Theremin-soaked electronica duo Zombie-Zombie cites John Carpenter and Goblin as two of their biggest influences. Appropriately, the “unofficial” music video for their Goblinesque tune “Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free” is a surprisingly complex re-enactment of Carpenter’s The Thing. It features stop-frame animated G.I. Joe dolls wandering stoically through carefully lit, finely crafted model sets, confronting one unearthly horror after another.
I was genuinely creeped out! And suddenly I’m deeply nostalgic for low-budget 80s horror flicks. Time to bust out The Stuff.
A comely consortium of Slave Leias gathered at Gentle Giant‘s booth this morning to pose with GG’s larger (and droolier)-than-life Jabba statue. Not pictured: legions of mouth-breathing Frito-eaters with cheap instant cameras and sweatpants boners.
How hot is this? Needs to be worn with a space helmet, though. Another lavish image after the cut, and more from this collection at Scherer Gonzalez’s site.
“Pardon! Bonjour! Fromage!” (photo by Rafe Baron.)
One balmy summer’s eve a couple years ago, Herr Titler came into my life. I was standing in the wings of an ancient Brooklyn theater, reeling in the chaos of Amanda Palmer’s boisterous Fuck The Back Row film/music/theater revue night, when I beheld a broad-shouldered figure in a slinky cocktail gown and perilous high heels. With his sultry voice, his sharply parted/pomaded hair and villainous moustache, Titler was simultaneously demure yet forceful, domineering yet somehow… dainty. I tell ya, he KILLED it that night.
Having basked in his commanding presence, I have trouble understanding what zealots on either side of the ongoing Dr. Steel vs Dr. Horrible debate are getting their jodhpurs in such a twist over! For my money, Titler is all anyone could ever want in a singing musical madman, with the unexpected (but welcome) bonus of a truly fetching décolletage.
Twink poses with The Haunted Corset, an Ebay find that terrified me so much I had to give it away.
If Nikola Tesla were alive today and he went to The Edison, he’d be pissed. “Why’d they name it after that guy?” And since it’s his birthday today (thanks, John Colby, for the reminder), we’re going to rename this incredible venue The Tesla for the next 24 hours in his honor.
So… looks like there’s some electric kissing party going on up in this joint! Happy Birthday, Nikola! The designer here is Mother of London, creating a sequel to the panoramic shoot that showcased an earlier collection – the first interactive, 360-degree fashion shoot ever created. Photographer Will Pearson came to LA from London to do this follow-up, and what you’re seeing here are preview stills – a taste of what’s to come, yet phenomenal images in their own right. When the panorama is complete, you’ll be able to navigate around The Tesla until your head spins.
Allan Amato (aka Venus Wept) was the art director for the shoot. Models above are Ulorin, right, and Evan, left. Hairstyling by Linh Nguyen, NoogieStyle and Jamie Gatlin. Makeup by Daven Mayeda. You can see more images from this heart-stopping shoot on Allan’s blog. There were many more models involved, including some very cute boys.
P.S. – Over at CoilSpace.com, we were able to salvage everyone’s images, even if you didn’t email. There are probably twice as many as there were before. Enjoy, and thanks again!
It’s nice to see that “weird shit” is back in style. Above, the latest from last week’s Christian Lacroix haute couture show in Paris (via parlour). Although there were no uniformly mind-blowing collections, there are a few choice pieces here and there, including this 20s-meets-the-future ensemble by Galliano (and from that same collection, these evil-looking shoes!), as well as this sexy number from Chanel. In truth, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but that doesn’t make it any less pleasant to behold.
However, the one designer who’s truly been kicking ass this year is handsome devil Gareth Pugh (previously here). What I love most about his Autumn/Winter 2008 collection is the texture. I bet wearing his stuff feels like being a piece of origami. And I have a feeling he’s only getting started. Go, Garteth, go!
Deformed ribs, fainting rooms and OMGDRAMAZ – why should ladies have all the fun? Men wear corsets too! Male corsetry was first popularized in Regency England by Beau Brummell, the original dandy – a man who polished his boots with champagne. Here he is in his pre-insane-from-syphilis days, sporting abs of whalebone. “Sixpack? Don’t need one.”
There’s been a spectacular revival of dandy style in fashion magazines and on the runway, but it’s not until now that I’ve seen a strong new take with a darker tone. Photographer Peter Ashworth (previously mentioned here) recently collaborated with designer Stefán Orschel-Read (who also models in the shoot) to create Orschel-Read’s A/W fashion lookbook, “Mourning for Orlando” – a series that, at various turns, perfectly marries dandy and deathrock. My favorite images are of the streamlined corset/jacket combo; I imagine Mr. Pearl would approve! The collection includes a wider array of unusual pairings, including geisha, punk, Baroque, and, amazingly, the 70’s leisure suit. How do they all combine? See for yourself.
Yesterday, Sociological Images reposted these incredible images, which originally came from the Daily Mail, a conservative British tabloid. These images appeared in “Femail” – the Daily Mail’s lifestyle section for women – under the title “Out of Africa: The incredible tribal fashion show inspired by Mother Nature.” Both SocImages and another fascinating blog, zunguzungu, took issue with the vapid exoticization that was going on in the article. I highly reccomend reading zunguzungu’s eloquent analysis of the Daily Mail’s presentation of these images, titled “Recycling Africa“.
Serious Business aside, I just want to say this: the images themselves are absolutely striking. When I separate these images from the Daily Mail’s silly writeup (“As they paint each other’s bodies and make bold decisions about their outfits… it seems that the only thing that motivates them is the sheer fun of creating their looks, and showing them off to other members of the tribe”), and from SocImages’ somewhat guilt-tripping Daily Mail smackdown (“What does it mean that people in the U.K. (and the U.S.) are consuming these images? What is the relationship between these images and colonialism? How do such images interact with “development” rhetoric about how Africa is un- or under-developed, developing, or undevelopable?”), on a purely visual level, I’m just absolutely inspired.
What happens when you bring together the leading actress from Audition, the FX artist behind The Machine Girl as a first-time director, the screenwriter of Uzumaki and the action star of Versus as fight choreographer? You have a cinematic supergroup that makes the geysers of blood you’ve come to expect from violent Asian films look like minuscule popping zits. Behold, the 5-minute trailer for the upcoming J-splatter film Tokyo Gore Police:
The trailer starts off kinda slow, but gets better and better as it goes along. Gore and body horror await: exploding heads, sliced-off faces, penises instead of noses, borg-like facial implants and a mermaid-from-hell with a chomping crocodile head instead of legs. There are also some hyper-detailed fetish costumes by the latex designer duo Kariwanz.
One of the mutants looks like she escaped from Kurôzu-cho
The plot: future Tokyo is plagued by bio-mechanical a virus. People who contract the virus turn into “Engineers,” named so for their ability to assemble weapons out of their infected flesh wounds. A special privatized police force (the gore police, also known as “Engineer Hunters”) exists to wipe out these beings, but if they’re wounded by one of the engineers, they quickly join their ranks, horrific implements of death quickly spawning from their own flesh. The protagonist is Ruka, one of the strongest members of the police force. Ruka appears to be the archetypal cute Japanese girl with a sword, but one thing I found interesting about her character is that according to one review, she’s a cutter. There are not many films that I’m aware of in which a main character suffers from self-mutilation, other than the French film Dans ma Pau, or In My Skin (definitely not a ‘feel-good movie’… and since we already got the ball rolling on the horrors of the flesh, here you go)
The main storyline of the film is peppered with faux commercials, reminding me of the faketrailersinGrindhouse. As reviewer Mike Skurko describes it:
We flash back and forth to some extremely demented and hilarious public service announcements as T.V. commercials throughout the film. My personal favorite being three cute school girls singing “Let’s go stylish with wrist cutting!” Just enough “Engrish” charm and realism to make this scene as cute as Hello Kitty while they morbidly introduce a new design that is “rounded for a cleaner cutting edge that school girls love!” Oh, this can’t be beat. More great T.V. ads: “Remote Control Exterminate!!” is a demented Wii that lets the viewer slice and dice a tormented player. Complete with all the spraying blood we’ve come to expect from just about everything with the Tokyo Shock label.
If you’re in New York or San Francisco this weekend, you are among the lucky few who can catch this film’s on-screen North American debut. It will premiere this Saturday at the New York Asian Film Festival. In San Francisco, you’ll be able to see it this Sunday at the Brava Theater as part of the Another Hole In The Head film festival, which looks like a lot of fun. A little bit later on, this film will also be premiering in Montreal.
What makes Viktoria “bizarre”? Is it her amputated leg? Is it the fact that she has an amputated leg and is still incredibly sexy? Or is it that she has an amputated leg and still considers herself a sexual person? Is this empowering? And to who? Surely the disabled are desexualized in this country, so it’s nice to see that challenged even, I suppose, in a magazine about weirdos. And yet, I suspect her sexuality is acceptable, fetishizable, only because she conforms to expectations of feminine beauty. In the big scheme of things, does she reproduce the standard of beauty, unattainable for most women, that crushes women’s self-esteem and sense of self-worth? And will disabled women, most of whom (like most non-disabled women) could never dream of being so beautiful, actually look at her and be able to identify? Or will this just draw attention to another way in which they don’t match up?
Now really, I think that SocImages went a little overboard with Viktoria (especially when they dismissed her comments about sexuality as “standard porn star talk”). Maybe it’s because I know her little better than they do, but I think that they oversimplify the genuine place that she comes from in choosing to be a model. However, they do bring up an important discussion that’s been nagging me for some time. What is an alternative model, and what is an alt model’s role in visual culture? In my life, at various points, I came up with 3 different definitions. I believe in each of them, and I have a problem with each of them as well. Here they are below. Which one resonates with you? Do you think it’s a combination of the three below, or something completely different? Opinions, please.
1. The model who challenges society’s notions of beauty.
I love these models, but the issue here is that, while they appear to push the boundaries of beauty in some direction, they usually wind up brutally reinforcing another traditional notion in the process. For example, trans models make us rethink gender/beauty, but with their self-presentation they usually reinforce the ideal of a sleek, hairless feminine figure, thus fueling the hair-removal industry. In fact, epilator-manufacturer Philips Norelco has already found a way to to capitalize on this to great effect – just watch this ad. And large models like Velvet D’Amour and skinny-by-comparison but still-considered-plus-size recent ANTM winner Whitney Thompson help to redefine weight in modeling, but what makes them “legitimately beautiful” in the eyes of the mainstream world is their “correct” bone structure, their blond hair. Without some “redeeming quality” of this sort, the world doesn’t recognize them as models, and wouldn’t even give them a shot at making a difference. Mainstream media often presents them as beautiful “in spite of,” not “because of.” While their individual messages are empowering (I love Velvet’s interviews), I don’t find our culture’s use of these models empowering at all.
