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Late last year, critic-musician Franklin Bruno, writing in the Boston Phoenix, one of America's oldest “underground” newspapers, declared that the best rock record of 2006 was The Observer by the Vancouver-based duo Mecca Normal (a.k.a. Jean Smith, 47, and David Lester, 49). Better, he claimed, than White Bread Black Beer by Britain's Scritti Politti, his No. 2 choice, better than Sound Grammar by New York jazz legend Ornette Coleman, better even than Songs and Other Things by Television founder Tom Verlaine.

It's a pretty safe bet The Observer didn't end up on any similar list from a Canadian critic. In part, this is because the disc was released by Seattle's small Kill Rock Stars label and distributed, as most of Mecca Normal's records usually have been, as an import. Partly, too, it's because Mecca Normal, with a repertoire of self-penned songs with titles like I'm Not into Being the Woman You're With While You're Looking for the Woman You Want and Don't Heel Me Like a Dog Just to Break Me Like a Horse, remains stubbornly sui generis – “the Buckley's cough syrup of rock” – 20-plus years and 12 or so full-length records after its formation. As vocalist/keyboardist Smith remarked recently: “We operate Mecca Normal as a vehicle to put across ideas. I didn't start a band and then try to think of things to say. I had things to say, so I started a band … We aren't changing to satisfy trends or new audiences; anything we want to do, we give it a try.”

She added: “From the very beginning, there have been those who love what we do and those who hate it, and both of those positions give us inspiration and encouragement.”

Sometimes the things Mecca Normal has wished to say haven't taken a musical form. Indeed, Lester, the group's guitarist, and Smith – who stresses they're “not a couple … We have an excellent friendship” – have “included art exhibits, lectures, publishing, writing (Smith's novel Broke Like Me, her third or fourth work of fiction, will be published next year) and graphics into the Mecca Normal vehicle.” The duo has worked various day jobs to keep the vehicle running — Lester's the editor and designer of B.C. BookWorld while Smith, a former ski instructor, has a steady gig as “a fitness technician encouraging and instructing women in weight-bearing exercise.”

Neither Lester nor Smith has ever seriously considered moving out of Vancouver to, say, New York (Mecca Normal has opened for Sonic Youth and Fugazi) or Seattle. True, “we have made a lot of friends in the U.S. over the years,” perhaps because “Americans believe or hope that art and music can change the world – more than Canadians” and because “the gregarious nature of Americans, their energy” provides more of a boost to Mecca Normal's live shows. But, noted Smith, “we did not set out to be famous … [we're] not essentially a ‘get-ahead' kind of a band.”

Yes, if fame and fortune ever come to the band that once produced this couplet “You vote Socred next time instead of NDP/I'm gonna have to wonder about you and me,” it's gonna come on their own terms.

KITTY SCOTT - art curator

The Serpentine Gallery is housed in a lovely converted tea house situated in the heart of London – in Kensington Gardens in Hyde Park, in fact. England, of course, has been at the forefront of the contemporary-art boom of the last 10 years, and the Serpentine, founded in 1970, has been a big player in that scene, having mounted exhibitions by Damien Hirst, Elizabeth Peyton, Bridget Riley, Sam Taylor-Wood and Tracey Emin, among other stars. The gallery, which charges no admission and averages more than 750,000 visitors each year, is also famous for the invitation it extends each summer to an international architect to design a temporary pavilion adjacent to the tea house. Architects who've received the commission include Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas.

Catapulted into this heady environment last August was Kitty Scott. She'd just been named chief curator of the Serpentine after having spent the previous six years at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, five of them as its curator of contemporary art. It was Scott, a Newfoundlander by birth (in 1963) who orchestrated the gallery's famous purchase of Maman, Louise Bourgeois's huge, rather menacing sculpture of a female black spider, now installed in the outdoor plaza by the gallery's main entrance.

Scott's no stranger to London – she completed her MA in visual-arts administration there at the Royal College of Art in 1995 – but prior to last year, her career had largely been in Canada, in cities such as Edmonton, Montreal, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Toronto, with forays to San Francisco, Santa Fe and Amsterdam.

“I'm not really the kind of person who has wanted to ‘get ahead,' ” she observed recently. “More than anything I have wanted to work with artists, from Canada and abroad, and see their work realized in the best possible way. I have sought out situations and like-minded individuals in order to realize my goal.”

Scott said she was hired by the Serpentine because, “as I understand it … I have a good reputation internationally, with artists. I cannot say I was conscious of this, but in my work I have always been driven to do the best I can do for artists.”

Life at the Serpentine is much less bureaucratic than it was in Ottawa and Scott enjoys being “higher in the food chain than I was at my old job.” Moreover, as she told Canadian Art magazine, “I have had more Canadian artists calling and asking to drop by to see me since I have been in London,” whereas in Ottawa “there was not too much traffic.”

That said, she doesn't put too much pressure on herself to try to include Canadian artists in the Serpentine's exhibition schedule. For one thing, “I'm not sure what it means to be a Canadian or what ‘Canadianness' is.” For another, “the art has to come first … I want to work with artists who are making challenging art first and foremost and, of course, I'm always thinking about the work of artists I feel passionate about,” some of whom just happen to be Canadian or have strong links to Canada (such as Peter Doig, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and Althea Thauberger).

It's Scott's opinion that major Canadian art institutions don't do enough to support living Canadian artists, nor do they show much initiative in mounting big shows by non-Canadians. By contrast, “the world is very generous to Canadian artists,” she remarked, noting the large retrospective New York's Museum of Modern Art recently did for Vancouver's Jeff Wall. “They come home having had major exhibitions accompanied by big books or catalogues.” However, Canadian galleries “don't really give back to the larger world in the same way.”

ASZURE BARTON - choreographer-dancer

We caught up with Aszure Barton the other day by cellphone as she rode a bus out of Manhattan en route to a performing-arts centre in Hartford, Conn. Barton's a dancer and choreographer currently associated with Hell's Kitchen Dance, a troupe of young dancers (Barton is 31) assembled by none other than Mikhail Baryshnikov for the Baryshnikov Arts Center, founded in 2005. In fact, Baryshnikov was on the bus with Barton that day because, at 59, he's dancing in a piece choreographed by Barton (in which she dances as well) called Come In on a three-month tour that's taking Hell's Kitchen to Chicago, Ann Arbor, Reno and Birmingham as well as Madrid, Rio de Janeiro an Sao Paulo.

“It was happenstance,” not design, that brought Barton to New York seven years ago and into Baryshnikov's orbit or, as she calls him, “Mischa.” A native of Edmonton, she left the Alberta capital at 14 to train at the National Ballet School in Toronto. After graduation, she got a Canada Council grant to study contemporary dance in Europe for a year, returning in the early 1990s to join Montreal's Les Ballets Jazz. But then, “wanting a change in my life,” she heeded the invitation of her dancing sisters, Charissa and Cherice, “to come to New York where they were already living, and see what happens.”

A lot has happened. She started her own company, Aszure and Artists, in 2002. She met Baryshnikov in Nebraska in 2003 when she was on tour with New York's Ruth Davidson Hahn & Company and he was a guest soloist. Last year, she choreographed Scott Elliott's interpretation of The Threepenny Opera, with costumes by Isaac Mizrahi and a cast including Cyndi Lauper and Tony award-winner Alan Cumming.

Barton acknowledged New York, which she calls “a mecca of dance,” has been beneficial to her art. “It's definitely pushed me, opened me to so much. There's so much to feed your brain and art there, and you have to be really motivated.” But “I don't think you necessarily have to leave [Canada] to become a big deal. I mean, I do know a lot of people who've never left or left briefly and had amazing careers in Canada.”

“I like Canada more than I like America, to be honest with you,” she said, laughing. But New York is world unto itself. “It's so international … It doesn't feel like George W. Bush country, that's for sure.”

ROBERT CHARLES WILSON - writer

When Stephen King travelled to Toronto from his home in Maine earlier this month to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Booksellers Association, the billionaire creator of The Shining and Misery told an adoring crowd of about 1,400 of his fondness for certain Canadian writers. One he singled out was Robert Charles Wilson who, at 54, he declared, was “probably the finest science-fiction author now writing.”

Now you'd think the audience would have whooped it up for the hometown boy. (Smith, while born in California, has resided in Canada pretty much full-time since his ninth birthday and currently lives in Concord, just outside Toronto.) After all, this wasn't the first time that King had sung Wilson's praises; in a column in Entertainment Weekly last year, he'd called Wilson “a hell of a storyteller and the geek factor in his books is zero.” Last year, Wilson won the biggest science-fiction prize of all, the Hugo Award, for his novel, S pin. That put him in the august company of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick and J.K. Rowling.

But, as Wilson himself noted (he was at the King fete), the crowd's response to King's “incredibly flattering” shout-out was polite but underwhelming. Wilson's most enthusiastic audiences, it seems, are elsewhere – in the United States, France (where he recently toured) and Germany (where he just won a major science-fiction award). “For the general reader in Canada, science-fiction flies under the radar a bit,” he reasoned, adding, “I don't put a lot of work into publicity. I mean, I haven't updated my website since August, 2006!”

Wilson said his relative lack of recognition “hasn't bothered me, although people have remarked on it to me. You're certainly not the first.” Indeed, when people are asked to cite famous living Canadian science-fiction writers, they almost invariably mention William Gibson, Spider Robinson (the last both U.S.-born) and perhaps Robert J. Sawyer before falling silent. “Maybe,” Wilson theorized, “there's an ecological niche for Canadian science-fiction writers. Maybe it can only hold one or two and that's about it.”

DAVID DQ LEE - singer

The Grateful Dead used to sing about how every once in a while you might “get shown the light/in the strangest of places/if you look at it right.”

For David DQ Lee, now an in-demand countertenor around the world, this happened in 1994 when he was 16 and happened to see a feature film called Farinelli. Critics tended to dismiss this tale of an 18th-century Italian castrato as no more than “a low-camp sumptuously mounted melodrama.” But not Lee: “This movie changed my life inside out,” he confessed the other day. “Since then, I've been madly in love with classical music and especially Baroque opera and history.”

Lee, who had come to Canada in 1991 from Korea, where he'd sung in the World Vision Korean Children's Choir, subsequently enrolled in voice training at the Vancouver Academy of Music, where he received instruction from the legendary mezzo-soprano Phyllis Mailing.

Lee, 29, unabashedly describes himself as ambitious. And while he had “a great training in Canada and many great opportunities to sing with most of the top Canadian symphonies and operas,” he finally decided to make the break for Europe last year. He is now based in Berlin. The baroque repertoire, he argued, “was never a huge interest for opera companies in Canada, which is too bad,” whereas in Europe “there are many theatres where they produce numerous baroque or specialized pieces.” Staying in Canada also would mean having “no chance to shine under [the] shadows” of such resident and established countertenors as Daniel Taylor, 38, and Matthew White, 34. Or at least that's what he believes.

There's no doubt that Lee has been busy in recent years, including dates with opera companies in Chile, Vienna, Hamburg and Venice. But one of his favourite gambits has been appearances at one international vocal arts competition or another. He's already won awards at some of the biggies – the Rosa Ponselle in the U.S., the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium competition, Italy's Musica Sacra, the Francisco Vinas in Barcelona. Just a few weeks ago, he was Canada's representative at the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World joust. One of 25 contestants, Lee won his initial round in the $35,000 competition with what critics and audience hailed as an electrifying performance, but failed to make the finals.

Lee confessed he “misses Canada dearly,” so he's happy to hear he's been booked to perform Bach's Mass in B Minor with the Orchestre symphonique de Québec in January next year. But “let's face it, even if North American music education is great, [there's] no comparison to experiencing [classical] culture and arts in its place of origin which is Europe.”

NANCY HUSTON - author

“Writers are a tribe,” the late, great Margaret Laurence remarked early in the 1970s, when she was helping the Writers' Union of Canada get on its feet.

Nancy Huston is a writer, too, primarily of novels, perhaps best known in this country for her 1999 Giller Prize nomination. But Canadians, or at least the reading public, have a hard time figuring out to just which tribe she belongs. Huston was born in Calgary in 1953 and spent most her childhood and teenage years there before moving first to the U.S. and then, fatefully, in 1973, to France, which she's called home (sort of) ever since. Certainly it's home to the two French-speaking daughters she's had with her Bulgarian-born, French-speaking husband, Tzvetan Todorov, a literary theorist and philosopher.

But Huston thinks of herself as being “ontologically divided in two” – a phrase she conjured in her excellent 2002 collection of linked essays Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue and Self. On the one hand, there's the inescapable fact of her childhood as “a gal of the Prairie,” a world of “Protestantism, wheat fields, country and western music, oil derricks” and other touchstones, all of them irredeemably Anglo. On the other, there's been her long adulthood in France – classes with Roland Barthes, writing books, plays, essays in French, residences in Paris and rural Berri, being called “notre Canadienne” by some of the French intelligentsia, bestsellerdom and a plethora of awards including the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens.

Huston has scored honours, English and French, in Canada as well – an Officer of the Order of Canada two years ago, the 1999 Giller nod, for The Mark of the Angel (first written in French as L'empreinte de l'ange), a Governor-General's literary award in 1993 for French fiction for Cantiques des plaines, a novel she first wrote in English, recast into French, then published in French just ahead of the English version. Yet for all these formal honours, Huston sometimes thinks of herself as “a national apostate, a traitor to the Great North” because, as she writes in Losing North, her 34 years abroad have made her “woefully ignorant” of the textures of Canadian culture and its claims to multiculturalism. Indeed, she's been prone, she admits, to “peremptorily” thinking that Canada hasn't got a culture.

Huston's backing-and-forthing has all been quite dizzying, and it's contributed, in part, to the divided fan base Huston has in this country. True, her fellow expatriate Mavis Gallant has lived even longer in Paris – almost 56 of her 84 years – and, like Huston, communicates well in French. However, anglophone Canadian readers have never relinquished their notion of Gallant as “one of us” because through all her years in exile, Gallant has always written in English. Huston's latest novel, published last year in French as Lignes de faille (Fault Lines)is due out in English this fall and will be called Birth Marks.

RAGHAV - urban artist

When Raghav Mathur was growing up in Calgary and Fort McMurray, his parents would play a lot of Hindi and Indian classical music in their home. At age five, he was enrolled in lessons in Indian vocal and instrumental music with a Calgary instructor named Nishi Kant Bali.

“But there was also lots of other music around,” including Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, Raghav (his stage name) recalled recently. “They were proud of their culture and were totally happy at the same time to have me listen to Michael Jackson.” The only time they put their foot down was when young Raghav brought home a CD by the notorious rapper Snoop Dogg.

Now, at 26, Raghav is a pop sensation, a tousle-haired creamy crooner who's melded the Hindi sounds he heard at home, the vocal training he got in Los Angeles from Seth Riggs (vocal coach for Madonna and Michael Jackson) and the compositional chops he developed at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts into an idiom one critic has described as “Asian-flavoured U.S. R & B music with hip-hop flourishes.”

This hybrid has made Raghav a star in the U.K. (where he now lives full-time) and India (where he owns an apartment in Mumbai and where he claims his debut CD, 2004's Storyteller, ranks as the sixth best-selling album ever). He's something of a star in Canada, too – but his fame is restricted largely to the country's South Asian communities. When he sells out the Rogers Centre in downtown Toronto (which he's done twice), the crowd is all South Asian, Raghav observed. When he plays Europe, the audiences are racially mixed.

Raghav felt compelled to leave Canada at 17 to pursue his muse because, for all of the country's supposed support for and embrace of multiculturalism, there wasn't “much room” for his synthesis of styles and he feared he'd end up pegged as a specialty act appealing solely to South Asians. “Being an urban artist, a South Asian artist, and staying in Canada would have been a lot more difficult, a lot more of an uphill battle than it was in the U.K.”

Still, he's determined to break into the North American mainstream, but without changing his style – which shouldn't be difficult, since melodically, production-wise and lyrically, it's pretty much of a piece with the stuff one hears in cool R & B clubs these days. “I've kind of worked backwards a little bit,” he acknowledged. “I mean, I'm not like a Bollywood artist who is coming over here from India. I'm singing in English.”

With a report from Kate Taylor

RACHEL SKLAR - blogebrity-author

We all know the Trojan War adage, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” But have you heard the one that goes, “Beware of Jewish-Canadian ex-lawyers speaking Greek”?

Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington has. While attending a party thrown in her honour in Manhattan in 2004 by Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, the Athens-born author, pundit and politico found herself being greeted by one Rachel Sklar with the words “Welcome to New York,” spoken in Greek! Turns out that before the party, Sklar, born and bred in Toronto and educated at the University of Toronto's law school, had asked some of her Greek-speaking friends how to say that greeting to make an impression.

Well, it did – “an online rapport ensued” – and that, my friends, has made all the difference. At 34 (“but I behave like I'm 24”), Rachel Sklar is now an employee of Huffington, becoming as of March, 2006, the media and special projects editor for The Huffington Post, the “virtual online cocktail party” launched in May, 2005. This has resulted in Sklar making frequent appearances on such TV current-affairs programs in the U.S. as Scarborough County on MSNBC and CNN's Reliable Sources. And, lest we forget, she also has a book on the way, Jew-ish: Who We Are, How We Got Here and All the Ish in Between, arriving in 2008 courtesy of HarperCollins.

Sklar first arrived in New York in 1998 and for the next three years worked full-time as a corporate lawyer. But “I always knew I wanted to write,” she said the other day from her home on the Lower East Side. Moreover, she also had a showbizzy side, having at one time considered forsaking law school to take musical theatre at New York University. Tiring of the legal world, she began to freelance for all sorts of New York-based and Canadian publications, eventually ending up as (in the words of The New York Observer) “the unusually sunny-voiced” editor of FishBowl NY, a much-read blog devoted almost entirely to the ins and outs of U.S. media. After almost a year there, Huffington went on to “pluck me from relative obscurity to less obscurity,” she laughed.

But has all this buzz gotten her any profile in Canada? So far no, it seems. Late last year, a producer for CBC-TV's The Hour with George Stromboulopoulos contacted Huffington to see if she could do an interview. She could not, but she indicated Sklar could. The CBC declined. “There I was, a homegrown Canadian expert in New York and the CBC said no.” said Skar, “I was really stunned.”

EAST VILLAGE OPERA COMPANY - musicians

Formed in New York in 2004, EVOC is the brainchild of singer Tyley Ross and arranger/multi-instrumentalist Peter Kiesewalter. The pair are thirtysomething expatriates from Ottawa with years of experience in all sorts of idioms – musical theatre (Ross most famously as the lead in the original Canadian production of Tommy), folk, jazz, classical, film music, pop and opera. Complemented by as many as nine supporting musicians, Ross and Kiesewalter take classical operatic arias – think Puccini's Nessun dorma – and recast them as “unabashed seventies arena-rock anthems,” “sultry bossa novas” or “four-on-the-floor disco workouts.” The ensemble has been a regular at Joe's Pub in New York's Public Theater, and in 2005 EVOC was signed to Decca Records, with Neil Dorfsman (Dire Straits, Sting) producing its self-titled CD of that year.

Asked this week if the EVOC would have the same profile if either or both of its two principals had used a Canadian city as its base of operations, Ross said no. “Less than 100 persons came to our first New York show, far fewer than had come to see us play in our hometown just days before,” he recalled.

“But while our Ottawa audience was filled with family and friends, our New York debut [in March, 2004] was attended by a veritable Who's Who of the New York arts biz: arts reporters from various media outlets … the creative team of the Public Theater, staff from New York City Opera and a half-dozen record company executives. That doesn't happen in Canada. In one night we managed to lay the foundation for a career in the recording business, one that had eluded us at home for years … We all know that Canada is a better place to live, but as an artist it's a harder place to make a living.”

At the same time, Ross acknowledged the Internet is turning the music biz topsy-turvy. “Soon it might not be necessary to leave home to live in a major centre, and anybody with talent, a laptop and an Internet hookup will be able to [make a living] from the comfort of their own home. I'm looking forward to the day when I can do my work via the Internet from my very own piece of Canadian soil.”

Kiesewalter said he originally came to New York “to study clarinet and immerse myself in the music scene for a short while (thank you, Canada Council).” Even with EVOC, “the initial intent was to do a few shows for fun and return to our respective careers” in acting and film and TV soundtrack composition. But once Kiesewalter got into the rhythm of things, “I found an incredibly deep and approachable pool of like-minded artists,” most of them from places outside New York and even the U.S. In EVOC's last touring ensemble of 11, only the string quartet was American.

DAVID AGLER - conductor/artistic director

Eight years ago, the then 52-year-old David Agler found himself in a nasty dispute with his masters at the Vancouver Opera. Indiana-born and Princeton-educated, Agler had been hired as the music director of the VOC in 1992 after stints as a conductor with the Australian Opera in Sydney and the San Francisco Opera.

Today, of course, the dispute is just so much blood under the bridge. And even though it resulted in the VOC deciding not to renew Agler's contract, Agler decided he would stay in B.C.'s largest city. He still spends almost half the year there, teaching master classes at the University of British Columbia. In January, he'll conduct the world premiere at UBC of The Dream Healer, an opera by veteran Vancouver composer-baritone Lloyd Burritt.

But it's safe to say Agler's most prestigious gig has been as artistic director of the Wexford Festival Opera in southeastern Ireland. Established in 1951, Wexford was one of the first opera festivals and over the years it has developed a reputation as “the world leader in the production of rare operas,” in the words of Ireland's minister for arts, sports and tourism. Mixing sports, geography and arts, John O'Donoghue said Wexford “bedrocks an important part of our international reputation as a major player on the global cultural scene, which consistently punches above its weight.”

Agler, who assumed Wexford's directorship in 2005, spends two months of the calendar year in Ireland. This year's festival ran for just over two weeks, starting May 31, and presented some 50 events, including performances of Dvorak's opera Rusalka and Der Silbersee (A Winter's Fairy Tale) by Kurt Weill and Georg Kaiser. Next year, Agler expects to be working in Wexford's new opera theatre whose main auditorium will contain 750 seats.

Agler admits he doesn't yet have Canadian citizenship – he's a landed immigrant – but he expects to rectify that situation in the next few months. “I have chosen Canada … I had worked regularly in Canada – Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal and Vancouver – and I fell in love with [it]. I have respect for what it has achieved. Canadians compromise for the common good. Which is something I don't think can be said for the land of my birth.”

With a report from Kate Taylor