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: This is kind of eerie. I like that his uniform appears to be pink, though.
“The deputy leader of Sunderland City Council said she hopes Margaret Thatcher ‘burns in hell’ on social networking site Facebook.” My dad’s hometown! “Social networking site Facebook”!
Send a suggestively blank email to Eileen Myles (well, okay, to her publisher) and she/they will give you something good.
Like Carl, I’m going to indulge in a bit of self-promotion: Godard films as R&B songs.
Carl: Quick! Today’s the last day Toronto artist Seth Scriver and Vancouver’s Shayne Ehman are raising money to make the second half of their autobiographical cartoon Asphalt Watches, about driving across Canada in sweaty-little-monster form. Check out the preview on Indie Gogo and I think you’ll agree you want to see the rest.
This syllabus is a very useful resource for any teacher who wants to address issues around the Occupy movement, or anyone who wants to do more independent reading on same. The course itself presents some interesting anthropological-pedagogical-political issues: The professor seems to be asking the students to take part in the movement for a grade. How would other activists feel about that? How about other teachers and students? I’m not against it – it’s not a mandatory course, after all. Just intrigued. Her argument: “As a class, we will have scrupulous contingency plans in place for each field visit, including buddy-systems, phone trees, and meeting places determined in advance. As a regular participant in the Occupy movement, however, I can say with absolute certainty that there is no foreseeable risk in teaching this as a field-based class. On the contrary, the risks of disengaged scholarship seem more profound.”
Dept of Self-Promotion: Ann Powers, Daphne Carr and I were asked to discuss Simon Reynolds’ much-praised Retromania book for a panel discussion on Bookforum. That was a couple of months ago, but the results just went up on the website this week. When we had the exchange it seemed like we were the only negative voices on the book (I also wrote about it on Slate last week). But now other dissenters are starting to surface, too.
Now, what kind of cultural recycling is this? “HI!! JACK! You’ll find your fortune in Chinatown! … Your love is broken into Five Easy Pieces!”
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