Self-taught graphic designer Courtney Riot is celebrating her whelping day. At 24, she’s the baby of the Coilhouse family.

Rascally Riot.

Courtney joined us on Issue 02 as the magazine’s Creative Director, and she’s been rocking our world ever since. Normally, someone in this position oversees a full staff of graphic designers. When she set about to work on Issue 02, Courtney handled everything from the overall design themes to the minutia of kerning and tracking on every single page. She didn’t just lay the magazine out; she gave it a personality. Suddenly, each article had a life of its own: hand-drawn lettering, intricate scrapbook-style collages, angular Soviet poster sensibilities, layouts constructed from cityscapes and mushroom clouds, type overgrown with weeds or shrouded in smoke… an article that looked like a pharmacy… an article that tasted like sugar skulls. Courtney brought them all to life.

This woman has become the invaluable fourth core member of Coilhouse’s editorial team. She’s a vital force in our production, and our evolution. As we head into the final production weeks of our next print issue, we want to shout something from the rooftops: THANK YOU, COURTNEY RIOT.

Photo by Lou O’Bedlam.

Our secret weapon. Our powerhouse. You never cease to amaze us. Without you, we were a knock-kneed, three-legged endtable that wasn’t quite sure of its aesthetic, or direction. With you, we’ve become an elegant, streamlined, galloping banquet table. We can’t wait to share what you’re working on right now for #05. Jaws are gonna drop.

Happy birthday, beautiful.

Okay, you know the 2010 Media Kit and Big Coilhouse News that we’ve been promising you since last week? Well, turns out we’re going to have to make you all wait one more day (this news is worth the wait, though, we promise!). Tabulating the survey results has taken more time than we anticipated. Here’s a screenshot of what the process looks like in Excel.  While we finish up the media kit, allow me to entertain you with six graphs and pie charts that we’ve created so far. Some of this will be in tomorrow’s media kit, some of it is a blog exclusive!

This was in response to the question “what country do you live in? Some fun facts:

• Six respondents included their state in the answer. Two of them were from California, and the other four were from Texas. No one else indicated a home state.
• Six respondents wrote in “USA! USA! USA!”  Three respondents wrote in “USA! USA!”
• The eight readers who wrote in from The Nertherlands are highly encouraged to attend the OK Festival that we just blogged about.
• Other top countries included Germany, Brazil, New Zealand, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Sweden, China, Croatia, Finland and Singapore

This was in response to the question, “do you have a creative pursuit that you’re extremely passionate about?”

• 116 creative pursuits were listed
• The chart above indicates the Top 16 creative pursuits. The next most popular pursuits, in order of popularity, were: knitting, sewing, animation, blogging, singing, costume design, jewelry, videography,  acting, electronic music, guitar, sculpture, baking, web design, book binding, cloth design, digital art, gardening, printing, theatre and aerials
• Some of less popular creative pursuits included: ceremonial magick, spinning poi, papercraft, math (“pure mathematics is eminently creative”), hardware engineering, typography, haberdashery and swimming

This was in response to the “What are your favorite magazines?” question:

• Most indicated that Coilhouse was their favorite magazine. Aww, you guys! *squish*
• The graph above indicates the Top 12 favorite magazines. The runners-up that didn’t make it into the chart, in order of the number of people who indicated that they were favorite magazines, were: Filament, Adbusters, Edge, Esquire, Fortean Times, Zink, Cabinet, Der Spiegel, Dwell and Elegy.

Photo by Gustavo Lopez Manas. Design by Courtney Riot

Much is afoot in da’ Haus. Next Monday, we’ll be putting out a call for ads for our upcoming Issue 05 as part of our Small Business Advertising Program. On that day, we’ll unveil our brand-new, 2010 Media Kit (the cover of which you can see above).

Meanwhile, have you got a few minutes to spare? To complete the media kit, we’d like to ask you, valued Coilhouse reader, a few questions about your stance as a consumer and your spending habits in a  35-question survey. It’s secure and anonymous, and all of the questions are optional. We hope you’ll help us, as well as the many indie businesses that support us, by answering the survey as truthfully and completely as you can. [Update: the survey is now closed. Thank you to all who participated!]

Monday’s post will also include some very exciting news about Issue 05. Stay tuned.

In honor of Alex Chilton’s passing, we’d like to publish this article written by Joshua Ellis. This article appeared in Coilhouse Issue 04. You can also view a PDF of this article, by a strange twist of fate, over at the official Pixies website. It’s not an article about him, or The Pixies, per se. However, we’ve been wanting to publish this article on our blog for a while now, and this feels like the right moment to do so. This article speaks to the heart of why we’re all here together. What’s that song? / I’m in love / With that song…

I have this memory, and I’m not sure if it’s even real–or if it’s real, if it’s cobbled together from a half-dozen memories, fragments of things that happened over the course of a year or two that began the summer before I started high school, in 1991.

In this memory, I’m sitting in the basement of a girl named Sara, who pronounced her name “Saah-rah” and had purple hair and smoked clove cigarettes. I didn’t know Sara very well, but she was part of a small collective of freaks and weirdos that I had congregated to when I moved that summer from my ancestral home of north Texas to the small mountain town of Hamilton, Montana.

I’m sitting in Sara’s basement with my friends: Jeremy, the pretty guy who wears big black woolen overcoats and Jamaican tam o’ shanters in bright yellow and red and green, and seems to have unlimited access to the panties of every single girl in the Bitterroot Valley; Wade, who perpetually sports Birkenstock loafers that look like inflated bladders and drives a white Volkswagen Beetle covered in Grateful Dead stickers; Nate, who is one of the best guitarists I’ve ever met and is a huge aficionado of what will later come to be known as “extreme” sports, like bouncing down jagged rock faces on a beat-up skateboard deck; Sarah and her sister, Jenny, who are both fond of dropping random giggly non sequiturs into the conversation when stoned.

They’re all here, or some of them, or none of them. We’re sitting in the dark, talking bohemian bullshit, maybe smoking pot. It’s the kind of night that gets put on endless repeat when you’re young and strange and condemned to spend your adolescence in some far-flung desolate shithole like Hamilton, Montana, where you can’t lose yourself in the noise or happily become part of it, the way you can in New York or Seattle or Los Angeles or Chicago.

I’m not as cool as they are. I don’t know about cool shit. I’m just this uptight kid from J. R. Ewing Land who talks too much, still wears Bugle Boy button-downs and M. C. Hammer pants, and has only the dimmest idea that there’s some entire world out there of cool shit that I know nothing about. I own a Jane’s Addiction album and I’ve vaguely heard of the Sex Pistols.

And in this memory, Sara gets up and puts a cassette tape into her boom box. It’s a time traveler from 1984, beaten and scuffed, with the inevitable broken-off cassette door, so you just slap the tape in and hope that the tape head keeps it from falling out, which will cause the relentless motors to chew the tape and unspool it like the entrails of a slaughtered pig. Sara slaps the tape in and hits play.

This song comes out–a slow beat, big and echoing, then a bass playing eighth notes, and then a guitar, dreamy and vibrating. It sounds like what I imagine sunrise on a beach would be like, like what I imagine doing heroin would be like, like what I imagine sex in a dark room with that awesome girl you lie awake and dream of meeting would be like. I haven’t experienced any of these things–yet.

And then a voice, a high husky man’s voice, gentle over the music.

Cease to resist, given my good-byes
Drive my car into the o-o-sha-hah-hahn
You think I’m dead, but I sail away
On a wave of mutilation, wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Way-hey-hey-hey-have
Way-hey-hey-hey-have

“What is this?” I ask. Sara shrugs.

“It’s the Pixies,” she says in this memory that may not even be real, or maybe didn’t happen this way at all. “The song’s called ‘Wave of Mutilation.’ This is the U.K. Surf Mix. The real version is faster and louder.”

“I’ve never heard of them,” I said. “I’ve never heard this.”

“They’re pretty cool,” Sara says. “I think they’re from, like, Boston.”

I nod. Pretty cool.

Caitlin Hackett’s work is a lush stew of the beautiful, grotesque, and fantastic; pulling from a wide spectrum of myths and fairy tales. Mostly rendered with ballpoint pens and watercolors, it exhibits a level of detail that I find irresistible.

via Phantasmaphile

Issue 04, photographed by Siege

We’ve gotten a lot of emails asking where to find Issue 04 since it sold out in January on our site, so we’d like to make a courtesy post for all you guys who missed out. While it’s sold out forever here at our shop and at the Wildilocks shop (for Australian residents), and while we don’t see a reprint in the near future, you still have two options for getting this issue before it disappears:

1. Get thee to the nearest Borders or Barnes & Noble, where it should still be on the stands (but not for long). Here’s the complete list of stores that stock this issue. We suggest calling the stores in advance, because the copies might be gone. Or they might not! My parents just told me that the saw four of them sitting on a shelf at one in Jersey, for example.
2. Issue 04 does occasionally appear on Ebay. However, that’s not your cheapest option. We’ve seen their price on Ebay fluctuate between $20 and $30 in the past month. We have no control over who sells them on Ebay, or what they set their prices to. But for anyone interested, there’s currently one going for a “Buy It Now” price of $29.99 from seller viciouslyfun.

A lot of people have asked if future issues of Coilhouse are going to be stocked by independently-owned bookstores such as Trident in Boston, Quimby’s in Chicago, Atomic Books in Baltimore, and other mom-and-pop/campus bookshops. The answer is YES! You’ll be able to find our upcoming Issue 05 in all those stores, and we’ll post a list of them as we get nearer to the publication date.

On Monday, as promised, nine names were pulled out of a hat. The first three will receive a copy of It Books’ brand new Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated by Camille Rose Garcia, the second three will get a limited edition lithograph and the final three, a tote bag. If your name didn’t get pulled, the book can still be yours – it’s available online, here.

For those curious about the raffle process, it was fairly simple. I pasted the comments from our post into a document, removing comments from staff, double comments and comments from ineligible folks, printed the document and then cut it up, comment by comment. The separated answers we placed into an actual hat, and voila!

I hoped the winners would be announced on Monday, but we had to confirm everyone’s US and Canadian residence first, which took a little longer than anticipated. Without further ado, drum roll, please!

Book
Ed Autumn
Sarah Obscura
Evv

Lithograph
Whittles
Chocklit
Babs Noir

Tote
Vulgaire Turpentine
Lauren
Allie

Amy Stein’s photography is stuck somewhere between found and posed. Her subjects, no doubt interrupted while going about their routine, are nevertheless mugging for the camera, that wonderful grain giving each image the quality of a item found in a box at a garage sail. They occupy that perfect intersection between real and manufactured that only photography seems to be comfortable with; and so perfectly framed, so delightfully exacting, that they almost cannot fail to charm the viewer.

Back around the time of Issue 03, we launched the Small Business Advertising Program to create affordable ad space for indie companies in the print version of Coilhouse. By the time Issue 04 rolled around, the number of advertisers had grown significantly – by this time, we had record labels, jewelry and clothing designers, sculptors, other magazines, web hosts, toy makers and graphic designers advertising in our pages. Click here to see them all. With editorial duties taking up more and more of our time as the weeks go by, the moment has come for us to seek help with the advertising side of running the magazine. We’re looking to hire an Ad Manager for our Small Business Advertising Program, starting with Coilhouse Magazine #05… and possibly subsequent issues.

Full details after the jump!

Quickly! A sneak peek of some (very happy, glowy) people we’ll be featuring in Issue #05:

photo credit: Allan Amato/Coilhouse

(And everybody goes “AWWWWWWW.”)

So far, 2010 has indeed been a happy nude year for musician Amanda Palmer and her beau, author Neil Gaiman. On New Year’s Eve, Amanda joined the Boston Pops Orchestra for the second year running to perform both Dresden Dolls and solo material (as well as passionately ravish Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1), and at some point during the course of the night, Neil proposed. They publicly announced their engagement on January 15th. A day later, the lovebirds met up with our wondrous Mister Allan Amato in NYC, who took these photos for an upcoming Coilhouse Magazine feature on their creative life together. They like that top portrait so much, they’re using it as their official engagement press photo. Yay!

photo credit: Allan Amato/Coilhouse

At 4am the next morning, they boarded a plane to LA and went directly to the Golden Globes, where, as the Huffington Post put it, Amanda “immediately became the most interesting thing at the awards.” (Heeee hee hee hee hee. Some things never change.) Congratulations, you two.

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So, hey… things are kind of chaotic around here for the next few days, owing to the Whitechapel residency and all of us juggling multiple balls. Please forgive me for consolidating the following announcement with the Gaimanda Impending Nuptials Declaration, but my co-editors and I would also like to mention that Coilhouse Issue #04 has OFFICIALLY SOLD OUT in the online store.

Wow. It’s been what, a month?! We’re floored. Thank you for your overwhelming support and patronage! For those of you (in the States, at least) who missed the cutoff, fret not. There are still copies available in select Barnes & Noble stores across the country. Full list of stores here. Just be sure to call ahead to reserve your copy. There’s also Meltdown Comics in LA, Wildilocks in Australia, and… well… me in New Zealand. (Kiwis, just pipe up in comments and I’ll arrange to get your info.)

Onward and upward, comrades! Please do drop by the Whitechapel thread if you get the chance. There’s some really lively discussion happening over there, and we’d love to see more of our beloved blog readers chime in.