A young boy is trapped in an abusive home. As his parents become increasingly detached, demeaning, and violent he finds sanctuary in the attic. There, he plants magic seeds from which a grandmother grows.

David Lynch made Grandmother in 1970 on a total budget of $7,200. This incredible film [David’s third] was shot in Lynch’s house in Philadelphia, where he painted the walls black and the actors white. The lack of dialogue, with everything conveyed through guttural noises, barking, and a score from a local group, Tractor, compliments the stylized, stripped down atmosphere that’s since become the Lynch standard.

This depiction of childhood escapism yanks us away to that special place where everything is very, very WRONG. No one is better than David at evoking that sense of creeping  dread, that beautiful paranoia! But there is love here too, unconditional and pure, as the grandmother provides everything the boy’s parents deny him. A dream, a nightmare and a slow attack on the psyche – watch all 5 parts below when you have a quiet hour to spare.

Young German filmmaker Jeff Desom graduated from the Bournemouth Arts Institute in 2007. His senior project featured the experimental pianist Volker Bertelmann, a.k.a. Hauskchka. That partnership has led to this flawless collaboration:

Music video for the song “Morgenrot” off Hauschka’s latest album, Ferndorf. (Via Siege, thanks.)

Painstakingly animated, composited and rendered, “Morgenrot” features a flaming piano falling in slow motion through a series of vintage black and white photographs of NYC. Desom talks about the process:

The finished animation is mostly made from early twentieth century photographs that I found while browsing through the vast collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. I also used old postcards from New York that I purchased at a flea market in Paris. Most of the time I would only zoom into a tiny portion of the picture and utilise that as my frame.

The hardest part was to make it look as if it had been pasted together from a lost reel depicting this curious experiment where they’d [lit] up a piano and thrown it off a building only to see what would happen. The kind of unnecessary crash test executed [for] the sole purpose of drooling over the beauty of slow motion.

Mission accomplished. One can only imagine what Desom is going to come up with next.

I found this image completely by accident on some car restoration site that was last updated in 2005. I don’t even remember how I got there; I think I was doing a Google image search on vintage hair dryers. The image above appears in the following context:

Any vintage automotive electrical system can be a real challenge, especially if it’s been partially burned up due to modifications that got ugly or a voltage regulator that went into fricasse mode. Just about every tatooed Isetta wiring harness we’ve seen had ignition problems of some form or fashion with the blue and green ignition wires vying for first place in the Meltdown Category.

Dude. I don’t know what any of the above means, but it’s pure poetry.

Later this week on Coilhouse, we’ll be posting a Very Special Interview with one of our all-time favorite bloggers: Ross Rosenberg of ECTOPLASMOSIS! fame. If you’re unfamiliar with this man’s writing, proceed to ECTOMO immediately and read EVERYTHING that Ross – along with his wily co-editors – has posted there. We promise you, nothing will ever be the same. Ever. Again. For the abyss gazes also into you.

Here are some topics that Ross enjoys writing about:

• Moustache Monday: True Love
• Rockin’ The Dog Sack
• Do You Know Your Children Are Smoking Smarties?
• Great Moments In Masochism: The Petaminx
• Department Store Fossils
  
• The Art (And Craft) Of The Vulva
• The Inventiveness Of Failure
• Robot, Made Up

Ross’s keen command of the English language, coupled with his mystifying ability to flush esoterica out of the grimiest and most cryptic corners of the web, has landed him in our RSS readers from day one. How does he do it? The full interview is still to come, but for now, the exalted 23rd level Chaotic Neutral Blogmaster is ready to divulge his secrets for success to future generations:

What advice would you give to aspiring bloggers?

1)     Respect: When starting out it’s hard to get noticed. Just like in prison, it pays to find the biggest, baddest motherfucker in the room and go at them full steam. Nothing gets attention like pointing out Perez Hilton’s grammar mistakes or a long opinion piece on how you could take Xeni Jardin in a knife fight.

2)     Choose your words carefully: Polysyllabic words are for pussies and Fascists. Keep it short, sweet, and guttural. Also, using the British spelling of any word will ensure that you’ll never get anywhere and people will make fun of you behind your back.

3)     Lists, lists, lists: Everything you write should be in the form of a list, whether it be the top ten things you smelled on Thursday or the top five tips for aspiring bloggers.

4)    Just because your paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you: Blogging is a dog-eat-dog business (see #1), consequently everyone is a potential threat, so do your best to take care of them early whether it be character assassination or just giving really bad advice.

5)     Blockquote: This is a big one. Why write something when someone else has written it for you? Just blockquote a big old chunk of text and add a one line introduction followed by a one or two line opinion at the end.  Even better, ask your readers to comment and give you even more content! “Warren Ellis wrote an interesting article about ferret juicing today:” Blockquote everything but the last paragraph. “It all sounds good, but I’m not sure everyone has access to a cider press. What do you use to juice your ferrets?”

Bonus:  Boobs: Seriously, no matter what the subject matter is, stick some tits in there. Everybody loves tits.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Rosenberg Knows Things About Stuff, wherein the question of “boxers or briefs?” and other impenetrable mysteries of Rossness are finally answered.

Bon matin! May flowers are blooming, kites are flying, a dirigible is idling on the wind above my good city by the bay, and for some reason I can’t stop thinking about this film:

La grande finale of Le Ballon Rouge. Watch the entire movie here.

Written and directed by Albert Lamorisse, The Red Balloon has got to be one of the most gorgeous and enduring depictions of childhood ever committed to celluloid. 34 minutes depicting youth’s resilience, playfulness, longing, loneliness, passion, violence, innocence, fearfulness, and most of all, JOY! It’s all here, presented in glistening primary colors and awash in natural Parisian light.

Cheers, mates. Enjoy the beautiful day.

I know, I know. H1N1 is Serious Business! That fucking miniseries adaptation of The Stand terrified me when I was growing up, so I shouldn’t making light of this situation. OK, screw it: let’s reflect on how utterly surreal the official news coverage of this virus has been. I thought nothing could top SARS, but it’s like CNN, BBC, and even the Huffington Post have turned into one large gallery of Alt Photo Cliches. Case in point: cute surgical masks from Japan are to be expected, but I never thought I’d see this pop up on FOX NEWS.

I imagine the colorful swine flu parade coming from the news media to be the product of journalists/photographers bored to tears from framing recession-related stories. I mean, you can only stand covering so many Sad Guys on Trading Floors before you start to lose it a little bit. They’re excited to be reporting on something completely new, and I think that this giddy, liberated feeling is actually affecting the coverage. The best thing to come from all this is that news sites keep churning out photos of couples kissing in surgical masks, which is really sweet and romantic. Here’s my favorite new take on this theme, which has its roots in the following 50s image/erstwhile Torture Garden flyer photo (photographer unknown):

In the ad above, an elderly man pays a visit to a transgender hair salon owner in his small town. The man says to the woman, “[I wanted to] come and apologize to you for treating you badly all this time. For not knowing how to treat you.” Over at SocImages, where this was spotted, Gwen observes:

Often when I see companies touting their tolerance/eco-friendliness/good-neighborliness, I suspect it may be a marketing ploy with little change in actions or policies behind it–you can, for instance, celebrate Black History Month by putting up signs in your business and doing nothing else, and there’s little cost. It occurred to me after I watched the commercial that in this case the bank professed a type of tolerance that wasn’t risk-free to it. Saying your business is eco-friendly, or celebrates a civil rights hero from the past, or honors Carnival or Christmas or a local athletic team or the marching band, isn’t likely to make many people angry, which is why businesses usually stick to such safe issues. I’m by no means an expert on Argentinian culture and attitudes toward the transgender community; I’ve read that Argentinians are more accepting of people who are transgender, but I’ve also read that this acceptance is often over-exaggerated and that anti-gay and anti-transgender attitudes still exist, particularly outside of urban areas. Anyway, I assume that an Argentinian business might suffer some negative consequences from an ad like this that so openly and unequivocally advocates for acceptance, and I think it’s sort of fascinating that they decided to run it anyway.

For the most part, transgender people in advertising appear in hokey, stereotypical ways.  Most frequently, you’ll find them shilling hair removal products and providing us with fine slapstick comedy. It’s not often that you see transgender people in finance/banking. The one other time that the two intersected was in this two-year-old Israeli AIG ad featuring Dana International. What makes the Argentinian ad above really special is that the PSA for acceptance is targeted towards a demographic that usually ends up ignored in the hip trend of transgender advertising: the elderly conservative.

Meanwhile, back in the US of A, Depends recently launched a charming new campaign to promote its new products for men and women.  Sigh. You win some, you lose some.