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:

Chris: I miss the era when developers would publish a Laurie Anderson conceptual-art video game.

Connor Willumsen stays killing the incredible-full-length-comics-released-for-free-on-Tumblr game.

*shrieking* KYARY PAMYU PAMYU

Carl: First and foremost, read this account by a freelance war correspondent in Syria. It’s an impassioned account of how and why we’re getting perilously close to losing our ability to gather important information about global situations: Most media companies are unwilling to pay what it takes, because their audiences, us, don’t seem to care.

Next, I can’t put this any better than the headline does: “Please Stop Wearing Redface to A Tribe Called Red Shows.” Oh, and please stop wearing redface anywhere else. This kind of absolutely appalling ignorant fashionable-appropriation-trivialization-racism bullshit has been going on for several years, with the would-be-chic wearing headdresses and feathers and “tribal” makeup and holding “fashion powwows” (see Ke$ha among many, many others), but I didn’t think people would actually have the gall to wear it to concerts by actual aboriginal people, obviously thinking they were paying some kind of compliment. Can we take up a collection and buy these kids a clue?

Here, on the other hand, is something nicer about Ke$ha. I wouldn’t call this stealing, I’d call it a tribute to one of my favourite oddball bands ever. (I don’t have it on hand but she’s been photographed wearing a Residents T-shirt before.) As someone said, if even one Ke$ha fan buys a Residents album as a result, that’d be awesome.

On the appropriation/tribute/collaboration theme, there is a lot to say about Jay-Z’s dance with Marina Abromovich this week, and the developing relationship between hip-hop artists, fine-art-museum and auction culture (which I discuss a bit here) and now performance art (NB also Kanye’s collaborations with Vanessa Beecroft, among others), but time is short. Meanwhile enjoy Jerry Saltz’ s first-hand account of the Jay-Z-meets-the-art-world experience – kind of giddy, but kind of on-point too, because isn’t the central fact that (even in his recent, weaker period) someone like Jay-Z is at the very least as good and vital an artist as any of them?

A sexy-filthy Soviet alphabet.

And because I didn’t post a Tuesday Musics this week … I’m not even 100% sure what kind of music this is, but it makes me feel really good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVc3Z-bG6Eo