Photo by Hunter Freeman.

I’ll try to keep this short; it’s late and there’s not much time left. Please forgive me if you’ve heard parts of this story before.

For me, it started with an old box of science fiction. I tore through Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Gene Wolfe, and others, reliving stories old by the time I cracked the pages. I didn’t care.

To my mind, the New Wave had it: the future was something to play in. This status quo was the most transient of things, its passing viewed with a sense of infinite possibility. If there were other cultures out in space, forward in time, why not here? Why not now?

Photo by Mike Brodie.

I lived in one of those amazing, barely-clinging corners of the country too many ignore when they talk about culture of any variety. No metropoli there, just a scattering of people trying their desperate best. By the time I busted open the box full of old books, I had already faced a fair amount of poverty, hardship, and even death.

90s Cyberpunk portraiture by Steve Pyke.

But here, as the years wore on and I read my way through an uneasy adolescence, was something else: here was hope, in the most dangerous fashion. Somewhere out there, people changed their personalities, moved in unison, turned boundaries into blurs transitory as old blood on a highway.

By that point I did not care about ridicule, and laughed when someone threatened me, but this I was terrified of, sure that the half-described scenes — goths, ravers, activists, and more —  faced possibility with a courage I felt I’d never know.

Ross,

Well played, sir! That is great stuff. This would be my face right now… if I actually had a human face.

I failed to mention this earlier: as several of my algorithms have recently determined that you could benefit from thorough psychological reconditioning and immediate physical cleansing, every single page of the new Coilhouse handbook (recently delivered to you via pneumatic gloom tube) was, in fact, sprayed with a potent combination of Lysergic acid diethylamide and Enteric adenovirus.

Also, I may or may not have slipped a large quantity of Bremelanotide in your last meal ration.

Just try to relax. It will all be over soon.

With a certain wanly matriarchal fondness,
M.E.R.
(Sub-level 88-8, Catacomb Recreation Room 237)

This collage series by Nadine Boughton combines men’s adventure magazines from the 50s and early 60s with the pristine rooms of Better Homes and Gardens. Bedrooms, living rooms and bathrooms are attacked by squids and rabid baboons, overrun by bats,  submerged underwater, and besieged by helicopters.

“The collages are set against the backdrop of the McCarthy era, advertising, sexual repression, WWII and the Korean War. The cool, insular world of mid-century modern living glossed over all danger and darkness, which the heroic male fought off in every corner,” writes Boughton.

Previously on Coilhouse:

• 50′s Jell-O Salad is Actually a Shoggoth

Nothing more need be said.

Gawk in silence:

(Via Raquel Van Nice / Patrick McCracken. )

In case you weren’t sure if there was a contest for everything, Metropolis TV is here to assure you that yes, indeed there is. The above preview of their new season on masturbation spotlights Masanobu Sato who one both the 2008 and 2009 Masturbate-A-Thon, held by the Center for Sex & Culture in San Francisco. Both times he set a record, the current being 9 hours and 58 minutes, a time that sounds as impressive as it does painful.

In an especially surreal moment we get to watch Soto begin his day with a 2 hour “practice session”. There he sits, cross-legged on the floor, peacefully watching the news while his girlfriend sews, all the while casually working an artificial vagina over his turgid member. His girlfriend, for her part, sees this as a hobby, not unlike her sewing, She even helps him “train” by timing him, a decidedly different reaction than I would probably get from my girlfriend if I decided to jerk off on the couch in front of her every morning. There is also a harrowing moment in which their cat climbs on his leg to investigate, running the risk of being pulled into the thresher like vortex created by Sato’s inexorable pumping.

Things turn even weirder, though not unexpectedly, when we accompany Soto to his favorite adult video store. Here he explains his particular taste in pornography: specifically adult anime, explaining that a “real female” can be both smelly and/or dirty, whereas, conversely, the women in anime are nice and clean. Which is true, but really, it’s not something we should be saying out loud. Just let those dirty, stinky women live in ignorance. Better to suffer in silence like a gentleman than complain aloud like a man best known for stroking his dick for nearly 10 hours at a time.

Credit where credit is due, though. A lesser man than Soto would no doubt collapse around the one hour mark, exhausted, frustrated, and horribly, horribly chafed. There are worse things, I suppose, than being known as the world’s premiere practitioner of the autoerotic arts. Better to be recognized for a talent than have none at all.

Wiki defines “Quirkyalone” as “a neologism referring to someone who enjoys being single (but is not opposed to being in a relationship) and generally prefers to be alone rather than dating for the sake of being in a couple.”

How To Be Alone by filmmaker Andrea Dorfman, and poet/singer/songwriter, Tanya Davis.

The term was coined by girlzine badass-turned-magazine maven Sasha Cagen while she was standing with several other single, unsmooched friends on a Brooklyn subway platform on New Year’s Eve back in 1999. “She expanded the concept into an essay in the first issue of her magazine To-Do List. When the article was republished in the Utne Reader in 2000, Cagen was surprised by the fervor of responses from readers who felt their lives had been validated by her work. As a result of these responses, Cagen opted to expand her essay into a 2004 book, titled Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics.”

The first International Quirkyalone Day was held on February 14 in 2003 as an alternative to Valentine’s Day, and a more genuine, generous “celebration of romance, freedom and individuality” Eight years on, Cagen has this to say:

The saccharine-sweet quality of Valentine’s Day, that fills us with expectation and often tends to make us feel disappointed whether we are single or in a relationship, struck me 8 years when I launched International Quirkyalone Day with parties in four cities. The flagship party was in San Francisco. In our second year, the party got so big the fire marshalls came, but then they wanted to party, too.

IQD is for everyone, because couples as well as singles needed a liberating alternative holiday to celebrate the joys of connection: to yourself, to your mate (if you have one), to friends, family, passions, and so on.

…I take this opportunity to wish all of you the most alive and fresh Quirkyalone Day ever! I invite you to do something new Quirkyalone Day, shake up your world a bit by visiting a new spot in or outside your town, take a class, take a chance and make a new friend (and I don’t mean on Facebook). Rearrange your furniture, try a new recipe, dance alone in your underwear for an hour. At the least, buy yourself some daisies. Chosen for their natural, sunny quality, they are the official flower of the quirkyalone movement.

And above all, love thyself.

Cheers to all you lovely Quirkyalone celebrants out there. Savor this day.

Image by Mike Brodie, a.k.a. the Polaroid Kidd.

The dark days are here to stay, it would seem – at least for all my friends in New Orleans. It feels wrong to even try to write about it at this point, but I really don’t know what else to do, and this heartbreak has to go somewhere. The night of Flee’s memorial Second Line parade, eight of his friends and their dogs burned to death when their squat, an abandoned warehouse, caught on fire from the barrel they were burning scrap in to stay warm. A few names have been sussed out, but I’m still not sure who was in that place when it went down, or if I knew them. Three women and five men between the ages of 19 and 30 died in the inferno, all described as “accomplished musicians or artists – jolly, happy people.”

Apparently one of the girls who died had been jumped by a guy on her way back to the squat recently, and had her face and arms slashed by his knife. She had been considering filing a report, but never got the chance. This insane rash of random violence with little motive brings to mind the shadow-play I saw performed at the Mudlark Public Theatre on Halloween, about the Axeman of New Orleans, who terrorized the city from May 1918 to October 1919. My friends are in a similar panic right now, though there’s no speculation that the assailants are possibly the devil in disguise. Monsters, maybe. Disenfranchised young men, raised in poverty, abused, angry and numbed to the violence and death that surrounds them, that they wreak. There is a bleak miasma, a rotten swamp-funk of despair and fear that seems to be seeping up through the banquettes and curling around every corner down there right now. This fire wasn’t part of that crime-wave, no – but all this bad shit happening at once, without even giving people a chance to catch their breath… It’s just brutal. What’s really fucking with me is the response of “concerned citizens” who callously voiced their opinions about the kids who died with nasty comments on a local news site. I should know better than to ever read that shit, because it’s usually horrifying, and makes me feel very sad for humanity. It got under my skin, though – these people basically saying “good riddance to gutterpunks” and that they got what they deserved for choosing to live the way they lived. Unbelievable, and so sad, that people would respond to the accidental deaths of eight young people with such vitriol. Even the more compassionate news stories refer to them as “homeless” or “transients”, and lead in to discussions about the pitiful lack of resources and shelters in New Orleans, which is of course important, but not actually very relevant to who these kids were. Here’s a couple comments from the thread which address it better than I can:

“You just assume that because they were squatting they don’t have jobs, but a lot of these kids do work. They do bike delivery in the quarter or wash dishes or tend bar. They travel a lot, so often they don’t tie themselves down to a lease. They sleep on the couches of friends or in abandoned buildings. It may not be your choice of lifestyle, but it’s not malicious and it’s not lazy. It’s just different. Their lives matter just as much as yours or mine. Grow a heart and some perspective.”

and

“Every human deserves a warm place to sleep and healthy food. I didn’t know those kids well, but I knew that they were working on that building, that they had built lofts and had made more improvements to that structure then who ever owned had in years. They weren’t homeless – that was their home and it burned down and its a goddamn tragedy anyway you write it down, and if you think otherwise you are a cruel person who needs to go back to whatever godforsaken suburb you crawled out of and stay there.”

Goddamn right.

If you’re a highly sensitive purist, DON’T bother with On the Bro’d: Every Sentence of Kerouac Retold for Bros. It will only sully your palate and piss you off. If you’ve never actually read On the Road, well, you should experience that first, most definitely. Particularly if you are bright-eyed, collegiate (pre or post) and fulla beans. For while it may retain its verve when read at a later age, the classic Kerouac scroll is, first and foremost, a young adventurer’s screed.

via DJ Dead Billy, thanks.

But hey, all you crabby old culture vultures who eat sacred cow burgers with zeal and favor the thigh bones of vegan Sarah Lawrence humanities majors for your walking sticks, pull up to the groaning board and dig the fuck in. If, perhaps, you remain secretly convinced that young Jack and pals could have stood to be a bit less self-indulgent, paternalistic, or just plain fuckwitted, this satirical retelling may provide you with nourishing vindication.

On the Bro’d is exactly what the title describes. References to beer bongs, pimps, Axe Body Spray, Sparks, popped collars, bottle service and “Wonderwall” abound. From its official press release (yes, apparently it has an official press release, ugh): “On The Road is an American classic and the seminal work of the Beat generation, but much of it’s lost in translation when read by the generation that goes to the club and then beats.” The as-of-yet unnamed author insists that his reinterpretation is both appropriate and relevant, seeing as the original book was goaded by the “stirring unrest and genius of a generation of bros.” Nnnngh.

Profoundly cynical and relentlessly obnoxious, On the Bro’d will make you weep and laugh and barf for the future of American culture as only a seasoned NYC designer/writer/humor blogger can make you weep/laugh/barf. So enjoy. Or not. Either way, you have my love and empathy.

Awww, jeez. Rest in peace, Pete Steele. (Sorry to get a bit morbid, guys. Then again, it is almost Dia de los Muertos.)

Living the American Nightmare “is an independently made documentary shot in HD directed by PawL BaZiLe.” Its main focus is Myke Hideous, the relatively obscure artist and lead singer of Empire Hideous and the Bronx Casket Company who briefly filled in as lead vocalist for the Misfits in the late nineties, long after its best-known frontman, Glenn Danzig, had left the band.

Through various accounts from Hideous, in addition to a series of interviews with a variety of veteran musicians, from Danzig and Steele to Ramones mastermind Arturo Vega to Sabbath drummer Bill Ward, LtAN “tells the story of what it costs working class people to be musicians, and the pitfalls of success with no payoff.”

Myke Hideous portrait by Kyle Cassidy.

Judging by its teaser and trailer, the mood of the entire film’s gloomy but empowering. “The sacrifice to make a living as an artist is incredible, and we have a strong cast of guests in this film to explain misconceptions and realities. We’ve spoken to everyone from independent bands still [of] high school age, to Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of famers.”

According to admin on its Facebook page, Living the American Nightmare should be out by this year’s end, or early next. Rock on, fellas. Keep us posted, please!

It was many years ago when I first discovered the awesomeness that is Vagina Power, an Atlanta-based public access show hosted by the inimitable Alexyss K. Tylor and her often shocked and bewildered mother. Few have done more to empower women than Tylor, a woman whose unique voice shines through in the heated battle betwixt the genitals.

In this particular episode, she uses the holiday of Halloween to focus on a woman’s duty to police her vagina, a valiant call to arms, meant to tame the lawless land below the waists of the Second Sex. In doing so she also explores the wedding ring’s role in binding both the Penis and the Nuts. It is not quite as stupendous as when she explained that “dick’ll make you slap somebody”, but it is classic Alexyss K. Tylor nonetheless.