Coilhouse is pleased to introduce a new project by Jeff Wengrofsky (Agent Double Oh No). Jeff explains: “The Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers (SHIT) is an independent film production nexus whose mission is to provide exposure to art, cialis artists, movements, events, and organizations that we believe are unusual, timely, and provoking. Our current project is a series of short (10 minute) documentary films that examine the politics and aporias of creativity. “The Gospel According to Reverend Billy” is the first in this series. It is being published on the Coilhouse blog and is very much an extension of my work for you folks. We hope to web publish a little film once a month until the close of 2010.”

“Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.” – Rousseau

Film courtesy of the Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers.

The prime, often countervailing logics of 21^st century America – capitalism and democracy – seem dangerously out of balance today. Meanwhile, vestigial factors, like Puritanism, sometimes affect public life in surprising ways. Since the Giuliani years, America’s largest city – New York – has seen lower crime, infrastructural investments, an infusion of capital, a proliferation of chain stores, a vast profusion of surveillance devices and, perhaps, the general evisceration of democracy. Just recently, Mayor Michael Bloomberg ignored widespread opposition to the construction of two billion dollar stadiums and the much-maligned Atlantic Yards construction project. More egregiously, he bullied our City Council into overturning a term limits law that had been passed fifteen years earlier by public referendum. Now running for his third term, Bloomberg’s campaign war chest has intimidated all prominent Democratic challengers.

As politics appears as (yet another) massively-financed spectacle of buzzwords, scandals, outsized personas and deep psychology, is it possible to enter the political fray without selling your soul? Can you get the attention of the public eye by taking on an identity at once striking and also familiar to our public culture? Fifteen years ago, William Talen began the process of becoming a New Yorker and re-inventing himself as “Reverend Billy.” Today, armed with this identity, he enters churches of consumption – like the Disney store in Times Square – to project a powerful message opposing corporate retail, a culture of consumerism, and the encroachment of our public spaces.

Reverend Billy’s charisma, energy, and smarts have gathered him a gospel choir, the attention of CNN, a documentary film by Morgan Spurlock, and now the nomination of New York’s Green Party for the 2009 mayoral race. Reverend Billy combines a Nixonian charm with the overly stylized tropes of a preacher, and, perhaps as prime mover, a rich Calvinist heritage. America has a long history of Calvinist preachers – you may know them as “Puritans” – who rail against impure desires, “the moneychangers,” and fret mightily for the souls of their congregants.

All photos by Tina Zimmer.

COILHOUSE: Words like “community” and “neighborhood” have a special resonance for your choir. Are you a New Yorker?
REVEREND BILLY: I grew up in Watertown, South Dakota and Rochester, Minnesota, and I always dreamed of being a New Yorker, the way you can dream of New York on the prairie. When the satellites would go up across the night sky, I used to think they were New York City flying through space. I first moved here in 1974, stayed a couple of years. Moved back again in the early 80s and, for a longer period of time, in the late 80s. I was like a hitchhiker, I would come and crash in the Lower East Side. In March of 1994, I don’t know why exactly, my commitment became permanent.

Do you feel like a New Yorker?
I do now because I perform in so many neighborhoods. I marry, baptize and bury New Yorkers in so many different boroughs. We – me and Savitri and the choir – some of us were born here and many of us are immigrants, we like the idea of a homemade spirituality that does not necessarily come from an organized religion. That idea became a New York idea after 9-11. Many of us gathered in rooms. The Reverend Billy idea of a different God or Goddess every day with another name, staying out of trouble with deities that cause us to kill each other, that kind of fellowship, I needed it, too.

[Interview continues after the jump.]

It’s early. It’s dark. There’s a fish in the percolator. Brain not working yet? That’s okay. Use your butt.

This kid is grimmer than you will ever be:

Nothing says Malevolent Psychopomp of Satan quite like a pair of Reebok high-tops. Unless it’s biker shorts. Or a puffy ponytail.

I quail before his magnificence. It’s no wonder that cop took one look at the proceedings and tucked tail.

Sadly, little is known of the circumstances and origins of this clip. The YouTuber who uploaded it says “I got this randomly placed on a tape a dude sent me once. I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on here, as in where the rest of the band is.”

Band schmand. This guy doesn’t need backup. Whatever his solo rendition of “KILL EVERYONE” may lack in instrumentation (or tonality, or lyricism), it more than makes up for in conviction. Plus, he’s got the entire audience providing the chorus for his instant club hit, “I HATE EVERYONE”.

Hail.

Today is Goth Christmas. We wish you all happy hauntings.

It’s also the very last day of October and an opportune moment to observe a very important milestone: two years ago this month, the Coilhouse blog officially launched.

Despite being on completely different sleep schedules in three different time zones (hell, in two different hemispheres) we three wanted to make sure we got together to “properly” commemorate  what is, for us, a pretty huge milestone. Drinks were drunk, cupcakes were flambéd, cherry pie plasma was snorted, and lascivious nekkid dancing in the dark may or may not have occurred:

WOOPWOOPWOOP! DING! (“Happy Birthday” song by Altered Images.)

Two years ago, none of us had any idea what we were getting ourselves into. We were relative strangers with tons of enthusiasm and not a whole lot of experience. A little over 24 months and incalculable hours of work later, Coilhouse has published over 1000 blog posts, 3 issues of a glossy bookazine style print mag, and there’s a splendid 4th issue in production unlike anything we’ve yet attempted.

We’ve got an incredible group of brilliant, self-motivated contributors working with us, and our cherished readership has proved itself time and time again to be as passionately in love with fringe media and alternative culture as we are. We’re a community. You know, we might even be some sort of post-nuclear, pre-singularity extended family.

This place is proof that a small, close-knit, somewhat green group of folks can saddle up and ride to all kinds of wonderful places. Thank you, all of you, for joining us. We’re in for the long haul, and we can’t wait to see where this journey takes us next.

As many of you may be aware, tomorrow is Halloween, that magical day of the year where children are obligated to dress up in costume and gorge themselves on candy and where adult women are likewise, it seems, obligated to dress up like trollops. It is to the credit of the costume industry that they have managed to produce sexy derivations of almost every character type. I fully expect to see a salacious Mr. Belvedere walking the street this year; pinched and pushed cleavage heaving beneath a dapper moustache. That is neither here, nor there. The FAM is not so much interested in near nude women running through the streets in the guise of 80s TV stars unless, of course, it is part of an overarching thematic element. So let us get on with it.

Today’s FAM continues last week’s indecisiveness and results in a Double Feature, comprised of two classic and time-tested horror movies: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist both based on novels, by Stephen King and William Peter Blatty, respectively. These two are well trod ground, and if you have never seen them you are, I would say, in the minority. In that regard, I doubt I will be able to say anything about these two films that has not already been said, both of their corpses being well and truly picked over.

This is the sort of thing that YouTube was seemingly made for. User knoertz takes the mid-nineties Quentin Tarantino, pop-culture touchstone Pulp Fiction and chops and slices, copies and pastes it into a rhythmic audio/visual magnum opus. A cut-up of a cut-up. William S. Burroughs would approve.

It’s been what, a couple weeks since we last mentioned how fantastic Archive.org is? Just in time for Halloween, here’s another choice bit o’ public domain from their vaults:

Click Teh Debbil (performed by Häxan director Benjamin Christensen himself!) to be taken to the downloading page.

Häxan (a.k.a. The Witches or Witchcraft Through The Ages) is a lavishly strange Swedish/Danish silent film which, upon its release in 1922, received critical acclaim in its homeland and moral outrage just about everyone else, thanks to the many graphic depictions of nudity, torture and sexual depravity. Yum! An inspired mixture of documentary and lurid dramatization, it wouldn’t be too far off the mark to name Häxan as one of cinema’s first “shockumentaries”.

For all its butts and boobies and devils, Häxan is actually quite a rational study of how superstition and medieval ignorance of mental illness led to the the hysteria of the European witch hunts. Director and writer Benjamin Christensen plotted much of the film around his personal study and criticism of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century German guide for inquisitors. You can see echoes of Christensen’s blunt, cavalier, often darkly humorous first-person narrative style in the documentaries of Werner Herzog. Luis Buñuel applauded its fractured “WTF is going on” cue-less edits.

In addition to being a bit of a mindfuck, much of the film’s imagery is just drop dead stunningly beautiful. From the Criterion release feature notes:

Under any title and with any modifications, Häxan endures because of Christensen’s tremendous skill with lighting, staging, and varying of shot scale. The word “painterly” comes to mind in watching Christensen’s ingeniously constructed shots, but it is inadequate to evoke the fascination the film exerts through its patterns of movement and its narrative disjunctions. Christensen is at once painter, historian, social critic, and a highly self-conscious filmmaker. His world comes alive as few attempts to recreate the past on film have.

Apparently, there was a version released in 1967 that featured a narration by William S. Burroughs and a jazzy score led by percussionist Daniel Humair and featuring violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. Any of you guys happen to have a copy of that?

Um. Remember not too long ago when I was going on about how edgy and alt Nutella is, sildenafil and asserting that peanut butter is boring by comparison?

I take it all back:

When Smuckers met Olivier de Sagazan.

The Skinemax-worthy soundtrack makes this infinitely more disturbing. Not to mention the plastic wrap.

Via our beloved Siege, whose curatorial instincts sometimes jump the track from sharing sublime beauty to just wanting us all to cry and punch ourselves repeatedly in the netherbits until they shrivel up and fall off. (He has proven this on multiple occasions.)

I don’t like robots; not one bit. This is because they’re all secretly mechanical murder machines many of whom stand fully, blank-eyed and mouth agape, within the Uncanny Valley; a mere stone’s throw from the Creepy Sex Doll Meadow. This is all well-trod ground; my feelings on robots being spelled out in no uncertain terms on this site.

Which is why these images by Brandon Jan Blommaert depicting lumbering colossi, their bodies comprised of recycled refuse, devastating the countryside are so terrifying. For me these are not the fanciful musings of an, but a probable reality, a portent of things to come; one that I live in fear of every minute of my life. These are the monsters that haunt my nightmares; composting the human race into oblivion.

via Bioephemera

Various works by sculptor John T. Unger.

John T. Unger is a fabulously inventive artist, environmentalist, writer, small business owner and the creator of copyrighted sculptural Artisanal Firebowls. He crafts his wares with primarily recycled or re-used materials, designing for permanency and functionality. His work has been featured on Etsy, BoingBoing, Neatorama, and by Craft Magazine, Variety and VenusZine, to name only a few.

Right now Unger’s mired in what he has dryly referred to as “an unwanted education in copyright law” and boy, does it sound like FUN!  Unger, who obtained legal copyright a while back to protect his original sculptures from piracy, says a man by the name of Rick Wittrig, owner of FirePitArt.com, has not only begun manufacturing and selling products which are extremely similar to Unger’s, but has even gone so far as to bring a federal lawsuit against Unger to have the copyrights for Unger’s own original artwork overturned.

Repeating for emphasis: Unger is being copyright-sued by a guy who makes knockoffs of his own work. Wooo!

Fire bowl, mask, and “fire imp” figurines by John T. Unger.

Attempts at settlement have failed. Unger, who has already spent $50,000 fighting against Wittrig, says that “seeking a judicial ruling in federal court will cost more than any artist or small business can afford on its own”, yet the lawsuit continues to move forward. Apparently, Wittrig has money to burn, so to speak. Unger isn’t taking it lying down:

A life in the arts is all I have ever really wanted. After more than 20 years of working towards that goal I have achieved success… It isn’t easy to make it as an artist and I didn’t have a lot of initial support. When I started my art business as a full time occupation I was homeless, $20,000 in debt, and had few tools but a laptop. I joke that “I did it with nothing, because nothing is free,” but there’s truth in this… I built what I have now from the ground up because I was passionate enough to keep doing the work no matter what else happened.

I don’t understand why a person would fight as hard as Mr. Wittrig has to profit from the work of another. It baffles me because I have devoted my life to making things which are unique and to marketing them as unique items crafted from a detailed personal philosophy. I don’t view original artwork as a commodity. I have no interest in imitation. If he had spent the time, energy and money that has gone into this lawsuit on designing original work, with its own story and its own unique appeal there would be plenty of room for both of us to succeed on our own merits.

Guys, I realize it’s important to pick one’s battles carefully in life. This might seem like an oddly piddling skirmish for me to throw in on, but honestly, supporting an artist like Unger is at the heart of why I got involved in an online community like Coilhouse in the first place.

If Wittrig wins by outspending, Unger could lose everything. Not just the rights to his own designs, but his house and his studio as well… basically everything he’s been working toward for roughly a decade. But at the heart of it, this is not about financial loss or gain. This is about not letting a bully with a big wallet ruin a truly creative person’s reputation and credibility. When basic protections like these are overturned, it weakens the law for all artists.

We can help: spread the word and if you can afford to, donate a buck or two to Unger’s defense fund. If you have a bit more spending money on hand, check out his incredible, lovingly made fire pits or other pieces– the integrity and beauty of Unger’s work speaks for him better than any press release ever could.