My childhood edition of Town in a Snuffbox was published in 1981 and, as you can see by the cover alone, it’s Steampunk as f**k. It’s a tale of a boy who travels inside a wind-up musical snuffbox to find a town called “Din-Din” and anthropomorphic bells, hammers, springs and cogs inhabiting it. The bells tell young protagonist Misha about their life of forced music-making and daily beatings from the dreaded hammer-men. The hammer-men explain that they’re just following orders from their superior, who in turn takes his orders from Queen Spring. Displeased by all the violence an bureaucracy, Misha confronts Queen Spring and brings down the system by uncoiling her.

Here’s a book that probably wouldn’t get published today, at least not in the US, for the mere fact that its premise involves tobacco paraphernalia. But Prince Vladimir Odoevski didn’t write Town in a Snuffbox in modern times. Yep, the author was a prince. He was also a music critic, philanthropist, philosopher, senator and an enthusiastic fan of phantasmagoric storytelling. Oh, and a magazine editor, working on the socio-political Sovremennik with such literary greats as Pushkin and Gogol.

1800s Moscow was brimming with radical-thinking upper-crust entrepreneurs – Odoevski was doing all he could to keep up. Looks like he did a decent job of it, too. He’s recently been credited with predicting blogging in his unfinished utopian novel, Year 4338. From Wikipedia:

Finally, today we received a household journal from the prime minister, where we, among others, were invited to a soiree. You need to know that in many houses, especially those well connected, such journals are published, having replaced regular correspondence. <…> The journals usually provide information about the hosts’ good or bad health, family news, various thoughts and comments, small inventions, as well as invitations; in case of a dinner invitation, also the menu. Besides, for communicating in emergency, friends’ houses are connected by means of magnetic telegraphs that allow people who live far from each other to talk to each other.

Eerie!

The illustrator, Alexander Koshkin, is a contemporary artist, whose vision and watercolor technique make the dreamy tone of the book come alive. I love that though this is a children’s book, the art  doesn’t feel dumbed down – sparse backgrounds balance against super-detailed characters so there’s enough room for the imagination. Everything seems to be veiled in warm glowing fog and you can almost hear the music.

Koshkin was one of the first illustrators in the former USSR to branch out internationally. The English-laguage books he’s illustrated can be found here. Check out his version of Alice in Wonderland and click the jump to see more of his art from Town in a Snuffbox. Large scans of all the illustrations are here and definitely worth a look – so much detail!

No more meetings. Not one more. If you have to attend one more meeting today you’re going to scream. One more boring, monotonous PowerPoint presentation and you’re going to beat someone to death with their laptop. You’ll feel bad, sure; I mean, it wouldn’t be their fault necessarily, after all no one likes doing PowerPoint presentations — well, everyone except for Tim, that is, but he’s pretty fucking weird to begin with. I mean, remember that time when you walked into the break-room and he was standing there, whispering to the coffee machine and he didn’t even notice your presence because he was so intently whispering and so you cleared your throat and he finally realized there was another person in the room but he didn’t seem embarrassed or anything, just annoyed that someone had interrupted him, and he just sort of gave you a dirty, sideways glance which he kept trained on you for the endless seconds you spent deciding whether you really still wanted coffee, and until you finally backed out of the room at which point you could here him begin whispering again and you were fairly certain you heard your name and the word “whore”? Yeah, that was weird. — it’s just that, if you have to look at one more graph or here the word “actionable” again, you’re gonna snap.

Well relax. Meetings are over for the day. It’s time to chill out, put aside those thoughts of murderous rage, and just wait for that sweet, sweet weekend to roll around. In the meantime, why don’t you take a load off. Take off your shoes, maybe plug in that lava lamp that you got from your secret Santa last Christmas, because now is the time for The Floyd. This week we have Classic Albums: Pink Floyd – The Making of “The Dark Side of the Moon” or, at least, the shorter version for television. Not much to say about this one. It’s the story behind one of the great rock albums of all time as told by Those Who Were There. Containing a bevy of interviews, demo reels, and old footage it’s a journey through the labyrinthine inner workings of manufacturing an album. Bonus clip at the end with an extended look at the single “Money”.

The outlaw biker image is a break from the conformity that has taken over America since industrialization. My machined pizza cutters draw inspiration from chopper motorcycles and attempt to reclaim the mythology and economic usefulness of the American worker as patriarch; translating machine or functional object into flesh and blood. The outlaw as defiant nonconformist, as well as social outcast, parallels being an artist who makes functional objects and being an individual who takes pride in the power of invention and skill.

A complex and deep way for artist and teacher Frankie Flood to say that he makes badass pizza cutters. These are pizza cutters that will punch you in the face if they don’t like the way you look at them. Pizza cutters who will ride off with that pretty young daughter of yours for a lifetime of reckless and terrible debauchery, never to return. These pizza cutters will fuck your pizza up, no goddamn problem, boy.

via The Daily What

I realize this video may not be for everyone. For instance Nadya, one of my esteemed editors, hates videogames with an all-consuming passion. She must be forgiven for this, dear reader. It may not be common knowledge but Nadya’s entire village in Russia was destroyed by videogames. It was only by chance that she and her family had been chosen that week to travel the 500 miles to the nearest town to procure the beets on which they so desperately depended. Upon returning and finding the village razed and their neighbors slaughtered, they decided to flee to the United States.

You’ll excuse me, then, if I geek out for a moment. 8-bit Trip is a stop-motion music video that pays tribute to that generation of videogames that dominated my childhood, using the building blocks that has hijacked untold hours of my free time. Created by two crazy Swedes requiring over 1500 hours of work, who knows how many LEGO and a chiptune soundtrack; it is a perfect storm of cloying nostalgia, paralyzing my brain with its sheer awesomeness.

I would be lying if I said I had fond memories of Morgan Freeman on The Electric Company. This is not because I did not enjoy his contributions to the program but more because I cannot make the connection between the Morgan Freeman of today with the Morgan Freeman who played Easy Reader. They seem, to my mind, two entirely different people and, subsequently, I find myself having to be reminded of this fact when it is presented to me. More importantly, however, may be the fact that most of my memories of The Electric Company are dominated by the silent specter of Spiderman.

Regardless of mute superheroes or faulty memories Mr. Freeman was a regular cast member playing a number of different characters including Vincent the Vegetable Vampire, which is about all the backstory you’ll need for this clip of Morgan Freeman taking a bath in a coffin.

Inspiration is where you find it, and everyone’s gotta start somewhere. Before Enki Bilal’s blue-haired future-hotties and Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux, I had Gennady Kalinovsky and his black-bobbed, fishnet-stockinged, high-heeled no-nonsense powerhouse, Mary Poppins. From the moment I opened the book in 1988 I perceived Miss Poppins as a polished badass, with a collection of dubious acquaintances and a seedy past. Her lipstick was always perfect, she wore well-fitting suits and kept many secrets. Sure, she was sardonic and vain, but she was the best.

The original Mary Poppins stories are kid brain-candy, with magic, adventures, talking animals and going behind parents’ backs, but what really made me love the now-tattered book I’ve kept my whole life is the artwork. One might call Gennady Kalinovsky a Russian Edward Gorey, but I’d rather not. His line-art universe is looser and more psychedelic, with warped perspective and spindly figures you’d sooner expect in an eerie Jean-Pierre Jeunet flick than on the pages of kids’ classic. The twins drawing below the cut gave me nightmares and I’m forever grateful – I only wish more illustrators exercised this kind of freedom in children’s books.

After a bit of research I found that Gennady actually had quite a penchant for the surreal – check out the art he created for Alice in Wonderland , Behind the Looking Glass, and Master and Margarita – my top all-time favorites.

I remember the first and only time I watched the 1964 film about the character I grew up loving, and how disturbed I was by my Mary parading about in ugly pseudo-Edwardian garb, dancing, and, perhaps worst of all, singing. It’s not the first terrible thing Disney has done to a childhood favorite, but for me it was certainly the most jarring.

Looking over the Mary Poppins books’ Wikipedia page it becomes even more apparent just how much my view of the stories and the character has been colored by a Russian translation and the accompanying illustrations. I almost want to give Disney credit for matching their Poppins costumes to the original Mary Sheppard illustrations! Instead, I wish I could shake late Kalinovskiy’s hand and thank him for the introduction to my very first female ideal. Short dark hair, perfect makeup, stockinged legs and an arsenal of experience is how I pictured every modern fictional heroine for years after reading Mary Poppins. I remember when Margarita looked just like her.

A few more of Kalinovsky’s Mary Poppins illustrations after the jump, and the rest of them here on Flickr just for you!

Contrary to the beliefs of some, Coilhouse is not a “fantasy magazine”. Yes, it’s a repository of amazing and wonderful things, but a “fantasy magazine” it is not. Some may dispute this fact and to those people I would say that you are mistaken. At the very least you are confused as to the definition of “fantasy magazine”, for just because you may woolgather about the inner workings of Coilhouse, such musings do not qualify the publication as a “fantasy magazine”.

The dark corners of your mind have no effect, then, on the actual reality of the magazine itself meaning, for instance, that editorial meetings are staid affairs in no way resembling a Cinemax offering in which the three lovely women who helm this ship dress in beautiful clothing and totally make out. Nor do the day-to-day operations of Coilhouse consist of the aforementioned goddesses lounging about in provocative frilly things in a giant, Victorian mansion when, suddenly, a casual discussion about Russian literature turns heated and finally breaks out into a sexy pillow fight, after which they totally make out. These things do not happen, I assure you, and there’s no use arguing about it or even threatening to quit even though you may feel that certain parties may have misled you or outright lied to you in order to lure you into their cold, fetid little lair where, instead of satin pillows, limber nymphs clad in frilly-things, and sloppy make-out sessions, you found a room with a desk, a computer, two buckets, and a 24 hour curfew. So, yeah, no fantasies here.

Der Orchideengarten (The Garden of Orchids) , on the other hand, was a fantasy magazine and it may be the first such publication of its kind. It ran for 51 issues, from 1919-1921, pre-dating Weird Tales by four years and was printed in the bedsheet format of 9¾” x 12″, square-bound. Contributors ranged from contemporary, German fantasy authors to stories by foreign writers such as H.G. Wells, Dickens, Poe, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Pushkin, Washington Irving, and Hawthorne, among others. There were even two issues dedicated to mystery stories and one dedicated to erotic literature.

The real star here, though, has to be the art. Everything from reproductions of medieval woodcuts to work by Gustave Doré to pieces by Alfred Kubin is represented here. The covers, seen here, are simply magnificent, making those of Weird Tales (much as I love them) appear almost childish by comparison. Certainly it can be said that Der Orchideengarten‘s covers lack the kitsch factor so prevalent in its American counterpart. Whether that’s a good thing or not is up to the reader.

There are a myriad number of additional scans at the ever wonderful A Journey Round My Skull as well as some great interior illustrations; well worth checking out.

8-EP, by Hyungkoo Lee, from the series Objectuals.

If you’re not reading CONSTANT SIEGE, you should be. Photographer Clayton Cubitt’s tumbleblog diary is full of memorable quotes, photographs and footage, mixed in with Cubitt’s own work. The result is a voyeuristic glimpse at an artist’s audiovisual predilections, similar to Audrey Kawasaki’s ffffound page in the sense that you can draw interesting comparisons between what the author chooses to “clip” and what they produce. Most artists keep a secret stash of images they find interesting, and I appreciate those who share at least a small portion of that with the public.

Together, the past week’s eclectic collection of discoveries – which includes a sensual Gabriel von Max painting titled The Anatomist, a grisly early 20th-century Manhattan crime scene, a silicon sculpture of a human face that’s equally realistic and demonic, the Oriental rat flea, a fascination with with plague doctor masks spanning several posts, the first photo ever taken by Cubitt (at age 5), an SS recruiting poster from Norway that’s perfectly in keeping with Cubitt’s photographic color scheme, and the “Highlights from Wildwood, NJ” video – officially make this the Best Constant Siege Week Ever.

Enlarging My Right Hand with Gauntlet 1 by Hyungkoo Lee

Going a little further back, I was taken by these images from Hyungkoo Lee’s series Objectuals. Lee’s surreal augmentation of the face and body reminds me of Paddy’s Hartley’s experiments with face corsets, and faintly recalls my favorite shot from the movie Brazil. More images from the series after the jump, and yet more on Lee’s site.

I’m finding myself loving the work of Charlie Immer. It’s a combination of innocent cartoonish figures with brutal and often grotesque violence helping to create scenes of starkly surreal other-worldliness; an aesthetic quality reminiscent of mid-90s MTV animation or the more recent Superjail! from [adult swim]. These alien worlds are harrowingly dangerous places where beauty abounds and death lurks around every corner. It’s Fantastic Planet, pressed through a meat-grinder and it is delicious.

In a perfect world Switzerland would be exactly like the one depicted in these altered postcards by Franco Brambilla. The rolling, green fields littered with space-faring vehicles; an alien parking lot. The yodelers silenced by giant metal tripods which stride over the snow-capped mountains. The resorts, peppered with interstellar and Earthly tourists alike; gathered together for a weekend of skiing and chocolate tastings or in town for a cuckoo clock enthusiast’s convention.

Unfortunately this is not the case. No, in reality the aliens only come here to mutilate our bovines and abduct people who believe in the healing powers of crystals and the only reason anyone visits Switzerland is to utilize their efficient banking system to avoid paying taxes. And no one would ever admit to being a cuckoo clock enthusiast.