(by Moebius, 1995)
Monthly Archives: November 2011
Tea With Chris: In Love Like a Motherfucker
Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Friday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:
Chris: Big Boi’s Kate Bush fandom is so charming: “The album, to me, is just very somber and very chill…It’s almost like a scene from her diary – she seems to be in love like a motherfucker. Really, really, really in love.” Someone please get these two into a recording studio.
Two pieces about UK dance music: Julianne Escobedo Shepherd follows the fluorescent slime trail of the vital Night Slugs label, while Angus Finlayson critiques a disturbing misogynistic tendency among certain journalists and producers.
It only has a wall of light, not sound, but Wonder Girls’ new music video is worthy of the “Be My Baby” name.
Filed under carl wilson, chris randle, linkblogging, margaux williamson
Friday Pictures – Christian Chapman
Wisdom / Love / Bravery – 3 works from “The Seven Fire Prophets” on display at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto until Nov 30 2011 – as part of the group show “Ancestral Teachings: Contemporary Perspectives”
Ahmoo Angeconeb / from the series “Portraits”
Don’t break the law / from 2010
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Little Boxes #69: Origins
Filed under chris randle, comics
Tea With Chris: Sofia Cosplay
Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Friday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:
Carl: Psychoanalyst-essayist Adam Phillips, one of my favourite writers, talks to human-rights activist Sameer Padania: “This is where an information culture counts against us. People need to be educated into believing that evocation is more important than information. If we could bear listening to people, without trying to understand what they’re saying, we would get more from them. Effectively, psychoanalysis listens for the incoherencies that are saying more, or something other, than the coherences. It’s got something to do with the musicality of people’s voices and intonations; it’s a form of listening that’s less hypnotized and distracted by their coherences.”
Your call: Is Kate Bush’s new album, as my friend Ann argues here, “just what the best of Bush’s work has done since she burst on the scene, Spandex bat wings flapping, at the dawn of the New Wave era. It melds extravagant tales to unconventional song structures, and spirits the listener away into Bush’s distinctive hyperreality”? Or is it, as my friend Patrick has found, “feeble, empty, mindlessly repetitive, adolescently self-indulgent and, more than anything else, boring. … How does a great chef come to offer the world cold hot dogs in his own restaurant with a straight face?”
Tom McCarthy, author of The Remainder and C, eulogizes the communications theorist Friedrich Kittler, author of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, while lovingly lampooning his acolytes, actually known as the Kittlerjugend. Tribute and travesty at once, it’s a ticklish balancing act, but McCarthy finesses it.
What would Kittler have to say about this? Christianity, remixed as crypto-postmodernist poetry. (Thanks to Sasha Chapin for the diversion.)
Chris: Rich Juzwiak judged a child beauty pageant and the resulting essay is amazing, venturing into this demimonde of flattery, rhinestones and outlandish performance with the perspective of a temporary insider. He ends up demystifying the pageant circuit’s notoriously strange image somewhat, but one can only do so much: “The weirdest celebrity emulation was Sofia Coppola, as brought to us by a child in the 11-13 group named Courtney. Her dress looked like an old-time director’s slate, bordered in thick, diagonal black and white stripes and featuring a blank template on the chest (‘Movie: ________’). Clearly, someone had found this and thought, ‘Who’s a reasonably young, attractive, brunette, gawky director? Oh right. You’re Sofia Coppola.’ She danced around with an actual slate to a disco version of ‘Hooray for Hollywood,’ much as I presume Sofia Coppola does on her days off.”
Five facetious future literary movements, from noird to salvagepunk.
Jessica of the K-pop group SNSD does not fuck with cucumbers.
Filed under carl wilson, chris randle, linkblogging, margaux williamson
Little Boxes #68: Jack Strand
(from “Jack Strand” in Funny Picture Stories #11, writer unknown and art by Frank Frollo, 1938)
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Tea With Chris: A Meaningful Melange
Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Friday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:
Chris: After this site becomes an iPhone app next week, I’m probably going to drive someone to murder with the Waka Flocka and Juicy J buttons.
On a similarly monomaniacal note, someone has resolved to review every Pokémon episode ever on Tumblr. The, uh, appeal of their project will undoubtedly be lost on anyone born before the late 1980s, but what can I say, my generation didn’t get a Fraggle Rock.
Stephen Swift sent a text message from a Lil B concert that blew up a little online, and now he’s written a wonderful explanation of its contexts, personal and political: “So to see B stop rapping that song outright—not even picking it back up afterwards, which stunned me—in order to clarify what he’d only briefly and clumsily hinted at in its Youtube video’s description field; that it was a song about physical and ferocious but necessarily consensual intercourse; that, further, it dealt with a complicated and hard-to-elucidate facet of human sexuality, rather than promoted a brute-forcing through that complication; that we should put our drinks down and actually flip off sexual offenders, which really does sound silly on paper but, when taken in context as part of the mélange of performative acts asked of the audience at a good show, felt meaningful; I can’t tell you how it was to be there. No other performer has ever asked me to trust them like that, and I have seen no other performer assume that their audience would readily accept that challenge.”
(Margaux and Carl are linkless this week.)
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Friday Pictures – Sholem Krishtalka from his Lurking series – an ongoing series of drawings based on his friends’ Facebook photos
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Little Boxes #67
(by Hellen Jo, 2010)
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