Because it’s Thursday (truly one of the tougher, more unappreciated days of the week) and because it’s always thrilling when a venerated classic from my bootleg tape-trading days resurfaces on Youtube, here’s a “blooper” gem from the vaults.
As legend has it, the voice-over talent for this regional PSA got bored and decided to record an “alternate” version. I totally picture him dressed like Walter Matthau’s character from The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three and knocking back fifths of Chivas Regal while a golden retriever blows him under the table. UNION.
It is time! We’re happy to announce Coilhouse Magazine’s Launch Party and Art Exhibit.
Held this Saturday at Hans Haveron Studios this event will be stuffed full of excellence. Look forward to:
Art, photography & fashion exhibit
Refreshments, with Mer’s “special” Electric Lemonade
Incredibly strange music
Photo booth with weird medical props, straight from Zo’s cave
Wall projections of Issue 01 art
Your first glimpse at the actual magazine!
Enjoy art. Become art via expert lenses of Polaroid superstar Lou O’ Bedlam and Zo! Style Technician’s own Andrew Yoon. Dress your snazziest and bring your friends. Everyone’s invited!
Venture below the jump to see work by the exhibiting artists.
Above is Kenneth Anger‘s 1954 film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome in its entirety. A film critic friend pointed me to it, with the simple statement “it’s weird, you’ll like it.” This came up along with news that Anger, 81, is terminally ill.
In some ways this seems a film out of time. It presages ’60s psychedelica (and would be re-released in a “sacred mushroom” version in 1966), yet the style is enmeshed in the occult revival of the fin de siècle. Watching it the first time, I couldn’t but see it as a glimpse into an alternate universe where the silent film era never ended and Aleister Crowley took the world by storm instead of dying in a flophouse.
With its lush array of images and allusions, Pleasure Dome is made to be unraveled – and indeed, there’s plenty of theories about it out there. Filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain sees communion, and writes “the movement of the film is essentially the passing of the gifts from one guest to another as they advance into a state of transpersonal ecstasy.” But film critic Doug Pratt perceives a hollow heart in the same revels: “an appropriately decorated Hindu-like myth re-enactment, with its spiritual core utterly rotted away; a disturbed revelry of desperate souls clinging to the outdated fashions and orgiastic memories of their lost time.”
Which is it? The absurdity’s there. Yes, that’s Anais Nin with a birdcage on her head. Yes, the Scarlet Woman gets her cigarette lit in the middle of the damn thing. Yes, jewelry gets guzzled in copious amounts.
But like any good ritual experience, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Turn the lights off, watch deeply, let the images pile up and hear Janá?ek’s Glagolitic Mass swell in the background: the whole scene takes on a strange, unexpected power.
I used to work as a receptionist at a chiropracter’s office. I was in it for the swag: spine keychains (used for assembling an elaborate multi-tiered choker necklace), spine lamps (OK, ours weren’t as cool as the Mark Beam version), and one incredible metallic spine chair that looked like it belonged at a Giger bar… which I coveted, but never got to own. Discovering Bjorn Johansson’s lovely spine-inspired letters on the beautiful I Love Typography blog this morning took me back to those glory days.
It’s not a full font, just the designer’s experiment for creating type. Like my Becher font experiment, only a few letters exist. It wonderful to one day see them all. It would look nice paired with Value Pack, don’t you think?
Return from exile, 1994. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation. – Solzhenitsyn
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner and Russia’s voice against Stalinist regime’s brutality, has died at 89. The caustic prose of Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich exposed his fellow countrymen to the truth about inhuman suffering in secret slave labor camps, stirred the nation and ultimately cost him his citizenship.
After 20 years spent in exile, Solzhenitsyn was living and working in Moscow again, remaining vocal about his strong political views well into old age. In his recent years he briefly had his own TV show and wrote several political works condemning communism, Russia’s rampant nationalism and war as a whole.
Solzhenitsyn’s death is a tremendous loss and his work deserves special attention here at some point. Until then I suggest you pick up all 3 volumes of this and tell us what you think.
Video of Putin awarding Solzhenitsyn an award last year; a rather strange event as even the reporter points out.
A short autobiography written for Le Prix Nobel books.
This here’s a scan of a wet proof of the cover of Coilhouse Magazine, Issue 1. What is a wet proof, you ask? It’s a magazine prototype made using offset printing plates, with exactly the same inks, on paper with exactly the same thickness and finish as your entire print run. We didn’t know this term when we jumped into the process of printing. There were many such new terms – exotic publishing/typographic words like “ozalids” and “boustrophedon”. But we learned them all, and much more, in the process of putting together Issue 1. There were epiphanies, mistakes (to our high-school readership: math and geometry class are important), and magical 3:00 a.m. moments when it all came together.
Until the launch date, our lips are sealed regarding Issue 1’s content. The number of pages, the design, the art, the stories, the texture… all will be revealed. For now, we offer but a sneak peek in this “Behind the Scenes” post. Take a stroll through the hot dog factory with us!
Nadya works closely with an illustrator on a concept for a music feature.
When we first began this process, the entire staff sat down over milkshakes and batted around various ideas for Issue 1. Sifting through one another’s proposed articles, we gradually determined what to keep and what to discard or save for a future issue. After that meeting, we worked independently to develop the content, collaborating closely with our contributors.
Zoetica rescues an unfinished layout in the 11th hour.
We hit a snag when our original designer jumped ship. To the venerable List of Craig we went! Our search for a replacement – wherein we naively inquired after fellow lovers of Tschichold and Lissitzky – nearly induced epilepsy as we were forced to endure one blinking Flash website after another. Finally, we found a diamond in the rough: Cecilia Melli, a stylish Italian who understood what we were doing and was willing to work for what were, in retrospect, slave wages considering the amount of work that she did. In the end, even she couldn’t finish all the layouts, and in certain cases we were forced to take matters into our own hands.
He said that he wanted to find a way to recycle everything, and that life was fleeting. Hence the dinosaurs. John Payne turned prehistoric and poetic terrors into lifelike (and eerily inhuman) machines he dubbed “kinetosaurs.” Then he’d let children take the controls, or leave the beasts to shock unsuspecting passerby strolling through his studio.
But life is fleeting. I was shocked and saddened to find out that on July 17, Payne died tragically at the age of 58, following a massive stroke. A deeply thoughtful, compassionate man and one of the founders of Asheville’s arts community, his work was capable of conveying incredible energy or sublime peace.
I met Payne once in passing when he was showcasing his work in his studio, located in The Wedge, the old industrial building down by the river that he bought and turned into a warren of rooms for artists of all stripes. He’d come there after stints in Chicago and the Northeast (the kinetosaurs had formed the core of museum exhibits in Chicago and Pittsburgh). I’d been drawn in by the mechanical dog that suddenly sprang up and nipped at my heels before shaking itself and settling down for a nap.
Inside was the full menagerie. I marveled as The Crow struggled to escape its perch and The Raptor leered. I felt about five years old, stepping in to some great adventure. The kids in the place were naturally ecstatic. Watching him play at the controls, I could see the same feeling.
