By way of Boing Boing Gadgets, this phone is your “your one-stop shop for blackface, cosplay, fur and sex changes”:

Complete with a behind-the-scenes on YouTube.

Now, wouldn’t it be interesting if this ad were actually targeted towards the American audience, and engineered to spread virally through the tried-and-true “check out this weird Japanese shit” method? One ad, millions of hits, and not a single American TV spot booked. Smart, Sony Ericsson. Now we all think your phone is so futuristic. Where’s the model that turns me into a holographic vending machine?

“Pardon! Bonjour! Fromage!” (photo by Rafe Baron.)

One balmy summer’s eve a couple years ago, Herr Titler came into my life. I was standing in the wings of an ancient Brooklyn theater, reeling in the chaos of Amanda Palmer’s boisterous Fuck The Back Row film/music/theater revue night, when I beheld a broad-shouldered figure in a slinky cocktail gown and perilous high heels. With his sultry voice, his sharply parted/pomaded hair and villainous moustache, Titler was simultaneously demure yet forceful, domineering yet somehow… dainty. I tell ya, he KILLED it that night.

Having basked in his commanding presence, I have trouble understanding what zealots on either side of the ongoing Dr. Steel vs Dr. Horrible debate are getting their jodhpurs in such a twist over! For my money, Titler is all anyone could ever want in a singing musical madman, with the unexpected (but welcome) bonus of a truly fetching décolletage.

Comrades! For your consideration:

Intellectual property is an ever-raging discussion here in The Age of The Internet. Often the lines between inspiration and imitation are blurred but today I give you an interesting case. You decide!

Long-time mad scientist Doctor Steel has, over the course of many years, made himself an infectious image. To do this he’s combined vintage war propaganda aesthetics, catchy tunes and an image of an asylum escapee who plots away in a secret lab and seeks to improve Earth with toys and total world domination. Through his website he’s pulled together an entire army of fans called Toy Soldiers, who organize events and distribute various Dr. Steel propaganda.

Left: Doctor Steel. Right: Doctor Horrible

Now there’s come along a Doctor Horrible. Produced by Joss Whedon and starring Neil Parick Harris, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” is a website dedicated to video blogs starring a 30-something mad scientist who sings and wants to take over the world. In the site’s Master Plan, Whedon invites fans to spread the word, offers propaganda-style banners and promises a DVD release later.

Similarities beyond the singing mad doctor character include aforementioned propaganda-inspired banners, shiny gloves, goggles and an “Ask Dr. Horrible” segment – not unlike these “Ask Doctor Steel” videos. There is also the matter of the title itself : “Sing-Along Blog” is reminiscent of Doctor Steel’s Read-A-Long album.

Doctor Steel feels slighted by this endeavor and is rallying his troops in retaliation. Now that you’ve seen the evidence it’s time to cast your votes. Personally I’d like to see a bit of Doctor on Doctor boxing, shiny gloves and all.

With the evening of the Fantastic Contraption reception approaching this weekend, it’s time to introduce another participant of this wondrous exhibit.

Two pieces from the Dark Peculiar Toys series

Viktor Koen is a Greek-born artist specializing in digital illustration. He’s a professor at Parsons in New York and has his work regularly published in Time, Newsweek, Esquire, Money and Forbes among others.

Two pieces from Koen’s Damsels in Armor series

The body of Viktor’s work is huge, but my favorite of his series remains Transmigrations.

“Transmigrations, Cases of Corporate Reincarnation” is 24 portraits of high executive title holders that return to life as insects. It’s a series that combines theories and research on social insects, traditional and contemporary corporate structures, job descriptions and reincarnation scriptures (more specifically the controversial teachings of Pythagoras on transmigration of souls). They personify symbols and weapons of their trades in a number of levels, some instantly visible and other hidden, avoiding the obvious and the expected.

Beyond the Kafka aspect of this project I love the actual shapes these creatures take on in their transformed states. Imagine these human-sized insects buzzing among the rest of us, brandishing their tools and being very, very busy.

A few more human insects beyond the jump.

If you can’t judge a magazine by its cover, it’s not doing its job. This month, major magazines work hard for the money:

1. Rolling Stone released a very iconic Barack Obama cover. Just him and his flag pin. No name, no slogan and no eye contact. Pure faith and devotion. Compare to their last Obama cover, which made him look like a wax dummy of a superhero.
2. Again Obama, this time as an illustrated character on the cover of The New Yorker, sporting his Al-Qaeda gear and giving his sidekick, Angela Davis Michelle, the fearsome terrorist fist jab. The best comment on the controversy surrounding this cover comes from Gawker: “this obvious and heavy-handed satire has enraged Democrats and liberal media critics because now they are pretty sure this nation of child-like imbeciles will believe it to be an un-retouched photograph from the FUTURE.”
3. Predictably, this cover of Psychology Today caught my eye. Some nice use of type, but guess what? She’s wearing the corset backwards. How could something like be allowed to happen in 2008?

See, we’ve been thinking about magazine covers a lot over the past few months. Deciding together as a group on the cover of Coilhouse Issue 1 was a very intensive process. That decision’s been made, but to help myself think about what makes for a good cover in the future, I’ve started compiling a personal list of favorite covers, which I now share with you. I’ve excluded the undisputed heavyweight champions (John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol in a Campbell’s Soup Can, etc.) from my list. It’s going to be a Top 9, with the first 3 being posted today as part of a series. Enjoy!

9. Russia! Magazine, Winter 2008

This cover of Russia! Magazine is sexy, sexy, sexy. It’s also a cheeky remix of a controversial banned photograph titled An Era of Mercy. Two of Russia’s top male models were employed for this shoot, with real spacesuits on loan from the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics. The hip new Russian culture magazine also does a great job with its cover lines: Issue 2 has a bear dancing with Marilyn Monroe on the cover and entices you with the promise of “Eight More Bears Inside.”

Like every other sentimental mooncalf who watched too many Merchant Ivory flicks as a young girl, I continue to allow the actor Julian Sands to occupy a very special place in my heart, despite everything. Never mind Warlock. Or Harem. Forget Boxing Helena and Biker Mice From Mars. Put these sundries from your minds, my dears. Recall only A Room With A View, and Sands’ convincingly heterosexual ravishing of Helena Bonham Carter in a field of poppies.* It remains, to this day, one of my top picks for Most Romantic Moment in Cinema (seconded only by this tender scene from Myra Breckenridge).

I also happen to be a HYOOOGE fan of the Italian horror director, Dario Argento, so when I heard that he and Sands worked together ten years ago on an adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, I was quite curious! Why had I never heard about this movie before? Why?! I promptly Netflixed it.

“I gotta be MEEEEEEE.” Julian Sands in Il Fantasma.

Why, oh, why, indeed. Yes, Sands and Argento work seamlessly together… in a So-Bad-it’s-a-Festering-Masterpiece kind of way, their combined efforts cradling the budding psychosexual genius of Asia Argento like two slices of moldy sourdough bread wrapped around a generous dollop of indeterminate ooze in a rat salad sandwich.

The movie is quite long, and something tells me few of you will appreciate the full length version as much as I did. Luckily, Genevieve, a brilliant columnist over at Defenestration Magazine, has provided us with this MST3K-worthy “abridged version”. I laughed, I cried, it was better than… that other Andrew Lloyd Weber musical. Enjoy:

Parts II and III under the cut.

Tesla’s got bedroom eyes.

Oh, my, yes! Happy belated birthday, dear Nikola. Your Coilhouse whelping day party continues with this booty-electrifying Musical Tesla Coil rendition of the Ghostbusters theme song, courtesy of Dr. Zeus. Nerd up.

Twink poses with The Haunted Corset, an Ebay find that terrified me so much I had to give it away.

If Nikola Tesla were alive today and he went to The Edison, he’d be pissed. “Why’d they name it after that guy?” And since it’s his birthday today (thanks, John Colby, for the reminder), we’re going to rename this incredible venue The Tesla for the next 24 hours in his honor.

So… looks like there’s some electric kissing party going on up in this joint! Happy Birthday, Nikola! The designer here is Mother of London, creating a sequel to the panoramic shoot that showcased an earlier collection – the first interactive, 360-degree fashion shoot ever created. Photographer Will Pearson came to LA from London to do this follow-up, and what you’re seeing here are preview stills – a taste of what’s to come, yet phenomenal images in their own right. When the panorama is complete, you’ll be able to navigate around The Tesla until your head spins.

Allan Amato (aka Venus Wept) was the art director for the shoot. Models above are Ulorin, right, and Evan, left. Hairstyling by Linh Nguyen, NoogieStyle and Jamie Gatlin. Makeup by Daven Mayeda. You can see more images from this heart-stopping shoot on Allan’s blog. There were many more models involved, including some very cute boys.

[More Images From This Shoot]

P.S. – Over at CoilSpace.com, we were able to salvage everyone’s images, even if you didn’t email. There are probably twice as many as there were before. Enjoy, and thanks again!

Left: Ballerina. Right: Apollo and Daphne.

She died before I was ever born,  but she’s been with me all my life. Nadya Rusheva was only 17 when she succumbed to a brain hemorrhage in Moscow. She left behind ten thousand drawings – a fragile, incomplete catalogue of her teenage fascinations with Greek myths, Pushkin’s life, Bulgakov, Byron’s poems, War and Peace, and other bits and pieces from history and literature.

L: Pushkin and Goncherova. R: The Transfiguration of Margarita

She once said that she lived the lives of the people she drew. Her drawings are simple, impulsive – some might even say they’re amateurish – but there’s something to them,  a spark, a keen insight, a visible love. For example, when she illustrated The Master and Margarita (which Zo and I blogged about), it turned out that her drawings of Margarita bore an eerie resemblance to Bulgakov’s wife – whom Rusheva had never met.

L: Saying good-bye to Fox. R: Self-portrait.

She’s virtually unknown in the West –  not even a real Wikipedia page – but in Russia, she’s beloved by generations for her combination of tragedy, whimsy, youth and the adult-like insight that sometimes appeared in her work. Young fans still visit her museum and leave behind poems and drawings. On her Livejournal fan community, people swap scans of her drawings and write dedications. And a new film about her called “Secret Signs” recently came out in Russia.

Rusheva was born in 1952 in Mongolia to a Bolshoi theater designer and a ballerina (both of whom, I believe, are still alive today), and died in 1969. Some say that she was exploited to make the Soviet education system look good. I found two translations of the same document that claim that, upon being discovered, Rusheva was forced to produce artwork at a grueling pace so that the regime could hold her up as a paragon of Communist artistic training. One translation outright states that she was worked to death, but other (and better translation) doesn’t imply this. I’d never heard this before, even though I knew her work since childhood, thanks to my parents’ immense book collection. I could see it being true – despite the irony that Master and Margarita, one of her favorite books to illustrate, was banned when she drew it.

After the jump, my favorite Rusheva drawings (there’s lots!) and more.

While it’s my sincere hope that the wondrous Coilhouse Gushfest: Getting to Know You continues unabated, I can’t keep sitting on my hands with this one. Grace Jones has just released a new video for “Corporate Cannibal”, the first single off her forthcoming album, Hurricane (which features collaboration with Tricky, Brian Eno, and others). May Day is more heart-stoppingly badass than ever before:

(Via MusicSlut and Ectomo.)

Is she not fierce?! Like some creepy UrSkek, come to inform us of the Great Conjunction. And the lyrics… checkit, they’re all Free and Accepted n’ shiz:

Employer of the year
Grandmaster of fear
My blood flows satanical
Mechanical, masonical
And chemical… habitual

Jones performing at Meltdown in London last month.

Rawr. As previously mentioned on CH, Ms. Jones is my choice for It Girl of the 80s. Hell, let’s make her It Girl for ’08, as well. She’s sixty, she’s sexy, she’s scary as hell, and we should all bow before her fabulousness.