A footnote of sorts, lifted from the thread following this and in reply to Ben’s comment: “The only thing that’s shocking about any of this stuff is how fucking awful it is.”

Watching these things – almost any of them - you have to wonder, was there ever a time when the people involved looked at what they were doing, at each other, at any of their peers, and thought, “Hm. We’re a bit shit at this, aren’t we?” Was there ever a brief flickering of shame or humility, or even just frustration at their own inadequacy? Was that thread ever pulled at?

Answers on a postcard, please.

I bring you art. Twelve minutes of it. In which Ms Eames Armstrong and Matthew Ryan Rossetti thrill onlookers at the 2015 MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival with a terribly radical rendition of music from Les Misérables. As readers will no doubt be aware, the MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival is where gathered artistic juggernauts “create queer experimental media through an ever-changing constellation of means.” The participants, we’re told, “make art for ourselves and our community, not for markets or museums.” Consequently, the festival is a “decisive launching pad for emerging talents.”

No skipping ahead to the good bits.

The festival, including the soul-engorging splendour of the piece featured above, was sponsored by both the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. An earlier performance by Ms Armstrong and Mr Rossetti, in which Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, um, enhanced and made transgressive, can be found here. You lucky, lucky people. 

The chronically captious ladies and other-gendered beings at Everyday Feminism, where everyone is terribly complicated and fascinating, want us to know that people with narcissistic personality disorder are also victims of heteropatriachal capitalist society. And that not being overly keen on the company of pathologically narcissistic people, possibly because of their dishonesties, neediness and obnoxious sense of entitlement, is “ableist,” bigoted and therefore wicked. Apparently, we mustn’t “minimise the experience” of people who are very often unbearable, manipulative, exploitative, emotionally unstable, and indifferent to the wellbeing of anyone but themselves.

Sometimes comment is superfluous.

BBC Radio 4 veers into Alan Partridge territory: 

Can you ever trust a gorilla with a child?

Answers on a postcard, please.

Magic words. // Assorted dicey moments, illustrated. // Japanese log relocation. It’s a vigorous business. // Vitruvian man action figure. // Voltige, a cautionary tale. // At last, Star Trek: The Next Generation swimsuits. // We’ll be seeing more of this, I think. // Not thinking things through, I fear. // Animations of note. // American shopping malls circa 1989. // This. // That. // The other. // Post-It notes and beer. // Mechanical Pong. // “The stench started masking the smell of their popular hickory-smoked ham.” (h/t, Ace) // Yes, apparently, it does happen. // Made of sand. // Done with suction. Crime-fighting applications under consideration. // Something is licking his tent. // This is one of these. // And finally, via Damian, some cat comradeship.