Eeee! More Walter Potter goodies!

Via Morbid Anatomy/BoingBoing/Jessica Joslin, here’s the British Pathe‘s splendid ’65 tour of the now sadly defunct Walter Potter Museum in Bramber, UK, which, until recently, housed all of the famed anthropomorphizing taxidermist’s weird and whimsical work.

If you have a moment to explore, the British Pathe account on YouTube is entirely rife with ridiculous, charming, and occasionally sobering snippets of Ye Olde Infotainment. Pekingnese puppies dressed up as a wedding party; Mick the Mongrel climbing a ladder; “NO MORE BABIES“; flailing zombie-like Girl Water Diviner; “Buried Alive” Stunt Goes Badly, and many more!

Warren Ellis showed me this earlier today and I can’t stop thinking about it and now you won’t be able to, either.

Um. You’re… welcome?

It’s the gloriously controversial and demented kiddie cartoon’s 20th birthday today! Hard to believe, ain’t it? Feliz cumpleaños, and many happy returns.

“I dont think your happy enough! That’s right! I’ll teach you to be happy! I’ll teach your grandmother to suck eggs!”

Some weeks, thumb you just gotta throw your hands up in the air, cry “Tempus FUGGIT”, and do the Panda Dance.

Song by Jonathan Mann.

Not everyone loves cats as much as this lady. Some of our readers are dog people. More specifically, some our readers are morally bankrupt sadists who like to watch dogs dressed up like people mince around on their hind legs, pretending to do people things.

Coilhouse dedicates the following inexplicable thirty seconds to them:

via Little Scarab

Had enough, sickos? Didn’t think so. So here are some more choice cuts from the infamous Dogville Comedies, produced and filmed in the early 1930s:

Also see:

• Dogs In Duds dot com
• Modern Belly Dancing Dog Costume (Dude. Seriously, WTF?)
• Salsa ‘Hua!
• Merengue Dog
• Disgruntled Canine Princess Leia and Darth Vader
• Bonus: Prairie Dog in a dress.

Trunk animations strange and visually dense Winter Poem, animated anddirected by Rok Predin, with a lovely score by Ivan Arnold. If I am being honest, I’m not sure I know what is going on, but it certainly is nice to look at.

Via Drawn!

Jocelyn Marsh wearing a headdress by Tiffa Novoa. Photo by Brion Topolski. 2005.

Recently, Jenka Gurfinkel –a longtime mover/shaker in the California indie cirque scene— wrote “Why You’re Wearing Feathers Right Now”, a fantastic personal essay that happens to dovetail nicely (pun intended) with the extensive Tiffa Novoa love fest we ran in Coilhouse Magazine last year. Gurfinkel’s unique take on the current exploding trend of plumage in both indie and mainstream fashion is a deft mix of memoir and cultural nodal point-mapping:

“In the summer of 2011, feathers have become a staple of every sartorial and tonsorial aspect imaginable. The other day I was asked my opinion as to where this current ubiquity of feathers has come from. But as it turns out, I happen to have something better than an opinion: I have an explanation.”

El Circo performer at Burning Man, 2005. Photo by Siouxzen Kang.

“Just two years out of college, I stumbled into the role of production manager for a newly-formed, L.A.-based vaudeville cirque troupe called, Lucent Dossier. Through that initial involvement with Lucent I would meet many other circus groups, including El Circo, who were by then based in San Francisco along with The Yard Dogs Road Show and Vau De Vire Society. There was also March Fourth Marching Band in Portland, Clan Destino in Santa Barbara, and Cirque Berzerk, and Mutaytor in L.A. As these acts grew, the I-5 Freeway became a central artery of culture, pumping a distinct combination of art, music, fashion, and performance up and down the west coast. A social scene evolved around these circus troupes the same way the punk subculture sprang up around the bands that defined it.”

Full page Issue 05 Coilhouse spread of performer Joshua David wearing a Ernte feather headdress by Tiffa Novoa. Photo by Spencer Hansen.

“In the early to mid-aughts (when the photos above were taken) the feather was as de rigueur a cultural signifier within the circus scene as the safety pin was for punks in the late 1970s and early 80s. In fact, back before it was so commonplace as to lose meaning (or induce a national feather shortage), condescending terms for those sporting the look sprang up within the subculture: “Feather mafia,” was one I heard thrown around; ‘Trustafarian peacock‘ even made it into UrbanDictionary.com. And then, something else began to happen…”

View the full essay at Social Creature dot com.

As far as this ubiquitous trend of wearing feathers goes– if you adorn with birdie bits, please consider researching where they come from! Buying ethically and responsibly is beautiful. Here are some great resources:

• Feather Drop: For the Advocacy and Collection of Cruelty Free Feathers
• The Happy Rooster
• Cruelty Free Feather listings on Etsy
• Frogworks Jewelry

Yes, viagra yes. This meme is already everywhere else. It needs to live here, too.

Everybody DANCE!

“Bufo Periglenes” by Madeline von Foerster. Oil and egg tempera on panel. 8″ x 8″

Shortly, the astounding artist Madeline von Foerster (previously mentioned here and here, and featured in Issue 02 of Coilhouse Magazine) will be showing her most recent series of paintings, “The Golden Toad” at the Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle, WA. (Her work will be hanging alongside several exquisite pieces by her good friend and contemporary, Benjamin A. Vierling.) Foerster’s exhibition statement:

“This new series of paintings envisions fairy tales of the future. The current, unprecedented devastation of Earth’s wildernesses foretells a time when the great forests are gone, and with them, half the animal species with whom we share the world today. In comparison, the present will surely appear as a sort of Golden Age, abundant with lush forests and wondrous beasts — what sort of tales will they inspire?”

“Frog Cabinet” by Madeline von Foerster. Oil and egg tempera on panel. 18″ x 24″

“Stylistically, these artworks suggest the rich paintings from the School of Fontainebleau, a sixteenth century efflorescence of French Art, which exalted the enchanted forest. An aura of mystery and possibility pervades the paintings, which are meticulously rendered using an uncommon Renaissance mixed-technique of oil and egg tempera.”

“Although imagining the future, a common theme of the paintings is memory. While researching these works, the artist hunted for a fairytale titled “The Golden Toad,” which she was certain she had read. However, memory was deceiving her, for the Golden Toad (Bufo periglenes) is actually a Costa Rican amphibian, recently extinct. Ironically, though humans are responsible for the planet’s vanishing forests and extirpated species, it is in human imagination and memory that these lost treasures will continue to exist. Therefore, the Golden Toad, now gone, returns in mythical form, to remind us what we can still save.”

“The Tale of the Golden Toad” by Madeline von Foerster. Oil and egg tempera on panel. 24″ x 36″

The Madeline Von Foerster/Benjamin A. Vierling show at Roq La Rue Gallery opens this coming Friday night, July 08, and runs to August 06, 2011.

Another beautiful day, another amazing Kickstarter project by a beloved curator of the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.

Musician, composer, artist and storyteller Carla Kihlstedt‘s Necessary Monsters is a staged song cycle after Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. Carla wrote it with poet Rafael Osés for seven musicians and an actress. The narrative “follows a young writer as she tries in vain to corral the imaginary beings that parade out of her mind in the course of a sleepless night. In this journey, she encounters many beasts – some meddlesome, some winsome, some loathsome – and discovers that she is indeed the sum of their parts.”

Previous stagings of this work have provided stunning, intimate portraits of Carla and her colleagues’ creative processes– their intelligence, their playfulness, their sweetness. Since that time, the piece “has gone through a kind of distillation process, the way a good friendship does, that only happens with time. In this next chapter, we’ve recast, retooled, and redirected. The cast, the crew and the design team include some of my very favorite musicians and artists, all of whom have brought incredible ideas and energy to the piece. It is finally becoming the beast it was meant to be. We’re performing it in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on July 29th and 30th of this year. ”

As of this minute, hundreds of people have contributed approximately $23K toward Carla’s Kickstarter campaign. She just sent out an email saying “We’re right at the edge and the pressure’s on. We’ve got three days to raise another $2,043. So, If you’ve been waiting in the wings for these last giddy moments… NOW is your time!”