Well hello there!

Do you lack healthy boundaries? Are you guilty of the compulsive overshare? All-too-eager to share gory, palpating details with complete strangers that no one besides your own mother and/or proctologist would ever want to know?

Non-consensual boner anecdote-telling. Tactical uterus hurling in lieu of real intimate contact. The “I wasn’t breast fed enough so now I need to publicly air my personal anguish to feel properly nurtured and validated” power point presentation. “Cry For Help” cutting (across the street, not down the road). Cloaking references to life-shattering trauma in Obfuscating Yet Ominous Faerie Singsong™ (a Tori Amos patent).  “Fuck You Daddy, I’m a Suicide Girl Now!” blog posts. Spontaneous primal scream therapy in the supermarket. If you have ever attempted one or more of these maneuvers, chance are, you’re a TMI Avenger.

Relax. You’re among friends. And you’re gonna loooove Body Memories. A squirm-inducing, low budget film directed by the same fella who brought us one of the most fabulous independent documentaries of the decade, Body Memories is…

…one man’s journey inward to find meaning in his life. He becomes an archeologist of the soul, digging through the layers of his past. Evocative images blend with a riveting performance that uncovers family secrets and buried traumas.

Enjoy.

(More clips under the cut.)

Every time an issue of the magazine goes to print, things somehow turn Highly Inappropriate here at Coilhouse. This is apparent to anyone who was there on Twitter during the hours of our final revision deadline last night. And it’s only going to get worse before Issue 04’s out. So to celebrate, a video of Miss Piggy singing “Fuck the Pain Away” by Peaches. It’s that kind of day.

[via Shannon]

Videogioco by Donato Sansone reminds me of something that you would find on MTV during the mythical Time When It Was Cool/Played Music Videos; an era that took place sometime in the 80s or 90s depending on your place on the generational timeline and how curmudgeonly you are. Crude, drugstore violent, and imaginative, it is a meticulously crafted piece of work. I cannot imagine the planning that goes into something like this; the individual frames laid out in such a way as to allow Donato, hunched over them, to reveal each picture as needed.

via who killed bambi?

Many of you will recall our Issue 02 interview with Andy Ristaino, a brilliant comics artist/writer based in San Francisco. His visual style is extremely dense, textural and multi-layered, drawing inspiration from Japanese manga and ’60s head shop comix. Both the art and the text are rife with secret codes, cross-referenced visual puns, and painfully funny non-sequiturs. At times, the inked pages look almost like bas relief, or woodcut sculpture.

Detail of the cover art for Escape From Dullsville by Andy Ristaino.

It’s challenging, kaleidoscopic work– certainly not “skimmable”. As Andy would put it, his comics just aren’t the kind of thing you pick up and read in a matter of minutes, then never look at again. “So much time and effort goes into making comic books, but for the most part, they’re still a disposable medium. [I have always wanted] to create books where you couldn’t just skip ahead and read the last panel to find out what happens.” (Mission accomplished. I’ve read his oversized graphic novel The Babysitter three times now, and I’m still discovering  delightful new details.)

When I first met Andy well over a decade ago, he was hard at work on a demented, epic title for SLG Comics called Life of a Fetus. The premise:

A claustrophobic fetus grows tired of its surroundings and decides to make an early exit, setting an avalanche of bizarre happenings in motion. Soon the fetus becomes embroiled in the plots and schemes of the likes of little green men, mad scientist puppets, government cover-ups, jet-packed babysitters, strange cults, anarchists, beatniks, psychotic magicians, truckers, and crazy mothers, as it goes on the most wigged-out of road trips through the good ol’ U.S. of A.

About a week ago, he finally finished the 288 page book collecting all 7 issues of L.O.A.F. The collection, titled “Escape from Dullsville” also contains over 80 pages of new material, including the previously unpublished L.O.A.F. #8. Unfortunately, pre-orders have not been high enough for SLG to justify printing the book. (That can’t have been an easy decision for a publisher so dedicated to supporting industry underdogs.) Unless Andy can raise enough pre-order sales quickly it may never be printed. That, my friends, would be a crying fucking shame. To say the least.

You need to look at Andy’s art at higher res to even begin to comprehend how insanely awesome it is. Click here, here, here and here for larger jpegs.

Andy’s hoping to get everyone who would normally buy the book when it came out to preorder it from Amazon ASAP. (For less than 14 bucks! 6 dollars less than the official cover price). If SLG receives enough pre-order sales, the book will be printed. Folks who go through Amazon will not be charged until the book is shipped. Even more amazingly, Andy is offering a personalized original sketch of one of his book’s characters to anyone who emails him a photo of themselves holding the book when it comes out. He’s taking requests, even.

I just ordered two copies.

Is it just me, or is today full of uncertainty and hormonal angst? It’s probably just me. I hope it’s just me. But surely, we could all still use a good laugh. Here’s an OBG (Oldie But Goodie) that never fails to bring on schadenfreude-laced tears of hysterical laughter:

Via Kevin, thanks. Click here to see the letter itself embiggened.

See also:

• Passive Aggressive Notes
• Fake APStylebook
• Apostrophe Abuse
• My Very Worst Date
• The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
• Texts From Last Night

Every boy needs a hero. Someone he can look up to. Someone whose life he can model his own after. Someone to give him hope. In a far off land in an unspecified time, health young Billy is going to bed. But before his grandfather turns off the light he decides to tell they boy a story. The story of Tarboy, an amalgam of all the poor robots crushed and driven before the implacable greed of their robot masters. Down there, in the black depths of the tar pools into which they have been discarded, their consciousnesses become one. A single mind bent on revenge wielding sticky, onyx fists.

Tarboy, created by James Lee and Hania, is a sterling example of flash animation. A brisk, epic short film, it is a perfectly packaged capsule of awesome. A fantastic robot flavored, afternoon pick-me-up.

As you may or may not know Lou Dobbs — journalist, Birther, and cranky old man — resigned from CNN last week for the second time, for reasons that have not been made clear though it is speculated that he wanted more time to devote to his hobbies, like hunting illegal immigrants for sport; a hobby which has single-handedly kept this wonderful nation of ours from being overrun by a merciless tide of humanity intent on taking all the jobs that no one like Lou Dobbs wishes to do. Besides his outdoor hobbies, however, there are whispers that Mr. Dobbs may seek some sort of public office, thereby helping him to protect even more of America than he could alone in a tree stand armed with only his trusty rifle.

With that in mind, Mr. Dobbs has been making the rounds, getting his fleshy face out there and shaking his jowls gravely for the benefit of the public so that they may become more accustomed to his craggy, experienced folds. No appearance thus far typifies the direction that the Lou Dobbs Express will take than this recent interview on Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor in which the GOP’s favorite amateur pornographer asks the Border Baron — without even the slightest hint of irony — if he thinks that Barack Obama is the devil to which Lou, sounding every bit the glorious statesman he is destined to be, answers that no, Barack Obama is not the devil. He is just a terrible president. And a terrible person. Also, he may eat babies. In fact, he likes the taste of babies so much that he may mandate that every heterosexual couple in America must produce an extra baby which will be harvested by illegal, Mexican laborers for his sole, gastronomic satisfaction.

Or not, I’m just still flabbergasted that this question can be asked in full view of the public with a seriousness usually reserved for matters that are, well, not insane.

“Unfortunate little tumbleweave that met an unhappy end on V Street, hospital NE Washington, shop DC. Tumbleweaves thrive here in DC, their numbers are great.  She was one of the unlucky few.” – Urban Tumbleweave

A tumbleweave is the part of a hairstyle that, once mature and dry, disengages from the host and tumbles (rolls) away in the wind, seeking its own fortunes. The tumbleweave habit is most common in urban areas, such as PHILLAY. However, the ripe specimen of tumbleweave pictured below was sighted by intoallthat in Baltimore. Some thorough scientific analysis yields the following theory: “possibly originating continents away in a proto-religious Eurasian hairletting ritual, [this tumbleweave] found itself hopelessly and aimlessly clinging to a patch of concrete in downtown Bowtimo. Possibly looking for a cameo on The Wire.”

The blog Urban Tumbleweave seeks to further chronicle tumbleweaves discovered in Philadelphia, West Oakland (“the Philly of the West Coast”) and beyond. Each tumbleweave is like a snowflake, representing a particular genus, such as the exotic Synthetica Prolifera. Tumblewave sightings can also be submitted to this excellent Flickr pool.

A typical specimen found in Baltimore

In a couple of hours I’ll be making a post about urban hair carnage (by popular request… from one of my co-editors), so I thought I’d build up some anticipation by making a quick post celebrating the kind of hair engineering we all know and love. It’s been a while since we featured a nice, sculptural-looking ‘do, so here you go. Hairstyle by Andreas-H, photo by Kris Baum, makeup by Corrine, model unknown Aileen Lorenz. One more image, after the jump. Check back in a few hours to see where this kind of hairstyle goes to die.

Over the past two years, we’ve received numerous emails from art galleries, clothing stores and other assorted shops that don’t normally distribute magazines, asking us if they could carry copies of Coilhouse in their store. Sadly we had to turn down such requests in the past, because we didn’t have a system or staff in place for handling the process. We have a distributor (the wonderful team at RCS) that deals with shipping the magazines to bookstores on our behalf, and due to limited staff, we couldn’t take on the extra burden of individually corresponding with shops that didn’t have a magazine supplier. Basically, those stores were out of luck – until now.

This week, we’d like to try something new. We have a surplus of Issue 03 and we need to make room for Issue 04, so we’d like to offer wholesale copies (a minimum of 10) to any shops that are interested in carrying this issue. Think of it as a “pilot program” for figuring out whether we want to do this in the future. This experimental program is limited to the US & Canada only, and the only issue available is Issue 03. We are not going to be doing wholesale orders of Issue 04, but if this experiment goes well, we might consider offering the magazine wholesale to stores as soon as Issue 05 and figuring out a way to do this internationally. Stores that are already receiving the magazine through RCS will continue to go through RCS, but stores without a distributor could get it directly from us – if this little test with Issue 03 turns out to be effective.

If you’re a shop owner interested in carrying Issue 03, please drop us a note for full details! Please put “Wholesale” in the title of your email.

EDIT: I forgot to add, shops that participate in this program will definitely be featured on the blog, so that readers can find you.