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: Jonathan Bogart enlivens the perennial and somewhat contrived search for a “song of the summer” by listening to singles you probably won’t hear through a car stereo, including Lebanese pop, sweetly understated dancehall and Franco-Nigerian R&B.
Carl: I have spent most of my time on the web this week trying to figure out things about New Orleans, where I was visiting. Mainly I learned that in the future I should go to this amazing-sounding museum, but I missed it this time around. However, I did go to this incredible installation, an interactive set of musical shacks, which will some day be a permanent musical house. It’s closed now but when that happens you should go there. (Find out more in this fine NPR piece about it.) And when you do, the new website My Spilt Milk should be your guide, and you should read these two greatbooks by Ned Sublette about the biblically awesome-terrible-remarkable racial and colonial history that makes it a singular cultural crossroads on the North American continent. Also, have a Sazerac.
Otherwise, I have watched Hollywood goofballs parodying The Bachelor and discovered the (I think now defunct) Tumblr Animals Tweeting as Owen Pallett, e.g., two birds of paradise saying, “Whoa I thought I was being progressive with my hair choices and then I saw that Xavier de Rosnay guy has been doing it ‘for years’.” (Xavier de Rosnay is one of the guys in Justice. I looked it up. You’re welcome.)
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 log that’s a bench. I like the idea of carving modern furniture into various parts of the landscape, as if inverting the ethos of those men in downtown Toronto who only wear lumberjack shirts.
The Xiu Xiu cover of Rihanna’s “Only Girl (In the World)” sounds exactly like I expected (well, aside from the “we can make sandwiches” interpolation) but that is very much okay.
A K-pop summer jam for you, complete with dubstep breakdown:
Margaux: In a waiting room, I came across this article by Fania Fainer in Chatelaine Magazine “Would you risk your life for a friend?”. I stopped to read it because I know Fania Fainer and recognized her picture. I’m friends with her daughter and have met Mrs. Fainer several times. She’s a very charming and open-minded woman. The article is incredibly short, and it’s one of the most meaningful things I have read in a long time. I highly recommend it.
Two of my favourite people (one of my best friends and my partner) made a book called The Chairs Are Where the People Go that’s just coming out now. It was included in a summer reading list, in spot #2 for New York magazine. Sheila Heti talked to her good friend Misha Glouberman to see if they could come up with chapters on what he knows. He knows 72 short chapters. It’s a strange, elegant and deceptively simple book – even useful.
Speaking of New York magazine, I appreciated this article by art critic Jerry Saltz on the Venice Biennale a few weeks ago (as did 292 people on Facebook). Saltz writes of being worried by the majority of the art he saw there – work that speaks to and interacts with the concerns of an older generation of art academics. I share this concern. He seems worried, but from where I stand I see the battle between those working within an older academic dialogue (looking to their teachers for their concerns and for their audience) and those striving to communicate beyond the contemporary confines of the art world (hoping to contribute to a contemporary world dialogue rather than just an inner art world dialogue) as pretty 50/50. Unlike Saltz, I am confident that the world kids will win – even if they aren’t yet being warmly invited to the Biennales. Or maybe they are just having too much fun on the internet.
Dear Toronto’s Bell Lightbox. Everyone loves your cinemas and everyone complains about your website. Everyone wants a clearly-visible button that will take you to the monthly schedule – they want a clear monthly schedule in your catalogue too, like in the olden days of cinema. Everyone also complains that they can only pay with Visa like at your film festival. People really don’t like that – especially the people who have a Visa card and none of their other friends do so they have to buy all the tickets.
Dear Lady Gaga, you can still work a persona even if you’re not acting all the time. A persona in the natural world is crazy! Wearing sneakers and dirty hair, with a boring old human face. That can be a dangerous and exciting platform for some persona play. Some people might not even know there is any persona play – and that can be fucked up.
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