Angel >> The haloed halls of museums Away with culture snobbery! Begone, pretentious musings on composition, colour and contribution to genre! When is high art at its very best? When it's free! When museums bustle with all sorts of people with no knowledge of art whatsoever! When people who don't know each other stand in front of a great work and start talking about it, just like that! This Sunday, May 24 is Montreal Museums Day: a total of 26 museums will open their doors for free. If you're lucky it will be raining outside, making it the perfect day for art-watching. And if you're really lucky, you'll never once hear anyone mention anything about the "new brutalism" (as if the old brutalism wasn't all the brutalism we ever needed).

Insect >> Ottawa McCarthyists on a separatist witch-hunt The Ottawa Civic Hospital hired longtime Montrealer David Levine to run their shop. Then, when the good citizenry of Ottawa found out he once ran for the PQ (which the hospital knew already and didn't care), they started flooding the open-line shows, angry as hell that anyone would give a job to a separatist. Hospital donors are now threatening to withdraw their support if Levine stays. Even the Ottawa Citizen has called for him to step down. The entire controversy smacks of a return to the good old days, when all francophones knew there was no point in applying for work at Sun Life. First of all, Levine can think what he wants to think--heck, if he runs a good hospital operation, he can even believe in homeopathic medicine if he wants to. And second, if you're looking to eradicate the separatist threat, denying separatists jobs is not the way to do it. If you start denying many Quebecers their right to earn a living, that's just one more good reason to separate.