A playful reminder from the Vegetable Orchestra of Vienna: keep your diet green and leafy, cialis and always play with your food.




“Mother. Star Trek. Father. Star Wars. Kino. The Illuminatus Trilogy. James Joyce. Lovecraft. 1001 Arabian Nights. UFO sightings. Getting switched at birth. Encyclopedias. Synagogue. Catholicism. Mexican Shamanism. Carl Sagan. Praise Bob! Jazz music. Horrible Whining Bob and his Brooding Band. Latter-day Saints. Harrowsmith Magazine. Dead Can Dance. Being the only deaf Anglo person in a French community. Folklore/ghost tales. Gericault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa.’ Nothing at all. Being a virtual bubble boy due to illness. Gangsters, search Boadicea & haunted houses. Living with artists. Being the only kid in elementary school to dress up as a Ford Prefect for Halloween. David Bowie in Labyrinth. Lord of the Rings. Joy Division, Finnegan’s Wake (no, I didn’t get a lot out of that when reading it at 14 but it did secure a good grade in english for me) and Gitanes. ABBA. Deep-sea crustaceans. Astrid Lingren. USA Networks Nightflight. Museums my parents took me to…” – From comments on “What Made You Weird?”

“In The Garden” by Madeline von Foerster

I believe there is still time to make a new myth. There is still a chance for imagination to rise to power.
~Madeline von Foerster

The mystical paintings of Madeline von Foerster invoke names like Van Eyck, Brueghel, Bosch, Remedios Varo, Ernst Fuchs. It’s vibrant, multi-layered work, filled with Occult and Medieval symbolism and rendered in the painstaking egg tempera oil tradition of the Flemish Old Masters. Ageless, yet thematically timely, scholarly but always deeply personal, hers is simply some of the most moving work in the medium that I’ve seen from anyone of my generation.

I remember the first time I viewed the following self-portrait at a gallery showing in midtown NYC:

“Self Portrait (Trepanation)” 2005 by Madeline von Foerster

It’s a fairly large piece, 34″ x 42″ (not including the lavish frame, which she constructed and painted as well). If you’re familiar with the technique of egg tempera, closely examining a painting like this can be mind-boggling… all of those smoothly-placed, minuscule brush strokes, patiently layered, culminating in subjects that can only be described as having an unearthly inner glow. The enigmatic subject matter of trepanation thrilled me as well.

It was your typical overcrowded NYC gallery opening. Plenty of cheap wine and fabulously dressed people, all talking a little too loudly over one another. Then there was Madeline, standing off to one side, as gracious, elegant and mysterious as one of her paintings. Since that time, I’ve come to know her as one of those exceedingly rare examples of a person whose life reflects purely in their art.

Some of her recent work is currently up in a group show at the Strychnin Gallery in London. Take a peek at it and some other pieces behind the cut.

For many of us there is an event, a circumstance or a series of both that altered us in a specific way, making us strange, odd, whatever you want to call it enough to seek lives less ordinary. It’s different for everyone – Nadya, for instance, was inspired in part by Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation video’s military look and overall stompiness. For there were several components and so I present you a partial list of What Made Me Weird.

My Parents

Let’s get this one out of the way. I’ll narrow this down to just a couple of things, though I have much to thank them for. They took time to expose me to theaters and museums since a very early age, despite the social state of ’80s Russia and our modest finances. I grew up surrounded by literature and read things like Spartacus and Dandelion Wine. With my parents’ busy schedules I was often left home alone to rummage through my mother’s numerous art books and my father’s hefty collection of science fiction. Soon I realized I preferred to spend time by myself, not making me the best candidate for schoolyard popularity.

Mother of Balloon Music by Judy Dunaway

Initially, exposure to composer/performer Judy Dunaway and her “virtuostic balloon-playing” broke my brain. But after the giggle fit subsided, I realized I was genuinely in awe of the woman, for many of the same reasons I’ve long adored Harry Partch, Hans Reichel, Clara Rockmore, and Klaus Nomi. Like them, Dunaway is utterly fearless in her approach to her craft, and unflinching in the face of inevitable backlash from both her classical and avante-garde contemporaries. (It takes ovaries of steel to play Lincoln Center with nothing but an amplified balloon between your knees, ah tell you whut.)

Her Etudes No.1 and 2 for Balloon and Violin (2004) are particular favorites of mine, perhaps because they’re what my own stuffy classical violin instructor would undoubtedly have dismissed as “good musicans behaving unforgivably.” I’m at a loss to accurately describe the music… imagine what an orgy of parasitic wasps being slowly pressed to death between two lubricated sheets of mylar might sound like. New York Press writer Kenneth Goldsmith likened Dunaway’s live performances to witnessing “Cab Calloway in Munchkinland… Olivier Messiaen on helium.”

Dunaway’s own statement of purpose is more straightforward:

My own work … does not come out of a void. Creating a large body of work for balloons has allowed me to develop a vocabulary outside the realm of oppressive classical heritage. It has raised the ordinary and mundane to the status of high art. I have fetishized this simple cheap toy in my music, as the violin has been fetishized for centuries by Western European-influenced composers. In an era where the progress toward a woman’s control of her own body is threatened, I have coupled myself to a musical instrument that expresses sensuality, sexuality and humanity without inhibition.

Hooo wee! You go, girl!

• Listen to an interview with Judy Dunaway

• Download her CD on emusic.com

• Sex Workers’ Internet Radio Lounge (SWIRL) A not-for-profit educational webcast for audio art and activism concerning the rights of sex workers, founded by Dunaway.

Kudos to Brian V. for reminding me of her!

Yesterday, our friend Warren Ellis posed an interesting question: “why doesn’t alt culture exist?” In his weekly column, The Sunday Hangover, Warren points the finger in the same direction as our mission statement, blaming the rapacious mainstream. However, Warren goes a step further, fingering another culprit:

We’re in Reynolds’ “anachronesis” — living in a time of constant, delusional recursion, in a limbo of a dozen different pasts. Re-enactment, like living as a medieval soldier for a never-ending Renaissance Faire. Being Lenny Kravitz. Being the White Stripes. Record collection bands. People who like Amy Winehouse. Reynolds again: “Things under the sway of anachronesis are just nothing. You might as well be dead.”

Here’s another theory: perhaps anachronesis is not the retardant of a burgeoning alt culture, but its catalyst. After all, every subculture has always been a mediated response to the mainstream: punk culture’s rebellion grew out of a disillusionment with the rewards promised by white-collar mobility; Rastafarianism was a subversion of the white man’s religion; both the riot grrls of the 90s and the flappers of the 20s adopted certain styles to reject – or reclaim – certain conventions of womanhood. What, then, is the mainstream culture that today’s alt puts under the microscope?

Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout, originally uploaded by Coilhouse.

At this very moment, in my hot little hands, I hold a copy of 80s scream queen Linnea Quigley‘s ineffably rad “Horror Workout” video.

Much to the disappointment of B-movie fans everywhere, this pinnacle of home fitness instruction has yet to be made available on DVD. The VHS cassette sells for anywhere between 50 and 100 clams online.

Here’s a taste of what you’re missing…

EDIT 05/29/2009: Good news, boys and ghouls! You can now buy an autographed DVD-R of Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout on the scream queen’s website, www.linneaquigley.net.

Honestly, I hadn’t been missing NYC at all since I moved out west last May. Then the autumn equinox hit. Ever since, I’ve been aching to take a long bike ride through the fiery foliage of Prospect Park.

My soundtrack of choice would be Light Is Calling, an album by Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon. Its title track was written specifically for this stunning short film of the same name by Bill Morrison:

Gordon and Morrison previously worked together on Morrison’s full length movie Decasia. Both pieces build around a very simple premise; film is a fragile medium. Nearly all of that old nitrate-based film stock is too grimy and scratched, rotting and stinking of vinegar to be of much use to film preservationists. Morrison salvaged 70 minutes of archival footage from someone’s rubbish bin, stitched it together and re-shot film that showed decay or was actively decaying, frame-by-frame, using an optical printer.

The cumulative effect is breathtaking, and for reasons that are difficult to articulate, will always remind me of New York in the fall.

(Readers in Antwerp will be delighted to know that the Vlaams Radio Orkest are providing live accompaniment to Decasia on October 21st, as well as what I’m sure will be a stentorian rendition of John Cage’s 4’33”. *cough*)

Soap Bubble Box, originally uploaded by Coilhouse.

The magical curio cabinets and collages of Joseph Cornell make me pine for a Manhattan I never knew, for all things mildewed, dusty and indigo-hued, for faded starlets and forgotten prima ballerinas, and for constellations I have never seen.

Born towards the end of the Victorian era in upstate NY, reclusive Cornell never ventured any further than New England, but his body of work reveals an inner world of incalcuable depth. Inspired in equal parts by the penny arcades of his youth and the grandiose vision of the Dada/Surrealists, Cornell spent a lonely lifetime trawling L.E.S. flea markets and secondhand bookstores for nostalgic scraps of yesteryear. Whatever the medium (diorama, film collage, decoupage), each piece reflects the inexorable drive of a compulsive scavenger/architect to coax meaning and narrative –however mysterious– from discarded scraps of the past.

Thee High Priestess ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Blah (T.H.P.O.T.T.O.P.B.)*

And now it’s time for a joyous yodel (erm, sorry) shout out to a dear sister in Lucerne, Mlle Susanne G., a young lady who has officially been keeping it weird on the web since 2003. Unofficially? Much longer than that. In fact, we first found one another on deadjournal (of all the godforsaken places!) maaaany, many moons ago. Like, a moon in the nineties. *gasp*

Her blog compendium, Wurzeltod, is one of my absolute favorite nooks on the net, “a drawer full of all things weird, grotesque, bitter-sweet, embalmed and fortean. Brought to you by Suzanne – the eternal art history student.” You’ll laugh, you’ll cry… occasionally you’ll gag. It’s bliss.

So go for the gas masks, stay for the marzipan, and tell her Coilhouse sent ye.

*photo © of Suzanne G.