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: My tea this week tastes toxic: Flashes of the bad-old-bad-old from newly ascendant Republican Washington, with the new Speaker of the House palling around with anti-abortion terrorists and the Smithsonian’s briefly triumphant queer-positive exhibition getting kneecapped, Jesse Helms-style.
More sweetly, I spent part of this week trying to figure out if I had something to say about this YouTube phenom called “lip dubbing” (and why is it not just called lipsynching?), primarily practiced by large bunches of university students who otherwise would probably be joining a-capella clubs. In the end, I decided that no, I did not have anything to say about this, except that it beats a-capella clubs. (So I’m now working on a post about something else, which will appear over the weekend.)
Margaux: Ideal entertainments in Toronto this Saturday:
The lovely and talented Sherwin Tjia is in from Montreal to run his TORONTO QUEER SLOWDANCE on Saturday night. A “lending library of designated dancers for all you wallflowers” is promised.
And The Scandelles (a burlesque troupe that includes the dizzying Sasha Van Bon Bon – a woman whose dance performances can make the other fine arts quiver with powerlessness) are performing two shows of A Special Presentation of Neon Nightz at 3pm and 7pm on Saturday.
Speaking of ideal Saturday entertainments, the new Stephen Frears movie, Tamara Drewe, is a pleasure.
Chris: Via Comics Comics, Nicole Rudick interviews Lynda Barry about creativity, sloganeering and catharsis. There are few things I love more than Barry talking about whatever, and their conversation demonstrates why: “I stumbled on these magazines called Grade Teacher, which were sent to grade-school teachers every month, and I have a pile of them from the late twenties to the sixties. They have stuff like ‘Fun Things to Draw’ or ‘Let’s Do Our Bulletin Board.’ But the big ad sponsorship is from coal companies and asbestos companies: ‘Free giant charts for your class about how wonderful coal is!’ The weirdest things are the art projects with asbestos powder, like ‘Let’s make beads and make necklaces and wear them.’ I am not joking.”
Via Mike Barthel, Kanye asks Rihanna the important questions: “How does it feel to know that you could have any man in the world? Or woman. How does it feel to know that you can turn straight women gay?” His strange tangle of megalomania and monomania is still compelling.
Via everyone, a corrective to all your puny hopes:
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