Hooray, it’s our favorite cosmonomad‘s whelping day! If you’re attending the reception of Zo’s glorious Off World Cloud Hunters, Mutants and the Rest show in Toronto this evening, give her a squish from us, won’t you? If, like me, you were unable to catch the last rocket launch to this blessed event, feel free to join me in mooning over our epic Coilhouse repository of Zo posts. Guaranteed to make your brainy bits go FIZZZZ… and touch you where your bathing suit covers.
*SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK SPANK* and one to grow on *SPANK*
Zoetica’s solo art show (and birthday! woo!) takes place in Toronto this Thursday. The event unveils a new series of gorgeous monochrome ink and digital drawings, which began with our jetpacked Coilhouse poster girl and spiraled off into a new mythology. The subjects of the series – a team of “off-world cloud hunters” – posses high-altitude breathing devices, candy-shaped gravity-defying hairstyles and futuristic clothing that’s remeniscent of Plastik Wrap, the host of the gallery event. Adriana from Plastik Wrap and Zoetica previously collaborated on several fashionshoots, my favorite one taking place at the Bradbury Building in Downtown LA (most famously captured as J.F. Sebastian’s apartment building in Blade Runner). More information about this event can be found on Zo’s personal blog.
Just in case you can’t make it, here’s a cloud hunter – and three more after the jump.
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:
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.
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.”
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!
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.”
I, all three of us, we’ve been reading your introductions, and we owe you all a big , squishy, electrified Thank You. When we asked you to tell us about yourselves we were certainly hoping to lure some of you from the shadows, if only for a moment, but we did not expect this. One hundred forty three [143] replies and counting. A few of those are ours but the bulk is you, in all your international, multi-faceted splendor.
So thank you for shedding your veils of anonymity and taking the time to tell us and each other a bit about you. I’ll be here, gleaming with pride and reading away. And if you’re reading this and have yet to participate, do! Nudes OK.
A while back, Zo posted about an indie film that’s being made in Finland. One Jani from Tampere abruptly appeared in the comments to say “hey, the production team comes from my city!” It made me wonder: who’s out there? Every day, I get at least one new registration to the site. Some of the emails are shady ([email protected]? uh, no), but most look real – some give me a good laugh. But, out of all who register to post comments, a relatively small percentage ever speaks their piece.
I’ll be embarrassed if no one replies, but here goes: who’s reading? I’m especially curious to hear from the lurkers, but from everyone who comments as well. I want to know all you guys better. Perhaps I know some things about you already, like your taste in men (pervs!) and what made you weird. So, really, I’m more curious about the basics:
who you are
where you’re from
what you do in life
maybe even what you look like?
Warren Ellis does this self-portrait thread, and I love that idea. I’m sure some of you are from over there (hey, Shay!).
So… introduce yourselves! Tell all! No nudes.
UPDATE: CH guest blogger David Forbes has come up with this nifty map to create a visual summation of the response to this post. Forbes writes, “this map is the product of insomnia, writer’s block and appreciation. It will be updated as more info comes in. It isn’t horrendously accurate past the “Oh, that big red dot is Manchester” level, but it serves to show the array of worldwide (some on every continent) readers that Coilhouse has. So Los Angelines, St. Franciscans, Oaklandroids, Yankees, Kiwis, Aussies, Southerners (North Carolina!), Portlandracks, Chicagoans, Canucks, Irishers, England-types and everyone else: the signal is “Abraxas.” When you hear this word transmitted via morse code, rise up and take over!
This song goes out to Meredith Yayanos – ethereal violinist, cryptohistorian, deer-butt art connoisseur. Want to give Mer a little birthday gift? Then I suggest you do this: check out all her awesome Coilhouse posts, find a post that you somehow missed out on, and really get into it. We all have those busy days/weeks when a post or two slips us by, and today’s a great day to catch up. Celebrate Mer’s birthday by letting her make you a little bit weirder!
Summer winds are here and they’re sweeping our Mer away onceagain. This time she’s headed south and then all over the US, on extendo-tour with the Faun Fables. This could be your chance to catch one of these performances! Having witnessed this intense phantasmafolk first-hand I suggest you mark these dates in your calendars, dress to the nines and go rock, hard. In the meantime we’ll be standing by the window, clutching a handkerchief and longingly gazing at the open road until she returns to us.
This summer South African runner Oscar Pistorius, after much controversy, will have a shot at competing in the Olympics. Why the controversy? Pistorius, known as “blade runner” (a name he rejects as “boring stuff”) was born without fibula. He has not had flesh, blood and bone below his knees since he was 11 months old.
In January, the International Association of Athletic Federations ruled that his state of the art prosthetics were superior to human legs, and would thus give him an unfair advantage. Last month, that judgement was overturned. If he can cut his best times down by less than a second, Olympic competition will see its first cyborg. The future has arrived.
In just a few weeks, Issue 1 of Coilhouse Magazine goes off to the printers! We can’t believe that these final weeks are here already. To make sure that Issue 1 gets done properly, we are going to pause blogging until the end of this month. The next two weeks are going to be a completely grueling process for the entire staff as we proofread, color-correct, proofread again, finish the design, overdose on Jolt Cola, realize that we forgot something important at the last minute, panic, revise and finally send it off to the printer. Wish us luck. We can’t reveal the contents of Issue 1 just yet, but it’s going to be amazing. You just wait.
We’ll miss you guys in the next two weeks. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to watch our community bloom so much in such a brief span of time, and take part in the vibrant and inclusive discussions. Thanks to everyone who takes the time to read and respond to the blog, and no worries, it’s not going anywhere! We love the immediacy and the camaraderie far too much. Everyone’s excited to bring in more new writers and features over the coming months. Still, it’s human nature to try for the brass ring.
See you in May!
EDIT: Actually, it’s highly likely we’ll see you before that. (Let’s face it. We’re not going to be able to keep radio silence for two full weeks!)
People of Coilhouse! I come to you this day with news of art. Yes, the very first Coilhouse poster is here.
Hand drawn by yours truly, it features an exotic beauty – corseted, headphoned, jetpacked and ready for adventure. Formatted to be printed at 11×17″ she is available for free download here.
Print one, print one hundred, shrink it, pass it out as fliers or stick it full-size to the side of a train – the more you do with it, the better. All we ask is when you do to take a photo and add it to the Coilhouse Flickr pool, even if it’s just hanging in your kitchen. I’ll be under the cover of night, hooded up and armed with a bucket of glue. Photo-documentation to come. Hope you dig it!
We are hoping to have fixed the spamming issue by installing WordPress 2.3.3 and apologize in advance if spam links do appear. Wily bastards, them.
