Links for the Big Beat list of 10 local songs from 2010 will be available on Tuesday. The Big Beat regrets the delay.

Paul Lang, incoming deputy director and chief curator at the National Gallery of Canada, standing before a painting by Andrea Vaccaro at the Museum of Art and History of Geneva, Switzerland. (Photo by Pascal Frautschi)

Paul Lang says that when he walked through the National Gallery of Canada during a vacation in 2000, it never occurred to him that he might one day work there. The dream of someday working in a gallery in North America, however, was very real.

“It’s an old dream for me to work in a great museum on the American continent,” Lang said Thursday in a phone interview from France, shortly after the National Gallery announced he would be its new chief curator and deputy director. “For Europeans, we have always the feeling that it’s professional working (in North American),” Lang said from his sister’s home in the French countryside near Mulhouse. “It’s a kind of model, including the way you hang, for example.”

Lang was in Canada in 2000 because he “wanted to know of Canadian museums, so I travelled to Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto.” He was struck by the modern, purpose-built galleries and museums he saw, which he says is more common in North America than in Europe, where more gallery buildings were originally built for other uses, such as palaces (e.g., the Louvre in Paris).

The Museum of Art and History in Geneva, Switzerland, where Lang has worked as chief curator for the past 10 years, was built as a gallery, but more than a century ago. The opportunity to hang art in the modern, purpose-built National Gallery, in harmony with the building’s architecture, has great appeal, he said.

Lang is a dual citizen of France and Switzerland, and is fluent in French, English and German. He has a PhD in art history from the University of Geneva, and is a renowned expert in 19th-century European Art. The 52-year-old bachelor will start work in Ottawa on April 1.

He’ll replace David Franklin, who left the National Gallery earlier this year to become director of the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio. (Franklin will temporarily return to Ottawa to oversee this summer’s major exhibition Caravaggio and His Circle in Rome, which he has been organizing for several years in conjunction with the Kimbell Art Museum in Forth Worth, Texas. Franklin’s temporary return is typical when the key curator on a major project relocates late in the organizing game.)

Any similarities or differences between Franklin and Lang will become evident soon enough, but it’s immediately clear the two men share one glowing qualification.

“I needed somebody who had leverage in the art world and is an Old Master expert,” said National Gallery director Marc Mayer on Thursday, “. . . because those are the toughest loans to get.”

Borrowing and lending art is vital to any major gallery, the very lifeblood of major exhibitions, and Lang, like Franklin, has a global reputation. “He’s on a first name basis with the people who are going to say yes or no about the loans,” Mayer said.

Lang was in the midst of setting up a major exhibition in Geneva— on the work of Corot — in late August when he was approached by a headhunter about the Ottawa job. He met with Mayer in London, England in September, and later in Montreal. He was in Ottawa last month, and for the first time saw the collection not as a tourist but as an incoming chief curator.

Mayer had polled the curators of various departments at the National Gallery to see what they wanted in a new chief and deputy director. “They wanted somebody who was into mentorship, a more senior person who’s proven themselves in the art world,” and who could “empower our curators,” Mayer said.

“He’s not about micromanaging people who are much smarter about something than he is. . . . He’s not interested in second-guessing someone in their expertise,” Mayer said. “He’s not coming here to be the boss of everybody, he’s coming here to be the team leader.”

Mayer was effusive about Lang’s achievements, particularly an exhibition on the composer Richard Wagner’s influence on artists such as Renoir, which showed in Geneva and Paris between 2005 and 2008. “That turned a lot of heads in the art world,” Mayer said. “It was a very successful exhibition.”

Mayer also liked Lang’s response when asked, “Were I to hire you for this job, who do you work for?” Lang said, “I work for the public and so do you.” Bingo, Mayer said. “His answer was so right on that I thought this guy has got the most fundamental value nailed.

“Plus,” Mayer added, “he’s a really nice guy.”

Lang did indeed seem a most amiable chap during the Thursday interview, despite a woeful cell-phone connection. He even apologized for his English, though it was clear enough.

“We have to get him to stop doing that,” Mayer joked. “You know we don’t apologize for our English or our French in Ottawa.”

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Paul Lang, incoming deputy director and chief curator at the National Gallery of Canada, standing before a painting by Andrea Vaccaro at the Museum of Art and History of Geneva, Switzerland. (Photo by Pascal Frautschi)

The National Gallery of Canada has appointed Paul Lang as its new deputy director and chief curator. Lang replaces David Franklin, who left recently to be director of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Lang has been chief curator at the Musée d'art et d'histoire de Genève in Geneva, Switzerland for the past 10 years. He has a PhD in Art History from the University of Geneva, says a statement from the National Gallery, and is an expert in neo-classical European Art. He’ll begin his new post in Ottawa on April 1.

“Paul Lang brings to the National Gallery impeccable credentials as an art historian, an almost encyclopedic knowledge of neo-classical European art, a broad interest in material culture in general, a genuine interest in the success of his immediate colleagues and an ardent commitment to serving the public,” said National Gallery director Marc Mayer in a statement.  
Lang is 52, and is fluent in English, French and German, the statement said.

More to come . . .

The video at the centre of a censorship controversy in Washington D.C. is coming to Ottawa.

Gallery 101 on Bank Street in Centretown will screen David Wojnarowicz’s film A Fire in the Belly, which was censored by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington after protests by the Catholic League and other conservative and Republican voices.

The Portrait Gallery had been displaying a four-minute excerpt from the video of the film, which had vaguely Christian imagery including sporadic scenes of ants crawling over a bloody crucifix. The video was part of the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, which looks at American art about and made by homosexual artists.

The censorship has made the Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian, of which the gallery is a part, a target for widespread criticism. As part of the protest, Canadian artist AA Bronson has requested that a large photograph by him, titled Felix, June 5, 1994 and on loan from the National Gallery of Canada, be removed from the exhibition.

The Portrait Gallery refused to remove the Bronson photograph. National Gallery of Canada director Marc Mayer said Wednesday that while he regrets the decision to censor the Wojnarowicz film, the Canadian gallery will not ask for its photograph to be removed.

Gallery 101, an artist-run centre at 301 1/2 Bank Street, will screen the video at 7:30 and 8 p.m. on Jan 8. A suggested donation of $5 will go to the AIDS Committee of Ottawa.
“We are proud to join the many art galleries and institutions around the world, including the Tate Modern in London, U.K., and the New York Public Library, that have shown the film in solidarity against censorship of A Fire in the Belly,” said a statement from Gallery 101 member Glenn Crawford.

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The National Gallery of Canada is caught between censure and  censorship, and will take no further part in a controversy around the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., says director Marc Mayer.

“This issue isn’t about us,” Mayer said Wednesday. “It’s about AA Bronson and the National Portrait Gallery.”

The National Gallery of Canada loaned a photograph — titled Felix, June 5, 1994, by the Canadian artist AA Bronson — to the National Portrait Gallery for the current exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. Nobody protested Bronson’s piece — a life-sized photo of fellow artist Felix Partz, taken moments after Partz died of AIDs — but the influential Catholic League and Republicans on Capitol Hill were outraged by another piece of art in the publicly funded exhibition.

The critics claimed that a four-minute excerpt from a video by the late American artist David Wojnarowicz is “anti-Christian,” so the gallery removed the video, which showed various Christian imagery including ants crawling over a bloody crucifix. (There’s been much confusion in news reports about the length of the video in the exhibition: Wojnarowicz made two versions, one longer than 20 minutes and one at 13 minutes, and the Portrait Gallery exhibition featured a four-minute excerpt from the shorter version.)

The Portrait Gallery has refused to remove the photograph. “I have great empathy toward AA Bronson and his request,” said director Martin Sullivan in a statement on Monday. “However, we want visitors to the National Portrait Gallery to experience the exhibition without further alteration. Mr. Bronson’s photograph is a brilliant and sobering meditation on the human tragedy of AIDS and the power of portraiture.”

Mayer said Wednesday that he did encourage the Portrait Gallery to consider Bronson’s request, “because he perceives he’s an accessory to censorship, with his work present in this exhibition,” but he did not ask that the photograph be removed from the exhibition. “Personally, I don’t think that you successfully fight censorship by indulging in more censorship,” Mayer said, and that, “I certainly don’t want to get involved as an institution censuring another institution.”

He added, “Why would we wade into the middle of a free speech scandal in Washington, D.C.? It doesn’t have anything to do with us. We’re not an activist institution. We’re the National Gallery of Canada. Our agreements have been respected, so why would we do that?”

The National Gallery checked with its lawyers and found it has no claim against the Portrait Gallery, nor any further obligation to Bronson, Mayer said. The two galleries signed a formal agreement on terms and “they haven’t infringed anything.” If the National Gallery arbitrarily cancelled the agreement, Mayer said, it would have “dire consequences for us as a borrowing institution.”

Mayer noted that none of the media coverage around the censorship of Wojnarowicz’s video has put it within the context of the larger debate over the U.S. military’s contentious don’t ask-don’t tell policy on gay recruits. “It’s about saving the larger exhibition, that I think is very timely in the middle of a national and very important debate,” he said. It’s an especially unfortunate time for censorship by the political right on gay-themed art.

“I think it’s really too bad, and obviously it doesn’t work,” he said. “These things backfire. That video is now being shown in about 20 museums across the United States. It’s gotten a lot more attention that it would have otherwise. This has happened with every single art-related controversy that politicians get involved in.”

Bronson is the last surviving member of the influential Toronto collective the General Idea, which included Partz and Jorge Zontal, who also died of AIDS in 1994. Perhaps their best known piece in Ottawa is the installation One Year of AZT/One Day of AZT, which is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery.

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Here's a quick look at what's selling in Ottawa's largest chain of indie record stores this week.

It's never been  clear to me who buys all this Christmas music, but somebody's buying a ton of it — and the cheesier the better, it seems.

CD Warehouse, 499 Terry Fox Drive, 1383 Clyde Ave., 1717 St. Laurent Blvd.

O Holy Night - Jackie Evancho
The Perfect Gift - Canadian Tenors
The Gift - Susan Boyle
Christmas Cornucopia - Annie Lennox
Canadian Tenors - Canadian Tenors
The Wind That Shakes the Barley - Loreena McKennitt
Le Noise - Neil Young
The Promise - Bruce Springsteen
A Place Called Love - Johnny Reid
Doo-Wops & Hooligans - Bruno Mars

Lightbulbs in orange, by Katherine McNenly, stolen Friday from Cube Gallery in Ottawa.

The thief saw the lightbulbs and got an idea. An awful idea. A (not so) wonderful, awful idea. And then the thief stole not Christmas, but a painting in a Christmas sale at an Ottawa art gallery.

Cube Gallery curator Don Monet says somebody walked out of the Wellington West gallery Friday with a painting by Almonte artist Katherine McNenly. It’s a still-life oil, in orange and ochre, of three light bulbs. It’s six inches by six inches, part of Cube’s annual “Great Big Smalls” show, so it would fit into a bag, purse or the pocket of a winter coat.

The $400 painting was plucked off the wall, along with the paper card identifying the artist and other information. “We don’t have a camera or anything, but I think we might get one now,” Monet said Monday.

He’s called police in Ottawa and is waiting to hear back from an investigator. He also called Montreal police, who have a registry of stolen artworks, and sent a photo.

Thefts from Ottawa galleries are not rare, and sometimes they make the news. In 2009, a painting was stolen from the Gordon Harrison Gallery in the Byward Market. It was recovered by police a month later — but the thieves had been caught in the act on video.

In 2007 a painting by Heidi Conrod of a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan was stolen from Dale Smith Gallery in New Edinburgh. A month later it returned, in the gallery mail, with an unsigned note that said, “Je m’excuse.”

A year earlier, more than a dozen paintings, sculptures and other works with a combined value of $20,000 were cleaned out of Blink Gallery, in Major’s Hill Park. The theft — which occurred despite locked doors and working alarms at the National Capital Commission building — was never solved.

Monet said Cube will compensate McNenly for the loss. Neither McNenly or Ottawa police could be reached for comment on Monday afternoon.

C’Mon 4 stars out of five
Good2Go (independent)

WWII 3 stars
The White Wires (Dirtnap)

No Good Cowboy 3 stars
Stoney Martins & the Outriders (independent)


Retro rules in music these days. Now three Ottawa bands are serving up shots of old-time sounds, each garnished with a splash of something contemporary.

They are the White Wires, Good2Go and Stoney Martins & the Outriders, and together they offer a revealing look at the city’s music scene at year’s end. The first reconstitutes surf punk, the second rocks with the feel of old soul and R&B, and the third does old-time country.

Good2Go, from left, Christian Lapensee, Reg Allen, Miss Maureen, Gilles Mantha and Glen Russell. (handout photo)

Good2Go’s fourth album, C’Mon, was officially released two weeks ago at Irene’s Pub in the Glebe, and the show was sold-out. Mrs. Big Beat and I arrived around 10 p.m. and were stopped at the door. The place was packed tighter than Maureen Hogan’s dress.

Hogan is Good2Go’s lead singer, and has cleavage that would cause men to, as Dorothy Parker once wrote, “click their tongues and wag their heads roguishly.” It would her undoing if she had no talent to back up the boldness, but “Miss Maureen” has a strong voice and stage presence and is the bright, blond centre of the band’s personality.

The four men behind her have been playing together for years and have gotten very tight. Gilles Mantha is on drums, Reg Allen is on bass, Glen Russell is on keyboards and Christian Lapensee plays guitar.

Their cohesion is clear enough on the opening, title track. Lapensee hangs a sultry guitar chord in the air to frame Miss Maureen’s throaty call to love. “Be the reason I want you to find me,” she sings, a challenge tinged with the longing of Lapensee’s suspended, wavering guitar.

Downtown starts with a rising chorus — “bah bah, bup bah, bah BAH!” — that fell off a truckload of late-‘60s harmonies headed for the museum. The bass line that Allen lays down on U Can Have Him comes from the same place, and it’s the backbone of what is perhaps the album’s strongest track. Miss Maureen dismisses a boy with a lyrical (and literal) flick of her wrist — “take this boy/ I don’t need him no more/ you can have him/ you can have him.” Toss in a sax break from guest Brian Asselin and you’d think it was the early 1970s, polished to a contemporary sheen.

Click here to watch a Big Beat video of Good2Go performing U Can Have Him, from the new album C'Mon!

The White Wires, from left, Luke Nuclear, Allie Pookie and Ian Manhire. (Photo by Peter Simpson, Ottawa Citizen)

That classic “bah-bah-BAH” also shows up on WWII, the second album from the White Wires. It’s the retro influence again, though deliberately less polished. This is 1960s’ surf rock made in a 21st-century garage.

Let’s Go To the Beach, the opening track, sets the theme musically and lyrically. “Forget about the troubles you’re running from/ rock rock rock and roll summer fun,” sings Ian Manhire, who also plays guitar for the trio. The music is fun and fast: complexity has no place at a beach party.

Luke Nuclear, best known as the front man of Million Dollar Marxists, plays bass, and Allie Pookie, who also records as Peach Kelli Pop, plays drums. They race through 12 songs in under 30 minutes, and while there’s a sameness throughout there’s an irresistible abandon to it all. Then a comparatively restrained instrumental track, Bye Bye Baby, eases to the album’s end, like the sun setting after a hot day by the water.

Click here to watch the White Wires perform a song from their previous album (sorry, no new vids yet)

Stoney Martins. (Photo by Jonathan Lorange)

Setting suns are, of course, a traditional closing background for cowboys, like Stoney Martins & the Outriders. The band — Gatineau’s Dr. Lee on drums, Aylmer photographer Darren Holmes on guitar, and Guerilla magazine publisher Tony Martins on vocals, guitar and Stetson —  have roped that ol’ time country sound and wrassled it into a beast for today.

The album reaches its vintage country apex on the song Lost my Dog, where Martins confesses he thought he “knew the heartache of Hank Williams and Conway Twitty,” but then he “lost my mother, then lost my lover, then lost my dog.” One can almost hear the windshield wipers flappin’ in the rain.

The one limitation to it all is Martins’ singing voice. It has a narrow range and even there it’s tentative. But he can write a song, and has a way with words (“The darkness conceals my shrug and my scowl/ in the cool and the clear I’m a fearsome night owl.”)

He also has two good men behind him. Dr. Lee is well-known in the capital as a drumming teacher, and Holmes can provide the range of guitar voices to fit Martins’ varied writing styles, from the lonesome desert pull of God Never Spoke to the piercing, lingering notes of Night Owl, and even the rather inexplicable Celtic sounds of Safely Up to Heaven.

Three strong albums from Ottawa bands, each referencing the past in its own way.  Martins told me he uses “the cowboy ethos as an example of simpler times, purer times, slower times. Modern times, with loss of religion, loss of family and community connectedness, loss of faith in government and in the integrity of leaders . . . can leave us as individuals adrift and confused and beat up emotionally.”

Ahh yes, the allure of simpler times. “I guess that my propensity for retro music,” Miss Maureen told me, “comes from the fact that this is the music that takes me back to a time in my life when I didn't have a care in the world.”

Click here to watch a Big Beat video of Stoney Martins & the Outriders performing their new song Safely Up To Heaven.
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The White Wires’ CD release party is Dec. 23 at Babylon on Bank St.

The White Wires in their rehearsal space in Ottawa, from left, Luke, Allie and Ian. (Photo by Peter Simpson, Ottawa Citizen)

The White Wires, one of the city's most energetic and entertaining bands, hold a release party for their second full-length album, WWII, at Babylon Thursday, Dec. 23. It's straightforward, retro rock and roll with a summery attitude. Songs such as Let's Go To The Beach are simple and catchy, and a lot of fun when performed live. You can click here to hear a new song, Be True To Your School ('Til You Get Kicked Out).

No video yet of the new music, but below is a video of the band live in rehearsal in the spring, doing the song Pretty Girl from their first record.

Also on the bill are Uranium Comeback and the Dagger Eyes. Babylon is 317 Bank. 10 p.m. $6.

The cover photo of the Peptides' album For Those Who Hate Human Interaction. (Photo by Jonathan Hobin).

It’s a first for the Big Beat this year: a locally produced album sits atop my list of best records of 2010.

Readers can be forgiven for skepticism. Local media sometimes gives extra points to musicians merely for being local.  Too bad, because readers can sniff out boosterism, and if they believe local musicians are being held to a lower critical standard they’ll be less likely to buy local CDs. Fair criticism is what helps a music community to grow, so when a truly great record comes from a city band it gets its rightful opportunity to shine. And don’t doubt that there’s great music coming out of Ottawa, and this year none better than . . .

1. For Those Who Hate Human Interaction - The Peptides: An infectious mashup of sounds and styles, created by Claude Marquis in his Chinatown, Ottawa apartment, with the principal vocal help of the irrepressible and wonderfully named Dee Dee Butters. It bursts with music and sound, from vintage radio slogans to walls of horns to vocals that veer gleefully from a soul-inflected “huh!” to an Andrew Sisters’ squeak. It’s the most fun you’ll find on a CD this year. Get the party started.

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Patrick Carney, left, and Dan Auerbach, the Black Keys (promo photo)

2. Brothers - The Black Keys: The duo from Akron, Ohio gets better, and that’s saying a lot. They’ve added a bit of instrumentation but maintained the workmanlike feel in the music. After a decade, they’ve fully attained the mainstream with FM radio play and spots on all the late-night talk shows. What they’ll do next is anybody’s guess, and that’s part of what makes the Black Keys so great.

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Nick Cave, second from left, and Grinderman. (promo photo)

3. Grinderman 2 - Grinderman: Don’t wait for Nick Cave to mellow with age. The tireless 53-year-old Aussie, back with his side project and driven by squalling electric guitars, lays down another set of lyrically vivid and edgy songs.

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4. The Monitor - Titus Andronicus: A fest of literary and historical references and skepticism about the state of American patriotism, all laid out on a bed of arty hard rock for your loud listening pleasure. They’re on Rolling Stone’s list of the seven best new bands of 2010 (though their first disc came out in 2008). Their concert at Mavericks on Rideau Street a few months back was more fun than a Monday night has a right to be.

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Gil Scott-Heron. (handout photo)

5. I’m New Here - Gil Scott Heron: What a comeback for the oft-called godfather of rap, who remains unclassifiable — spoken word? jazz? R&B? Hip-hop? A Brit producer tracks Heron down (in prison) and lures him into the studio for a set of reflective gems. Heron has lived hard, and his aging growl lends added gravitas to the voice perhaps best remembered for the 1970s’ black-power anthem The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Songs such as Me and the Devil and the sparsely funky New York is Killing Me show a talent undiminished by time and trial.

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6. That’s All I Need  -  Andre Williams: The “Black Godfather” puts out his best record since 1998’s greasy, sleazy Silky. He’s still ornery and pugnacious, even if the songs are mellower than some of his recent output. At 72, he’s not so ribald as he’s notoriously been in the past, but he’s still bedeviled by women and vices. “Cigarettes, and my old lady,” he laments again and again, “are gonna drive me to my grave.” Sure, but you know he’ll never give them up.

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7. Ghostkeeper - Ghostkeeper: A jumpy, plucky album from the Alberta band. Its sound is slightly off-kilter but maintains a precarious and energizing balance. It just sounds like it’s coming from a different place, likely rooted in the Metis heritage of Shane Ghostkeeper.

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Ray LaMontagne (promo photo)

8. God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise - Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs: When you find a mellow groove, you ride it. LaMontagne’s fourth album of Americana is his first as producer, and it was a good move. It’s an impressively steady and coherent collection of songs — testified by three Grammy nominations.

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Hawksley Workman (promo photo)

9. Meat - Hawksley Workman: “French girl in L.A. - ooo la la la la la la.” Not sure how Workman, time after time, makes trite lyrics sound so smart and refined. It doesn’t always work - Baby Mosquito is an embarrassment - but he shines on the sublime Song for Sarah Jane, alone at the piano, even with the sounds of people moving about in the background. Some songs work, some don’t, but Workman takes chances, and that’s why he’s interesting.

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Phantogram (promo photo)

10. Eyelid Movies - Phantogram: Metric, sedated.


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A quick look at what's selling in Ottawa largest indie chain of CD shops . . .

CD Warehouse, 499 Terry Fox Drive, 1383 Clyde Ave., 1717 St. Laurent Blvd.

Susan Boyle - The Gift
Le Noise - Neil Young
O Holy Night - Jackie Evancho
Christmas Cornucopia - Annie Lennox
The Wind That Shakes the Barley - Loreena McKennitt
The Prefect Gift - Canadian Tenors
Various Artists - An Instrumental Christmas
Loud - Rihanna
Fly Me to the Moon: Great American Songbook, Vol 5 - Rod Stewart
Featuring Norah Jones - Norah Jones/Various Artists
 

From Scenes from The House Dream, by David Hoffos at the National Gallery of Canada. (Photo courtesy National Gallery)

Nobody saw every show in Ottawa this year, but we all had our favourites, those exhibitions or performances that left an indelible impression, that moved us in some real and personal way.
 
This is the Big Beat List 2010, the 10 best things that I saw in the city this year, including visual arts, music, whatever. As one person’s list of favourites, it’s a snapshot of the quality and diversity of the city’s arts scene, a thriving place where rookies go up against old pros.

From Scenes from The House Dream, by David Hoffos at the National Gallery of Canada. (Photo courtesy National Gallery)

 
1. Scenes from The House Dream, by David Hoffos, at the National Gallery of Canada, January: Hoffos, the Alberta artist, built dioramas of vaguely ominous Canadiana - the coast at night, the woods at night, an empty cottage kitchen with the door inexplicably open in mid-winter - and projected holographic humans into the scenes, where they moved about furtively. He also projected life-sized holographs throughout the exhibition space. It took me three minutes to realize that a woman sitting at a table in the corner a few feet from me was nothing but projected light. So was the table. Bewildering, brilliant.

 2. Monotonix, at Babylon Nightclub, Jan. 18: In all my years of live music, I’d never seen anything quite like Monotonix. The trio from Tel Aviv redefined “stripped down” with one beat-up guitar, three drums, and tiny, ’70s gym shorts for wardrobe. They played on the stage for half a song, then moved to the floor, then climbed on top of the bar, all without missing a single, frenetic beat. It all lasted less than an hour, and it was insanely entertaining. Pity to whoever had to clean up when it was over.

3. The Wall, by Roger Waters, Scotiabank Place, Oct. 17: The Wall was in every way a Roger Waters’ album, and the former Pink Floyd frontman has raised his 1980 baby into a far more visual, outspoken and provocative adult. From the scale-model Spitfire that flew the length of the arena and exploded in flames, to the mind-blowing animation, to the collapse of the wall itself - spectacular. Truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Diana Thorneycroft, from Group of Seven Awkward Moments, above, and A People's History, below, at Carleton University Art Gallery.

 4. Group of Seven Awkward Moments and A People’s History, by Diana Thorneycroft, at Carleton University Art Gallery, May: Thorneycroft’s photographs put Canadian icons - Bob and Doug McKenzie, Bobby Orr - against backgrounds by the Group of Seven. Then she twists them. Orr falls through the ice on an outdoor rink. Bob and Doug are circled by wolves. The whimsy vanishes in the other side of the gallery, A People’s History, where plastic Mounties and priests stand over children they will neglect, abuse or molest. It all was a textbook lesson on effective provocation: have a purpose.

 5. Titus Andronicus, at Maverick’s, Aug. 23: Seven people playing arty hard rock songs, in a band named for a lesser-known Shakespeare play, in a small bar on a Monday night. Well, they’re not in it for the money. The New York band put up a multi-guitar assault of smart, passionate rock and roll, with absurdly obscure titles - Richard II or Extraordinary Popular Dimensions and the Madness of Crowds (Responsible Hate Anthem) - and the liberating abandon of being decidedly outside the mainstream.

One of Genevieve Thauvette's elaborate self-portraits as the Dionne Quintuplets, from Dale Smith Gallery.
 
6. The Dione Quintuplets, by Genevieve Thauvette, at Dale Smith Gallery, April: Thauvette’s self-portraits as the Dione quintuplets are tremendously ambitious. The young Ottawa artist builds elaborate sets, with live-sized cutouts of herself representing the fated sisers. The Canadian Museum of Civilization bought the entire set.  Thauvette is a bold and outspoken talent. (Declaration: One photo was purchased and hangs in the Big Beat gallery.)

Bourgeois Bust, by Jeff Koons at Pop Life: Art in a Material World, at the National Gallery of Canada. (Photo courtesy National Gallery)

Click here to watch a Big Beat video tour of the art in Pop Life.

 7. Pop Life, Art in a Material World, National Gallery of Canada, June: Pop Life was more effectively staged at its earlier stop in Hamburg, Germany, where it had the space it needed to be loud, but it still had appeal when squeezed into Canada’s National Gallery. Love it or hate it, the pop art of Hirst, Murakami and Warhol was a spectacle, indeed. Who knew that a marble bust by Jeff Koons, the pathological self-promoter, would be the sublime highlight of the summer?

Two scenes from Wesley Kirschner's Metaphorical, at SPAO.

8. Metaphorical, by Wesley Kirschner, at the School of Photographic Arts: Ottawa, February: Kirschner, a SPAO student, built elaborate dresses out of trees, newspapers, shower curtains, etc. Then she photographed herself in situations that were absurdly dangerous (putting logs into a wood stove while wearing a dress made of newspapers) or just plain absurd (standing in a horse pasture while wearing a massive dress of tree boughs). It was inventive and witty.

From I Remember and I Forget, by Justin Wonnacott, at Carleton University Art Gallery. Above, blue crabs, and below, carp.

 
9. I Remember and I Forget, by Justin Wonnacott, part of the X Photo Festival, at Carleton University Art Gallery, September: Raw, dead fish on a plate. Doesn’t sound like much. Wonnacott visited his local fishmonger time and time again, and before he ate what he brought home, he photographed the fish laid out, unadorned. The sum was greater than the parts.

The national champion team Capital Slam, from left, Brandon Wint, Open Secret, John Akpata, PruFrock and Chris Tse. (Photo by Peter Simpson, Ottawa Citizen).

Click here to watch a video of Capital Slam's national championship-winning performance of The Wizard of Love.

10. The Wizard of Love, by Capital Slam, Dominion-Chalmers United Church, Oct. 16: The slam poetry finals of the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word at the Dom-Chalm were a decisive display of Ottawa’s supremacy. City teams finished first and second for good reason: their verse was the most developed and complex of any from across the country. The four-man performance of The Wizard of Love, by Ottawa’s national-champion team Capital Slam, was funny, clever and sharp.
 
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(NOTE: I apologize for the small type on this post. It's caused by technical problems beyond my control.)

Stony Lake, by Jennifer Amenta at Rideau River Antiques.

Carleton Place artist Jennifer Amenta’s new “liner landscapes” seem almost naive, as if they’re folk art, until you look closely. Countless brush strokes come together like building blocks to create fresh and distinctive scenes of the Canadian countryside, both whimsical and substantial. The landscapes include scenes that'll be familiar to anyone in Central Canada, and others of - oh, be still my eastern heart - Prince Edward Island.

They’re in a group exhibition — with Ross and Dave Rheaume, Keith Burnett and Allen Egan — at Rideau River Antiques (7 Hamilton North near the Parkdale Market, where Cube Gallery used to be). It continues to Dec. 19.

Above and below, two scenes of PEI, by Jennifer Amenta.

Under the Evening Sky, by Jennifer Amenta.

Oprah has chosen two Dickens' novels for her "Book Club." The books, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, are each magnificent works and, even better, they're in the public domain. That means you can get them for free - but where?

If you have a Kobo or Kindle or iPad reader you can download them for free from Chapters or Amazon or Apple. But you don't need an electronic reader to get free Dickens. You can download them as text files from Project Gutenberg, a website that archives all sorts of wonderful things that are in the public domain, including just about any classic work of fiction or non-fiction that you can think of. The downloads can be read on Kobo or Kindle or iPad or most any reader, but can also be read on a plain old computer or laptop. You can even print them out, if you prefer.

Download A Tale of Two Cities by clicking here.

Download Great Expectations by clicking here.