East Coasters, are you sad that you missed Mer’s theremin performance at the launch party? New York, Chicago, Indianapolis, Lousiville, Nashville, Atlanta, Columbia, Knoxville and Baltimore, you’re in luck: Faun Fables is coming through, and Mer is performing with them. Click here for the tour dates.

You know the drill: we’ll be light on Mer-posts for the next couple of weeks, but when she returns, there’ll be wonders to show! When the tour went through Europe, Mer revealed the the most depressing towel rack ever made, found at the Tyrolean Folk Museum in Austria. When she toured the midwest, Mer uncovered The Tarnished Beauties of Blackwell, Oklahoma – a poignant post that inspired both my mom’s first-ever Coilhouse comment and a heartfelt comment from Shirley Love, a 72-year-old native of Blackwell. What will Mer discover on her East Coast adventure? Stay tuned.

It’s the feeling that you don’t necessarily fit within your own time. You’re drawn to the past in ways you can’t quite understand… Jared Joslin

Two of Jared Joslin’s recent oil paintings, The Panther and the Zebra and Moonlit Starlet

My admiration for the visionary Joslin posse knows no bounds. If there were any way for me to make the reception for Jared’s solo exhibition in Beverly Hills tomorrow night (August 14th), I’d be there with bells on (as well as a pair of schmancy silk stockings with seams up the back, and possibly one of those vintage, beaded cloche hats). Alas, in a strange twist of fate, I’ll be in the Joslin’s own city of Chicago, no doubt weeping disconsolately into a plastic cup of draft beer in the corner of some rock club. So glamorous.

Metropolis by Jared Joslin (2008)

I urge our readers in Southern California to attend the reception in my stead. Don’t miss the opportunity to bask in the breathtaking elegance, mystery and nostalgia of Jared’s recent work, a collection of oil paintings entitled Shadow of the Silver Moon. Quoting the press release:

In the Shadow of the Silver Moon, a spectrum of intriguing characters spring to life. There is a Dietrich-esque emcee, striking her silver-tipped cane against the parquet floor. An alluring chanteuse beckons with her sparkling eyes and an elaborately costumed fan dancer strikes an elegant, sinuous pose.

Performers and patrons are caught in the swirl of the evening, yet remain lost in their own private reveries. Under the Shadow of the Silver Moon, while the band is playing, mysteries hidden behind the eyes linger in the air, like fireflies in the night.

The exhibition runs through September 13, 2008 at the Yarger/Strauss Fine Art.

A stern, last-minute reminder from M.A.D.D. (Muftaks Against Drunk Driving): all ya boozers attending the launch party tonight need to BRING A DESIGNATED DRIVER, or use a taxi service. That goes double for anyone who so much as sips the Electric Lemonade. We don’t want to see your drunk ass behind the wheel of anything besides the gorgeous carousel horse Roxy‘s lending us for the photo booth.

Cheers!

Post-Nerd Prom portrait of your pitiful narrator, afflicted with the dreaded Con Plague, or perhaps some form of eyeball-displacing orbital tumor.

Apologies for not updating in “real time” on Sunday, but I’ve been slimed. That is to say, I have succumbed to the dreaded Con Crud, and could not muster the strength to lift my fingers (blackened, trembling, tumescent with pus) to type this missive until now. Tonight (scabby, delirious, drowning in my own phlegm) I’d like to share a consolidation of ComicKAAAAAHHHHN postcards, and quite possibly my death rattle, with you.

To start things off, here’s a chick straddling a seahorse monster:

This cover image of The Fabulous Women of Boris Vellejo & Julie Bell is fabulous indeed. It would be even more fabulous with the addition of some strategically placed tiny bubbles, don’t you agree?

Again, medicine it is the legend.

Don’t know what to get Granny for Christmas now that her collection of Hummel figurines is complete? How about this winsome “Bunny Sees Boobs” sculpture by Colin Christian? Think about it.

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.

Once you start down the dark path, salve forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you, it will!

Like every other sentimental mooncalf who watched too many Merchant Ivory flicks as a young girl, I continue to allow the actor Julian Sands to occupy a very special place in my heart, despite everything. Never mind Warlock. Or Harem. Forget Boxing Helena and Biker Mice From Mars. Put these sundries from your minds, my dears. Recall only A Room With A View, and Sands’ convincingly heterosexual ravishing of Helena Bonham Carter in a field of poppies.* It remains, to this day, one of my top picks for Most Romantic Moment in Cinema (seconded only by this tender scene from Myra Breckenridge).

I also happen to be a HYOOOGE fan of the Italian horror director, Dario Argento, so when I heard that he and Sands worked together ten years ago on an adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, I was quite curious! Why had I never heard about this movie before? Why?! I promptly Netflixed it.

“I gotta be MEEEEEEE.” Julian Sands in Il Fantasma.

Why, oh, why, indeed. Yes, Sands and Argento work seamlessly together… in a So-Bad-it’s-a-Festering-Masterpiece kind of way, their combined efforts cradling the budding psychosexual genius of Asia Argento like two slices of moldy sourdough bread wrapped around a generous dollop of indeterminate ooze in a rat salad sandwich.

The movie is quite long, and something tells me few of you will appreciate the full length version as much as I did. Luckily, Genevieve, a brilliant columnist over at Defenestration Magazine, has provided us with this MST3K-worthy “abridged version”. I laughed, I cried, it was better than… that other Andrew Lloyd Weber musical. Enjoy:

Parts II and III under the cut.

Left: Ballerina. Right: Apollo and Daphne.

She died before I was ever born,  but she’s been with me all my life. Nadya Rusheva was only 17 when she succumbed to a brain hemorrhage in Moscow. She left behind ten thousand drawings – a fragile, incomplete catalogue of her teenage fascinations with Greek myths, Pushkin’s life, Bulgakov, Byron’s poems, War and Peace, and other bits and pieces from history and literature.

L: Pushkin and Goncherova. R: The Transfiguration of Margarita

She once said that she lived the lives of the people she drew. Her drawings are simple, impulsive – some might even say they’re amateurish – but there’s something to them,  a spark, a keen insight, a visible love. For example, when she illustrated The Master and Margarita (which Zo and I blogged about), it turned out that her drawings of Margarita bore an eerie resemblance to Bulgakov’s wife – whom Rusheva had never met.

L: Saying good-bye to Fox. R: Self-portrait.

She’s virtually unknown in the West –  not even a real Wikipedia page – but in Russia, she’s beloved by generations for her combination of tragedy, whimsy, youth and the adult-like insight that sometimes appeared in her work. Young fans still visit her museum and leave behind poems and drawings. On her Livejournal fan community, people swap scans of her drawings and write dedications. And a new film about her called “Secret Signs” recently came out in Russia.

Rusheva was born in 1952 in Mongolia to a Bolshoi theater designer and a ballerina (both of whom, I believe, are still alive today), and died in 1969. Some say that she was exploited to make the Soviet education system look good. I found two translations of the same document that claim that, upon being discovered, Rusheva was forced to produce artwork at a grueling pace so that the regime could hold her up as a paragon of Communist artistic training. One translation outright states that she was worked to death, but other (and better translation) doesn’t imply this. I’d never heard this before, even though I knew her work since childhood, thanks to my parents’ immense book collection. I could see it being true – despite the irony that Master and Margarita, one of her favorite books to illustrate, was banned when she drew it.

After the jump, my favorite Rusheva drawings (there’s lots!) and more.