I found this image completely by accident on some car restoration site that was last updated in 2005. I don’t even remember how I got there; I think I was doing a Google image search on vintage hair dryers. The image above appears in the following context:
Any vintage automotive electrical system can be a real challenge, especially if it’s been partially burned up due to modifications that got ugly or a voltage regulator that went into fricasse mode. Just about every tatooed Isetta wiring harness we’ve seen had ignition problems of some form or fashion with the blue and green ignition wires vying for first place in the Meltdown Category.
Dude. I don’t know what any of the above means, but it’s pure poetry.
There’s not much I can say about Ballard that hasn’t already been said. He was definitely a Coilhouse patron saint. Because so much has been written about Ballard’s influence on everything from cyberpunk (check out this rich article, which buzzes with the excitement of the genre’s earliest memories of itself) to modern music (as this article asserts, Ballard could be credited for having “inspired the entire genre of industrial music”), I’m going to make this obituary very subjective and leave you with my favorite Ballard memories.
The first one was watching Empire of the Sun with my parents. I didn’t know at the time that this movie, starring a 13-year-old Christian Bale, was actually based on Ballard’s autobiography. But I remember that even then, watching that film, I wondered: how would this kid, with his confused Stockholm Syndrome identification with the Japanese who kept him prisoner, his fetishization of aircraft and explosions, turn out later in life? Later, a friend helped me put 2 & 2 together, and I found out exactly how he turned out. He wrote Crash. And it all made perfect sense. Here’s Young Ballard in Empire of the Sun; haunting to re-watch on this day:
My second favorite Ballard moment is actually a famous quote of his. This was his response to a question in Re/Search 8/9 on October 30, 1982:
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.
Suburb of the soul. It still makes me shudder.
Post your favorite Ballard memories/impressions/quotes in the comments. We honor his influence, and we will miss him.
Charley Bowers ain’t even half as widely known as Ray Harryhausen, Georges Méliès, Winsor McCay, Buster Keaton, Jan Švankmajer, Ladislaw Starewicz or Willis O’Brien, but damn it, he should be! WACK-A-DOODLE-DOOOO:
It’s a Bird, featuring Charley Bowers and a scrapyard metal-eating, proto-Seussian “Metal Bird.” Directed by Harold L. Muller. (Thanks to longtime Coilhouse friend Mark P. for the heads up on this one!)
Once championed by the likes of Andre Breton, quite possibly an early inspiration to the likes of Theodor Seuss Geisel and Chuck Jones, this gonzo animator and comedian had fallen into obscurity by the time of his death in the mid 40s. Bowers’ work didn’t resurface until decades later, when a French film archivist sleuthed him out. Via mediascreen.com:
Raymond Borde of the Toulouse Cinemateque began the search after discovering a collection of rusty canisters simply labeled “Bricolo.” After discovering that Bricolo was the name given to an American comic named Charley Bowers, Borde began to scour the world archives for Bowers films. As usually the case in film preservation, Bowers films were located throughout the world in the archives of France, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia and only one film found in Bowers’ own native country of the United States. Eleven of Bowers’s twenty shorts are still considered lost films.
Bowers’s original claim to fame was as the animator and producer of hundreds of “Mutt and Jeff” animated films from 1915 until the early twenties. In the mid-20s, Bowers switched from pure animation to a hybrid mixture of live action and animation… comedy shorts starring himself as an obsessive inventor of gadgets, gizmos, contraptions, and crazy machines. Bowers continued with these shorts until after his first talkie short — “It’s a Bird” from 1930 (much admired by surrealists like Andre Breton). After “It’s a Bird,” Bowers dropped off the map, heading to New Jersey, working in advertising and industrial shorts, and drawing cartoons for local New Jersey newspapers. He reemerged in the late thirties as the animator for a short subject about oil for the New York World’s Fair (the film was also the first film produced by Joseph Losey). But after a few other animations in the early forties, Bowers contracted a debilitating illness and died in obscurity in 1946.
Fairly recently, Image Entertainment produced a lavish two-disc collection The Complete Charley Bowers: The Rediscovery of An American Comic Genius, which includes nearly all of his surviving films. They’re a frisky mixture of live-action slapstick, stop motion, uncanny SFX, talking cockroaches, Rube Goldberg shenanigans, and more.
In Now You Tell One, possibly Bower’s most over-the-top and mind-boggling film, a “gentlemen’s Liar’s Club” known as The Citizens United Against Ambiguity gathers for a storytelling contest. Wonky stop-motion animated cats and mice battle for dominance; bizarre botanical grafts yield impossible fruits; elephants and donkeys appear to stampede the Capitol building.
In Bowers’ world, a maternal Model T Ford hatches dozens of baby cars; a rapacious ostrich gobbles up inorganic matter and dances to a phonograph; a mad inventor labors to invent the world’s first “no-slip banana peel”; a sentient, white-gloved robotic creature runs amuck in what one reviewer refers to as an extraordinary “comical-bizarro poetic representation of the industrial age.”
The man’s talents as an actor/comedian may not have been on par with his idols Keaton and Chaplin, but his imagination certainly was. This is gloriously demented stuff deserving of far more cinematic acclaim.
The Sheffield, UK-based band began as a trio (Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson), mucking about with recorded sounds manipulated by reel-to-reel recorders in 1973. It started out as a very gritty, buzzy, bewildering wall-of-noise project. Later songs, while more conventional, were no less confrontational, helping to define both the sound and the anti-authoritarian attitude of the industrial music genre.
Difficult to imagine, perhaps, but the scratch and break elements of hip hop and rap are partly rooted in the noise terrorism of Cabaret Voltaire… Even as they’ve moved far away from their original all out assaults, their tempestuous beginnings still inform everything they do. The importance of those early years should not be denied, for their great blasts of noise were instrumental in freeing popular music from its narrow, restrictive definitions.
Control, and how to confound or defeat it, was a recurring theme in their work…. They were among the first popular musicians to seriously use “found” soundbytes, lacerating recorded speeches of politicians, pornographers and slot TV preachers, juxtaposing them in odd configurations, not only for comic effect but also to reveal their true nature.
Cabaret Voltaire, 1982.
Watson left in 1983*, right before CV’s decidedly more danceable albumThe Crackdowncame out. The above video –innovative in its own right– was created in support of one of the most addictive songs in their catalog: “Sensoria” from the albumMicro-Phonies.
They really were something special. As excited as I am to see Throbbing Gristle reforming, I’d be even more psyched to see these three reunite. Laptop music it ain’t, never was, and hopefully never will be.
Dontcha love it when we get it right? I love high-budget, haute-goth fashion editorials and seeing big-name designers go dark on the runway, but there’s something especially satisfying about seeing designers “of the scene” really pull off something spectacular from start to finish, from garment to finished photograph. It’s a pleasure when designers not only produce gorgeous garments, but really get involved in presenting them in a certain way. In this case, Tea Bauer, creator of Slovenian fashion label Degenerotika (previously featured here), borrows a page from Vintage Vogue to give us the wonderfully classic, textured and geometric “when-Leeloo-met-Irving-Penn” fashion image above. I love everything about it! More large-size images from this series, after the jump.
Yellow hair? Yum! Coat’s not too shabby, either. Degenerotika is definitely one to watch.
I do not have a confession to make. I do not have an abiding and utterly irrational love of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Not at all. Really, I don’t. Anything you may have heard to the contrary is the most vile and vicious slander. Again: I don’t like it. I sure as hell don’t crank up the volume when it comes on the radio. No Sirree. That’s only a repeated, annoying technical malfunction. I also, absolutely, 100% do not sing along in an overly dramatic fashion. Nope. Not me. Uh-uh.
The last thing I don’t do is lie awake at night, fearful that if my (non-existent) secret love of this power ballad came to light it would utterly ruin my reputation and any future rants of mine would be outright dismissed as they came up against the cold, hard brick wall of “Hey, Forbes is obviously wrong. The bastard likes Total Eclipse of the Heart. End of discussion.”
I mean, after all, it’s a terrible song: the gaudiest kind of syrupy ’80s excess. The video is even more awesome worse, so mind-numbingly ornate it provokes long, detailed thematic dissections. It has dancing greasers, sweaty fencers and dashing lads in suits wrecking elaborate dinners. And ninjas, of course, you can’t forget the frickin’ ninjas. Or the flying hive-mind of choir boys with radioactive eyes. Oh yeah, there’s also an angel. Really.
But all is not lost. If there is something I have no shame in adoring, hidden or otherwise, it’s the brilliant kitchen appliance battering, tracksuit-wearing Norwegian band Hurra Torpedo‘s cover of TEotH (my how I love that acronym. It sounds like an invocation to some grand hell-beast! Come, Great TEotH!). Minimalist and silly but surprisingly poignant, Hurra gives a whole new feel to this song-I-so-don’t-like.
See there? Doesn’t banging on kitchen appliances make everything better? Damnf’in rightitdoes!
Pictures of last Valentine’s Skate Massacre, from the Wumpskate site.
You’ve not truly experienced the goth/industrial scene until you’ve experienced it on roller skates. The lights, the music, the fashion… at five times the speed, with bone-crunching pain! It sounds like the beginning of that surreal dream that always ends with you driving an ice cream truck in a sexy panda outfit, but here in LA, it’s real. And it’s called… WUMPSKATE (by the way, I’d pay about a million dollars to see Wumpscut’s Rudy Ratzinger on skates). Wumpskate happens once a month, and leaves you energized for weeks to come. The event is held at the ghetto-nouveau World on Wheels, where, for 6 bucks, you get admission and a pair of skates. There are two basic rules: dress up but don’t wear sharp spikes (duh), and don’t get so drunk before showing up that you can’t skate. For pussies who are afeared to step on the rink, there are old-skool arcade games, air hockey and rows upon rows of candy machines.
The best thing about this event is the could-not-give-a-shit attitude. Goth clubs are known for drama, but there’s no time for drama when you’re crashing your ass into the wall at what feels like the speed of light! Everyone is just there to have a blast. Every month, Wumpskate puts on a different theme. We’ve seen Pirateskate, Ninjaskate, Cyberskate, Steampunk Skate, Antigoth Skate, Road Warrior Skate… even SARS Skate (!!!). This upcoming Monday, get ready for… Valentine’s Skate Massacre.
Coilhouse readers in LA, break out your LOLLERSKATES and join us for an evening of excitement and adventure this coming Monday night. The current list of attendees is shaping up to be quite the Issue 01 reunion. The event is all ages, from 9 PM – 1 PM. We’d better see you there!
“Like a caged beast, born of a caged beast, born of a caged beast, born of a caged beast, born dead and then…” –Samuel Beckett
Stills from Olivier de Sagazan’s 1998 sculptural performance work, Eye and the Chair.
Joe Haskins just alerted me to this astounding piece of performance art by a man named Olivier de Sagazan, titled Return to Close:
Clayface, for real.
Olivier de Sagazan has an appropriately unsettling site with a wide array of stills and clips from his live installations, as well as an image gallery of sublimely horrific sculptures. There doesn’t seem to be much web content on him written in native English. If any of our French (or is it Belgian?) speaking readers have information about this fascinating fellow available, it’d be wonderful to discover more about the man and his singularly beastly, loamy work!
Musically, I have two main guilty pleasures: ABBA and And One. Like most bands producing evil dance music, And One is best enjoyed when the lyrics are sung in German, for it provides fodder for interpretations such as the one above. If you like your Boyd Rice like this, and your Bollywood films like that, then hit play, get up, and be ready to punch the floor to this EBM classic like you’ve never heard it before.
After 9-11, that sick, sinking feeling many weary commuters experienced stepping onto a crowded NYC subway car was magnified by the MTA’s stentorian banner campaign, “If You See Something, Say Something.” Artist Caroline Woolard has found a delightful way to strip away the defensive layers of suspicion and dread that can accompany a subterranean commute, replacing default anxiety with spontaneous joy by crafting a backpack that transforms easily into a swing! Using 1000 mesh “L-train grey” cordura, webbing, sliders, hooks, velcro, and snaps, Woolard’s “bag swing” is fitted with sturdy straps that hook easily around the handrail of the subway:
Says Woolard: “I hope that the innocent amusement of swinging on the subway eclipses the current atmosphere of insulation and suspicion.”
Much of Woolard’s creative output seems to revolve around the idea that we should all strive to come into the moment, moving actively through the world rather than shuffling absently through it. Her emphasis on exploring pedestrian space and “cultivating everyday magic” in an urban environment encourages viewers (and participants) to reexamine their relationships with the overwhelmingly massive, immovable urban architecture they live in.
What is the relationship between play and revolution? Creating fissures in reality opens up the possibility for change: change in the everyday/monotonous routine, change in assumptions about ‘facts’, change in the world in general. The act of “making strange” allows a new perspective for reassessment and critique. Nothing is fixed and anyone can make the environment around them better.
Adventurous New Yorkers will definitely want to get on her email list.
Recently, presumably to take her site specific explorations a step further and be even more fully in the present, Woolard has stopped updating her art blog. “My projects are lived and may eventually lose any connection to Art…” In other words, she’s just doing it without defining it. “Many things are happening, but you must discover them in real time.” Bravo, Caroline.
Via the lovable guerilla art wunderkind SF Slim, thanks.
