Mark Little of the notorious Canadian comedy troupe Picnicface takes you “deep into the flaming bowels of friendship”:

Thanks, order Melody!

SLUGWARS = FRIENDSHIP.

Few announcements could be as exciting for the devoted Metal connoisseur as the one made by Manowar, letting their loyal fans know that high quality, Giclée prints of Ken Kelly’s album artwork are now available for purchase. The video shows the the great attention to detail put into these prints, how they are able to reproduce the exquisite sheen on a slave-girl’s naked bosom, as well as showing you what they would look like hanging in your grandmother’s condo. Truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Witness the nerdy buffoonery of the trailer for Frank Miller’s commercial for the new scent from Gucci, Gucci Guilty. Certainly, this is not the first director-driven television spot we have featured on Coilhouse, Nadya having previously spotlighted David Lynch’s sixteen minute ad (Film? Vignette?) for Christian Dior. Gucci, however, is playing this one up as an event. The actual commercial hits a little under a month from now at the MTV Music Awards, no doubt preceding the long awaited Lady Gaga/M.I.A. Fish Slapping Dance Battle to the Death.

Entitled “Friendly Fires” “Frank Miller’s Gucci Guilty”, it stars Evan Rachel Wood and Chris Evans in a wire-frame world of imposing, CG skyscrapers and a distinct lack of color. Wood plays a femme fatale in a slinky outfit piloting a futuristic Jaguar XK120 on fire while Evans plays a gentleman involved with the aforementioned seductress. It is all very tried and true ground for Miller, a man whose greatest crime has been to take his credit as a director on Sin City seriously enough to convince people with money that he actually is a director. No doubt I will be accused of various degrees of hipster posturing due to this bit of nerd rage but Miller’s green screen chicanery is truly a film-making nadir — managing to take a style that produced some excellent comic books and turning it into a tired, vapid cliche. On the other hand, those same qualities might work well for pimping an over-priced, designer fragrance and indeed “Guilty” seems to share many of the same qualities that made Calvin Klein Obsession ads from the 1980s so absurd (and, some would argue, effective). It may be that Miller has finally found his niche.

Update: As BaggerMcGuirk notes in the comments, the ad’s title is not “Friendly Fires” as originally written in this post. Friendly Fires is responsible for the music in the ad.

Update the 2nd: The full trailer is online. Not much longer than the teaser, really.

Via Super Punch

Syzygryd Software Preview from nicole aptekar on Vimeo.

Currently in the Bay Area, a team of artists, engineers, hackers, musicians, designers and makers of all stripes is working around the clock to produce an ambitious interactive sound/light/fire sculpture called Syzygryd. As you read this, chances are someone is welding, grinding, riveting, plasma cutting, wiring up LED lighting, finalizing the touchscreen control panels, or installing fire effects at the Nimby DIY space in Oakland, where the project is rapidly coming together – tube by tube, cube by cube, burst by burst of flame.

A collaboration between Interpretive Arson, False Profit Labs, Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (GAFFTA), and Illutron, this 2.5-ton, 60-foot sculpture will act as a giant electronic musical instrument. Designed as a traveling installation, Syzygryd will debut at Burning Man in under a month. The Syzygryd user experience, as explained by Interpretive Arson’s Morley John, will be as follows: “Three strangers [will] come together and visually compose a unique piece of music. The beauty of Syzygryd is that the entire sculpture responds to what you’re creating in sequenced light and fire. Each touchscreen controller has a grid of buttons which allow you to input musical patterns.” The initial Syzygryd proposal elaborates further:

Syzygryd is a collaborative musical instrument for three non-professional players. We are not naive. We’re not shoving guitars into the hands of novices and expecting symphonies. This is a very carefully designed canvas that guides beginners to harmony (in fact, discordant notes are literally impossible.) The interface is rhythmic, visual, and dead simple. We’ve been meticulously developing the software for months, playing with iPhone prototypes on busses, tweaking sounds, testing it out on our friends. We knew we were getting warmer the first time that three people, with no formal training in music, got bystanders grooving involuntarily…

Though most of the heavy lifting takes place Oakland, people from around the world are invited to contribute to the build.

How can you help build Syzygryd? By submitting sound sets. You’re basically submitting 3 (or more) types of sounds that mesh well together, and people will make music with them. For Syzygryd’s sound palette is not limited to the three electronic tones you hear in the software demo above. You can make it play anything: chirping bird noises, breathing, machine/factory sounds… the more creative the combination, the better. To submit a set, all you need to do is have Ableton Live, download Syzygryd’s MDK (Musician Developer Kit), and consult this handy video tutorial for extra help as needed. There’s also a forum where you can ask questions and get advice. All submitted sets will be reviewed by Syzygryd’s Music Team, and a selection of the top sets will played by the sculpture.

Having observed and participated in the Syzygryd project build, it’s clear that everyone involved is deeply invested in crafting an experiential zone that will be the first of its kind. As the proposal states, “[Syzygryd is] the most beautiful expression we can imagine of the joy we take in community, music, technology, fire, sculpture and architecture. We have assembled an international team of artists with extraordinary talent and experience. All of us are in love. Every day we see things that no one has yet imagined, and it’s been our delight to work within a community to make them real. We’d like to create a space in our city where others — people who don’t normally do this sort of thing — can feel at least a little of that.” That’s a wonderful thing to be part of on any level, and in Syzygryd’s case, people from around the world can get involved.

The deadline for submitting sounds sets to Syzygryd is Tuesday, August 24th. More info on the sculpture and music submission process, after the jump!

Up in the sky, look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane. It’s…Superman!

Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

Thus goes, perhaps, the most famous of all superhero tag-lines. Running from 1941 to 1943, seventeen episodes of Superman were released by Paramount Pictures. The series is commonly referred to as the Fleischer Superman cartoons though this is a bit of a misnomer as only the first nine episodes were done by the studio of brothers Max and Dave. The last eight were done by Famous Studios, after Paramount took over Fleischer Studios and ousted its founders, and would see an increased focus of WWII-era propaganda and feature some uncomfortable racial depictions.

I’ve been a fan of these cartoons since watching them on a cheap VHS collection when I was a child. The series is beautifully animated especially when one considers that most animators at Fleischer studios had little figure-drawing knowledge. While much of the series was rotoscoped (a technique that Max Fleischer invented) there was no way it could be used for, say, scenes in which Superman was flying. As such, they had their assistants who did understand figure-drawing go over their roughs to keep Superman looking like Superman. It’s also interesting to note that, not only was the cartoon responsible for the “It’s a bird! It’s a plane!” line but also for giving the Man of Steel the ability to fly, previously his ability being limited to spectacular leaps.

Fleischer Studios:
•Superman (or The Mad Scientist)
•The Mechanical Monsters
•Billion Dollar Limited
•The Arctic Giant
•The Bulleteers
•The Magnetic Telescope
•Electric Earthquake
•Volcano
•Terror on the Midway

Famous Studios:
•Japoteurs
•Showdown
•Eleventh Hour
•Destruction, Inc.
•The Mummy Strikes
•Jungle Drums
•The Underground World
•Secret Agent

For those who don’t necessarily wish to wade through all seventeen, the Fleischer episodes are unsurprisingly superior, if only for the fact that their stories are much more interesting. The sci-fi leanings of these, complete with evil scientists, robots, and death rays avoid the sour taste left by buck-toothed Japanese caricatures and African natives. An in-depth look at the series can be found here, if your interested in learning more about it.

“It’s time for GLAMOR… What should we do to become GLAMOROUS?”

Via Colin Peters.

Glad you asked, Island Princess Barbie! How about letting the gloriously demented folks from Freeform Delusion circuit bend the ever-lovin’ frak outta you? They’re going to skin your pretty little head and soup it up with a switchable mono mini jack output, voice relay bypass, glowing/alternating LED eyeballs, and pitch manipulators. Would you like that, Barbie? Now you’re ready for the ball! You look like royalty. Let’s all sing.

Is it just me, or is an exceptionally pungent cloud of irony-infused nostalgia hanging o’er the interwub like a stale pegacorn fart today? First, three different people send me this. Also, this has resurfaced. Someone just made me watch “Falkor Gone Wild“. And now, this:

*sob*

I’m so glad Z published that Captain Eo post. A questionable antidote for the inappropriate diddling of one’s childhood, perhaps, but still. Every little bit helps.

Menacing and amusing in equal measure, here’s “a selection of book titles and covers so boring they’re interesting”, set to spooky minimal pseudo-Webern music, and seemingly narrated by Alan Rickman on a ‘luude binge:

Via Sport Murphy.

Reading the YouTube comments is, for once, highly recommended. MAXIMUM PO-MO LULZ.

We haven’t mentioned “punk rock mathematician” Tom Henderson here before, have we? Gotta fix that, pronto.

First, go here to read a fantastic interview at Technoccult to get a sense of Henderson’s deeply personal and accessible philosophy of mathematics. After that, if you find that your brainy bits are delightfully fizzy, go to the Mathpunk site to read MORE fizzmaking stuff, or listen to the Math For Primates podcast. And then, if you find Henderson to be just as badass, brilliant and MAXIMUMADORBZ as so many of us already do, head over to Kickstarter to watch his deeply endearing pitch video for the Punk Mathematics book project:

Punk Mathematics will be a series of mathematical stories. It is written for readers who are interested in having their minds expanded by the strange metaphors and implications of mathematics, even if they’re not always on friendly terms with equations. Better living through probability; the fractal dimension of cities and cancers; using orders of magnitude to detect bullshit; free will and quantum economics; and the mathematics of cooperation in a networked world on the brink of a No Future collapse.

It looks like Henderson’s more than reached his financial goal, but don’t let that dissuade you from tucking some more money into his punk-as-fuck fanny pack. Every little bit helps, and this book sounds unlike anything else that’s being published these days.

In 1977, a Boston Globe article revealed an interesting tidbit about Edward Gorey’s television watching habits:

Edward Gorey watched television for the first time this summer, or so he claims, and in the process, the 52-year-old artist became a Star Trek fan. He watched the science-fiction program re-runs twice a day, five times a week, and once on the sixth day, and despite the faithful viewing has yet to see the show’s most famous episode, ‘The Trouble With Tribbles,’ which is about these little furry creatures in outer space, or so he says.

Having discovered this information in 2007, cartoonist/writer Shaenon K. Garrity ran with it, imagining what could’ve been had the beloved macabre illustrator taken his fandom one step further. The full result is after the jump, and can be seen at a larger size here. [via Grey_Area]