These Nomi-inspired pieces were created by Hungarian designer Eva Nyiri. Her first collection, a slick robotic-samuri affair titled “Black on Black,” sparked awe on blogs such as Haute Macabre earlier this year. Nyiri’s work represents a new breed of sophisticated, grownup-goth Eastern European fashion designers, along with fellow Hungarian Dora Mojzes (Nyiri’s best friend of 10 years), Serbian-based Marko Mitanovski, and Slovenian prodigy Tea Bauer.
This week, German photographer Madame Peripetie – who you may remember from the impossible-shoe Insectarium series – published her new collaboration with Nyiri, titled “Warriors in the Dark.” The full shoot consists of twelve images, and can be found in the latest issue of Nico Magazine. More images from the shoot can be seen at the Larapixie blog. Expect more great things from both Peripetie and Nyiri in 2010!
“We remember it well now, our younger days, when we got the cassette deck for the car. The windows always rolled up, closing us off to the outside world. We moved steadily as things rolled by, always with the cassettes playing at the loudest possible volume.” [via]
Joshua Z-P (of Roadside Picnic Podcast and A Room Forever fame) and his friend Adam Helms were recently asked by Type Records (home to Svarte Greiner, Deaf Center, Grouper, and Koen Holtkamp, among other phenomenal bands) to compile a mix for their Typecast series. “So a mix we did – one of epic and biblical proportions which we now share with you. This isn’t your older brother’s black metal – there’s no Dungeons & Dragons posturing while wearing corpse paint. Just pure, brutal, lo-fi nihilism full of tape hiss and vinegar.”
Cirrhus, Horrid Cross, Haxan.
All tracks were transferred from cassettes, save the Akitsa song. There’s Bone Awl and Ash Pool and freakin’ Ancestors and a bunch of even more obscure shit I don’t recognize at all.Holy balls, this mix is awesome. Sadly, the vast majority of our readers will find it unlistenable. So unless you enjoy making your eardrums hemorrhage with tinny, shrieking, blood-gargling KVLT AS FUCKNESS, please back away slowly from this post without making direct eye contact, and click here instead.
If you read any rant today, make sure it’s “The Bitch Is Back”. (Be warned: should you happen to think Objectivism is nifty, you may not appreciate it quite as much.) Andrew Corsello’s essay for GQ concerning author/philosopher Ayn Rand’s followers and her work’s lingering influence over global economics and politics is a raw, rambunctious, damning piece of work. Here’s a choice excerpt:
In the end, it’s not the books but the smug, evangelical certainty of Ayn Rand Assholes that causes me to loathe Ayn Rand in a personal way. The thing I liked most about college was being around so many young people who were as earnest as they were dauntingly smart. People who didn’t (yet) feel the need to own every room they walked into. People who knew how to ask questions. That was it. All that elevated question-asking, and the pliancy of temperament it entailed.
We were children. Then came Rand, “the Rosa Klebb of letters,” as entertainment journalist Gary Susman calls her, to body-snatch some of the best of them. Rhetorical question: Is there anything more irritating than a 20-year-old incapable of uttering the words “I don’t know”?
Actually, there is: an 82-year-old Alan Greenspan admitting in October 2008—at least ten years too late—that he’d found “a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.”
WORD. Wish I still had the email address for this kid in my high school econ class who used to carry Rand’s photo around in his wallet and habitually referred to people as “subnormals”, just so I could send him the final, frothing paragraphs of Corsello’s essay.
Intrigued. Enamored. Deeply amused. This is how I’m left feeling after watching Megumi Satsu videos. The striking French singer’s voice cascades like velvet and breaks like glass, while her hat collection is rivaled only by that of Grace Jones.
She left her native Sapporo, Japan for Paris in the seventies. In France, the enigmatic Satsu captured the attention of surrealist poet Jacques Prévert who wanted her to interpret some of his work. After doing just that, Megumi befriended sociologist Jean Baudrillard and artist/filmmaker Roland Topor. Both wrote songs for her. It’s hard to say whether she’s exactly “known” but the avant-garde underground clout can not be denied with such a repertoire. Among her song titles, Monte dans mon Ambulance [Ride My Ambulance], Motel Suicide Below, and Silicone Lady. Below, one of her few songs in English, Give Back My Soul.
The drama! The floorwork! The camp! I had an impossible time choosing which version of this song to post. The others are here , here, and here for your perusal; you decide which is best. Researching her, I’ve come across several Nina Hagen comparisons, but my friend Q. and I agree there’s more Anna Varney on enka than anything else. Megumi Satsu has stayed true to herself, maintaining a decidedly stark haircut, browless face and love of hats and cigarettes to this day. You can see recent photos of the singer along with another video below the jump. And! She has a new album out as of last week titled Aprés Ma Mort [After My Death] which can be obtained on her website. My new role model, indubitably.
Nothing says Malevolent Psychopomp of Satan quite like a pair of Reebok high-tops. Unless it’s biker shorts. Or a puffy ponytail.
I quail before his magnificence. It’s no wonder that cop took one look at the proceedings and tucked tail.
Sadly, little is known of the circumstances and origins of this clip. The YouTuber who uploaded it says “I got this randomly placed on a tape a dude sent me once. I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on here, as in where the rest of the band is.”
Band schmand. This guy doesn’t need backup. Whatever his solo rendition of “KILL EVERYONE” may lack in instrumentation (or tonality, or lyricism), it more than makes up for in conviction. Plus, he’s got the entire audience providing the chorus for his instant club hit, “I HATE EVERYONE”.
Okay, first things first, I think we can all agree that cuffed blue jeans are probably not the way to go when you’re wearing the most incredible baby T-Rex costume puppet ever friggin’ made in the history of EVAR. But still. Holy shit, right? Someone over at Geekologie sums up my own feelings about this clip quite well:
Let me tell you: when that [baby T-Rex] first came running out I thought it was CG. But it wasn’t. And neither were my 30 boners! My God, I’ve never wanted to be part of a live studio audience so bad in my life.
Seriously! Well, it turns out that if you live in the UK, US, Canada or any number of cities in Europe, you can have your Brachiosaurus and meet it, too. The dinos in that clip are only three of over 10 species featured in a spectacular live arena show spin-off of the cherished BBC series Walking With Dinosaurs. Creature designer Sonny Tilders and his crew used their extensive knowledge of puppetry arts and animatronics to bring these long-extinct giants back to life.
Don’t let anybody steer you different; Andrew B’s x planesTumblr is straight-up anachro-airship porn. Andrew has been posting scores of “weird and wonderful aircraft pictures and stories found both on the web, and in print” over there for the better part of a year now. You can get lost in the archives for days:
Some more choice excerpts from x planes after the jump, but seriously, if you have a few minutes (or a few hours) to spare, just get over there and explore. Motherload.
The 2012 crackpots won’t shut up about Schumman Resonance and the earth’s racing heartbeat and how time is literally accelerating toward a zero point, at which time we will all apparently be escorted by luminous karmic god warriors from the 5th Dimension into a blissful, egoless Eternal Now paradise. (Weeee!) While the skeptic in me has trouble stifling her giggles, I have to admit something… I can’t help but feel like time really IS speeding up when I watch footage like this:
(This is another one of those times where turning off the sound and picking your own soundtrack may prove less monotonous.)
Wiki describes martial arts tricking as “a relatively new underground alternative sport movement, combining martial arts, gymnastics, breakdancing and other activities to create an aesthetic blend of flips, kicks, and twists.” There are no formal rules, no official regulations, no limitations whatsoever beyond those placed on a fit human body by gravity and centrifugal force. To a battered old gimp like me, it just looks impossibly fast and light. Some of these kids seem superhuman.
It’s not like I’m about to bust out a Mayan calendar or anything, but yeah. Is the human race –if not the planet itself– speeding up at an ever-accelerating rate? Food for thought while we sip our morning joe, grunt and crack our stiff necks, and hunker down in front of our computers for another physically strenuous day of farting around on the web.
“To wake, and not to know where, or who you are, not even to know what you are—whether a thing with legs and arms, or a brain in the hull of a great fish—that is a strange awakening. But after awhile, uncurling in the darkness, I began to uncover myself, and I was a woman.”
So begins Tanith Lee’s 1975 novel The Birthgrave, her first. I stumbled upon it some years ago, yellowing long out of print in a bargain bin.
I usually try to avoid revisiting authors too much on All Tomorrows, and regular readers will remember that I sang Lee’s praises for The Silver Metal Lover. But lately this column has been tracing the lesser known paths of fantasy and epic. No discussion of epic during sci-fi-fanta-whatever’s Deviant Age would be complete without delving into The Birthgrave.
It is a Sword and Sorcery epic, thunderously bloody and sensual in a way that would make Robert E. Howard pant. Yet it is also a deeper story of character and identity: a feminist work of a piece with the questions sweeping through its time.
For Lee’s (at first) nameless heroine awakes with nothing but questions, as the eruption of a volcano shakes her from a seemingly endless sleep with memories of hidden power, tragedy and a bottomless sense of guilt.
Driven to find answers, she runs into Übermensch types who try to turn her into the women featured on the covers of your average Sword and Sorcery tale— slave, figurehead goddess, concubine — clinging open-mouthed to the leg of some buffed-up conqueror.
But this is not their story: it is hers. As she survives (or buries) them all, as Lee sucks the reader into the elusive quest for power over one’s own life, she makes sure you’ll never see a dread sorceress the same way again.
A week ago, in a fighting rink hidden behind trees in the middle of San Francisco, I witnessed a grand melee. As dust rose and danced in the July light, a tournament of warriors fought each other for honor and glory. It was an epic battle of worthy and agile opponents: children, grown men and women, and elderly paladins alike. The game stretched on for several hours. Competitors were eliminated after rounds of bludgeoning each other with swords, their broken weapons littering the ground.
If you’re a little bit worried about casualties – don’t bother. The key element to this glorious battle was its weapon of choice – a cardboard tube. “Tube Fighting” is all the rage right now, even though the concept is only two years old, officially. While living in Seattle, a fellow named Robert Easley pondered ways to encourage friends and strangers to go out into the summer sunshine and do something playful, interactive and free. Eventually, he brainstormed the idea of hosting a melee with cardboard swords.
Since its inception, the game has grown into a large-scale network, with official chapters in cities like San Francisco and Sydney, as well as scores of unaffiliated gatherings taking place globally every summer. The rules of the game are simple –show up to the meeting spot and sign up on the list to be matched with a friend, or stranger, in battle. Regulation cardboard tubes are available for free if you are participating in one of the events organized by an official chapter. Otherwise, bring your own. The objective is to so thoroughly batter your opponent’s cardboard tube that it will break, thus disqualifying your competitor from advancing into the next round. Nobody actually hits each other – it’s their tubes that take all the beating.
Besides being a fun and cathartic form of stress release –drawing a large audience cheering from the sidelines– the tournament also encourages creativity, as many people make elaborate armor and helmets out of cardboard. Nothing is quite like the sight of a trio of Vikings in a cardboard ship being chased by a cardboard-headed robot, or a 5 year old girl pumping her fists in the air victoriously after winning yet another round of the tournament.
Tube Vikings Kristin, Layla and Jinny.
For official rules, check out tubeduel.com. If a League game isn’t officially scheduled in your home city, why not start your own? Just get some cardboard tubes, invite some friends and head out to a park or city square. (Make sure to double check regulations about large gatherings, before arranging a melee, of course). These photos from a week ago may prove inspirational.
More photos from Tanya’s outing after the jump. Not to be missed!
