Robotic Lion & Warrior illustration by Greg Broadmore for Jess Nevins’ article in Issue 05.

Those of you who own Coilhouse Magazine Issues 03 and 05 will remember Jess Nevins’ pieces on Russian and Chinese pulp. You may have also seen Jess’ Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, his many comic book annotations, or his writing on IO9. As a librarian and author, Jess has an uncanny skill for unearthing rare gems from the realms of pulp and sci-fi, such as the world’s first lesbian science fiction novel (published in 1906), the first cyborg horror story (“The Steam Arm,” 1834), and steampunk poetry from 1867. Jess Nevins can give you the entire history of mad scientists in the industrial age, provide a thorough overview of genderbending in pulps, and hypothesize whether Cthulhu appears on a 300-year-old gravestone. In short, Jess Nevins is a kind of biblio-archaeologist, discovering and preserving beautiful relics from fictional ages past.

His latest endeavor focuses on superheroes. Specifically, superheroes from comics’ Golden Age, which lasted from 1935 to 1949. The project is called The Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes, and Jess is currently raising funds on Kickstarter to produce a book and a website (which will include a free download of the book’s manuscript) to catalogue 2000+ superheroes: everything from “floating eyeballs and centaurs” to “robot brains and super rabbits.” Jess needs to travel to Michigan State University in East Lansing to study up on all of these wondrous things, and estimates that it will take two weeks to get the research done. The money raised by Kickstart will go towards subsidizing Jess’ travel and building the site. The project may have hit its modest funding goal, but believe us, the bare minimum is never really enough. Plus, Kickstarter projects that raise substantially more than the required amount often have a way of evolving and deepening into even bigger, more beautiful work (for instance, Molly Crabapple’s Week in Hell or R. Stevens’ Diesel Sweeties e-book).

In celebration of Jess’ ambitious new project, we are releasing a full, free PDF of his article from Issue 05, titled “Sherlock Holmes vs. The Fox Woman: A Brief Tour of Chinese Pulp”. Lushly-illustrated by Greg Broadmore and Paul Tobin, the article provides a sweeping overview of Chinese Pulp from, from moon colonies to pirate queens. Enjoy!

The ghostly garment resembles magically symmetrical wisps of smoke curling around the model. Below, zip ties are used to create a striking crown of thorns.

These images are from a series called “LastBreathe” by fashion designer Robert Wun. A recent graduate of the University of the Arts in London, Wun creates textured, airy garments such as the ones pictured here. This series was photographed by Bobby Sham, and the model is Lauren H.

[via JUST_MONK3Y]

This beautiful, scary TED talk by Kevin Slavin discusses the power of phantom, unfathomable algorithms to alter human behavior and physically reshape the world that we live in.

Cue up the Pi soundtrack, sit back, and enjoy. [via raindrift]

Someone working on The Hunger Games really knew what they were doing! As Wired blogger Geeta Dayal points out, hidden in the middle of the film, there’s a rare, beautiful, raw experimental track titled “Sediment”.

The track was recorded by electronic music pioneer and computer scientist Laurie Spiegel in 1972. Appearing during the film’s cornucopia scene, “Sediment” is a 9-minute soundscape created using an ElectroComp 200 analog synthesizer, two tape decks, graphing paper and a ruler. It’s the perfect music for the tense, terrifying moment when the competition truly begins.

“The only way to mix was to play something live, where one deck was playing audio while the other deck was recording the other machine,” Spiegel told Wired in a phone interview. “You piled the tape hiss and noise for every generation you added.” Spiegel recorded the piece in a five-room apartment running on a 15-amp fuse, leading to technical difficulties when her appliances interfered with the recording. “When the refrigerator went on, half the oscillators dropped by a quarter tone…. I had to turn the refrigerator off, or it would ruin the take.”

Laurie Spiegel surrounded by her equipment in the 1970s. Photo by Stan Bratman

[more on Wired, via Geeta Dayal]

While most of Lado Alexi’s photography falls squarely in the realm of traditional, commercial fashion photography, a few of his photos are too magical not to share here. The character in the image above looks like an spellbound Russian princess, while the fetish gladiatrix below resembles a rendering or a sculpture more than a real person.

After the jump, a couple more of Alexi’s stranger photos from the series Fin de Siecle, Amazones, and Astronaut, including a priestess wearing a decrepit doll head, a blue-faced woman wearing Saran wrap, a colorful circus girl, and an astronaut resting in a mysterious room with red lanterns. Overall, the photos might be more compelling if the agency models didn’t all employ the same thousand-yard stare (and, in fact, if some of them weren’t agency models), but the colors are beautiful, the fashion is astonishing, and the makeup is very inspired.

[via Wicked Halo]

Adrienne Rich – a poet, essayist, and activist – died today at age 82 from complications of  rheumatoid arthritis. As Margalit Fox wrote in Rich’s New York Times obituary, “triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined … She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, did in prose.”

Unfortunately, like many other feminists from her era, Rich may have had her own blind spots when it came to gender identity. In The Transsexual Empire, an extremely hateful transphobic text from 1979 by Janice Raymond, she receives special thanks for reading the manuscript through all its stages and providing resources, creative criticism, and encouragement. However, years later, she’s thanked in FTM author Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors, and in Minnie Bruce Pratt’s S/He. It’s possible that her feelings towards transgender rights evolved, though there are no direct quotes to evidence this.

One of her best works is Diving into the Wreck - a truly weird story told by a lone explorer who goes deep underwater to discover something terrible. There are many interpretations: it’s a story about sex, self, mythos, and/or ego death. There’s a great reading of it by poet Anne Waldman.

Below is the third poem from her series Twenty-One Love Poems:

III

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we’re not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other life,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

Shien Lee. Styling by Vecona. Photo by Tina Cassati.

New blog alert!

New York-based artist/performer Shien Lee - who you’ll know as the fanciful designer of the anachronistic event Dances of Vice –  has launched a new blog, titled ”Not Your China Girl.” In Shien’s own words:

The title of the blog was conceived in response to the frequent catcalls I’d get on city streets, which include “China Girl”, “China Doll”, “Konnichiwa”, “Ni hao”, and “Geisha Girl”, among other terms associated with The Asian Mystique. This compelled me to examine the Orientalized and fetishized filter through which Westerners frequently view Asia—and Asian women in particular—which perpetuates a subconscious racism fueled by dehumanizing stereotypes. I wish to challenge the Occidental misperceptions about Asia that are based on mythologies and sexualized for the male imagination.

My aim is not to attack or destroy the fantasy of an exotic, romantic, and beautiful Orient, which many Asians, including myself, can and do appreciate. You’ll find that many of my photos are infused with romanticized Asian imagery; even Asians possess a fantasy of the grandeur of their own history, colored by art, images, and stories passed through time. But can a beautiful thing be detached from the social inferences governed by the male gaze? Yes, and no. To analyze a dream, a fantasy, or thing of beauty calls attention to its flaws, and takes away from its wonderful mystique. Nevertheless, it is imperative to acknowledge and understand the filters that contort our perspectives so that we can see ourselves and the world in which we live more clearly. My goal is to call attention to the issues of race and sex, fantasy and power in representations of Asian culture.

By simultaneously appreciating and examining lavish Orientalist imagery through a feminist lens, Shien tackles an interesting set of issues that often crop up in anachronistic/decadent movements. Within the steampunk subculture, questions are regularly raised about whether or not certain ideals ganked from the Victorian era have reinforced a colonialist narrative. In gothic/industrial spheres, conflicts often flare up around longstanding presumptions regarding whiteness (why has there never been a dark-skinned cover model in 12 years of Gothic Beauty? Why was Side-Line “stunned“, in 2010, by the black lead singer of O. Children?), misogyny (the phenomenon of Combichrist), and supremacism (the racist gray area that begins with Death in June).

Shien clearly cares very deeply about the world that she’s creating for herself and her friends – in the case of Dances of Vice, a world of cinched waists, powdered faces, and themes that reach into a deeply gendered past. Enough to ask: What’s really going on here? How can we be more self-aware about the motifs we’re playing with?  So far, the answers involve a romp through 1950s Rockabilly in China, 1920s Deco Japan, and a thoughtful post titled “On the Asian Fetish, Why Asian Women Date White Men, and the Remasculation of the Western Man“. Throw in some gorgeous Pinterest finds, and the blog becomes an addictive mix of analysis, pop culture, fashion, and art.

Congratulations on your new platform, Shien… we’ll be reading!

Man, do 2012′s Republican presidential hopefuls ever have a penchant for apocalyptic fiction! While Rick Perry fantasizes about Obama’s war on religion, (“the openly gay military hereby sentences you to re-education at Camp Kwanzaa!”) and Newt Gingrich speaks of colonizing the moon and pens alternate-history fiction in which Nazi Germany thrives (see also: “terrible sex scenes written by politicians”), Rick Santorum has just upped the ante.

This week, the Santorum camp released a chilling (read: hilarious) trailer for an eight-part series titled Obamaville. Rife with a combination of Silent Hill-like visuals, random stock imagery (meat grinders and babies!), and Obama/Ahmadinejad speech footage mashups, the 1-minute video closes with an ominous shot of the open road, with promises of more “coming soon.” YES PLEASE. It’s the perfect film to pair up with newly-released Iron Sky.

Matt Novak of Paleofuture has helpfully screen-captured and captioned the most striking images from the video. At time of writing, the video has 852 likes and 11,011 dislikes on YouTube. ”Santorumville” porn parody coming in 3… 2…

[via Matt Novak via William Gibson]

Last summer, photographer Abigail Amalton, who publishes moody, meditative images under the name The Silent Infinite, met artist Asha Beta (previously on Coilhouse) at the Coilhouse Black and White And Red All Over Ball in Brooklyn. The result was a series of photos titled “Immanence” and “To the Center Within“: a collaboration that explores personal mythology and self-transformation. With piercing assistance from Venus Pain, Asha and Abigail created a three-part sequence taking place outdoors, and a second shoot in the studio.

“We can use art for deep change – when we undertake the journey of individuation, we can move beyond survival needs and encounter truly beautiful territory,” writes Abigail in a description of this series. “These images remind me that I can always hold myself to my greatest possibilities, that I no longer need to pretend that the conventional is something I want in any form at all … what I want is real, deep, never-ending change. A feeling of the power of choice in creating reality. The second we free ourselves of the half-truth that we are bound to the organizational templates of society and culture is the precious moment we start to self-define and steer our own ship … Who knows where we will arrive?”

More images after the jump, and even more on Flickr and on Abigail’s site.

Artist Aubrey Learner‘s recent series of watercolor, graphite and ink drawings pair larvae and lace, scissors and satin, pollen and pins. As J. Schnabel of Blood Milk writes on Tumblr, “these drawings … make me want to bury my hands in dark soil. i’m especially interested in the tension of the sensual things we want against our body, the ribbons, the chamise, & the grotesque, yet intensely beautiful inclusion of the dark beetles & winged cicadas that make up these garments.”