Famous photo of Buzz Aldrin by Neil Armstrong.
“The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited.”
– Neil Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012)
Still image of Armstrong walking on the moon, shot by the lunar lander’s movie camera.
Our long-admired colleague Sarah Dopp –a compulsive mover/shaker/go-getter whose Twitter description aptly reads “Gets excited and poops out communities”– has just announced the official launch of Genderplayful, a new venture she’s running with several cohorts. Sixteen months in the making, Genderplayful is an online marketplace celebrating diversity in gender presentation and body types, and it is wonderful.
GENDERFUCKER Etched Copper Necklace, available at Genderplayful.
From their press release:
This is for anyone who can’t easily find what they’re looking for in a typical clothing store, with special support for androgynous, unisex, butch, dapper, femme, gender-bending, gender-transgressive, and gender-fanflippingtastic clothing solutions for all kinds of bodies.
Genderplayful cares about custom solutions, and the marketplace will host a lively community that finds and creates those solutions together. Vendors will include indie designers, crafters, clothing makers, tailors, and people selling things from their closets and local thrift stores. Community members will pool notes on what they’re excited about, and vendors will take cues from buyers on what to create more of. The goal is to create a culture-rich gorgeous Internet bazaar for the playful, the exquisite, and the just trying to get dressed in the morning.
Dopp further states, “It rallies a community to work collectively on the question, ‘How can we build wardrobes we love that fit our bodies well?’, and it offers extra encouraging support for trans, genderqueer, and gender nonconforming folks (an identity set that we define very broadly). The project was inspired by what we’ve learned in our work at Genderfork.com.”
IKE tee by Genderplayful vendor komsikomsi.
Hearty congratulations to Dopp and the entire Genderplayful family. We know how long and hard you’ve worked to put this community/interface together, and it’s really exciting.
Genderfuckery is fun! Let’s go shopping!
Please welcome the second guest post by artist and writer Eden Gallanter! Eden previously brought you an illustrated post on dancing, physics and Mannerstist painting titled The Tango, the Quark, and the Allegory of Love. In this post, Eden discusses the ways in which hallucinations have influenced the work of Jim Woodring and William Blake. Enjoy! – Nadya
Jim Woodring, “Divornum – or Life After Man”
Although Jim Woodring is a contemporary American cartoonist, fine artist, and writer with a strong cult following, and William Blake was a 19th Century English poet and painter who lived most of his life in poverty and obscurity, these two men shared a common source of artistic inspiration: both experienced visual hallucinations for the majority of their lives.
William Blake, Jacob’s Ladder
These visions (or apparitions) are clearly at the heart of both artists’ work, serving as gateways into another world that contains deep human truth and startling strangenesses. One account of Blake’s earliest visions, which remained full of the Christian iconography of 19th century England, describes the four-year-old Blake screaming for his parents upon seeing the face of God at the window. A few years later, he saw a “tree filled with angels,” and was saved from a thrashing by his father for telling a lie by the sympathetic intervention of his mother. Most of Blake’s hallucinations depicted the most beautiful and spiritual of the Christian themes. He also could see and speak to deceased friends, and saw angelic figures and other celestial beings mingled among the everyday ladies and gentlemen of England.
William Blake, Ghost of a Flea
Blake was considered to be a gentle madman by his contemporaries, and although some prominent writers regarded him with interest, his work was largely unrecognized during his lifetime. Upon encouragement by his friends, he painted some of the apparitions he saw, most famously his Ghost of a Flea. Blake’s lovely otherworldly visions, interpreted by him as divine inspiration, gave a confident shape to many socially deviant beliefs and practices. Blake had many ideas about religion that were frankly considered heretical (most notably his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which described a unified vision of the cosmos, where both satanic and angelic realms were a vitally important part of a holy and just world). Due to numerous references to the sanctity of romantic love and the necessity of its liberation from oppressive conventions such as duty and possession, Blake has been claimed as one of the forerunners of the Free Love movement in the 19th Century. His poetry is full of rejections of the Christian virtue of chastity, and his writing advocated the removal of bans on homosexuality, prostitution, adultery, and birth control. Blake is said to have lived a happy, quiet life: poor, obscure, and content simply in expressing his visions in his poetry and painting.
Excited about driving to the playa to destroy yet another pair of Demonia platforms? This video may be for you.
In the newly-released, self-directed video for her song “Genesis”, Grimes dons a Daenerys Targaryen-meets-Sailor Moon getup, rides through the desert, wields a fiery sword, and cuddles with an albino python. However, it’s rapper Brooke Candy, looking very cybergoth 2002, who steals the show. All that’s missing from this video is The Vengabus.
[via Marina Galperina, who adds, “I can’t even tell if this is #PLUR.”)
See also:
“Like living organisms; a breathing artificial skin garment with pulsing veins (air is pumping through the veins to simulate a pulse), ambulance the pulse increases when you approach and the neckpiece deflates on touch as sign of trust.”
Designer duo Local Androids consists of Cor and Leonie Baauw. Their work is a stunning techno-chthonian amalgam of 2D and 3D, capsule traditional and digital imagery. With assistance from engineers Ralf Jacobs, unhealthy Daniel Schatzmayr, and Berend-Jan van Dijkhey, Local Androids created this “interactive skinfashion” for the 2012 Technosensual Expo, which will be running until September 2 in Vienna.
Via E. Stephen of S.N.A.F.U., who says “Long Live the New Flesh!”
Free Pussy Riot! #freepussyriot from Peaches on Vimeo.
Well, it happened. The Pussy Riot verdict has been announced. The girls have each been sentenced to two years in prison for performing their one-minute “punk prayer” in the Christ The Savior Cathedral to protest Russia’s fusion of church and state. “Even though we are behind bars, we are freer than those people,” said Pussy Riot band member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova from her glass cage on the last day of the trial. “We can say what we want, while they can only say what political censorship allows.”
Below, a free poster by Molly Crabapple. Download the hi-res here. Print, post, mashup, and share. (Or buy a limited-edition 17″ x 22″ print to support their legal fund from Molly.) FREE PUSSY RIOT!
Paging Ross Rosenberg. Ross Rosenberg, sovaldi please report for doody.
(Via Ariana, of course.)
Related tidbit, courtesy of Kittydoom:
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Gerda Wegener, Cuckoo, 1920. Note the fallen black mask on the floor: it repeats in many of Gerda’s erotic paintings.
This is the true story of turn-of-the-century lesbian romance, erotic Deco illustrations rife with harlequins and crinolines, the world’s first male-to-female sex reassignment surgery, and the 1950s pulp novel that brought it all to light.
The story begins one hundred years ago. In 1912, artist couple Gerda and Einar Wegener arrived in Paris, hoping for greater prosperity and freedom than their conservative hometown of Copengahen would allow. They checked into the Hôtel d’Alsace, where – they were shocked to learn – they had been placed into the very same room where Oscar Wilde had once died twelve years earlier. The couple spent the next few days reading Wilde’s works out loud to each other. The forbidden sexuality, transformation, beauty and tragedy in Wilde’s work was reflected in the couple’s following years together.
Gerda, left. Lili, right.
In Paris, Gerda quickly became well-known for her sensual, free-spirited illustrations. Her work often featured a mysterious beauty with a stylish short bob, full lips, and beguiling brown eyes. In 1913, the public was shocked to learn the identity of the mystery model: Gerda’s husband, Einar. Einar was transitioning to living life openly as woman named Lili Elbe.
As has been previously discussed (albeit briefly) on Coilhouse, many of us are morbidly fascinated by the oeuvre of Anne Geddes, and quietly suspect she may be the devil incarnate.
Apparently, we are not alone:
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’s better than Kinkade.
[via Jezebel]
Robot Restaurant. Or, as jwz calls it, “Chuck E. Cheese: Judgement Day Version”.
The new restaurant (official site) is located in Shinjuku’s Kabukich? district, a neon-lit pleasure paradise also known as “Sleepless City” and renowned for its host/hostess bars, love hotels and nightclubs.
The restaurant is said to have cost 10 billion yen (or $130 million dollars). It features LED-encrusted tanks, cabaret girls, and gigantic fembots that can be steered with joysticks (one video also appears to show them being controlled via motion sensor.)
Admission to the restaurant costs 3000 yen (or $38). The fee covers seating, a simple meal, and an hour-long performance featuring Japanese taiko drums, a vinyl-clad marching band, a motorcycle performance, tanks and a B-52. More images can be found at Crunchyroll, Japan News 24, and Nippon News.
Now if we could get Freeform Delusion to go in there and circuit-bend a few things, this place would actually be perfect.
