In honor of Alex Chilton’s passing, we’d like to publish this article written by Joshua Ellis. This article appeared in Coilhouse Issue 04. You can also view a PDF of this article, by a strange twist of fate, over at the official Pixies website. It’s not an article about him, or The Pixies, per se. However, we’ve been wanting to publish this article on our blog for a while now, and this feels like the right moment to do so. This article speaks to the heart of why we’re all here together. What’s that song? / I’m in love / With that song…

I have this memory, and I’m not sure if it’s even real–or if it’s real, if it’s cobbled together from a half-dozen memories, fragments of things that happened over the course of a year or two that began the summer before I started high school, in 1991.

In this memory, I’m sitting in the basement of a girl named Sara, who pronounced her name “Saah-rah” and had purple hair and smoked clove cigarettes. I didn’t know Sara very well, but she was part of a small collective of freaks and weirdos that I had congregated to when I moved that summer from my ancestral home of north Texas to the small mountain town of Hamilton, Montana.

I’m sitting in Sara’s basement with my friends: Jeremy, the pretty guy who wears big black woolen overcoats and Jamaican tam o’ shanters in bright yellow and red and green, and seems to have unlimited access to the panties of every single girl in the Bitterroot Valley; Wade, who perpetually sports Birkenstock loafers that look like inflated bladders and drives a white Volkswagen Beetle covered in Grateful Dead stickers; Nate, who is one of the best guitarists I’ve ever met and is a huge aficionado of what will later come to be known as “extreme” sports, like bouncing down jagged rock faces on a beat-up skateboard deck; Sarah and her sister, Jenny, who are both fond of dropping random giggly non sequiturs into the conversation when stoned.

They’re all here, or some of them, or none of them. We’re sitting in the dark, talking bohemian bullshit, maybe smoking pot. It’s the kind of night that gets put on endless repeat when you’re young and strange and condemned to spend your adolescence in some far-flung desolate shithole like Hamilton, Montana, where you can’t lose yourself in the noise or happily become part of it, the way you can in New York or Seattle or Los Angeles or Chicago.

I’m not as cool as they are. I don’t know about cool shit. I’m just this uptight kid from J. R. Ewing Land who talks too much, still wears Bugle Boy button-downs and M. C. Hammer pants, and has only the dimmest idea that there’s some entire world out there of cool shit that I know nothing about. I own a Jane’s Addiction album and I’ve vaguely heard of the Sex Pistols.

And in this memory, Sara gets up and puts a cassette tape into her boom box. It’s a time traveler from 1984, beaten and scuffed, with the inevitable broken-off cassette door, so you just slap the tape in and hope that the tape head keeps it from falling out, which will cause the relentless motors to chew the tape and unspool it like the entrails of a slaughtered pig. Sara slaps the tape in and hits play.

This song comes out–a slow beat, big and echoing, then a bass playing eighth notes, and then a guitar, dreamy and vibrating. It sounds like what I imagine sunrise on a beach would be like, like what I imagine doing heroin would be like, like what I imagine sex in a dark room with that awesome girl you lie awake and dream of meeting would be like. I haven’t experienced any of these things–yet.

And then a voice, a high husky man’s voice, gentle over the music.

Cease to resist, given my good-byes
Drive my car into the o-o-sha-hah-hahn
You think I’m dead, but I sail away
On a wave of mutilation, wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Way-hey-hey-hey-have
Way-hey-hey-hey-have

“What is this?” I ask. Sara shrugs.

“It’s the Pixies,” she says in this memory that may not even be real, or maybe didn’t happen this way at all. “The song’s called ‘Wave of Mutilation.’ This is the U.K. Surf Mix. The real version is faster and louder.”

“I’ve never heard of them,” I said. “I’ve never heard this.”

“They’re pretty cool,” Sara says. “I think they’re from, like, Boston.”

I nod. Pretty cool.

Caitlin Hackett’s work is a lush stew of the beautiful, grotesque, and fantastic; pulling from a wide spectrum of myths and fairy tales. Mostly rendered with ballpoint pens and watercolors, it exhibits a level of detail that I find irresistible.

via Phantasmaphile

Issue 04, photographed by Siege

We’ve gotten a lot of emails asking where to find Issue 04 since it sold out in January on our site, so we’d like to make a courtesy post for all you guys who missed out. While it’s sold out forever here at our shop and at the Wildilocks shop (for Australian residents), and while we don’t see a reprint in the near future, you still have two options for getting this issue before it disappears:

1. Get thee to the nearest Borders or Barnes & Noble, where it should still be on the stands (but not for long). Here’s the complete list of stores that stock this issue. We suggest calling the stores in advance, because the copies might be gone. Or they might not! My parents just told me that the saw four of them sitting on a shelf at one in Jersey, for example.
2. Issue 04 does occasionally appear on Ebay. However, that’s not your cheapest option. We’ve seen their price on Ebay fluctuate between $20 and $30 in the past month. We have no control over who sells them on Ebay, or what they set their prices to. But for anyone interested, there’s currently one going for a “Buy It Now” price of $29.99 from seller viciouslyfun.

A lot of people have asked if future issues of Coilhouse are going to be stocked by independently-owned bookstores such as Trident in Boston, Quimby’s in Chicago, Atomic Books in Baltimore, and other mom-and-pop/campus bookshops. The answer is YES! You’ll be able to find our upcoming Issue 05 in all those stores, and we’ll post a list of them as we get nearer to the publication date.

On Monday, as promised, nine names were pulled out of a hat. The first three will receive a copy of It Books’ brand new Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated by Camille Rose Garcia, the second three will get a limited edition lithograph and the final three, a tote bag. If your name didn’t get pulled, the book can still be yours – it’s available online, here.

For those curious about the raffle process, it was fairly simple. I pasted the comments from our post into a document, removing comments from staff, double comments and comments from ineligible folks, printed the document and then cut it up, comment by comment. The separated answers we placed into an actual hat, and voila!

I hoped the winners would be announced on Monday, but we had to confirm everyone’s US and Canadian residence first, which took a little longer than anticipated. Without further ado, drum roll, please!

Book
Ed Autumn
Sarah Obscura
Evv

Lithograph
Whittles
Chocklit
Babs Noir

Tote
Vulgaire Turpentine
Lauren
Allie

Amy Stein’s photography is stuck somewhere between found and posed. Her subjects, no doubt interrupted while going about their routine, are nevertheless mugging for the camera, that wonderful grain giving each image the quality of a item found in a box at a garage sail. They occupy that perfect intersection between real and manufactured that only photography seems to be comfortable with; and so perfectly framed, so delightfully exacting, that they almost cannot fail to charm the viewer.

Back around the time of Issue 03, we launched the Small Business Advertising Program to create affordable ad space for indie companies in the print version of Coilhouse. By the time Issue 04 rolled around, the number of advertisers had grown significantly – by this time, we had record labels, jewelry and clothing designers, sculptors, other magazines, web hosts, toy makers and graphic designers advertising in our pages. Click here to see them all. With editorial duties taking up more and more of our time as the weeks go by, the moment has come for us to seek help with the advertising side of running the magazine. We’re looking to hire an Ad Manager for our Small Business Advertising Program, starting with Coilhouse Magazine #05… and possibly subsequent issues.

Full details after the jump!

Quickly! A sneak peek of some (very happy, glowy) people we’ll be featuring in Issue #05:

photo credit: Allan Amato/Coilhouse

(And everybody goes “AWWWWWWW.”)

So far, 2010 has indeed been a happy nude year for musician Amanda Palmer and her beau, author Neil Gaiman. On New Year’s Eve, Amanda joined the Boston Pops Orchestra for the second year running to perform both Dresden Dolls and solo material (as well as passionately ravish Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1), and at some point during the course of the night, Neil proposed. They publicly announced their engagement on January 15th. A day later, the lovebirds met up with our wondrous Mister Allan Amato in NYC, who took these photos for an upcoming Coilhouse Magazine feature on their creative life together. They like that top portrait so much, they’re using it as their official engagement press photo. Yay!

photo credit: Allan Amato/Coilhouse

At 4am the next morning, they boarded a plane to LA and went directly to the Golden Globes, where, as the Huffington Post put it, Amanda “immediately became the most interesting thing at the awards.” (Heeee hee hee hee hee. Some things never change.) Congratulations, you two.

________________________________________________________

So, hey… things are kind of chaotic around here for the next few days, owing to the Whitechapel residency and all of us juggling multiple balls. Please forgive me for consolidating the following announcement with the Gaimanda Impending Nuptials Declaration, but my co-editors and I would also like to mention that Coilhouse Issue #04 has OFFICIALLY SOLD OUT in the online store.

Wow. It’s been what, a month?! We’re floored. Thank you for your overwhelming support and patronage! For those of you (in the States, at least) who missed the cutoff, fret not. There are still copies available in select Barnes & Noble stores across the country. Full list of stores here. Just be sure to call ahead to reserve your copy. There’s also Meltdown Comics in LA, Wildilocks in Australia, and… well… me in New Zealand. (Kiwis, just pipe up in comments and I’ll arrange to get your info.)

Onward and upward, comrades! Please do drop by the Whitechapel thread if you get the chance. There’s some really lively discussion happening over there, and we’d love to see more of our beloved blog readers chime in.

Film courtesy of Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers.

All but her belly buried in the floor;
And the lewd trounce of a final muted beat!
We flee her spasm through a fleshless door…
Then you, the burlesque of our lust — and faith,
Lug us back lifeward — bone by infant bone.
– Hart Crane, “National Winter Garden,” (1930)

“Jo Boobs” Weldon is Headmistress of The New York School of Burlesque, whose home at The Slipper Room is just a few blocks from where Lydia Thompson’s “London Blondes” brought burlesque to America and a stone’s throw from where Minsky’s original National Winter Garden made burlesque part of the American vernacular. Minsky’s notoriously established Gypsy Rose Lee as an icon synonymous with striptease, and launched the careers of Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers and Robert Alda before being closed in the name of public morality.

Houston Street Burlesque by Mabel Dwight (1928)

Is burlesque – a word which refers to turning things upside down – still able to subvert morals and mores? In a popular culture where the use of sexuality to sell consumer goods is banal, pornography of nearly every stripe is freely and instantly available, and sympathetic gay and lesbian characters are commonplace, is the self-conscious performance of gender merely campy fun or does it still have a liberating capacity? Can sex work, titillation, gender play and masturbation undermine heterosexual monogamy? Whose moralities and identities might they challenge?

Catherine MacKinnon argues that sexualized depictions of women in patriarchal societies reinforce misogyny to the point of constituting a form of violence. Do sexualized performances by women lead to their individual and collective debasement? Is stripping a phenomenon where women who appeal most to men are degraded whereas burlesque liberates women who stand outside the norms of beauty as prescribed by male desire? Considering stripping and prostitution, I ask whether everyone sells their bodies at every job? Further, when men pay a high premium to be with a woman or just to look at one, whose body is exploited? More specifically, does it make sense to import 20th century standards of judgment to a 21st century United States whose educational system produces more female post-graduates than male and whose career women earn 94.2% of the income of their male counterparts? Despite shifts in income and status, why do so few straight males study burlesque or work as strippers?

Jo Boobs and I met at the basement headquarters of her school on the coldest evening in recent years to explore questions of gender, activism, and whether she and her ilk are gender traitors or gender busters. She even stripped down to fighting gear for an intimate performance caught by our unblinking digital eyeball. (See above!) In June 2010, Jo will publish The Pocket Book of Burlesque (with a forward by Margaret Cho), a volume whose slender design can slip under the inspector’s prying gaze. The New York School of Burlesque is in sympathetic affiliation with Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque in Seattle and Michelle L’Amour’s Burlesque Finishing School in Chicago as well as programs in Washington, D.C and elsewhere. When will someone open a campus in Tehran?

COILHOUSE: How does burlesque differ from stripping?
JO BOOBS: To understand the difference, look at it from the audience’s point of view. If someone goes to a strip joint, they usually go in whenever they want, they pick the performer they want, they negotiate how they interact with them, they interact one-on-one, and they leave. When they go to a burlesque show, the show starts at a [predetermined] time, they pay a cover (not the performers), they watch the show, there isn’t usually any one-on-one interaction, and they leave when the performance is over.

Kurt Komoda’s editor illustration for Issue 04 of Coilhouse. Tea and sympathy (and tentacles). Arsenic and old lace (and absinthe). Information, inspiration, infection!

Morning, sinners! That’s Warren’s line, but then it’s a Warren kind of morning (the kind of morning that all Coilhouse readers should begin with a bottle of whiskey in hand.) Because this morning, and all week, we’re taking your questions and answers over on Whitechapel! Step right up, ask us anything your heart desires. There are a lot of different beakers bubbling in the CH lab that we probably can’t discuss directly… but we can hint! And we can certainly get into more general chat: Coilhouse’s history, our personal inspirations, magazine theory, internet curating, etc. We’re basically game to discuss whatever parts of the process you’d like to hear more about, and we’d love to ask you some questions as well! What periodicals do you read? What you think the future holds for mainstream print? For indie mags? For tastemaking blogs? For fringe/alternative culture in general? If you’re a Coilhouse reader, what subject matter would you be interested in seeing more of in our future issues? Down the rabbit hole we go. Let the Coilhouse/Whitechapel tea party commence!

Additionally, this a courtesy post is to let all readers know that Issue 04 is almost gone. Issue 03 is walking out the door pretty fast as well (we had more 03’s in stock originally), but Issue 04 disappeared at an alarming pace that even we weren’t prepared for. 800 copies are gone since we put it up on sale on December 21, and 200 copies remain (with about as many copies left of Issue 03). So for any stragglers who were on the fence about buying one or both issues, now’s the time. Now or never, because we’re not in the position to reprint. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. This one’s pretty special to us, so we hope you get a copy. You can pick it up in our online store, at Wildilocks in Australia, Barnes & Noble and Borders in the US, and Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles. An exact list of store locations will be posted today or tomorrow.

Top row: Caryn Drexl, Elle Moss, Katie West. Middle row: Hilary McHone, Diana Lemieux, Zoetica Ebb. Bottom row: Laura Kicey, Natalie Dybisz, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir.

Finally, there’s a self-portrait competition in the last days of voting with several members of the extended Coilhouse family in the running, as well as some talented folks we’ve not encountered before. The artist who wins the popular vote will receive a $1,000, and the grand prize is a residency in Manhattan. We’d like to urge you to support an artist by taking the time to view and vote for their portfolio. The contest’s site unhelpfully does not list a guide to the portfolios entered, so we’ve selected a few artists who we believe deserve your time. Photographers Caryn Drexl, Laura Kicey and Katie West should be familiar to anyone who’s read the blog long enough; our articles about their work appear at the bottom of this post. Additionally, our very own Zoetica has entered the contest with several phantasmagorical interpretations of reality. Other photographers whose work we found fascinating include Elle Moss, Hilary McHone, Diana Lemieux, Natalie Dybisz, and Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir. This list is by no means exhaustive, so if there are other entrants we should be aware of, please let us know in the comments!

On a related note:

• In Caryn Drexl’s Skin
• Low Self-Esteem: Self-Portraits by Katie West
• Laura Kicey: Lonelyhearths and Living Rooms
• Five Self-Portrait Artists You Should Know
• Setting Sail in the Flickr Ocean: Vorfas
• Gala Darling Interviews Coilhouse

FINALLY. Issue #04 of Coilhouse has taken corporeal form.

It’s haunted, you know. Or maybe it’s possessed. Or it could be we’ve got a grimoire on our hands.

All we know is, at some point during our editorial process—which normally involves very little cauldron-stirring or eye of newt, despite whatever “coven” rumors you may have heard—#04 took on a life of its own, and has since become a small, seething portal of the uncanny. It’s all a bit magic-with-a-k. We may giggle and wink (“O R’LYEH? IA, R’LYEH!”), but that doesn’t change the fact that these pages are spellbound. You will read of channeling and scrying, of shades and shamans, and phantoms both fabricated and inexplicable. You will meet reluctant oracles, occultists, and ghosts from the past.

Issue 04 is now available in our shop. For a limited time, you can purchase Issues 03 + 04 together for a discount price of $23! Click here to buy. Without further ado, the contents of Issue 04, below:

INFORM
This issue’s Inform/Inspire/Infect section headers, crafted by Zoetica, are all about communing with animal spirits. Below: the INFORM header, titled Stork Whispers. The section header below also contains almost all the design motifs that creative director Courtney Riot conjured throughout the issue: smoke, burn holes, aged paper and tattered lace.

The Tarnished Beauties of Blackwell, Oklahoma
In mid 2008, we were captivated by the imagery Meredith Yayanos shared in a post describing her visit to an obscure, careworn prairie museum in a small Oklahoma town. More recently, Coilhouse enlisted one of our wonderful readers, Joseph A. Holsten, to return to The White Pavilion, where he archived dozens of high res portraits of long-grown, long-dead children of pioneer America. They are reproduced here in an extended version of the original Blackwell photo essay.

Bernd Preiml’s Exquisite Apparitions
Bernd Preiml’s photographs describe a world filled with magic and mystery, often coupled with a disconcerting sense that sinister forces may be lurking. Through his dark and shining visions, he weaves haunting tales that encompass violence as well as transcendence, beauty as well as wrath. Interview by longtime Coilhouse co-conspirator, Jessica Joslin.

Children by the Millions Wait For Alex Chilton: A Fractured Memoir of the Counterculture
Joshua Ellis returns to Coilhouse with a whip-smart personal essay examining his experience with alternative culture. Beginning with an endearing description of adolescent initiation-by-music and ranting its way into present day’s monoculture, “Children by the Millions” is an incisive evaluation of the death of societal revolution in our “been there, done that” world. Josh draws parallels between counterculture and ancient mysticism, while eloquently articulating a premise that’s been gestating in all of our minds since we first started discussing the living death of alt culture here on Coilhouse.

Calaveras de Azucar
Courtesy of photographer Gayla Partridge comes this toothsome autumnal fashion editorial inspired by el Día de los Muertos, with a corresponding overview by Mer on the festival’s historical and cultural significance.

Hauntings: The Science of Ghosts
Earlier this year, our Manchester-based correspondent Mark Powell traveled to a “Science of Ghosts” conference in Edinburgh hosted by esteemed psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman and other leading experts. Mark shares what he learned about the history, pathology (and quackery) of hauntings and spiritualism. With fetching spirit photos, daguerrotypes, and other vintage ephemera provided by archivists Jack & Beverly Wilgus.

INSPIRE
Frog Prince

Kris Kuksi: Sculpting the Infinite
A substantial editorial featuring meticulous, hyper-detailed monuments to destruction sculpted by Missouri-born artist Kris Kuksi. In the coming days we’ll be posting an exclusive interview with Kris where he shares his thoughts on time, fixing humanity, and what might lie ahead. Introduction and interview by Ales Kot.

Still In The Cards: Alejandro Jodorowsky on King Shot, Comic Books and the Tarot De Marseilles
An informative, zany dialogue with one of modern cinema’s most iconoclastic masterminds, Alejandro Jodorowsky. The filmmaker who brought us The Holy Mountain, El Topo, and Santa Sangre speaks candidly about his past, present and future… as well as the roles that tarot, spirituality and comics have led in his more recent life. Article by Mark Powell.

Through the Mirror into the Forest: Kristamas Klousch
Our stunning cover girl’s self-portraiture explores a dark, kaleidoscopic array of facets; Kristamas is at once wild forest creature, fetish vixen, tousled witch, Lolita, courtesan, silent movie vamp and Voodoo priestess. Her ethereal photos race to capture each incarnation, just before the next comes out to play. Introduction by staffer Tanya Virodova.

Grant Morrison: Embracing the Apocalypse
Groundbreaking comic book writer Grant Morrison blows our minds with a massive ten-page interview that will gently squeeze your reality’s underbelly until you’re ready to take the future seriously. Grant sat down with Zoetica Ebb and Ales Kot for a three-hour talk covering everything from superheroes and interdimentional parasites to personal transformation and 2012. Featuring new portraits of Grant and his wife, Kristan, by Allan Amato.

Larkin Grimm: Advanced Shapeshifter
In a time when our culture seems to openly scorn –but secretly craves– magic, the musician Larkin Grimm is an unashamed and forthright power to be reckoned with. Interview by Coilhouse collaborator Angeliska Polacheck, as well as a review of the Musicka Mystica Maxima Festival curated by Grimm in NYC last fall.

INFECT
Snake Charmer

Brave Old World
A  collaboration between Chad Michael Ward and  Bad Charlotte, this editorial takes the gorgeous model out of time and space, into a gauzy netherworld. With wardrobe by Mother of London.

CB I Hate Perfume: The Story of an Olfactory Architect
Christopher Brosius has been called “The Willy Wonka of Perfume” and is renowned for his eccentricity and passionate standpoint when it comes to both the art and the industry of scent-building. An intimate and inspiring interview about his work and philosophy, conducted by Angeliska.

Print to Fit: Mavens of Meatcake
What self-respecting, spellbound witchy-pooh magazine would be complete without paper dolls by Dame Darcy?! Featuring beloved characters from the darling Dame’s legendary long-running comic book, Meatcake.