(from Strawberries, by Mia Schwartz, 2013)
Tea With Chris: ‘Help! I Ate My Own Vagina!’
Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Thursday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week.
Chris: After the wan enervation of their last album, Elysium, the new Pet Shop Boys single “Axis” comes on like somebody jolting up from sleep: relentlessly propulsive, a coruscating pulse, with only the merest vocal presence from Neil Tennant himself. More singing would just complicate the sensation. “Why don’t I use the synthesizer, which is the sound of the future?”
Carl: I was recently in the Andalusian province of Sevilla, but didn’t visit (or then know about) the town there that is apparently its own small-scale experiment in utopianism that recalls the anarchist hopes of the Spanish Civil War. Compared to the unemployment-ridden Spanish economy in general, it seems like it’s thriving, although the comments on this story throw not-unexpected doubt on the mayor’s domineering style and perhaps cronyism. Still, any such real-life testing of social potentials and economic alternatives is exciting in a world so ahistorically convinced that one model fits all.
For a hilarious illustration of said model’s deep contradictions, you could do no better than Kathleen Phillips’s character monologue as a high-school guidance counselor who sees her job as an excuse to do “sweet fuck-all.”
The luminous writer Paul LaFarge brings a similar mixture of laughter and queasy undertones, but a lot more fucking, to these “scenes left out of Henry James’s The Ambassadors.” I thought it was really funny at first, and then it started to wear thin, and then it became unexpectedly meaningful. I haven’t read The Ambassadors, so that’s not a prerequisite, but you likely have to have swallowed your share of James one way or another. Oh dear, that last part sounded like a line from the story.
And finally something for which I’ve been lobbying for years: The Experience Music Project in Seattle has got a bunch of videos online of lectures from this year’s mini-Pop Conference. Douglas Wolk’s talk on very, very short songs is one not to miss:
Filed under carl wilson, chris randle, linkblogging, margaux williamson
Carl’s Tuesday Musics: “Money (Dollar Bill Y’All)”, Jimmy Spicer
I discovered this old-school jam via Douglas Wolk’s genealogy-of-the-Gatsby-soundtrack post on MTV today, and my ears can’t quite stop gobbling it up. Plus, I am in work-related negotiations this week, so it’s a useful mnemonic. $avour it!
Filed under carl wilson, Tuesday Musics
Little Boxes #140: Heartless
(from Heartless, by Nina Bunjevac, 2012)
Filed under chris randle, comics
Tea With Chris: Sous les pavés, le thé
Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Thursday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week.
Carl: Well, I’m sure we’ll talk more about this in five years, or else when Mad Men deals with it, but it’s been 45 years since May ’68, and that deserves a little somethin’ somethin’. Enjoy Bomblog’s roundup of soixante-huitarded materials, including René Viénet’s detourned kung-fu action movie Can Dialectics Break Bricks? Then read David Graeber smashing some masonry with a Baffler essay that goes from the Bastille to Occupy and the Debt Jubilee via May ’68, A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse. And Rhizome does a “cavalier” interview with Situationist historian McKenzie Wark.
And speaking of movements that bowl over the essential logic of their social foundations: My new favourite podcast, Hardcore History with Dan Carlin, has a four-hour episode on the Anabaptist rebellion and the siege of Munster during the Protestant Reformation that makes fascinating listening, especially if you remember the parts of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces about John of Leyden (not to be confused with John Lyden, unless you’re Greil Marcus of course).
The second (or millionth) time as farce: Radical feminism as horror villain in this ace Jezebel find.
By contrast, extraordinary clear-minded feminism from former kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart. I hope the women who were freed from sexual captivity in Cleveland this week get the chance to speak to her.
This story by a writer who tracked down the cast members of Harmony Korine and Larry Clark’s Kids twenty years later turned out to be one of the most compelling and moving things about chosen families, fame and loss.
I’ve never been as big a fan of webcomic artist Allie Brosh as many are, but her autobiographical post this week about depression is among the more powerful and illuminating things you could read on the subject. Many will identify. Many others might grasp for the first time how unhelpful it can be to say, “Why can’t you just make your fish alive again?”
But if we could make things alive again, I would like to nominate Taylor Mead.
Finally, it’s ridiculous how excited I am that friend of B2TW and scarily drily funny comedian David Heti has a podcast. I haven’t had a chance to listen to I Have a Problem, With David Heti yet and I am still recommending it to you. That’s excitertainment.
Chris: I’m deep into preparations for the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, so all I have for you this week is a looped Nate Dogg / Kyary mashup, which if not revolutionary will at least annoy any patriarchal figures around.
Filed under carl wilson, chris randle, linkblogging, margaux williamson
Carl’s Tuesday Musics: “King Kong” by Daniel Johnston (and cover by Tom Waits)
Hollywood special-effects magician Ray Harryhausen died this week at 93, recalling an era of cinematic creatures that were not just built out of zeroes and ones and were at once cheesier and more captivating because of it. Harryhausen in his turn was inspired by the original King Kong movie, with its stop-motion animation by Willis H. O’Brien.
In the song above, Daniel Johnston retells the tale of Kong, O’Brien and Harryhausen in an a capella recitation vaguely smelling of the blues. In the version below, Tom Waits pays tribute to Johnston but also fulfills the song’s potential by bringing the full blues ape-stank, just as R.H. built upon W.H.O’B.
When I was a kid I thought King Kong was pretty much the saddest movie ever, so I preferred the later Mighty Joe Young, which O’Brien also designed, but which gives the ape a happy ending.
Filed under carl wilson, movies, music, Tuesday Musics
Little Boxes #139: The Revenge of Foreshortening
(from Space Ace #1, writer unknown and art by Fred Guardineer, 1952)
Filed under chris randle, comics
