Tag Archives: Occupy

by | September 13, 2012 · 6:41 PM

Tea With Chris: All the Stories in 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: Only one solitary squib this week, because I’m an idiot fucker (and because the Toronto film festival has actually managed to moderate my internet usage). But it’s a mashup of Khia and the Spice Girls, so you’ll forgive me, won’t you?

Carl: This weekend marks the anniversary of the birth of the Occupy movement, and people are gathering this weekend to assess, plan and move forward. That end of the debate during the U.S. election campaign has been too little heard so far. But I have some faith we’re just coming into the real heat of it – I know because this week I had my first lefty-vs-lefty debate about whether the Democrats actually differ enough from Republicans for it to matter, the lesser of two evils, etc. A more intelligent version of that argument was staged this week on Democracy Now, with Michael Eric Dyson and Glen Ford: “The More Effective Evil, or Progressives’ Best Hope?”

But if all the present-day polemicizing wears upon you, dig into the historic archive of radical texts assembled by poet-essayist Lisa Robertson and novelist-essayist Matthew Stadler in Revolution: A Reader. Or, with more brevity but even more sweep, this attempt to list all the stories in the world.

Does listing all the stories on the Internet risk taming and domesticating them, though? There are many parts of this argument about “the Brooklynization of music”  that I don’t quite agree with, but the defense of regionalism is stirring, and at least an ingredient in a question I’ve often had in recent years: Why does it seem like things, people, culture, have gotten less weird than they used to be? Not that weird is synonymous with good – it can even be the opposite. But when it leaks out of the ecosystem, you miss it.

I wouldn’t call Luke Fishbeck (of Lucky Dragons) weird, for example. But he’s good. I enjoyed this brief Wired profile – it especially made me want to start a Sum Iink Club in my neighbourhood.

And speaking of the former culture of the weird, I am excited to hear that Marc Maron might be interviewing John Darnielle. Heck, I’m just excited to think about Maron listening to the Mountain Goats.

Comments Off on Tea With Chris: All the Stories in the World

Filed under carl wilson, chris randle, linkblogging, margaux williamson

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

by | January 6, 2012 · 5:56 PM

Tea With Chris: Bad Mirror

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!”

Comments Off on Tea With Chris: Bad Mirror

Filed under carl wilson, chris randle, linkblogging, margaux williamson

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

by | December 16, 2011 · 2:56 PM

Tea With Chris: Oblivion Scattereth

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: “The ruins of Wonderland.”

Owen Pallett started a Tumblr devoted to Toronto show posters (2000-09), and it’s already fascinating – not only for suggesting what the local musical topography looked like a decade ago to us babies, but for its explicit rejection of nostalgia. Who wants to live in a museum?

New John Ashbery poem, 11 perfect lines, the last one almost a wink:

Oblivion scattereth her poppy, and besides
it’s time to go inside now,
feed the aggressive pets, forgive our trespasses
for trespassing against us.

Margaux: This sort of feels good, this video “#nov30 WHY I AM STRIKING”. “I’m going to try to do this, actually, without swearing and shouting.” (he doesn’t succeed)

Speaking of which, fuck you my Canada! for being the first to pull out of Kyoto.

I kind of like our lack of manners in the  age of WikiLeaks, but I like this article Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks from Slavoj Žižek too. “The only surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn’t we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances; we can no longer pretend we don’t know what everyone knows we know.”

A magical Spanish man named Eduardo Sousa has maybe provided one solution the nightmarish foie gras problem – as part of a slightly more Peta-friendly This American Life “Poultry Slam” broadcast.

This would be a nice service for adults too, What children’s drawings would look like if it were painted realistically.

This seems easy and useful – ethical fashion options.

“They’re making everyone do socialism to each other” – a wonderfully unrigorous rant on Ayn Rand and a Lulu Lemon misstep.

Carl: For my sins, I’ve been reading a shitload of year-end music lists. For my virtues, I have gotten to see this: A blog in praise of older women’s “advanced style”.

A man with a great many sins and virtues, Christopher Hitchens, died today. My closest personal connection to him was sometimes in the early 1990s being in the same room in which his Nation column was being edited, over the phone, by the fantastic and patience-of-a-saint-having JoAnn Wypijewski. So his death makes me think of her.

Also died this week: George Whitman, the 98-year-old proprietor of Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris (the successor to Sylvia Beach’s famous institution). Whitman would let writers and artists live in the (filthy) upstairs of the store if they would either work there a day a week, write a one-page autobiography, or pledge to read a book a day. The illustrator Molly Crabapple joined that tradition at 17: She made this picture today in tribute.

And on top of that, RIP to Russell Hoban, who managed in his life to write both this and this, among many other things. That’s a life.

If I were in New York this weekend I would go to this conference, “Occupy Onwards,” at the New School on Sunday.

But first, if I were American, I would do something about this Internet censorship bill in Congress: David Rees entertainingly helps explain why shit is fucked up and scary

1 Comment

Filed under carl wilson, chris randle, linkblogging, margaux williamson

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,