Holy shitballs. New Yorkers, you lucky ducks, you get to have ALL the retro-badass fun! Via East Village Radio:

Kraftwerk –one of the most important groups in electronic music’s relatively short history– will be the focus of a retrospective taking place in April at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the New York Times reports. The band, featuring lone founding member Ralf Hütter, will be present and performing as part of the celebration named Kraftwerk-Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.  Starting April 10th […] Kraftwerk will perform over eight consecutive nights, with each evening dedicated to one of the pioneering group’s albums in chronological order, starting with 1974’s Autobahn.

The concerts will be held MoMA’s (appropriately retrofuturetastic) Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium. Tickets go on sale at noon, February 22nd, $25 a pop. (Zounds, they’re gonna go fast!)

“Fuck You” Opening Party is tomorrow (Thursday, February 16th) from 6pm-9pm. Exhibition closes Thursday, March 8th. Boo-Hooray is open every day from 11am-6pm.

There’s a gallery space down on Canal St. in NYC called Boo-Hooray; it’s a splendid place dedicated to 20th/21st century counterculture ephemera, photography, and book arts. Tomorrow evening (Thursday, Feb 16th) is the opening night for their most recent exhibition: a comprehensive collection of publications from Ed Sanders’ legendary Fuck You Press, including a complete run of Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts.

Ed Sanders‘ an unofficial patron saint of the 20th century underground who has often been referred to as “the bridge between the Beat and Hippie Generations”.  More specifically, he’s a poet, singer, activist, author, and publisher. Any way you cut ‘n’ paste it, this man broke the mold and the mimeograph!

Boo-Hooray’s exhibition of fabulous Fuck You-ness will commemorate the publication of Sanders’ characteristically feisty, funny memoir, Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (Da Capo Press).

Sanders shares a bit of history about his publication:

“In February of 1962 I was sitting in Stanley’s Bar at 12th and B with some friends from the Catholic Worker. We’d just seen Jonas Mekas’s movie Guns of the Trees, and I announced I was going to publish a poetry journal called Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts. There was a certain tone of skepticism among my rather inebriated friends, but the next day I began typing stencils, and had an issue out within a week. I bought a small mimeograph machine, and installed it in my pad on East 11th, hand-cranking and collating 500 copies, which I gave away free wherever I wandered. (…)

Fuck You was part of what they called the Mimeograph Revolution, and my vision was to reach out to the “Best Minds” of my generation with a message of Gandhian pacifism, great sharing, social change, the expansion of personal freedom (including the legalization of marijuana), and the then-stirring messages of sexual liberation.

I published Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts from 1962 through 1965, for a total of thirteen issues. In addition, I formed a mimeograph press which issued a flood of broadsides and manifestoes during those years, including Burroughs’s Roosevelt After Inauguration, Carol Bergé’s Vancouver Report, Auden’s Platonic Blow, The Marijuana Review, and a bootleg collection of the final Cantos of Ezra Pound.

Other contributors to Fuck You included Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Julian Beck, Ray Bremser, Lenore Kandel, Charles Olson, Tuli Kupferberg, Joel Oppenheimer, Peter Orlovsky, Philip Whalen, Herbert Huncke, Frank O’Hara, Leroi Jones, Diane DiPrima, Gary Snyder, Robert Kelly, Judith Malina, Carl Solomon, Gregory Corso, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Gilbert Sorrentino, and countless others.

It was a ‘zine “dedicated to free expression, defying taboo subjects, celebrating sexual liberation and the use of psychedelics years before the Summer of Love. Sanders and his collaborators bridged the Beats of the Fifties and the counterculture of the late Sixties, and helped define many of the differences between the two—the latter building on the breakthroughs initiated by the former.”

The Fuck You opening party is happening Thursday, February 16th – 6pm-9pm. Sanders will be reading from/signing copies of his book. Exhibition closes Thursday, March 8th. Boo-Hooray is open every day from 11am-6pm.

New Yorkers! Don’t miss this! (And by all means, report back in comments.)

(Hat tip to William Gibson.)

Our friend, longtime Coilhouse contributor Jeff Wengrofsky, has just informed us that The Party in Taylor Mead’s Kitchen, his latest Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers film, will be screened at the Independent Film Center (IFC) in New York on Tuesday, January 31st at 8pm, as part of the “Stranger Than Fiction” film series. “Come early,” says he. “It will be the first film shown, thus kicking off the STF 2012 Spring Season.” It will be followed by The Girl with the Black Balloons, a film about a reclusive artist in the Chelsea Hotel.

Both films sound fascinating; here’s a bit of background from the Syndicate on the Taylor Mead feature:

After reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Taylor Mead, the scion of Michigan’s Democratic Party political boss Harry Mead, left his Grosse Point home and Merrill Lynch sinecure to hitchhike across the United States. Upon arriving in San Francisco, his ability to write and perform clever, bawdy, homoerotic poems made Taylor an instant hit with the Beatnik scene. He soon came to personify the Beatnik ethic in Ron Rice’s classic film, THE FLOWER THIEF, in 1960. Deciding to move to the Lower East Side of New York, then the Beat capital of the world, Taylor was soon a fixture of the downtown poetry scene and a Warhol Superstar, most famously appearing in “Tarzan and Jane Revisited…Sort of,” and most notoriously, as the star of ‘Taylor Mead’s Ass” in 1964.  Taylor has since appeared scores of films, has acted for the stage, and has published books of poetry.

Fifty-odd years after trading in upper-crust luxury for bohemian art stardom, THE PARTY IN TAYLOR MEAD’S KITCHEN finds Taylor still living a life of poetry, painting, partying, acting, homo-eroticism, modest living, and indifference to bourgeois notions of hygiene. We visit the octogenarian in his Lower East Side grotto, finding him still brilliant, boyishly innocent, abundantly cute, and wanting to party at noon. The film depicts the romantic beauty and squalid dereliction of the bohemian life while dishing the dirt on Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac, Ron Rice, Woody Allen, and Tallulah Bankhead.

This is “Pony”, a motion-sensitive kinetic sculpture by Tim Lewis. Unsettling and beautiful:

“Tim Lewis combines mechanical devices and sculpture to investigate, test and experiment with his own doubts and perception of the world.” (via)

Lewis, recently interviewed about his work by Dazed Digital, makes a compelling statement about the power inherent in tangibility:

I think that when you first approach a piece of art, and you imagine it and draw it, there’s a sense that it will always remain somewhat in your imagination. Its only when you take the 2D object and re-work it into the physical 3D world that it becomes somewhat more real. It no longer just exists in your eyes and mind, but instead has to react with the floors and walls around it in the physical world. For me, kinetic art highlights the importance of bringing both inventions and imagination into a physical existence.

Lewis’ work is regularly exhibited and promoted by the folks who run the Kinetica Museum and related events in Spitalfields, London. Their annual Kinetica Art Fair is coming up in February. As it has for the past several years, the Fair will bring together “galleries, art organisations and curatorial groups from around the world who focus on universal concepts and evolutionary processes though the convergence of kinetic, electronic, robotic, sound, light, time-based and multi-disciplinary new media art, science and technology.”

Are any of our UK readers going? Please do report back! It sounds amazing.

Via Tertiary, thanks!

For three whole years now, January 21st has been officially recognized as Squirrel Appreciation Day.

This momentous occasion offers us the perfect excuse to revisit a somewhat more time-honored form of squirrel appreciation, namely “Gonads and Strife“.

Aaaaannnd WEEEEEEEEEE:

Threebrain, we miss you!

Previous squirrelage on Coilhouse:

• Love for Walter Potter
• The Royal Ballet’s “Tales of Beatrix Potter” 
• Beer for Expensive Tastes (ROSS. NOOOOOOOOOO.)

Coilhouse Magazine + Blog wishes all of you an inspiring, creative, compassionate, exhilarating, loving, and giggle-filled 2012.

Coilhouse has a longstanding policy of never posting flyers on the blog. But I think we can make an exception for this one (uploaded to FB recently by Gym De Meo):

WOOOOOOOOOO!

But srsly. What are you guys up to this year, pharmacy fer realz?

Our dear and charming and preternaturally intelligent friend Mister Thomas Negovan was recently invited to give a TED talk in the midwest United States wherein he shared, among more personal revelations, “how unearthing obsolete technologies teaches us about our future.” Here it is:

Thomas, in addition to making music and running the Century Guild art gallery, regularly lectures all over the world on subjects ranging from Art Nouveau to Weimar-era Berlin cabaret; his talk on the subject of populism and technology is both informative and self-assured.

As one who shares Thomas’ interest in archaic technology and antique musical instruments, and as a fellow wax cylinder experimenter, I found the live/real-time demonstration of the wax cylinder machine especially intriguing!

Thomas’ sexy wax cylinder player, playing to the crowd at our fundraising Ball last summer in NYC.

Tomorrow (Thursday) evening in San Francisco, non-profit arts organization Gray Area Foundation for the Arts – GAFFTA for short – is hosting Galvanize: a concert, dinner and art auction to raise funds for its many endeavors. GAFFTA is a Bay Area organization devoted to hacking, creative coding, and interactive art. The organization carries out its mission through education, art curation and research.

GAFFTA offers a host of classes with an emphasis in audio, visuals, web and physical interaction. Each of these concentrations is explored thoroughly. For example, the physical interaction classes highlight topics such as “various forms of 3D art, prototyping, multitouch interfaces, electronics, conductive fabrics and physical computing.” The current course catalogue offers classes on augmented reality, Arduino, visualizing and mapping data, and more.

GAFFTA for Ghostly International 10 Year Anniversary

In addition to its focus on education, GAFFTA also champions new-media artists worldwide. Recently, GAFFTA curated Future/Canvas², and exhibit on the emerging medium of iPad art. Previously, GAFFTA presented exhibits exploring urban futures and sound, data and mechanics. Artists whose works have appeared at GAFFTA include Robert Hodgin, Nicole Aptekar, Aaron Koblin and Zimoun. Additionally, GAFFTA partnered with art group Ardent Heavy Industries to produce Syzygryd– a collaborative electronic musical instrument / interactive art installation with a 2.5 ton sculptural visualizer made of metal, fire, and a kilowatt of RGB LEDs.

GAFFTA’s research department exists to explore “the increasingly gray areas between art, technology, and society.” GAFFTA regularly hosts hackathons, offers collaborative research residencies, and has several large-scale initiatives and projects going on right now. And they even find time to host the occasional Cinema Speakeasy in their beautiful space below the historic Warfield building in mid-Market San Francisco. Last week, month, there was an Evil Dead double-feature with zombie dress-up!

A performance at GAFFTA.

All these things cost money. And that’s why GAFFTA is throwing an epic bash in order to raise money for the new year. For $60, guests to the event become members of GAFFTA. This includes the snazzy membership card designed by artist Nicole Aptekar and gains entrants a 10% discount on workshops and ticketed special events in the future. Performing at the event wil be artists ELEW, Electric Method and Garibaldi. See more at the event page for GAFFTA Galvanize.

Membership card designed by Nicole.

In honor of centaur week (previously and continuing on Coilhouse), and in keeping with the tech-art feeling of this post, I present you with this beautiful bionic centaur, titled “Barbie Strogg,” created by artist Mario Caicedo Langer. You can see a larger version of this sculpture here, and more of Langer’s work here. [via BoingBoing]

Sometimes I forget just how wonderful a thing this Internet is. Were it not for the internet, sales how many of us would have been able to experience the glory of this footage from some unnamed talk show, circa 1984? What a tragedy it would have been to not behold this man, with his perfectly groomed moustache, bouncing mullet, and Detroit Pistons sweatshirt. What fairness would there have been in the world if only those lucky members of the studio audience that day were able to gaze upon his hirsute visage, twisting and contorting with emotion or, perhaps, the effort of trying to keep from shitting himself, as he belted out the smoothest grooves ever heard?

None, I say. The people there that day, spellbound, their mouths agape, no doubt told stories about that day, but unable to properly convey the sublime magic of those few, short minutes, their words were most likely met with disbelief and skepticism. And really, who could blame them? Such accounts must have seemed ludicrous, the product of feeble minds. Now, though, we can see and hear for ourselves, and we too can be put under that same, powerful spell.

Yes, it truly is amazing, this internet. I will not take it for granted again.