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: This interview with the big-on-Tumblr cartoonist Simon Hanselmann is, um, wow. For once the word “revelatory” seems not only justified but understated. From his very first answer: “I turned 31 last December, four days before Christmas. I spent it in a hot tub, drinking champagne, gazing out across the ocean. I was born in Tasmania. Tasmania is a small island/sovereign state at the bottom of Australia. It is densely haunted by convicts’ ghosts — highest rate of ghosts per square kilometer in the world. I was born in Launceston, the second largest population center in Tasmania. A real shit hole. Highest crime rate per capita in Australia. I detest it.”
Carl: Fresh from kicking the ass of the Venice Biennale, Toronto’s leading clit-rawk ensemble Vag Halen is profiled alongside a host of other “all-female tribute bands” in the Guardian. (Though they missed Toronto’s other exemplar, Sheezer.) Light on analysis but perhaps the analysis is obvious enough? Vanessa Dunn expands in The Globe and Mail: “As soon as you step on stage, you’re a feminist.”
Somebody please buy the novelization rights to this: Man Builds Secret Apartment in Mall, Gets Away with It for Four Years. It could be written by Sam Lipsyte, in one mode, or Lydia Davis, in another.
This is an extraordinary story about landays, Afghanistan’s Pashtun folk poetry form, and how women are creating them in undercover protest against their own repression, whether by men in their own culture or by the American invaders. “Making love to an old man/ is like fucking a shriveled cornstalk blackened by mold.” “O darling, you’re American in my eyes./ You are guilty; I apologize.”
LRB blog has been running some good first-person reports from Turkey.
And in a more end-of-week mood: All of us with physiques kinda like Patton Oswalt wish we could be edited to dance as well as he does here in this video for his favourite Coup song, The Magic Clap.
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