Young German filmmaker Jeff Desom graduated from the Bournemouth Arts Institute in 2007. His senior project featured the experimental pianist Volker Bertelmann, a.k.a. Hauskchka. That partnership has led to this flawless collaboration:

Music video for the song “Morgenrot” off Hauschka’s latest album, Ferndorf. (Via Siege, thanks.)

Painstakingly animated, composited and rendered, “Morgenrot” features a flaming piano falling in slow motion through a series of vintage black and white photographs of NYC. Desom talks about the process:

The finished animation is mostly made from early twentieth century photographs that I found while browsing through the vast collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. I also used old postcards from New York that I purchased at a flea market in Paris. Most of the time I would only zoom into a tiny portion of the picture and utilise that as my frame.

The hardest part was to make it look as if it had been pasted together from a lost reel depicting this curious experiment where they’d [lit] up a piano and thrown it off a building only to see what would happen. The kind of unnecessary crash test executed [for] the sole purpose of drooling over the beauty of slow motion.

Mission accomplished. One can only imagine what Desom is going to come up with next.

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.

Fellow Angel City residents! If you love love music and obscure video, tonight – Thursday April 30 – holds a very special treat. Joe of Target Video, a legendary San Francisco-based punk video archive, has gathered some rarities from the past which The Silent Movie Theater will screen tonight only. On the menu, from Target Video’s newsletter:

Joe’s gone through and put together some gems from the past including: the Suburban Lawns, Middle Class, Nervous Gender, the Bags, the Minutemen, TSOL, the Mau Maus, Catholic Discipline, Castration Squad, the Plugz, BPeople, Chrome, Tuxedomoon, Young Marble Giants and favorites like the Screamers, the Dils, Devo and Black Flag. He’s even dug up a Mentors clip. There will be tidbits like Nash the Slash, who’s virtually unknown in the US.

Unlike our “Underground Forces” series, this show is more MTV style so that we could get in as many bands as possible. This stuff is direct from the library, and unrefined.

Need I convince you further? Well, I’m afraid I can’t because finding all those band links has rendered me incapable. However, here’s Castration Squad, rocking their way into your hearts straight from Hollywood, 1980.

“Jack is 53, doesn’t look any more dead than me” Ahh, yess.

Whether this will be a roaring trip down memory lane or an introductory crash course depends on you, but one thing is certain: this night is not to be missed! I’ll be there honing my knowledge and toasting the event with cheap champagne, if my last visit to this theater is any indication.

The Silent Movie Theater is located 611 N. Fairfax Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90036, 323-655-2510
The show starts at 7:30.
[Of course there will be sound]

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.]:

• Kristy’s Riot Grrrl Review
• Panpleasant Profederacy of Eris Proleteriat
• How to Dance Gothic (this and other sites like it are basically where Voltaire scraped all the jokes/lore for his “how to be goth” Hot Topic bestsellers from)

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?

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.

I became a graphic designer mostly because I love stuff. Specifically, I love paper. My career ambitions have changed over the years, but somewhere in my mind was always the notion that I wanted to produce cool two-dimensional stuff — photographs, stationary, magazines — stuff and things made of paper. This love affair with paper has led me to hoard years worth of fashion, music and design magazines, postcards, advertisements and what have you. In these particular economic times, it’s become fashionable to say the publishing industry is dying — dead, even — and who am I to argue when a recent New Yorker has only twelve pages of ads in it? Who am I indeed, but a crazy, stupid hopeful paper-obsessed idealist?

I dream of a publishing industry reborn, emerging from the ashes of poverty burned clean, pruned back and more beautiful than ever. I dream of a Darwinian rebirth, where only the most audacious and gorgeous of publications will survive; a rebirth only possible in the internet age where every niche market can find its products with the tap and a click of a search field and mouse. The popularity of sites like Magazine Death Pool is hard to ignore; once popular and award-winning titles seem to be dropping like flies. But this, I say, is the day of the unique, the individual, the small-run and the special. In order to survive a magazine can no longer count on appealing to everyone blandly; a magazine must be something more in an attempt to rise above the fray. It cannot be dedicated to the dissemination of information, because the internet does that better and faster than any printed publication could. It must embrace its status as an obsolete object and revel in its old-fashioned tactility.

In the 1950s there was a magazine that did just that, in unprecedented fashion. I’m speaking of Gentry Magazine, a footnote in publishing history and the subject of an illuminating little essay by Stephen Heller that I happened to read this year. Published quarterly in the 1950’s by William Segal, Gentry was unabashedly aimed squarely over the heads of the riff-raff at the “100,000 men” who were cultivated, sophisticated and wealthy enough to “get it”. Produced at great expense with first-rate papers, sumptuous printing, die cuts, embossing, fold-out pages, product samples and color plates, the magazine cost 8 dollars for a yearlong subscription. This was going out on a pretty big limb for the publishers if you consider the average magazine issue cost in the 50s was about 25 cents. I can’t believe they sold it so cheaply.

The erudite content centered on men’s fashion and gentlemanly pursuits like riding and smoking, along with articles about food, wine, art, history and culture. Segal saw the publication as both an exclusive club for those cultivated enough to appreciate it and an educational tool for those aspiring to appreciate it. Endeavoring to reach beyond the pages and engage with the audience, he included many unusual treats. An article about suits would include a swatch of fabric for the reader to touch; an article about smoking might include a tobacco leaf to smell; an article about riding was famously accompanied by a small sample of oats. Henri Matisse did a cover in 1956, which is not surprising, given Segal’s desire to elevate the magazine to the realm of fine art. Each goodie — each fabric swatch or color plate — was hand-placed and glued, a fact that was celebrated as proof of the value of the extravagant book, giving it more in common with fine art than mass-produced pop rags.

If I came across a publication such as this today, it would take my breath away. The sheer opulence and ambition of it (even now, when those fabric swatches needn’t be hand-glued as they were in the 50’s), coupled with a high level of respect for the reader’s intelligence, would floor me. The publishing industry is dead, you say? Magazines are history, you say? I declare, I would buy any magazine that could floor me like that. Even in a recession, I would buy the ever loving fuck out of it. I also declare with equal certainty that as long as there are people like me who love paper, magazines can never die; they can only get better as they battle for attention.

Now, be nice and stay away from my Gentry ebay auctions and no one will get hurt.

• Scans of Gentry Magazine on Flickr

The “Sensoria/Do Right” video: a danceypants gateway drug into the complex world of Cabaret Voltaire.

Cabaret Voltaire: underrated, years ahead of their time, and punk as fuck. Not punk in a preening Vivienne Westwood way (although they were quite stylin’). Punk as fuck, like the famed Dadaist nightclub they named themselves after, like the tape-splicing experimental musicians involved in Musica Elettronica Viva in the 60s, like Brion Gysin and Stockhausen, like My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Filth.

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.

From an early Grey Area of Mute catalogue:

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 album The Crackdown came 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 album Micro-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.

More classic CV clips after the jump.

Headlining performer Victoria Vengeance. Image by Chad Ward.

This Friday the 13th, Los Angeles will see the premiere of a new dark cabaret night hosted & organized by Coilhouse favorite Chad Michael Ward. This new night is called Lost Grind Opera, and all I knew about it before writing this post is that it’s hosted by two clowns that make me extremely uncomfortable and that there are a lot of pretty ladies involved. Although I’m not a huge fan of burlesque events, I’m curious to check this one out, because I’m curious to find out what Chad in particular thinks will make for a good show. If the actual event is anything like the photography and graphic design that he’s been cranking out to promote it, I know it’ll be something unique. So I caught up with Chad and asked him a few questions about this upcoming night.

Headlining performer Shelby “Belfast” Jones. Image by Chad Ward.

Lost Grind promises to be a cabaret show unlike any other. In an era that’s oversaturated with neo-burlesque outfits, what’s in store that we’ve perhaps never seen before?
“Burlesque” has taken many shapes and forms over the last decade here in Los Angeles.  We’ve seen everything from very traditional acts that hearken back to the 50s to modern dance troupes to full-on stripteases, and everything in between.  With the Lost Grind Opera, we’ve taken some of the better bits of what makes Burlesque great: live music, comedy, beautiful women and both vintage and modern dance and combined it with the kind of dark and sultry sensibility you might find in a Prohibition-era speakeasy or 1940s Berlin with a touch of vaudeville and theater.  The end result is a new unique experience for the patrons of the L.A. underground looking to be entertained in a way that has yet to be fulfilled.

Can you describe some of the performances that we can expect to see at Lost Grind Opera?
I don’t want to give too much away, but the evening’s overall theme is “Decadence” and the girls have taken their routines in many different directions.  We’ve got a bit of cabaret, a touch of drag, a little Cajun mysticism and some Gypsy spirit all done to the live music of our house band, The Grinder Monkey Quartet.

What kind of atmosphere does the El Cid Theater have?
The El Cid was originally built as a theater for D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” to be screened.  In the 1950s it became a well-known Cabaret Concert Theater before eventually becoming the Flamenco dance theater and restaurant it is today.  It’s got a very intimate and historic vibe to it that made it perfect for our inaugural show.

Thank you, Chad! Hope to see you there.

Belzebuth (aka Belzebub, Beelzebuth), whose name means “lord of the flies” is prince of demons according to the Scriptures. Milton calls him foremost in power and crime after Satan, and most demonographers call him supreme chief of hell. Belzebuth is also known to rid harvests of flies. His favorite color is chartreuse.

Even if you’re not remotely interested in the occult, chances are you’ve been exposed to at least a few of the critters compiled in that hugely influential Dover collection, Treasury of Fantastic and Mythological Creatures; it’s been kicking around for decades. Several of the most fascinating and grotesque beasts contained therein are from a series of 19th century illustrations produced for Jacques Auguste Simon Collin de Plancy‘s Dictionnaire Infernal, aka, Demonographia. Louis Breton drew the set of 69 illustrations of various demons as described by Collin de Plancy, which were then engraved by one M. Jarrault.

Did you know that in addition to vomiting flames and commanding forty legions (most of these dudes seem to command an awful lot of legions… or, alternately, inflict lesions), the Egyptian deity Amon has the power to reconcile differences between friends? Or that Ukobach the Inferior, a lesser minion who maintains the oil in the infernal boilers of hell, also probably invented deep-frying? Is that wild? That is wild! Did you know that? I did not know that. Weird, wild stuff.

For a while, proper reprints of the grimoire were very difficult to obtain. In fact, they’re still pretty pricey, but you can download the entire book in PDF form (in fairly good quality).

Furfur: a count of hell who rules 26 legions. He appears as an angel or a stag with a flaming tail and speaks only lies unless enclosed in a triangle. He speaks in a raucous voice. Furfur sustains marriage, can cause thunderstorms, and speaks on abstract things. He has also been known, on occasion, to “get Yiffy wid’ it.”

Several more frisky demons and (paraphrased) descriptions from Demonographia after the jump.

Left: Weta’s design. Right: Vessey swimming with a fully functional prosthetic tail. (Photo by Steve Unwin.)

As if we didn’t already have a bounty of reasons to love Weta Workshop, this just in via the Dominion Post in New Zealand:

Nadya Vessey lost her legs as a child but now she swims like a mermaid.

Ms Vessey’s mermaid tail was created by Wellington-based film industry wizards Weta Workshop after the Auckland woman wrote to them two years ago asking if they could make her a prosthetic tail. She was astounded when they agreed.

She lost both legs below the knee from a medical condition when she was a child and told Close Up last night her long-held dream had come true… [Read more]

Some mornings are much easier to wake up to than others, eh? Other Coilhouse posts of possible interest:

• The Iron Hand of Goetz Von Berlichingen
• The First Olympic Cyborg?
• Hans Christian Anderson’s Real Little Mermaid
• Meet the Feebles
• Along Came a Spider
• Artificial Luminescent Eyelashes
• Haus-Rucker-Co’s Mind Bending Spatial Contraptions
• POSTCARDS FROM NERD PROM: “Unnatural Selector”