Back to the World

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:

Margaux: I went to an event recently, an informal award ceremony at The Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. The K.M. Hunter Artist Awards were recognizing my friend Jean Marshall’s work along with 7 other recipients. The people who received the grants were awarded out of the blue – nothing fancy, no applications, no parades, no advertisements. The night was structured around pretty great and simple short videos of each of the recipients talking about their work and somehow, as my mother would say, there was no B.S. – everyone seemed to know what they were doing. The video of my friend featured her first Skype conversation since she’s from way up north. All in all, a real classy way of going about an art award.

I love this art book by Richard William Hill, The World Upside Down, lent to me by the curator Michelle Jacques. As Hill explains inside: “The term ‘world upside down’ has its origins in Europe’s Middle Ages, and I have taken the liberty, as an enthusiastic amateur, of attempting an account of inversion in the visual arts of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods.” There are many confident and recklessly perfect things inside, one of which is a discussion on tricksters that involves Chery L’Hirondelle. As L’Hirondell says there, “that spirit (the trickster) is there to remind us that many social parameters are just man-made, are not of the natural order.”

Ketchup is changing

This is a pretty interesting audio interview about hearing voices in the evangelical community – “‘When God Talks Back’ To The Evangelical Community”

Good art shows ended and in process in Toronto: I loved some of the new work from Derek Mainella at Neubacher Shor Contemporary. Jenn Murphy has an art show on now at Clint Roenisch gallery, Monkey’s Recovery, that I have no doubt will be pretty great to be in the middle of.

Chris: Here’s the pointillist form letter that rejected would-be contributors to Raw magazine received. “Impossible to reproduce / should not be allowed to reproduce.”

As someone who hates the word “foodie” even more than the bovine fetishism it denotes, I appreciate the fake menus a mystery comedian handed out at Brooklyn’s “Great GoogaMooga” festival (this orthography!) last weekend.

Carl: I have been distressed about our country this week. For just one example of why, listen to what a former government scientist has to say. On the other hand, I have been inspired by what our young, red-squared, francophone compatriots in Quebec have achieved, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the streets to protest their province’s drift away from its social-democratic traditions and, subsequently, its attempt to curtail their rights to protest. If you’ve gotten a less positive impression, here are 10 points you should know.

On a lighter (but raspier) note, I had an animated conversation at a dinner party last night about the apparent speech trend called “vocal fry,” aka “creaky voice,” especially among young women, about which there was much pop-science chatter early this year. Today I stumbled on a terrific blog about speech that has a more in-depth examination of the phenomenon’s precedents, prevalence and implications, from Britney to Gene Pitney. I did like the theory that we came up with last night, though – that, among people with parents and elder siblings likely afflicted with at least traces of Uptalk, it’s probably a typical generational reaction-for-distinction.