Hollis Hawthorne, Bay Area, 2008. (Photo by Alicia Sanguiliano, I think? If not, just let me know and I’ll update.)

Incredible, joyful news: Hollis Hawthorne has fully emerged from her coma.

Many of you will recall an urgent plea that went up on Coilhouse exactly a year ago, to the day, titled Performer/Cyclist Hollis Hawthorne Needs Our Help. Hollis, a lion-hearted young woman from the bay area performing arts/activist community, was traveling through India by motorcycle with her beau, Harrison, when tragedy struck– a driving accident left her bleeding out from severe head trauma in the middle of a busy road while Harrison frantically performed CPR to keep her alive. Twenty minutes passed before some good Samaritans stopped to pick them up and drove her to a hospital.

Hollis was in a vegetative state, thousands of miles from home and in dire need of highly specialized medical care– care unavailable to her in Chennai. Time was of the essence, but Hollis’ mother (who had rushed to her side) was told that they would have to pay $150,000 up front for medical transport from India to the States– an impossibly huge sum of money. As an uninsured American traveling abroad, Hollis was stranded.

“For the Love of Hollis” benefit in Portland, March 2009. Photo by Brooke Dillon.

Horrified word quickly spread online. If the internet were truly as cynical or callous a place as they say, people could have easily have dismissed Hollis for making a “reckless” choice to travel without insurance. But hey, guess what? Humanity prevailed. Turns out there really is something to this idea of a global tribe! Thousands of donations began pouring in from all over the world for this feisty, foundering girl we could all relate to. A dollar here, ten dollars there, it quickly added up. Across the country, massive benefits were held by concerned friends and strangers alike– auctions and raffles and kissing booths, dance performances, marching band processions, puppet shows. It was an incalculably huge and steady outpouring of support coming from every direction, “for Hollis, the doer, the mover, the shaker, the dancer, the muse, the generous, the dumpster queen, the friend.”

Meanwhile, her chart was reviewed and accepted by Stanford Medical–one of the best hospitals in the world– as a charity case. After three long, anxious weeks, $100k was raised. Hollis was able to return to California in a discount air ambulance. Her community rejoiced and folks flocked to visit Hollis at her bedside, to talk and cuddle, trying to coax her back from oblivion. But her fight, and her kin’s 24-7 vigil at her side, was only beginning. On March 24, 2009, Harrison wrote:

What does it mean to be in a coma? What does it mean to wake up? What defines consciousness? Where are the lines between ‘coma’, ‘persistent vegetative state’, ‘minimally conscious’ and ‘fully conscious’?  Hollis waxes and wanes between these and nobody can really say what’s going on behind the surface of her eyes.  I do know this; Hollis is beating all the odds.

Ever since the story broke, I’ve been checking in on Hollis’ progress via Friends of Hollis Hawthorne and Help Holli Heal. The latter is a site updated regularly by Hollis’ devoted mother, Diane, who has stayed with her daughter through this entire harrowing post-accident ordeal, sleeping on a cot beside her, holding her hand in the dark. Diane’s entries are rarely anything less than three-hanky tearjerkers! But her tone has remained steadfastly hopeful.

Hollis, healing up. (Photos via The Hindu, Eliza S., Angela Mae, Diane Allison.)

Eventually, Hollis was moved from Stanford to a rehab facility near Diane’s home in Nashville, TN. Loyal friends still visit as often as they can. Continuing benefits to help pay her overwhelming medical bills have been held as recently as last month. (If you want to donate, click here.) With the help of doctors, healers, medications and physical therapy, Hollis has shown slow but steady improvements these past few months. She has been fighting very, very hard.

There is so much love surrounding this girl. So many people –family and friends and strangers alike– are rooting for her. Why? Because any number of us could just as easily have wound up in a similarly nightmarish predicament, had our luck been different. Because a situation like hers reminds us just how easy it is to give, and to care. Because all of us weirdos, us wanderers, we’re in this together. Because she is luminous and we cannot afford to lose her:

Photo by Kyle Hailey.

And now, finally, she is waking up. Harrison, who visited her last week, just posted this update:

HOLLIS IS NOT AT ALL IN A COMA ANYMORE!!! Yes! You read that correctly! Scream, shout, jump up and down! Have a shot! Dance! Kiss somebody! It’s the real deal, seen it with mine own two eyes! She is awake and talking and present and brilliant and amazing!

“Alien Faced People of the World Unite!” by Suzanne Gerber.

The marvelous, nurse oft-mentioned curator/creator/writer Suzanne Gerber recently posted something on her main site, Wurzeltod.ch, that should catch the attention of artistic East Londoners:

I recently came to the conclusion that it’s about time for me to get my own little space for art and exhibitions. I know this is not going to happen from one day to another and I’m also fully aware of all the competition around and the dire economic times, but heck, this is as good or bad as any time to start a business when you put a mind as determined as mine to it and if I never try, I will never know.

I have been wanting to get a shop/show room for a long time now and I know that I’m not the only one with such grand hopes but zero cash. So here I am, asking you, fellow (preferably East) London creative/artist/designer/utopian to join forces with me and share a space for creative endeavours with me. I’m looking particularly (but not exclusively) for:

• An artist in need of a studio
• A (fashion) designer in need of a shop space
• A creative hairdresser in need of a salon
• An (art) book/mag/graphic novel nerd/collector in need of a book shop
• A restaurateur in need of a small café
• A combination of the above
• Someone who already owns a space with a creative direction and wants to rent parts of it out

So if you’re any of the above or know of someone who is and if you have been wanting to have a space of your own for a while and are committed, trustworthy, hardworking and willing to make human sacrifices, please do get in touch so that we can discuss everything over a few cups of hazelnut soy latte.

Best of luck, lovely lady. Break limbs and hearts and piggy banks, whatever it takes! Hoping to hear a lot more about this in the coming months.

Lee Evil and Dougy Gyro in his “Nautilus” costume.

The tenth Edwardian Ball crept up upon us unawares, while we were still sleepy from holiday overeating and adjusting to our regular work schedules again. All of a sudden everyone seemed to say “This weekend? But I haven’t a costume!” And thus began the yearly scramble, with last-minute runs to the fabric store and safety pins carefully tucked away inside as-yet unfinished garments. The Edwardian Ball is one of those rare events where everyone–not just the performers and regulars–dons a costume. For some of us this means little more than our everyday wear, while others brainstorm for weeks.

A contact juggler amongst the revelers.

Film courtesy of Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers.

All but her belly buried in the floor;
And the lewd trounce of a final muted beat!
We flee her spasm through a fleshless door…
Then you, the burlesque of our lust — and faith,
Lug us back lifeward — bone by infant bone.
— Hart Crane, “National Winter Garden,” (1930)

“Jo Boobs” Weldon is Headmistress of The New York School of Burlesque, whose home at The Slipper Room is just a few blocks from where Lydia Thompson’s “London Blondes” brought burlesque to America and a stone’s throw from where Minsky’s original National Winter Garden made burlesque part of the American vernacular. Minsky’s notoriously established Gypsy Rose Lee as an icon synonymous with striptease, and launched the careers of Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers and Robert Alda before being closed in the name of public morality.

Houston Street Burlesque by Mabel Dwight (1928)

Is burlesque – a word which refers to turning things upside down – still able to subvert morals and mores? In a popular culture where the use of sexuality to sell consumer goods is banal, pornography of nearly every stripe is freely and instantly available, and sympathetic gay and lesbian characters are commonplace, is the self-conscious performance of gender merely campy fun or does it still have a liberating capacity? Can sex work, titillation, gender play and masturbation undermine heterosexual monogamy? Whose moralities and identities might they challenge?

Catherine MacKinnon argues that sexualized depictions of women in patriarchal societies reinforce misogyny to the point of constituting a form of violence. Do sexualized performances by women lead to their individual and collective debasement? Is stripping a phenomenon where women who appeal most to men are degraded whereas burlesque liberates women who stand outside the norms of beauty as prescribed by male desire? Considering stripping and prostitution, I ask whether everyone sells their bodies at every job? Further, when men pay a high premium to be with a woman or just to look at one, whose body is exploited? More specifically, does it make sense to import 20th century standards of judgment to a 21st century United States whose educational system produces more female post-graduates than male and whose career women earn 94.2% of the income of their male counterparts? Despite shifts in income and status, why do so few straight males study burlesque or work as strippers?

Jo Boobs and I met at the basement headquarters of her school on the coldest evening in recent years to explore questions of gender, activism, and whether she and her ilk are gender traitors or gender busters. She even stripped down to fighting gear for an intimate performance caught by our unblinking digital eyeball. (See above!) In June 2010, Jo will publish The Pocket Book of Burlesque (with a forward by Margaret Cho), a volume whose slender design can slip under the inspector’s prying gaze. The New York School of Burlesque is in sympathetic affiliation with Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque in Seattle and Michelle L’Amour’s Burlesque Finishing School in Chicago as well as programs in Washington, D.C and elsewhere. When will someone open a campus in Tehran?

COILHOUSE: How does burlesque differ from stripping?
JO BOOBS: To understand the difference, look at it from the audience’s point of view. If someone goes to a strip joint, they usually go in whenever they want, they pick the performer they want, they negotiate how they interact with them, they interact one-on-one, and they leave. When they go to a burlesque show, the show starts at a [predetermined] time, they pay a cover (not the performers), they watch the show, there isn’t usually any one-on-one interaction, and they leave when the performance is over.

Chances are good you’ve already heard tell of Mike from Milwaukee and his 70 minute long YouTube video review of The Phantom Menace. But have you actually taken the time to sit down and watch this vitriolic magnum opus?! I’m not gonna say “you haven’t lived” or anything, but this has got to be one of the funniest, most devastating blockbuster smackdowns in the history of cinema, let alone the internet.

Post-holiday depression can be a bitch. Let heathenish laughter cure what ails you, and pass the pizza rolls.

“We remember it well now, our younger days, when we got the cassette deck for the car. The windows always rolled up, closing us off to the outside world. We moved steadily as things rolled by, always with the cassettes playing at the loudest possible volume.” [via]

Joshua Z-P (of Roadside Picnic Podcast and A Room Forever fame) and his friend Adam Helms were recently asked by Type Records (home to Svarte Greiner, Deaf Center, Grouper, and Koen Holtkamp, among other phenomenal bands) to compile a mix for their Typecast series. “So a mix we did – one of epic and biblical proportions which we now share with you. This isn’t your older brother’s black metal – there’s no Dungeons & Dragons posturing while wearing corpse paint. Just pure, brutal, lo-fi nihilism full of tape hiss and vinegar.”

Cirrhus, Horrid Cross, Haxan.

All tracks were transferred from cassettes, save the Akitsa song. There’s Bone Awl and Ash Pool and freakin’ Ancestors and a bunch of even more obscure shit I don’t recognize at all. Holy balls, this mix is awesome. Sadly, the vast majority of our readers will find it unlistenable. So unless you enjoy making your eardrums hemorrhage with tinny, shrieking, blood-gargling KVLT AS FUCKNESS, please back away slowly from this post without making direct eye contact, and click here instead.

Tracklist after the jump.

See also:

• Backyard Metal Jamboree/Scream-Along
• To Build a Fire (A Most Grim and Epic Fire)
• Mix It, Mix It Good
• The Black Oven: Tasty, Tasty Doom
• Nothing is Sacred, Everything Is Terrible

Krautrock: The Rebirth Of Germany. Part 1 of 6. Parts 2-6 posted under the cut.

Produced for BBC Four, this excellent hour-long documentary offers an engaging and comprehensive overview of the 60s/70s experimental music scene in Germany that came to be known as Krautrock. Here’s a fascinating glimpse of what it meant to be part of a generation of radical young musicians, artists and filmmakers struggling to redefine themselves in the rubble of post-war Germany. These kids were drowning in a sea of Schlager pop and classical schmaltz– arguably the music of cultural guilt and denial. Meanwhile, they had the most horrifying historical specters imaginable hanging over their heads. They were isolated, rebellious, and deeply disinterested in “traditional” anthemic western guitar rock. The synthesizer was newly invented, and electronic music as we know it today didn’t really exist yet. They breathed life into its lungs.

Featuring the works of Popol Vuh, Amon Düül, Can, Cluster, Neu!, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Faust and others.

Sit down right now. I don’t care that mail has to be delivered. N- no, seriously, you can change that ink cartridge later. Ju- just, shhhhhhut up. Shut up and sit down, because it’s FAM Time.

Today’s very special FAM is Shinya Tsukamoto’s unmatched 1989 cyberpunk film Tetsuo: The Iron Man. To explain this movie can only be done in the very simplest of terms: The man (or The Metal Fetishist) sticks an iron bar into a wound he has made in his leg. Soon it is festering with maggots. He runs, screaming into the street and is hit by a car, driven by the Japanese Salaryman who decides to hide his crime by dumping the body in a ravine. What follows is one of cinema’s more bizarre experiences as the Japanes Salaryman, haunted by the spirit of the Metal Fetishist, begins to undergo a startling transformation wherein his entire body metamorphoses into a shambling heap of scrap metal. This is a movie in which a man’s girlfriend fucks herself to death on his penis, which by that time has changed into a giant drill bit. No, I’m not making that up and, no, telling you that it happens won’t diminish its impact in the slightest.

At first blush this all probably seems fairly pedestrian and in the context of the torture porn/special fx demo reel trash turned out these days you would be forgiven for thinking so; but Tsukamoto’s film is never about mere grotesqueries. Tetsuo is a superb audio/visual experience, its stark, moody black and white images set to Chu Ishikawa’s pounding industrial score. Many have compared it to David Lynch’s Eraserhead but it is mostly a superficial one, insomuch as, like Lynch’s seminal film they both share the same, high contrast black and white, industrial aesthetic. Tsukomoto’s presentation leaves the (purposefully) monotonous dirge of Eraserhead far behind, instead opting for a frenetic and, one might say, decidedly anime-like pacing epitomized by its multiple chase scenes, making for a frantic, fever dream of a movie.

What Tetsuo is about — the subtext, if any — is much more difficult to pin down. One interpretation is that the entire film is a metaphor for being homosexual and while it can be read that way I’m not entirely convinced that that was the intention. For certain, sex is a central component in Tsukomoto’s oeuvre, serving as a catalyst for metamorphosis, but the nature of that sexuality — homo or hetero — appears irrelevant or, at least, equal opportunity, although the final scene may convince you otherwise. Regardless of how one chooses to interpret it, however, Tetsuo: The Iron Man remains a much watch. It’s a powerful, beautiful, and confusing film, one that I find myself revisiting long after my initial viewing and it always sticks with me long after the “GAME OVER”.

Film courtesy of Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers.

Many of us across the Coilhouse nation dream of becoming full-time artists, and some of us actually become so, but few follow our vision as fearlessly as Jack Terricloth.  Jack never learned any marketable skill like speed typing or graphic design or computer programming.  He’s never had a “Plan B” of any kind whatsoever.  He just jumped out his window and – wooosh! – he started flying.  While most of us were in college, Jack was a full-time punk rocker. In fact, he never even bothered to graduate from high school. What would cause an abundantly gifted, middle class kid from a stable family to behave so recklessly? Why wasn’t he disciplined by a fear of falling through the social safety net?

While our current global economic bust forecloses conventional career options for many of us, it’s also an opportunity to change consumption patterns and general complicity with an economic order that is clearly unsustainable in the long run. Will the economic downturn lead more people to unconventional lives or will it make us ever more desperate to fit into the economic system? Will global recession be good news for the planet and for making art? Is this the best time to follow Timothy Leary’s advice: “Turn on, tune in, drop out”?  Likewise, as file sharing rings the death knell of the music industry, will we see less mass-orchestrated pop sensations? Will musicians be more inclined to self-expression and artistic exploration once they no longer have the temptation to sell out?

Jack on the beach in Spain. Photo courtesy of the World/Inferno.

I first met our man o’ cloth way back in 1991, while I was working at Reconstruction Records, an all-volunteer punk record store in New York’s East Village. Back then, Jack was a snot-nosed teenager living under an assumed name with more than assumed parents in suburban New Jersey and fronted the band, Sticks and Stones. With Jack at the helm, Sticks and Stones restlessly explored new musical terrain – hardcore, punk, goth, techno, pop – until 1995, when his bandmates told him that they would go no further.  Undeterred, Jack started the current cabaret revival by assembling the World/Inferno Friendship Society.  The World/Inferno has since also explored a smattering of Northern Soul, pop, klezmer, and African-American spirituals. Now, several albums and scores of tours later, the World/Inferno has embarked in a more ambitious direction. They have integrated theater into their live performance in a production titled: Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s Twentieth Century. Doubtless, their tour will inspire some imitators, but there ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby.

One non-sucky aspect of being a relatively old fart: getting to see Fugazi play live several times during their fiercest years. Now, nobody’s saying these four guys aren’t still fierce as hell; they surely are. But a live Fugazi show circa early ’90s was post-hardcore baptism by fire.

Fugazi, 1988, Philly. The early days! [via sgustilo]

A bit of background on the band for the uninitiated: Fugazi formed in Washington D.C. in 1987. Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto on guitar and vocals. Joe Lally on bass. Brendan Canty drumming. The music, which evolved tremendously over the decades, is a singular, dynamic mix of punk rock, hardcore, anthemic guitar rock, noise, soul, and more dissonant, experimental elements. They toured extensively for many, many, MANY moons before going on indefinite hiatus in 2002. Fugazi has my vote for the most resolutely DIY, ethically upstanding band that’s ever existed. From Wiki:

Fugazi’s early tours earned them a strong word-of-mouth reputation, both for their powerful performances, and for their eagerness to play in unusual venues. They sought out alternatives to traditional rock clubs partly to relieve the boredom of touring, but also hoping to show fans that there are other options to traditional ways of doing things. As Picciotto said, “You find the Elks Lodge, you find the guy who’s got a space in the back of his pizzeria, you find the guy who has a gallery. Kids will do that stuff because they want to make stuff happen.”

Yes. Very true. Motivated kids will do just about anything to make stuff happen. And when you’re young and scrappy, you’ll also endure a lot to see live music. I loved certain bands so much, I’d go to all ages shows and cheerfully risk being crushed, clocked in the head, kicked ’til bloody or used as a footstool by crowd-surfing, slam-dancing goons twice my size. Like so many punk babies I know must be reading and remembering, I was game. At that age, you just want to get as close to the music as possible. Even so, gnawing one’s way out of Broheim Armpit/Knuckle/Knee Forest always gets old after ten minutes, tops.

It never occurred to me that shows didn’t have to be that way. I thought, “this is how these things are, it’s part of the experience.” I was just happy to be there.

But the wise, worldly fellas in Fugazi? They weren’t fucking having it.

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