*I note, not without triumph, that Joshua and I shared a Chicago apartment during my one year of college. I got to watch him do this all the time.

Related post: Our Top 10 Most Preternaturally Beautiful Men

Post tags: Dance, End of the World, Faboo, Fetish, Personal Style, Punk, Sexuality, Silly-looking types, Stroke Material, Surreal, Testing your faith

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.

Read the rest of Jo Boobs Teaches the Va-Va Voom!

Post tags: Coilhouse, DIY, Dance, Fetish, Gender, Opinion, Politics, Punk, Queer, Sexuality, Stroke Material, Ye Olde

In the past, I’ve talked about how, with a few bright exceptions, the term “fetish photography” has pretty much become an embarrassment in the past decade, about the pornographic banality that eventually killed risk-taking publications like Skin Two. In an alternate universe, Skin Two No. 64 just came out, and this was the cover. Balanced, graphic, authoritative – not too dissimilar from Irving Penn and vintage Vogue. Image by Fräulein Ehrhardt, modeling by Koneko.

Post tags: Fetish, Magazines, Photography, Stroke Material

These Nomi-inspired pieces were created by Hungarian designer Eva Nyiri. Her first collection, a slick robotic-samuri affair titled “Black on Black,” sparked awe on blogs such as Haute Macabre earlier this year. Nyiri’s work represents a new breed of sophisticated, grownup-goth Eastern European fashion designers, along with fellow Hungarian Dora Mojzes (Nyiri’s best friend of 10 years), Serbian-based Marko Mitanovski, and Slovenian prodigy Tea Bauer.

This week, German photographer Madame Peripetie – who you may remember from the impossible-shoe Insectarium series – published her new collaboration with Nyiri, titled “Warriors in the Dark.” The full shoot consists of twelve images, and can be found in the latest issue of Nico Magazine. More images from the shoot can be seen at the Larapixie blog. Expect more great things from both Peripetie and Nyiri in 2010!

Post tags: Cyberpunk, Fashion, Fetish, Goth, Hair, Photography, Uber

This could be a readable art object in its own right.

Unlike previous e-tablets I’ve seen, the Mag+ technology would run articles in scrolls rather than as “flipped” pages (an abhorrent digital gimmick, if you ask me), and placed side-to-side in what BERG is calling “mountain range” format. It’s a far less literal translation. More organic. Readers page through by shifting focus, tapping pictures on the left of the screen to peruse content, then tapping text on the right to hone in. Magazines are still presented as compartmentalized issues, without that sense of incompleteness created by an infinite webfeed. It’s… cozy, somehow. BERG says:

It is, we hope, like stepping into a space for quiet reading. It’s pleasant to have an uncluttered space. Let the Web be the Web. But you can heat up the words and pics to share, comment, and to dig into supplementary material.

The design has an eye to how paper magazines can re-use their editorial work without having to drastically change their workflow or add new teams. Maybe if the form is clear enough, then every mag, no matter how niche, can look gorgeous [and] be super easy to understand.

Watch the demo; it’s fascinating. I’m eager to see where they go with this. There’s a discussion board over at Bonnier R&D Beta Lab, if you want to give them direct feedback.

Student team’s CG “Wall of Knowledge” design proposal for the Stockholm Library. (via)

On a related note, the press is saying 2010 will be “The Year of the E-Reader”. We’ve never really discussed e-books here, have we? What has your experience been –if any– with portable tablets like Kindle, Nook or the Sony Reader? So far, bibliophiles I know have had really strong and varied reactions to them. My more tech savvy  (also, dare I say, somewhat more jet-setty and affluent) friends have embraced the digital format as a new and freeing medium. Other, more traditional bookworms reel in horror from the concept of spending yet more time staring at a pixelated screen. [edit: although, as Mark Cook just pointed out in comments, ideally, an e-book screen does not look pixelated.]

Read the rest of MagPlus and the Impending “Year of the E-Reader”

Post tags: Fetish, Future, Magazines, Opinion, Technology, Testing your faith

Yes, I can still feel.

Monica Cook, a painter from Georgia, started out as a self-portraitist, moving on to other subjects several years into her career. Her earlier work is relatively sober, with solitary female figures peering and gesturing enigmatically from their canvas quarantines.  2009 marked a period of transformation for Monica, when she created a series of sexually-charged paintings for a solo show at Marcia Wood Gallery, titled Seeded and Soiled. Showcasing mostly-nude, slimy women in glimpses of bacchanalian orgies and a more commanding brush stroke, these paintings are in quite a contrast to the self-reflecting maidens of Cook’s earlier work.

Delightfully energetic and fetishistic, Seeded and Soiled covers everything from power exchange and food play to asphyxiation and foot fancy. Click the jump for two more pieces from the series and two bonus cephalo-phallic images by Monica Cook.

Read the rest of Monica Cook’s Food Fights

Post tags: Art, Cthulhu, Fetish, Flora & Fauna

This holiday season, if you see one Tumblr blog, make it Santa, NO!*

“An advent calendar of unpleasant Santa antics, with the occasional uplifting/confusing Santa action shot.”

“Y’know, for kids.”

*Brought to you by the producers of THE FIVE FISTINGS OF SCIENCE and HOBO DARKSEID: THE MUSICAL.

Post tags: End of the World, Fetish, Horror, Memes, Silly-looking types, Testing your faith, Why

It could be said that women have, perhaps, not had a great time of it fashion-wise. Throughout the centuries the industry of clothing the second sex has produced bizarre and painful contraptions to push, pinch, and bind women into various, and oftentimes decidedly unnatural, shapes. Whether it be the lotus foot or high heals, corsets or neck rings there is a strange and morbid thread woven through mankind’s history.

Intermixed with this sadistic molding of flesh there is, of course, a fair share of positively ridiculous inventions designed to make all of this that much easier on the modern woman. Nowhere is this better evidenced that in the Frederick’s of Hollywood ad from 1960. Designed to accentuate the all important Bust, it proposes a simple inflation device; meaning that it supposes that women would take to inflating their bras like life rafts or water wings every morning, devoting precious time to shaping their already heaving bosoms into keen edged, yet pillowy, missiles. Of course the side effect of this is looking like the young lady in the upper left corner; surprised and chagrined when her lactation fetishist husband discovers and misinterprets her morning routine.

via vintage_ads

Post tags: Conspiracy theories, Fashion, Fetish, Madness, Serious Business, Sexuality, Technology

We are going to get right into it because you and I both know that there are copies to be made and collated A.S.A.P. As in As Soon As Possible. As in by 10 minutes ago.

The Naked Lunch is a mess of a novel which, I suppose, was the point. William S. Burroughs’s most famous work, made possible by the cut-up technique he championed* was decried as pornographic when it was published in Paris in 1959. It wasn’t published in the U.S. until 1962 where an obscenity trial was held for it and it was banned by courts in Boston, though the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned that ban in 1966. What The Naked Lunch is about is hard to say. There is a man named William Lee. He is an Agent. There are strange, far off places with names like Interzone and Freeland. There is a lot of sex of many varieties, centipedes, drugs, pedophilia, and Mugwumps. Somewhere in all this is satire. Mostly, it is nonsense.

And yet, it is interesting nonsense which is the key to its enduring legacy and the reason that David Cronenberg decided to make a movie out of it in 1991 starring Peter Weller, pulling an excellent Burroughs imitation. Also mixed in there are Ian Holm, Judy Davis and a crazed cameo by Roy Scheider. Naked Lunch does its best to make some kind of narrative out of Uncle Bill’s series of vignettes by filling in many of the gaps with snippets taken from Burroughs’s life, meaning we get to meet fellow Beat writers Alan Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac in the forms of Bill’s friends Martin and Hank. It also features the infamous “William Tell routine” which resulted in Burroughs shooting and killing his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer Burroughs née Adams, in 1951 for which he would spend 13 days in jail and eventually receive a suspended 2 year sentence, in absentia.

Luckily, the novel contains a plethora of just the kind of body horror material that so appealed to Cronenberg before 2002’s Spider. Fluids, orifices, and gruesome transformations are in gleeful abundance and the end result is a film that keeps the hallucinatory vision of the novel while adding a narrative anchor to keep it from completely floating away. Also, it helped to insure that, should one ever have to name a foreign rent-boy for their novel, short story, movie, whatever, it will always be Kiki. Always.

*This is not true, as pointed out by Ben Morris in the comments. While it is considered part of Burroughs’s cut-up period it was not produced using this method, a method Burroughs became acquainted with only after the publication of “The Naked Lunch”, meaning that Burroughs required no special technique to write a confusing mess of a book.

Post tags: Books, Crackpot Visionary, Drugs, Fetish, Film, Horror, Madness, Queer, Sexuality, Surreal

fapfapfapfapfapfapfapfapfapOH GOOD MORNING COMRADES I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE.

What’s that? Oh, um. I was just, uh, playing with my tribble.

Ariana showed me the following picture last night…

…which spurred me to revisit that notorious “Closer” slashup, the gravitational pull of which sent me spiraling down a long, twisted YouTube wormhole of Trekkie aberration and depravity. Woooo!

To help you get your sluggish blood pumping, I’d like to share a bit of what I found with you. Just the tip…

…of the proverbial iceberg, I mean.

See also:

• Shatner of the Mount
• Nixa: The Kirk/Spock of Our Generation
• Belgian Trekkie Weirdness, Parts One & Two
• Infinite Khan (also, unsurprisingly, Ariana’s fault)

Read the rest of BTC: Kirk/Spock Morningwood Edition

Post tags: Better than coffee, Fetish, Geekdom, Sci-fi, Sexuality, Silly-looking types, Stroke Material, Television