Like you, stuff I await with bated breath the reveal of new Coilhouse themed accouterments, sickness even if I cannot purchase them. Here in my dank, subterranean cell in the festering heart of The Catacombs I can only imagine the enjoyment you horrible beautiful people feel, strolling freely under the warm gaze of the sun, breathing in fresh, un-recycled air. The thought of being able to wear clothes, real clothes not these ragged, school-boy uniforms I am made to wear (where do they get all these school-boy uniforms?) — it fills me with both great joy. Also, irrepressible rage. Mostly the joy though.

In order to soothe my restless and weary spirit and to tide you, our spoiled awful putrescent wonderful audience over until then I thought we could watch this delightful mash-up of Staying Alive, by disco mavens The Bee Gees and Another Brick in the Wall Part II, by laser pioneers Pink Floyd, put together by Wax Audio. It also features the aforementioned schoolboy uniforms, only in a much more danceable way. I hope you all are eaten alive by honey badgers enjoy it.

Via Laughing Squid

I know I’m supposed to actually write something but, really, nothing I could say would do this man justice.

I’m fascinated by conspiracy theories. The machinations within machinations, the way they simultaneously complicate simple matters and simplifying the most complex world events, they are a monument to human creativity and imagination. It should be no surprise then that conspiracy theories have come up multiple times on the FAM. Indeed, only last week, we examined some breathless speculation on the veracity of claims that man has ever set foot on the lunar surface.

That, however, is tame as far as conspiracies go. The real money is in world domination, in the people pulling the strings. The Freemasons, the Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Grove, Lizard Men — this is the nexus of lunatic postulation. Therefore, as a service to those in the audience who are, perhaps, not as well versed in the affairs of the tin-foil hat crowd the FAM presents the History Channel special Secret Societies which functions as a great introduction into the mad, mad world and which features FAM favorite David Icke, making his third Friday appearance. Should this pique your interests, feel free to check out Jon Ronson’s Secret Rulers of the World which delves much deeper into all this weird and wonderful nonsense.

Welcome to a Russian Roulette episode of The Friday Afternoon Movie, brought to you by my lack of functioning brain cells and a YouTube search for “documentary”. Today we present the kind of programming many viewers of FOX TV might remember in and around the time of the X-Files. Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? begs the titular question in the voice of an announcer for a monster truck rally with a smooth chaser of X-Files alum Mitch Pileggi to help lend an air of mystery and intrigue. This is all in the service of one of my favorite, inconsequential conspiracy theories — an elaborate hoax perpetrated by NASA in order to stick it to the Communists. Or not. I’ve never really been sure as to why NASA would go through such lengths to fake such an event; “Communists” is merely a solid go-to for any conspiracy taking place before the fall of the Soviet Union. Either way, it’s 40 minutes of “experts” with backyard bunkers explaining how the American flag could not flutter without an atmosphere and even hints at murder most foul. Enjoy.

Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s 1956 piece ‘Gesang Der Junglinge’ (Song of the Children) analysed song verses into their elementary phonetic components and deployed electronically generated aperiodic sound – more commonly known as ‘white noise’. The Disabled Avant-Garde also generate white noise in this piece by varying the syne-waves produced by a loudly whistling boiling kettle. As with Stockhausen, a vocalist intones ‘inside’ the white noise (but using a different song – something by Roy Orbison). The total effect produced is to provide the listener with no idea whatsoever of what it must sound like to be profoundly deaf’.

That is the official description for Disabled Avante-Garde’s video “Stockhausen”. I must say, however, nothing may encapsulate the internet better than image of a disabled little person in a wheelchair, plastered in heavy makeup, accompanied by a tiny, confused dog and a conveniently placed broom, giggling gleefully as a man waves his posterior in front of her — all set to the tones of a screeching tea kettle.

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

I am certain there are those who would follow Mer’s amazing Cenobite accessory post with something a bit more weighty with content, a bit more elegant than this. Those people are, I am almost as certain, more talented than I. It seems that I am, in fact, just a sucker for a really excellent pun. And thus my private shame is now made public.

via The Daily What : Street Anatomy

Okay, you know the 2010 Media Kit and Big Coilhouse News that we’ve been promising you since last week? Well, turns out we’re going to have to make you all wait one more day (this news is worth the wait, though, we promise!). Tabulating the survey results has taken more time than we anticipated. Here’s a screenshot of what the process looks like in Excel.  While we finish up the media kit, allow me to entertain you with six graphs and pie charts that we’ve created so far. Some of this will be in tomorrow’s media kit, some of it is a blog exclusive!

This was in response to the question “what country do you live in? Some fun facts:

• Six respondents included their state in the answer. Two of them were from California, and the other four were from Texas. No one else indicated a home state.
• Six respondents wrote in “USA! USA! USA!”  Three respondents wrote in “USA! USA!”
• The eight readers who wrote in from The Nertherlands are highly encouraged to attend the OK Festival that we just blogged about.
• Other top countries included Germany, Brazil, New Zealand, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Sweden, China, Croatia, Finland and Singapore

This was in response to the question, “do you have a creative pursuit that you’re extremely passionate about?”

• 116 creative pursuits were listed
• The chart above indicates the Top 16 creative pursuits. The next most popular pursuits, in order of popularity, were: knitting, sewing, animation, blogging, singing, costume design, jewelry, videography,  acting, electronic music, guitar, sculpture, baking, web design, book binding, cloth design, digital art, gardening, printing, theatre and aerials
• Some of less popular creative pursuits included: ceremonial magick, spinning poi, papercraft, math (“pure mathematics is eminently creative”), hardware engineering, typography, haberdashery and swimming

This was in response to the “What are your favorite magazines?” question:

• Most indicated that Coilhouse was their favorite magazine. Aww, you guys! *squish*
• The graph above indicates the Top 12 favorite magazines. The runners-up that didn’t make it into the chart, in order of the number of people who indicated that they were favorite magazines, were: Filament, Adbusters, Edge, Esquire, Fortean Times, Zink, Cabinet, Der Spiegel, Dwell and Elegy.

In 1993 a movie titled CB4 starring Chris Rock was released. A parody of the “gangsta rap” phenomenon of the 90s it was met with mediocre reviews and went on to gross 17 million dollars domestically. A little over one year later another movie in the same vein appeared. Written, directed, and co-starring one Rusty Cundieff it was released to critical acclaim and went on to make a total of $238,000.00. In other words, like many good movies, no one saw it.

If you, dear reader, are one of the many who have not seen Fear of a Black Hat the FAM is giving you an opportunity right now to remedy this situation. Filmed in the mockumentary style popularized by Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap, Fear of a Black Hat treats its subject as a real entity; and the members of N.W.H. (Niggaz With Hats) — Ice Cold, Tasty Taste, and Tone Def — go about the business of being a headwear-centric rap trio as they normally would under the gaze of sociologist Nina Blackburn’s camera.

What ensues is an almost pitch-perfect satirical time capsule of early 90s hip-hop. References abound from the internal feuding of N.W.A., to the ubiquitous “Ice” moniker and the hippy weirdness of P.M Dawn. Cundieff manages to tick off an entire checklist of well-worn rap tropes with hilarious consistency. It’s a movie that never fails to make me laugh, no matter how many times I see it. Rather than running the risk of talking this film up too much, I will simply leave you with one of my favorite exchanges, in which the boys explain just what N.W.H. is all about:

Nina Blackburn: So, guys, what’s the deal with the hats?

Ice Cold: That’s what NWH is all about. We got a whole hat philosophy, you know what I’m saying? I mean, see, back in the days when there was slaves and stuff, they would work in the hot sun all day, you know, with the sun beating down them. Hatless. I mean, not even a babushka.

Tone Def: Word. Heads totally exposed to the sun.

Ice Cold: You know, so by the time they got back to the plantation from being in all the heat, they was too tired to rebel against their masters, right? So what we saying with Niggaz With Hats is, “Yo, we got some hats now, muh-fuckers.”

Previously on Coilhouse:

Credence was given to the supposition that Werner Herzog, or someone who may sound only somewhat like Werner Herzog, can add tremendous weight to even the most mundane and innocent of children’s tales; his intonation imbuing the words with a profound sense of existential navel-gazing.

Ramin Bahrani understands this all to well and therefore enlisted the talent of Mr. Herzog to give voice to the titular protagonist of his short film, Plastic Bag; a film described thus:

Struggling with its immortality, a discarded plastic bag ventures through the environmentally barren remains of America as it searches for its maker.

I like to imagine that whenever a script like this arrives at his mountain-top fortress, he reads the script and, upon finishing it, bolts upright. Standing there, arms akimbo, he exclaims “This is a job for…WERNER HERZOG!” to the chagrin of his ever-faithful manservant who can do nothing but go ready the Herzogmobile.

via kottke