EDITOR’S NOTE, Tuesday, Feb 17th, 8:00 PM: Woops. Turns out this may all actually be a big load of hooey. A hoax. A flummox. A gaff. A fabrication. Serves me right for not examining my sources more carefully. Bad pseudojournalist! Bad! Mea culpa. Will investigate further in the A.M. WHAAAOOOO WHAAOOOOO…

Darque pussy.

Hey, folks! Ever shit yourself and projectile vomit simultaneously? No? Well, get thee to the nearest Port-O-Let before reading any further. Today might be your lucky day!

VH1 announced today that producers are now filming a new season of Rock of Love featuring metal/punk/horror-core legend, Glenn Danzig.

The new show, which will premiere this July, is called Rock of Love: Bride of Satan with Glenn Danzig. Danzig is well-known in metal and punk circles as one of the founding members of 1980s horror-core punk rockers Samhain. He went on to the form hard-rock band Danzig, which scored several top 40 hits in the late ’80s including “Mother” and “She Rides.” Both a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Danzig is also well-known for his interest in the occult and all things evil. [Anyone else notice the mysterious omission of the Misfits from this press material?]

In sixth grade, my class visited a Long Island nursing home. The experience was supposed be uplifting; back in the classroom we’d been studying Ellis Island, and the teachers excitedly informed us that we’d have the opportunity to gather first-person accounts of the immigrant experience, from people who’d been there! When we arrived at the nursing home, we were ready with our little pencils and notebooks and mini-recorders. We broke up into pairs and made our way around the room, each team spending about 5-10 minutes with each of the home’s geriatric inhabitants.

When we got back to the classroom the next day, nobody talked about what had happened. The teachers never mentioned the field trip again, and we weren’t asked to write a report. We turned to a new chapter in the textbook, and teachers hastened on to tell us all about how the U.S. had won the war and saved the rest of the world in the 40s. But we learned a valuable lesson that day, even if no one acknowledged it aloud. When we tried to interview the people at the nursing home, most of them they stared right past us. They drooled. They moaned and mumbled absently. The few who were actually aware of our presence spoke a little, but it was gibberish; no conversation lasted more than 2 minutes before the train of thought evaporated. The lesson we learned that day, completely not intended by our teachers, was to dread and fear the process of losing our minds with age.

Granted, we saw the worst-case scenario. It was a very poor nursing home that we went to, the kind of place where people with no loving/living relatives eventually end up in storage.  Still, that memory can’t be erased – not until the moment when all memories start to slip, as I learned the year my grandmother used Palmolive instead of olive oil when making eggs one morning. Within a couple of years, she didn’t remember who I was, and soon afterward forgot herself. The books she’d read, the places she’d been – they were all gone. Between that and the aforementioned school trip of doom, I developed what’s probably one of my biggest fears.

Then, there are people who give me hope, like Terry Pratchett, who got was diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer’s last year. Well, he didn’t take that diagnosis lying down; he donates to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, cheerfully refers to his condition as The Embuggerance, participates in experimental programs to find a cure, and continues to work on Unseen Academicals, the thirty-seventh book in the Discworld series. It’s the opposite of how my grandmother approached it, and maybe the attitude makes all the difference. “My father always used to say you have to be philosophical about things, by which he meant stoical,” he joked in a Times interview last year. “The future is going to happen whether I’m scared of it or not so I do my best not to be. Around about five o’clock in the morning things might be different but you just have to face it.” He’s right, of course. I just hope that if the same condition strikes me, I’ll be just as brave. And keep my fingers crossed in hope that by that time, every old person’s home will have a Holodeck installed.

Tripped out animated “Love is All” sequence from the vastly underrated rock opera, The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast. (Arguably Ronnie James Dio’s finest moment.)

Yeah, yeah… we know. Whether you choose to call it Commercially Dictated Affection Day, Lupercalia, or Just Another Epic Lonely Fart-Sucking Excuse For a Personal Pity Party, Valentine’s Day can be full of fail. We’ve all done our share of hatin’ on it. But hey, know what? It really is a gorgeous world out there, and as the Troggs once said, Love is All Around.

Coilhouse Magazine & Blog feels a little bashful asking you this. Um. Don’t feel obligated or anything, but… will you be our Valentine? We think you’re pretty swell. It’s okay, you don’t have to decide right away.*

But tell us, who do you love?

Felted “Love is a Battlefield” Hand Grenade from NifNaks.

*Think it over! Who’s it gonna hurt… where ya goin’?

Bless you, O magical land of Belgium, for bestowing upon the world your gifts of fine chocolates, exquisite wheat beers, Rene Magritte, The Adventures of Tintin, and now this:

(Via Wil Wheaton, who says, “I’m not sure what the hell is going on here, but I love it.”)

More consternating Belgian Trekkie non sequiturs after the jump.

Kanye West does a lot to bridge cultural gaps, which I’ve always found admirable. This is a man not afraid to say “Balenciaga is one of the illest lines right now”. Between his multi-genre music, popular blog, and innovative videos he’s practically on a holy mission to bring art, fashion and literature into the lives of his fans. However, change is not always easy.

Owens model channels Laibach

A few days ago the rapper blogged about the new Rick Owens collection. Owens is known for extreme tailoring, using a lot of black materials and being generally spooky as hell. He’s also known for hand-picking divinely alien specimens to showcase his work. This time around at Paris Fashion Week his choices were especially exotic, and Kanye’s fans noticed. Some of the comments his blog post received:

Ahh, growing pains.

As far as I’m concerned, Owens has impeccable taste and these models are top-notch, with potential to fit nicely into both our Preternatural and Alien beauty posts. I adore his clothes and consider him to be one of the best high fashion designers of our time, up there with Gareth Pugh, C.C. Poell and a few select others. It pleases me to see someone with as much much influence as Kanye West sharing this sentiment to some extent. I’m sure he expected a bit of a backlash when he presented images of all those pale, black-clad gentlemen to his public. But do you think he was prepared for this?

Clearly, user gdzhulakidze’s mind was blown to the point of incoherence. He seems genuinely scared and his disdain is palpable. I’d almost say Kanye might have done better with an introductory post before unleashing the Rick upon his followers, but there is plenty of positive feedback to counter the bad. For instance: “No one does black better, except 4 obama… ;)”. Mm. Change is here.

A special thanks to StyleZeitgeist for bringing this matter to our attention.

Photo by TruShu on Flickr: “With smiles like that they must be … stoned. Bada-bum!

Aww, look at those toofs. I kinda wish these three guys would start bobbing up and down and singing me a happy tune. I wish I could have these three on my bedside, ready to talk when I really need some guidance. They look like they’d give really, really good advice, don’t they? These were crafted by 51-year-old Hirotoshi Ito. Here’s an excerpt from Mr. Ito’s bio at the the Keiko Gallery site:

After graduating from the distinguished Tokyo National University of Fine Arts, Mr. Ito was destined to take over his father’s masonry business in his hometown of Matsumoto City in Nagano Prefecture. He works out of his studio at home, creating his sculptures, while attending his family business.

Hirotoshi Ito continues to find new and original ways to create sculptures that people would touch and feel the unexpected softness and the warmth of them. He would be honored if his work would add laughs and smiles to people who come in contact with them.

What I love about these sculptures is the idea of a secret life. Since I was old enough to understand adventure stories (shout-out to Mio, my Mio), I was enchanted with the idea that the right string of words could make a door appear when there wasn’t one before, that every object (the more mundane, the better) had an alternate purpose, revealed only to those who could see the world in a different way. It’s rare to find something on the net that reaches me on such a tactile level, but I can almost smell the roasted coffee beans, mixed in with the scent of cold moss and stones. It makes me wish, as I believed with all my heart was possible as a child, that my hands could know the secret to unlocking any object they touched.

• Hirotoshi Ito’s Official Site
• Hirotoshi Ito’s Blog (in Japanese)
• Hirotoshi Ito on Flickr
• Hirotoshi Page at Keiko Gallery (read this lovely writeup of Ito’s work by William Thrasher)

Okay. Um…

Coilhouse takes pride in not being yet another lazy link-dumping blog, but y’know, this is one of those times where the less said, the better. Just… just click the image below. It links to a very special place. Once you’re there, scroll all the way down to the bottom.

(Via the craziest Canuck I know, Chip Zdarsky.)

Gawd bless America. And Japan.

[EDIT 01/23/09: Hooo WEE! That one went viral so fast, it knocked the Gamu Toys website on its ass. Luckily, some smart fella over at wickedglee.com captured the site as a PDF before it disappeared. Here ya go.]

‘Couple more doozies after the jump.

What a historic day! Big, bonecrushing hugs from all of us here at CH headquarters to everyone else on planet earth who is rejoicing at the departure of the Bush administration. There will never be a better time to post the following human rights essay and interview that our staffer Jeff Wengrofsky (aka Agent Double Oh No) has been working on for months. At Coilhouse, we’re glad to supply subject matter ranging from the utterly frivolous to the deeply involved and intense. This piece goes in the latter category. We’re honored to provide a forum for Jeff’s in-depth, thought-provoking conversation with human rights activists Suzette Brunkhorst and Ronald Eissens. We hope that their story and struggle will move some of you as much as it has moved us. ~Mer

“Human institutions appear to be the obvious and obtrusive causes of
much mischief to mankind; yet in reality, they are light and superficial
…in comparison with those deeper seated causes of impurity
that…render turbid the whole stream of human life.“
– Thomas Malthus  (1798)

As membership is constitutive for a society, its conditions are routinely, if not essentially, contested.  More than any other society, America has wrestled with two competing notions of membership: one based on exclusion (class until 1824, race formally until 1870 and practically until 1965, and gender until 1920) and another based on inclusion and rooted in the Declaration of Independence’s influential clause: “all…are created equal.”  This quarrel over defining principles was apparent even in the drafting of the Declaration. Thomas Jefferson’s original document, later altered in a compromise, called for the abolition of slavery.  Jefferson himself was in love and sired children with Sally Hemings, an African-American who was the half-sister of his wife and his slave. And so, America was born in original sin under a star of some perversion with an ever-present element of redemption. Even today, America blinks like a giant, Masonic hologram, simultaneously symbolizing and embodying our greatest hope and, in the Bush years, our greatest disappointment.

In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois declared “the color line” to be the defining issue of the 20th Century. The election of Barack Hussein Obama Jr. opens up the question as to whether the United States has begun the new century by transcending racial exclusion. Surely the America of 1903 looks little like the America of today: African-Americans are no longer its largest ethnic minority, its citizenry includes significant numbers of people who do not fit into the black-white axis, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts rendered discrimination illegal 43 years ago, Affirmative Action dates back to J.F.K., intermarriage is not unusual, Martin Luther King’s birthday is a national holiday, racial bigotry has long since fallen into disrepute in the sciences and is not tolerated in polite conversation, and even the Bush Administration had African-Americans in its cabinet. On the other hand, police departments are often charged with brutality and “stop and frisk” policies that target black youth, African-Americans continue to be overrepresented among our nation’s most impoverished and undereducated and imprisoned, and African-Americans are the victim of more hate crime than any other group in the United States.

Certainly it is very unusual for the people of any society to select a member of a minority (however understood) to its highest office and, perhaps, this event is even more profound in a country whose entire history can be understood as a long and troubled march toward the fulfillment of its inclusive promise. Can 300 years of racial difference be transcended by legislation or election? Will Americans whose biographies are not like Obama’s accept his leadership in a time of economic and ecological crisis? With the election of Obama, is the United States once again poised to provide moral leadership (as it surely did in 1776)? Is international moral leadership possible? It seems as though history itself has opened and the full range of human potential – the good, the bad, and the ugly – are all equally likely.

What is “racism”? Are all bigotries a form of racism? Is racism conceptually distinct from other forms of ethnic chauvinism? The major genocides of the past century were, aside from the Nazi extermination of the Jews, not understood in racial terms: the Turkish-Armenian genocide (1915-18), the Turkish-Greek genocide (1914-23), Stalin’s liquidation of the Kulaks (1932-33), the Japanese-Chinese genocide in Nanking (1937-38), the Nigerian-Biafran genocide (1966-1970), the Pakistani-Bangladeshi genocide (1971), the Tutsi-Hutu genocide in Burundi (1972), Pol Pot’s Cambodian purges (1975-79), the Hutu-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda (1994), and the Serb-Bosnian genocide (1992-95).

Where do these cleavages, these notions of belonging and otherness, come from? They are found in various forms in every human society.  Sadly, our closest kin in the animal world also share this trait. Wars among chimpanzees and between apes have been noted by biologists since 1970. Are hatreds naturally rooted in “selfish genes”? If so, do we need unrealizable principles to inform our behavior and ground social criticism?

Is cosmopolitanism – the idea that one can be a “citizen of the world” – possible? Aren’t we always already embedded in cultural conversations, genetic inheritances, and political communities? Does anyone have arms long enough to embrace humanity as a whole? What do we do with those who return our embrace with bullets and bombs? Is cosmopolitanism an unrealistic retreat from the world as it actually is? Is cosmopolitanism a rhetorical strategy of the weak to keep the strong from winning?

Suzette Brunkhorst and Ronald Eissens.

On Thanksgiving, an American holiday whose lore bespeaks inclusion and exclusion, I sat down to discuss hate, race, and the limits of freedom in Holland, often considered among the freest places in this world, and on the internet, a transnational network, with Suzette Brunkhorst and Ronald Eissens, the Directors of the Magenta Foundation.  In their own words, “Magenta is a foundation that aims to combat racism and other forms of discrimination primarily on and through the Internet.” They have organized many high profile events in the name of inclusion and understanding, and have presented reports on bigotry before the United Nations and the O.S.C.E. Undeterred in the face of many death threats, they are cosmopolitan heroes. Sadly, just one day after this interview, Suzette was diagnosed with cancer and has since gone into chemotherapy. On this day, full of hope, let’s wish her a fast and painless recovery.

(Jeff’s full interview with Suzette Brunkhorst and Ronald Eissens appears after the jump.)

Morning!

It’s hard to quantify the effects minimalist composer Steve Reich’s “phasing” meditations can have on average human grey matter. The best way I know to describe my own listening experience is a wonky, tripped out sensation of neglected synaptic channels in my brainy bits being seared open and reconnected to other brainy bits in new and unusual ways. Occipital, Parietal, Temporal, Frontal, Limbic… feels like they’re all getting a rigorous, interactive workout. If I listen long enough to this sort of thing, it’ll pitch me into a contemplative state not quite beyond reflexive thinking, but certainly more relaxed, more present, somehow. Kinda like toking, but without “I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER” side effects.

Clip via Ben Morris, thanks. I truly don’t think it matters whether you have a staid background in music, or math, or both. Whether you understand wtf Aidu’s doing here or not, it’ll stir your noodles. Drop into this stuff and stew for a little while.

This abridged rendition of Reich’s “Piano Phase” by Russian concert pianist Peter Aidu is literally head-splitting. The piece is usually performed by two pianists, one of whom repeats the same sequence of notes over and over again at exactly the same tempo, while the other player gradually speeds up and then slows back down, eventually returning to a unified BPM before the pattern starts again. That’s basically all phasing is. Sounds simple enough, right? But try playing one part of it and you’ll soon realize just how difficult it is to sustain. As for performing two separate parts simultaneously? Great googly moogly.

Aidu’s concentration is astounding. He’s got the hypnotized, slightly crazed expression of someone who’s gone to another plane entirely. (It’s a look I always envy on other musician’s faces. If I could, I’d opt to live “in the zone” all the time.) If you like the clip, be sure to grab the full 20 minute version on archive.org.

Detractors of minimalist experimentation with phasing and polyrhythm all say the same thing; the resulting music is boring, pretentious, cerebral, emotionless. I suspect they’re missing the point entirely. Personally I find the form to be an invigorating causeway to the same meditative state invoked by more traditional forms like gamelan and ketjak. What do you think?

Click below for more Reich-related audiovisual trip toys.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Argh, I know, I’m really late with this one. Slept ’til noon, then had to hop on a train. Fuggit. Let’s consider it a special midnight BTC edition for folks who are working the graveyard shift or traveling/packing/wrapping for the holidays and in need a pick-me-up of the non-denominational, demonic variety, shall we?

Hellhounds are mythical demon dogs from HELL. (Say it wiff meh…  HEEEAAGGHHHHHLLLLLLL.)

Video by Brian Boyce, who also made this and lots of other brilliant crap.

Hellhounds carry themselves in an aggressive or baleful manner. They may have glowing red eyes, supernatural abilities, or even the gift of human speech. They’re associated with fire (say it wiff meh… FIIIGHHYAAAAAHHHHHH) and endowed with flaming fiery blowtorchy powers or/or appearances. Hellhounds are often designated guardians to the entrance to the world of the dead. Or, in this case, designated guardians of the filthy, dog-hair-encrusted couch you slept on all night after passing out in a puddle of regurgitated egg nog.

(Oh, wait, sorry, that was me. I’d better go wash my hair now.)

EDITOR’S NOTE PART DEUX, ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: Hmm. Just noticed that Better Than Coffee is a bit pooch–obsessed lately. Apologies to all (especially Warren, who loathes dogs even more than I loathe Anne Geddes photos). Just to make sure I get it all out of my system, I’m including twenty-five clips of dogs eating peanut butter after the jump.

You’re welcome.