At long last, Coilhouse fave Joshua Zucker-Pluda is finishing up his film about Aokigahara Jukai (The Sea of Trees), Japan’s forest of suicides.  Subsidized by grants from the New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA), the NYSCA, and the Jerome Foundation, production on The Sea of Trees began two years ago. The footage is, like everything else Zucker-Pluda creates, haunting and beautiful.

Some background information from Zucker-Pluda on Aokigahara Jukai, and his film’s content:

When Mount Fuji erupted for the second time, in 864 A.D., lava streamed down its northeastern face and into the lake at its base. The area was transformed into a volcanic plateau and in the centuries that followed, evergreen and beech trees grew; their roots clawed the moss-covered rocks, siphoning nutrients and water. A fifteen-square-mile forest was formed: Aokigahara Jukai, the Sea of Trees. Today its trees are so numerous and densely packed that they block out the sunlight and wind. Their roots intertwine, forming gnarled nests of strands shooting in every direction. The foliage absorbs all sound. Walking through the forest, it is impossible to see the sky beyond the canopy or to determine one direction from another. The magnetic materials in the igneous rocks are said to render compasses useless.

The first recorded suicide in Aokigahara Jukai took place in 1340. A Buddhist monk named Shohkai installed himself in one of the forest’s caves in order to perform nyujoh, a fasting ritual meant to purify and, eventually, kill oneself. Other monks followed his example. The popularity of the Aokigahara Jukai as a place to die grew such that, in 1971, local officials and residents established annual patrols for bodies. In 1993, Wataru Tsurumi published The Complete Manual of Suicide, which suggests killing oneself in the forest and includes directions, hotel recommendations, a map, and advice on evading police and local residents. “Your body will not be found,” he writes. “You will become a missing person and slowly disappear from people’s memory.” The book sold millions of copies.

A still from The Sea of Trees.

They say that the spirits of the dead inhabit the trees, that wild dogs roam, that a dragon makes his den in one of the caverns. Abandoned backpacks, bottles, and cell phones sit on patches of lichen. Electrical tape snakes across the forest floor, marking the paths of those who meant to return to the outside. Glacial Apollo butterflies flutter between the branches. Thickets of disc-shaped mushrooms ring the trunks of alder trees. Bush warblers emit their indifferent song. The snow-capped peak of Mount Fuji, which has been dormant for three hundred years, looms above, invisible.

The Sea of Trees explores the Japanese forest where the spirits of suicides linger, silence reigns and compasses fail.

(Chills? Yeah. Me, too.)

Since Zucker-Pluda began his long, often challenging artist-on-a-shoestring journey into the Sea of Trees, other Aokigahara coverage has been completed and covered here. While informative and touching in narrative, that footage doesn’t begin to capture the sublime, often chilling beauty of Aokigahara Jukai. Meanwhile, JZ-P has an astounding eye for composition, pacing, mood. Since the early 00s, he has been consistently producing work in a variety mediums that is reminiscent of Herzog, Tarkovsky, Lynch.

This film is going to be something very rare and special.

A still from The Sea of Trees.

Grant money can only go so far; now Zucker-Pluda needs to raise funds for post-production. Most immediately, he’s hoping to start work on translating all of the interviews from Japanese to English. And so, yet again, it’s indie crowd-sourcing to the rescue. (Gotta love Kickstarter.)

If, through the years, you’ve enjoyed Zucker-Pluda’s phenomenal Roadside Picnic Podcast (a new episode just went up, by the way!), here’s the perfect way to say thank you. He just needs a wee boost. To the Kickstarter, comrades.

One man animation machine Nick Cross describes his short The Pig Farmer thus:

A simple tale of a wayward soul, click awash in an ocean of tragedy and regret.

Which, sick while succinct, does not, perhaps, do a proper job of accurately describing the character of the porcine homesteader at the center of this tale. No, at the very least I believe a modifier is required here, “naive” being my suggestion; for surely it is a dearth of worldly experience that best explains why he would trust those sly and treacherous Vulpes, enshrined, as is their wont, in a world of cheap sex and illicit substances. To suggest otherwise would be to assume our hero a complete idiot, and I am loathe to paint all those who live off the land as brainless rubes. I pity this poor, anthropomorphized pig, then. He really could not have seen it coming.

Coilhouse is delighted to welcome writer and dancer Sarah Hassan into the Coilhouse family. Her premiere piece for us is a 3000 word feature about Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes. This is definitely one of the most informative, inspiring, infectious posts you’ll read here this month, so settle in, and enjoy! ~Mer

Dancers in the original Le sacre du printemps production.

The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris seems an unlikely venue for a riot. Yet almost one hundred years ago, on May 29^th, 1913, fist-fights broke out in an audience made up of socialites, musicians, and artists. The institution in question was one that by today’s standards seems chaste and predictable: the ballet.

The premiere of Le sacre du printemps by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes has become the stuff of legend. Against Nicholas Roerich’s backdrop of a primitive Russia, the radical score by Igor Stravinsky came alive to the choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky, the danseur noble darling – and object of Diaghilev’s affection – whose unsurpassed defiance of gravity on Europe’s great stages had been leaving balletomane’s breathless. Now, the dancer whose roles included a lovesick puppet, a sprightly rose, and a predatory golden slave presented a complicated tableau of sacred ritual. With balled-up fists and downward glances, his dancers jumped and stomped their pigeon-toed feet in time with the violins as if trying to conjure up the ghosts of pagan tribesmen. The heavy woolen dresses painted with folk patterns on the peasant girls were in place of the frothy tulle skirts of nighttime sylphs and bejeweled torsos of slinking odalisques expected from a program a’la Russes.

Nicholas Roerich’s Costumes for Le Sacre Du Printemps.

The production, presenting a ‘new type of savagery,’ caused a literal aesthetic outrage among the haute Parisian audience. Backstage, as the birth of modern dance unfolded, Nijinsky screamed the tempo counts in Russian to dancers who couldn’t hear over the booing, while Stravinsky held him by his coattails lest the crazed choreographer topple into the orchestra. Diaghilev attempted to placate the uproar by turning the house lights on and off. Yet despite its unsuccessful reception, Le sacre du printemps was performed six times, and Diaghilev declared the opening night scandal to be ‘exactly what he wanted.’ It was clear that the ballet was no longer safe.

Thirty-two years after Le sacre’s premiere, Nijinsky, having succumbed to insanity, leapt for a photographer’s camera in a Swiss asylum. The image captured the aging dancer smartly dressed in a suit suspended in the air, proof of his once otherworldly powers. Yet, one can only wonder if the height Nijinsky was attempting to recapture was not his own, but that of the sacrificial virgin he created, dying from her own mad dance in a flash of beastly glory.

The banner at the Victoria & Albert Museum for Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes.

All the hoopla generated by Darren Aronofsky’s psycho-sexual melodrama Black Swan made it easy to believe that ballet had been once again recovered from the ashes of its own antiquity. With Jennifer Homan’s attempt to condense 400 years of history with her book, Apollo’s Angels, the ballet’s ability to survive in an age where anything goes and everything changes came into question – the blood-stained tutu of Natalie Portman’s Nina Sawyer notwithstanding. Madness is, by Aronofsky’s account, the cost of greatness. This idea is artistic old-hat, retold through ballet by Moira Shearer’s exceptional Victoria Page in The Red Shoes – a movie loosely based on Diaghilev and his company – and all the gory details of Swan, from broken toes, bone-thin frames, and endless retching struck a resonant, less glamorous chord. The curtain was pulled back to reveal an art that demands perfection as you claw your way to the top while clawing yourself apart. Ballet, according to Black Swan, is more an arena for the cruel and calculated and less the foundation for beauty, innovation and fantasy.

Oh, how the days of Diaghilev would beg to differ.

“Praised be man” (2010, Parfum Exotique)

Spring, in many places, is slow in coming this year to the Northern Hemisphere. Until such a time as the land is restored to a state of verdancy and the flora and herbaceous things start to flourish again, why not immerse ourselves in the works of Margriet Smulders? Her hauntingly elaborate floral tableaux are narcotic,  intoxicating things– both ethereal and sensual, dark and glowing.

Of her “Endless garlands of flowers” images she says:

You can see a whole world in my flowers. Lush and strangely erotic tableaux entice you into another dimension. Huge mirrors, elaborate glass vases, rich draperies, fruit and cut blooms are used to make these ‘paintings’. As Baudelaire says “Get drunk: on wine, poetry or virtue”. Imagine lingering and languishing in these fresh, sultry and lucid landscapes. I love this sensual state. To lose myself, to deliver myself as in a love affair. Reality doesn’t matter. When making photos I get lost in the scenes as if the flowers were caressing me in the gulfs of the sea.

There are worse states in which to languish while we wait for spring than to lose ourselves in such delights, n’est-ce pas?

Before we begin, can I just ask you to look at that title. Do you see it? See how it overflows its banks, cascading down onto a second, blissful line? Nadya recently changed the headers so that we can do that. Have you any understanding of how wondrous this is? Do you have any idea how difficult it was for a grandiloquent fuck like myself to pare down my excessive verbiage to fit on one line? My post titles are going to run a paragraph long for weeks I expect.

Alright, that’s enough. I can see that you are entirely too enthused about the little bit of web coding. It’s time to bring you down a few notches; somewhere closer to a normal state of hopelessness and despair. To that end, The FAM present America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis Louis Theroux’s hyperbolically titled follow up to The Most Hated Family in America, both done for the BBC. The titular family is that of Fred Phelps, alleged drug addled abusive husband and father, who heads the Westboro Baptist Church, the Evangelical church, and pop music parodists, infamous for their picketing of, among other events, the funerals of American soldiers. Theroux’s previous visit had taken place 4 years ago, and since then, a number of members had left the church, including one of Fred Phelps’s sons.

Both of these documentaries (I was unable to find the first in its entirety to link here) are stunning for the ignorance on display. Like Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s 2006 documentary, Jesus Camp, Theroux presents a group of people whose bigotry is presented as devotion to divine scripture. Phelps and his ilk manage to out-crazy the participants in that film, if only because of how vociferous their dogma is, how naked their hatred for anything or anyone that differs from what they believe, and how complete and thorough its grip is on them. Perhaps the most disturbing scene in the entire hour is when Theroux interviews Grace, the youngest daughter of Shirley Phelps, accompanied by three other family members to make sure he doesn’t try to corrupt her with his words, speaking for her so that her answers may more closely align with the church’s teachings.

In the end, I suppose it winds up being more voyeuristic than anything, playing to a morbid fascination with just how far the depths of idiocy can go, just how awful people can be. Still, it serves to remind us that, yes, there are people who walk this Earth who really think this way and who, for the time being, are not going anywhere.

Ingrid Nelson’s series Pavement Trees feature surreal landscapes reflected in puddles of water; using the texture of the pavement, the painted lines, and rainbow slicks of oil floating on the water’s surface to great effect, turning these dirty pools of water into little scenes from another world:

Last summer I started shooting concrete and parking lots and dividing lines, fading paint and patterns. Alongside my compulsive inclination to take a photo of every tree branch I see, this contrast to the natural world was a break from the norm. With all the rain this winter, my eye was drawn into the glistening cement and of course…puddles. I am fascinated how my two worlds seem to magically intersect and become one dimensional galaxies both in reflection and in print. It’s almost like tree trapping … yet transient as we know that summer is just around the corner and these accidental worlds will exist no more.

PetaPixel : Thanks, Jinny!

A glimpse of the Helpless Corpses Enactment film shoot. Photo by Meredith Yayanos and Gooby Herms.

Click here to download a free Coilhouse Magazine PDF: Lives Transformed Through the Power of Confusing Music: Nils Frykdahl on Art and Kinship.

With solemnity, gratitude and a touch of sorrow, Coilhouse must acknowledge that Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, the most gloriously unclassifiable American band currently in existence, is about to call it quits. After a dozen relentless years of composing, recording, touring and performing some truly jaw-dropping music, the Oakland-based vanguards will play four final shows later this week in California: one in San Diego on April 7th, one in Los Angeles on April 8th, and two in San Francisco, both on April 10th (the evening show sold out, so they added a matinee).

Throughout the late nineties and all of the aughts, the legendary DIY road warriors of SGM crisscrossed the continental United States two, sometimes three times a year (and later on, toured Europe). Arriving at venues like a cheerful doomsday circus in their beautifully renovated vintage Green Tortoise bus, the curators entertained audiences with everything from puppet shows to Butoh dance to passionate readings of Italian Futurist manifestos. Flustered reviewers and reluctant converts, determined to pigeonhole SGM, labeled the avant-garde act as everything from neo-RIO (Rock in Opposition) to avant-prog metal, to grindcore funk theater, to, in the words of one concertgoer, “Satanic Anarchic Viking Shit”. But none of these descriptors come anywhere near encapsulating the band’s eclectic sound, style, or ethos. Not even close.

SGM on tour, 2009. Photo by Olivia Oyama.

The quintet has penned lyrics inspired by the Unabomber, James Joyce, madness, stroke-stricken baby doctors, love, death, cockroaches, and the end of the world. They have employed strange, esoteric contraptions from various folk traditions as well as several homemade instruments, such as the Viking Row-Boat, the Wiggler, the Spring-Nail Guitar, and a brutal, seven feet long piano-stringed bass behemoth called The Log. They have developed stage shows with stark lighting and elaborate costumes, sporting tooth black and spiked leather gauntlets and bonnets and bihawks and military khaki and antique lace nighties. They have sung lilting post-modern folk melodies. They have delivered face-melting blasts of pure, untrammeled metal.

They have rocked harder, more intelligently, and with more unabashed strangeness than anyone else around.

They will go down in legend.

Take comfort in knowing that these final shows won’t be the very last we’ll hear/see of them–the band has a comprehensive live DVD compilation in the works, as well as short film called The Last Human Being, and a final album. (We’ll be sure to announce all of those here when they’re released.)

Photo of Nils Frykdahl by Mikel Pickett.

In honor of the band, and to give our readers another peek at the variety of stuff we cover in the print magazine, Coilhouse is offering this free PDF download of our interview with Nils Frykdahl of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (as well as Idiot Flesh, Faun Fables, and several other acts) printed in Issue Three, summer of 2009.

Frykdahl is a fascinating artist with a lot of delight and wisdom to share. That goes for all of the curators of SGM, truly. (Nils, Dan, Carla, Matthias, Michael, Shinichi, Frank, Moe! et al: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Lots of love, and best of luck with all of your future endeavors.)

Click here to download a free Coilhouse Magazine PDF: Lives Transformed Through the Power of Confusing Music: Nils Frykdahl on Art and Kinship.

If the recent, resurgent fame of Eduard Hill is any indication, there is a vast cornucopia of Soviet-era televised kitsch that has yet to find its way onto the internet. Take this sextet, for instance, performing what sounds like “Korobeiniki”, known by ignorant Americans, such as myself, as “That Song From Tetris”. Alexey Pajitnov’s falling blocks, however, popular as they may be, fail to evoke the same majesty and wonder as these fine gentleman, resplendent in their gold wallpaper jackets and blindingly white ascots, performing in front of a faux stained glass backdrop. Somewhere treasures like this are rotting, abandoned and unappreciated. If that isn’t a crime, I’m not sure what is.

Love, love, love, LOVE, LOVE these ladies. Holy moly. So much love.

Originally featured on NOWNESS, this sweet, sharp short by filmmaker Lina Plioplyte is an inspiring glimpse into the lives of senior sartorialists– all of whom photographer Ari Seth Cohen has featured on his Advanced Style blog over the past couple of years.

Cohen’s mission is as follows: to document “men and woman over 50 who are stylish, creative and vital” and to offer “proof from the wise and silver-haired set that personal style advances with age.” For younger clothes horses who view our wardrobe as a medium for artistic self-expression, the short also offers an uplifting peek into one possible future.

The Idiosyncratic Fashionistas! Filmed/photographed by Ari Seth Cohen.

Cohen, speaking with NOWNESS about the Advanced Style ethos:

Walking around New York taking photographs, I noticed how many young girls are appropriating style from older women: leopard print, fur, turbans and hats. In general, the older women wear these things naturally, with more confidence. With the blog I not only want to show that older women are vital and creative, but also to show people [they need not be] afraid of aging—and personal style is a great way to showcase this. […] What is important to me is self-expression and what might inspire others.

(Via Sarah Masear, thanks!)

Via David Forbes, “A haunting (no, really) compilation of video game deaths” presented by our friends at Boing Boing Video:

Directed by Rob Beschizza. “Music is Rob’s MIDI homage to “Mad World” by Tears for Fears, and you can download the MP3 here and buy their original song here.”