No, not that Nick Cave. This is the work of a Chicago-based Nick Cave, whose soundsuits, seen here, focus on the fusion between fiber textile art and modern dance to create manifestations of the wearer’s physical energy. Cave’s shamanistic soundsuits have been described in the Boston Phoenix as “lavish, strange, beautifully-crafted outfits resembling mash-ups of African tribal ceremonial dress, Ku Klux Klan robes, Roman Catholic clergy vestments, yetis, Star Wars aliens, plumed and sequined carnival costumes, and fabulous drag queen gowns.” In an interview with Greg Cook, Cave poignantly describes the moment he created his first soundsuit:

When the Rodney King incident happened. I was reading in the paper about how the police sort of brought description to him. You know they were talking about, I can’t remember exactly what it said, but they were talking about this big, black, male figure that was bigger than life, that was mammoth-like. And I just started thinking about these words that were describing this human being, and I was like, “This is just fucking insane to me.” And I realized at that point I needed to take a different responsibility, I need to recognize that this is the platform that I need to be delivering, to work on.

And my first “Soundsuit” was a twig-suit. Which I didn’t even know it was a “Soundsuit.” I was just sort of making a piece in response to that situation. So I gathered all these twigs in the park and made this suit. I wasn’t even thinking that I could get into it. That wasn’t even on my brain. And then I made it and then I put it on. And I was just like, “Oh. My. God.” And at that point I knew that I had, you know you just know when you’ve found it. And I just knew. And I thought, “Oh, God, am I ready to take on all of this right now.” Because I just knew that it was a sculpture, it was again this suit of armor, it was this sort very unfamiliar sort of territory that I wasn’t really quite sure what it meant. Still don’t know really. Then there was performance. So it’s all of these sort of things. In order to be heard, to have a voice, you need to be an activist.

There are some wonderful high-res images of the soundsuits over at the LOUDreams blog, and there’s also a short YouTube clip of Cave talking about his work.

Promo shot for Lovich’s 1979 Flex LP.

In under the wire, we’d like to wish the incomparable Lene Lovich a very happy birthday! The New Wave/Death Disco diva was born on March 30th in 1949. At some point when we’re not all scrambling to meet deadlines, this virtuosa deserves a big, juicy feature on Coilhouse. We’ll get ‘er done, promise.

For now, here’s the “Bird Song” video, feauring Lovich in all her eye-popping, spookylicious glory:

Morning! Are any of you still in your sleep schlubs? Got 4 minutes to spare before heading to work?

For your consideration:

Shake it sugar, do it to it. Double dog dare ya. Aaow!

Physical fitness doesn’t get more nerdcore than this vintage clip of Judi Sheppard Misset and friends dancing to “Move Your Boogie Body” back in 1982. But let’s not laugh at Judi, let’s laugh with her; Jazzercise turns 40 this coming October. The woman-based, woman-owned company is still going strong, raking in $93 million last year in spite of the lousy economy. At the core of its long-winded success is Misset herself, with her unabashedly goofy Midwestern pep squad accent and megawatt energy level.

At 61 years of age, Misset is still teaching several classes a week and changing up the franchise routine every 10 weeks. Said franchise now incorporates yoga and pilates into its hour-long classes, and provides thousands of job opportunities for women worldwide. Alas, no more wacky 80s hairdos… but hey, legwarmers and sparkly leotards are still kosher. Find it! Feel it! Do it! Aaow!

A couple more butt-blasts from the past after the jump.

Performer/cyclist/activist Hollis Hawthorne. Photo by Alicia Sanguiliano.

There’s this awesome, beautiful gal I only kinda sorta barely know through our many mutual circus friends here in the bay area; her name is Hollis Hawthorne. She’s a founding member of a cycling dance troupe called The Derailleurs, a fabulous velocipede-inspired dance team active in a bunch of bay area-based critical mass stuff. Their goal:

To educate and entertain audiences with the possibilities of alternative transportation. Our performances embrace critical inquiry that reaches beyond conventional thought and action. We promote radical self reliance and mine local talents to unearth their strength.

They’re wonderful and vibrant folks leading adventurous lives who are trying to affect some sort of positive change in their community. They smile and laugh a lot; they are very shiny people. To be honest, I rather envy them, most days. But not today:

Late last month, Hollis was traveling by motor scooter in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India when something terrible happened. Some sort of freak hit-and-run accident that wasn’t her fault left her bleeding out on the side of the road with her boyfriend Harrison frantically performing CPR for 20 minutes before a van of German tourists picked them up and drove them to a hospital. According to her best pal Eliza, Hollis was wearing her helmet and driving very slowly at the time of the accident. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it sounds really bad. Now she’s in a coma in a rural hospital with a serious brain stem injury. (You know, that part of the brain that controls, um, everything?)

According to Harrison, who has been with her from the moment it happened, “there are huge rats scurrying around on the [hospital] floor. I am sleeping on the ant-covered floor outside her room as I am not allowed in and the water they have used for many procedures is not even purified.” When Hollis’ mom flew in from Tennessee a couple of days ago with emergency support from the US consulate to see her own daughter, the orderlies were dismissive and curt. “They are not observing her brain pressure and have done nothing to alleviate the swelling in her brain. These are things that can make or break her early on in her recovery and healing process.”

Through a series of fortuitous connections, Hollis’s case has been reviewed and accepted by Stanford Medical; one of the best hospitals in the world. As a charity case, even. (Just like me and most other starving artsy fartsies I know, Hollis has no insurance.) All we need to do is get her there. The friends and family of Hollis are reaching out to everyone they can to raise funds to get her on an I.C.U. plane (aka air ambulance) to fly her back to California.

This is truly a matter of life and death. They need move her quickly as possible.

Before that can happen, Friends of Hollis must raise $150,000 dollars. They’ve already raised approximately $40,000. Can you spare a dollar, or five, or ten?

Yes, I know, life is risk, and life is uncertain. Life is also precious. If, in some small way, we can help someone in our community to come back from the brink, we really should. Click here to help.

EDIT, MARCH 6TH: According to The Hindu, Hollis has been moved to Apollo hopsital in Chennai, where she is receiving the best possible medical care in India. While still in a coma, she is off the ventilator. But she still need help:

“Stanford has offered us free care and Hollis has no insurance,” says [Harrison] Bartlett. Ms. Allison is currently paying for hospitalisation expenses. She hopes that the fundraising effort, which is gathering momentum in the United States, would be able to help them make the trip back home as soon as Ms. Hollis is ready to go.

Chances are good you’ve seen Michael Moschen at work and didn’t even know it. Often imitated, never duplicated, the world-renowned physical artist choreographed and performed all of Jareth the Goblin King’s “crystal ball manipulations” in Labyrinth.

The phrase contact juggling hadn’t even been coined yet. Moschen was working blind, crouched down behind Bowie, and those spheres really were made out of crystal. (Nowadays you can buy hardy acrylic ones that won’t shatter when you inevitably drop them.) Moschen is widely regarded as one of the most innovative conceptual performers in the biz.

Heads up: if you’re easily distracted/put-off by the sight of a toned, nearly nude body (or your boss is) this first clip may not be for you. If you’re easily distracted/put-off by 80s new age colonic music (as I am), you may want to turn down the sound and cue up the soundtrack of your choice. That said, it’s a hypnotic, singularly beautiful and accomplished performance.

Click here to learn a bit more about just how much effort goes into doing what Moschen makes seem effortless. More mesmerizing clips of the man at work after the jump.

Dear Coilhäusers,

I do not have a confession to make. I do not have an abiding and utterly irrational love of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Not at all. Really, I don’t. Anything you may have heard to the contrary is the most vile and vicious slander. Again: I don’t like it. I sure as hell don’t crank up the volume when it comes on the radio. No Sirree. That’s only a repeated, annoying technical malfunction. I also, absolutely, 100% do not sing along in an overly dramatic fashion. Nope. Not me. Uh-uh.

The last thing I don’t do is lie awake at night, fearful that if my (non-existent) secret love of this power ballad came to light it would utterly ruin my reputation and any future rants of mine would be outright dismissed as they came up against the cold, hard brick wall of “Hey, Forbes is obviously wrong. The bastard likes Total Eclipse of the Heart. End of discussion.”

I mean, after all, it’s a terrible song: the gaudiest kind of syrupy ’80s excess. The video is even more awesome worse, so mind-numbingly ornate it provokes long, detailed thematic dissections. It has dancing greasers, sweaty fencers and dashing lads in suits wrecking elaborate dinners. And ninjas, of course, you can’t forget the frickin’ ninjas. Or the flying hive-mind of choir boys with radioactive eyes. Oh yeah, there’s also an angel. Really.

But all is not lost. If there is something I have no shame in adoring, hidden or otherwise, it’s the brilliant kitchen appliance battering, tracksuit-wearing Norwegian band Hurra Torpedo’s cover of TEotH (my how I love that acronym. It sounds like an invocation to some grand hell-beast! Come, Great TEotH!). Minimalist and silly but surprisingly poignant, Hurra gives a whole new feel to this song-I-so-don’t-like.

See there? Doesn’t banging on kitchen appliances make everything better? Damn f’in right it does!

And I ain’t confessing crap.

Damn it, my laptop’s power supply cable just queefed and died. I’ll have to be extra quick with BTC this morning before my little external brain goes sreepytime. Luckily, I have just the thing cued up on my playlist:

Scrumptious promo image for HF’s first (and only) album, Battle Hymns For Children Singing. I can’t be the only one who imprinted on Kate Garner’s fashion designs. Stripey, stripey…

Ragamuffin pop duo Haysi Fantayzee *cough* formed in London in the early 80s. Typing out that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad name is like nails on a grammarian’s chalkboard, and the label ”Dickensian Hillbilly Rasta” makes me cry blood. Still, I love these guys with a deep, doofy devotion rivaled only by the size of my permaboner for fellow Brit-fops Adam Ant and Boy George.

Performed by Jeremiah Healy and Kate Garner, produced by Garner’s then-boyfriend Paul Caplin, Haysi Fantayzee’s *twitch* UK dance hit, “Shiny Shiny” is quite possibly the most chipper song about the apocalypse ever written (short of Fishbone’s “Party at Ground Zero”). May the antics of these two sexy human fraggles help you dance your cute petudies all the way to work, and may we all take to yelling “I’M A HOT RETARD…MARQUIS DE SADE” in public as often and as loudly as possible.

A couple more Haysi Fantayzee *gack* clips after the jump.

“Like a caged beast, born of a caged beast, born of a caged beast, born of a caged beast, born dead and then…” –Samuel Beckett

Stills from Olivier de Sagazan’s 1998 sculptural performance work, Eye and the Chair.

Joe Haskins just alerted me to this astounding piece of performance art by a man named Olivier de Sagazan, titled Return to Close:

Clayface, for real.

Olivier de Sagazan has an appropriately unsettling site with a wide array of stills and clips from his live installations, as well as an image gallery of sublimely horrific sculptures. There doesn’t seem to be much web content on him written in native English. If any of our French (or is it Belgian?) speaking readers have information about this fascinating fellow available, it’d be wonderful to discover more about the man and his singularly beastly, loamy, lovely work!

“I got hair on my chest. I look good without a shirt.” - Tom Waits

I had this ridiculously hot friend in high school who looked like a punk rock, flannel-clad version of Fabio. Big, built, rustic, hairy, unrepentant manbro. He’d come swaggering into 2nd period economics class reeking of Pabst and cigarettes, start an argument with the teacher over the ethics of business regulation or the Coase theorem (did I mention he was brilliant to boot?) and all the weird girls would just swoon.

“Goin’ Out West” - Tom Waits

This guy regularly favored me with bonecrushing hugs that blotted out the sun. As I recall, even freshly showered, he had a musky, vaguely goat-like odor. Being slammed face-first into his armpit should’ve been off-putting, but somehow wasn’t. In fact, I think I must have imprinted on the gent and his scent, because all these years later, there’s still a very special place in my crotch heart for brawny, unshaven, man-stinky lumberjack types with big hands and lantern jaws.

“Lumberjack” - Jackyl

This testosterone-injected morningwood edition of BTC goes out to all of the big, built, rustic, hairy, unrepentant manbros of the world… and the loincloth-sniffing perverts who love them.

Click below for more Beorn porn (and please do add your own in comments)!

Sometimes, the less exposition the better. I’m pretty sure this is one of those times. Let me just say: if you watch this entire video, I can just about guarantee you’ll be wide fucking awake with elevated blood pressure and an increased heart rate by the end.

Good morning, good morning, GOOOD MOOOOORRRRRNIIIIING…

*mwah*