Plazm Magazine is nearing their 20th year anniversary. In the past two decades, the Portland-based alternative art and design periodical has listed contributors including David Byrne, Trent Reznor, Yoko Ono, David Carson, R. U. Sirius, Sonic Youth, and many others.
To celebrate 20 years in print, the Plazm team is releasing Issue 30, a glossy affair that will feature David Lynch, Bruce Sterling, Wangechi Mutu, Raymond Pettibon, Corin Tucker from Sleater-Kinney, Erik Davis, Kevin Kelly, Sherry Turkle, and Douglas Rushkoff. And to offset half the costs of printing that issue, Plazm recently set up a Kickstarter fund. Like Coilhouse, Plazm is very passionate about staying in print:
Plazm magazine is found on coffee tables and on book shelves with the art books and the limited edition, silkscreened album covers. It isn’t something you look at for thirty seconds and then get distracted by a cat video on YouTube. It presents art, and according to some critics, it *is* art.
Being able to download a cheap publication for $1.99 does not and cannot replace the unique, tactile sensation of print and the ability to reproduce amazing art beautifully. A backlit, monitor-colored screen JPG of a painting doesn’t do the work justice.
Plazm already reached its goal of $7500, but there are six hours left to go on Kickstarter, and the non-profit magazine needs help. Because, take it from us: it always costs more to print a magazine than you think it’s going to cost. These things always run overbudget. There is always one more set of proofs that need to be printed, one more unexpected, last-minute piece of text that must slip into the magazine before it’s rushed off to print, one more revision fee from the printer, one more weird anomaly that takes time and money to solve.
There are many wonderful rewards available for supporters of Plazm, including copies of the issues, books, art and more. Looking forward to Plazm #30!
It seems that some couples find their wedding moments not vivid enough. They believe that photo editing can make the memories of the wedding day even much more impressive and close the boring gaps with the help of the powerful Photoshop. It’s not recommended for people with highly sensitive nature to look at the pictures.
Damn, hospital Russia… damn. More horrifying wedding photos after the jump, pharm and even more over here.
“Vintage lesbians, affectionate women, Boston Marriages, lesbian innuendo, antique erotica, [and] women who may not be lesbians but we wish they were.” Something for everyone. Collette, Marlene, Bettie, Renée, Anna May. NSWF.
This month, two Coilhouse photographers – Lou O’Bedlam and Allan Amato – launched two very different Kickstarter projects – This is Us, Together and Illuminate Parkinson’s. Both Lou and Allan have been contributing to Coilhouse since Issue 01, and each has a project that’s worthy of your attention and support.
Lou is good at photography and, it seems, bad at relationships. In the cute Kickstarter video, Lou’s ex-girlfriend appears to tell you all the ways in which Lou really, really needs help in the love department: apparently, he’s not a good communicator, doesn’t take criticism well, and thinks that the “silent treatment” is an effective way of talking about problems. To remedy these issues, Lou has decided to embark on a 30-day journey to visit 12 cities to interview as many couples as he can about what makes their relationship work. In the process, he will document the couples he meets, learn from them, and produce a beautiful coffee-table book. The Kickstarter has only 38 hours to go; support his efforts here!
When Coilhouse cover photographer Allan Amato learned that his friend Becky has had Parkinson’s Disease since she was 29, he was shocked. Like many, he was under the impression that Parkinson’s was something that only afflicted the elderly. Allan began to create portraits of other young Parkinson’s sufferers. Artists including Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Terry Gilliam and Kevin Smith have teamed up with Allan to create a series of images to “illuminate Parkinson’s,” as can be seen above. He now hopes to take his portrait series of Parkinson’s sufferers on the road, and recently launched a Kickstarter page to help with the costs associated: making large prints, shipping, and creating a book.
At first glance, this haunting collodion print looks like an aged Victorian carte de visite. If you look closely, you’ll notice something odd: the dress is trimmed with scraps of paper with typewritten notes. This is a papier-mache sculpture titled Storydress II, designed by artist Christine Elfman. The dress is made of stories recorded from her great-grandmother’s autobiographical reminiscences. On her site, Elfman elaborates on the process and motivations behind this piece:
Finding unknown relatives in my family photograph collection, and noticing old photographs of anonymous people in antique stores, I was taken by how many people were forgotten regardless of photography’s intention to “Secure the shadow, ‘ere the substance fades away.” The older the picture, the more forlorn the subject appeared to me. Holding their image, I was impressed with their absence. Storydress II tries to show this underlying subject of photographic portraiture. The 19th century cabinet card is turned inside out, revealing the presence of absence in a medium characterized by rigid detail and anonymity. The figure of reminiscence, cast in plaster, parallels the poetic immobility of the head clamp, used in early photography to prevent movement during long exposures, aptly defined by Barthes as “the corset of my imaginary existence”. The life size cast figure wears a paper mache dress made of family stories: recorded, torn up, and glued back together again.
Flickr user turezure recently snapped this menacing picture of the Humax Pavilion in Shibuya. Doesn’t it look like it’s just sitting there, biding its time, waiting to bust a move, Megatron-style?
The Pavilion was designed in 1991 by Hiroyuki Wakabayashi, who also designed the Nankai 50000 train series, seen above. The design theme for the train was Outdated Future, and indeed, there is a suspicious resemblance to the 1978 Cylon Centurian model.Wakabayashi’s other works include the breathtaking Uji Station and Maruto Bldg. No.17 in Kyoto. [via Battling Pink Robots]
All art lovers have had those revelatory moments when visual art just blows our minds. It’s surprising, beautiful, provocative, painful, confusing and every kind of emotion at once. I think that’s what the small child in this video is feeling when he wanders into one of Yayoi Kusama‘s infinite dot rooms, installed in Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory. Also, it’s SO CUTE.
For many of us who have been following the story of Chrissy Lee Polis, the 22-year-old transgender woman who was brutally attacked in a suburban McDonald’s near Baltimore ten days ago, it’s been a difficult week. Watching the story go viral provided a sobering look at the amount of phobia and ignorance that still surrounds many people’s concepts of both gender and race.
The attack occurred on April 18th, when Polis stopped at the restaurant to use the ladies’ room. Polis told the Baltimore Sun that she heard her assailants saying “that’s a dude, that’s a dude – and he’s in the female bathroom.” Immediately afterwards, she was beaten, dragged across the floor by her hair, and kicked by two teenagers as a McDonald’s employee recorded the attack on his camera phone and other workers stood by idly. The cell phone recording of the attack (TRIGGER WARNING: extremely violent) shows several employees gawking and laughing as the attack progresses. A sole employee makes an attempt to break up the fight, but retreats almost immediately. A grandmotherly woman attempts to come to Polis’ aid; a police report revealed that she was punched in the face by one of the assailants when she tried to intervene. After two minutes, Polis collapses into a seizure on the floor. The McDonald’s worker who is taping the scene warns the attackers that they need to flee because the police are coming.
A crowd rallies outside the McDonald’s where the crime took place
Coverage of the story on the web has been as painful to watch as the footage itself. It was awful to witness the first wave of discussion, which appeared almost exclusively on white supremacist blogs, with transphobia piling on top of racism as details about Polis’ identity emerged. It was painful to watch mainstream, high-traffic blogs use the word “tranny” in their coverage (the best example of this being, if memory serves correctly, Time-Warner-owned blog Smoking Gun, though their posts appear to have now been scrubbed of the slur). And it was painful to watch Polis’ own twin brother continually refer to her as “my brother” and pointedly use male gender pronouns at her support rally (here, at 1:15). All around, a damning look at the country’s state of gender awareness, or lack thereof.
Polis has been released from the hospital, and spoke to the Baltimore Sun about her experience living as a transwoman in her neighborhood. The McDonald’s employee who filmed the attack has been fired. Both attackers have been apprehended and charged with assault. Hate crime charges may or may not be applied to the case; we’ll likely know in about a week.
In the face of the ugly, seething hatred that surrounds this story, the most encouraging element has been the turnout of support. Over 135,000 people have signed a petition demanding that the McDonald’s Corporation holds its employees accountable for the assault. More inspiring than anything have been images of the rally held at the scene of the crime this past Monday. Hundreds of people showed up outside McDonald’s to voice their solidarity with Chrissy Lee Polis. One of the right-wing hate sites covering the assault early on asked the question, “what happens when sanctified leftwing grievance groups collide over black homophobia?” In their small imagination, people can only choose one side: black vs. white, gay vs. straight, trans vs. cis. There are no gradations or complexities in their world.
Except, that’s not what the images and footage of this rally show us. There are people from all across the race, gender and class spectrum standing up for Chrissy Lee Polis. Trans activist Dayna Beyer, who helped organize the rally, recounts the event:
What was initially intended to be a vigil as the victim appeared severely injured… evolved into an upbeat rally of a united community demanding an end to violence and discrimination.
Having been involved in far too many vigils for murdered trans women over the years, and accepting the general apathy in both the trans and LGBT communities, I expected 30 people to ultimately show up. Instead, 300 did.
…when the program ended and the crowd would have normally dispersed, a funny thing happened. No one left.
People mingled for another 75 minutes until the lights were turned out in the parking lot. There had been no trouble, no counter-demonstration, no hate speech – just love and sisterhood and camaraderie. Locals and activists, gay and straight, cis and trans.
Maryland still has a long way to go. Earlier this month, the Maryland Senate voted down a bill that would have provided protection for trans people against discrimination in housing and employment. Before the bill even hit the Senate, language pertaining to use of public accommodations was stripped from it. Blogger Amanda Hess writes, “opposition to the bill largely focused on the toilet issue—a hysterical concern over gender non-conforming people sharing public restrooms.” Perhaps the tragedy of this event will push lawmakers to rethink their position.
Nadya, Zo & Mer as the Star, the Moon and the Sun Tarot cards illustrated by Bethalynne Bajema
The Coilhouse editorial team is honored to be part of the beautiful Black Ibis Tarot Deck, conceived and illustrated by artist Bethalynne Bajema (previously on Coilhouse here and here).
The Black Ibis Tarot Deck is a companion to Bajema’s Sepia Stains Tarot Deck, and both decks exist to accompany a nine-book graphic novel series that Bajema is currently working on called The Black Ibis. Book I, The Secret London, will be available on May 27th. More about this project, from Bethalynne Bajema’s Kickstarter page:
The Black Ibis is a graphic novel told in nine books. Each book takes you a little deeper into a dark fairy tale that is based upon my own love of the idea that there exists a world beneath the world. This idea that sometimes a door is not just a mundane door but an entrance to someplace we reserve for our dreams. The story, at its heart, is a simple one. It revolves around one sister trying to find her sister who has become lost. She must follow the same path her sister has set out on going a little farther into this underground world of dark cabarets and strange theaters as she attempts to catch up to her sister, who is falling faster down this path in her desire to finally find a performer known as the Black Ibis. The story is absurd at times, illustrated in my particular style and filled with my legion of wonky characters and enigmatic performers.
Bajema has launched a Kickstarter project to support the printing of the first book and the Tarot Deck. Although Bajema has already reached her modest goal of $2K, the fundraiser still has 3 days left to go. Pledge rewards include signed metallic prints, graphic novels, decks, original sketches, handmade deck boxes, pages of artwork from the novel, and even a chance to appear in one scene in a cabaret scene in the final chapter of the graphic novel.
As the fundraiser continues, Bajema has been revealing more and more cards from the deck on Twitter. Follow her for the latest!
