“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 presentation of the average beauty commercial. He’s so crafty, in fact, it takes a few seconds for the “I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE” to kick in. Just in case anyone’s confused, a statement beneath the Vimeo embed reads: “This commercial isn’t real, neither are society’s standards of beauty.”

Invasive, absurd digital manipulation’s not going anywhere. Still, it’s nice to know we’re at the point of not just openly discussing its ubiquity, but mocking it mercilessly!

Previously on Coilhouse:

• In Defense of H&M’s Fembots

Post tags: Advertising, Fashion, Misinformation, Photography, Propaganda, Silly-looking types, Television, Testing your faith

WOOOOOOOOOO!

But srsly. What are you guys up to this year, fer realz?

Post tags: Events, Memes, Misinformation, Silly-looking types, Testing your faith

Via The Daily What, who says “If you understand this video, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is, you’ve gone insane. The good news is, you’re gonna splaish mabeleen furgo mistation.”

It’s extra fun to watch with YouTube’s Beta CC Translator option on (and, as many folks online are noting, would make for a fab double feature with Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol).

Post tags: Crackpot Visionary, Film, Misinformation, Surreal

Via Fitz, with thanks.

Post tags: Conspiracy theories, Crackpot Visionary, Madness, Misinformation, Opinion, Silly-looking types

Friday! It is now! At this very moment! Time for the FAM! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Today’s Friday Afternoon Movie is 1991′s Blood in the Face, directed by Anne Bohlen, Kevin Rafferty, and James Ridgeway, based upon Ridgeway’s book Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture. You may assume from the title of that book that this film may be about white supremacists. You would assume correctly. Blood in the Face, filmed mostly in Cohoctah Township, Michigan, is an encounter with the ultra-right, lunatic fringe — at least as it existed 20 years ago.

What makes the movie work, I think, is how casual, for lack of a better word, the entire encounter is. The directors eschew the usual tropes associated with exposés and documentaries. There is no narrator, there are no experts being interviewed in order to provide commentary or context. By and large the filmmakers stay out of the actual film (with the exception of Michael Moore, who makes an appearance around 7:12 in part one, interviewing a uniformed neo-Nazi). The majority of the interviews are conversational in tone, giving the disturbing illusion of actually being amongst these people. Oftentimes it feels like it’s just you and a bunch of crazed racists; an uncomfortable experience, to say the least.

Post tags: Conspiracy theories, Film, Friday Afternoon Movie, Horror, Madness, Misinformation, Testing your faith

Every once in a while I like to check in on Alex Jones, just to see how he’s doing. The man lives in a very dangerous world, you understand. Far more dangerous than the sphere that you and I inhabit. Crazy shit goes down on a daily basis in Jones’s ‘hood, so I just stop by every now and then to make sure that his head hasn’t exploded or, at the very least, to witness his head exploding.

There could not have been a better time. Truly, this is some of the man’s finest work. It’s got everything a conspiracy could ask for: government cover-ups, drug use, Philip K. Dick and elves. It’s awe-inspiring stuff. The gist is that powerful old men, who may or may not be ruling the world, are jacked up on the powerful hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Under the effects of the drug, they have come into contact with beings Jones’s claims they refer to as “clockwork elves” who instructed them to enslave humanity and build the Large Hadron Collider.

Now, Jones insists that he does not believe this (probably…maybe) and that this is “pretty David Icke”. He wants you to know that he doesn’t talk about this stuff because it would blow your mind. But he also knows that you need to know these things. You need to be aware because, as mentioned, Alex Jones lives in a pretty dangerous world and, with his help, you can too.

Post tags: Art, Conspiracy theories, Crackpot Visionary, Drugs, End of the World, Madness, Misinformation, Occult, Politics, Propaganda, Religion, Sci-fi, Serious Business, Surreal, Technology, Television, Testing your faith

Probably one of the more despicable leads you’ll read in American news this week, via the Orlando Sentinel:

Bird watcher wrongly arrested for possession of pot had sage in backpack. Deputy thought herb was marijuana; State Attorney’s Office ordered arrest without lab test.

Robin Brown was thrown in a Florida jail on felony charges of marijuana possession three months after sheriff deputy Dominic Raimondi mistook the sage she had in her backpack for pot. A field test had yielded a false positive, and after Raimondi filed his report, the State Attorney’s Office ordered for Brown’s arrest without ever conducting a crime lab narcotics test.

The 49 year old birdwatcher was taken out of her place of work in handcuffs and driven down to the station to be stripped, subjected to a body cavity search, and spend the night in jail. Such was Brown’s punishment for possession of a personal use-sized amount of marijuana plant… that wasn’t actually marijuana plant.

News of this story came to my attention via my friend Stephen, who comments: “Body cavity searches are getting to be a disturbingly common occurrence. Folks complain about sex education corrupting children, but when law enforcement wants to poke around inside your orifices, that’s just patriotic.”

There are many, many different ways in which Robin Brown’s story disturbs me. I’m not even sure what aspect to focus on; I just know that I owe it to myself to think actively and critically about what an increase in occurrences like this might mean, and that reportage of incidents like this should be shared as widely as possible.

Post tags: Activism, Crime, Drugs, Flora & Fauna, Misinformation, Opinion, Religion, We disapprove, Why

Last year I spent my summer vacation working on a feature film in Detroit.  While creeping around the city, I could not help but notice its mountainous Masonic Temple – the largest in the world – whose muscular shoulders rise above its environs as if Charlton Heston’s urban fortress in Omega Man were carved into Yosemite’s El Capitan.  I was even able to arrange a private tour of the windowless monolith by its hospitable and wily Grand Master, including many meeting rooms and a majestic 4,004 seat auditorium (numerologists take note), all of it a visual feast for anyone with a taste for dramatic architecture, grotesque beauty, or even cryptography for that matter.  While in the lobby, our guide offhandedly revealed three levels of meaning behind a seemingly random painting, and the stately oddities awaiting us in floors above and below nearly exploded with symbolic resonance.  Unfortunately, the photographer I brought with me was so spooked by the experience that he ran screaming into the long night, ever since unreachable by phone or email.

And who can blame him? The uninitiated public can never comfortably claim to understand the true raison d’etre and inner machinations of secret societies because any scholar or spokesperson or self-declared defector may actually be a shill for the organization, spreading misleading rumors and planting seeds of misinformation.   Conspiracies are easily projected behind vaulted iron doors, masks, secret handshakes and passwords.   Consequently, it can never be definitely settled as to whether any or all such societies are actually: cults of mystical inquiry; repositories of Enlightenment values of science and public service; the core of a “power elite”; a collection of people who enjoy rituals involving aprons (not that there’s anything wrong with that); or some combination thereof.

Last year, Fantagraphics reproduced Catalog No. 439 of the DeMoulin Brothers– the most extensive depiction of initiation contraptions and ritual outfits used by Freemasons and other fraternal orders, like the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, and E. Clampus Vitus. Bearing the title Burlesque Paraphernalia and Side Degree Specialties and Costumes, this wacky book may shed a shred of light into the outer sanctum of these associations – unless, of course, it is actually a hoax disseminated to lead us astray.  Bracketing but never disregarding this notion, the readership of Coilhouse may discover certain Truths regarding these quasi-mystical clubs from perusing its glossy pages.  Even if Enlightenment should, as always, prove ever elusive, the illustrated designs of Edmund DeMoulin and the handiwork of his brothers Ulysses and Erastus, as reproduced in Burlesque Paraphernalia, will still deliver amusing, if sadistic, anthropology.

Read the rest of The Unyielding Mystery of Catalog No. 439

Post tags: Adornment, Architecture, Books, Conspiracy theories, Cryptohistory, Fetish, Misinformation, Occult, Review, Sexuality, Silly-looking types, Ye Olde

via Disinformation

Whaddaya reckon? Real or fake? Either way, it certainly filled my Involuntary Horrified Shrieking Laughter of the Damned quotient for the day. Gah…

You win this round, internet. Walking away now.

Post tags: Cirque, End of the World, Horror, Madness, Memes, Misinformation, Testing your faith, Why

Yesterday, having recently seen links about them in a couple different places, I tweeted: “Haunting, tragically beautiful photos of derelict Detroit by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre: http://bit.ly/fwDwPg [from the UK Guardian]”

They really are breathtaking images. A lone copy of Marchand and Meffre’s (rare?) book The Ruins of Detroit is currently on sale at Amazon, if anybody with a whopping $237.94 to spare is interested.

The ruined Spanish-Gothic interior of the United Artists Theater in Detroit, and Light Court, Farwell Building. Photos by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

Here’s the thing, though: in American cities like New Orleans, the Salton Sea, and (most vocally) Detroit, frustrated residents who see scores of photojournalists touring their neighborhoods just to take pictures of the sexy devastation and leave again have started calling these sorts of de-contextualized photo series of their backyards “ruin porn”.

“Here in Detroit, we’re sick of how the ruin porn runs rampant around the world, and everybody loves to use it to show how things have degraded here. Know what? There is a big resurgence happening here, and things are getting better.” That’s a quote from Ryan Cooper, a Detroit resident reacting to Dangerous Minds’ coverage of the Ruins of Detroit photobook.

Only I hadn’t read that, yet. I’ll admit it: when I linked out to the Guardian feature, I’d never even heard the term “ruin porn” before. About an hour after I aired that tweet, someone in Australia called datacorrupt responded bluntly with: “Detroit Thrives.” And a link.

Photo by Jon DeBoer. Mural by Philip Lauri, founder of “DETROIT LIVES!“

Clicking through to Palladium Boots dot com, I promptly had my ruin porn-disseminating ass handed to me by the following half-hour documentary featuring not just several of those same sprawling abandoned spaces that captivated Marchand and Meffre, but also a rich variety of local entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, urban farmers and prodigal shopkeepers of Motor City who have been steadily reclaiming and reviving substantial portions of the urban grid, creating robust communities in a crumbling realm that was:

“Once the fourth-largest metropolis in America–some have called it the Death of the American Dream. Today, the young people of the Motor City are making it their own DIY paradise where rules are second to passion and creativity. They are creating the new Detroit on their own terms, against real adversity. We put our boots on and went exploring.”

Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Williamsburg anymore…

Product-shilling and Johnny Knoxville-yukkstering aside, Detroit Lives is an inspiring point of entry into the tenacious world of modern DIY Detroit. After watching the doc, I spent several more hours online exploring other links and sites (several of which are listed below). These kids are making and growing and building and yes, thriving. They seem committed, fierce, and in fucking earnest. Check ‘em out.

Any Detroit badasses reading? Please forgive me; I… I still love my ruin porn. Can’t help it. But in all sincerity, I love what you are doing far, far more. I’m surely not alone in that. Long may you thrive. Please come say hello if you like. We would love to hear more from you, and about you.

Detroit revival links:

• Detroit Lives dot org
• I Am Young Detroit
• Handmade Detroit
• NPR: Are photojournalists obsessed with “ruin porn”?
• Detroit Gets Growing
• Maker Faire Detroit 2010
• DIY Video: How the Detroit Music Scene is Seen on YouTube
• 2008 NYT Article about revival/economy
• photographer Trixie Bedlam’s I Got a Good Feeling in a Bad City series

Other Coilhouse posts of possible interest:

• Kowloon Walled City: The Modern Pirate Utopia
• Forest I Carry Inside
• Laura Kicey: Lonelyhearths and Living Rooms
• Deep Down Into Derinkuyu
• The Oakland Crucible

Post tags: Activism, Architecture, Art, Cryptohistory, Culture, DIY, Misinformation, Music, Photography, Punk, Revolutionary, Ye Olde