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: Via Tom Ewing, I discovered Rastamouse, a new BBC kids’ show about patois-speaking rodents and the importance of communal rehabilitation. Each episode features Rastamouse’s crew “making a bad ting good” by persuading some wrongdoer that life is so much better irie. Now I can put my hypothetical children through musical and ideological indoctrination at the same time!
Friedrich Engels: secret cartoonist.
Also at Comics Comics this week, Joe McCulloch posted a terrific essay about Steve Ditko, grappling with that great artist’s series of avant-garde Randian tracts: “A View of Justice! is, by my estimate, the most ideologically extreme thing Ditko has ever made, depicting a heroic doctor brought off a tourist bus in a vaguely South American setting to tend to a Communist leader shot down while fighting fascist occupying forces. The doctor is not a resident of South Park and therefore the truth does not, in fact, lay in the middle; instead, he rejects both as forms of Force and idealistically refuses to operate on the wounded man. A horde of unsuspecting bystanders are gunned down as a result, which is terrible, but the Hero castigates his agitated fellow tourists for spouting meaningless irrational contradictions and delivers a rousing seven-panel speech on the practice of Justice.”
Eileen Myles: “I wrote five pages of pussy wallpaper and gave it to the editors at VICE who did publish it but confided in me that the money people really had to be convinced that it was not entirely disgusting. With all the dirty and violent and racist things that VICE has done, this was um a little troubling. Do we really want to send that kind of message to our readers. What kind of message is that. I guess a wet hairy soft female one. I mean a big giant female hole you might fall into never to be heard from again.” <3, <3, <3.
Carl: A lot of my friends in New York can’t stop talking about – and skipping off work to go to – Christian Marclay’s show, “The Clock,” at the Paula Cooper Gallery. Marclay’s work for a long time dealt primarily with music – I first encountered him as the world’s most abstract DJ – but now his focus seems to be on film. Not long ago he made a film that compiled hundreds of clips from movies of people talking on telephones. Roberta Smith of the NYT explains pretty well the general concept of “The Clock,” which edits together thousands of movie images in a 24-hour sequence of clocks showing the time that it actually is in the gallery the day you see it, as well as its effect – even if she can’t quite capture what led one person to call it maybe the most powerful work of art she’d ever seen and another friend to compare it seriously to the Sistine Chapel. The exhibition closes this weekend after a couple of marathon showings, at least until, as my friend Jody Rosen demanded, some rich person buys it and install it permanently somewhere that we can all go see it. I post this here primarily in case any of our readers is that rich person.
Meanwhile, someone who was a little bored in the offices of OKCupid has realized that besides being a dating site, they are a research organization gathering data from millions of people about the sociology of courtship and mating. And since they are also a tech company, they know math. So they’ve combined all that in surprising posts like this one, which correlates stats, with graphs, to show what questions you should ask on a first date – to find out if your date is conservative or liberal or likely to sleep with you, without asking any of those questions directly. For instance, if you want to know if they’re religious, find out how annoyed they get by people’s spelling and grammatical errors – people of faith are more willing to give the less-literate a break, while we godless heathens apparently have nothing better to worry about.
Finally: Klout, or, Snobbery: The Next Frontier. (Thanks to Sherwin Sullivan Tija.)
Margaux: Bring your children to Darren O’Donnell! He is looking for families, or children aged 6-12 with an accompanying adult, to participate in a FREE one-hour workshop session at the Harbourfront Centre. Mammalian is looking for feedback and advice for their Monster Makers show.
There are some beautiful colour drawings in the window at Show Gallery on Queen West in Toronto. They are signed by “Katt” and are about $20.
I somehow just ate something called Teriyaki Vibe Help Noodle Salad. It was pretty good.
Art went back to the world and went here to the Philippines’ Malabon City for this nighttime outdoor stage show (thanks to Stefan St-Laurent).
This Laurie Anderson video of her masterpiece “O Superman” somehow floated into my television last night through various internet/ facebook concoctions. It is really something to make an 8 1/2 minute long music video that looks that simple and that captivating. She sure makes it look easy – and essential.
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