Pay no mind to the occasional tumbleweed blowing across you screen, comrades. The three of us are neck-deep in Issue 02 deadlines right now. Come Tuesday or so, postings should pick up again.

Meantime, please enjoy a rare clip of David Bowie speaking on behalf of his fellow nelly boys back in 1964. This was our reigning Preternatural Beauty King‘s first ever television appearance. He was 17 years old.

Aw, darlin’. I’ll carry your handbag any time.

Here’s an even more delectable baby Bowie tidbit, via Siege:

Getting busted for pot with Iggy Pop in NY, 1976.  (Frank Sinatra, eat your heart out.)

And since Halloween draws ever nearer and you’re (hopefully) not at work, there’s one more for the road under the cut…

Photographer Chad Michael Ward is known for his visceral photos of haunted hospitals, evil girls with eyepatches and scary priests. Yet somehow, whenever he photographs Mother of London clothing, a completely different side of Chad emerges. All his Mother of London images are delicate and nostalgic, reminiscent in a way of of Paulo Roversi. Ward’s ethereal fashion sensibilities emerged strongly in his first Mother of London collaboration, a portrait of Chinagirl Lily, and appear again in this recent set with the stunning Bad Charlotte.

And yeah, the legendary neck corset in the picture above has made its rounds. I, for one, am never tired of seeing it! That piece manages to look like a completely different garment through every photographer’s lens. Here was my take on it, and here is Allan Amato’s. But this new shoot is not just about the older clothing; there is also a brand-new dress – revealed for the first time on Coilhouse! Behold – and beware of boobies after the jump.

Welcome, IO9 readers who came here from Meredith Woerner’s excellent review of Coilhouse Issue 01. This one’s for you.

via Ectomo and Trevor “Don’t Click It, Mom” Brown, I discovered the android amputee bondage art of Takashi Itsuki. Completed over 20 years ago and originally published a Japanese magazine titled Bizarre (not the “extreme lad’s mag” UK Bizarre or the ye olde John Willie Bizarre), the drawings fascinate Brown in that they predate the EGL style by at least a decade (as is most evident in this image, with the loli-droid’s blunt bangs, lace headdress and oversize bow). Brown initially scanned and posted 5 of the 13 drawings from Itsuki’s “amputee robot doll bondage” series on his blog, and followed up with another post containing rare scans of Itsuki’s long-lost manga.

There’s not much more infromation than that. We know that in the mid-90s Itsuki put out a comic called Yoso no Himitsu (“Secret of the Worm”), based on a Cthulhu mythos story by Robert Bloch, the H.P. Lovecraft protégé best known penning Psycho. That’s where the trail grows cold – at least on the English-speaking Internet. Brown notes that the artist “is (and maybe was) pretty much unknown and unpopular and now forgotten” and that it is now almost impossible to find his manga.

If I never see the manga, I hope that at least the other 8 images from Itsuki’s bot-bondage set make their way onto the web. They’re creepy and hot and haunting all at once. Don’t know if the images’ lilac tone was the way they were printed or an effect added to the scans in Photoshop, but it adds just the right mood, like it’s all happening at dusk, the most magical time of the day. Please, whoever has these, scan more!

UPDATE: Trevor Brown has graciously scanned three more for everyone’s viewing pleasure. See them on his blog. Thank you kindly!

To the casual observer, Etsy.com is a cutesy realm of craft hipster chicks and middle American stay-at-home moms; a twee repository of homemade flowery jewelry crafts, popsicle stick and Fimo clay sculptures and hand-sewn terrycloth baby bibs. I am here to tell you that I have spent the week spelunking Etsy’s dark side and my friends, there is so much more. It’s a pervert’s treasure trove waiting to be discovered. It’s almost October, which means it’s almost Halloween, which is basically Goth Christmas (oh yeah, I said GOTH CHRISTMAS and I’ll say it again). Here are my gifty picks for the special perverts in your life.

1. Road Kill Squirrel Neoprene Mask. Hand made from neoprene rubber, reinforced with leather, padded inside for comfort, with three straps to ensure it won’t slip off during moments of necro-furry Valentine/Halloween passion.

2. Latex Cage Dress. High quality latex is always pricey and this is no exception. But for this kind of detail and quality you expect to fork over the cash. HMS Latex features pieces that hit the holy trinity of sexy, tough, and ladylike with this dress, these adorable latex gloves and this to-die-for elegant shrug.

• Gloves
• Shrug

Evil-Last, new painting by pinup artist Brian Viveros

Arist Brian M. Viveros has the “don’t mess with me” girl-with-a-cigarette pinup down to a science. So many dense fetish permutations, so little time! Here’s helmet + goggle + octopus + tentacle marks. Or: eyepatch + band-aid + mickey mouse ears + fetish gear. Etc. The transparency of the source material is at times a bit distracting (i.e. this obviously came from this), but the images remain fun nevertheless.

I imagine a young Brian coming face-to-face with the cover of Tank Girl: Apocalypse, and just being scarred (in a good way) for life. Or an alternate-universe, born-50-years-too-early Viveros going off to war and ignoring the pinups that the other soldiers were so crazy about, jacking off to the U.S. Department of Public Health-issued pamphlets instead. Inspiration is where you find it!

• Brian Viveros

See also:

• Katsuya Terada
• John John Jesse
• National Library of Health’s Venereal Disease Poster Gallery

“taken”, Oil & graphite on wood 19×26, ‘Mayoi Michi’ @ Copro Nason

The work of 26-year-old painter Audrey Kawasaki, LA darling of the pop surrealist movement, always forces me into the persistent place between discomfort, cynicism and arousal.

On the one hand, her wood-panel paintings of languid, smooth and pale-skinned androgynous beauties are meticulously rendered with a sure hand and extreme eye for detail and aesthetic flow. The flawless pink and white skin of her sexy imaginary youngsters always seems to glow from within the image, the subjects look longing out with their impossibly big cartoon eyes as though they’re just aching to be touched, stroked, set free from their 2-D prison. The Art Nouveau-inspired flower, branch and seaweed forms that often surround the figures seems to undulate suggestively, giving the fantasy portraits a honey-slow-motion feel and matching soundtrack (in my head, anyway). I sort of want to go dunk my head in a bucket of icewater just thinking about the glistening parted lips and come-hither stares of her paintings. Ahem.

On the other hand, my intellectual mind can’t help leaping in to question the reactions of my lizard brain. Her style is incredibly consistent, almost to an obsessive degree; the figures she paints could all be related, and they all appear to exist in the same world, the same erotic melancholy state of waiting to be touched and taken. I am here in stasis, they say, I am waiting for you.

“Kakure Zakura”, Oil & graphite on wood 20×15, ‘Innocents’ @ Lineage

• Kakurenbu Info
• Audrey Kawaski’s Website
• Audrey Kawasaki’s Blog
• Interview at Mactribe

[Please welcome our newest guest blogger, Irene Kaoru. Irene is a designer, photographer, model, artist, and sculptor. Irene’s blog can be found here, and prints of her work can be found here.]

First, about the website: click here to go to the site of designers Lucy and Bart. Maximize the window. Move your mouse around. Get your face really close to the screen and stare into their eyes. It’s uncanny! Morphing nothing new; we all remember it from a steady stream of ’90s music videos and more recently from the hypnotic Women in Art YouTube spectacle, but this interface manages to make it novel again. Maybe it’s the fact that you can see every pore in the high-res images, the fact that you scan stare into their eyes and manipulate their faces at will, coupled with a flawless, uncomplicated execution. Either way, the simple navigation feels immersive in an unexpected way.

The designers use cheap materials such as cardboard and pantyhose nylon to produce extravagant shapes. While most art clothing made out of bubble wrap, toilet paper and tinsel tends to resemble failed Project Runway challenges, the constructions here contain volume, depth, texture and, importantly, storytelling. The motivations for the designs are explained on the site as “an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and the body.” It is stated that designers Lucy McRae and Bart Hess share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression, and that unconsciously their collaborations touch on these themes, though it was not their intention to communicate this. Their process searches for “low–tech prosthetic ways for human enhancement,” stumbling on new constructions during a creative process that they describe as a primitive, blind search.

[Thank you, Nicola!]

What’s Natalie Shau been up to? Last we checked, the Lithuanian-based digital artist was creating sepia images based on Greek mythology. More recently, she’s completed a sumptuous new set of illustrations for French jewelry designer Lydia Courteille. On Courteille’s site, Shau’s dreamy Ray Caesar-esque illustrations serve to introduce each of the seven ranges: My Secret Garden, Vanities, Bestiary, Esoterism, Cameos & Glyptics, Cassandra’s and Cabinet of Curiosities.

The prices for Courteille’s diamond-encrusted bijoux range in the average of $10,000. Why use real diamonds? Gross! Nevertheless, there are a couple of baubles on Courteille’s site that I covet, and I include them here for your viewing pleasure.

Model wearing one of René Cigler’s apocalyptic adornments.

Sad news from BoingBoing: artist René Cigler has passed away. Cigler’s many talents included illustration, sculpture, costuming, toy design  and running her own shop, Strange Monster, with partner Cameron Smith in Portland. My favorite works by Rene were always her apocalyptic costume designs, many of which were worn by dancers in Ministry’s stage performances, as well as in the film version of Tank Girl.

Gareth Branwyn once described Cigler’s costume work as having a unique sense of play:

Cigler does a great job of creating a strong field, a believable fiction, around her work. Even though this type of industrial/post-apocalyptic/Road Warrior art has been done to death, René’s work still seems fresh and interesting. One saving grace is that her sculptures have a sense of humor – they don’t seem to take themselves too seriously … hub cap necklaces, hats made out of barbecue grills, purses made out of cereal boxes and rubber car mats. This is the kind of high fashion one might imagine wearing after the world has run out of oil, the rainforests are gone, and the local supermall offers nothing but mountains of rubble (fashion accessories?) and lurking blood-thirsty mutants.

Among her many publications (which ranged from Penthouse to People to Heavy Metal), there is one very striking cover:

Boing Boing Magazine, Issue 11

René, you will be missed.

• Rene Cigler’s Website
• Obituary on BoingBoing
• Article/Interview in Gothic Beauty 18

I must hear the fireworks. This is vital to the whole experience.

Found by Storm – a  m4w Craig’s List ad titled “Want it from behind while you play Super Mario Brothers?” The entire scene is too long and raunchy to repost here, but here’s the gist:

When you arrive the door will be open. Please come in close and lock the door and close the shades if they are still open. I will be in the bathroom and the door will be closed. Turn on the TV and the Nintendo. Remove all of your clothing. Turn off all lights in the room and kneel down on the bed so you are directly in the light of the TV.

After a bit of Goomba-stomping, platform-jumping, brick-smashing foreplay, Serious Business ensues:

When you reach the end of level one, make sure to trigger the fireworks. This is vital to the entire experience. I must hear the fireworks. When level 2 begins and Mario walks into the pipe, I will penetrate you.

But it’s not all fun and games! “I will continue having sex until the level ends. DO NOT take the secret level skip. If you die I will pull out and spank you until the level restarts.”

Creepy? Hilarious? Awesome? Fake? Whatever – I’ve found his soul mate!