Much museum

In 1981, the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first video shown on MTV. Now 25 years after that historic broadcast, the Musée d’Art Contemporain is giving the best of these three-and-a-half minute pieces of art their due (unfortunately the “Thong Song” didn’t make the cut).

Among the 26 works being shown at Vidéomusique, there’s Spike Jonze’s Christopher Walken-dancing video for the Fatboy Slim song “Weapon of Choice,” Michel Gondry’s lego-centric White Stripes video “Fell in Love with a Girl” and Stephen R. Johnson’s stop-motion animated video for Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.” Local directors Louis-Philippe Eno (Malajube) and Joshua Deu (Arcade Fire) are also represented.

“We want people to form a new relation with music videos. The videos will get people to look at these popular songs in a different way,” says Louise Ismert, who is in charge of multimedia events at the museum. If you like some Godley with your Creme, the exhibit runs until October 1. For more info, including a list of the videos, visit www.macm.org. —Erik Leijon

Wandering fast talkers

Since last winter’s move to the community-minded Toc Toc Café (6091 Parc), the Bibliograph/e zine library has hooked up with the Perpetual Motion Roadshow to present a series of wandering zinesters, scribes, ranters, poets and riot grrrls. “It just made sense for us to host that kind of event,” says Bibliograph/e co-founder Anna Levanthal. “We’re working toward the same idea of promoting independent culture and also hopefully creating links between the creators and the audience.”

Tonight, infamous Trash and Ready performance artist, and associate art director of $pread magazine, Hadassah M. Hill, unleashes a few pieces from her self-produced CD Bad Girls Belief System. There’ll be acoustic bliss with Alberta roots songwriter Cort Bulloch, some very fast talking by Halifax hip hop maven Jesse Dangerously and bits from local performers Fiona Annis and Sarah Mangle. July 20, 8 p.m., pay-what-you-can. —Vincent Tinguely

Go west

Emily Carr has come a long way from the days when the tenants of her boarding house complained that her paintings gave them indigestion. The work of this well-known and well-loved West Coast artist is the focus of this summer’s blockbuster show at the National Gallery of Canada, a summer art road trip away in Ottawa.

Hats off to curators Johanne Lamoureux, Charlie Hill and Ian Thom for their presentation. It includes a partial reconstruction of the museum’s 1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art that first presented Carr’s work to a national audience. Paintings from her posthumous exhibition in 1945, organized in large part by Lauren Harris for the Art Gallery of Ontario, gives prominence to her sculptural forests and undulating skies. And her early paintings of native villages are hung amongst images created by other artists at that time to re-examine them with contemporary eyes. If you go, a detour through the museum’s permanent collection is highly recommended. Runs until Sept. 4, info: (613) 990-1985. —Christine Redfern

Canadian idols

Walking up the imposing staircase at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and encountering Jeff Wall’s photo of a hairy nude guy on a red couch is worth the effort. The photo, titled “Stereo,” and its placement at the beginning of the exhibition Sound and Vision is one of the high points of this showcase of photographs and videos by contemporary Canadian artists. Other highlights include Isabelle Hayeur’s “Refuge,” Stan Douglas’s “Havana” series and Mark Lewis’s perspective-shifting video “Algonquin Park, Early March.”

Ironically, Rodney Graham’s piece “Rheinmetall/Victoria 8,” about obsolete technology, wasn’t working. The weakest works were the more music-video-inspired ones. Tim Lee’s spoofy guitar piece wasn’t that interesting the first time I saw it in an exhibition, never mind the third time. Althea Thauberger’s love song in nature “Songstress” is, well, cornball. And sometimes a cliché cannot rise above being a really lame cliché, as in Kevin Schmidt’s video of the artist playing “Stairway to Heaven” as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean. Go for the visuals, get your music fix elsewhere. Runs until Oct. 22, free. —Christine Redfern

Is it Art?

I CAN FEEL IT COMING IN THE AIR TONIGHT: Is Phil Collins stuck in your head yet? Do you feel awful? Tom Reynolds explains why: “For reasons known only to the demented spawn in charge of programming, this grumpy dirge still finds its way onto FM playlists and will reliably crawl out of your car speakers like a balding slug at the exact same spot on the highway where your cell phone cuts out.”

Reyonlds’ I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard is a collection of long, angry rants packed with interesting trivia and covering such hits as Celine Dion’s “All By Myself,” Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Let Her Cry,” Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” and Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which, he writes, “begins creepy, turns creepy and ends up totally psychotic. Turn around, bright eyes, and look at the mess you left.” (Hyperion, $17.95).

ArtsHole

BERLIN TO BUENOS AIRES: Well known painter but first-time director G. Scott MacLeod and director Emmet Walsh throw a fundraiser for their respective in-progress flicks After the War With Hannelore (a portrait of a woman growing up in post-war Berlin) and Argentina (which follows international art collective la Raza Group around their titular home country), with an evening of visual art, film, food and music. That’s Thursday, July 27, 5 p.m.–midnight at the McAuslan Visitor Centre (5080 St-Ambroise) • POOL PARTY: Montreal photographer Daniel Rabinovitch’s snaps of children swimming underwater, Young Amphibious Mammals, is at the Centre Culturel Calixa-Lavallée, Parc Lafontaine (3819 Calixa-Lavallée) until Aug. 25.

ARTISTAT: Number of filmmakers—open to all, but first come, first serve—who can participate in this fall’s Super 8 Film Festival (theme: Secret Love), by registering on Aug 7 at ABC Cinefilm (113 Mont-Royal W.), $25, infoms8@yahoo.ca: 30

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