In 2010 when Plosive Productions entered stage right into Ottawa’s theatre community it used Internet-based communications to explain who was involved, how each new show was progressing and even what cast members were thinking. What the company didn’t talk about was its $5,000 grant from the City of Ottawa in 2011 to help finance shows at the troubled Gladstone Theatre.

To be interested in the story of local Ottawa theatre is to watch talented people congregate and separate like amoebas with some versions surviving and others disappearing. So when a new creation gets a financial nod, that should be exciting news: a recipient showing enough promise to make the entire community optimistic; a funder believing enough in the value of local theatre to risk writing a cheque.

The same story goes for Rag and Bone’s puppets ($10,000), AB Series’ poets ($6,500)and John Geggie’s jazz career ($5,500) – lots of promotional news from them but nothing celebrating the City’s financial support (short of small onsite acknowledgements). No hoots from either giver or taker at a time when any success in Ottawa’s arts should be publicly cherished.

Could Ottawa's arts community be its own Aesop's fable? Courtesy of Google Images.

Brett Delmage, of Ottawa Jazz Scene, pestered the above figures early out of City arts developer Nicole Zuger. Here’s a little more information about funding to 104 groups and individuals last year, out of an overall arts-and-culture budget around $7.5 million:

Theatre –           $131,250 (26 percent)

Music -              $122,000 (24 percent)

Literary -            $105,500 (21 percent)

Visual arts –       $98,250 (20 percent)

Film and video – $28,500 (six percent)

Dance -              $15,500 (three percent)

The numbers say little about Ottawa’s arts scene except to show that it does get some attention. Without context these grants represent just another spreadsheet. So why no trumpet fanfare heralding Plosive or any of the others?

The City has long done its arts funding with transparent blandness. Much of this comes from the cloak of defensibility that shelters all public-sector organizations. If I broadcast that I gave money to you, then I’ll have to explain to your neighbours why they didn’t get the same treatment. That’s pain most people try to avoid.

Delmage says he was on the verge of filing a Freedom-To-Information request to get the numbers. This act of interest is adversarial and explains why the City uses blandness as a shield. Bureaucracy by its nature is only capable of being reactive and gets little reward for doing its job. Celebrating its successes can provoke attacks.

Ottawa’s creative community has no such skin because it operates in silos. It has no leadership, or even a champion, to knit connections. Insulation produces a sense of tribalism (survivorism) that social-media’s distracted pervasiveness so greatly underscores. There is less and less willingness to co-operate with those outside the tribe, so when resources are allocated, the reaction is: “we’re as good as they are, did we get our share?”

When grants are announced, artists who haven’t even applied will smile but will also feel envy. What often comes next is envy’s inevitable conclusion of contempt, for the grant recipients but also for the smilers themselves. And the value of those little chunks of give-away cash can get dismissed pretty quickly, something Aesop used grapes and a fox to explain 2,600 years ago.

Arts funding is too often a yardstick for measuring victimhood in the pursuit of personal creativity. It shouldn’t be. When artists feel badly about a “competitor’s” success, it’s an admission that art is not the communal experience it’s supposed to be. To celebrate any artistic success is to engage in personal motivation and also to retreat from blaming external systems for being dysfunctional. Blame and contempt are common tribal bedfellows.

The City of Ottawa’s hesitation to pay tribute to its arts-grant recipients seems mostly a result of artists’ inabilities to honour themselves. (Don’t try and tell me that artists have problems bragging.) It would be great if this city had organizations similar to those in Toronto, Hamilton, Montreal, Quebec City, Winnipeg, Vancouver and dozens of other urban centres that don’t shy away from using their funding trumpets.

But arts organizations only reflect the artistic communities they represent. Of the 104 group-and-individual-grant recipients here last year, not one to my knowledge sent out emails or  tweets saying “Hey, we just got $5,000 from the City. Now we can do this……”

And this reticence, however motivated, keeps the silos confident in their desperate belief that Ottawa’s arts are indeed a place of winners and losers.

Brenda Gale Warner. Photo by Mike Levin.

What is your present state of mind?

Content.

What is your biggest fault?

Organizing clutter. I have a hard time with small bits and pieces.

Where is your ideal place to live?

Arizona.

When were you happiest?

When I was a child.

Who is your favourite historical figure?

Hans Christian Andersen.

What human quality do you most admire?

Compassion.

What is the most over-rated human virtue?

Love.

Who is your favourite fictional character?

Robin Hood.

What was your greatest misfortune?

Losing my father.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Don’t take advice, live it.

What is your greatest extravagance?

Art supplies and jewellery.

What is your favourite journey?

Going to buy groceries.

What is your greatest regret?

That my father didn’t live to see my successes.

What talent would you most like to have?

Tap dance.

What is your most treasured possession?

Aunt Mona’s watch.

What male quality do you most admire?

Men who are able to show extreme emotions.

What female quality do you most admire?

Just the right amount of strength.

What is your motto?

Know when to stop.

Art has the potential to…..?

Change lives.

What, if anything, scares you about the creative process?

That I might run out of ideas.

There are about 500 towns and 30 cities across Canada who have just been told that this year they won’t be receiving grants from the federal government for the quaintly named Building Communities Through Arts and Heritage program. The total they won’t be getting is about $3 million.

I wondered what the feds would do with that cash, and today I found out. Canadian Heritage will use it to pay the Canadian Mint, a crown corporation, $3.7 million to make 60,000 medals. These medals will be given out to civic-minded Canadians to commemorate the Queen of England’s Diamond Jubilee.

By slicing some artistic celebrations in communities across the country, the federal government is creating a make-work project for a publicly funded company that, according to its own annual report, doesn’t really need the business. The trend gets worse.

Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl but I'd rather hear a local musician. Courtesy of the National Post.

Federal expenditure on the Jubilee will total $7.5 million, all to honour a woman who, however sweet, is only admired in this country because we hate American royalty so much.

This spending is happening at a time when our politicians are howling for austerity. There are very few communities in this country that aren’t trying to figure out how to cut their budgets because the funding trickle-down tap is closing just enough to be painful. Arts is one of the worst-hit sectors.

Since 2006 the feds annually erase about five percent of the money that goes into arts and culture in Canada, despite it’s own studies that show that each dollar of investment in the sector generates $1.68 of economic growth. Media headlines focus on how the CBC  and the Canada Council for the Arts are going to retain their funding levels. What you don’t hear about are the almost-daily cuts to programs run by people who aren’t owed favours by politicians.

Here’s only a small sample of what the Conservative government has decided is worthless: the $2.5-million National Training Program in film and video sectors and the $300,000 Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, both of which help train people in one of our economy’s most vibrant industries; the $4.7-million Prom-Art program that funded Canadian artists and art in international markets, which tells a globalized world that Canadian art is not worth promoting; and $28 million worth of grants and subsidies for schools that want to retain full-time arts education, the biggest mistake of all by politicians who actually care about the future wellbeing of their constituents.

The Canadian Conference of the Arts says the upcoming budget will erase about $129 million in arts funding, or about four percent of total spending last year.

Most other non-commercial Canadian sectors are undoubtedly hearing the same warnings. I wonder how they feel when they’re told that an English institution that contributes virtually nothing to the wellbeing of Canadians is more worthy of celebrating than their own daily efforts to keep communities vibrant?

Do you wonder who's out of step with reality in this photo? Courtesy of Google Images.

By Mike Levin

In the year 220, Roman Emperor Elagabalus stepped in a pile of shit his horse had just deposited on the ground. He turned to his guards and told them to kill the groom holding the reins. “You can’t expect me to walk around it, can you? I am the Emperor,” he later told a reporter.

Maybe my sources aren’t the best on this story, but trust me when I tell you Elagabalus was a weirdo, The Golden Lunatic according to scholars and Number 2 after Caligula in the Classical Despot Hall of Fame. His tenure as Big Boss (218-224) coincided with a period when the Roman Empire was starting to fall apart, even though the death certificate says 476.

Third-century Rome was too busy patting itself on the back for its mighty reputation to understand how the world was changing. Its armies still launched attacks of imperialism, but no one really quaked in front of them anymore.

OK, enough of the history lesson except to say that history repeats and repeats. Because the angry old men who have always run the world believe societies need angry old men’s permission to change. Which is why the Roman Empire bears a remarkable similarity to the Copyright Empire that has dictated terms of derivative content use since 1790.

The Copyright Cartel had a great 200-year run, creating fertile fields for many originators and making a lot of money for the aristocracy. And like the Roman aristos who didn’t see the Huns, Ostrogoths and Visigoths massing on their borders, the big copyright holders in our time thought their empire would last forever. But by the 1990s, their own borders were full of terrorists called file sharers.

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) are similar to decaying Roman tactics – a small, well-financed group using unmotivated soldiers and uneasy politicians to attack invaders. Insiders feel there is little chance of SOPA and PIPA being passed into law because the world of derivative use changes every night. In fact, today it’s completely out of control.

Big Copyright lost its last chance for detente more than a decade ago. The following is a true story.

In 2000 I was drinking coffee with two men during the break in a music conference in Hong Kong. Beautiful green and pink clouds puffed out by the factories of southern mainland China passed daily in front of the convention centre’s big windows. We were talking about a creature called Napster that was giving apoplectic fits to conference sponsors, major record labels like BMG and Warner Music.

One of the guys was Cory Doctorow, back then just another outlier who was posting all his science-fiction writing online for free download. I wasn’t sure what he was doing at a music conference in Asia until the name of Charlene Barshefsky came up. “Poor woman, she doesn’t understand that she’s lost the war,” Doctorow said about the U.S. Trade Representative who had just announced (via American media) that the Recording Industry Association of America had a jurisdictional war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars and if Napster thought it was going to keep its piracy gig going, it had another thing coming.

The other guy was Fred von Lohmann, who was then a counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was working with Lawrence Lessig on the 2001 birth of Creative Commons. Von Lohmann giggled at Doctorow’s comment and said that if record companies didn’t realize that download prices of 10 cents a track and 25 cents an album were their only foreseeable business model, then maybe they didn’t deserve to survive. (Downloading video wasn’t really big in those days of kilobyte transfer and storage, but the lawyer predicted a price point of a buck per movie.)

Both these men, still relatively young and new to the Internet game, could see that the genie was out of the bottle. They saw the Goths at the border and advised Big Copyright to find new strategies. Twelve years later those corporations are still tapping their war chests to fund skirmishes that can’t possibly stop the inevitable collapse of their empire in its current incarnation. And they’re really pissed off that no one is asking their permission anymore.

Even if SOPA and PIPA were to be passed in a January 24 vote by American lawmakers, they wouldn’t turn the clock back. In 2000, price was a negotiating point; today it no longer is. Hence the full-court press on the Pirate Empire; so what if a little freedom of speech becomes collateral damage. But freedom of enterprise, that’s something different. What’s most silly is how the emperors appear willing to sacrifice those who keep that enterprise lubricated.

With these new laws, the financial cost of a hamstrung Internet to the economically beleaguered United States would be so painful that enforcement of SOPA and PIPA might not even be affordable. By necessity, these laws would effectively be ignored. It is pure angry-old-men arrogance to claim that a dollar’s worth of pirating is the same dollar that someone would actually pull out of their own wallets.

The Roman Empire fell apart because the self-obsession of aristocrats allowed its tax-paying economy to crumble. Big Copyright is so concerned about what it feels it is losing that its members don’t seem to have grasped that lesson.

Empowering youth with musical instruments can be more radical than by giving them smart phones. Orkidstra photo by Michael Bell.

The El Sistema orchestra program in Venezuela is helping change how that country’s social order sees itself by teaching resilience and collaboration rather than just Mozart to marginalized youth. It’s become a socio-political movement, and an offshoot in Ottawa called Orkidstra is trying to create the same resonance.

By Mike Levin

Tina Fedeski launched Orkidstra in 2007 within the Leading Note Foundation. She isn’t all that comfortable with my political analogy for her program but she’s right on board with its objectives. Ottawa doesn’t have the grinding poverty and drug addiction that prey on youth in the cities like Caracas, but it does have its own obstacles: social barriers for immigrant and marginalized children, families that can’t afford traditional music lessons and a growing number of at-risk youth.

Born in Canada, raised in England, Tina Fedeski is an accomplished flautist and social programmer. Photo by Gary McMillen.

Her program focusses on these groups, starting with children at five years old and continuing through the end of high school. Eighty-five percent of Orkidstra members aren’t charged the fees asked of families in richer socio-economic categories. But the political motivation goes much deeper.

There are whole herds of studies that show investment and participation in the arts are not only strong economic generators but are also in the top three social-health indicators. There are also murders of studies that show disappearing interest among youth for focussed hard work, delayed gratification and collaboration.

El Sistema founder Jose Antonio Abreu long ago linked these human protocols with theories from his day job as an economist. He understood humans fear failure more than they crave success and that they solve problems much more efficiently in groups than as isolated individuals. He knew we learn best from people we love and that the best way to judge success is not by empirical measurement. Basically he grasped Behavioural Economics long before Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely made it today’s biggest field of social studies.

Abreu’s goal for El Sistema was always to make better humans, with discipline but also with creativity that’s fun, engaging, inspiring and community building. These qualities make us, and especially the young, believe that real change is possible, that fate is in one’s own hands, dispelling the myth that heady individualism is a guarantee of success and happiness.

Fedeski nods deeply when I suggest that Orkidstra is part of this community building process. She knows she’s helping hone executive function - the ability to control cognitive behaviour that studies since Mischel’s Marshmallows in 1972 have linked directly to improved personal fulfillment later in life.

“I love kids because they’re curious; music is a tool to bring that (curiosity) out of them. Our aim is to provide continual access to music making and to inspire them to empower themselves with it. So success is because they want to be here. We’re a social program powered by kids,” she says.

Steve Mazey recently wrote a piece on the  success of the Ottawa program for the Ottawa Citizen. Fedeski loved it, but she has a more-tangible example – the one about a young Karen (Burmese) boy who  arrived in Canada in 2007 with his family from a refugee camp on the Thailand/Burma border. He had nervously stepped into Orkidstra’s room just after it opened. Within 10 months he was walking up Bronson Avenue every day with a cello slung across his back, mostly integrated into a society whose languages he still wasn’t sure of but whose social norms weren’t so scary anymore.

So on OMNI TV January 22 you’ll see a story that is about transcendence; it might even make you cry. Not because someone put a violin in the hands of a child and said “sweetheart, work hard and you’ll be famous” but because someone put children in an orchestra and said “sweethearts, work hard and you’ll change the lives of yourself, your family and perhaps the world.”

The Leading Note is about to start its first major fundraising campaign to support its own socio-political revolution.

El Sistema's Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra under conductor Gustavo Dudamel. Courtesy of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra.

By Mike Levin

This post is meant to convince you to turn on your television January 22 at 9 p.m. and select whatever channel you use to get OMNI1. You’ll see a documentary called Teaching The Life Of Music about a Venezuelan program called El Sistema that uses music to lift children out of their mean streets.

The story is a feel-good archetype, creating hope and optimism where little exists. Also, a chunk of the film is devoted to Orkidstra, an Ottawa-based version run by the Leading Note Foundation that was the first to incorporate the Sistema template outside South America. The documentary is inspiring, but it would be a mistake to think that it’s simply about music.

El Sistema is a socio-political story with a youth-orchestra soundtrack. The politics are progressive to be sure, but squarely aimed at systemic change in the social fabric (first in Caracas and then throughout Venezuela) of a culture with too many marginalized people. It is, to use a cliche, the thin edge of a social wedge because its multi-decade experiment is proving how transcendence is possible when humans link deeply with one another.

It’s likely that El Sistema’s 37-year history and the hundreds of thousands who have been through its programs helped elect President Hugo Chavez for the first time in 1999. Love him or hate him, Chavez is all about change. His government is the organization’s biggest financial supporter.

El Sistema uses music as a tool, not as a product. Jose Antonio Abreu started it with the belief that an orchestra represents an idealized social organization (including a strong religious component) but only if its members commit to hard work and collaboration. Training is rigorous; children must attend the program four hours a day, five days a week, and they must be supportive of everyone else. The structure is nothing short of el camino hacia la revolucion.

Jose Antonio Abreu speaks to young members of El Sistema. Courtesy of El Sistema.

“Not so much about politics as about change that otherwise wouldn’t happen….a story about something that prevents so many problems,” says Noemi Weis, president of filmblanc, the Toronto production company that produced the documentary.

Teaching The Life Of Music took two years to make, and Weis says she’s constantly amazed at the effect El Sistema has had on people around the world. There are about 13 international programs based on, but not replicating, the Venezuelan idea. “The impact it had on that country, on the people, is so inspiring.”

Abreu’s system has had stars emerge, such as Gustavo Dudamel, but moving performers up the musical hierarchy was never the goal; changing lives was. Abreu excelled in one career (economics) before searching for ways to improve the social and intellectual conditions around him. Upon receiving the TED Prize, he borrowed the 2,500-year-old political philosophy of the Greek intellectuals. My purpose, Abreu said, “was to provide a noble identity.”

If that doesn’t make the hair on the back of your arms rise, then the El Sistema story is just about kids using art to overcome the odds, like so many Billy Elliots.

Tina Fedeski is The Leading Note Foundation’s executive director. She understood Sistema’s purpose from the first moment she saw it in 2006. “Our goal (with Orkidstra) is to create virtuoso people, not virtuoso musicians,” she says in her Bronson Centre office.

“Music schools are hugely competitive, and (competition) takes it out of our environment. We’re not as rigorous as El Sistema, but the acknowledging of commitment and effort is the same.” It is an easy distinction to miss because all the public sees is children playing instruments.

When Sistema New Brunswick started just over two years ago in conjunction with the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra, there were all kinds of problems because each organization had different goals – one to empower youth, the other to produce high-quality musicians. Fights erupted, directors quit, and only now is SistemaNB distancing itself from the youth orchestra.

Enduring social change never follows a smooth curve.

Tomorrow: Orkidstra’s Ottawa revolution.

Office life is often just a series of silly walks and the ability to laugh at them. Courtesy of Monty Python.

By Mike Levin

An office can be an interesting place.

On a good day it offers familiarity and order, to say nothing of a pay cheque. In bad moments it demands conformity, anonymity and an often-counterproductive set of rules. When it’s poisonous, it is full of people who aren’t engaged with their work and who dislike the people they work with; employees who because of some sort of tribal membership can’t be shuffled out the door regardless of their competence; and administrators who have, shall we say, control issues.

I’ve often written about the quest for the visual arts to lampoon this place of gainful employment. Very few artists haven’t experienced punching a clock, however metaphorically, and probably all have meditated, anxiously, on some aspect of the process only to realize how open it is to satire. Yet so few seem to follow through.

This isn’t about political satire, which is a national pastime. Yet putting the glowing coals of humour to bureaucracy while poking both management and labour for their all-too-human traits of obsessiveness, bitchiness and disengagement has usually been a non-starter.

Perhaps most people actually like their jobs, although that doesn’t make them immune to murky office aesthetics. It’s likely many are thankful for having one, but that shouldn’t erase their senses of humour. Isn’t art supposed help us understand ourselves and our lives a little better? Making us laugh about it is just a bonus.

If that’s true, Ottawa should be the mother lode of bureaucratic satire. About 26 percentage of the city’s workforce is employed by the public service (StatCan) and at least another 10 percent is connected by earning wages from outsourced government contracts. The civil service is nothing if not a caricature of office culture. So where are the spoofs, the parodies, the inside jokes?

I’ve been told that you don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Can’t argue with that.

I’ve also been told, with a definite intent to hurt, that artists don’t have the brains to make this contribution to our culture. Don’t want to touch that.

It takes courage to be a full-time artist, to reflect the world at the risk of being called goofy. It takes even more courage to mount a show that not only mocks the hand that feeds it but also can go over the heads of many people who see it.

Sleeping Beauty. Courtesy of Rene Price.

Gallery 101, a government-supported gallery, is taking on the office aesthetic with Bureaucracy, which opens January 13 at 301 1/2 Bank St. downtown. Even with both of the show’s two artists – Rene Price and Immony Men - coming from from outside Ottawa, it’s impossible to miss the theme’s target: the federal public service.

Price, from Cornwall, doesn’t dwell on distinctions. “Bureaucracy can range form a two-or-three-person office up to the big guys. It’s about the etiquette with which people treat each other, and that’s where the satire comes in. I just happen to know the civil service really well,” he says.

Two and a half years ago he retired after 31 years as an exhibition designer for Parks Canada. His job was typical enough, moments of joy layered with monotony and office politics but always with the sense that there was something funny about the clock watchers, the sycophants and the protocol. Price always wanted to reveal how human nature can be modulated by group think.

Most of his works in Bureaucracy were created a decade ago, “during three years of hell when everything in the public service was being downsized. I did them to relieve my own angst but also to show what people can do when their middle-class vales are threatened,” he says.

Taking Care of Business. Courtesy of Gallery 101.

Men is a young Toronto artist who’s contribution will be performance art using a Post-It-note template to string out the tedious nature of office life. “It speaks to the nature of certain work that seems to be useless, boring and possibly more about maintaining a system than producing tangibles,” writes Gallery 101‘s Leanne L’Hirondelle in the show’s excellent curatorial essay.

When she organized the show, the civil service was always going to be the elephant in the room. “It’s a completely different world, one unto itself with all those feelings of resentment and entitlement, how you stick to the rules whether they work or not because that’s the deal you’ve made.”

The danger with a subject so familiar is that people can’t, or won’t, discover its humour, as much a result of political correctness as of intimacy. Bureaucracy doesn’t mock office work, it simply isolates its idiosyncrasies and asks whether it’s okay to laugh.

L’Hirondelle isn’t worried about the material going over people’s heads. “Nah, too many people have had bad bosses and backstabbing. (The show) is actually very biting.” Price is more pragmatic. “People who don’t get the humour in it won’t go to see it,” he says, adding that the timing is interesting considering the media-inflated anxiety from a new round of public-sector downsizing expected in February.

There will be a 1 pm. panel discussion January 14 on the bureaucratic life with the artists and Ottawa bureaucrat/authors Christian McPherson (The Cube People) and Dick Bourgeois-Doyle.

Expect backstabbing.

It took Michel Luc Bellemare a week to reel away from the accusations of a falsified artist’s resume made by Zev Singer of the Ottawa Citizen, as well as from some comments hateful to all artists, and then regroup enough to respond. His reply is below.

I must note that when I interviewed and posted a story on Bellemare about a year ago, he made claims, some of which I checked out, others that I didn’t. The only one vital to the story was about having a book in the National Gallery of Canada’s collection. I checked at the time; he did have one in its catalogue.

Here is Bellemare’s response to Singer’s story:

Michel Luc Bellemare. Photo by Mike Levin.

“Well, I should comment on the piece, which I took to be sensationalistic yellow journalism. First and foremost, Mr. Singer did not want to meet with me to discuss the in and outs. Here are some hard facts that Mr. Singer bent himself.

1. I do hold a Ph.D. but since I had spent time at Carleton I thought for translation purposes I would just go with Carleton. Its slicker.

2. Never did I say ” I was a genius”, that was a misquote on Mr. Singer’s part.

3. I am not married but recently engaged.

4. I am not actually banned from Ottawa Start as I do have many other accounts with the site that are still operational. No one can really ever get banned from anything on the net.

5. Yes, I have artwork in the National Gallery of Canada, the article states that clearly, A book. And I have two artefacts in there as well. You see, major galleries have a policy that they cannot get rid of artwork no matter what. So an artist these days needs only to send a curator an artefact without a return address and it automatically goes into the vault as it is policy. That is policy smarts. So I did this with all the major Canadian museums. So I do in all accounts have artwork in every museum I state on my C.V.

6. Who exactly did I defraud? This is certainly not a Conrad Black or Bernie Madeoff (sic) affair. I simply made people think about what art is? and what are its possibilities? If I have a point to my art, it is 1) to create great f’n art by any means necessary and 2) to turn power back to the artist from curators that have to (sic) much say in what is considered art and/or great art for that matter, i.e. what is a museum object, is determined by the art itself. And my art makes a legitimate claim to this.

7. Yves Klein manipulated his C.V. for years in France and England to gain entry in museums and galleries. As well, 90 percent of the articles on me are factual, outlining my philosophy of color and abstract art. The fact that the Citizen deleted roughly five years’ work or mostly authentic work is in my estimation a gross exageration (sic). And yes, this has been going on for more than a year and half, roughly five to six years.

8. If my art is so boring, why did Mr. Singer write so much about it, why did he go to such great lengths to expose to study it and get commentaries. Why did it make him burn inside that he had uphold citizen standards in contrast to me. Make no mistakes this was a bias (sic) article, yellow in nature, on the journalist part, in part to uphold citizen values.

9. This is a David and Goliath story, and the Ottawa Citizen Goliath got it right between the eyes in the name of great art.

Sincerely;

Michel Luc Bellemare Ph.D.”

I wrote to Bellemare asking where his Ph.D. was taken, but he’s currently out of the country. During 2011 he did have shows at many of the city’s Starbucks. As for his claim to have played Major Junior Hockey, I didn’t check that fact. Please don’t send me to Guantanamo.

I checked the Art Gallery of Ontario and Museum of Civilization online archives and couldn’t find any entries for Bellemare, but he never made those claims with me. I can’t be bothered to check whether he has work in Oshawa’s Robert McLaughlin Gallery. If I used a different finger to count each time an artist has embellished where they’ve shown, I’d need at least five hands. I’d probably need a third to count the artists who I’ve found to have flat-out lied on their resumes.

I’d also have to include myself (in an earlier career incarnation) on any list of embellishers, and I would be in a very, very large crowd. When was the last time you heard someone claim they had created the “world’s leading widget.” or promised to get “pensions for artists”. It’s so common in a competitive culture that expects the best of everything.

This is not to excuse Bellemare’s false claims. He got caught, and slapped. He’s tried to explain himself, although I’m disappointed that he’s never apologized. If nothing else he’s brash, right to the end (see number 9).

Yet perhaps his biggest mistake was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And to reveal human frailties that exist in every one of us.

There are two ways to define media covering local arts in Ottawa. The federal government recognizes only those who have been “accredited by an appropriate media organization.” I’m figuring “appropriate” means those outlets which can be held responsible for the content they publish or broadcast.

The other definition comes from those who actually create the content, in this case Ottawa’s artists. During the past few months I’ve asked their opinions, and most feel anyone who reports continually and regularly on the arts qualifies as media, even if the artists aren’t always happy with the words and images.

I wonder whether a definition matters anymore. But if you mix the two categories, a startling statistic appears: in a city of one-million people, Ottawa’s arts are covered by just three “real” media: the Ottawa Citizen, Rogers community cable and Carleton University radio station CKCU.

There’s a point to be made that CBC, CTV, Ottawa Sun and community newspapers, among others, could qualify. But while they are “appropriate,” their local arts coverage is not continual and regular. Others offer this content only sporadically. Basically three-quarters of the coverage of Ottawa’s arts is done by Websites, blogs and other “inappropriate” media.

This says a lot about how our city sees the arts. Rather than moan I’d prefer to direct you to media that consider Ottawa’s arts as important subjects on their own and therefore worthy of (almost always unpaid) groundwork. Some are good, some tiresome, but all have a vital role regardless of their affiliations. Without them, information on the arts in this city could become a desert, although these media are sands that constantly shift.

Searching for local arts reporting. Courtesy of the New Yorker.

Accredited (by quantity of content)

Big Beat, the Ottawa Citizen’s column/blog by Peter Simpson who, thankfully, is prolific as the city’s only reporter on a full-time arts beat.

CKCU, with local arts content that can be the focus of an entire show or that can pop up in a dozen contexts during daily programming.

Ottawa’s Art Seen, hosted by Lily Koltun on Rogers that features straight ahead profiles of artists and their work.

Unaccredited (alphabetically)

Apartment 613, an enthusiastic young collective that focuses on events, news roundups and anything else it finds cool. Also features excellent theatre reviews by the unsung Andrew Snowdon.

Byward of Mouth, new in 2011, a youth-oriented take on the city’s alternative arts and cultural environments.

Bywords, extensive site devoted to poetry, events and news.

Capital Critics Circle, local theatre reviews by critics (including Patrick Langston, Alvina Ruprecht and Iris Winston) with an amazing amount of experience. Now also available as part of the Citizen’s blogs.

Capital Slam, covering the emerging excitement of slam (poetry). Ottawa slam teams regularly win national championships.

Couch Assassin, started this year as part of the city’s Ottawa App contest, it is a user-friendly events listing site.

Free Range Print, a solo blog about anything to do with words in Ottawa.

Guerilla, a wonderful resource of features about Ottawa’s arts, but is about to drop off the list at its next issue (March) when publisher Tony Martins moves the content focus Canada-wide.

i(heart)music, covers the local contemporary music scene.

Local Tourist, also new in 2011, another collective with enthusiastic wide-ranging blog posts about what the writers find cool in Ottawa, mostly things you can eat.

Ottawa Blues This Week, listings of blues, jazz and other musical performances.

Ottawa Express, a shadow of its former local-arts coverage but still more consistent than most of the city’s mainstream media.

Ottawa Jazz Scene, the best source in the city for jazz features, news and events.

Ottawa Festivals, government-funded site for all festival news in Ottawa.

Ottawa Focus, Ottawa Start, corporate entities with on-again, off-again arts content.

Ottawa Sneezers, reformed out of the Ottawa Arts newsletter by Sterling Lynch, focuses on theatre but is completely devoted to the entire local arts scene.

Ottawa Tonite, not prolific but one of the city’s very few media that focuses solely on Ottawa’s creative ecosystem.

Photog Music, always-energetic words and photos about the Ottawa music scene by Ming Wu.

Spotlight Ottawa, features, news and events from the local indie music scene.

UnFolding, wide-ranging topics but only covers local art and artists.

Visual Encounter, just-discovered blog, insightful view on Ottawa’s visual arts, mostly reviews.

Two huge losses in local coverage happened this year when Dharma Arts never returned to the Web from its 2010 sabbatical and when The Wig stopped posting new content in July.

Soon, some of the above names will disappear (almost all will be economic casualties) and new ones will take their places. This is the nature of arts journalism. The good news is that more than any other media, the arts attract the most enthusiastic observers, the ones who draw up business plans on the back of pub napkins knowing that if the plan doesn’t work, at least they’ll have fun.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone in Ottawa who visited the above sites would take 30 seconds and write a quick thank you to their preferred choice? It wouldn’t affect the ever-shifting list but it would make these media know they are appreciated just a little.

There’s something unsettling about Tony Martins. Unsettling, that is, if you expect someone with publisher/editor/writer after his name to have a definite plan of what his next issue, and maybe the one after that, should contain.

And if that content is shifting from Ottawa culture to all-of-Canada culture, then why does he simply shrug when I ask what Guerilla 31 will be about when it is posted in March? “You know, it’s never really been a goal-oriented thing. It’s evolved, about making an impact with whatever you have at your disposal,” he says.

Martins started Guerilla magazine in 2004 and since then has built with partner Paul Cavanaugh, arguably, Ottawa’s best-known alternative arts media - Ottawa culture at ground level – with very strong content and issue-launch events at places like the National Gallery of Canada. It’s always been online, and until two issues ago also came in print form. Now he’s looking for new journalistic territory.

“We tell Ottawa about itself, away from special interest groups. Canada needs that too,” he says, and he’s right. There are less than half a dozen national arts media (personal blogs not included) on the Internet, and only Canada Arts Connect focusses on anything other than high-profile visual arts and artists. None regularly cover outsider art or drag queens or tattoos or musicians who are too honest for their own promotional good.

Come spring, those stories won’t be just about Ottawa but from anywhere in this country that Martins can dig up an enthusiastic writer or photographer who wants to help dissect Canada’s cultural guts.

But first there is the launch of Guerilla 30, December 17 at the National Arts Centre, the magazine’s final Ottawa-centric hurrah.

Tony Martins. Courtesy of the most exquisite moments.

Then it’s the national stage. “Not much will be different. It will be about establishing credibility in other cities, a bigger pool.” He’s not completely sure how it will work, or even if, although he’s had a previous career in promotional marketing so networking is just another skin.

This is how Guerilla started, and that’s why his national plan can puzzle outsiders. Canadians tend not to do this kind of thing on a wing and a prayer; we’d have a marketing team and a sales rep, an established group of contributors and focus groups. And even then we’d be sweating in our boots.

“Huh,” Martins says. “It’s going to be the same formula, quarterly, five or six in-depth stories and steady additions to G-gallery and the blog. It’s just me, same budget. We’ll see how it goes.” He’s had success once, albeit through hard work; no reason it won’t happen again.

Anyone can put up a Website and write about any subject they want. But with the Guerilla brand centred in Ottawa, Martins is taking a gamble. “I don’t see it that way. The keys are (being able to create) content development without being (in multiple cities), but there are tons of young writers and photographers out there. It’s just about using contacts.”

Ultimately online success is measured by traffic, and he’s not giving up his other jobs, including editing the Kitchisippi Times. Guerilla may eventually reunite with its hard-copy sibling; it may graft on a business manager who can sell advertising. Martins adds these things with another shrug, although there is a plan planted in his head. “I have thought about this for so long,” he says. “I see it as (an attempt) to get the same respect we have in Ottawa.”

It seems simple, but it’s not. Martins drove Guerilla by finding a niche that was virtually empty and then by convincing some very good writers and photographers to help fill it for virtually no money. It was entirely collaborative, an inevitable direction for arts in Canada.

Which is where he’ll strike out for after the NAC launch, probably unsettling a few more people along the way.