The Lifesize Mousetrap is exactly what it sounds like: an astoundingly cool, “big kid” version of the classic board game. Created by Mark Perez, constructed from leftover metal/nuts/bolts/spare wood over the course of thirteen years, and operated and maintained by a small, scrappy collective of bay-area based engineers, artists and performers, it’s “a colorful assemblage of kinetic sculptures fantastically handcrafted into a giant, 25 TON Rube Goldberg machine.”
The mechanical spectacle is enhanced by a vaudevillian style road show featuring tap-dancing mouse women, live music, and several dapper “clown engineers” who endeavor to “achieve a chain reaction using Newtonian physics and bowling balls! The action culminates with the spectacular dropping of a 2 TON bank safe from a 30-foot crane.”
This 50,000 pound contraption and its stage show must be seen to be believed. Preferably in person, not on a computer screen– which is why they need our help getting to Maker Faire Detroit and Maker Faire World in New York City. They’ve setup a Kickstarter project to help raise funds for the labor-intensive, rather expensive cross-country trip. There are 10 days left on the clock, and they’ve still got a ways to go before they reach their goal of $6,600 — a buck for every mile they travel. If you’re inspired by small, indie, gloriously strange community art and outreach, here’s a chance to express it. You guys know how this works: a buck here, a fiver there, and spread the word. It adds up so quickly.
For many there is nothing like the taste of an ice cold beer on a hot summer day. For others, there is nothing like the taste of a beer brewed by gnomes on some remote mountain in the Himalayas at a rate of twenty bottles a year. You have met these people, no doubt, and they have explained to you in great depth just why you have never truly tasted an ale until you have quaffed one which has had its ingredients massaged by the tiny, nimble hands of Himalayan gnomes.
For those people Scottish brewery BrewDog has created The End of History. At 55% alcohol by volume it is currently the world’s strongest beer. BrewDog is making 11 bottles of the stuff which will come in two editions: Stoat and Squirrel, priced at $763.00 and $1068.00 respectively, making them also the most expensive beer at the moment. Also, in case you haven’t noticed, the beer comes in bottles — bottles that have been inserted into nattily dressed stuffed stoats and gray squirrels like furry, taxidermy beer-cozies which, at that price, is really the least BrewDog could do for it’s customers. Much higher and I would expect something endangered impaled on my drink or, perhaps, a rhino’s horn bottle opener. Further details, instructions for proper consumption can be found at BrewDog’s website.
One of Cleveland’s great contributions to the world passed away yesterday. Harvey Pekar, curmudgeon and cartoonist, was found dead of unknown causes by his wife Joyce Brabner. He was 70 years old. Pekar was, of course, best known for his award-winning comic American Splendor, an autobiographical work that detailed both his daily life and the city he lived in.
Pekar’s start in comics came via Robert Crumb, the two having become friends in the ’60s after meeting at a swap-meet. Crumb encouraged Pekar’s interest in comics and his first story, “Crazy Ed”, appeared in Crumb’s The People’s Comics. Crumb would also go on to illustrate the early issues of American Splendor.
It’s an intriguing aspect of Pekar’s work. Most autobiographical comics are both written and illustrated by the same person, if for no other reason than than the personal nature of the subject matter. American Splendor, on the other hand, was illustrated by a rotating lineup of artists, including Spain Rodriguez, Joe Sacco, Chester Brown, Jim Woodring, Alison Bechdel, Gilbert Hernandez, Eddie Campbell, and a host of others, including many Cleveland-based cartoonists, his wife Joyce, and writer Alan Moore.
Despite all this contributing talent, American Splendor was Pekar’s in every way – and not only because he happened to star in it. Pekar was unflinching in its depiction of his life. Whether he was detailing his work as a file clerk at the VA hospital or the harrowing year of undergoing treatment for lymphoma, Pekar’s writing managed to be both plain and poetic. It also benefited from at least seeming to be completely unfiltered. It’s honesty sprang from the distinct impression that every neurotic thought, all those feelings of self-doubt, loathing, and anger, all the things most people filter out when relating their stories was there on the page.
Introspection and retrospection reign supreme on this day, the Ninth day of July in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Ten. Today the FAM presents Krapp’s Last Tape starring John Hurt and directed by Atom Egoyan for the series Beckett On Film for Irish broadcaster RTÉ, British broadcaster Channel 4, and the Irish Film Board and which began showing in 2001. The project’s aim was to film 19 of Samuel Beckett’s 20 plays; the exception being the early play Eleutheria which at the time remained unperformed and, in fact, was only staged for the first time in 2005, 58 years after Beckett wrote it. Along with Hurt and Agoyan, Beckett On Film featured an impressive stable of acting and directorial talent. Seriously, look at that list.
We, however, are here to focus on one. Krapp’s Last Tape is the story of Krapp, who is celebrating his sixty-ninth birthday and, is his habit, has hauled out his reel-to-reel tape recorder in order to review the tapes he has made upon every instance of the “awful occasion”. Those are the words used by Krapp, but the Krapp of 30 years previous and from whom we learn the majority of what we know about the man. It is this man, pompous and sneering, who narrates most of Krapp’s life and Krapp sneers along with him, laughing along condescendingly with his 39 year-old self at the idealism and naivete at the 20 year-old man he used to be. We learn from this incarnation of his mother’s death and the women he has loved.
But even Krapp at 39 cannot escape the bitterness that he hurls at his youth. At 69, there is little else left in him but bile and regret; his last book has sold next nothing, his sex life revolves around the periodic visits of an old prostitute. He has no years left for idealism. The only future for Krapp is death; and now in full light of that realization he retreats to the dim memories on those tapes. As the tape ends he can only sit frozen, the only sound the hiss of the reel as it runs down.
The most famous production of Krapp’s Last Tape, no doubt, is 1972 for the BBC, starring the late, great Patrick Magee. In fact, Beckett wrote the play specifically for McGee, it’s original title being “Magee monologue”. I must admit that, much as I love Magee’s work, Hurt seems almost as if he was born for this role. Watching him is hypnotic, every movement seems to take incredible effort and it seems as if he’s willing he joints to creak. Hurt is also in possession of an incredibly expressive face and he uses it to great effect here, betraying the sadness and despair of character with a subtlety that keeps the whole affair from becoming maudlin. It also contains the only instance in which I have laughed at the slipping-on-a-banana peel gag.
It would be hard for most to rank this as Beckett’s greatest play, especially when compared to his most famous play, the incomparable Waiting For Godot, but there is a reality present in Krapp’s Last Tape that is absent from the tale of Vladimir and Estragon that I find deeply affecting. Much of Beckett’s life is reflected in Krapp’s Last Tape and at the time he wrote it his outlook was, one could maintain, quite grim. Perhaps therein lies crux of my position. It’s effectiveness may hinge on just how much of one’s self one sees reflected here.
Ever wonder what it would sound like if Darth Vader went to a Berlin discotheque and spontaneously suffered anal prolapse after indulging in one-too-many ketamine suppositories? WUNDER NO MOAR:
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.
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.
“I wanted to make things beautiful, funny and positive – escapes that you could just get into and laugh through. That was really important to me. I felt like good could triumph over evil.” –Tom Rubnitz
Glory be to the man behind the pickle, not to mention Strawberry Shortcut, Frieda the “Living Doll”, the original Wigstock:The Movie, and dozens of other delectable tidbits. Rubnitz died tragically young of AIDS in 1992, but his amazing video shorts have survived, and they’re such a joy to see. Via Golden Age:
An expert in genre manipulation and campy hilarity, Rubnitz’s films could only have come from the eccentric East Village during the ‘80s New York art scene. Having grown up in a generation of television junkies as opposed to museum-goers, Rubnitz felt compelled to appropriate more from the mass media than the art world. He mixed drag queens with cooking shows, saluted motherhood with Frieda, the wholesomely creepy “living” doll, and consistently offered us a portal into unique and comical escapism.
Rubnitz worked with many talented musicians and artists in his films and videos, including the late John Sex, Happi Phace, the B-52s, Lipsynchia, Ann Magnuson, Quentin Crisp, Michael Clark, and Lady Bunny. Viewers will surly be enthralled by John Sex’s unique musical talent and sock-stuffed crotch as he performs with the Bodacious Ta-Ta’s in two music videos and is uncovered in a rockumentary called John Sex: The TrueStory. Rubnitz loved Drag Queens, which many of his films are a testament to. Wigstock: The Movie documents Lady Bunny’s annual event, “storywig-in,” a parody of Woodstock (particularly noteworthy is the rendition of Janis Joplin). And in the Drag Queen Marathon participants are pitted against each other to see who can endure relentless photo opportunities.
These glitzy, hallucinogenic shorts paint a loving portrait of the East Village, a regular of nightlife hot spots like Club 57 and the Pyramid Club. Since we live in an equally politically bleak time, Rubnitz’s films may feel strangely contemporary to us as they offer a glimpse into the repressed underground hedonism of the New York underground scene during the Reagan era. Alternative artist spaces, which were characteristic of the East Village, weren’t simply stepping-stones to becoming commercial galleries. They fostered a genuine alternative to the dominant culture of the time.
Still from Strawberry Shortcut.
A while back, the time-honored Chicago-based Video Data Bank institution started offering Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty— a compilation of all of Rubnitz’s most beloved underground hits. I have a feeling it must have been a limited release, because it’s currently selling on the Golden Age website for a whopping 50 bucks! I’m not finding it anywhere else for less. If any of you guys have better luck, please give me a shout. Otherwise I may just bite the pickle and shell out fiddy clams… happily! Rubnitz & Co aretotally worth it.
In remembrance of Dennis Hopper, who passed away on May 29th, The FAM presents David Lynch’s 1986 masterpiece Blue Velvet, a film that did perhaps just as much for Hopper’s career as it did for Lynch’s. I would imagine that most, if not all, Coilhouse readers have seen this film at least once. Starring the aforementioned Mr. Hopper as the psychotic Frank Booth as well as Kyle McLachlan, Laura Dern, and Isabella Rossellini, Blue Velvet is the story of a small town that hides dark and terrible secrets. It’s a classic Lynchian theme by now, but coming after the disaster that was 1984’s Dune — a film that I must admit, I like very much and a book, I must admit, I dislike as equally — it was a revelation.
Much of the film’s success must be placed at the feet of Mr. Hopper who, after accepting the role of Frank Booth (he was Lynch’s third choice for the part) was said to have exclaimed “I’ve got to play Frank! I am Frank!” His portrayal of Booth: impulsive, unpredictable, and terrifically violent, makes for one of the scariest characters in all of film. His constantly shifting moods and disturbing, recursive, Oedipal-tinged sexual proclivities, combined with his iconic nitrous oxide kit, are the perfect foil for McLauchlan’s naive, amateur detective. It’s a truly masterful performance.
In many ways Blue Velvet may be Lynch’s crowning achievement, and part of reason for that, I would maintain, is due to its relative simplicity. The imagery he uses here is powerful, but it is also far less obtuse than he has a tendency to be. In other words the signal to noise ratio of meaningful symbols and Stuff David Lynch Thought Looked Pretty is fairly low, making for what I feel is a much more complete and perhaps enjoyable experience.
At the very least, it’s a chance to see Dennis Hopper at his crazed, drug-addled best, every line spewed wild-eyed, frothing, and peppered with profanity. He shall be missed.
That has to be the single most impractical, exhausting, adorable combination of bicycle components EVAR. His brass clown horn is the big honkin’ cherry on top.
Several more squee-making wackywheel-related items of possible interest:
