I love this photo by Hyperion for its milky, opalescent quality. Most “scene portraits” try to be loud and in-your-face, so it’s interesting to see portraits that are so muted that still manage to resonate a great deal of strength. Hyperion shoots mostly on film and uses sculptural hairpieces to fill up the square compositions. I sometimes disagree with the makeup choices in his images, but when it all comes together, it’s pure magic.
Today we are going to play a game! It’s called “Gothic Outfit or Halloween Costume?” There are eight gothic ensembles in this post; some of them are actual outfits designed by alternative clothing labels to be worn out and about in the scene, others are Halloween costumes intended for adults who want to play-pretend to be goths one day out of the year. Can you guess which is which? Test yourself after the jump!
That was the Tank Girl of the 90s, the one I fell in love with. We didn’t hear from her for over a decade, but this year she re-emerged in The Gifting, a new series by Alan Martin (the original creator) and illustrator Ashley Wood. What does the Tank Girl of 2007 look like? Alan Martin had the following to say:
Here’s the emerging new look for Tank Girl. We were concerned that she didn’t make her re-appearance in the same, tired old clothes that she bowed out in some twelve years ago. What was alternative, upsetting, anarchic, and just plain odd-ball back then has since become common place. Mainstream media smothers us daily with punky chic, and modern day babies can be seen sporting spikey hairdos and Travis Bickle T-shirts. The uniform of the cultural revolutionary has been sold to The Man. So how to rebel? How give the finger to the fashion fascists? Normal is the only way ahead. Dress like a high school teacher from the mid-eighties, or pick clothes from your boring aunty’s wardrobe. The only way left to rebel is to dress like you’re not rebelling. We hope to bring a whole different flavour to Tank Girl, as she borrows ideas from past cultural reference points (Fay Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde, anyone?).
I completely feel what Alan Martin is saying. I like the look of the new Tank Girl drawings. However, the old-school, combat-boot-wearing, band-aid-covered, baseball-bat-wielding, kinda-dykey Tank Girl of yore will always hold a very dear place in my heart.
I’ll come out and say it: I love Ashley Wood’s amazing drawing style, but the new Tank Girl look doesn’t really do it for me. Maybe I’m being way too nostalgic, but it’s also possible that what I’m reacting to is the idea that so many people have decided to rebel by not-trying-to-look-rebellious that it’s starting to look like an easy way out of any real effort. I’m not saying that to undermine Martin’s very important message (see our Hot Topic Rebranding post), but it may be possible that so many people have caught onto the “rebel by looking normal” notion, and so many are using it to lazily avoid any attempts at interesting self-expression through clothing, that I’m just hoping that the pendulum swings back to the other side. You know, the side with the band-aids and corrugated tubing and knee pads.
But I guess I should get over it and enjoy the story. Comic book characters change, if it’s a good comic. When Maggie from Love and Rockets gained weight and creator Jaime Hernandez insisted that this was the way that Maggie was meant to be, I thought that was incredibly touching and honest. It’s impossible to keep up a certain look forever, and the story can be just as interesting once that look is gone.
Warehouse 23 is a really simple HTML site that hasn’t changed much in the past 10 years; you go there and you open different boxes, and find strange things inside. I opened up three boxes for this post and here are the last three items I’ve found there:
A small hamster, seemingly healthy. There is a small shaved patch on its back with a tattoo that says “Intel Inside.”
A small birthday candle in a small metal lantern, lit. It cannot be blown out or extinguished by any means and never seems to consume itself. A package of similar candles is in the crate, labeled “Everlast… the trick Birthday Candle by Il Lumens, Ltd.”
An old, yellowed copy of the San Jose Mercury-News. The headline story is about the assassination of the current president during his tour of a Silicon Valley firm. Several reassuring quotes from the vice president (now president) are included. The paper is dated the 27th of next month.
Go open a random box for yourself and see what you find! You can also add an item to the Warehouse (just stay away from the phrase “seemingly ordinary,” for the love of Bob!), or – and this is my favorite – dig through the dumpster, where you find items submitted to Warehouse 23 that didn’t quite make the cut, but were just too weird to ignore.
Left: Lucy from Dracula. Right: Ruff by Junya Watanabe.
Ruffs! Why are they so intoxicatingly awesome? It’s just a ruffle of fabric on a drawstring, but whenever I see one, it still evokes an instant Pavlovian response. A ruff turns a person into a character: a creature that’s decadent, aristocratic, maybe even a little tragic. I marvel at ruffs the way I marvel at lush cake icing and delicate origami, and while there’s something very sensuous about the wrapping, ruffs also make people look very strong, armored, untouchable.
“Virginqueen” photo shoot by Viona.
In celebration of my tender relationship with ruffs, I present to you my favorite manifestations of these sumptuous adornments in fashion, photography, music and film. The list is by no means complete, so please feel free to chime with your own ruff finds! One of the images and some of the links below may not be SFW, but most are. The Romp through Ruffs begins with the work of photographer Tina Cassati:
Felt animals! They are so cute! The images above come from Chika Photography, where adorable felt squirrels, doves and elephants await you. You can get your own felt feline and simultaneously help out a person in need over at Kittyaid, and if you want to make one of your own, there’s a great Flickr tutorial that will show you how to make any kind of monster you want. Need more specific instructions? Here are some more little DIY felt projects:
And if text-and-photo instructions aren’t enough, here’s some time-lapse footage from indie/experimental/noise band Deerhoof to help you. Featuring Satomi Matsuzaki, the clip is called “Stuffed” and I love it because she’s just making the weirdest shit. You get to see her create a log, a video cassette, and a nippled jock-wearing bear:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/gcHmv21Ddvk" width="400" height="330" wmode="transparent" /]
Incidentally, Deerhoof is playing tomorrow (Monday) night in LA at the Avalon (details here), with our girl Mer opening for them as part of Faun Fables, the same band that she toured Europe with last month. See you there?
Hey guys, I’m back from my super-secret Coilhouse mission to Belgrade/Ljubljana. I can’t tell you what I did there; I’ll only mention that it has something vaguely to do with stags and light beer. You will love it!
My jet-lagged brains really got a good rattle when I read Abstraction by Shintaro Kago, sent to us by Lucylle. Not safe for work! Don’t click it, mom! Lucylle describes Abstraction as “a short story in manga style, featuring an extremely creative approach to panel division/story continuity.”
I didn’t think I’d like it at first – the first few panels seemed so flat, so sparse, so lifeless. I thought, “this is why I think most manga is so boring.” But before I could finish thinking that sentence, my eye scrolled down to the page and something happened. The panels got weirder and weirder, and began to take a shape of their own. I felt like I’d been sucked into some sort of bizarre, claustrophobic fishbowl of dysmorphia, sex, awkwardness and pain, and most unsettling thing I felt as I kept on reading this was horror at how many of the completely anatomically-impossible, disjointed panels gave me an “oh shit, been there” kind of feeling. Ah, young love.
Internet addict Barbie. Neglected children sold separately.
Okay, who didn’t make their Barbies do obscene things at some point? But The Subversive 11½ Inch Fashion Doll takes it to all new levels of wrong.
The author of the site, alt model Theda B, describes the effort as “awful things I did to my old toys in a fit of boredom” and presents the Mattell-made dolls, dubbed “Bobbie” and “Ben,” in some hilarious, completely un-PC scenarios that draw on politics, illness, subculture, deviant sexuality and criminal behavior. And a good time is had by all! My personal favorites are Pretentious Performance Artist Barbie, Bobbie Christ (or the “I’m Going Straight to Hell” doll) and Trench Coat Mafia Ben. Collect them all!
The site hasn’t been updated in 3 years, which is a shame. It would be interesting to see what kind of new dolls people would submit to the site today. My own contributions would be Internet-Famous Bobbie and Sadistic TSA Agent Ben.
Yesterday I got two emails, one right after another, from two completely different people, both about Survival Research Laboratories.
Paul Komoda shares a link to a YouTube video entitled Weird Weapons of WW2, which aired on the History Channel. The video discusses psychoacoustics, air cannons and other unusual Nazi attempts at weaponry from WW2. All of these machines were abandoned or dismantled, but Mark Pauline appears to demonstrate how some of them worked using SRL recreations. It’s funny to hear the History Channel people describe SRL in that gee-whiz History Channel voice. Also from Paul, a link to A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief, “an almost Quay-like film” featuing SRL machines.
Mark Jennings sends along news of the approaching Blue + Green Ball, a Todd Blair benefit happening this Saturday in San Francisco. Todd Blair is a member of SRL who suffered a head injury during a recent SRL performance in Amsterdam. Todd has a long road of medical bills, living and rehab expenses, and a community of artists and performers has joined to help him by putting together this show. Activities include music, belly dancing, dada percussion, art auction peices by Stelarc, SRL, Lynn Hershman, Eduardo Kac and others, hot dogs steamed by the Neverwas Steam Car, and more.
This image came from a storybook I had as a child. Whenever I look at it now, my heart still jumps up to my throat. In this image, Vasilisa the Beautiful, wandering through the forest, comes to the hut of Baba Yaga. The hut surrounded by strange lights, lights that emanate from the skulls of Baba Yaga’s victims. Vasilisa picks up one of these and uses it as a lantern, guiding her way as she walks on the dark path.
You can read the entire story here, complete with all of the amazing illustrations by the artist, Igor Bilibin. My other three images from the same storybook are the following three:
Taken from Old Russia, an amazing resource page of Bilibin’s Art and the stories that accompany it. Bless this person for taking the time to translate all of it.