Considering this is my second post concerned with dolls one may have the impression that I am some sort of aficionado; an enthusiast; a doll fancier. While it is true that I may have a small collection of figurines, I would not take this as a sign that I am deeply embedded in the hobby. And while, yes, it is true that some of the dolls may have been painstakingly handcrafted by myself; requiring hours of meticulous effort under a dingy, sixty watt bulb this does not necessarily mean that I have any deep affection for the craft. And while these dolls may have been modeled after the curves and features of the otherworldly nymphs who are my editors, the clothes fashioned from the surreptitiously stolen threads of their garments, their hair being the same follicles so carefully and secretively trimmed and harvested whenever one of these heavenly creatures appeared at my desk to inform me that no, Ross, no one wants to read about your fantasies of being given a sponge bath by Norwegian nurses of Amazonian stature and maybe you should think about, I don’t know, perhaps writing a paragraph or two about the actual fucking thing you are linking instead of stringing a bunch of arcane adjectives together with commas and semi-colons into a long winded sentence concerning nothing but your own, sick little world — that doesn’t mean that I’m obsessed or odd.
Which brings us, slowly but surely, to the work of Julien Martinez, whose highly detailed figures exude a different sort of oddness. Most of the people and creatures who inhabit his world are hunched, squat, and old, their swollen conjunctiva making even the children appear octogenarian. Indeed, even their skeletons are drooping, the mouths pulled down by massive, boned jowls. It’s striking that only two figures of the entire portfolio are what many would consider traditionally beautiful, Végalia, pictured above, being one of them with her delicate face protected by a fishbowl mask. Most resemble Melchior et Brutus, exuding a forlorn weariness tinged with ennui; beautiful in their own, otherworldly way.
The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls . . . Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.
-Hunter S. Thompson from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The late, great Thompson’s masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has been a favorite of mine ever since my father gave me his battered, paperback copy to read in high school. All these years later its magical lunacy is still just as powerful as when I first found Duke and his attorney in the desert.
No surprise then that I am enamored of Jonathan Baldwin’s Rauol inspired, narcotics themed board game. A worthy display piece for anyone with a yen for H.S.T.’s particular brand of mayhem.
Here is one of the holy grails of interviews, with visionary writer Kathy Acker quizzing the legendary William Burroughs.
They talk about many things: Word as Virus, Scientology, Jesus and the legion of apocryphal stories that followed Burroughs around like carrion crows. This took place in the late ’80s, and both had less than a decade to live, passing away within a few months of each other in 1997. We will not see their like again.
A particularly telling moment, at least to my eyes, comes early on when Burroughs talks about the power of “shotgun” methods — the cut-up method in writing or a spray blast in painting — that introduce a random factor. Yet at the same time, they don’t take away the importance of “careful brushwork.”
It’s an important point: it illustrates how false the line between inspiration and discipline is. Acker and Burroughs grasped that instinctually and their works put the lie to that division. I think many people wrongly draw the lesson from both that simply spewing up one’s subconscious visions makes for good writing or art, while missing the considerable craft they put into honing those thoughts into glistening brain-gems.
Lessons aside, the prime pleasure in watching this interview comes from witnessing two keenly unique minds in a fascinating conversation. The rest is below the jump. Enjoy.
Attention all New Yorkers! Looking for something to do this summer on Wednesday nights? Frequent Coilhouse contributor Agent Double Oh No, aka Jeff Wengrofsky, is teaching a course this summer at NYU. The course is titled “The Postwar Avant-Garde in Downtown New York.” The course sounds amazing – I wish I could visit NYC for the summer, just to take it. Check out the description:
In the period from 1950 to 1980, New York City’s downtown art world teemed with freewheeling vitality. From the musicians of the postwar jazz scene to 1970s punk musicians jamming at CBGB’s, neighborhoods comprising an area smaller than most American towns produced many significant contributions to music, film, theater, dance, the visual arts, and the written and spoken word. In this course, we explore the history of lower Manhattan, experience some of this art and music, discuss the social conditions that nurtured creativity, and hear from a few of the people who were prime movers in these creative communities.
Jeff is a wealth of knowledge and insight – this course is not to be missed. There will be films, slides, things to read and places to explore. Guest speakers include two living legends of the avant-garde: Judith Malina, founder of The Living Theater and direct theatrical descendant of Brecht, and Andy Warhol superstar Taylor Mead.
The course runs from June 3 – July 22, and takes place every Wednesday from 6:20pm-8:40pm. Click here to learn more. You do not need to be an NYU student to enroll.
Like cherubs stuffed to their breaking point, Cheng Fei’s figures revel in vice. Their corpulent bodies, drenched in lust and gluttony, roil and roll on the canvas. Faceless, save for collagen plumped pornstar lips, their appendages have ballooned and bloated so that they are nigh unrecognizable. Incapable of seeing, hearing, or smelling they can only imbibe and consume, feeding their own, selfish desires. Some, their skins forced beyond the confines of their elasticity, split asunder, revealing a beautiful and ghastly store of jeweled offal; strings of pearly entrails; the digested result of their hedonism which, even in death, they claw at.
Cute and macabre they manage, mostly, to draw the viewer in while simultaneously repulsing them. They are undeniably repugnant, embodying as they do the most base facets of our society, culture, species, what have you; but they do it with a greeting card sensibility which is, perhaps, what makes them so effective. It’s an interesting dichotomy, regardless of the message.
Manhattan-based 1stAveMachine produces lush, hyperreal short videos that glisten with bleeding-edge CGI. The clip above, a music video for Alias made in 2006, is considered their breakout masterpiece: a succulent garden of bio-electronic cyberflora. Describing the clip, director Arvind Palep told CGISociety, “we were looking at a merge between synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and what could spawn from them.”
Since that clip, 1stAveMachine, helmed by Palep and Serge Patzak (the former turned down a job from Industrial Light & Magic to join the startup), has produced short commercials for the likes of MTV Japan, Samsung and HP. But no matter how corporate their clients roster becomes, 1stAvenue keeps it weird, inviting comparisons to Chris Cunningham and Patricia Piccinini. Consider the below ad for Saturn, which 1stAveMachine describes as “a haunting hyper-sexual and stylized vision for the future”:
Shown above is the director’s cut, which features a naked lady. NSFW!
There are many more clips to be seen on 1stAveMachine’s site. Some favorites clips and image stills, after the cut. [via Paul Komoda]
Lena & Katsya Popova, beautiful sisters, are new wave in Russian doll scene. Their early creations were proportional figures as shown this album, but their recent series as ‘Fashion MOON’ and ‘SKIN’ are quite unique and aggressive in deformed body.
My ignorance of a “Russian doll scene” should come as no surprise. That is, while I am aware of Russian dolls in the form of matryoshkas, I was unaware that there was a scene. Of course, this may have more to do with the connotations that I attach to the word “scene”, meaning that “Russian doll scene” makes me think of imposing, babushka-wearing Barbies looking disinterested at a trendy dance party. This would be wrong.
Looking beyond my own linguistic hang-ups we have the sisters’s actual work, and I can’t help but be drawn to it. The more traditional lamps are beautiful, their voluminous dresses lit up from within, belying their spindly frames topped by ivory faces. However, SKIN is a completely different animal all together. These are stunning, foregoing the traditional doll trimmings in favor of displaying fully that alien body-type, elongated just beyond the point of believability, clad in Westernized tribal chic.
It’s some impressive work, retaining the cuteness of a child’s toy while simultaneously functioning as modern sculpture. Plus, I can easily imagine them looking bored while listening to, say, Lady Gaga.
Deep down we allknewthis; didn’t we? We all had our suspicions. How else could we reconcile the putrid taste of that colorless powder, requiring as it did pounds of sugar in order to dispel that fetid flavor which so offended the palate, and transform it into the toothsome elixir so beloved by children? A flavor which we can now pin upon the lingering stench of death.
More important queries, however, concern the Man itself. Whatever qualms we may have had in reference to its violent behavior, its insatiable need for destruction, are finally confirmed. “There is no reason,” we said to ourselves, “that someone should constantly smash through walls if their intentions are pure.”
Now all those questions and concerns have been answered. Now, thanks to Jon Vermilyea, we can say with absolute certainty that we were right. Now we can say that Kool-Aid is people.
From Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, whose previous efforts include hanging Björk and pimping Nichole Kidman, comes Antichrist starring Willem DeFoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. IMDB’s synopsis runs thusly: “A grieving couple retreats to their cabin ‘Eden’ in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse.” So it seems that a couple had a child, who died. Overcome with grief the mother succumbs to the overuse of mood-altering prescription drugs. Seeing their marriage falling apart the husband convinces her to get rid of them and join him in their cabin in the middle of the woods. There, crazy shit occurs.
To be honest I’m quite unsure as to this latest effort from von Trier. The idea that he would feel the need to make a genre film of this sort is a strange one. After all, the man has been making horror movies in one form or another his entire career, and the instances where he has succumbed to the need for traditional horror have been tedious affairs (see The Kingdom). It could merely be that von Trier wants to join the ranks of directors who have filmed sex scenes featuring Willem DeFoe.
Still, a von Trier/DeFoe pairing, in spite of the aforementioned Gollum-esque sex scene, is intriguing and lately I’ve been feeling perhaps a bit too upbeat so a dose of unyielding, soul crushing angst would probably go a long way in bringing me down a few pegs.
OK, so about that interview with Ross the other day. Despite the fact that some of you seem to have found it amusing, we don’t do that sort of thing for shits and giggles. When we ask a man if he prefers sushi or tacos, we mean business. That, friends, was a Coilhouse job interview. And he’s hired. Ladies and gentlemen, put your tentacles together for our newest guest blogger, Ross Rosenberg!*
Few subjects are as tiresome to discuss in a public forum as politics. It is an arena which I make a concerted effort to avoid whenever possible. Indeed, should I have the urge to debate matters of a political bent I do it alone, in the privacy of my own cave. So devoted am I to the idea that I have cultivated a rather well-conceived alter ego; a personage of conservative persuasion who I merely call Dermot. This personality, combined with the hand-puppet I fashioned in secret just for these occasions, provides the perfect foil for my decidedly liberal views and many times I have debated, long into the night after everyone has retired for the evening, in a dual toned, hushed and angry whisper, subjects ranging from stem-cell research, to corn subsidies, to what I should have for breakfast.
The reason for disclosing this tedious and potentially embarrassing information is to assure you, dear readers, that I do not dwell wistfully on this area of our society; that I do not haunt the same vicious corners of the internet as the detestable and frail “political junkie”; and that I certainly do not watch C-Span.
