‘I Have Your Heart’ – A Short Animated Film

Artist Molly Crabapple, songstress Kim Boekbinder, and animator Jim Batt have teamed up to create an animated film based on Kim’s song, “The Organ Donor’s March.” This morning, the three launched a Kickstarter page to raise funds for the project. The final result will be an animated stop-motion story featuring original characters and sets. Crabapple, Boekbinder and Batt are looking to raise $7K to fund studio rent, 2-3 months of full time animating, printing, lights, hard drives, animation software, specialized camera equipment, and the manufacturing of the DVDs.

Supporters of the project receive goodies such as puppets from the production and pieces of the set. You can also follow the project at ihaveyourheart.com. There, you can find delicious tidbits such as character sketches, set design snapshots, and test animations… such as this:

Kim Boekbinder: The Impossible Girl

The Impossible Girl is the glorious solo debut of Kim Boekbinder (previously of the duo, Vermillion Lies). Kim’s a quirky, funny, bravely vulnerable, electrifying lightning rod of a woman. Her music tends to reflect these traits in a most endearing fashion.


Video for “Impossible Girl #2” by Jim Batt. Song inspired by Kate Rannells.

She recorded the 18 tracks of her record in increments earlier this year at studios in Maine and Boston with Sean Slade (Radiohead, Dresden Dolls) and Benny Grotto (Aerosmith) and an assortment of talented session players. She’s also been traveling internationally on a shoestring budget, bringing her songs of love, loss, self-discovery, sex, drugs, and nuclear physics to audiences in Berlin, Melbourne, and New York City.


Photo by Heike Schneider-Matzigkeit.

The Impossible Girl is yet another wonderful example of how crowdsourcing hubs like Kickstarter are enabling creative people to self-produce art that would otherwise be very difficult for them to afford. It’s a brave new world full of, ya know… POSSIBILITY. And community. And rainbows. And unicorns. Yay!

Kim’s album drops today. You can buy a copy in MP3 or CD format (the packaging for which features an exquisite portrait of The Impossible Girl by longtime Coilhouse fave, Travis Louie), and she’s offering all kinds of fancy package deals that include posters, limited edition eye makeup kits by Sweet Libertine, and an Impossible Girl paper doll by (yet another beloved Coilhouse comrade) Molly Crabapple.

Tom Henderson’s “Punk Mathematics” Book Project

We haven’t mentioned “punk rock mathematician” Tom Henderson here before, have we? Gotta fix that, pronto.

First, go here to read a fantastic interview at Technoccult to get a sense of Henderson’s deeply personal and accessible philosophy of mathematics. After that, if you find that your brainy bits are delightfully fizzy, go to the Mathpunk site to read MORE fizzmaking stuff, or listen to the Math For Primates podcast. And then, if you find Henderson to be just as badass, brilliant and MAXIMUMADORBZ as so many of us already do, head over to Kickstarter to watch his deeply endearing pitch video for the Punk Mathematics book project:

Punk Mathematics will be a series of mathematical stories. It is written for readers who are interested in having their minds expanded by the strange metaphors and implications of mathematics, even if they’re not always on friendly terms with equations. Better living through probability; the fractal dimension of cities and cancers; using orders of magnitude to detect bullshit; free will and quantum economics; and the mathematics of cooperation in a networked world on the brink of a No Future collapse.

It looks like Henderson’s more than reached his financial goal, but don’t let that dissuade you from tucking some more money into his punk-as-fuck fanny pack. Every little bit helps, and this book sounds unlike anything else that’s being published these days.

Support the LifeSize Mousetrap!

The Lifesize Mousetrap is exactly what it sounds like: an astoundingly cool, “big kid” version of the classic board game. Created by Mark Perez, constructed from leftover metal/nuts/bolts/spare wood over the course of thirteen years, and operated and maintained by a small, scrappy collective of bay-area based engineers, artists and performers, it’s “a colorful assemblage of kinetic sculptures fantastically handcrafted into a giant, 25 TON Rube Goldberg machine.”

The mechanical spectacle is enhanced by a vaudevillian style road show featuring tap-dancing mouse women, live music, and several dapper “clown engineers” who endeavor to “achieve a chain reaction using Newtonian physics and bowling balls! The action culminates with the spectacular dropping of a 2 TON bank safe from a 30-foot crane.”

This 50,000 pound contraption and its stage show must be seen to be believed. Preferably in person, not on a computer screen– which is why they need our help getting to Maker Faire Detroit and Maker Faire World in New York City. They’ve setup a Kickstarter project to help raise funds for the labor-intensive, rather expensive cross-country trip. There are 10 days left on the clock, and they’ve still got a ways to go before they reach their goal of $6,600 — a buck for every mile they travel.  If you’re inspired by small, indie, gloriously strange community art and outreach, here’s a chance to express it. You guys know how this works: a buck here, a fiver there, and spread the word. It adds up so quickly.

Best of luck, you guys!

Joshua Ellis Presents Dbasr

Most of you are familiar with the work of Coilhouse contributor Joshua Ellis. Perhaps you read his excellent article “Dark Miracle: Trinity, The Manhattan Project And The Birth Of The Atomic Agein Issue 02, or “Children by the Millions Wait for Alex Chiltonin Issue 04. He’s also been published in Mondo 2000, Make, and countless other fine publications. Additionally, he’s a musician and a web designer.

Josh has just launched a new project called Dbasr – a free, open-source content management system for musicians and other rich media artists. Dbasr aims to do for musicians what WordPress did for writers and artists – create a decentralized, customizable platform with an emphasis on flexible design options and usability.

Josh is uniquely qualified to undertake this sort of project owing to his experience as creative lead and co-founder of the now-defunct Mperia, a BitPass-founded, DRM-free online music store launched in the early 00s. Josh has described it as “a sort of radical iTunes where any artist could create a profile, upload their music, choose a price for each song and album, and sell it using BitPass’s payment system.” For complex reasons beyond the developers’ control, Mperia folded after four years. Since that time, Josh has been keeping an eye on more recent online stores and promo websites. He’s been doing his homework on interface and user experience, and has some excellent points concerning the various options musicians and fans currently have for presenting or perusing music online:

MySpace is ugly and clumsy, and music is shoehorned in as an afterthought to what the site was designed for […] Facebook is even worse. Music is just not what these sites are meant for. There are music-specific social-type network sites for bands, such as ReverbNation and Bandcamp. These are great tools for what they do, but I think they miss the point. Musicians — really any kind of artist — need their own unique presence online. Their web presence needs to match up with their individual aesthetic, and they need to be able to interact with their fans and publish work in ways that they and their fans choose.

Agreed.  A truly elegant, intuitive, multifunctional interface for presenting or buying independent music on the web has yet to surface. Click here to read what Josh has to say about his concept. Could DBASR could be be the site we’ve all been waiting for?

If you’ve enjoyed Josh’s work for Coilhouse, we’d like to invite to pitch in and help him devote himself to this project as if it were a full-time job. There are three ways that you can help – by donating to get the project going, contributing your coding skills, or simply spreading the word.

Questions? Opinions? Share them in comments.