Whether it’s jet-lag delirium, an abiding love for handcranked slapstick comedy, an abiding love for my homeland’s Rayban-wearing forefathers, or an abiding love for Tony Millionaire that has sent me over the edge, this is making me die:
By the way, The Art of Tony Millionaire is coming out on Sept 2nd. A most beautiful and long overdue collection of gorgeous, fanciful and hilarious art. Geddit.
Jimi Hendrix performs “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York, 1969. You can hear the bombs, screams and ear-splitting jetfire of Vietnam in that guitar.
At first, I just figured I’d take a minute to mark the occasion of this country’s birth with the above clip of Hendrix’s string/mind/soul-bending rendition of the U.S. National Anthem. It’s been almost exactly 40 years since the footage was shot at Woodstock, during late summer, in the astoundingly eventful year of 1969.
Then I got to thinking a bit more about 1969. Egads, what a dense historical American nerve cluster! Over the course of those twelve months, one seriously heavy, snaking cultural current swept humanity in some exhilarating and alarming directions. Countless aspects of life as we now know it were irrevocably changed, and it all happened overnight.
In a piece written recently for USA Today, cultural anthropologist Jeremy Wallach called 1969 “the apotheosis and decline of the counterculture” and Rob Kirkpatrick, author of 1969: The Year Everything Changed said: “I don’t think it’s even debatable. There’s an America before ’69, and an America after ’69.”
To give me and mah feller ‘Merkins something to chew on today besides corn on the cob, here’s a list of just a few of the country’s more momentous occurrences, circa 1969:
The whole world watched, breathless, as the lunar module Eagle landed and Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the Moon. Dr. Denton Cooley successfully implanted the first temporary artificial heart in Texas. Four months after Woodstock, the infamously violent, miserable Altamont Free Concert was held at the Altamont Speedway in northern California, ostensibly bringing an end to the idealistic sixties. In NYC, the Stonewall riots kicked off the modern gay rights movement in the U.S. Members of the Manson Family cult committed the Tate/LaBianca murders, horrifying Los Angeles and goading a prurient media circus. The first message was sent over ARPANET between UCLA and Stanford. L. Ron Hubbard had his organization’s name officially changed to The Church of Scientology, and they started litigating. Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography and the Thoth Tarot Deck were both republished, and Kenneth Anger shot his lesser known –but deeply resonant– film Invocation of My Demon Brother. Barred from reentering the states to hold their planned New York City “Bed-In”, John Lennon and Yoko Ono relocated the event to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Quebec, where they recorded “Give Peace a Chance”. Everybody got nekkid in the Broadway muscial production, Hair…
Hi, hello, yes, good morning, my brain is broken. I’m afraid this is the best I can do.
I know. It’s scary and wrong and you’re all probably going to get gushing nosebleeds just from looking at it and loudly shout profanities at work and then get fired and hate me forever.
But you can’t tell me it isn’t oddly stimulating.
(Blame Ariana. She shows me the wrongest shit.)
It should be pointed out that I never claimed any great love for humanity. Cloistered as I am deep in the warrens of the Catacombs I do not profess to be my brother’s keeper. Here, shuttered in nigh total darkness, chained to the floor in front of a rickety desk and computer, no human contact save for when my editors send down one of their smooth, mahogany-skinned eunuchs to push a bowl of thin, watery gruel through the slot in my door, I have nothing but the internet and my own disdain for the outside world to warm me. I can replay the events leading up to my current imprisonment a hundred times over and I will never fully understand just how I came to be here. All I know is that I am here and you, you dear readers are up there. Up there, free and traipsing in the sun and eating anything but thin, watery gruel and I loathe you.
Oh you vicious creatures and your traipsing! How many nights have I tortured myself with these thoughts? No matter, for today I have my revenge. Today I have been given the power to break minds and make men weep like children, to make women crush their babes to their breasts in lamentation. Today I have been given a clip of a tour of the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland, circa 1964, narrated by hell’s own ringleader Walt Disney. May the endless, infectious repetition of the Sherman Brothers’s insipid song burrow deep into your minds! May the wooden shoe children of Holland crush your souls and may the wee bagpiper of Scotland haunt your dreams!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go. It is coming on midnight and that’s when the…ah, it doesn’t matter. It’s just time to go.
I heard “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas while switching between radio stations in my car. The words “I got the that rock and roll, that future flow, that digital spit, next level visual shit” piqued my curiosity so I decided to listen to the rest. As the beat kicked in, I remembered sort of liking the Peas’ first album and dreamily wondered whether T-Pain and Kanye West have inspired an amazing new genre: cyber rap. Just as I was starting to smile at the prospect of a Funkadelic generation for the 21st century, Fergie’s brute battle screech crushed all my hopes of space-hop grandeur with just one verse: “I like that boom boom pow, them chickinz jackin’ my style, they try copy my swagger I’m on that next shit now”.
Still, I looked up the video when I got home – wanted to see what boom-boom-pow looked like. Observe:
Alright, I’ll admit that, with the exception of the cheesy gas masks and biohazard symbols, there is a lot to like about the visuals thanks to art director Norm Myers but… I can’t help but weep for the future if it is to be filled with My Little Ponies headphones and slang from the 80s. I like a little supersonic boom as much as the next guy, but until one of these Peas can be a little more specific about their zooming space shit I’m afraid I just don’t buy it. What exactly makes this song futuristic? Help me out. Until then I’ll try to avoid saying “You’re SOO two thousand and LATE” in my lexicon and look to the cosmos for answers.
Enjoy the uncensored lyrics, below the supersonic space-jump. Try not to get shat on.
Bon matin! May flowers are blooming, kites are flying, a dirigible is idling on the wind above my good city by the bay, and for some reason I can’t stop thinking about this film:
La grande finale of Le Ballon Rouge. Watch the entire movie here.
Written and directed by Albert Lamorisse, The Red Balloon has got to be one of the most gorgeous and enduring depictions of childhood ever committed to celluloid. 34 minutes depicting youth’s resilience, playfulness, longing, loneliness, passion, violence, innocence, fearfulness, and most of all, JOY! It’s all here, presented in glistening primary colors and awash in natural Parisian light.
Cheers, mates. Enjoy the beautiful day.
I dedicate this dripping blood bar to the memory GeoCities, which was shut down by Yahoo last week:
GeoCities – or GeoShitties, as we all oh-so-cleverly called it – began in 1994 as a community of themed “virtual cities.” There’s a list of all the GeoCities neighborhood names that ever existed on this page, which also offers an illuminating explanation of how the whole process worked:
When GeoCities first started offering free web pages to the public, they decided to create themed neighborhoods. Each neighborhood was then divided into blocks (each block was numbered between 1000 up to 9999). A user would then adopt a block and thus create their own pages within that block. Thus, a user would then have their own web pages located at a URL in this format: http://www.geocities.com/neighborhood/XXXX (“XXXX” would be a four digit number). The whole management of each Neighborhood was run by volunteers – known as ‘Community Leaders’ (CL’s), which is what made the GeoCities experience so special.
This whole process was known as “homesteading”, and each user had their own “homestead”. Community Leaders helped out each “homesteader”, and created a friendly atmosphere which contributed to the rapid explosion of personal web pages on the internet.
And though it’s probably been years since any of us have even looked at a GeoCities page (and that’s probably a good thing), to some of us, those pages, with “BourbonStreet” and “SoHo” in their URLs, represented a special time: the period in which audiovisual sharing first really took off on the web. Geocities, along with Angelfire and Tripod, were among the first wave of free personal self-expression sites for the masses. It was the first time that people who weren’t born-and-bred web geeks began to establish an earnest online presence, clumsily piecing together basic HTML (“hello! border = 0!” was the big insult to fling at someone whose page lacked a certain finesse). Sure, it contaminated the web with a lot of bad poetry, but it also brought us a plethora of wonder: band fan sites, zine reviews, scanned photos of interesting strangers from across the world.
GeoCities will completely cease to exist by the end of the year, and all its sites will be wiped from the face of the web forever. Feast your eyes on few of the relics that will be soon be gone [edit: But there’s hope! æon writes in the comments, “jason scott of bbs documentary fame and a team of volunteers are archiving the whole thing.” Click here to learn of their valiant efforts.]:
So… anyone here remember a beloved Geocities site that they’d like to share? Anyone here guilty of actually having ever made their own Geocities page? Let us take a moment to commiserate and recall our first memories of the web, our favorite haunts, the ways we discovered one another. Efnet. Dalnet. Undernet. Midgaard. Webrings. Guestbooks. X of the Y sites. ASCII-embellished sigs. BBSes. Alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die.
What was your first circle of friends on the web? Do you still keep in touch with them? Where did you get your first taste of this great series of tubes?
J. G. Ballard died today. He was 78 years old.
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.
Apocalypse Meow is the Americanized title of Cat Shit One, a dark and befuddling manga series by Motofumi Kobayashi. Published in the late 90s, the book features a team of fuzzy wuzzy widdle bunny wabbits in an American special ops team battling the forces of cutesy wootsy wily Viet Cong kitty cats on a wide variety of historically accurate, often graphically violent recon missions. Characters are depicted as different species according to nationality; Yankees as rabbits, the Vietnamese as cats, Frenchmen as pigs, Koreans as dogs, Australians as koala bears, etc.
Yyyyeah. Cute Overload it ain’t. Or Watership Down, for that matter. And now, it would seem that Anima Studio has produced an equally gory animated trailer/short based off the manga. Only this time, special ops team Cat Shit One is in the Middle East, fighting… Taliban camels? Taliban camels wearing… turbans?
Oh god. Oh my god. Ohmygodwhatthefuckbarbeque, even.
Replete with M4A1 annihilation and bargain basement Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan-soundalike ululations. Keepin’ it classy.
Clip via Sean Dicken. Thanks for the nightmares, Sean.
You can’t go wrong with preserved shit in jars. You just can’t. It’s like a secret handshake. You like shit in jars, you’re on my team. We bond over Mütter mystique. I liked Alien: Resurrection, you hated it, but I know how we both felt about that scene.
And that is why Creature Feature is a site for sore eyes. I’m sure that there are many more modern, fluid ways to locate images of these types of “creature-infused” wines from Indo-China; for example, I just tried typing “scorpion wine” into Flickr, and got 192 crisp (and probably crispy!) results. Still, there’s something precious and ordered about the musty pre-CSS presentation of Creature Feature that draws me. I like looking at that ancient HTML table, reverently stacked with aged Seahorse Wine, Centipede Wine and Toad Wine, the same way I like drifting away into a Joseph Cornell piece. I love stumbling across pages like this, pages that feel like they’re from another Internet that’s totally gone. We should preserve them.