“I thought only my classmates, mom and dad would watch this,” wrote French animation student Stéphanie Mercier in the Vimeo comments for the clip above after witnessing an influx of visitors from MetaFilter,Daily What, SocImages and beyond. Titled “Girls Suck at Video Games,” the animation presents the challenge of climbing the corporate ladder, maintaining a stylish image, having babies and doing housework though the use of beloved 8-bit/16-bit metaphors: Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter, Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Compare and contrast with Dan the Man.
ROLL CALL. Who among our readers has a vinyl toy addiction? We know you’re out there, setting aside monthly Kid Robot allowances, religiously reading JUXTAPOZ, chuckling appreciatively at the inclusion of a Nathan Jurevicius figurine in Splice, etc.
You’ll be interested to know about an independent feature film exploring the American vinyl toy movement, its creators and collectors, called The Vinyl Frontier. Directed by Daniel Zana, it’s the first comprehensive documentary on the subject. Via Spread Art Culture:
Brilliantly shot on location [over the course of several years] in studios, homes, convention centers, and offices around the country, The Vinyl Frontier is sure to be a favorite in this year’s festival season. Featuring such heavy hitters as Tristan Eaton, Ron English, Gary Baseman, Dalek, Frank Kozik, Tim Biskup, and many more.
The Vinyl Frontier will be having its world premiere at the San Francisco Frozen Film Festival (July 2-3) at the Roxie Theatre. Tickets are available for Friday, July 2, 8PM (an array of artists involved with the film will be in attendance after screening to take part in an audience Q&A) or Saturday, Jul 03, 9:20 PM.
O frabjous day! Our beloved friend, the cellist Zoë Keating, has finally released her long-anticipated new album, Into the Trees. It’s streaming free on her website. It is gorgeous. If you like what you hear, you can purchase all eleven tracks for immediate download –directly from Zoë– in your choice of 320k mp3, FLAC, or just about any other format your heart desires. You also have the option of snail mail-ordering an artfully designed and presented CD. Quoth the composer: “No middlemen involved other than PayPal and your purchase allows me to keep making music, for which I am profoundly grateful.”
Last spring, while Zoë was still finishing up the album (and still pregnant with her beautiful baby boy, Alex, born May 13!), she granted Coilhouse Magazine an extensive, giddy interview. We discussed all manner of things both whimsical and practical– from the spirit of old growth forests and her biological imperative to counteract those proselytizing Quiverfull weirdos to the advantages of musicians self-producing and releasing their own albums, from the joy of nerd solidarity, to stage fright, to Tulip Mania. The article, titled “Into the Trees With Zoë Keating,” will be running in our upcoming issue #05, and features photography by our own dear Nadya, as well as Peter Hinson (the pictures you’re looking at are outtakes from that shoot), typography and illustration by Teagan White, and an exquisite custom-crafted wardrobe courtesy of Gibbous Fashions.
I don’t know about you but we here at the FAM are beat, dog-tired, perhaps even, knackered if you’re of the sort who use that specific verbiage. It’s been a long day and after a long day nothing soothes the soul and calms the nerves like a dose of the dulcet tones of David Attenborough. Here, then, is the naturalist (at the spry age of 45) in the BBC documentary A Blank on the Map from 1971, which details the first meeting of a previously uncontacted tribe in New Guinea. As I’ve noted before, the man could read a Denny’s menu and make it sound interesting. The FAM apologizes for the brevity and will return next week, fully refreshed, with a healthier helping of exposition.
HAPPY MERDAY! Your co-editors wish you blankets of autumn leaves, wreaths of kitten-bound turtles, a harem of lamé-wearing Italian 80s TV popstars, a barrel of the finest mocha with a side of bum-biscuits, dusted with poop jokes and polished with mermaid tears, delivered by a stampede of naked hobbits on WETA legs. Every day, we marvel at your ability to juggle music recording, editorship, cross-hemisphere time travel, and simply being there for your friends in times of need. You leave a path of growing dendrites wherever you go, inspiring all who surround you to do their best. Like watching a magician who outdoes herself with each new act, we shiver with ANTICI… (master-master-master)… PATION of The Parlour Trick album that you’re probably working on as we type these words, and everything else that you’ll accomplish in the year to come.
Birthday card by Paul Komoda, who’s pig-sitting Mer’s beloved Ingmar Superstar while she’s in New Zealand.
Anthony Francisco Schepperd’s animated video for Blockhead’s “The Music Scene” imagines “a post human New York where TV and animals rule.” One could also describe it as a pop-culture fueled acid trip. With animals. It’s great either way.
Josh has just launched a new project called Dbasr – a free, open-source content management system for musicians and other rich media artists. Dbasr aims to do for musicians what WordPress did for writers and artists – create a decentralized, customizable platform with an emphasis on flexible design options and usability.
Josh is uniquely qualified to undertake this sort of project owing to his experience as creative lead and co-founder of the now-defunct Mperia, a BitPass-founded, DRM-free online music store launched in the early 00s. Josh has described it as “a sort of radical iTunes where any artist could create a profile, upload their music, choose a price for each song and album, and sell it using BitPass’s payment system.” For complex reasons beyond the developers’ control, Mperia folded after four years. Since that time, Josh has been keeping an eye on more recent online stores and promo websites. He’s been doing his homework on interface and user experience, and has some excellent points concerning the various options musicians and fans currently have for presenting or perusing music online:
MySpace is ugly and clumsy, and music is shoehorned in as an afterthought to what the site was designed for […] Facebook is even worse. Music is just not what these sites are meant for. There are music-specific social-type network sites for bands, such as ReverbNation and Bandcamp. These are great tools for what they do, but I think they miss the point. Musicians — really any kind of artist — need their own unique presence online. Their web presence needs to match up with their individual aesthetic, and they need to be able to interact with their fans and publish work in ways that they and their fans choose.
Agreed. A truly elegant, intuitive, multifunctional interface for presenting or buying independent music on the web has yet to surface. Click here to read what Josh has to say about his concept. Could DBASR could be be the site we’ve all been waiting for?
If you’ve enjoyed Josh’s work for Coilhouse, we’d like to invite to pitch in and help him devote himself to this project as if it were a full-time job. There are three ways that you can help – by donating to get the project going, contributing your coding skills, or simply spreading the word.
Here on these internets doomsayer analysts and tech gurus have for years foreseen the death of the printed page, especially newspapers, those seemingly horrible vestiges of what many keep hoping is a bygone age. From a trance-like state they attempt to divine the future, devoting thousands of words to the subject, drunk on the smell of blood in their nostrils, slathering at the thought of a world devoid of ink. I suspect that I could hyperlink every other letter in this post without fear of running out of material.
The anti-hero of Mark Potts’ faux-trailer for faux-remakeKane understands this all too well. How precipitous the fall is of no consequence to him; what is assured is the fall itself and Kane will not be pushed aside without a fight. With that as its main thrust, Kane proceeds to exemplify everything one would expect from a modern remake of Orson Welles’s classic film. Kane poses a simple supposition: If Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made, imagine an updated re-imagining with at least 100% more dick kicking.
What follows is funnier than it has any right to be. Welles’ Charles Foster Kane is replaced by a brooding, unshaven, gravelly-voiced vigilante, cutting a bloody swath on his way to destroying the internet; every fight occurring in a blurry series of flashy cuts, set to a selection from Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, giving way to The Pixies’s Where Is My Mind, to establish the proper pathos for a Fight Club generation. It covers nearly every cliche on the way to the finish line, even hitting us with an “In 3-D Fall” stinger. In all honesty it’s a bit disheartening when a scene like the one in which Kane, trembling with rage and bellowing in frustration, defecates on a Macbook seems like something that I can imagine being in a trailer for an actual film. Trust me, in a few years popular cinema may consist solely of angry men, shitting on things. You heard it here first, on the internet.
Happy Summer Solstice! Y’know, unless, like Sergeant Howie here, you’re not into that sort of thing…
SPOILER ALERT. Don’t watch if you haven’t seen The Wicker Man before! Rent the full film.
Summer is Icumen in,
Loudly sing, cuckoo!
Grows the seed and blows the mead,
And springs the wood anew;
Sing, cuckoo!
Ewe bleats harshly after lamb,
Cows after calves make moo;
Bullock stamps and deer champs,
Now shrilly sing, cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo
Wild bird are you;
Be never still, cuckoo!
“Sumer Is Icumen In“, a traditional English round, is one of the oldest known pieces of polyphonic music in existence, dating back to the early 13th century. It’s actually a song celebrating the advent of spring (or Christ’s crucfixion, depending on what translation you favor), not summer. Yet it always seems ends up in my stereo on June 21st.
G’day. We’re not sleepy, and there ain’t no place we’re going to, so here’s David Zellner blowing a raspberry in slow motion, as shot by Wiley Wiggins.*
*This post is my shamefully lazy subtle way of reminding the Coilhouse readership that Wiggins and the Zellner Bros are under-appreciated cinematic geniuses of our time. Now go. Explore. Lose hours and hours of your work day spelunking their respective websites.
