-forth – let’s say productive friction.”

Big Bang continues at the Musée des beaux arts de Montréal (1380 Sherbrooke W.) until Jan. 22
Admission is free

What would possess an acclaimed art photographer to shoot his 80-year-old mother in the nude? Well, she wanted him to do it. Hounded him.

That’s the kind of woman Margaret Lunt is, an iconoclast and something of a show-off, as Don Winkler’s latest art documentary, Margaret & Evergon, so ably captures. After spending most of her life in Niagara Falls, Ontario, keeping up a small bungalow on a mainly quiet street, Mrs. Lunt accepted her 62-year-old son’s offer to come live with him in Montreal – the first time she and Evergon (Albert Lunt’s professional name) had co-habited in ages.

“Living with your muse de-muses her,” he admits, with a wry smile. “It was easier to be amused or even bemused when she was a few hours away.”

Nevertheless, the invitation – and obeying her request to pose – resulted in what critics refer to as series of “powerful” black and white photographs confronting the ample body of a weathered woman pushing against a wooden pillar, sprawled on a Recamier or seated facing the camera, draped in spotted skin several sizes too big. Breasts like beloved old handbags, cellulite clinging to gnarled thighs resembling collapsed bread dough – the portraits are unsparing, devoid of vanity. Perseverance personified. A lifetime of letting go. What’s left of Margaret Lunt after her clothes come off is a rare variety of confidence: she feels better than she looks, and is completely comfortable with the truth.

Winkler’s documentary starts out slowly, with an atmosphere that sets us up for a yawn-provoking home movie. We see son, mother and friends at her birthday party. The queen bee is taking full advantage, accepting her role as the ageless person, sexually neutral, a celebrity by association. No effort is taken to explain how famous her son is, or why. You have to know that Evergon has an international reputation (with over 1000 exhibitions) as a pioneer in new photographic techniques and subject matter, personal sexuality being a consistent motif in his work.

This film is mainly about Margaret. Only when the story moves forward into tales of Albert and his brother Ronnie’s youth is the true measure of this amazing woman revealed. The physical and mental abuse she suffered as part of a rigid patriarchal society. How readily she threw off her own deepest cultural conditioning when she discovered both sons were gay.

This is where Margaret & Evergon becomes great: in the quiet revelation of her efforts to let Ronnie and Albert be exactly who they are, and during a time and place where this was a revolutionary act. Sewing dresses for them, bailing teenage drag queens out of jail, opposing her homophobic husband – she spared no effort to let them live the life they craved.

As it turns out, taking her clothes off was an attention-getting device. Margaret Lunt has been naked since the day her father went after her child self with a two-by-four. Don Winkler’s remarkable film captures a lifetime of heroic shedding of skin. Evergon’s cryptic comments about mother as muse say everything. A many-sided gem of a film, not to be missed.

Margaret & Evergon will be shown in Montreal at the Image+Nation film festival on Saturday, Nov 5, 6 pm. Sève Cinema, 1400 de Maisonneuve West. Margaret Lunt, Evergon and Don Winkler will be present.

An exhibition of Evergon’s photographs is currently at Galerie Trois Points, 372 St. Catherine St. W, #520 through Nov 5.

Toronto International Art Fair: Donald Winkler, Margaret Lunt, and Evergon will at the Galérie Trois Points kiosque, # 903. Oct 29 and 30.   2:30 – 5 pm. There will be a discussion on Friday at 3:30. The film will be shown Saturday at 3 pm, discussion to follow. http://www.tiafair.com/

Full details: www.donaldwinkler.com

If an author’s life bears any relation to her writing, then even more so her death. In the case of Nelly Arcan, it is impossible to read this outstanding Quebecoise novelist’s final work without being aware at every turn that she took her own life days after completing the manuscript.

A powerful argument for suicide as a human right, Exit is also strangely life-affirming. Ordinarily, these contradictory positions could suffice as the motor of a plot. Arcan’s protagonist is the irascible, narcissistic Antoinette Beauchamp, who seeks strength and reason to live from within the depths of her own twisted psychology. Knowing that the young woman who wrote this outrageously beautiful, thoroughly original novel did not is, well, heartbreaking.

Cruel, even. So Exit and the late Nelly Arcan’s life are a package.

Reams of modern criticism hereby die too: there is no way this novel can be read or discussed without reference to the author’s private answer to “the one truly philosophical question,” as described by Camus. In literature, there is redemption. In life, not. But if literary achievement can stand in as an acceptable substitute for body and soul, Arcan will live for a very long time by virtue of four extraordinary novels: Putin (2001), Folle (2004), À ciel ouverte (2007) and now Paradis, clef en main (a stronger title in French).

A child born of artificial insemination, now in her early 30s, Antoinette Beauchamp has been paralyzed following a botched suicide attempt. Confined to a hospital bed, she is cared for by her fashionista mom who visits every day bringing jugs of vodka and orange juice so her daughter can sink into oblivion at will. Meanwhile, she tells her story (which we are reading) for posterity, every gesture followed by a surveillance camera her mother has set up in the hospital room.

While mother loves daughter resolutely, Antoinette loathes the woman who forced her into being and dreams of crushing her. Suicide is something of a family tradition. The narrator’s grandfather took his life in a conventional way for a psychologically coherent cause: grief.  Her uncle Léon did it for more complex, possibly temperamental reasons, a sense that life was a prison sentence, and enlisted the services of a professional agency called “Paradis clef en main.” Sensing a kindred spirit in the child Antoinette, he left her enough money to take the same road out should her desire for escape someday overcome the will to carry on.

Paradis clef en main is a bizarre enterprise run by a mysterious leader who employs a huge staff to put clients through a series of hoops designed to test their resolve to die. This is where the novel finds its energy, as the hapless Antoinette is forced to cope with quest-like tribulations in her pursuit of death. The resolution comes via highly cinematic scenes, worthy of Atom Egoyan, or John Greyson’s film treatment of Michel-Marc Bouchard’s play Les feuleuettes, where fantasy and reality collide.

In the end, though, I only thought of Nelly Arcan. How could she have had this book inside her, let it out, and still leave us?

Great beauty can be found in very dark places.

Marianne Ackerman’s latest novel is Piers’ Desire, published by McArthur & Co.

Peter Behrens is back in town this weekend to meet fans and read from his new novel, The O’Briens, at the Westmount Public Library.

Born and educated in Montreal (LCC, McGill and Concordia universities), Behrens received high praise and a Governor General’s Award for his 2006 novel, The Law of Dreams, about a young man’s torturous journey from famine-wracked Ireland to Montreal and beyond. He’s back this season with The O’Briens, a sequel of sorts, though a very different and considerably more ambitious novel.

Set in California, Western Canada and (mostly) Montreal, it follows Joe O’Brien, great grandson of Fergus from The Law of Dreams, who, as a willful teenager, leads his siblings out of dire circumstances in Pontiac County, Que. After making a fortune building railroads, he settles his brood in Westmount, where they cope with two world wars and the psychological scars.

The fictional family bears a strong resemblance to Behrens’s own. The names have not been changed; the cover is a family photo, a beach scene featuring the author’s lovely dark-haired mother and her sisters. The protagonist is based on his grandfather, a man he remembers as a powerful if troubled patriarch.

So what happens when a writer weaves blood secrets into fiction? In the late 19th century, Thomas Mann pestered family and friends for their recipes, sayings, banking details in order to write his masterful family saga The Buddenbrooks, published when he was only 25. Residents of the north German town of Lübeck were scandalized to see themselves, warts and all, in print, but the literary success set Mann on his way to the Nobel Prize. Having read both The Buddenbrooks and The O’Briens this summer, I can affirm they are definitely in the same league – great, juicy tales that will make you take a second look at annoying relatives. They are, after all, part of the big picture, otherwise known as history and destiny.

Behrens is 56. The relatives he writes about are dead, although he has 17 cousins living in Montreal who do remember their common elders. The delay was accidental, he says. A Hollywood screenplay writer for many years, he worked on The O’Briens off and on for ages, setting it aside to write The Law of Dreams as a way of investigating his characters’ origins. The O’Briens is chiefly concerned with how characters move, think and feel. History is context, as is social circumstance.

The book is, however, an important corrective to our collective consciousness. Until now, Irish Montreal has usually been depicted in literature as a working-class community, with the Scottish closely associated with wealth. Behrens’s Irish world is one of debutantes, mansions and status anxiety.

“Our little corner of the city was peculiar in that we were much closer to French Quebec than any other group,” he says. “My mother attended a convent school where she learned French and made lifelong friends with francophone girls. I can’t claim she was bilingual. She would open a conversation in French but her friends always spoke to her in English. That’s just the way it was in those days.” Religion was the meeting ground, intermarriage and integration, common. Says Behrens, “I’ve never met a Quebecer who didn’t have at least one Irish ancestor.”

A rebel from an early age, he shocked his parents by taking off for Alberta to work on a cattle ranch. Tall, slim, with fine grey hair, he still has something of the cowhand’s gait, his spoken English bearing traces of displacement. Studying French in high school convinced him he had no aptitude for languages, but working in Alberta with a unilingual cowboy from the Beauce proved otherwise. Living in California, he hired a tutor and caught up on the grammar. As a result, he’s delighted to speak French with a mystifying range of accent.

These days, the author, his wife and young son spend winter in small-town Texas and summers in Maine, where he enjoyed many sailing seasons as a youth. He was back in Montreal for the Irish Studies conference held at Concordia, then headed out a cross-country promotional tour.

A truly wonderful writer who will no doubt be dominating the literary award nomination lists this fall, Peter Behrens will be at the Westmount Public Library, on Saturday, Sept. 24 from 3 p.m. Signed copies of The O’Briens will be available. Refreshments will be served.

First published in The Gazette, July 22. Read Marianne Ackerman’s column Micro Montreal on page two of The Gazette, every fourth Friday.

We’ve said it before and let’s say it again: Montreal is the capital of creative ideas. Latest proof: success of this year’s Infringement Festival in Buffalo, USA. A spin-off of our own great event!

This, from the Buffalo News, July 29:

In 2004, when a small group of countercultural malcontents banded together in Montreal to launch the world’s first Infringement Festival, they were making a bold statement against the status quo.

The more visionary among them might have suspected that their radically democratic, all-inclusive experiment – launched in response to the more staid Montreal Fringe Festival and dubbed “a critical response to the oppressive neoliberal worldview” – might find acolytes outside of Quebec.

But certainly no one predicted that the city of Buffalo, where an impressive fleet of cultural enterprises large and small has long been flying beneath the national radar, would develop that seed into the largest of five Infringement fests in North America.

And this year, Buffalo’s seventh version of the mammoth affair, which got started on Thursday night, is one for the ages. By the estimation of the event’s increasingly harried team of organizers, this year’s Infringement Fest will feature 1,200 separate performances in 52 venues across 11 days. These include 190 musical acts, 24 film and video productions, 20 dance troupes or individual dancers, 35 separate theater productions and 27 poetry and spoken word events.

The fest has come a stunning distance since 2005, when the Montreal group Car Stories, with the help of early Infringement proponent and Subversive Theatre founder Kurt Schneiderman, launched Buffalo’s first modest version of the event.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to overstate the significance of Infringement in revealing the true depth and variety of Buffalo’s many artistic communities and enterprises – and thereby feeding those communities with the concentrated esteem of their city.

In the recent debates over cultural funding in Erie County, we’ve heard the name of perhaps some two dozen arts organizations large or established enough to rise to the attention of the Western New York populace. But there are many orders of magnitude, organizations, artists and mini-collaborations in the region’s sprawling creative underground which – by virtue of their small size, occasionally unorthodox subject matter or refusal to play by the rules of traditional art-commerce – have remained largely unsung outside of small circles of followers.

These groups and individuals are on full and glorious display during the Infringement Festival, which is what lends the festival its unique and indispensable power as a city-defining, culture-shifting venture. They have names like Moss of Ancients, Crabmeat Thompson, the Boom Boom Betties, the Zombettes and Spider Goat. Their disciplines range from straight-up rock ‘n’ roll to rap-punk fusion, traditional graphite-on-paper sketching to interactive hula-hoop instruction.

That head-spinning range, along with the serious dedication of the festival’s creators and organizers, unveils a thriving artistic underground that cities twice Buffalo’s size would be hard pressed to reckon with.

This year, the fest’s constantly rotating and expanding team of organizers includes, but is not nearly limited to: music booker Curt Rotterdam; all-around Infringement PR guru and Filigrees Gallery & Boutique owner Melissa Campbell; dance coordinator Leslie Fineberg; web dude Dave Pape; theater coordinator John Shotwell; visual art coordinator Cat McCarthy; film and media coordinator and musician/poet Geoffrey Peters; and legions of others.

Discussions of the quality of work in the festival are another matter entirely – but suffice it to say that the experimental, hit-and-miss nature of Infringement is part of what lends it its power.

And all of that is what makes the Infringement Fest not only the largest, longest and coolest arts festival in our expansive region, but one of the most important cultural developments the city has seen in the past decade.

For more about the line-up, go to Buffalo News.

Read Jason McLean’s account of his journey to Buffalo here.

Shortly after I voted, the doorbell rang. It was a gentleman about my age, dressed in a suit and tie, bearing NDP pamphlets.  We fell into conversation, in French, naturally.

Only when I started saying how great it would be, as an Anglophone Quebecer, to have a vote that counts, did he switch into English – his first language too.

“Take this for what it’s worth,” he said, lowering his voice. “But it’s looking like Madame Laverdière might win. She wasn’t expecting to have to move to Ottawa.”

Aye, there’s the rub for Montrealers who dabble in federal politics. Hélène Laverdière did indeed topple Bloc Québecois leader Gilles Duceppe in Laurier-Sainte-Maire, and now she has to leave town. Yikes!

Much has already been said and written about the source of Jack Layton’s sudden popularity in Quebec. How he’s from Hudson, speaks French and of course has handed around broad hints about a possible resurgence of interest in constitutional reform. (As if.)

He’s a great guy, no doubt about it. But I have a strong feeling Stephen Harper had more to do with the NDP wave in Quebec than the affable leftish leader, or his policies.

Francophone Quebecers are extremely canny voters who can sniff out self-interest quicker than people in any other part of Canada. Harper’s tough love approach signalled an end to the gravy train politics that has benefited this province so handily for decades. A Liberal leader would have tossed a hockey arena at Quebec City, no problem. But Harper’s had his fingers burned here a few times. He made it clear he won’t risk a dime in hopes of winning seats.

That was bad news for francophone voters, who are used to being courted in style. Thoughts of a majority leader’s steely-eyed gaze shifting right past Bloc members in the House of Commons was enough to make them realise they’d better give up on the unsubtle us-first Bloc appeal. Better find a new big love, fast.

I feel for Mme Laverdière, and for the NDP, a party that will be changed over the next few years beyond anyone’s imagination.

But I’m very happy Quebec is back in the news, above the fold. If there’s one thing this province cannot abide, it’s the loss of limelight. Thomas (Outremont) Mulcair as finance critic? Works for me, and for our indépendentiste neighbours.

Amitav Ghosh up close: a memorable experience, even with a couple of hundred other people in the room, the backs of their heads obscuring sight lines. An occasional glimpse of his ruddy face, black-rimmed glasses and moon white hair sufficed.

What matters, of course, is what he had to say, the clarity of his high-pitched, almost girlish voice, warm and enthusiastic, even when he was rubbing the guilt complex those of us from the white first world are often invited to share. What makes these Blue Met onstage interviews so much better than edited radio is the roughness of it all. The way conversation bobs along, a full room watching two men in a small boat paddling while facing sideways.

Speaking of Ghosh’s most recent novel, Sea of Poppies, moderator Noah Richler remarked upon the richness of the language, so many unfamiliar words. Sixty-percent of them can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, the author said. We never did find out about the other 40, but the remark led to a fascinating discussion of how migrants embrace and change the language of their adopted lands, how the ever-refined rules of grammar may have stunted the English language for native users, leaving the way open for speakers in former colonies (like India) to write with so much more freedom and invention.

The subject turned to the opium trade, backbone of British imperialism, how the flow of drugs from India to China split a notoriously closed society open. Sanctioned by Adam Smith and Protestant religious ideology, it was hugely destructive to millions of people. “Walk out of this building, up the street and you’ll find an international bank (ING) that wouldn’t exist without the opium trade.” He read a passage from his book about workers stamping the black liquid, their faces dazed by the drug, a chilling moment.

Ghosh admitted he was personally shocked to discover all of this in the course of his research for the novel, felt he should have known it already, from his wide reading of history. But the true extent of the trade had not occurred to him before.

Were you not angry? Noah asked. He was, but his thoroughly literary imagination led him beyond anger, on into a story he says will stretch into three volumes, at least. Some readers said the ending of Sea of Poppies felt unfinished. “I agree with them,” he said. “I wanted to get back to these people myself, but at the moment, the story ended itself. I couldn’t go on.”

Quoting James Joyce, he said a writer needs silence, exile and cunning.

On the future on Indian writing, he said he didn’t know anything about it, except for his own work and the work of his friends. His generation. “We read each others books, and help each other. That’s about all I know.”

Walking out into the night, past the opium bank, road works and traffic jams, I was inspired. And quite moved by the idea of writers supporting each other.

PS. A note to those hundred or so people who turned out for Imaginez Montréal at Blue Met on Friday night, sorry we were not able to include the selection from Rawi Hage’s novel Cockroach, as promised on posters splashed around town and on the Rover website. False advertising, mea cupla, though not our fault.

At 2 pm on the day of the event, the author noticed his photo had been used in Blue Met’s ads for the event, and was so steamed he insisted we withdraw his material.

So we did, and the show went on successfully without him.

For a complete list of 24 other writers who did participate — and as far as I can tell, were happy to be part of a collective action on the part of Montreal fiction — as well as a description of their books, click here.

What if suddenly a whole pack of potential actors and dancers ran away with the circus? As a matter of fact, this is what’s happened in Quebec.

Don’t count on me for a studious history lesson, but it does seem as if the phenomenally internationally successful Cirque du Soleil now has a substantial fleet of smaller craft bobbing in its wake. Circus is now a bona fide funding category in the arts bureaucracy, a sure sign of legitimacy in Quebec.

These are morning after thoughts to be sure. While I was watching Patrick Léonard’s fabulous solo show Patinoire at Théâtre La Chapelle, all I could do was grip my seat, wondering when the dare-devil was going to topple and be hauled off-stage on a stretcher. Léonard’s act may not be as dangerous as it looks, but there was a palpable sense of fear in the opening night audience.

A member of the celebrated cirque troupe Les 7 doigts de la main, Léonard started out by explaining he’d been working up to a solo show for years, and so hoped he could pull it off. The evening started low-key, with the performer in cords and t-shirt assembling the most ordinary of props – a collapsible table, gymnasium chair, a hodgepodge of ancient stereo speakers connected to a turntable and amp. Just the kind of stuff you’d expect to find in an ‘80s basement, which is where the piece seemed to be set, in the basement of Léonard’s mind.

What happened after that was pure, exhilarating exhibitionism, stunts, tricks, sleight of hand galore, the performer always keeping eye contact with his audience. The repertoire is rough, zany, inventive and refreshingly devoid of slick. In fact, the feeling of choreographed improvisation adds to the tension. When I wasn’t worrying about bodily injury, I was afraid he’d run out of ideas and just stand there, sobbing, and we’d all feel so bad. Such is the intensity of the performer’s need to dazzle, you get completely caught up in his desperation, his need to stretch every muscle on behalf of the show.

Agreed, the circus has been declared an art. Maybe next, an Olympic sport. Watching this extraordinary effort, I felt like I was watching the actor, Everyman, naked. So this is what propels the theatre artist, a raw need to be seen and dazzle? No secondary agenda such as story-telling or soul-searching. Just us and him. A night to remember.

Patinoire continues at Théâtre la Chapelle, 3700 St. Dominique St., through April 30.

Does New York know something about Montreal we don’t? Or is AEG Live in for a shock after booking a writer into the 1441-seat Théâtre Maisonneuve? Okay, it’s David Sedaris, but …

The best-selling essayist, humourist and popular radio personality has a big following on This American Life, available via CBC. But an English-speaking literary personality at Place des Arts?

Reached by phone, Sam Kinken, the event’s New York-based producer, sounded calm and confident about the prospect of finding upwards to 1441 people paying $48 or $68 to meet Sedaris live on May 4, reading from published work and new material. That’s the way he works, says Kinken. “He tries stuff out on audiences, then hones it according to whether people laugh at the right place, or don’t.”

Kinken has visited Montreal for the Just for Laughs Festival and says he found the city is an open, cultured place.

Though AEG Live’s main interest is rock and pop music, the company also handles Leonard Cohen and Céline Dion in Los Vegas, two mega-stars with close associations to Montreal. Those names could explain why our city might have earned a more Anglo image abroad than it holds here. At least, an image other than the one we hold here, based on conditions in the local theatre and literary scenes.

“David has done very well in Canada,” Kinken added. “He played Massey Hall (Toronto) and drew a great crowd.” Also, there’s a bit of a connection, Kinken added. He spent quality time living in Paris, often writes about the French and “still maintains a home in France.

“We’re not heavily chasing the French audience in Montreal. But we’re not neglecting them either.”

At this point in the conversation, I’m thinking about people who book a trip to France, then decide to tack on Italy and Spain, because they are so close. From a distance, foreign places seem relatively manageable. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible a company that calls itself “a world leader in creating and presenting ‘culturetainment’”, whose clients also include King Tut and Cleopatra, will actually prove a point that isn’t obvious to those of us on the ground.

Although he’s 55, Sedaris seems of a younger generation, a stylist and personality who grasped early on that today’s writer is actually in competition with his or her own books. Meaning that a Booker or a Giller prize guarantees the winning book will sell, but does relatively little for the next one. Unless, that is, the author has a public life as well as a best-selling book.

Sedaris is a performer as well as a writer, the two being quite distinct vocations. When you open up one of his books, his voice leaps off the page. His essays are finely-crafted tales posing as autobiography, persona and authorial voice, indistinguishable. (When You Are Engulfed in Flames is one of my favourites, both content and title. I keep Sedaris by the bed in case other tomes flag.)

The marketing approach to his appearance is also unusual. Last November, he did a free reading at Paragraph Bookstore, an event organised after his promoters had planned the Place des Arts gig. Paragraph manager Peter Mandelos says it was one of the best-attended events ever held in the store, something like 350 people present, many lining up outside. The store closed officially at 9 pm but Mandelos kept the doors open until 12:30, since Sedaris insisted on speaking personally to everyone present.

“I was amazed by the genius of this idea,” he says. “We could have filled a hall of 5-600 people. But he purposely chose to leave people wanting more. I’m amazed at how simple the idea was. No one else has done it.”

Kinken says the promotion budget for the May 4 event is on the modest side. “In today’s media world, it’s not easy to get a message out. We don’t have a huge budget, so we’re doing a lot by internet.”

No doubt the author’s new friends from the Paragraph up-close encounter will be back, with friends in tow. And if Sedaris at PdA is a hit, surely other publishers who routinely strike Montreal off their promotional tours will take note, and stop writing Montreal off.

Maybe it isn’t the book that’s dying. Maybe the problem lies elsewhere.

Tickets are $68 and $48. Paragraph will be selling books after the event and David Sedaris will be signing. For tickets, call 514-842-2112 or visit the Place des Arts site.

Few theatrical events in recent memory have demonstrated the power to divide audiences quite like Schwartz’s The Musical, currently onstage at the Centaur. How much you like it – or don’t – tells a lot about who you are: how hip, how generous, how hungry for local laughs. 

First off the mark was The Charlebois Post or Charpo, as the popular blog site calls itself, with a satirical put-down rifting on Bowser and Blue’s doggerel, posted a scant two hours after the singing ended on opening night. Then came The Globe and Mail, a withering dismissal by Montreal freelance arts writer Matthew Hays, which began by questioning whether the idea had been a good one from the get-go. Hays took particular issue with the deluge of old jokes and a dancing pickle number.

The script was based on a short book about the deli’s history by Gazette columnist Bill Brownstein, and to no one’s surprise, Gazette’s theatre critic Pat Donnelly went gaga. But (Office palship aside, Pat has always had a soft spot in her head for big, blowsy community theatre.) After observing it “often sounds like an over-the-top commercial for a venerable local eating establishment,” she declared the show “easily the most impressive original creation within the musical comedy genre that has emerged from within Montreal’s anglophone theatre community in decades.” How these two opinions could co-exist in a single review is anybody’s guess.

Rover’s young, hip critic James Gartler was charitably positive, calling it Montreal’s “long overdue love-in.”

One fact is indisputable: this show has already found an audience. Scarcely a week after opening, the first run was sold out and an extension to May 1 added. Schwartz’s The Musical, like Celine’s love, will live on. And no doubt do wonders for the Centaur’s pesky deficit, which is a good thing.

What’s great about Schwartz’s The Musical is precisely what is real, namely the story and characters. The founder, Ruben, a penniless refugee who opens the doors in 1928, dies heirless and leaves it to his friend, an opera singer, who passes it on to a French woman, who in the late nineties, hands it over to her accountant. No wonder composers George Bowser and Rick Blue stuck close to historical facts. It is a fairly remarkable tale. And the question of why you can’t get Schwartz’s smoked meat everywhere is a very good question.

As for the parts they made up, a love triangle between a dishy Torontonian bent on buying the place, her sharky boyfriend/backer and the waiter she falls for, this story has as much potential as any other love story in a musical. It just needs more obstacles in the second act, a believable, earned ending, and a serious trim of the fat.

Stephanie Martin is quite wonderful as Amber, the would-be buyer. Her solo “What’s Toronto Got?” is the best song in the show, and a dangerously credible summary of what that other city has to boast about. A lot! If only Act Two came back with “What’s Montreal Got?” her decision to stay might seem reasonable.

Although the action is supposedly set in 1998, it feels more like the seventies. I lived three blocks from the Main in those days (still do), and can testify that punks, Goths and dealers outnumbered even the panhandlers, but there’s scant evidence of youthful street culture in designer John Dinning’ world.  He must have arrived by taxi on a Sunday, and never waited in line.

I’ll leave it to Jewish observers to say whether a tune about anti-Semitism called “They Kicked Us Out” is tasteless or funny. The choreography ranges from bunny hop to Hava Nagila parody and dash of the swim, but otherwise the acting/singing cast is first-rate, managing a dizzying variety of well-observed roles.

With all its faults, Schwartz’s The Musical has energy, humour and heart. The first act is strong, the second, wobbly, as if the writers started running out of gas and forgot all about what they’d set up in the first place. If only Centaur resists being content with local box office success, this show could be so much better. If you’re hungry for theatre that talks about who we are, what we’ve lived collectively, this one will fill the hollow. Cutting edge it isn’t. Prepare to groan and giggle.

Should you line up for a ticket? In the best of possible worlds, I’d say wait for the remount.

If there’s any justice in our fair city, this zany rough diamond will go through the normal process of revision that any work of ambition and potential requires, then re-emerge as a first-rate piece of musical theatre, ready to amuse audiences elsewhere and do wonders for Montreal’s image in the Rest of Canada. Like, say The Drowsey Chaperone, a Toronto musical that started out as a lark, made it to Broadway and won a Tony.

But if the past is any guide, this show will roll on more or less as is until every last West Islander has had a good guffaw, then maybe take to the road and suffer through a similar taste test in Toronto, with perhaps greater consequence. Or, the half million Anglos who’ve left Quebec in the last three decades will like it as much as Centaur’s audience, and I’ll be wearing egg lipstick.

Schwartz’s The Musical, at Centaur Theatre until May 1. Box office 514-288-3161.

Is the Quartier des spectacles a Disneyland theme park or a brave new bid to solidify Montreal’s status as the cultural capital of Canada? NTS chief Simon Brault and architect Witold Rybczynski joined Nathalie Petrowski for a lively conversation about the subject at the Segal on Wednesday. Billed as a debate, it wasn’t, but interesting on many levels nonetheless.

A collaboration involving The Walrus, McGill University, TD Bank and Segal Centre, it was announced as the first of an annual event by Walrus co-publisher Shelly Ambrose, who promised the series will stay away from politics, focusing instead on other important subjects. (Hey, Shelly! Politics is what we do here.) One can sympathise with her trepidation, but maybe a little more controversy would be good. The morning after, I couldn’t remember who took which side. Fortunately, I’d taken notes.

Rybczynski, McGill grad and former prof, turned bestselling author of works about architecture (Home: A Short History of an Idea), came out against social planning in culture, upholding the Jacobsian generalisation that cities are best left finding their own way; too much planning can kill the organic evolution of urban life. Brault, author of No Culture, No Future, clearly believes massive government intervention in the downtown core will be a boon to both artists and tourism.

Soft on facts and focus, the conversation sparked when Rybcznski announced Montreal is the fourth most important city in the world in terms of performing and visual arts. Culturally, we’re number 17, just behind (good company) Barcelona. Overall, we’re 31, ahead of Geneva and Munich. Toronto ranked 14 overall. These rankings come from reams of data he dipped into as editorial advisor on a piece about cities published by the review Foreign Policy. He also mentioned Montreal is a net exporter of cultural product, while Toronto is a net importer. Unclear as to where this info came from.

Montreal is in an awkward position, he said. Culturally speaking, the city is very successful.  “We’ve done it. The point is, you don’t want to screw it up.”

Brault cast doubts on the whole notion of rankings, saying they operate counter to originality, which is the most important quality for any city hoping to exercise drawing power on visitors.

Inevitably, the conversation turned to Richard Florida, the American architect/author whose big idea – that a city’s “cultural class” rules – has firmly ensconced him on the talk-show circuit of populist urban thinkers. (He now lives in Toronto.) Florida has city planners worrying about their gay and bohemian index, etc., a trend both debaters dismissed as misguided.

“You cannot create a powerful underground scene in a city like Calgary,” Rybczynski declared, without explaining where – if anywhere – a powerful underground scene has ever been created. Montreal definitely has one, they agreed, and is happy to coast on its success whenever possible.

Brault said trying to tie culture to economic development is a dubious idea. “We know cultural assets and activity provide great social benefits, but will they produce economic development? That’s not obvious.”

Inevitably, somebody mentioned Arcade Fire. The context was their hit album, The Suburbs, which one member of the audience suggested was a nod to those who live in the 450 area code regions, and are usually forgotten when it comes to talk of city culture. How to get these people to come downtown occupied a goodly part of the chat. More parking and fast trains would help. One 40-year resident of the ‘burbs said he and his wife avail themselves of cultural offerings on a regular basis, stepping out locally about 24 times a year, and making the same number of sorties into the city centre. Admirable record, audience-wide sigh.

As moderator, TV personality and La Presse columnist Nathalie Petrowski did double duty, silencing ramblers and tossing in her own trenchant opinions. Although no one had argued otherwise, she insisted artists need and deserve subsidies for doing what they do. Her most provocative comment was a throw-away line. “Montreal is a bilingual city,” she said. “A bilingual city like Montreal…” Technically speaking, it is not, although we know this to be true and obvious. Still, it’s nice to hear a boomer francophone say it out loud without implying the sky is falling. But then the event wasn’t about politics, so stop me.

Two comments from the floor hinted at other buried issues that didn’t quite make it into the discussion. Visibility and cost.  Just where is the Quartier des Spectacles? one woman asked. (It’s a rectangle between Sherbooke St., de Maisonneuve, Berri and City Councillors.) Someone mentioned the cost at $1.6ish million. Brault, who surely knows better, muttered, “Well, it’s a little more than that.”

Indeed. The budget is $1.9 billion, to be spent by 2025. Expenditures to date have already weighed in at about double the original estimate.

Idea for next year’s debate: The Cultural Capital of Canada in the 21st Century: Montreal or Toronto? I’d definitely pay to hear that one thrashed out.

So, the leader of the Liberal Party decides to kick off his campaign in Mile End. Nine a.m., Sunday morning at Café Olimpico, Michael Ignatieff and a crowd of handlers/friends weren’t exactly lining up for latte.

Clocking the swarm of suits milling around outside the door, an innocent passer-by might have figured a Mafioso funeral. Inside it was standing room only.

First child of the campaign kissed was the son of Daniel Sanger, journalist turned political attaché for Plateau Mont-Royal Mayor Luc Ferendez, who was not (to my knowledge) present. Although our councillor Alex Norris was, taking time to chat with arrondissement residents, discretely pointing out to a group of us standing on sidelines that he’s a life-long NDP supporter. Never mind, there were a few of those present.

Did Ignatieff’s appearance on the corner of Waverly and St. Viateur win him any votes? Fewer, I suspect, that the editorial in Saturday’s Globe and Mail advising us not to hold the candidate’s brainpower against him. “No one would argue that Mr. Ignatieff’s achievements entitle him to ride a howdah to 24 Sussex Drive, whereby he would descend to take up his seat as prime minister. But at the same time, they should not be thrown in his face in the form of corrosive personal attacks.”

Indeed, the Conservatives’ extremely tiresome attack ads, “He didn’t come back for you.” Back from where? The dead? Anybody who spends five years as an opposition member of parliament has no past, Steve. He’s one of the boys from the Hill. Harvard? Get over it.

Five years ago, when I first glimpsed the man himself up reasonably close, at the Liberal Leadership convention, I found him unctuous and far less interesting than the francophone with the excellent green energy policy. So don’t ask me to predict who will or will not succeed in politics.

Since then, I’ve mainly taken note of certain inane pronouncements on relatively trivial issues for which he obviously doesn’t give a toss. He is not a natural street politician, Mr. Ignatieff. Not a natural public kisser. But all of these issues are insignificant next to the scandal of Harper’s thoroughly cynical lunge at entrenching his party in power, no matter what. The blizzard of pre-campaign TV ads touting expenditures of our money on basic necessities, $26 million? A tweet or two would have been more than enough.

Politicians get paid and a pension for doing their job. They get elected for having good ideas, showing leadership.

As for Harper’s legendary financial acumen, the majority of voters are personally immune to the big issue called “the economy”, except inasmuch as we are following the herd, risking big money on the stock market or slapping the credit card down too often. In which case, the solutions have nothing to do with federal politics, everything to do with nebulous things like what other people are doing, age, opportunity.

When we do respond to predictions about “the economy”, we are responding to an abstraction: is the big picture likely to get better or worse? At present, the big picture seems relatively rosy. Meaning we can certainly afford a less boring Prime Minister than the one we had last week.

In an ideal world, all three national political parties would be led by someone younger, an accomplished Gen Xer for whom the good old days ended with the dot com bust.

In the meantime, I’m thinking maybe it’s time to take a chance on nuance. Accomplishment. After five years with the high school principal in charge, a little arrogance might be just the thing. Which is why I tossed the Sunday Times aside and made my way to Open-da-nuit on a sunny March morning. Just to see the well-dressed professor kiss those kids.

At key moments in art, it’s all about real estate. While performance decamps to Quartier des spectacles, a new visual arts scene pops up across the Ville Marie Expressway, first DHC/ART in Old Montreal, then Parisian Laundry on St. Antoine. Now Galerie Division’s new mega-project in Griffintown could lift Montreal’s contemporary art scene into the clouds.

A cavernous factory of the corner of William and Canning Streets is the site of Divison’s new headquarters, expected to open (at least part of it) this summer. The facility will include a 22,000-square foot ground floor space to be used for large-scale events and exhibitions, with gallery quarters and offices upstairs. Division’s co-director Hugues Charbonneau would like to keep the news under wraps until a propitious moment for announcement presents itself, but details keep leaking out. Not to mention dust and other signs of construction.

The dean of contemporary art, René Blouin will be moving there, leaving a noticeable hole in the Belgo Building, for so many years a hub of the Montreal gallery scene. Lately, though, the Belgo is looking decidedly shabby, as though it may have weathered one too many nuits blanches. Division will shut the doors at the Greene Avenue gallery on March 31, last day of the current solo by Barry Allikas.

An exhibition, by the way, that’s well worth a visit. An abstract painter just shy of 60, Allikas has undergone something of an image makeover since joining Division. Once described as a néo-plasticien, he is now spoken of in the same breath as such iconic Québécois masters as the Automatistes. In laymen’s terms, that means he used to be considered an eccentric older dude whereas now his historical past is cutting edge, part of the patrimoine.

The press release references Baudelaire and John Cage. What you get is bold, flat colour fields intersecting without any hint of merger in wildly dramatic ways. Calm, explosive energy. Horizons, seas, mountains – maybe. Occasionally a human figure, if you will, but mostly just intense colour and form. A whiff of the ridiculous too – masking tape on beige paint. But then surely a painter can’t do pure abstraction these days and remain one hundred per cent serious.

Allikas will be one of ten artists moving to the new space with Division. The stable has been paired down to a precious few whose careers will receive the intense focus of directors Charbonneau and Dominique Toutant. The goal, says Charbonneau, is to invest in the long-term, bring a few artists to international stature by showing their work beside the best from elsewhere. A solo show by LA painter and filmmaker Allison Schulnick will open the new space. Schulnick, at 32, is a top young American artist who takes a theatrical approach to paint, sculpture, film, creativity in general. She’s part of the thick-paint school whose membership includes west coast (now Toronto-based) Kim Dorland, also at Division.

Other Divison artists include Amber Albrecht, Bonnie Baxter, Vincent Lafrance, Mathieu Lefevre, Jonathan Plante, André Ethier, Isabelle Hayeur and Richard-Max Tremblay.

The eminence gris behind it all is collector Pierre Trahan, a lawyer and businessman who founded Galerie Divison four years ago. Built with private capital, the new Divison HQ promises to be up in a flash, without the lengthy wrangling that usually attends publicly-funded projects. Not quite a first for Quebec (the Segal Centre did it too), but rare nonetheless.

Charbonneau says the new space will host large-scale public and corporate events at which people who don’t normally find themselves in an art gallery will, ipso facto, be faced with art they just might find amazing.

“We’re not interested in the usual white cube gallery,” he says. The space will be flexible, multi-purpose and welcoming, a destination for people exploring the growing number of fine restaurants and shops springing up in the Atwater Market area. Think the 1990s, New York’s Chelsea. It could happen here.

Barry Allikas, Lines of Sight, at Galerie Division, 1368 Green Avenue, until March 31.

Should Canadian publishers be allowed to sell off equity in search of capital? Instinctively, those of us who remember the invention of CanLit will say “No Way.” John Barber’s piece in The Globe and Mail makes a strong argument to the contrary.

The total book market in Canada is a $2.8-million a year business, some 234 million books are sold per year, or 12.3 books per Canadian consumer. A roaring trade, but in order to survive and prosper in a global market, mid-sized Canadian firms need an opportunity to grow. Canadian capital just isn’t interested in publishing, but investors elsewhere are. Smaller publishers — the farm teams, who discover and nurture new talent — deserve greater government subsidies. A refreshing look at a possible future for Canadian publishing. Read the whole story.

A substantial piece of analysis, complete with key figures, Barber’s piece makes the argument that to survive in a global market firms need to get bigger. Often times, only foreign investment is available. More than one mid-sized publisher has disappeared in recent year, after stiff foreign ownership rules prevented them from partnering with a non-Canadian firm.