Right, I’m taking a few days off. Call it a long weekend. A revitalising interlude. By all means amuse yourselves by sharing links and snippets in the comments and then bickering about them. I’ll leave you with some conversational possibilities, including an inadvisable solution; an activity for the weekend, the rules of which are somewhat unclear to me; some stop-motion cross-sections; a small boy’s sporting monologue; and, via Damian, how to spot a classy diner.

The reheated series and greatest hits are there to be poked at.

Performance artist Angeliki Chiado Tsoli is, we’re told, “interested in… contributing her knowledge as an artistic and pedagogical tool.” Her work, we learn, “explores the political, poetic and displaced body through actions in the public space, photography, video, sound, installation and experimental writing.” Further exploration is done “through a visual and mental poetic space.” If the magnitude of her labours is somehow unclear, we’re also informed,

Angeliki aims to… challenge the existence of social, economic, cultural, and class-based inequalities.

Do bear these things in mind as you thrill to the video embedded below, in which Ms Tsoli unleashes a fearless, selfless and terribly radical “intervention” at a crossing on Michigan Avenue, Chicago. Said intervention, titled Attempting to Reach Equilibrium in Times of Dystopia, is of course crammed with aesthetic value. A particular highlight occurs around 2:30 when a passing police car stops, resulting in a need to explain that what is happening is actually art. 

An open thread. In which to share links and bicker.

Oh, and via Dicentra, and in a shocking turn of events, here’s an intersectional feminist – pronouns she/her/hers – telling you what to do:

As you might imagine, she has some further thoughts.

A beginner’s guide to snake removal. || Just a little bit of give. || Bees want your tears. || Cobalt tarantula. || Lucille Ball demonstrates the Sonovox, 1939. || Backfire is a game. || Thug life. || Some very Guardian thinking. || Ping, pong and spin. || Step aside, puny humans. (h/t, Dicentra) || Opal uncovered. || When it’s too much effort to fold paper and throw. || “To prove their mousy worth, they’ll overthrow the Earth.” || Evaporating horse sweat. || Isle of Wight attraction of note. || Using wood. || Why cats don’t rule the Earth. || Always respect the media. || You don’t often see them. || Meanwhile, in sporting news. || Not cake. || And finally, via Damian, I’m not entirely sure what the protocol here is.

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

You Look Like You Need Some Art. 

In which we thrill to the creative eruptions of Ms Sandrine Schaefer.

The pretence of intellectual heft and critical discernment is quite funny, given the unspoken rules of pretend artists and their pretend art. Like practically all of her fellow hustlers, Ms Schaefer tells us that she “investigates” and “questions” things, and presumably interrogates them; but despite this allegedly relentless curiosity, I doubt that any specific insight or profundity is ever conveyed to her audience, such as it is, via the art, such as it is. And of course, we’re not supposed to notice this, or notice the comical mismatch of arch rhetoric and inept flummery. And so, in order to feign discernment, one has to not discern any number of really obvious things.

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Big Hooped Earrings. 

On the woes of radical accessorising at Pitzer College, Claremont, California.

It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed - by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort.

Fashionable Malice. 

Woke educators attempt to inculcate dishonesty, bemoan pockets of resistance. 

“White fragility” is the unremarkable fact that people by and large don’t like being slandered as racists and then assigned with some pretentious collective guilt, the supposed atonement for which requires deference to actual racists and predatory hokum merchants.