Via the most brutal and unrelenting Ben Catmull. \m/
If a Speedo-wearing, paddle-wagging, KVLT AS FUCK individual and his demonic friend headbang in the forest, does it make a sound? Apparently not, save for the mesmerizing voosh voosh voosh of dewy black metal tresses sluicing through crisp mountain air (and some Attila-worthy bellowing at the very end, there).
Canadian YouTube user and Dark Overlord of the Perplexing Non SequiTORRR, esy87, explains: “the music is coming from a headset close to us but the camera hasnt picked it up. for natural perservation of the vid we didnt edit it to put the song on it, but for ppl interested it was ‘Decade of Therion‘ from Behemoth.”
Ah. Yes. That explains everything. Except the banana hammock. But in any case, well done, good sirs. I’d throw you some horns, but I’m still doubled over in hysterics.
Everyone say hello to Angeliska Polacheck from Austin, Texas! (And keep an eye out for her sartorial luminosity in an upcoming edition of our Style Vanguard series.) Angel attended SXSW earlier this year to cover some of the festival’s more enchanting performers for Coilhouse. First up, an interview with Au Revoir Simone.
A.R.S. in Austin, TX for SXSW, 2009. Photo by Angeliska Polacheck.
The keyboard-playing trio Au Revoir Simone makes dreamy, lo-fi electro-pop music with wistful lyrics and dulcet harmonies that Spin Magazine aptly describes as “make-out music for your inner android”. The band’s name is a line from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which makes them even more lovable! Heather D’Angelo, Erika Forster and Annie Hart have been together since 2003, recorded three albums, and recently completed tours with Air, We Are Scientists and Peter, Bjorn and John. Their latest album, Still Night, Still Bright, is the perfect late night/early morning soundtrack, filled with introspective melodies guaranteed to soothe a buzzing brain or keep one company at sunrise.
Chatting with the girls during SXSW last March, I was utterly charmed by their sweetness. Despite having played a whirlwind of shows over a handful of days during the festival (the Moshi Moshi Records showcase, the Brooklyn Vegan & Agency Group showcase and to a packed rooftop at Maggie Mae’s) they were remarkably serene. Peaceful respite from the hubbub was found in a hedge-maze on the haunted grounds of the French Legation, where we discussed kindred spirits, darkness, haircuts, and David Lynch.
A.R.S. press packet photo. Photographer unknown.
Coilhouse: I’ve been listening to your new album Still Night, Still Light a lot lately, and have fallen in love with it. What’s the title about?
Erika: We just came up with it in our practice space. We were asking ourselves, “What are these songs to us?” and we thought about the feeling of 5am, and the sort of clarity that happens when everything is quiet around you, and the stillness. It was free association, and just yelling out words in the practice space. Pretty much everything happens that way for us –our band name, our song titles– everything always happens that way, where we just kind of throw stuff out. We look around at each other and as soon as we’re all smiling, we know we’ve found the winner!
Heather: It’s hard enough to get two people to agree on something, so getting three people to agree… it’s never a fight, but if somebody’s like “hmmm” then you don’t feel as good about it.
In under the wire, we’d like to wish the incomparable Lene Lovich a very happy birthday! The New Wave/Death Disco diva was born on March 30th in 1949. At some point when we’re not all scrambling to meet deadlines, this virtuosa deserves a big, juicy feature on Coilhouse. We’ll get ‘er done, promise.
For now, here’s the “Bird Song” video, feauring Lovich in all her eye-popping, spookylicious glory:
Kermit coat by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, “ready-to-wear” outfit by Lie Sang Bong. Below: Pepi’s-inspired hair action by fashion students from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana.
NBC has pulled together a lovely gallery consisting of 100 crisp, large-sized images from various recent fashion shows, titled: “Would You Wear It?” I love finding outlandish new designs, but quickly tire of sifting through hundreds of dull runway photos on places like Style.com in order to find them. So these kind of galleries - which usually have names like “Looks You Won’t Be Caught Dead In” - are extremely helpful. All the images in this post are from the NBC gallery except for the muppet one - that I found here. I also enjoyed NBC’s crystal-clear Gaultier and McQueen galleries. I’d seen photos of both these collections before, but the photography here is the best. The makeup in the McQueen collection is terrifying!
Uber-hot mask by Lydia Delgado. Imagine wearing that with these shoes! And nothing else.
Not like that, you perverts (though, I admit, she is my type). But here’s a photo I took of my beautiful Coilhouse co-editor Meredith Yayanos, which I’ve been dying to post for quite some time. We did this shoot back in December, and it was pretty much my only big shoot of 2008. We did two looks that day, light and dark. Above is Angelic Mer, but there’s also the more sinister Rocky Horror-meets-Caligari Mer (”Mergenta Mernau”), which you may have seen before on my site, her Flickr or via Warren Ellis (drink up, bitches!). Note the necklace in this picture; Mer made it herself out of keys that she’s been collecting all her life (here it is, up close). Mer did her own makeup, the hair here was done by the inimitable Holly Jones - who also did the styling for our Issue 02 cover - and the ruffalicious garment was styled by Mildred.
Mer is a total chameleon. I’ve done a lot of shoots in my life, and it’s hard even for me to believe that these two pictures of the same person were done literally within an hour of each other:
There will probably be more from the white set on Mer’s Flickr on the days to come. Stay tuned!
Revelation du jour: as much as I adore all things Ye Olde (read: stained, blanched, sepia-tinted, distressed, Dover-collagey… or just plain black) and will undoubtedly continue to incorporate time-honored neo-Victorian aesthetics into my decor and wardrobe, an internal plate has shifted. Lately I’m finding myself –possibly for the first time since I was a toddler cutting my teeth on primary-colored Legos and rubber balls– infected by an entirely different strain of retro: mod-futurism.
Rest assured, no one’s about to run out and buy some garish, orange one-piece pantsuit (though I’ll freely admit to a burgeoning obsession with the OVALIA “Egg Chair”). What I am doing is poring over every last Peggy Moffitt/Rudi Gernreich photo book I can find. Via FIDM:
Hers is the face that launched a thousand ripples through the fashion world when she wore the world’s first topless bathing suit. “Designer of the future” Rudi Gernreich considered Peggy Moffitt to be his muse and model of choice for his controversial designs. With her Kabuki-inspired face painting, Peggy created her own unique look in the Sixties. Gernreich collaborated with super hair stylist Vidal Sassoon to create Peggy’s trademark hairstyle. He gave her a short helmet haircut, with precise geometric bangs cut right to her eyebrows. She also created her own makeup style with heavy black and white eyeliner and long false eyelashes to exaggerate her huge dark eyes. She took the term “strike a pose” very seriously in front of the camera. She made Gernreich’s clothes all the more extreme with her striking presence.
Peggy Moffitt is an icon and innovator of fashion who didn’t just wear designs, she inspired them. Even super sixties model Twiggy said, “She taught me how much more a model puts in her work than just a pretty face.”
A few of those frocks look hideously dated now, but more often than not, Gernreich’s colorful, daring designs read to me like peals of laughter in a musty tomb. And Moffitt always looks smashing; an updated technicolor incarnation of Lulu Brooks; fearless and versatile. I don’t know that 95% of these pieces are something I would ever want wear, but they sure do make me happy.
Click below for more smile-inducing images of the Muse of Mod after the jump.
Dontcha love it when we get it right? I love high-budget, haute-goth fashion editorials and seeing big-name designers go dark on the runway, but there’s something especially satisfying about seeing designers “of the scene” really pull off something spectacular from start to finish, from garment to finished photograph. It’s a pleasure when designers not only produce gorgeous garments, but really get involved in presenting them in a certain way. In this case, Tea Bauer, creator of Slovenian fashion label Degenerotika (previously featured here), borrows a page from Vintage Vogue to give us the wonderfully classic, textured and geometric “when-Leeloo-met-Irving-Penn” fashion image above. I love everything about it! More large-size images from this series, after the jump.
Yellow hair? Yum! Coat’s not too shabby, either. Degenerotika is definitely one to watch.
Damn it, my laptop’s power supply cable just queefed and died. I’ll have to be extra quick with BTC this morning before my little external brain goes sreepytime. Luckily, I have just the thing cued up on my playlist:
Scrumptious promo image for HF’s first (and only) album, Battle Hymns For Children Singing. I can’t be the only one who imprinted on Kate Garner’s fashion designs. Stripey, stripey…
Ragamuffin pop duo Haysi Fantayzee *cough* formed in London in the early 80s. Typing out that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad name is like nails on a grammarian’s chalkboard, and the label ”Dickensian Hillbilly Rasta” makes me cry blood. Still, I love these guys with a deep, doofy devotion rivaled only by the size of my permaboner for fellow Brit-fops Adam Ant and Boy George.
Performed by Jeremiah Healy and Kate Garner, produced by Garner’s then-boyfriend Paul Caplin, Haysi Fantayzee’s *twitch* UK dance hit, “Shiny Shiny” is quite possibly the most chipper song about the apocalypse ever written (short of Fishbone’s “Party at Ground Zero”). May the antics of these two sexy human fraggles help you dance your cute petudies all the way to work, and may we all take to yelling “I’M A HOT RETARD…MARQUIS DE SADE” in public as often and as loudly as possible.
A couple more Haysi Fantayzee *gack* clips after the jump.
Meet the Beetles! The Bee-Gees! Adam Ant! W.A.S.P.! (sorry, x4.) Any entomologists in the Coilhouse? How ’bout Cosmetologists? Prints ads, via Munich ad agency Saint Elmo’s, for Amboss precision scissors. Showing an asymmetrical, Christian Siriano-like haircut on the wig of a bug is certainly a new visualization of the concept of precision. But, wigs on bugs? Putting aside the coolness/creepiness of this look for a sec, is this sell believable? I guess this is a trade campaign targeting pro stylists. Some of the Amboss shears have three finger holes, which maybe allows one to cut hair with more exactitude, I’m assuming. But, simply claiming the “precision” advantage so phantasmagorically may be enough to get a discerning (and offbeat) beautician to change brands. I love the imagery, doubt the selling power. But the last word is yours—what do you think? Two more hipster arthropod below (images via adsoftheworld).
Mario, a magician, and his assistant, Katie, have a 1920s-themed wedding. Kate wears a headband bought on Etsy. Photos by Daria Bishop. More images here.
In Junior High, our Health class had a unit about “basic adult life skills”: how to pay your bills, how your car works & why you really do need health insurance, despite the fact that you think you’re indestructible. One of the final projects we had that quarter was to budget out $30,000 in one of two ways: it was to be either your funds for one year of single living, or your budget to plan a wedding. The teachers assigned this without irony, and kids took it very seriously: it was not a lesson to show us how excessive the average wedding seems when you consider how else the money could be spent, but a lesson in how a proper American wedding was to be done. I was horrified. Years later, the following passage from The Commitment, Dan Savage’s gay-marriage memoir, summed up my perception of The Great American Wedding perfectly. In the scene below, Savage and his boyfriend Terry find themselves at a wedding expo:
Each and every vendor, from the lowliest florist to the highest-end caterer, was selling the fairy-tale princess wedding, the wedding that almost all straight girls grow up fantasizing about. For the women in the room, this was their one and only chance to be the princess in the Disney movie and they were determined not to fuck it up - and “it” refers to the ceremony and the reception, not the choice of a mate, as divorce rates would seem to indicate. (The wedding industry rakes in billions annually at a time when one out of every two marriages ends in divorce. Isn’t it about time some trial lawyers slapped Brides magazine, Vera Wang, and the rest of “big marriage” with a class action lawsuit modeled on the ones filed against big tobacco?)
Back to the boys: As we worked out way up and down the rows of vendors, I caught sight of the same guys again and again. Every time their fiancées or future mothers-in-law looked away, the boys would send out subtle distress signals, like a kidnap victim in a ransom video, blinking messages in Morse code. “Oh my god, what have I done?” As they were dragged from florist to caterer to limo, they looked like pawns. No, it was worse than that: They looked like hostages. No, worse still: they looked like afterthoughts. You don’t need men to have weddings! You need women and their mothers and sisters and their best friends and container ships full of machine-made lace from China and towering ice sculptures and enormous white canvas tents and karaoke machines and stretch Hummer limos and bouquets and chocolate fountains and cover bands and garter belts and veils and trains and engraved champagne glasses and sterling silver cake knives and on and on and on … you need a boy at a wedding like you need a stalk of celery in a Bloody Mary: It looks nice, and it makes things official, but it’s not crucial and probably wouldn’t be missed if you left it out. But a wedding - as currently understood, practiced, and marketed in America - without a bride? Unthinkable.
There are, of course, other ways to go, especially this year. More and more people are opting for crafty, creative weddings that either twist around the tired tiara-and-lace tropes, or toss them out altogether. And on the site Offbeat Bride, the Wedding Porn section chronicles the most unusual, inspiring weddings ever to be documented on the web.
