The name comes from Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dada movement, who wrote in his Sept manifestes Dada, “Is poetry necessary? I know that those who shout loudest against it are actually preparing a comfortable perfection for it; they call it the Future Hygienic.” A portion of this is quoted on the copyright page of the book, which does not resemble a conventional copyright page. Not only does it list the editors and tell the reader that the copyright on the book is for 2009, but it also informs the reader that the book was made over the course of one and one-sixth of a year in seven different apartments in Montreal and that “those with hooves are most likely to enjoy this book.” The unconventional nature of this one page alone sets a tone for the rest of the book.

The Future Hygienic is an acute, and in many instances funny, anthology. The works contained are not limited to poetry or prose, or to any other restrictions; on page 153, the recognizable rhyme and metre dotting Ian Goodman’s poem “Acheron” is almost shocking, though not unwelcome. In many instances, a piece transcends a particular form.

Peter Schwartz’s four contributions – “Call Me Radio,” “Natural Causes,” “Degeneration,” and “Catapult” – are prose poetry. In the first of these he writes: “Wrap the radio in newspaper. Mix mediums; all you’re risking is your loneliness and shirtsleeves;” in the last he describes a “catapult made of night waiting this whole time to be filled.” In these short pieces, he beautifully captures images of modern, future, or non-existent worlds.

Daniel Aureliano Newman’s piece in the anthology, “The Coolidge Effect in Gallus gallus: Implications for Human Demography,” is a report on the breeding habits of chickens and how this behaviour relates to humans, complete with footnotes, graphs, and tables. The level of scientific work that went into this study may or may not be astounding; however, if you see someone reading The Future Hygienic and laughing to him or herself, there is a good chance that they are reading Newman’s piece. It’s not prose, it’s not poetry – it’s fake science.

The contributors to The Future Hygienic are at the start of their literary careers, and even though they may not all exhibit brilliance yet, they all show promise. PistolPress plays a significant and essential role in the publishing world, giving new talent a medium; they publish novels and anthologies like this one that would not be published by a large press but still have a market and artistic merit.

Uniting many of the writers featured in the anthology is their common maintenance of blogs or presence in online literary journals. Schwartz is the editor of DOGZPLOT. Five of the contributors have their own personal blogs. Through these online sources, we can access the work of all of the writers featured in The Future Hygienic without buying the book or using any paper; the entire anthology is even available online for free download. This follows a larger trend, bred by applications like Google Reader and RSS feeds, which give readers the capability to easily access the work of a diverse selection of artists.

The Future Hygienic is an entertaining and interesting collection of many genres and forms of literature, and maintains continuity in the concept of a far away place that can only be accessed through the pages of a book.

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We first glimpse Sophie as a middle-aged woman arguing with her husband, and trying to understand and control her 16-year-old daughter. Through flashbacks, we see Sophie’s life as a passionate student, and her affair and eventual marriage to one of her professors. We watch her as she sees the Shah’s departure from Iran in 1979 and the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989, and we witness the impact of these experiences on her worldview. Though an advocate of Quebec independence, as an anglophone, Sophie feels overwhelmed by pressure to vote “No” during the first referendum in 1980. Because her daughter is a student at the college, the 2006 shootings at Dawson have the biggest effect on Sophie’s life. Questions about communism, separatism, feminism, and gun violence are thrown into the mix of political ideas and human emotions – the effect is sometimes overwhelming.

The Assumption of Empire discusses issues currently sparking much debate among artists, writers, and filmmakers, but the play succeeds in tying them into a Montreal point of view by bringing in the question of the sovereignty movement and the Dawson shootings, and looking for links between local and the global events. However, the stages of Sophie’s life do not make the most compelling backdrop – the scenarios of a middle-aged couple trying to save their marriage, a student in love with her professor, and a mother arguing with her teenage daughter are hardly new. Though the play attempts to meet the Unwashed Grape’s goal of “producing entertainment that speaks to the passions and the perplexities of the human heart” by presenting a situation where the heart is indeed deeply involved, it doesn’t particularly speak to the audience or offer any new insights.

The characters of The Assumption of Empire are archetypes playing out very familiar situations. These clichés only have force when new elements enliven them – and in this play this is rarely the case. The story line introduces nothing new and its commentary on these situations is unoriginal; for two and a half hours, the audience watches the characters take the most predictable routes.

The play nevertheless merits some notice, because of the connections it makes between historical events and their impact on a local level. Many of the people involved in the production attended, taught at, or are somehow otherwise connected to Dawson; the play is one way of dealing with the tragedy that occurred there.

Though The Assumption of Empire’s main goal is to investigate interpersonal relations through different stages of life, the assumptions people base their decisions on, and how these decisions can become tainted, the play succeeds most in its capacity to bring seemingly unrelated events together and shed new light on them. The play, though entertaining at times, is mostly an indulgence for those who enjoy fringe festivals and minimalist theatre.

Visit unwashedgrape.com for show times and ticket reservations. The play runs at MainLine Theatre until March 22.

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Growing up in Beirut, Lebanon, Hage endured nine years of civil war. During this time he was exposed to violence and the strain on sanity that comes with an impossibly complicated political situation. The reader can clearly see that the violence and thuggery that the author was exposed to from a young age acutely affected him.

Hage’s characters always seem to be hiding something sinister, in a way that makes the reader question their mental stability. It is hard to know what will happen next, how each character will react to each new event. This style is present in Cockroach as well as Hage’s first novel, De Niro’s Game, which was published in 2006 and won a number of awards, including the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. De Niro’s Game took place in Beirut during the civil war of the 1970s and followed the life of a young man named Bassam, who is not so unlike the narrator of Cockroach.

Cockroach takes place in Montreal’s immigrant community. We never know for sure where the narrator is from (or even what his name is); he spends time with Iranian immigrants and refugees, but makes it a point that he is not one of them. He is free to casually talk to a professor from Algeria about welfare, chat with a cab driver who once published a magazine in Iran, and wander up and down St. Laurent on the days when he isn’t working as a bus boy at a local Iranian restaurant. The narrator lives in an apartment building where he smells the strong spices of the Pakistani family below and drinks tea with the Russian lady in the basement apartment.

The plot follows the narrator as he grapples with the cold Montreal winter. The most urgent events in his life include collecting money that his friends owe him, meeting with the woman he claims to love, and breaking into strangers’ houses. However, the majority of his time is spent wandering the streets of Montreal, contemplating life, and imagining that he is half human and half cockroach. This bizarre concept, evocative of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, begins to make sense as the narrator slowly reveals information about himself and the life that he lived before it was committed to the page.

Among other things, we learn about an unsuccessful suicide attempt in his recent past: he tried to hang himself from a tree in Mount Royal Park. This action was not about death or trying to end life, but curiosity about what it would be like to escape the light. His attempted suicide results in mandatory weekly therapy sessions, leading to an interesting relationship between the narrator and his therapist.

The whole book takes place in a state of delirium. This could be credited to the narrator’s occasional substance abuse, but the end result is a foggy style of narration that somehow reaches moments of lucidity. It tells the truth as the narrator sees it, but the reader must decide what is real.

That Hage is Canadian and chooses Montreal as the setting for his novel makes Cockroach relevant to readers who can recognize the city’s landmarks and frigid weather. Although the novel has a distinctly Canadian setting, it is an example of a Canadian novel that branches off from traditional Canadiana in its style and subject matter. Hage is proof that exciting [and unusual] things can happen in the Canadian literary world. In his acknowledgements, Hage thanks the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. The contributions of institutions such as Canada Council have made it possible for books to be written and art created that may never have had a chance.

Don’t be afraid to imagine what it would be like to travel the streets of Montreal in the dark winter while you stay warm indoors, or to imagine the world from a cockroach’s perspective. The idea is strange and a little terrifying at first, but this book tells a beautiful story told from a unique point of view in words that glide easily across the page.

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The CCA is housed in an impressive building that looks onto Boulevard Réné Lévesque. As cars drive by on the busy street, the CCA’s enormity is striking. Inside the building, which the museum-goer enters from Rue Baile, Toplight is found in the Octagonal Gallery.

The exhibit starts with drawings for the Halle au Blé, which was built in Paris from 1763 to 1782. The idea for this building was developed from traditional urban grain markets, where grains were kept in containers with open roofs in order to dispel rumours of stockpiling. The theme of transparency in this first building begins a trend apparent throughout the exhibit.

The next part of the exhibit deals with overhead lighting in museums, and the best ways to illuminate art on display. The exhibit takes a look at the lighting used in exhibition halls, such as London’s Crystal Palace, and the problems that arose from their skylights.

From museums and exhibition halls, the display goes on to examine the effects of overhead lighting in railway stations, factories, department stores, and working class tenements. It is interesting to observe the architectural changes that take place alongside social ones during this period. 1760 was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, a period when the middle class grew and moved to the city, as manufacturing emerged as a prominent industry. Pierre-Edouard Latouch, assistant curator of collections at the CCA, says in his introduction to the exhibit: “Time and time again it seemed clear to us that these glazed openings, used to illuminate the bourgeois lifestyle from on high, were somehow linked to the harsh material realities of the nineteenth century – a period marked by the disintegration of traditional alliances but slow to establish new ones.”

We can see how the functions of these buildings are linked. The exhibition halls, railway stations, factories, and department stores all had ways of separating different social classes. The use of overhead lighting illuminated what had been covered up for centuries, and the upper class tried to use light to clean up the working class. Architects even thought that making natural light available to New York’s working-class tenements would reduce alcoholism and abuse among families cooped up in small apartments with few windows.

Through an impressive array of photographs, sketches, and models, Toplight reveals how light has shaped our lives since the late 18th century.

“Toplight” runs through February 15 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (1920 Baile). Admission is free to the public. Additional information can be found at cca.qc.ca.

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The art ranged from endearing to disgusting, but never failed to be compelling. The show started last year as part of the Montreal Festival of Anarchy and featured the work of 230 local and international artists, but this year it was scaled back to only 15 artists.

Anarchy in this case means more than just resistance to organized government. The art in the show makes statements about human rights, feminism, poverty, war, and persecution, and varies from the strange to the poignant.

In the domain of strange art was Diana Arce’s piece “Politaoke” and Dayna McLeod’s “HotBeaverWetPussy.com.” Arce inserts the viewer into “Poitaoke” by making them watch themselves in a mirror and giving them a microphone to speak into. Arce created this project with the People’s Party for Participatory Democracy and the Advancement of Karaoke to give the average person a chance to make a speech, just like any politician.

Both of these pieces aim to shock the viewer, but McLeod’s piece is quicker to do so. A feminist artist, McLeod’s aim with “HotBeaverWetPussy.com” was to address the way women are viewed and the words that are used to describe women. To do this, she dressed up in beaver and cat costumes. Her art could easily be dismissed as the work of an overzealous feminist, but when it’s considered seriously, it’s clear there is merit in her message.

An especially poignant piece is “The House that Herman Built” by Jackie Sumell and Herman Wallace, a multimedia presentation that answers the question: “What kind of house does a man who has lived in a six-by-nine-foot box for over 30 years dream of?” A video takes the viewer on a three-dimensional tour of a house. The narrator is Herman Wallace, who has been in solitary confinement in the Louisiana State Penitentiary for over 36 years after being convicted of murder based on false testimony. The house is surrounded by gardens and the bathroom holds a tub bigger than Wallace’s cell, moving the viewer to think about injustice and freedom in the modern world.

Other notable pieces include “The Maid” by Freda Guttman, “The Stands” by Michael Rakowitz, “Public Faces” by Kathryn Delaney, and “Seeds of Victory” by Tania Willard.

Guttman’s piece is particularly effective. It features a series of photographs displayed in a dark room with a light moving behind them from left to right, showing the pictures successively. Each photograph is of the same scene: the artist’s 13th birthday party with friends and family gathered around. The maid who prepared the party appears and disappears – she is both present and absent at this gathering. “The Stands” is a collection of sketches depicting protestors in the stands of baseball games, holding signs that do not encourage the players but instead communicate political messages. In one case they hold signs and chant “bring them home,” referring to soldiers overseas rather than the baseball players. In “Public Faces” Delaney puts sketches of the faces of female sex workers on the streets where the women work. “Seeds of Victory” is a piece that shows a child blowing the seeds of a dandelion in front of a row of armed soldiers.

The majority of the works part of “Dissident Art” were not radical displays of disobedience to government, but instead articulated the desire for equality and freedom from the conventions of society. The exhibit emphasized grassroots movements and the importance of the most victimized people who cannot speak for themselves without the help of artists and activists.

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If you’re yearning for something more than the cold click-and-drag of digital playlists, Out of Sound Records wants to give you something more tangible. The Guelph, Ontario-based independent music label launched a project last March that plays with the world of digital downloading, while its heart stays in the realm of old-school technology. The project is called Digital DIY, and it’s a way to merge unique “do-it-yourself” merchandise with the convenience of digital downloads. At artists’ concerts fans can buy handmade products that come with a digital download code that gives them access to music from Canadian independent music download site zunior.com.

Out of Sound has sold handmade silk-screened posters, CDs packaged in hand-sewn bags, glow-in-the-dark record compilations, and colouring books, just to name a few. It’s all part of improving the fans’ experience, they say. Upcoming Digital DIY offerings could be anything: cartoons, comic books, wallpaper, posters, or pictures.

According to the label, Digital DIY is “a rebuttal to the insincere and corporate world of digital media.” Part of its aim is to give indie music fans a chance to connect with artists in a more personal way than a major label can offer; it’s also a reaction to “digital only” releases, available exclusively through the Internet.

This project is designed for the “super indie fan,” says an Out of Sound representative. “Most people don’t seem to care about individuality, but rather buy into a collective concept that is being force-fed like crispy chicken from McDonald’s.” Instead of reproducing a product that is identical to others around the world, Out of Sound is looking for individual thought and stresses the sincerity of their aspirations.

We all know the perils of being unique – it’s great until everyone else is unique in exactly the same way. The efforts of the small indie label today could easily be the crispy chicken from McDonald’s of tomorrow.

Larger indie labels have already used similar ideas; perhaps coincidentally, Outside Music sold posters for their artist Sebastian Grainger the same way that they hawk hand-silk-screened posters for lesser-known group Hot Kid. If the project continues to be successful, we can only guess that major labels will soon be emulating these DIY trends. Out of Sound is aware of this dilemma, but isn’t too bothered by it; they plan to continue with their business and stick to the “true spirit of Canadian indie culture.” That means developing with an industry that is always changing and continuing to innovate.

The DIY concept is also not new to the indie community, as a representative from Out of Sound acknowledges. “We have always been printing [cover art] and burning and taping and recording music,” he says. In the age of music downloads, a digital spin on the tradition of releasing DIY albums is a natural step. Out of Sound strives to keep up with the new technology of the Internet while staying true to the beloved production practices of independent artists.

Out of Sound Records’s next digital DIY release is called Cassette, a compilation of unreleased songs by 24 different artists released in association with zunior.com. The DIY feature of this compilation is that the music is on an actual tape, which comes with an digital access code to download music online. Cassette features Canadian artists like Shotgun Jimmie, Sunparlour Players, Jim Bryson, and Andre Ethier. The tour to promote Cassette includes a Montreal date on Sunday, September 28 at The Pound, with Tacoma Hellfarm Tragedy, Innes Wilson & His Opposition, among others.

Cassette plays on the nostalgia of children of the eighties and early nineties who saw tapes as a new medium for music and then watched them become obsolete as CDs, and then iPods, took the lead. That we think of tapes as ancient technology is a testament to the level at which the digital world has permeated our music experience to the point where we forget how young it is. The heyday of the tape format was little more than ten years ago, but when we consider it now it seems like a relic from a different world – we’re already pulling out old cassettes and reminiscing about our youth the same way that our parents did with their records.

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