Placid nuns with milky alien-beauty faces, glowing children with otherworldly skin conditions, and the most ordinary faces made strange by details such as a chalk-white complexion, a subtle change in proportions, overly-glassy eyes. These are the images of Russian artist Oleg Dou, who combines conventional photography with graphic rendering techniques to produce matching portraits of unsettling consistency.
Like many other good things, Oleg Dou’s art was introduced to me by Elegy Magazine. Elegy just released Issue 52, which features Alexander Hacke, Thurston Moore, Tim Burton/Johnny Depp, Nick Cave and Lisa Gerrard.
Her Modesty is a Muslim Fashion blog that will soon be a print magazine.
I’ve been reading Her Modesty, a Muslim women’s fashion blog. The project has a lot in common with Coilhouse: both Coilhouse and Her Modesty are blogs that will soon launch in print magazine format, both extoll the virtues of being covered vs. letting it all hang out (you may have noticed our obsession with covered necks, loosely-flowing clothes and total body coverage), and most importantly, both Her Modesty and Coilhouse are interested in the tenuous relationship between the “mainstream” and the “underground,” and where one stops and the other begins. They’re two different “undergrounds,” but the concerns are largely the same.
Primarily a fashion blog, Her Modesty’s main purpose is to display “how sisters can be covered but yet still feel good about themselves and how they look.” The blog author, Kima, obsessively catalogues her new favorite trends as inspired by street wear and the runway, follows the appearance of the hijab-inspired styles in Western fashion magazines, and offers readers tips on how to create the “modest version” of various popular styles. My favorite is this outfit, which in the author’s opinion walks the line, though her readers seem to love it.
Haute Hijab from the Her Modesty blog.
Kima’s writing tone reminds me of the sweet and upbeat Gala Darling, and similarly to Gala, Kima also challenges the readers by briging topics for discussion into the fashion mix. In one post, Kima posts a loose leopard-print D&G dress that resembles an abaya (the loose overgarment that’s worn by many Muslim women), and asks her readers, “would you rock it with a shiny red bag, black pumps, and a hijab?” In another post, Kima engages the readers in an interesting debate about the female “fashion police” in Iran. Similarly to my obsession with goths in TV commercials, there’s a post about a hijab-wearing girl in a Sunsilk TV ad. The most profound post, one where I almost felt like a voyeur when reading the impassioned comments, is the post where Kima asks readers if they’d still dress modestly if Allah didn’t will it.
But the best part are the hilarious Muslim Fashion Dont’s! Here they are, after the jump.
Thew new issue of Elegy is out! Actually, I think it’s more that the cover got leaked, which means that it’s about to come out. On the cover, a mask by Madame Khufu, as photographed by Spanish photographer Eccehomo.
Every time I get a new issue of Elegy, I mourn the fact that I’ve forgotten all my French. Luckily, every issue of Elegy is so packed with gorgeous full bleeds of photos and art from all over the world that even though I can’t understand a thing, the magazine is worth every penny. As Elegy’s main focus is music, each issue comes with a CD sampler; last issue, it included Neil Gaiman, Neubauten and Nurse with Wound.
Alyz Tale - Rédactrice en chef, photographer and muse
Shit, I loved that game! One of my happiest memories growing up was playing it with my dad. My favorite colors to play were black and green together; death and replenishment. I thought that red was for boneheads. I liked blue, but was never able to construct the kind of mindfuck blue decks that won you the game. And white was just… blah. Too pacifist. Green-white decks were for hippies. I remember liking artifacts; Magic was where I learned the word “ornithopter” from. Any time I opened a new pack, I prayed to find the coveted rare card Black Lotus; it would be like winning the lottery and I’d be filthy rich. I loved the artwork, which looks more crude to me now than I remember it being. Phil Foglio and Quinton Hoover were my favorite artists.
While I was a card-flopper, I was never a dice-chucker. I never learned how to play RPG’s because I didn’t know anybody else who played. But at the time, tons of card games were coming out right and left; games inspired by Lovecraft like Call of Cthulhu, the Illuminati card game inspired by Robert Anton Wilson, and the Netrunner game inspired by (ripped off without credit, I heard?) the work of William Gibson. This was my official exposure to all these artists and others, making Magic: The Gathering the official source of What Made Me Weird. My dad got me subscriptions to Scrye and Inquest, which had interviews with people like Clive Barker and Brom. In every issue of Scrye, they printed imaginary cards that readers made up, and I even remember submitting some of my own.
Reader Jarem Morrow has sent over a link to an interesting little community on LJ called design_history. A must for any design junkie! In particular, there’s an interesting post about an all-but-forgotten art magazine from Germany called Die Schönheit (Beauty). Poster Nekokaiju on the community has unearthed some covers, and has this to say:
“Die Schönheit was a German magazine that ran through the years 1902-1936. It dealt mainly with the emerging Nacktkultur, Nudist movement. But also featured articles on modern artists, science fiction and sexual aids. It became well known for it’s racy classifieds section. Needless to say, it didn’t last too long after the rise of Nazi Germany.” I couldn’t find much more information on it online, but a book search reveals that Die Schönheit was also one of the first to publish the work of Erich Maria Remarque.
The last issue of Mondo 2000, featuring Nina Hagen on the cover.
I’m obsessed with dead magazines, especially ones that crossed over into the mainstream. The history of such magazines often sounds like a VH-1 Behind the Music special; first the group’s idealistic creation rises to fame on account of its originality, then comes the inevitable collapse due to in-fighting under the conflicting pressures of appeasing a wider audience, a set of advertisers and the project’s own artistic aims. More often then not, the problem is simply that such a magazine is way ahead of its time. This was the case with Mondo 2000, yet I’m grateful that it existed precisely when it did.
So, what made Mondo 2000 so special? It was, in my opinion, the best alternative culture magazine that America ever had. They wrote about smart drugs, brain implants, virtual reality, cyberpunk, Cthulhupunk and cryogenics. They covered Laibach and Lydia Lunch in the same issue. The pantheon of writers was a force to be reckoned with: Bruce Sterling, Robert Anton Wilson, and William Gibson all lent their talents, and there was even a Burroughs vs. Leary interview face-off. Then there was the famous U2-Negativland interview, in which Negativland, disguised as reporters, interviewed U2 into a corner to reveal the band’s hypocrisy over their lawsuit against Negativland over sampling. All in all, the magazine took risks. “The good dream for me and Mondo,” said editor R.U. Sirius in an interview with Purple Prose, “is overcoming the limits of biology without necessarily leaving sensuality or sexuality behind.” Issue after issue, Mondo 2000 threw a sexy dystopian bash and invited the decade’s best thinkers.
