The Council for the Arts in Ottawa has just kicked some butt. It was written in bureaucratese, which is probably wise when criticizing bureaucrats, but there’s fighting words in the summary of a report the council just released.

I was told yesterday that I had missed Ottawa’s best jam session of the year. It happened last weekend at D’Arcy McGee’s in Orleans, right across the street from the Shenkman Arts Centre and 30 minutes after the final award had been given out there by the Canadian Grand Master’s Fiddling Championships.

In April, when Orca Books published four short novels in its new Rapid Reads series, the scoffing started immediately: 20,000 words isn’t even a novella, maybe a long short story; it’s an old mousetrap, and not even a better one; stick to what you know (children and young-adult books), don’t dumb-down adult fiction. Makes you wonder why an industry in such trouble, like Canadian publishing, can be so petty.

There’s a reason why most songs have choruses, but many don’t; why theatre has intermissions, but movies don’t; why visual art has a background to support its foreground. And it’s not to allow time for a word from our sponsor.

His publicist Ashley Shea wrote me because she felt Tyler’s story of “how a small town Canadian maintains his integrity in a city known for swallowing its artists” would interest readers in his Ottawa home. It’s difficult to judge the integrity of a 22-year-old to whom you’ve talked long-distance for just 45 minutes. I do know Ham Pong makes a living in a notoriously fickle city with his stunning good looks and a short acting pedigree that started in Grade 9 at Ashbury College.

And I’m more than willing to dissent from those who insist photography is not art because it is something seen by the eye, not the mind. Oh please, that’s like saying only art can change how one sees the world, which photography has done more times than any, except perhaps for the atomic bomb. While there is definitely mind-shifting in that level of destruction, I’m not sure I’d want to argue that its art.

Earlier this month, painter Ross Rheaume read that millennia-old paintings in the Lescaux caves were not just depictions of animals in the hills of southern France; they were perfect representations of constellations. There was the requisite moment of awe, but the news wasn’t a surprise because Rheaume thinks that good art is always a story about who we are (humans in space) and what we feel (wonder, nostalgia, fear

Elliott Smith knew the hotel’s talent contest was in the bag. By then he’d been performing magic for 34 years, and the crowd loved his session. Then the manager asked him to stay for another week and do some shows; the hotel would comp the room and meals for him and his wife. Smith says the decision was a no-brainer.

This comes from theatre people, who, Marc Ouimet reminds us, “run the gamut of emotion on an hourly basis.” But in chatting with Ouimet and fellow actor Manon St. Jules, it’s clear that something is changing here.

All artistic endeavours in Canada depend heavily on laws protecting free expression. Without them, creative acts would be various interpretations of Anne of Green Gables, and you can be sure we’d never get to see the curve of an unclothed shoulder.