WWII image taken by Yevgeni Khaldey. Laibach was always present.

Laibach has finally returned to North America for a very short tour. If you’re in Portland or Seattle, I hope you saw them. If you’re in San Francisco, Hollywood, New York or Mexico City, you’re in luck! Click here for tour dates.

There are many reasons why this is my favorite band, and most of them actually don’t have much to do with the music. It’s the stories: weird, fantastical events that surround this band in which art, politics, history, media and human nature intersect in unexpected ways. My favorite Laibach story is this: in 1992, they group established the NSK State, a virtual “state in time.” Citizenship to the NSK State came complete with a very realistic-looking passport, and anyone could apply. Applications could be found at concerts and in the back of certain art books. In 1995, Laibach concluded their NATO tour in besieged Sarajevo. They declared Sarajevo to be NSK territory, so for a brief moment, the NSK State existed in the physical world. During this time, they issued 350 NSK diplomatic passports. What’s remarkable is this: some people were actually able to use these passports to escape occupied Sarajevo. Bosnian passports were not recognized at the borders, but a French soldier who saw the NSK ones let those people through. With their art and performance, Laibach was able to potentially save lives. Compelling – even more so when you consider that their work centers around a deadpan sense of humor.

The music is great too, of course! This entire website was designed while listening to Kapital, and partially inspired by the album’s aesthetic. So, Mildred and I will see you at the LA gig if you’re there. In the meantime, a random assortment of odd Laibach-related links:

• Melodrom – “Counting Days” – An ’80s-tastic music video featuring Mina Spiler, who performs with Laibach and sings on many of their recent songs (she’s also the subject of this illustration in Issue 01’s Laibach feature, in case you were wondering)
• Putokazi – “Play, Rew, F Fwd” – Dreamy, surreal music video by Croatian band Putokazi, with a rare vocal cameo by Laibach singer Milan Fras as the voice of a nightmarish teddy bear
• Fear the Kittens – Parody of Tanz Mit Laibach. Made in 2004, now an internet classic.
• Steel Trust – History of the Laibach euro-disco ballad and the lost Kapital that never was on Coilhouse
• Hilarious high school reenactment of the original Opus Dei video
  

Welcome, IO9 readers who came here from Meredith Woerner’s excellent review of Coilhouse Issue 01. This one’s for you.

via Ectomo and Trevor “Don’t Click It, Mom” Brown, I discovered the android amputee bondage art of Takashi Itsuki. Completed over 20 years ago and originally published a Japanese magazine titled Bizarre (not the “extreme lad’s mag” UK Bizarre or the ye olde John Willie Bizarre), the drawings fascinate Brown in that they predate the EGL style by at least a decade (as is most evident in this image, with the loli-droid’s blunt bangs, lace headdress and oversize bow). Brown initially scanned and posted 5 of the 13 drawings from Itsuki’s “amputee robot doll bondage” series on his blog, and followed up with another post containing rare scans of Itsuki’s long-lost manga.

There’s not much more infromation than that. We know that in the mid-90s Itsuki put out a comic called Yoso no Himitsu (“Secret of the Worm”), based on a Cthulhu mythos story by Robert Bloch, the H.P. Lovecraft protégé best known penning Psycho. That’s where the trail grows cold – at least on the English-speaking Internet. Brown notes that the artist “is (and maybe was) pretty much unknown and unpopular and now forgotten” and that it is now almost impossible to find his manga.

If I never see the manga, I hope that at least the other 8 images from Itsuki’s bot-bondage set make their way onto the web. They’re creepy and hot and haunting all at once. Don’t know if the images’ lilac tone was the way they were printed or an effect added to the scans in Photoshop, but it adds just the right mood, like it’s all happening at dusk, the most magical time of the day. Please, whoever has these, scan more!

UPDATE: Trevor Brown has graciously scanned three more for everyone’s viewing pleasure. See them on his blog. Thank you kindly!

This man has been immortalized on the Internet forever, though probably not in a way he would’ve approved.

This Romanian cemetery is a splitting image of my favorite playgrounds growing up in Russia – it has the same feeling of being colorful, cheerful and creepy (Russian playgrounds are famously creepy) all at once. Each person here has a story. Some are obvious, some are more mysterious. Okay, so Gumby attacked him from beyond the grave. And her husband ran her over. Meanwhile, he… loved Etch-a-Sketch? Other interpretations are welcome in the comments.

While this merely reminds me of a playground, I’d love to see this idea fully realized. My ideal cemetery is now one giant playground: everyone that’s buried has their own swing set or slide, in all different colors. Rich people who’d normally have mausoleums could have treehouses and jungle gyms. Cremated people get to be a sandbox.

• Wikipedia entry on Merry Cemetery in Romania
• Lots of pictures from the cemetery on LJ
• More pictures c/o Google

Evil-Last, new painting by pinup artist Brian Viveros

Arist Brian M. Viveros has the “don’t mess with me” girl-with-a-cigarette pinup down to a science. So many dense fetish permutations, so little time! Here’s helmet + goggle + octopus + tentacle marks. Or: eyepatch + band-aid + mickey mouse ears + fetish gear. Etc. The transparency of the source material is at times a bit distracting (i.e. this obviously came from this), but the images remain fun nevertheless.

I imagine a young Brian coming face-to-face with the cover of Tank Girl: Apocalypse, and just being scarred (in a good way) for life. Or an alternate-universe, born-50-years-too-early Viveros going off to war and ignoring the pinups that the other soldiers were so crazy about, jacking off to the U.S. Department of Public Health-issued pamphlets instead. Inspiration is where you find it!

• Brian Viveros

See also:

• Katsuya Terada
• John John Jesse
• National Library of Health’s Venereal Disease Poster Gallery

“I paid for a lap dance, not a desk dance.” Caption/image via Pop Sensation.

Faux lesbianism – yet another value that this great country has lost. Just look at Katie Perry’s disgrace of a music video, “I Kissed a Girl.” As heyguysitsthebible points out, “Katy Perry is no fake lesbian. She’s fake questioning. She’s fake experimenting. And that’s not good enough.” Indeed. The author proceeds to dolefully recount the good old days, back when this country still had some backbone, in which bands like t.A.T.u had to actually make out with each other to prove that they were indeed true fake lesbians. The depths to which this nation has sunk! Not only does Katy Perry fail to lock lips with a single female in her music video, but to add insult to injury, in the end she actually wakes up next to her boyfriend, realizing that her super-safe, bowdlerized lesbian fantasy (or was it a fantasy about being in an ad for Claire’s Accessories?) was just a dream. Damn it, we are better than these last eight years.

Jill Sobule, whose catchier, wittier “I Kissed a Girl” video became a controversial hit in the pre-Ellen mid-90s (to be fair, her video doesn’t have a kiss in it either, though it does have Fabio in uniform, which somehow makes it extra-gay), isn’t bothered: “I don’t feel precious about the title, but I’ve gotten tons of e-mails from annoyed fans,” she recently told EW.com. “Maybe I’ll write a third ‘I Kissed a Girl’ for fun… it will be about how I kissed her, left the dull boyfriend, got gay-married in California, and really no one gave a shit.”

Meanwhile, real lesbians continue to make music! Uh Huh Her just released a new music video. The luscious Leisha Hailey looks oddly like Cylon Six in it, but the real star is still the hipster unicorn.

First, about the website: click here to go to the site of designers Lucy and Bart. Maximize the window. Move your mouse around. Get your face really close to the screen and stare into their eyes. It’s uncanny! Morphing nothing new; we all remember it from a steady stream of ’90s music videos and more recently from the hypnotic Women in Art YouTube spectacle, but this interface manages to make it novel again. Maybe it’s the fact that you can see every pore in the high-res images, the fact that you scan stare into their eyes and manipulate their faces at will, coupled with a flawless, uncomplicated execution. Either way, the simple navigation feels immersive in an unexpected way.

The designers use cheap materials such as cardboard and pantyhose nylon to produce extravagant shapes. While most art clothing made out of bubble wrap, toilet paper and tinsel tends to resemble failed Project Runway challenges, the constructions here contain volume, depth, texture and, importantly, storytelling. The motivations for the designs are explained on the site as “an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and the body.” It is stated that designers Lucy McRae and Bart Hess share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression, and that unconsciously their collaborations touch on these themes, though it was not their intention to communicate this. Their process searches for “low–tech prosthetic ways for human enhancement,” stumbling on new constructions during a creative process that they describe as a primitive, blind search.

[Thank you, Nicola!]

One of of Recife’s new fonts, “Hand-Made.”

Brazilian font designer and collage artist Eduardo Recife, famous for freely giving away some of the most beautiful fonts ever made, has just released a new version of Misprinted Type. The completely-redesigned site features 7 new fonts, 4 new drawings, 17 new collage illustrations and new original art in the web store.

Recife’s legendary font “Nars”

I’ve been following Recife’s site ever since version 2.0. His fonts are probably what got me interested in typography in the first place. I have to say that while some may consider Recife’s grunge-antique collage aesthetic “played out,” I don’t care. Looking at his work, I feel like it comes from a very genuine place. His style still gets to me every time – no matter how many shitty emo bands use it. Here’s to more Recife fonts in the years to come!

• Misprinted Type 4.0
• Misprinted Type 3.0
• Misprinted Type 2.0

In 1994, Margaret Cho starred in an ABC sitcom called All-American Girl – or, as Cho called it, “Saved by the Gong.” It was the first show about about an all-Asian American family on television. If you remember seeing it on TV, you remember how quickly it disappeared. Mainly, it failed because of network meddling with Margaret’s on-screen persona.

First the network decided that she wasn’t skinny enough, and put pressure on Margaret Cho to lose weight to play the part of herself. It didn’t help that show  was met with minimal enthusiasm by the Korean-American community; one 12-year-old Korean girl wrote in to say, “when I see Margaret Cho on television, I feel deep shame.” Panicked by this type of reaction, the network decided that Cho wasn’t Asian enough. To improve the situation, they hired an “Asian consultant” to teach Cho about chopsticks and not wearing shoes in the house. For some reason, that didn’t help! After consistently low ratings, the entire cast was fired except for Cho and the grandmother. Shortly thereafter, the show went up in smoke.

Since then, Margaret Cho has done many wonderful things, including eight tours, two books and a burlesque show. But one thing she’s not done since All-American Girl was star in a television show – until now, with the arrival of The Cho Show. It’s the second-ever show about an all-Asian American family; no one’s tried since All-American Girl. Margaret vows that this time – along with her parents (real ones this time), her gays and her elegant 3’10” co-star Selene Luna – this time, the show gets made on her terms. Episode 1 premiered today, and I quite enjoyed it. The full episode is posted on Margaret Cho’s blog. Go Cho!

• The Cho Show
• I’m The One that I Want
• Assassin
• Notorious C.H.O.
• Revolution

MTV was once amazing! Not to go there or anything, but what I miss most are the cartoons. Aeon Flux, The Maxx, Liquid Television (Nietzsche Pops!), and yes, even Beavis and Butthead had its moments (like when they watch the music video for Bull in the Heather and think that Kathleen Hanna is a 5-year-old who can’t dance). But the show that came back to haunt me this year? Daria. Smart as a whip and cynical as a roomful of reporters, Daria “misery chick” Morgendorfer was my age when the show first aired, and quickly became my hero. Recently, I decided to revisit the show now that 10 years have passed, and happily found that it’s as funny and true now as it was back then.

This time around, my favorite characters aren’t Daria and her artsy sidekick Jane, but the adults. Hands-down, my favorite character is Mr. DeMartino, the Chrisopher Walken-inspired history teacher with some anger-management issues and a serious gambling problem. A classic example of DeMartino’s temperament can be seen in early on in Fizz Ed, an episode in which the school runs out of budget and seeks sponsorship from a cola company. Then there’s Helen – Daria’s workaholic lawyer mom, whose parenting techniques backfire terribly but hit the mark when it matters.

If you’ve never seen the show, it’s logical to begin at the beginning. From there, it gets even better. Adventures in babysitting the kids of over-PC parents, dating retro-obsessed douchebags, and being forced to teach hateful classmates during a teacher’s strike await. Many of my favorite episodes aren’t grounded in reality at all; there’s the urban legends episode, the high school murder mystery, and the most bizarre Daria episode of all time, in which the holidays of Christmas, Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day escape the spirit world to start a high school band, with Daria’s help.

Until the music liscencing issues get worked out, the show survives only in bootlegs. In the meantime, the legend lives on; if the obsessiveness/slash quotient of the fan art is any measure of a work’s impact, then Daria rivals Harry Potter. Actually, the show itself presented a myriad of character alter egos at the end of every episode during the credits. Every week, familiar denizens of the Daria-verse transformed into R. Crumb characters, historical figures, athletes, dinosaurs and canned vegetables. Amidst her turns as Mother Goose and Bella Abzug, Daria was sometimes shown in a more realistic context: a journalist, an author, a talk show host. Watching the credits roll, I always wondered: what will happen to Daria when she leaves high school? Is life really better after that? What will she be? What will I be? Now, I kinda know.

What’s Natalie Shau been up to? Last we checked, the Lithuanian-based digital artist was creating sepia images based on Greek mythology. More recently, she’s completed a sumptuous new set of illustrations for French jewelry designer Lydia Courteille. On Courteille’s site, Shau’s dreamy Ray Caesar-esque illustrations serve to introduce each of the seven ranges: My Secret Garden, Vanities, Bestiary, Esoterism, Cameos & Glyptics, Cassandra’s and Cabinet of Curiosities.

The prices for Courteille’s diamond-encrusted bijoux range in the average of $10,000. Why use real diamonds? Gross! Nevertheless, there are a couple of baubles on Courteille’s site that I covet, and I include them here for your viewing pleasure.