I’ve not seen The King’s Speech, though I have heard nothing but good things about it. The trailer made me immediately think of The Madness of King George. This is, perhaps, unfair and may be due mostly to the fact that both films are about British royalty. Whatever the case, I can’t help but think that this trailer, with music by Dan Bull, would have sold the movie better, though perhaps not to its intended audience.

Striking, innovative photography is, apart from chocolate and comics, Belgium’s national treasure. Even the Royal Family themselves once commissioned Dirk Braeckman – an expert in depicting murky, disturbing interiors and their mostly undressed inhabitants – to take a series of portraits with a goth feeling. How appropriate for a country which gave us Les Disques Du Crépuscule and Front 242.

Another sensational creator of wondrous Belgian photograph is Koen Demuynck, who reveals very little about himself, letting the pictures express his uncanny imagination. His daring, surrealist approach to commercial photography quickly made Demuynck every art director’s dream associate and one of the busiest advertising photographers of today.

The heavily manipulated, weird landscapes and the most unbelievable juxtapositions make one curious to take a look inside his mind. Seeing gnomes constantly tripping on acid there wouldn’t be a surprise at all. Cats watering plants? Check. The secret of Stonehenge revealed? Check. A dog sorry for peeing on your house’s wall (how cute!)? Check.

I have to say: I love me some space. Give me high resolution imagery of some uninhabited sphere out in the cold, merciless void and I’m all over it. Reading the exploits of diminutive robots poking digging into alien soil leaves me tumescent with nerdy excitement. There are those who, of course, do not. There are many who feel that instead of looking up, we should instead be looking down, or forward, or even catty-corner. That the money being shot into the ether would be better off spent here. And like those who would extol the virtues of white chocolate or the musical stylings of the Violent Femmes, I simply allow my eyes to roll into the back of my head and drool profusely when those naysayers begin to pontificate their anti-NASA vitriol until they depart my company, confused and disgusted. It seems the only reasonable reaction. Also, I am exceedingly lazy.

It probably doesn’t help that, as of now, NASA doesn’t have anything as sexy as the moon landing going on at the moment. Smashing things into Jupiter is cool and all, but not as awe inspiring as watching humans traipse about on the surface of an orb hundreds of thousands of miles away. As such, the agency doesn’t have quite the media presence of, say, the armed forces. There are no images of astronauts flying spaceships or scientists doing complex math formulas while Keith David narrates over a pulsing, rap metal track.

This did not sit well with YouTube user damewse, who put together a video entitled “The Frontier is Everywhere” that features “narration” by the late Dr. Carl Sagan comprised of his reflections on the Pale Blue Dot photograph. It’s a stirring piece of video that, as admitted by damewse, borrows heavily from “EARTH: The Pale Blue Dot” by Michael Marantz, (see below), tailored with images of the space shuttle. Whether or not this is effective advertising is up for debate, but it’s certainly beautiful to watch.

Thanks, Evan!

Morning! While it’s true that Coilhouse’s BTC category probably already has one-too-many Twin Peaks posts, this one’s just WAY too good to resist:

Japanese Georgia coffee ads directed by David Lynch! (Discovered on Julie In Japan‘s blog while researching that post about Bunny Island.) DAMN fine advertisements.

Coilhouse can be found in over 2,000 retail locations. For specific details of our distribution, click here. Photo by rickiep00h on Flickr.

Coilhouse Magazine Issue 06 is coming. It’s been coming for a long time, and that’s because we’ve challenged ourselves to put more care and effort into this issue than ever before. You won’t have to wait much longer: 06 will be out in early spring! For those of you interested in advertising in Coilhouse, now is the time to get in touch and reserve your spot. The deadline for reserving an ad in Issue 06 is February 1st.

Who’s advertising in Coilhouse?  Increasingly, it’s not just businesses – it’s also artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, designers, art galleries and publications. Take a look at November’s “Support Our Advertisers” blog post, which outlines the 69 participants in Issue 05’s Small Business Advertising Program. It’s an inspiring, eclectic collection of products and people.

Magazines with production quality on par with Coilhouse are usually chock-full of corporate advertising, but we’ve made it part of our mission to prioritize our cherished community base, enabling less profit-driven entities to appear in our pages. Though we’ve raised all our full-page rates as of 2011, a beautifully-designed ad square in our Small Business Program still costs only $99-149.

Magazine reader response to the catalog style layout has been very positive. We hear a lot of people say that they spend as much time poring over the scrumptious small biz grid pages as they do over the articles themselves. You can see examples of what the ad grid layout looks like in the magazine here and here.

If you’re new to the advertising in Coilhouse, check our Advertising FAQ. For specifics about our distribution, circulation and pricing, check out our 2011 Media Kit. If you’ve made up your mind to take out an ad, all you need to do in order to get the ball rolling is email our wonderful Ad Manager, Samantha.

The Coilhouse venture remains, first and foremost, a labor of love… with lucre a very distant second. Rest assured that when beloved members of this community participate in our Small Business Ad Program, it’s a mutually beneficial partnership that keeps us all striving. (And hey – if you’re a small business, but you still want to take out a full page ad, come talk to us – we’ll be happy work something out.)

As always, thanks for reading. See you in Issue 06!

From Joseph Nanni and friends (the same twisted souls who brought us that Necronomicon infomercial) comes this important, potentially lifesaving message about Elder Sign:

Sure, this clip has been circulating on the internet for a while, but as everyone knows, flying polyp infestations are most rampant during the holiday season. If you suffer from “an overwhelming sense of dread brought on by the realization of your own insignificance in the universe” that’s possibly being compounded by Seasonal Affective Disorder, rancid egg nog or overexposure to Glenn Beck-parroting (read: polyp ridden) in-laws, you need Elder Sign now more than ever.

And possibly some *cough* stocking stuffers from the HPLHS Bazaar:

(ElderWear™: “Because you don’t want Shoggoths in your pants.”)

Last week, we blogged about our wonderful Small-Business Advertisers. Today, we’d like to honor and give thanks to our five full-page advertisers from Issue 05. Thank you to Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs, Fluevog Shoes, Frenzy Universe, Swatch and Zivity. Two learn more about the businesses that support us, and receive some discounts for Coilhouse readers, venture beyond the cut!

Today is the Friday after Thanksgiving here in the US, which of course means that once again the Salespocalypse has descended upon this fair nation. Even now the fields are being decimated by swarms of bargains and the rivers run red with savings. While we here at the FAM do not partake in this yearly consumer orgy, content to huddle in our cell deep underground, far away from the lamentations of the trampled, we understand that there may be some among our readership who cannot resist the primal, thrifty Siren call of Great Deals.

Should you be among those who make it out alive we invite you to sit down, relax, and put the images of that helpless little girl out of your mind. No need to revisit the scene. No need to remember her cries of pain or recall the look of horror and resignation that came across her face right before that obese woman’s Jazzy crushed her skull. Here, have a look at some wonderful cartoons. To ease your guilt we give you Don Hertzfeldt’s amazing animated short Rejected. Watch it; it’s pretty funny. There you go, you just forget about that poor girl. I’m sure her family will be fine and, after all, they did wind up beating you to that very cheap HDTV. They came out ahead really. I mean, they can always make another daughter but when are you ever going to be able to get a 52″ plasma for under $600.00?

Update: So Nanna in the comments points out that Bon-Bon is not, indeed, Dutch but Danish which means that I’m an idiot and everything in this article is wrong. Everything except the part about Dutch toilets.

Above, dear reader, you will find a collection of five commercials, circa 1990, for candies produced by Dutch confectioners, Bonbon. These sugary delights have names like Ape Snoten and Smul-Tietjen which crude internet translation informs me is, roughly, Boob Feast in English. That particular treat features a nightmarish and considerable buxom, anthropomorphic cow milking another, non-anthropomorphized cow after which her heaving breasts explode from her shirt making for what must be a record holder for most fetishes in a television commercial. This is only one in a series of ads featuring a plethora of bodily fluids and functions. Please do not let these commercials affect your opinions of the Dutch, however. Yes this seems odd, but no doubt there are more than a few aspects of our culture that would confound the citizens of the Netherlands. No, we should instead save our condescending judgment for their bizarre and unholy toilets, equipped with “inspection shelf”.

In this post, we’d like to introduce and honor the companies and artists participating in our Small-Business Advertising Program as of Issue 05. We’re not doing this because it’s part of the ad deal; in fact, our FAQ plainly states that advertising and editorial do not mix. We’re doing this because we’re genuinely awed and inspired by the incredible mix of people who’ve come forth to advertise in this magazine, and think you will be, too.

Through this program, we’ve discovered phenomenal new places to shop, found new places in our cities to explore, and even made new friends. Our list of advertisers has always been very eclectic, but as of Issue 05, with the help of our ad managers Samantha and Allie, this list exceeded anything we ever imagined.

We invite you to explore beyond the cut, where a wondrous array of music, art, clothing, literature, graphic design, technology and sculpture await. There are absinthe cocktail recipes, a glitter-covered worm, skull jewelry for cats, weird paintings of cats, corsets, spats, photographs, magazines, records, dolls, monsters… and much, much more.

Support our advertisers this holiday season if you can, leave an encouraging comment about something you saw here that you liked, and spread the word. Without you guys, none of this would be possible. Thank you!