John Paizs’ Crime Wave is a film that inspires great devotion among its fans. In some ways it’s the quintessential Canadian cult film. Shot on 16mm with rented equipment on a shoestring budget, using a (really) small crew on weekends over the course of two years, it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1985 and had a theatrical release in 1986 in just one city: Winnipeg – the place it was filmed

Rap music for sons, classical for aunts and always the belief that all are equally valid, except that our own choices are a little more so.

He’s been so prolific that we could easily fill a full festival with Neil Young films. Though we’re not going that far, we’re showing both Rust Never Sleeps and Greendale as part of the Canadian Cult Revue at the Mayfair Theatre on July 21.

There’s a trace of trepidation in John Koensgen as he prepares his newest role. When he picked up the script for Educating Rita, he realized, “boy, these people sure talk a lot.” Not that Koensgen doesn’t like lines; he is, after all, an actor. But it’s the language that’s made him blink, the complex sentence structure and the nuanced words that play England’s upper class off against its lower. So finding resonance in a version of theatre’s most archetypal theme of transformation will be, he admits, a big challenge.

As a classical-music critic, Norman Lebrecht is often cranky but always insightful. A decade ago he took a break from predicting the death of the genre to write a novel, trading interpretation for plot and critique for characterization. The superb result was The Song of Names, which won the 2002 Whitbread Award for first novels. Today he’s firmly back into music analysis and not so sure classical music is breathing its last. He’ll bring this and other views to the opening lecture of Music and Beyond July 5.

In honour of Canada Day, the Canadian Cult Revue screenings at the Mayfair Theatre in June are dedicated to what are, on the surface, the most stereotypical themes of pop-culture Canadiana: wilderness adventure and the (largely comedic) power of beer.

In most performance on stage there’s a moment, usually early, when the audience knows exactly the domain they’ve entered. It is tradition, the satisfaction delivered for the $20 or $120 ticket, and this endorsement molds people to the back of their seats. No performance event in Ottawa obscures those domains like the Fringe Festival, and this implausibility draws viewers to the edges of their seats.

There nothing more interesting than watching an apparent bystander get drawn into a framed image and stand for minutes with a look caught between confusion and recollection. This is what Angela Grauerholz wants her photographs to do, trip memories, spark associations, “stretch it out, that perfect moment, to allow something else to occur,” as she told Jonathan Newman in the National Gallery of Canada’s Vernissage magazine.

There is a new academic debate about whether context – usually written text that accompanies a piece of visual art – heightens or lessens one’s appreciation of that piece. Apparently we all have an internal concept of what art means, and our judgments are based on seeing, not reading. The National Gallery of Canada, however unintentionally, wades right into the issue this summer with Pop Life, perhaps the most contextual exhibit it has ever staged.

We christened the May 19 evening Slacker-Counter-Culture Triple Bill because all three films deal with the notion of rebellion and the different forms it can take – some sort of protest against “The Man” as represented by the capitalist and consumerist values that dominate modern society.

Memory has a niche reserved for music. It’s called the MPC Room, for Medial Prefrontal Cortex, science’s term for the brain hub that links music, memories and emotion. But that’s the last thing anyone thinks of when a tune hits your ears, the hair on the back of your neck goes rigid and the rest of the world goes away.

If there is a path of study with a chance to lead us to the Fountain of Happiness, it is neuroscience. The field is so hot right now that it appears to be sucking up half the health-related research funds in the English-speaking world. Some of that is directed at music’s role in the human brain.