February 2012
28 posts
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Jeff Frost's "Flawed Symmetry of Prediction"
A breathtaking combination of time lapse and 3D optical illusion by California-based multimedia artist Jeff Frost:
“Over 40,000 high resolution still images were shot on Canon DSLR cameras for this film. I roamed the deserts of California and Utah looking for abandoned structures in the same manner that my Grandpa, Alfred, explored the Four Corners area looking for ancient Native American...
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Pressure Molded Skrillex Sausage
YouTube user frannintendo64 has made a beatmatched mashup out of scads of Skrillex dubstep/electro house tunes, with no pitch-shifting. Pretty darn funneh:
Via Ariana, who says: “The whoa-that’s-off-pitch of the first ten seconds or so fades fast. And then it’s… well it’s basically just Skrillex, innit. If you hold out (or skip ahead) to 1:20 it kinda starts to get a little magical....
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Space Age '60s Fashion
A short clip about the gorgeous futuristic fashion of the 1960s from designers like Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges, Paco Rabanne etc.
Most of the scenes are from the German TV-Show “Paris Aktuell”.
The music is “DEJA VU” from Mort Garson’s Ataraxia The Unexplained (1975).
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Sharp, Funny, Thought-Provoking "Crazy Watering...
Last year, Vania Heymann, a first-year student at Bezalel art school, took a Canon 7D out into the seething spiritual/cultural microcosm of Jerusalem and —over the course of two very busy afternoons— shot the footage for this remarkable satirical short. Beautifully done. Can’t wait to see what Heymann comes up with next!
(Via Reddit / Sam Harris / GreatDismal )
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Industrial Culture Handbook: The Movie!
That might as well be the title of Decoder, a German film that came out in 1984. Unreleased in the United States and forgotten until the Internet recovered it in recent years, Decoder is a fascinating relic of the early industrial ethos.
Written by Klaus Maeck, directed by Jürgen Muschalek, and based on The Electronic Revolution by William S. Burroughs, the film focuses on a lone audiophile who...
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BTC: World's Largest Rope Swing
Morning!
This shiznit’s already megaviral. But just in case you haven’t seen it yet, here’ a video of filmmaker Devin Graham and chums swinging sweet and low from the Corona Arch (that’s 130 full feet of freefall, folks!) in Moab, Utah:
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Pussy Riot Rocks Russia
Great googly moogly:
The riot grrl ethos is alive and well… in Russia! The above footage of an anonymous feminist punk band called Pussy Riot was shot earlier this month. From the Guardian’s coverage:
Eight women stood in a line opposite the Kremlin, neon balaclavas hiding their faces, fists pounding the air in rugged defiance. Before police carted them off, the members of Pussy...
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Greta Alfaro's "In Ictu Oculi" and Other Works
“In ictu oculi” is a somewhat loaded Latin phrase that translates roughly as “in the blink [or twinkling] of an eye”. It’s also the title of a famously (and beautifully) grotesque Baroque painting created in Spain in the 1670s by artist Juan de Valdés Leal. Said painting depicts a skeletal Death, coffin tucked under its arm and clutching a scythe, hunched gleefully...
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Skyrim Dance Warmup
Friday night, wooooo! Untold legions of open world action role-playing gamers are about to tumble down a weekend-long Scroll Hole. In honor of their impending battles, here’s footage of a young, frisky, ostensibly naked dude gettin’ his FUS RO DERP on:
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"That Heartbreaking Invisible Place"
“She makes visible that heartbreaking invisible place between the appearance and the disappearance of things,” wrote Richard Avedon about photographer Lillian Bassman, who died at 94 in her home at Manhattan last week.
Like her contemporary Irving Penn, who passed away last year at age 92, Bassman worked on her art until the very end of her life. The photo above, titled “It’s a...
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Japanese Fart Scroll from 1847
WOW. Wow…
Over at Tofugu, author Hashi states:
I was doing research for another post a while back, and found something a bit…unusual. It was an old Japanese scroll about farting. No, you didn’t misread that last sentence. The whole scroll, which is called He-Gassen (“The Fart Battle”) is just about people farting. Farting at other people, farting at cats, farting off of horses, farting...
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An Experimental Film with Early Electronic Music...
Today, we celebrate what would have been Anaïs Nin’s 109th birthday by posting Bells of Atlantis, an experimental film from 1952.
The film stars Nin as the mythical queen of Atlantis and conveys, as Wonders in the Dark puts it, ”the experience of trying to remember and re-experience a dream.” Over cascading experimental footage, Nin reads aloud from her novella House of...
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Auberon Shull's "Desert Dance", and an Interview...
LA-based imagemaker/mover/shaker Sequoia Emmanuelle has just premiered this video of dancer Auberon Shull (definitely watch it full screen):
Filmed, edited and directed by Sequoia Emmanuelle Dance by Auberon Shull Hair and makeup by Ashley Joy Beck Costumes by Tiffa Novoa and Auberon Shull Music by Distance and Adventure Club
Auberon is a powerhouse. Sequoia, too, is a force of nature who...
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Wayne White: "Beauty Is Embarrassing"
Wayne White is an American artist, puppeteer, sculptor, set designer, cartoonist, art director, animator, and illustrator whose influence on popular culture has been quietly vast. As Mark Mothersbaugh puts it: “Kids [in the ’80s] mainlined it. He was imprinting their brains, and they don’t even know it.” Filmmaker Neil Berkeley’s new documentary about White’s...
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Walter Schnackenberg's Theater of the Strange
So, Will Schofield over at 50 Watts has a bit of a fetish for German poster illustrator Walter Schnackenberg (1880-1961) and I’m finding it pretty easy to see why. Schnackenberg’s work is almost like Salvador Dali and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (whose work Schnackenberg admired) had a child, swinging wildly between the more traditional theater illustration and extremely surreal...
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8 Consecutive Nights of KRAFTWERK! (NYC MoMA,...
Holy shitballs. New Yorkers, you lucky ducks, you get to have ALL the retro-badass fun! Via East Village Radio:
Kraftwerk —one of the most important groups in electronic music’s relatively short history— will be the focus of a retrospective taking place in April at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the New York Times reports. The band, featuring lone founding member Ralf Hütter, will...
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Ed Sanders: Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts...
“Fuck You” Opening Party is tomorrow (Thursday, February 16th) from 6pm-9pm. Exhibition closes Thursday, March 8th. Boo-Hooray is open every day from 11am-6pm.
There’s a gallery space down on Canal St. in NYC called Boo-Hooray; it’s a splendid place dedicated to 20th/21st century counterculture ephemera, photography, and book arts. Tomorrow evening (Thursday, Feb 16th) is...
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"Knocked The Bottom Out of Me"? Knock it off,...
Oh, PETA…
(via SigKate)
Can’t you folks create any campaigns that don’t hinge on some form of insipid, othering, sexist objectification? It shouldn’t be that difficult, considering your stated aims. Here’s an idea: rather than euthanizing a vast majority of your rescues, how about hiring ‘em to come up with some new marketing and promotional material for ya?...
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Eyepatch Party!
Eyepatches have long been a staple of alt fashion. From visual kei to burlesque, the eyepatch has been used to accentuate elements of romanticism, glamour, and mystique throughout the ages.
Advertising giant David Ogilvy knew this in 1951 when he created “the man with the Hathaway shirt,” a campaign that put a tiny company on the map by featuring a distinguished-looking man with a...
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"A Homogenous, Cancerous, Rhizomatic Junkspace"
Map of the Online Communities by XKCD, 2007. Larger version.
J.G. Ballard one said that his biggest fear was that the future would be boring. He feared the future would be “a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.” The notion, as applied to the Internet, was recently explored in two pieces on the changing face of internet culture.
Both are wonderfully-written, playful and full of...
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Randy Halverson's "Dakotalapse"
Randy Halverson’s gorgeously ethereal “Dakotalapse”. Comprised of thousands of 20-30 second exposures stitched together, it was shot mostly near the White River in South Dakota, with additional footage shot in Utah and Colorado.
In the opening “Dakotalapse” title shot, you see bands of red and green moving across the sky. After asking several Astronomers, they are...
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Osombie. No, really, Osombie.
You would probably want to be careful when making a movie that involves Afghanistan. You could, perhaps, be more cavalier in dealing with Osama bin Laden (in the U.S. at least), but I’d think you would want to exhibit some sort of sensitivity when making a film about a country we’ve been involved with on, let’s just say, unpleasant terms for a while now. It seems like a bad...
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A Muppet Wicker Man
Oh… um.
Wow. Yeah. So… this exists:
Via Jess Nevins.
That’s the video preview for a full-length comic book mashup of The Muppet Show and The Wicker Man by Paul O’Connell.
It’s… uh…
Well, words seem to be failing at the moment.
Really, what can one say when confronted with something like this, except:
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"When you cut into the present the future leaks...
Yes. Hello. Feb 5th is the date of novelist William S. Burroughs’ birth. Coilhouse should really show the man some love. W.S.B. double feature, anyone?
First, The Cut-Ups, a mesmeric and disorienting experimental piece Burroughs put together with filmmaker Antony Balch (aided by multi-disciplinary art firebrand Brion Gysin and others) in 1966. Over the course of twenty minutes, it plays...
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Cycle-Skating In Paris
If you were a Parisian gentleman in 1923 looking for the newest thing in personal mobility, you may have had a keen interest in the above: cycle-skating. Essentially small bicycle wheels strapped to your legs, they could be used with or without poles, “ski style”. Perfect for the hip, urban man on the go. Just make sure to hike those trousers up over your knee-highs.
Via Buzzfeed
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"My work is about leaving the door open to the...
Sleeping Nude (1954) by Dorothea Tanning. Oil on canvas.
And she did. Countless others have walked through that door behind Dorothea Tanning— fellow iconoclasts and creative powerhouses (many women, but surely, many not) who might never have pursued their work otherwise.
Her independence, her intelligence, and her centenarian resolve to lead an extraordinary life no matter what, should be...
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'80s Explosion: Space Stallions
Space Stallions, a bachelor film project from the 2012 Animation Workshop, plays like every Saturday morning cartoon from my childhood boiled down into one four minute concept. Created by Thorvaldur S. Gunnarsson, Jonatan Brüsch, Ágúst Kristinsson, Arna Snæbjørnsdottir, Esben J. Jespersen, Touraj Khosravi and Polina Bokhan, it appears to have everything: spaceships, spandex-clad heroes,...
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WTFtastic Music Video for Maruosa's "ACA" by...
This perfect, gleaming sliver of transcendent “whaaaa thaaaa faaaaaa??!” comes to us care of a tweet from Keith Jenson of Brainwomb, who claims to be sharing it to polarize the effect of the “‘spirit bomb’ of Harajuku” video that Nadya just posted. (Athough it seems just as likely that he’s trying to insidiously destroy us with subliminal mind control.)
...
January 2012
25 posts
1 tag
Human-Shaped RC Planes Soaring Above NYC
WOW! Check out this splendid footage of three human-shaped, remote-controlled planes being flown above downtown NYC/Brooklyn, creating the illusion of people flying:
VERY cool. Perhaps somewhat less cool: it’s apparently viral marketing for that movie Chronicle. “Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… product placement!” But still. Wow.
...
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IFC Screening of "The Party in Taylor Mead's...
Our friend, longtime Coilhouse contributor Jeff Wengrofsky, has just informed us that The Party in Taylor Mead’s Kitchen, his latest Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers film, will be screened at the Independent Film Center (IFC) in New York on Tuesday, January 31st at 8pm, as part of the “Stranger Than Fiction” film series. “Come early,” says he. “It will be...
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"Pony" by Tim Lewis, and the Kinetica Art Fair
This is “Pony”, a motion-sensitive kinetic sculpture by Tim Lewis. Unsettling and beautiful:
“Tim Lewis combines mechanical devices and sculpture to investigate, test and experiment with his own doubts and perception of the world.” (via)
Lewis, recently interviewed about his work by Dazed Digital, makes a compelling statement about the power inherent in tangibility:
I...
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Rabbit Rabbit Radio
(Rabbit Rabbit Radio illustration by Mariko Ando.)
Next Wednesday, February 1st, professional musicians/married couple/doting parents Carla Kihlstedt and Matthias Bossi —whose various other projects have been mentioned on Coilhouse many times— are launching a very interesting new multimedia musical subscription service called Rabbit Rabbit Radio.
“Saying ‘rabbit,...
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Culture Osolence by Lucas de Alcântara
From the same land that recently brought us Vinicius Quesada’s ominous post-apocalyptic images in the McDonald’s color scheme comes this two-image series from Brazilian artist Lucas de Alcântara.
The strange atomic-age flying machines (robots? winged helmets? …life forms?) recall Leonardo da Vinci’s technical drawings, while the composition echoes high-concept,...
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Coilhouse Presents: Matthew Borgatti's OWS...
Photo, model and wardrobe styling: Numidas Prasarn.
Last fall, artist and maker Matthew Borgatti (previously on Coilhouse) released a snappy Guy Fawkes bandanna in solidarity with OWS. ”This is the hanky code for revolution,” wrote Matthew. Perfect for protecting oneself from “sudden dust storms and outbreaks of authoritarianism,” the bandanna’s design includes...
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How Will YOU Celebrate Squirrel Appreciation Day,...
For three whole years now, January 21st has been officially recognized as Squirrel Appreciation Day.
This momentous occasion offers us the perfect excuse to revisit a somewhat more time-honored form of squirrel appreciation, namely “Gonads and Strife”.
Aaaaannnd WEEEEEEEEEE:
Threebrain, we miss you!
Previous squirrelage on Coilhouse:
Love for Walter Potter
The Royal...
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Music Video for Light Asylum's "Skull Fuct"
Welcome back, comrades. That was an interesting 24 hours, eh?
Here’s a verrrrrry wonderfully stark and moody Light Asylum video (directed by Emilxa Xuryłowicz and Cezary Zacharewicz) to ease us back into full-fledged internetness:
(If you haven’t heard it yet, Light Asylum’s 2011 In Tension EP is phenomenal. Tangible run is already out of print, but you can download it.)
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Wingsuit Flyers, Hunan Province
Courtesy of Base-Book, some truly heart-jolting footage of wingsuit badassery, recently shot in China’s Hunan Province:
Via Jason Zendtraedi, thanks!
Previously on Coilhouse:
Wingsuit base-jumpers in Norway
Parahawking!
SAMPARKOUR
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Limerence for Ron Turner
I just stumbled across The Bold Italic’s lovely tribute to countercultural legend Ron Turner via Laughing Squid and smiled until my face hurt. Sasha Darling writes:
Of all the brilliant and amazing people I have encountered here, none are as dear to me as Mr. Ron Turner of Last Gasp. He’s equal parts underground comic book publishing icon, art collector extraordinaire, genuine gentleman,...
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"Yu + Me" by Megan Rose Gedris
Megan Rose Gedris’ comic Yu + Me is billed as a surreal lesbian romance- and it’s hard to say more than that with out spoiling it. In fact, this is one of those situations where, for some people, even mentioning the spoilers may spoil it. If you prefer stories in which things are what they seem, Yu + Me may not be your cuppa. But if you enjoy adventure, love, and a decadent...
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BTC: Saucy '80s "Female Gaze" Yoga Workout Video
Last week’s BTC starred a gorgeous, mega-talented yogini in an elegant-yet-questionable ad that blurred the lines between art, athleticism, sexuality and voyeurism. This week’s BTC features, uh… these guys:
Thanks for the tip, Mythical Man.
Nope, nothin’ blurry about this one! *chortle*
As of yet, no confirmation —though certainly a lot of speculation— as to...
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The Battleship Potemkin
One of the most acclaimed films of all time, and certainly one of the artfully made/broadly influential propaganda pieces created to this day, Sergei Eisentstein’s 1926 feature film The Battleship Potemkin presents an exhilarating (not to mention highly dramatized, sometimes outright fictionalized) depiction of the 1905 mutiny of a Russian battleship’s crew agains their Tsarist...
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Compare and Contrast: Teen Girls Talking About...
Two very different videos of teenage girls airing our their grievances on YouTube have gone viral in the past two days. Here they are. Compare and contrast:
On the uplifting side, we have a 13-year-old vlogger named astrorice articulating the concepts of slut shaming and rape culture. “While I am fully aware that this is a bit of an unorthodox topic for a thirteen year old virgin to be...
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Jitterbug: The Most Caffeinated Animated Gif EVAR
Matthew Innman, twisted mastermind behind The Oatmeal webcomic, made this splendid beast. Then Ariana shared it. And lo, now it hath become the unofficial Better Than Coffee mascot. That is all. Carry on.
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"Fotoshop" by "Adobé"
A deftly crafted satirical fauxmercial by Jesse Rosten sings the praises of an beauty industry secret known as “Fotoshop”:
“You don’t have to rely on a healthy body image or self respect anymore. […] There’s only one way to look like a REAL cover girl: Fotoshop by Adobé.” OH SNAP.
Rosten’s piss-take nails the spooky Stepfordian tone and...
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Adorable Rocker Clogger Girl
Dusty Paik just shared this on her Facebook page:
Rocker Clogger is a spirited seventeen-year old American amateur clogger who likes to dance to Adam and the Ants, The Cure, David Bowie, Oingo Boingo, Siouxsie & the Banshees, and Johnny Cash.
From her cute costumes, to the peaceful backyard background sounds of birdsong and wind chimes and rustling trees in all of her clips, to that...
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BTC: Briohny Smyth for Equinox
In this advert, an exquisitely beautiful and powerful yogini, Briohny Smyth, clad in fetching skivvies, moves through her acrobatic morning practice in a million dollar Manhattan apartment for all us wistful voyeurs while her oblivious bedroom companion snoozes away in the background:
Well played, Equinox. Manipulative as hell —as many have noted— but still. Well played, ye...
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Vermin Supreme for President, 2012
The venerable Vermin Supreme is back once again! Last month, he let loose at the Lesser-Known Democratic Candidates Presidential Forum in New Hampshire:
Via Sean Donahoe, thanks!
He wants you to brush your teeth. He wants to control your life. He wants to protect you from the impending zombie apocalypse. Best of all, he wants to give you a pony.
Mah feller ‘merkunz, try to look beyond...
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Trent Reznor & Erik Satie: Majestic Angst-Bros of...
Editor’s Note: This gem of a submission from writer/proto-ambient scholar/fervent NIN-lover Matt Keefer was discovered several tiers deep during a recent trawl of the Coilhouse slush account. It’s an offbeat and spirited piece, simultaneously comparing and cross-referencing the musical and philosophical kinship inherent between Erik Satie and Trent Reznor, and issuing several...
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New Larkin Grimm Album Imminent, Free Village...
Photo by Dese’Rae L. Stage
The powerfully enchanting Larkin Grimm, previously interviewed by Angeliska on the Coilhouse blog and featured in Issue Four of our print issue, has a new album coming out next month! You can read about what she’s been up to recently, and preview/download her song “Paradise And So Many Colors” at the Village Voice website.
Last year, the...
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Pingu's "The Thing"
I’ll admit, I know very little about the Swiss, stop-motion cartoon Pingu other than that it is a Swiss, stop-motion cartoon about penguins. That does little to dampen my enthusiasm for this, a remake of John Carpenter’s sci-fi/horror classic The Thing by Lee Hardcastle, starring the adorable cast of the aforementioned cartoon and animated in the same style. It is just as good as it...