I didn’t even know there was such a thing as industrial music when I stumbled onto Janet’s Rhythm Nation 1814 film in my pre-teens, but I knew that I’d made a very important discovery. Later there would be the mix tapes and the radio shows that exposed me to my favorite music in its true form, but until then, isolated in suburbia and still learning English, Janet’s video was my first glimpse into the aesthetics of my favorite musical genre.
Having re-watched Rhythm Nation today, I have come to a very important conclusion: Janet Jackson is even more ÜBER than I initially thought. Here’s why:
The uniforms! God, the uniforms. Those gloves with the riveted metallic plates? Hot.
“We are a nation with no geographic boundaries, bound together by our beliefs.” NSK State, anyone? Laibach, take note: Janet beat you to it by 4 years.
The entire clip takes place in a steamy factory that recalls Test Dept’s Total State Machine.
Despite the strong percussion and electronic elements, I’d be pushing it if I claimed that this awesome song was industrial. But you know what? Janet created this socially-conscious record on her terms, in the face of a record company pressuring her to only sing about love and relationships. Who knows what this could have been, had there not been that pressure at all?
Artist/writer Bajema has been one of my biggest inspirations over the years. It’s through Beth’s work that I first “met” Coilhouse co-writer Zoe some five years ago by following a link from Bajema.com. Bajema’s wistful images make me feel as though the world is still full of secrets, and a lot of the images hint at the idea of a hidden mystical order. The sensual titles of her work enhance the sense of longing evoked by her images – Saturnine, The Angel Balm, Insects and Angels, & Snapdragon Tea are just a few examples. Her site is currently going through a majer overhaul so it’s down, but she’s recently uploaded much of her older work to her MySpace page. Even though the graphics are small, they are still lush and it’s great to see them all together. Can’t wait until you get your site up, Beth.
Well, hello! While we’re all waiting for the next installment of What’s Zo Wearing to appear here on Coilhouse, I thought I’d treat you to some fashion tips coming from a real pro: Brenda Dickson, whose claim to fame is starring in the soap opera “The Young and the Restless”. If you watch this video, then you too can be beautiful, glamorous and stylish like her. So let’s “teleport” into her closet and take a look!
Feeling fab yet? Here’s Part 2, dubbed over with fucking Dada raunch genius by Deven Green. “I just tattooed this cat this morning. Look at the good I do. Get the hell out of here. I’m a pirate.”
“The mask serves the double function of displaying and concealing; it is at once surface and depth.”- Francette Patceau, The Symptom of Beauty
This image and the ones after the cut come from the book “Torture Garden: From Bodyshocks to Cybersex,” edited by Dave TG. This book, a frozen moment of 90s fetish club culture, mixes party photos with formal studio shots to showcase the personalities and fetishes of TG’s clubgoes, along with inspirational and well-researched fetish-related quotations.
What strikes me about Alan Sivroni’s portraits in the book is that not one person in his images appears to be insecure or uncomfortable. There are images of old and young people of every ethnicity and body type, and the one thing they have in common is that they all project total ownership and control. That’s not what I see when I look at fetish portraits today. It makes me wonder: was the fetish scene really more confident then than it is now, or is it just careful editing?
We previously blogged about Paddy Hartley’s Project Facade, cialis a uniform-sculpture exploration of wartime trauma and facial reconstruction. But before Hartley became known for Project Facade, ambulance he received international acclaim for another project – a series of face corsets focused on exploring attitudes towards plastic surgery and ideals of facial beauty.
The bioglass and cinching invoke Botox, collagen, implants and other techniques that stretch and compress our faces into their ideal shape – but only temporarily. Hartley elaborates on these ideas and more in an excellent interview over at We Make Money not Art.
Any man who puts pictures like this of himself on the internet in order to make an artistic point has our respect forever.
Reader Jarem Morrow has sent over a link to an interesting little community on LJ called design_history. A must for any design junkie! In particular, there’s an interesting post about an all-but-forgotten art magazine from Germany called Die Schönheit (Beauty). Poster Nekokaiju on the community has unearthed some covers, and has this to say:
“Die Schönheit was a German magazine that ran through the years 1902-1936. It dealt mainly with the emerging Nacktkultur, Nudist movement. But also featured articles on modern artists, science fiction and sexual aids. It became well known for it’s racy classifieds section. Needless to say, it didn’t last too long after the rise of Nazi Germany.” I couldn’t find much more information on it online, but a book search reveals that Die Schönheit was also one of the first to publish the work of Erich Maria Remarque.
Yesterday, our friend Warren Ellis posed an interesting question: “why doesn’t alt culture exist?” In his weekly column, The Sunday Hangover, Warren points the finger in the same direction as our mission statement, blaming the rapacious mainstream. However, Warren goes a step further, fingering another culprit:
We’re in Reynolds’ “anachronesis” — living in a time of constant, delusional recursion, in a limbo of a dozen different pasts. Re-enactment, like living as a medieval soldier for a never-ending Renaissance Faire. Being Lenny Kravitz. Being the White Stripes. Record collection bands. People who like Amy Winehouse. Reynolds again: “Things under the sway of anachronesis are just nothing. You might as well be dead.”
Here’s another theory: perhaps anachronesis is not the retardant of a burgeoning alt culture, but its catalyst. After all, every subculture has always been a mediated response to the mainstream: punk culture’s rebellion grew out of a disillusionment with the rewards promised by white-collar mobility; Rastafarianism was a subversion of the white man’s religion; both the riot grrls of the 90s and the flappers of the 20s adopted certain styles to reject – or reclaim – certain conventions of womanhood. What, then, is the mainstream culture that today’s alt puts under the microscope?
Yes, you read that headline correctly. The Bloody Digusting News website reports: “last night at the 2007 Scream Awards Paris Hilton was nearly booed off the stage once again, but by the time they finished showing the first ever footage from Darren Bousman’s Repo! The Genetic Opera all of the boos had turned into cheers.” This rock opera about organ repossession takes us to the year 2056, in which a worldwide epidemic causes organ failure on a massive scale, enabling a biotech firm called GeneCo to begin renting out genetically-perfect organs to those who can afford them. The nature of the program is similar to a car lease, and the firm sends out a repo man if the recipient can’t make payments. In addition to Paris Hilton and Nivek Ogre, other talents involved in the project, on and off the screen, include singer Poe, Daniel Ash from Bauhaus, Yoshiki Hayashi from X Japan, Bill Mosely and Sarah Brightman. Ogre plays Pavi, the younger son of the evil mastermind behind GeneCO, and Hilton is cast as Amber Sweet, a “sexy aspiring opera diva and scalpel-slut will stop at nothing to get her moment in the spotlight.” Is this to be the Rocky Horror Picture Show of our generation? I sure hope so!
The last issue of Mondo 2000, featuring Nina Hagen on the cover.
I’m obsessed with dead magazines, especially ones that crossed over into the mainstream. The history of such magazines often sounds like a VH-1 Behind the Music special; first the group’s idealistic creation rises to fame on account of its originality, then comes the inevitable collapse due to in-fighting under the conflicting pressures of appeasing a wider audience, a set of advertisers and the project’s own artistic aims. More often then not, the problem is simply that such a magazine is way ahead of its time. This was the case with Mondo 2000, yet I’m grateful that it existed precisely when it did.
So, what made Mondo 2000 so special? It was, in my opinion, the best alternative culture magazine that America ever had. They wrote about smart drugs, brain implants, virtual reality, cyberpunk, Cthulhupunk and cryogenics. They covered Laibach and Lydia Lunch in the same issue. The pantheon of writers was a force to be reckoned with: Bruce Sterling, Robert Anton Wilson, and William Gibson all lent their talents, and there was even a Burroughs vs. Leary interview face-off. Then there was the famous U2-Negativland interview, in which Negativland, disguised as reporters, interviewed U2 into a corner to reveal the band’s hypocrisy over their lawsuit against Negativland over sampling. All in all, the magazine took risks. “The good dream for me and Mondo,” said editor R.U. Sirius in an interview with Purple Prose, “is overcoming the limits of biology without necessarily leaving sensuality or sexuality behind.” Issue after issue, Mondo 2000 threw a sexy dystopian bash and invited the decade’s best thinkers.
“Blind Love” is one of my favorite pieces ever by artist Paul Komoda. The piece features Courtney Claveloux, sales one of the main characters in Paul’s stories. I don’t want to give too much away about what kind of person Courtney is or what she and her friends get up to, but you can tell she likes the tentacle action. She also likes fuzzy stuffed animals. More on Courtney soon.
