Quick heads up! Tomorrow, Sir Richard Branson and Imogen Heap are spearheading “a very spontaneous ‘get together‘ with live music and open discussion […] to raise funds to benefit the victims of the recent devastating floods in Pakistan.”
Hosted by Ze Frank, the webcast will feature intimate musical performances by Coilhouse faves Zoë Keating and Amanda Palmer, as well as Heap, Kaki King, KT Tunstall, Ben Folds, (Zoetica’s old high school chum) Josh Groban, and others. Conversations with Sir Richard Branson, Mary Robinson, Cameron Sinclair, Mark Pearson (live from Karachi), Gary Slutkin and Anders Wilhemlson. Heap says:
As you know, Monsoon rains have caused extensive flooding throughout Pakistan. Around one fifth of the country was hit, causing over 14 million people to have been affected, 900,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed and the death toll is rising.
The future of Pakistan and its region are at risk . Our global and connected communities can help today by coming together and showing solidarity.
Firstly and most importantly, we’re looking to fund raise for a group of charites on the ground. A further aim is to stimulate a debate between you and the speakers perhaps generating lifechanging ideas and solutions which could address the long lasting social and geopolitial consequences.
So, this is about the disaster relief and also how life copes after the flood.
Find out when the live event begins in your time zone, and tune in to see how you can help.
Tracy Widdess is currently accepting custom orders for her sublime horror and sci-fi inspired knitwear, but queue up quick! Undoubtedly, she’s about to be inundated with weirdos clients.
Coilhouse Issue 02 alum Kate O’Brien just finished a Tom Banwell-and-Bioshock-inspired shoot, and a few dreamy images have trickled out into her Flickr stream over the past 24 hours.
I remember her uploading a bunch of in-progress photos of the helmet featured in these shots, and me being verrry curious about the forthcoming images. Kate pours a massive amount of time, money, and energy into building her own props and sets, often documenting the process in her blog. You can read all about this gold leather helmet here.
Apologies for the black bars, but we’ve had a few complaints about posting teh n00dz on the front page before, so please click the jump for bar-free pretties.
All hail the caterwauling Carmen Orange. Venerated demigod of public broadcasting, mesmeric and disturbing in equal measure, she haunts the collective memory of multiple generations of Sesame Street-watching children. According to a couple of unconfirmed reports online, she was animated by Jim Henson himself.
In memory of Satoshi Kon, The FAM presents Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories (1995), specifically the first episode of three entitled Metallic Rose, directed by Koji Morimoto and written by the late Mr. Kon. Metallic Rose tells the story of a space-faring salvage team who respond to a distress signal (in the form of a recording of Puccinni’s opera Madame Butterfly) emanating from a giant space station in a particularly dangerous area of the galaxy known as Area RZ-3005 or Sargasso. The ship’s two engineers, Heintz and Miguel, are deployed to investigate. Inside they find an opulent, rococo interior and a woman claiming to be an opera singer named Eva Friedal.
The true nature of Eva is something I won’t spoil, but it is safe to say that she is not exactly who she appears to be. Magnetic Rose then, in sci-fi shorthand, is a mash-up of the used, dingy, space-trucker aesthetics of Alien and the psychological mindfuckery of Solaris; and it succeeds admirably. And while it was based on a story by Otomo, it contains many of the themes that would define Kon’s work: the interest in the protagonist’s mental state and subjective reality. Two years later he would go on to write and direct his first feature film, Perfect Blue, and a brilliant career; but the seeds were sown here in the span of 40 minutes. If only that career could have lasted a little longer.
Baths is, apparently, one man: Will Wiesenfeld, whose debut album Cerulean was released on June 22nd of this year. That may or may not be important to you. Above is the video for the single “Lovely Bloodflow” and while I’m not sure I’m a fan of the song, the video is decidedly beautiful — following a mortally wounded samurai through a lush forest. Masked, otherworldly beings and the visions of a dying man abound.
An Armenian woman in national costume poses for Prokudin-Gorskii on a hillside near Artvin (in present day Turkey), look circa 1910.
This series of exquisitely beautiful images from southern and central Russia is already all over the web via the Boston Globe, no rx but Coilhouse has to post a heads up in case anybody missed them. Absolutely stunning. Boston.com editor-in-chief, buy viagraAlan Taylor, says:
“With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images.”
A man and woman pose in Dagestan, ca. 1910.
“The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time – when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948.”
The full gallery is viewable here, high res. Previously on Coilhouse:
Isfandiyar Jurji Bahadur, Khan of the Russian protectorate of Khorezm (Khiva, now a part of modern Uzbekistan), full-length portrait, seated outdoors, ca. 1910.
In a new series titled Machine Punk, artist Laurie Lipton (previously on Coilhouse, with a cameo appearance by Caryn Drexl) skillfully renders a series of cumbersome, beautifully sprawling machines whose tangled wires and polluted textures conspire to create a sense of unease. Lipton states that the series was inspired by steampunk, but notes that the machines in her images run on “madness and electricity” rather than steam. “I was vacuuming one day, and noticed the amount of plugs and cables on the floor… a veritable wasp’s nest of wires and sockets connecting a hoard of gadgets and doo-dads intertwining around the house and my life. I was trapped like a fly in an electrical web. What had happened? Were these things making my life easier or more complex?” The resulting series features contraptions ranging from rickety flying machines to torturous exercise equipment, and critiques – among other things – CCTV surveillance, a broken recycling system, and the empty thought-calories of spending too much time online. Most of the images in this series are best enjoyed at a larger size, so click here to see them all.
Machine Punk will be on display at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles from November 5 – 28th in Gallery 1, side-by-side with artist and Coilhouse collaborator Jessica Joslin in Gallery 2. Also, if you’re a fan of Laurie Lipton’s ghostly older work, it’s worth mentioning that she recently collaborated with clothing company AllSaints to produce a line of t-shirts featuring the wraiths and skeletons of her previous work, and that some of these shirts are now on sale. [Many thanks to the awesome Coilhouse reader who sent this in – I received your submission a while ago, but can’t find it now to credit you! Was it via Twitter?]
Very sad news out of Japan yesterday as it was confirmed that visionary director Satoshi Kon had indeed passed away, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 46.
Kon began his career as a manga artist, working with Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo. He wrote a section of Otomo’s anthology film Memories entitled “Magnetic Rose” and in 1997 he made his directorial debut with Perfect Blue. This was followed by Millennium Actress in 2001, Tokyo Godfathers in 2003, the television show Paranoia Agent in 2004 (featured previously on Coilhouse), and finally Paprika in 2006. At the time of his death he was working on the film The Dream Machine which may be released posthumously.
