Coilhouse Magazine, Issue 01 is finally here!

Get ready for 96 glossy, full-color pages of art, photography, music, fashion and literature. In this issue, the stark android beauty created by Andy Julia for our cover is counterbalanced inside by his elegant portfolio of vintage-style nudes. Our biggest feature in Issue 01 is an exclusive 10-page showcase and interview with the incredible taxidermy sculptress Jessica Joslin. Also in Issue 01, Coilhouse travels to Ljubljana, Slovenia (literally! we actually went!) to interview Laibach, while singer Jarboe tells war tales from her career post-Swans. Photographer Eugenio Recuenco contributes a lush 10-page portfolio and interview, while Clayton James Cubitt delivers a poignant, visceral spread (again, literally) on the topic of genital origami. Renowned science fiction author Samuel R. Delany shares an exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming novel, “From the Valley of the Nest of Spiders,” while our first installment of “All Yesterday’s Parties” digs up forgotten party photos from eras long gone, starting with London’s Slimelight circa ’95. Fans of WZW and Z!ST will love Zo’s fashion pictorial, in which she reconstructs a Galliano outfit on a budget. Pop-surrealist Travis Louie gives us a glimpse of his inner monster, and cult painter Saturno Butto has some medical fun at the expense of Catholics everywhere. All this, and much more – including supervillain how-to’s, Coilhouse paper dolls, interviews, fashion and art await. Get it now!

Readers of the blog, we have another treat just for you: the fact that the version of the magazine that you are buying here today will not be available in stores. Coilhouse will be in stores this fall, but it won’t be the unique version that’s available here. On this site, and on this site only, you can get the uncensored edition. This version includes a powerful piece that was too risqué for stores to accept without problems due to the graphic (and in our opinion, beautiful) images involved. Only 1000 copies of this very limited version exist – a mere fraction of the entire print run. And that version is only available here, on this site. When we run out, we’ll start selling the censored version that will also be available in stores – so get the limited edition copy that we call the “true version of the magazine” while we still have them!

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(Yeah, we know. This is already yesterday’s poos. Don’t care. Must blog for sake of prost… er… posterity.)

Via the Nainamo Daily News (and ten gazillion other websites): “A giant inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a greenhouse window before it landed again, the museum said Monday.”

OH SHIT! Photo via LiveNews, Australia.

A strong gust of wind carried the gargantuan pile of crap several hundred yards from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne before it touched down again on the grounds of a children’s home, where it broke a window. No word yet on whether or not the home’s inhabitants have been traumatized for life. Museum director Juri Steiner claims the piece of art has a safety system which normally makes the cacadoody deflate during stormy weather, but something went wrong.

Vaguely related items of possible interest:

• The Adventures of Algie (Pink Floyd’s havoc-wreaking inflatable pig)
• George Bush poop flags
• Ed the Happy Clown (man’s anus becomes inter-dimensional poo portal)
• “Weiner Poopie”
• Student Says Vomiting on Art was Artistic Act

Okay, I’m doing an asinine thing: blogging about this fiction website called Dollar Dreadful, despite the fact that I’ve not read a single piece of writing on it. I’m not even going to try to fool you guys; I don’t think I’ve read more than 5 words on this page since I first discovered it over a year go. I come back to this website again and again with the full intention of reading the stories, but the layout just hypnotizes me. Before I can download a single PDF, the brain starts going: “DESIGN! Must look up fonts! Need to buy vintage Sears catalogue on Ebay!” and then before I know it, I’m on Flickr drooling over somebody’s grandma’s scanned corset ads. Also, I love the fact that they designed the ads at the bottom in the same exact style as the rest of the page. If only all websites worked this way!

I used to work as a receptionist at a chiropracter’s office. I was in it for the swag: spine keychains (used for assembling an elaborate multi-tiered choker necklace), spine lamps (OK, ours weren’t as cool as the Mark Beam version), and one incredible metallic spine chair that looked like it belonged at a Giger bar… which I coveted, but never got to own. Discovering Bjorn Johansson’s lovely spine-inspired letters on the beautiful I Love Typography blog this morning took me back to those glory days.

It’s not a full font, just the designer’s experiment for creating type. Like my Becher font experiment, only a few letters exist. It wonderful to one day see them all. It would look nice paired with Value Pack, don’t you think?

Photographer couple Bernd and Hilla Becher, cheap born in the 30s, dedicated their life to creating a visual taxonomy of the world’s industrial structures. Armed with a large-format camera, they traveled together for over 40 years to photograph and catalogue man-made constructions from every corner of the globe. Among their subjects were gas holders, blast furnaces, mineheads and water towers, whose monolithic portraits were arranged by the couple into “Typologies”; families of images that showcase the uniformity of these buildings, in context of each other, as they come together from all over the world. If you look at any of these images by itself, it’s meaningless – but if you look at them together, each picture’s power is multiplied by the ones around it.

Seeing prints of these (or similar ones) at MOMA, my friend remarked to me, “these look like alphabets.” It’s true; as I looked at these I began to see a grid, stems, serifs, ligatures, bowls… slowly, letterforms began to emerge from the stoic architecture. Back in LA, I got to work: scanning, cutting and rearranging, I’ve been able to come up with several letters. Below are “C” and “U”. Would any designers/typographers out there be interested in collaborating on this? If so, drop me a line!

Weta director/effects supervisor Richard Taylor, yours truly, and the almost intolerably scrumptious prototype for Dr. Grodbort’s Ray-Blunderbuss.

..is what I would say if this concept design for a fingernail timepiece were to actually make it into our daily lives. From the 2154: The Future of Time Design website:

TX54 is a disposable timepiece that is worn on the user’s thumbnail. While its translucency makes it blend seamlessly with the hand, a selection of text color options and a glow feature that activates on command make it easy to read.

Now, forget the finger. Wouldn’t you prefer to simply know the time, without having to think about it? On second thought, that might be a little maddening, especially for those as obsessed with the passage of time as your truly. In any case, here it is:

Sublimex is worn on the eye like a contact lens where it periodically flashes the time so quickly that the brain isn’t conscious of how it got the information. The user seems to simply know the time, raising a host of possibilities about how the nature of clockwatching would change.

But you see, we live in a time where designers make drooling lechers of us all. They flaunt their charts, mock-ups, concept art and shiny 3-D models without concrete promise of these ideas ever making it into our homes, laps, nails, etc. But I always come back for more, grateful to them for bringing this Future For The Home we dream of just a little closer.

[Thanks, Kris!]

If you can’t judge a magazine by its cover, it’s not doing its job. This month, major magazines work hard for the money:

1. Rolling Stone released a very iconic Barack Obama cover. Just him and his flag pin. No name, no slogan and no eye contact. Pure faith and devotion. Compare to their last Obama cover, which made him look like a wax dummy of a superhero.
2. Again Obama, this time as an illustrated character on the cover of The New Yorker, sporting his Al-Qaeda gear and giving his sidekick, Angela Davis Michelle, the fearsome terrorist fist jab. The best comment on the controversy surrounding this cover comes from Gawker: “this obvious and heavy-handed satire has enraged Democrats and liberal media critics because now they are pretty sure this nation of child-like imbeciles will believe it to be an un-retouched photograph from the FUTURE.”
3. Predictably, this cover of Psychology Today caught my eye. Some nice use of type, but guess what? She’s wearing the corset backwards. How could something like be allowed to happen in 2008?

See, we’ve been thinking about magazine covers a lot over the past few months. Deciding together as a group on the cover of Coilhouse Issue 1 was a very intensive process. That decision’s been made, but to help myself think about what makes for a good cover in the future, I’ve started compiling a personal list of favorite covers, which I now share with you. I’ve excluded the undisputed heavyweight champions (John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol in a Campbell’s Soup Can, etc.) from my list. It’s going to be a Top 9, with the first 3 being posted today as part of a series. Enjoy!

9. Russia! Magazine, Winter 2008

This cover of Russia! Magazine is sexy, sexy, sexy. It’s also a cheeky remix of a controversial banned photograph titled An Era of Mercy. Two of Russia’s top male models were employed for this shoot, with real spacesuits on loan from the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics. The hip new Russian culture magazine also does a great job with its cover lines: Issue 2 has a bear dancing with Marilyn Monroe on the cover and entices you with the promise of “Eight More Bears Inside.”

In a stroke of pure demented genius Kacper Hamilton has created a set of cups inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins.

These red wine glasses are based on the 7 deadly sins. Each glass encapsulates a sin, which is revealed through the ritual of drinking. The ‘7 Deadly Glasses’ are about celebrating passion and encouraging the user to be sinful in a theatrical fashion.

From their English laboratories straight to your chateau, these delightfully hedonistic goblets are made to order. Browse the entire set, below.

Too much is not enough for you, sir! You’ll gulp and slurp like a filthy pig while attempting to suck out the very last drops from the cup of Greed.

You enemies will truly feel your Wrath as you jab their jugular with this perilous object, then drink their sweet blood while they fight for a final breath.

Coffin furniture has long been within reach around the ‘wub. At Casketfurniture.com the macabre enthusiast will find beds, coffee tables and a private coffin phone booth called “The Edison”, no less. Coffinitup.com even offers a coffin computer desk! Unfortunately much of what’s available today isn’t particularly attractive and has too much of a novelty feel. But now there is something to make even the pickiest of decorators salivate. Behold!

For those not fond of woodgrain and longing for a sleeker look coffincouches.com offers custom couches made from 18 gauge steel coffins, upholstered and finished to your every whim.

We approached funeral directors with the attitude of recycling. These coffins are not used for burial due to slight cosmetic inconsistencies. They are reconfigured and modified resulting in a finished product – a unique one a kind coffin couch. If you notice (although it may be too small) the six cast iron heavy duty legs are embossed with the universal biohazard insignia. The reason we utilize this sign is because safety is our utmost concern. If you are not aware, once a human body is placed in a coffin it is considered biohazard tissue. The legs have the embossed insignia for precautionary reasons in the event body fluids are exchanged on these coffins.

Golly, they’ve thought of everything! And for $3,500 + shipping you too can own one of these exquisite pieces. Not a bad deal, I say.