Better Than Coffee: Infinite Khan

Hi, hello, yes, good morning, my brain is broken. I’m afraid this is the best I can do.



I know. It’s scary and wrong and you’re all probably going to get gushing nosebleeds just from looking at it and loudly shout profanities at work and then get fired and hate me forever.

But you can’t tell me it isn’t oddly stimulating.

(Blame Ariana. She shows me the wrongest shit.)

Crackpot Visionary of the Month: Joseph Carnevale

Via The Smoking Gun:

JUNE 12–A North Carolina man is facing criminal charges for creating an amusing piece of public art from construction barrels. Joseph Carnevale, 21, was nabbed Wednesday after a Raleigh Police Department investigation determined that he was responsible for the work constructed May 31 on a roadway adjacent to North Carolina State University. Carnevale was charged with misdemeanor larceny for allegedly building his orange monster from materials pilfered from a construction site. According to an arrest warrant, Carnevale “destroyed three road blocking barrels by cutting and screwing them together to form a statue.” Police estimated that Carnevale’s artwork caused $360 in damages to Hamlett Associates, the North Carolina construction company that owned the barrels. Carnevale is scheduled for a July 21 court appearance in Wake County.

Dude. TOTALLY WORTH IT.

Going to MTV Hell With Nick and Blixa

It’s been a while since we’ve had a Nick and/or Blixa post, innit?*


Nick Cave & Blixa Bargeld announce 120 Minutes for MTV, recorded early 1994.

If anyone here can decipher Blixa‘s sinister whisper divulging the 4th circle of MTV hell (“sea of burning lead of … hippie …” something?) please leave it in comments.

*For those of you just tuning in, we three Coilhouse editors share a breathless, bone-deep predilection for all things Nixa. The depth, power and futility of our combined/confused longing easily eclipses the paltry obsessions of even the most twitterpated Twilight tween. (Say that three times fast.) Fear us. Pity us. We are lost.

(Belated) Better Than Coffee: Rachel Brice

It’s my pal Bricey’s birthday. In addition to being a bottomless font of warm fuzzy vibes, moral support and hilarious butt jokes, Rachel Brice is widely regarded to be one of the most accomplished and innovative belly dancers working in the Tribal Fusion style today. So, for those of you who are (like me) shamefully staggering out of bed just in time for dinner (hey, man, some of us were up ’til 11am copy-editing Coilhouse print edition #3) and in need of something awe-inspiring/energizing/exquisite to look upon, here’s an assortment of clips of Rachel Brice: Professional Belly Dancing Badass and Beloved Goofball.

Have a lovely day, homeslice.

To Build A Fire (A Most Grim and EPIC Fire)


Via the most brutal and unrelenting Ben Catmull. \m/

If a Speedo-wearing, paddle-wagging, KVLT AS FUCK individual and his demonic friend headbang in the forest, does it make a sound? Apparently not, save for the mesmerizing voosh voosh voosh of dewy black metal tresses sluicing through crisp mountain air (and some Attila-worthy bellowing at the very end, there).

Canadian YouTube user and Dark Overlord of the Perplexing Non SequiTORRR, esy87, explains: “the music is coming from a headset close to us but the camera hasnt picked it up. for natural perservation of the vid we didnt edit it to put the song on it, but for ppl interested it was ‘Decade of Therion‘ from Behemoth.”

Ah. Yes. That explains everything. Except the banana hammock. But in any case, well done, good sirs. I’d throw you some horns, but I’m still doubled over in hysterics.

BTC: We Can Dance If We Want To


(Via Gala Darling. Bear with the janky visuals and audio! It’s worth it.)

Confession: I am a terrible dancer. Really, truly awful. Nothing graceful, mysterious, strong or sexy about me on a disco floor. More like a capuchin monkey being electrocuted. Once, in my early twenties, partying at a club in downtown NYC (land of folded arms, reserved weight-shifting and ambivalent head-nodding) a friend pulled me aside and frankly informed me “sweetie, you look like a twat out there.” For one immensely painful split second, I was deeply wounded. But the bullet passed through non-vital tissue. No permanent damage.

“I know. So what?” I pinched my friend’s cheek, went right back out there and recommenced shakin’ my monkeymaker.

Yes, many of us are terrified of making asses out of ourselves for all eternity. Me too. But when it comes to dancing for the sheer joy of it, all bets are off. All of you cool coordinated kids in the peanut gallery can point and laugh, but babies, you’re the ones missing out. Mark Twain knew his shit, and like Maude once said, “everyone has the right to make an ass out of themselves. You can’t let the world judge you too much.”

Who knows? Maybe the world just wants to join in the fun.

Much more wacky wiggle dancing after the jump.

A Fruity Bonne Bell-Flavored Mega Queef from 1984

California-born dancer/singer Heather Parisi isn’t a household name in the US, but some of our Mediterranean readers might recognize her. Back in the late 70s, an Italian producer discovered the flexible 19-year-old sunning on a beach in Rimini. Parisi was set up with the best thrustiest jazz choreographer liras could buy, pimped out in one seriously bedazzlicious wardrobe, and became an Italian TV pop sensation overnight.

There are so many transcendentally Stupid/Awesome aspects to this video for her song “Crilù”, it’s hard to know where to start. Just… enjoy.


Gyrations atop a giant Rubik’s cube? Check. Uber groiny, hardbodied ballet dancers in metallic bowler shoes? Check. Intimated BJ three-way with male Moschino models? Check. Glittering Mickey Mouse butt cleavage? OKAY NOW THAT’S JUST GOING TOO FAR.

Clip via DJ Dead Billy, thanks. More Parisi videos after the jump. Additionally, if you appreciate this level of Stupid/Awesome 80s kitsch, you may also like:

International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia

Today is IDAHO, 2009. On this date not too long ago (1992), homosexuality was finally removed from the International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization (WHO). This year, in a gesture of pride and solidarity, hundreds of folks from 48 countries across six continents around the world participated in a video message produced by the Parisian IDAHO committee in conjunction with the Hong Kong-based site, Gays.com.


“Participants submitted videos in all of the world’s key languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tamil and even American Sign Language.”

Unfortunately, you can’t actually watch the video (or anything else) on the official Gays.com site right now because they’re experiencing a big ol’ DDoS attack that hit the site approximately 48 hours ago, shortly before various global IDAHO celebrations were set to begin. Coincidence? Um, no. Gays.com spokesperson Kenneth Tan, who spoke to Pitch Engine earlier today, says that “this is a well-timed, well-orchestrated assault by a large botnet with tens of thousands of PCs sending requests to our site. Engineers with our Internet Service Provider remarked they have never seen an attack of this intensity before.”

Okay, who else is getting REALLY effin’ sick of irony? Thankfully, Gays.com has been able to upload and share the video on many other sites. Ooo! AND… via Calpernia Addams’ Twitter, I just found out that (with a nod to the weekend’s worldwide IDAHO celebrations) France has just become the first country in the world to officially depathologize transexualism as a mental illness. Woot!

Two steps back, three steps forward. Let’s keep on dancing, shall we?

Happy Mother’s Day from Coilhouse (and Mr. T)

Arthur: It’s at times like this I wish I’d listened to my mother.

Ford: Why, what did she say?

Arthur: I don’t know, I never listened.

Douglas Adams

Wishing all mothers, mother-lovers and tender-hearted mensfolk with highly developed maternal instincts a very joyful and nurturing day.

Hauschka Music Video by Jeff Desom

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.