At last! After days spent trembling in post-production anticipation, we’re unveiling the Coilhouse 04 cover. Words can scarcely express how happy we are to finally share a glimpse of our most ambitious issue yet.

Tomorrow, all Issue 04 articles will be revealed, and the magazine will go on sale. For now, huge congratulations to our cover girl, mysterious self-portrait artist Kristamas Klousch. Kristamas’ work is integral to the Coilhouse 04 concept and you can expect to see an array of her intensely haunting photographs nestled within the new pages.

Every issue, we try out a new visual effect in print. In Issue 02, we had a fold-out map. For Issue 03, we embossed the cover. This time around, we’ve experimented with a silver ink overlay. The tattered lace and title of the cover contain a subtle, frostbitten shimmer, as can be seen below.

We can’t wait to reveal the contents of this issue. Check back soon!

It’s been what, a couple weeks since we last mentioned how fantastic Archive.org is? Just in time for Halloween, here’s another choice bit o’ public domain from their vaults:

Click Teh Debbil (performed by Häxan director Benjamin Christensen himself!) to be taken to the downloading page.

Häxan (a.k.a. The Witches or Witchcraft Through The Ages) is a lavishly strange Swedish/Danish silent film which, upon its release in 1922, received critical acclaim in its homeland and moral outrage just about everyone else, thanks to the many graphic depictions of nudity, torture and sexual depravity. Yum! An inspired mixture of documentary and lurid dramatization, it wouldn’t be too far off the mark to name Häxan as one of cinema’s first “shockumentaries”.

For all its butts and boobies and devils, Häxan is actually quite a rational study of how superstition and medieval ignorance of mental illness led to the the hysteria of the European witch hunts. Director and writer Benjamin Christensen plotted much of the film around his personal study and criticism of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century German guide for inquisitors. You can see echoes of Christensen’s blunt, cavalier, often darkly humorous first-person narrative style in the documentaries of Werner Herzog. Luis Buñuel applauded its fractured “WTF is going on” cue-less edits.

In addition to being a bit of a mindfuck, much of the film’s imagery is just drop dead stunningly beautiful. From the Criterion release feature notes:

Under any title and with any modifications, Häxan endures because of Christensen’s tremendous skill with lighting, staging, and varying of shot scale. The word “painterly” comes to mind in watching Christensen’s ingeniously constructed shots, but it is inadequate to evoke the fascination the film exerts through its patterns of movement and its narrative disjunctions. Christensen is at once painter, historian, social critic, and a highly self-conscious filmmaker. His world comes alive as few attempts to recreate the past on film have.

Apparently, there was a version released in 1967 that featured a narration by William S. Burroughs and a jazzy score led by percussionist Daniel Humair and featuring violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. Any of you guys happen to have a copy of that?

You may have already seen this photo at BoingBoing or elswhere, but it’s too charming not to include here. Strange creatures from a strange world gazing at other strange creatures from another strange world. This photo was taken with a point-and-shoot camera by a hobbyist photographer, who was attending the aquarium with her friends during Dragon*Con. The photographer, positivespace on Flickr, had this to say about the photo in the BB comment thread:

For what it’s worth, the only editing I did in Photoshop was a small amount of cropping (apparently trying to center an image crouching while dressed as the third Good Fairy in a hoop skirt and a giant stuffed bra was difficult… who knew?!).

I was very lucky with this photo. Awesome environment, awesome models (my lovely friends) and, IMO, an awesome point-and-shoot camera. I basically wandered by this window, saw a great opportunity, directed my friends to stand under it, stuck the camera on Auto and fired away.

There’s another shot from this series that I also quite like, but this one’s the winner.

Some excellent detective work by Ghoul Next Door has uncovered the origins of this 101-year-old photo. The stunning image was brought to our attention by guest blogger Angeliska, who writes, “I’ve become totally obsessed with this carte de visite depicting Maria Germanova of the Moscow Arts Theatre, costumed for her role [as the fairy] in Blue Bird. She is my perfect style icon, now and forever.”

Unfortunately, the photographs of the actors are all that remain of this 1908 premiere of Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, produced by Stanislavsky. A descriptive play-by-play of the performance can be found in the 1920 book The Russian Theater Under the Revolution by Oliver Sayler (thanks, Google book search!), but all other images of this art noveau-inspired production have been lost to time, despite Sayler’s valiant attempts to preserve more for posterity, recounted in the book:

I asked Stanislavsky eagerly for photographs of scenes from “The Blue Bird” or else for the original designs of the scenic artist so that I might have them copied… the photographs, I was told, were not available – except those of the players themselves – for the originals had been made by Fischer, a German, and had been destroyed in the pogrom at the beginning of the war in 1914. And in the difficult times Russia has undergone since then, no others have been made. When I pressed my point and asked about the orignal designs, the firm, square but kindly face of my host carried a passing glance of embarassed modesty and then admitted that there were no designs. He had conceived them himself and had personally directed the artist, V. E. Yevgenoff, in the execution of the settings.

Yep, 1908 is definitely going to the top of my “If I Had a Time Machine” list. Craving more images after discovering Germanova’s fairy, I did a bit of searching on the Russian web and uncovered the images below (from an Ogonyok article about Blue Bird). After the jump, a full-body shot of Germanova looking like a pre-Raphaelite sorceress.

The Compagnie Philippe Genty is widely regarded to be one of the most accomplished and gutsy performing arts troupes currently working on the world stage. Their elaborate productions defy easy categorization, using a mixture of puppetry, mime and dance in conjunction with elaborate costuming and props. The narratives and meanings behind their productions are even more difficult to nail down; usually there’s no coherent, linear plot. Surreal, sometimes nightmarish vignettes play out like Freudian wet dreams:

(Via Whittles, thanks!)

Translating roughly from the French on their website, Philippe Gentry calls their story-building process one of free association.”The company is intent on exploring a visual language that reveals and plays upon conflicting aspects of human nature. When a scene takes place in the subconscious, following neither linear narrative nor the psychology of traditional characters, there are no hard and fast laws of causality. Instead, the performances resonate with our inner landscapes, provoking the emergence of these unspoken and insane hopes, these fears, these shames and desires… these shared, unlimited spaces.”

All that deep and somber explication aside, sometimes the troupe’s output is just downright hilarious:

Several more clips after the jump.

Golden Weeds

When I look at Ewelina Ferruso‘s art, one thing pops into my mind: “this is what lowbrow art is supposed to look like”. Like Nadya, I’ve grown a little weary of the pre-teens in distress and bloody bears barraging the genre over the past few years; my brain simply doesn’t respond to spooky imagery as it once did. Ewelina stands apart because she manages to capture the very essence of childhood’s dreamy, happy haze and fears alike without dipping into that same old collective symbol pool.  And let’s not forget her keen technical skill – I’ve seen a couple of these pieces in person and have to say that hers is some of the most impressive workmanship I’ve encountered this year. What I especially dig about Ewelina’s painting style is the way she integrates textures with smooth gradients – each shiny little blob carefully considered and attended to, each stroke blended to perfection.

Above, likely my favorite of Ewelina’s pieces. When I look at this I see yellow flowers pictured from below, as they would look to a child lying in a sunny meadow on a warm summer afternoon. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the enchanted wonderment most of us don’t indulge in nearly enough.

Below, Ewelina describes her evolution and the direction of her new work to Coilhouse.

EF: “My intention is to chronicle a personal spiritual journey. We are the storytellers, fable fibbers, truth seekers, elaborators of dreams and embracers of muses and magical things that others are consciously or unconsciously drawn towards. As artists, we are the magnets of beauty. We bring unlikely particles together in orgasmic connections. Thus, it is in a sense, fireworks in the making as I see it.

I work on a deep inner plane coming from a place of an accumulation of experiences, meditations, mid-night visions, psychic revelations, appreciation of the unseen and a profound passion to evolve. The earlier pieces were centered in childhood and express a certain innocence in play and discovery. I allow myself to be immersed in mystery and often find that the work reveals to me what the mystery is in due time. And so, I expand and demand more mysterious phenomena. The current revelation of work is unraveling itself now as a thorough digging within the denied realms of this soul. I pose the question, ‘How can one fully share their lightness, if one does not embark on a quest to know their darkness?’ It is within this yin and yang that a true woman unfolds. There will be a shedding of old skin and an unlocking of doors.”

Peace in the Garden

More of Ewelina‘s work below the jump.

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!

“To wake, and not to know where, or who you are, not even to know what you are—whether a thing with legs and arms, or a brain in the hull of a great fish—that is a strange awakening. But after awhile, uncurling in the darkness, I began to uncover myself, and I was a woman.”

So begins Tanith Lee’s 1975 novel The Birthgrave, her first. I stumbled upon it some years ago, yellowing long out of print in a bargain bin.

I usually try to avoid revisiting authors too much on All Tomorrows, and regular readers will remember that I sang Lee’s praises for The Silver Metal Lover. But lately this column has been tracing the lesser known paths of fantasy and epic. No discussion of epic during sci-fi-fanta-whatever’s Deviant Age would be complete without delving into The Birthgrave.

It is a Sword and Sorcery epic, thunderously bloody and sensual in a way that would make Robert E. Howard pant. Yet it is also a deeper story of character and identity: a feminist work of a piece with the questions sweeping through its time.

For Lee’s (at first) nameless heroine awakes with nothing but questions, as the eruption of a volcano shakes her from a seemingly endless sleep with memories of hidden power, tragedy and a bottomless sense of guilt.

Driven to find answers, she runs into Übermensch types who try to turn her into the women featured on the covers of your average Sword and Sorcery tale— slave, figurehead goddess, concubine — clinging open-mouthed to the leg of some buffed-up conqueror.

But this is not their story: it is hers. As she survives (or buries) them all, as Lee sucks the reader into the elusive quest for power over one’s own life, she makes sure you’ll never see a dread sorceress the same way again.

It’s Friday once again and you are mere hours from another glorious weekend of coke and Thai lady-boys. Still, it might as well be days as summers are slow and your cubicle is, unfortunately, adjacent to Carol’s. This is unfortunate as Carol talks, ceaselessly, about her eight (yes, eight) Pomeranians; a torrent of gibberish spewed in an unyielding stream in your direction. All day it’s stories about anthropomorphized facial expressions, idiotic tricks, and unfortunate bowel movements punctuated by requests for you to look at a funny picture she took of one of them wearing a doggie sweater or galoshes. You wonder how Carol’s husband feels about living with a yammering pack of fur with teeth; maybe he too looks forward to cocaine fueled weekends. You also wonder how long until the little bastards get tired of those sweaters and revolt, rending poor Carol limb from limb.

There are better things to occupy your mind with than thoughts such as these. There are movies and I am here to help you drown out Carol before you turn to her and slowly, deliberately puncture your ear drums with a letter opener. This week, its Snow White: A Tale of Terror the 1997 horror movie based on the Grimm Brothers’s tale. Starring Sigourney Weaver, Sam Neill, Monica Keena and the greaser guy from The Shawshank Redemption, this is a bloodier and more realistic version of the classic tale, adapted most famously by Walt Disney (and less famously by Rammstein), by which I mean that no one spontaneously bursts into song. Despite its slightly over the top subtitle, it’s actually not that bad, bearing more of a resemblance to the source material than the animated film, by which I mean that there is a fair amount of violence while simultaneously lacking the dwarf spanking and drugs angle of Rammstein’s version.

Regardless of which is your preferred Snow White, watching Sigourney Weaver get her evil on has got to beat listening to the story about how dog #2 shit on the carpet yesterday, right?

Weeeee! Let’s dance!

My flight arrives in Wellington (one day into THE FUTURE… FUTURE… FUTURE…) on Tuesday, the 11th. If all goes well *knock on wood* I should be there for quite some time.

New Zealanders, any tips for me? I’ve got one of those little culture/customs/slang dictionaries, but real live advice from savvy weirdo Kiwis would be preferable. Can you think of any great places to visit, particularly in and around Wellington? (I’m definitely hitting the Ian Curtis wall first thing.) Local coffee shops and clothing boutiques, a good comic book store, night clubs, a place to buy a sturdy kite, etc? Inquiring n0obz want to know.

See you on the other side!