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:
Margaux: This is hilarious – bad police sketches.
Carl: The Internet thing that made me happiest comes courtesy of friend and musical-poetic-philosophical-critical hero Franklin Bruno: an ear-and-body-melting DIY mashup of Terry Riley’s aleatory-minimalist classic “In C” and Marc Cerrone’s moaning-disco-cheese macksimilist classic “Love in C Minor.” I put it up on Facebook last weekend but since then, Hilobrow has posted it, but I also made an automated version on YouTubeDoubler. What no one else has mentioned, though, is that both pieces also have a Part 2 (Riley, Cerrone) so it’s possible to get all four parts going at once. Quadrophrenic!
Biggest loss among the world’s pulsing brains this week: Eric Hobsbawm.
Best mockery of sexist music coverage of the past three decades: The Stranger‘s “Men Who Rock!” edition.
Your self-help aide of the week: How to Get Started, with John Cage.
Chris: I have in fact heard a few of “the 20 best Prince songs you’ve never heard” (and dispute its contention that “Dance With the Devil” is the highlight of the Batman sessions, because, uh, “Electric Chair”?), but this list is still long on counterintuitive rarities and unfairly unreleased tracks, many sifted from the badlands that are his post-’80s discography.
“Oh yeah, I think of jazz. You can just make more jokes about ska.” There are lots of horns on the new Mountain Goats record, and my friend Brad Nelson talked to John Darnielle about that, along with its recording process in general.
I liked the provocative slyness of Joshua Clover’s piece about Kickstarter queen Amanda Palmer and her “accidental experiment with real communism,” partly because it led numerous Palmer superfans to believe that the author, facing years in prison for occupying a bank, must be invoking Brecht in the service of some new McCarthyism. The resulting comments, alternately sorrowful and threatening, are hilarious: “In fact, I fail to see how this isn’t libel?” “If you want to reinvent communism, that’s fine, but is a music criticism piece the place to start?” “Amanda Palmer makes a wonderful lightning rod, doesn’t she? By poking her head up, free of the music industry, handlers and marketers, not wrapped in cellophane for mass consumption… [&c]”
Back to the World 