Fine china should be handled with care, as demonstrated by artist/sculptor Beccy Ridsel earlier this year. “This work was an installation, set up as a lab experiment in progress, complete with scalpels, lab coats, needles and a microscope. Piles of dicarded, cut-up craft objects lay about the desk, some with their innards seeping out, others rearranged, Frankenstein-style.” The purpose of Ridsel’s experiment was to find the point at which craft transforms into art, a problematic division she discusses in a post on Yatzer. She notes at the end of the article, “I am currently working on domestic variations of these pieces; the irony of [this] isn’t lost on me.”

[via Asha Beta]

FINALLY. Issue #04 of Coilhouse has taken corporeal form.

It’s haunted, you know. Or maybe it’s possessed. Or it could be we’ve got a grimoire on our hands.

All we know is, at some point during our editorial process—which normally involves very little cauldron-stirring or eye of newt, despite whatever “coven” rumors you may have heard—#04 took on a life of its own, and has since become a small, seething portal of the uncanny. It’s all a bit magic-with-a-k. We may giggle and wink (“O R’LYEH? IA, R’LYEH!”), but that doesn’t change the fact that these pages are spellbound. You will read of channeling and scrying, of shades and shamans, and phantoms both fabricated and inexplicable. You will meet reluctant oracles, occultists, and ghosts from the past.

Issue 04 is now available in our shop. For a limited time, you can purchase Issues 03 + 04 together for a discount price of $23! Click here to buy. Without further ado, the contents of Issue 04, below:

INFORM
This issue’s Inform/Inspire/Infect section headers, crafted by Zoetica, are all about communing with animal spirits. Below: the INFORM header, titled Stork Whispers. The section header below also contains almost all the design motifs that creative director Courtney Riot conjured throughout the issue: smoke, burn holes, aged paper and tattered lace.

The Tarnished Beauties of Blackwell, Oklahoma
In mid 2008, we were captivated by the imagery Meredith Yayanos shared in a post describing her visit to an obscure, careworn prairie museum in a small Oklahoma town. More recently, Coilhouse enlisted one of our wonderful readers, Joseph A. Holsten, to return to The White Pavilion, where he archived dozens of high res portraits of long-grown, long-dead children of pioneer America. They are reproduced here in an extended version of the original Blackwell photo essay.

Bernd Preiml’s Exquisite Apparitions
Bernd Preiml’s photographs describe a world filled with magic and mystery, often coupled with a disconcerting sense that sinister forces may be lurking. Through his dark and shining visions, he weaves haunting tales that encompass violence as well as transcendence, beauty as well as wrath. Interview by longtime Coilhouse co-conspirator, Jessica Joslin.

Children by the Millions Wait For Alex Chilton: A Fractured Memoir of the Counterculture
Joshua Ellis returns to Coilhouse with a whip-smart personal essay examining his experience with alternative culture. Beginning with an endearing description of adolescent initiation-by-music and ranting its way into present day’s monoculture, “Children by the Millions” is an incisive evaluation of the death of societal revolution in our “been there, done that” world. Josh draws parallels between counterculture and ancient mysticism, while eloquently articulating a premise that’s been gestating in all of our minds since we first started discussing the living death of alt culture here on Coilhouse.

Calaveras de Azucar
Courtesy of photographer Gayla Partridge comes this toothsome autumnal fashion editorial inspired by el Día de los Muertos, with a corresponding overview by Mer on the festival’s historical and cultural significance.

Hauntings: The Science of Ghosts
Earlier this year, our Manchester-based correspondent Mark Powell traveled to a “Science of Ghosts” conference in Edinburgh hosted by esteemed psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman and other leading experts. Mark shares what he learned about the history, pathology (and quackery) of hauntings and spiritualism. With fetching spirit photos, daguerrotypes, and other vintage ephemera provided by archivists Jack & Beverly Wilgus.

INSPIRE
Frog Prince

Kris Kuksi: Sculpting the Infinite
A substantial editorial featuring meticulous, hyper-detailed monuments to destruction sculpted by Missouri-born artist Kris Kuksi. In the coming days we’ll be posting an exclusive interview with Kris where he shares his thoughts on time, fixing humanity, and what might lie ahead. Introduction and interview by Ales Kot.

Still In The Cards: Alejandro Jodorowsky on King Shot, Comic Books and the Tarot De Marseilles
An informative, zany dialogue with one of modern cinema’s most iconoclastic masterminds, Alejandro Jodorowsky. The filmmaker who brought us The Holy Mountain, El Topo, and Santa Sangre speaks candidly about his past, present and future… as well as the roles that tarot, spirituality and comics have led in his more recent life. Article by Mark Powell.

Through the Mirror into the Forest: Kristamas Klousch
Our stunning cover girl’s self-portraiture explores a dark, kaleidoscopic array of facets; Kristamas is at once wild forest creature, fetish vixen, tousled witch, Lolita, courtesan, silent movie vamp and Voodoo priestess. Her ethereal photos race to capture each incarnation, just before the next comes out to play. Introduction by staffer Tanya Virodova.

Grant Morrison: Embracing the Apocalypse
Groundbreaking comic book writer Grant Morrison blows our minds with a massive ten-page interview that will gently squeeze your reality’s underbelly until you’re ready to take the future seriously. Grant sat down with Zoetica Ebb and Ales Kot for a three-hour talk covering everything from superheroes and interdimentional parasites to personal transformation and 2012. Featuring new portraits of Grant and his wife, Kristan, by Allan Amato.

Larkin Grimm: Advanced Shapeshifter
In a time when our culture seems to openly scorn –but secretly craves– magic, the musician Larkin Grimm is an unashamed and forthright power to be reckoned with. Interview by Coilhouse collaborator Angeliska Polacheck, as well as a review of the Musicka Mystica Maxima Festival curated by Grimm in NYC last fall.

INFECT
Snake Charmer

Brave Old World
A  collaboration between Chad Michael Ward and  Bad Charlotte, this editorial takes the gorgeous model out of time and space, into a gauzy netherworld. With wardrobe by Mother of London.

CB I Hate Perfume: The Story of an Olfactory Architect
Christopher Brosius has been called “The Willy Wonka of Perfume” and is renowned for his eccentricity and passionate standpoint when it comes to both the art and the industry of scent-building. An intimate and inspiring interview about his work and philosophy, conducted by Angeliska.

Print to Fit: Mavens of Meatcake
What self-respecting, spellbound witchy-pooh magazine would be complete without paper dolls by Dame Darcy?! Featuring beloved characters from the darling Dame’s legendary long-running comic book, Meatcake.

Christmas is almost here, that dark time when a filthy, gluttonous fat man acts on a years worth of planning. He’s been watching, waiting, and now the moment has arrived.

“Hello Katie. I’ve been thinking about you. Did you know that? You’ve made my list.

My special list…”

The Winter Stalker comes from the twisted minds of artist Alex Pardee, writer/director Stephen Reedy, and the crew at Zerofriends

At last! After days spent trembling in post-production anticipation, we’re unveiling the Coilhouse 04 cover. Words can scarcely express how happy we are to finally share a glimpse of our most ambitious issue yet.

Tomorrow, all Issue 04 articles will be revealed, and the magazine will go on sale. For now, huge congratulations to our cover girl, mysterious self-portrait artist Kristamas Klousch. Kristamas’ work is integral to the Coilhouse 04 concept and you can expect to see an array of her intensely haunting photographs nestled within the new pages.

Every issue, we try out a new visual effect in print. In Issue 02, we had a fold-out map. For Issue 03, we embossed the cover. This time around, we’ve experimented with a silver ink overlay. The tattered lace and title of the cover contain a subtle, frostbitten shimmer, as can be seen below.

We can’t wait to reveal the contents of this issue. Check back soon!

Morning already? Fuck… I’m think I’m still drunk.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… for watching holiday fare with lapsed copyright. Betcha can’t channel surf right now without stumbling across earnest ol’ Jimmy on his existential quest for redemption. Many of us know this movie by heart by now.

Or do we?

Not that you really need context, but this is a scene from 976 Evil 2. Despite featuring astral projection and Brigitte Nielsen, it’s a borderline unwatchable film. But this bit is pure genius: a busty sorority babe’s up late watching TV, trying to choose between Night of the Living Dead and It’s a Wonderful Life, when a Satanic, co-ed stalking college dean turned serial murderer possesses the remote and somehow traps her in the most horrific public domain mashup imaginable.

Zuzu, NOOOO!

“We remember it well now, our younger days, when we got the cassette deck for the car. The windows always rolled up, closing us off to the outside world. We moved steadily as things rolled by, always with the cassettes playing at the loudest possible volume.” [via]

Joshua Z-P (of Roadside Picnic Podcast and A Room Forever fame) and his friend Adam Helms were recently asked by Type Records (home to Svarte Greiner, Deaf Center, Grouper, and Koen Holtkamp, among other phenomenal bands) to compile a mix for their Typecast series. “So a mix we did – one of epic and biblical proportions which we now share with you. This isn’t your older brother’s black metal – there’s no Dungeons & Dragons posturing while wearing corpse paint. Just pure, brutal, lo-fi nihilism full of tape hiss and vinegar.”

Cirrhus, Horrid Cross, Haxan.

All tracks were transferred from cassettes, save the Akitsa song. There’s Bone Awl and Ash Pool and freakin’ Ancestors and a bunch of even more obscure shit I don’t recognize at all. Holy balls, this mix is awesome. Sadly, the vast majority of our readers will find it unlistenable. So unless you enjoy making your eardrums hemorrhage with tinny, shrieking, blood-gargling KVLT AS FUCKNESS, please back away slowly from this post without making direct eye contact, and click here instead.

Tracklist after the jump.

See also:

• Backyard Metal Jamboree/Scream-Along
• To Build a Fire (A Most Grim and Epic Fire)
• Mix It, Mix It Good
• The Black Oven: Tasty, Tasty Doom
• Nothing is Sacred, Everything Is Terrible

Soon enough I will have made Coilhouse a repository for the Complete Works of John Carpenter. Certainly this was not the intention when I started the FAM, but it seems to have turned out that way. In this case, however, it is with great sadness that I post his cult favorite, Dark Star.

As Mer detailed below, Dan O’Bannon, one of the creative forces behind one of the greatest science fiction/horror movies in all of cinema, died yesterday. Alien is almost a mythical movie at this point, a landmark piece of film of which thousands of words have been written and which has been numerated on countless lists. It is, by dint of its prestige, almost completely absent from the internet, swept away by the watchful eye of Twentieth Century Fox.

What we are left with, then, is Dark Star and here I must make a confession: I hate this movie. Well, hate may be a strong word. I have seen this movie exactly once. It was rented, long ago in the days of my long forgotten youth, under the impression that, like the box proclaimed, it was a laugh out loud comedy, a rollicking good time. It was, in my memory, none of these things and by the time the credits rolled my parents, brother, and I felt that we had surely been tricked; the victims of a cruel bait-and-switch.

Watching it now I find myself appreciating it more for what it represents rather than what it is. Since that day so long ago my taste for irony and absurdist humor has matured, but even so I find few parts of Dark Star to be funny with the exception of O’Bannon’s rightfully lauded turn as Sgt. Pinback/Bill Froog. No, as a comedy it fails, at least for me. What it does do is foreshadow the arc of O’Bannon’s career and hint at just what he was capable of conjuring up from the depths of his brain. Dark Star is the seed from which Alien sprang and, regardless of whether you love it or hate it, for that reason alone it is priceless.

O’Bannon as the legendary Sgt. Pinback in John Carpenter’s 1974 cult classic, Dark Star. (O’Bannon also wrote the screenplay.)

Dan O’Bannon –the screenwriter who penned Alien, Total Recall, Dark Star and wrote/directed The Return of the Living Dead– has died, aged 63, following a brief illness.

Think about it for a second: without this man, we wouldn’t have Ellen Ripley. For that contribution alone, Dan O’Bannon is ensured the eternal adoration and gratitude of everyone here at Coilhouse.

In honor of the departed, here are a handful of scenes and previews from just a few of the fantastic sci fi and horror films O’Bannon worked on over the years. Requiescat in pace.

Via Feministe.

On December 10th (International Human Rights Day), Filipina activist Sass Rogando Sasot spoke passionately about transgender rights before an assembly of the United Nations. Her speech, titled “Reclaiming the Lucidity of Our Hearts”, addresses the need for vastly improved acceptance, support and protection of transgender citizens worldwide.

Her entire presentation is very moving, but about 8 minutes into this clip, something shifts in Sasot’s voice and delivery. What began as an engaging speech swiftly transforms into something far more urgent, immediate, and beautiful:

Is our right to life, to dignified existence, to liberty, and pursuit of happiness subservient to gender norms? This doesn’t need a complicated answer. You want to be born, to live, and die with dignity – so do we! You want the freedom to express the uniqueness of the life force within you – so do we! You want to live with authenticity – so do we!

Now is the time that we realize that diversity does not diminish our humanity; that respecting diversity does not make us less human; that understanding and accepting our differences does not make us cruel. And in fact, history has shown us that denying and rejecting human variability is the one that has lead us to inflict indignity upon indignity towards each other.

We are human beings of transgender experience. We are your children, your partners, your friends, your siblings, your students, your teachers, your workers, your citizens.

Let our lives delight in the same freedom of expression that you enjoy as you manifest to the outside world your unique and graceful selves.

Mabuhay, Ms. Sasot. Kinship.

The full transcript of her speech –reproduced at Rainbow Bloggers Phillipines with permission to repost– can be found below the jump.

Spanish illustrator and architect Vasco Maurao creates mind-bogglingly complex structures, site rendered in stark black and white. Utilizing the thinnest and most uniform of lines he constructs sprawling buildings with hundreds of windows, diagnosis eaves, and support beams. So large that they are rendered abstract, it almost seems that Maurao was doodling on a sheet of paper and simply zoned out, shaken out of reverie only to find that he had covered the entire table in those neatly inscribed lines, his subconscious having painstakingly assembled them in his absence.

via DRAWN!