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.
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 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.”
Author and gourmand Eli Brown is writing the first-ever ethnic cookbook of Tre-Mang, a small Atlantic island you’ve definitely never heard of.
Around the turn of the 20th century, the islanders of Tre-Mang celebrated a complex and lively heritage, and prepared some truly mouthwatering traditional cuisine: moist cakes, savory side dishes and breads, frothy pâtés, fresh compotes, hearty chowder pies, and much more. Tre-Mang’s people and dishes also happen to be figments of Eli Brown’s imagination. The Alameda, California-based storyteller readily admits that his entire manuscript is an elaborate, loving fabrication.
Fruitless attempts to sell his “real recipes from an imagined island” to timid publishers have prompted Brown to create a Kickstarter campaign. He is going to produce and print his cookbook on his own:
After several prominent publishing houses told me that my latest work was “too lovely and literary to make it in this market” and “exciting and unlike anything we’ve seen. We’d take it if we knew how to market it” and etcetera, I’ve been forced to reconsider my place in the writing world. It would be one thing if I had been rejected because the work needed improvement. But to be told I was writing as well as I could, but that the industry had no place for my particular works, well, that was a shock. It’s a strange conundrum: Editors love my writing—marketing departments reject it on sight.
We all know that the literary industry is sinking, or, as my younger brother so succinctly puts it, “has auto-cannibalized itself.” And so we are left running about trying to catch crumbs from an ever shrinking pie. (This is why we don’t mix metaphors; a sinking, auto-cannibalistic pie should be avoided at all costs.)
I am not willing to surrender. I believe that if editors love my work, readers will, too. And so I’m turning to the grass roots. […] I’m starting a Kickstarter campaign! I’m combining my love of fiction with my love of cooking. The result is an ethnic cookbook based on the cuisine of a culture that doesn’t exist.
The Feasts of Tre-Mang is a most delightful and nourishing premise from yet another internet crowd-sourcing pioneer. Check out this interview with Brown for more background information, and click here to support his Kickstarter drive in its final days for as little as one dollar. (Or as much as $550… and be crowned an Honorary Governor of Tre-mang!)
Good morning, lovelies. A beautiful, larger-than-life, booty-clappin’ sissy bounce Queen Diva badass who goes by the name of Big Freedia has got some important questions for you in this glorious AM:
Directed by Bob Weisz and Josh Ente, produced by Michael Gottwald and Casey Coleman. BIG ol’ limerence for everyone who was involved in making this insanity happen.
“Where that uptown at? Where that downtown at? Where that west bank at?” And, most importantly, “who has the back to make the beat go BOOM?”
Forget the images you’ve learned to attach
To words like cock and clit, nurse
Chest and breasts.
Break those words open
Like a paramedic cracking ribs
To pump blood through a failing heart.
Push your hands inside.
Get them messy.
Scratch new definitions on the bones.
Get rid of the old words altogether.
Make up new words.
Call it a click or a ditto.
Call it the sound he makes
When you brush your hand against it through his jeans, salve
When you can hear his heart knocking on the back of his teeth
And every cell in his body is breathing.
Make the arch of her back a language
Name the hollows of each of her vertebrae
When they catch pools of sweat
Like rainwater in a row of paper cups
Align your teeth with this alphabet of her spine
So every word is weighted with the salt of her.
When you peel layers of clothing from his skin
Do not act as though you are changing dressings on a trauma patient
Even though it’s highly likely that you are.
Do not ask if she’s “had the surgery.”
Do not tell him that the needlepoint bruises on his thighs look like they hurt
If you are being offered a body
That has already been laid upon an altar of surgical steel
A sacrifice to whatever gods govern bodies
That come with some assembly required
Whatever you do, cialis
Do not say that the carefully sculpted landscape
Bordered by rocky ridges of scar tissue
Looks almost natural.
If she offers you breastbone
Aching to carve soft fruit from its branches
Though there may be more tissue in the lining of her bra
Than the flesh that rises to meet it, Let her ripen in your hands.
Imagine if she’d lost those swells to cancer,
Diabetes,
A car accident instead of an accident of genetics
Would you think of her as less a woman then?
Then think of her as no less one now.
If he offers you a thumb-sized sprout of muscle
Reaching toward you when you kiss him
Like it wants to go deep enough inside you
To scratch his name on the bottom of your heart
Hold it as if it can-
In your hand, in your mouth
Inside the nest of your pelvic bones.
Though his skin may hardly do more than brush yours,
You will feel him deeper than you think.
Realize that bodies are only a fraction of who we are
They’re just oddly-shaped vessels for hearts
And honestly, they can barely contain us
We strain at their seams with every breath we take
We are all pulse and sweat,
Tissue and nerve ending
We are programmed to grope and fumble until we get it right.
Bodies have been learning each other forever.
It’s what bodies do.
They are grab bags of parts
And half the fun is figuring out
All the different ways we can fit them together;
All the different uses for hipbones and hands,
Tongues and teeth;
All the ways to car-crash our bodies beautiful.
But we could never forget how to use our hearts
Even if we tried.
That’s the important part.
Don’t worry about the bodies.
They’ve got this.
Gabe Moses is “a poet, author, performance artist, dogwalker, and accomplished floor-sock-glider who does most of his best writing in the bathtub. You can find his work in lots of cool places, but that kid singing James Brown on YouTube is not him.”
TV on the Radio’s new song “Will Do” has a tenderhearted, lovely new video… replete with VR cybergoggles. Their next album, Nine Types of Light, drops April 12th. Best wishes to bassist Gerard Smith for a speedy recovery.
Director: Dugan O’Neal / Executive Producer: Danielle Hinde / Director of Photography: David Myrick / Visual Effects: BEMO / Art Director: Ashley Fenton and Megan Fenton / Editor: Dugan O’Neal and Isaiah Seret / Virtual Reality Goggles by Nikolai Hass and Simon Hass / Commissioner: Michelle An / Production CO: Doomsday Ent.
Oof. The world continues to feel like an extra brutal place this week. We’re all finding it a bit difficult to concentrate over here, for many reasons. Also, by now, many of you will have noticed that Coilhouse is experiencing technical difficulties due to some sort of EPIC HOSTING FAIL that’s not in our immediate control. Big thanks to those of you who have kindly told us “psst… your slip is showing, honey!” Queries have been logged. Hopefully it will get fixed soon.
Meantime, I’m gonna go ahead and live vicariously through this guy:
The world is extra scary/sad right now. This morning, the coffee at Chez Coilhouse is decidedly Irish. We’re mixin’ it up with Princess Nicotine, Peter Sellers, some muppets, and few different iterations of a crusty ol’ preachment, if you’d care to partake:
Wesleyan University students, determined to speak out against extreme conservative members of the House of Representatives’ recent attack on Planned Parenthood, have presented this straightforward, sex-positive rallying cry to fellow young people across the country:
In order to “balance the budget” the House of Representatives recently announced the intention to strip all federal funding to Planned Parenthood. This is unacceptable. It’s time to face reality: many young people have sex, and need to know how to stay safe and healthy. Even those who have chosen to wait still need to know how to be safe and healthy when begin their sexual activity. This extreme ideological measure threatens our youth’s ability to choose their own future.
In many parts of America, Planned Parenthood is the only place young people can go to learn about safe sex, access contraceptives, or have a simple question about “down there” answered.
With all the rhetoric centering on “government waste,” Congress’s refusal to close multi-billion dollar corporate tax loopholes and instead eliminate essential, multi-million dollar sexual health programs is beyond hypocritical.
We are starting a student movement to make sure elected leaders know: Americans have sex, and we stand with Planned Parenthood.
On March 9, 2011, the Senate defeated the proposed de-funding bill. “However, budget negotiations are not yet over and we expect conservative members to continue to push to include the amendment to bar Planned Parenthood from receiving federal funds in upcoming continuing resolutions,” stated PP in a recent newsletter.
Obviously, teens and twentysomethings aren’t the only ones who would have been negatively impacted by the proposed H.R.1 bill. People from all walks of life have been benefiting from the many services Planned Parenthood provides for nearly a century. Were the organization (which spends ZERO federal dollars on abortion procedures) to lose all government funding, untold millions of women and men would potentially be affected.
What can defenders of reproductive rights, sex education, inexpensive health care, and safe sex advocacy do to peacefully and intelligently combat further ideological attacks? Visit Stand With Planned Parenthood to learn more.
Turn off all the lights, get under the covers, put on your best pair of headphones, and listen… if you dare:
Via Aaron Shinn (whose own fantastic work definitely deserves a Coilhouse writeup ASAP).
Demdike Stare is an occult-tinged music collaboration between Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty, two highly knowledgeable fellows from Manchester, each with a versatile background in DJing, record collecting and curating. Author Mike Powell’s review of Demdike Stare’sTriptych –one of the most interesting write-ups Pitchfork has posted recently– covers Whittaker’s and Canty’s work and history, both as a team, and separately. From that same review:
Demdike Stare is primarily a sample-based project, and “dark” is its organizing principle. Their logo is a skull, rose, and triangle; the cover of one of their EPs is a visual riff on a Ouija board; and they’re named after a 17th-century witch– a quasi-gothic, English variation on the sci-fi and horror imagery that has saturated the American underground over the past couple of years. The tracks on Tryptych are droning and nightmarish: lots of close murmuring and distant wind, lots of groaning earth and quietly whining steam-powered machines, glassy techno keyboards and the buried wailing of undefined tribes. But like some drone (and most minimal techno) there’s usually a build or a climax, and one of the most consistently satisfying things about listening to Tryptych is that it takes music you might expect to be purely ambient and shapes it into something with a hump somewhere in the middle– something with a narrative to it.
Cover for Demdike Stare’s Forest of Evil EP. Buy their CDs and MP3s at Amazon or Insound.
There’s a captivating visual element to Demdike Stare as well– to accentuate their live shows, the band often projects footage lifted from a wide range of classic horror and giallo films, spaghetti westerns, and thrillers onto the wall behind them, then mixes live beats and samples into their tracks to match those visuals. Additionally, Demdike Stare’s listeners have come up with with several captivating fan videos, many of which are included in the above playlist [and are not entirely SFW, mind you], along with a great interview with Whittaker and Canty, for those interested in learning more about the team’s process. Or, if you’d prefer to keep things more mysterious, skip the interview, and just let yourself be swept away by the enigmatic loveliness of the music and presentation.
