Long white clouds in the sky above the southernmost tip of the North Island. Photo by Mer.

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Greetings, comrades, from the Motu-Kairangi valley of Aotearoa. New Zealand’s north island is spectacularly sun-drenched at the moment– an unseasonably serene autumnal week, by Land o’ Long White Cloud standards.

Perfect timing, too, ‘cos Nadya‘s here! Squee! We’ve been talkin’ some SRZ COILBIZ (“Brainstorrrrm! Maaaaagic!”) and have decided to give ourselves a few days off from blogging and cat-herding to take a much-needed Coil-free road trip together. Coilhouse.net will probably be a bit sleepy for the next leetle beet. Consider this post our GONE FISHIN’ sign.

Speaking of fish, check out this jaw-dropping photograph of an immaculately preserved, exquisitely beautiful/fantastical Mola Mola skeleton:

A specimen housed in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Austria. (Via Paul Komoda.)

Oh, our marvelous world. It is full of such fantastical things, both natural and unnatural. We hope you’re all reveling in the weirdness as much as we are right now!

Love,

Mer & Nadya

“Soon…” Photo by Matthew Borgatti.

A frozen rainbow carousel, headless dinosaurs and lonely swan-shaped boats: this can only be Spreepark, an abandoned amusement park in Southeast Berlin. Conceived as a Socialist project to celebrate 20 years of GDR, Spreepark opened its doors in 1969, and shut down in 2001.  If you saw the film Hanna, images of a girl assassin running through this decaying fairyland park may spring to mind. Recently, Matthew Borgatti (previously on Coilhouse here and here) grabbed his camera and went exploring: he’s just published a beautiful set of photos showing both Spreepark’s ruins and signs of life, in tandem with a witty, comprehensive guide to urban spelunking. Spreepark’s story, writes Matthew, is one of “broken dreams, drug smuggling, and illegal things done with kiddie park rides in the dead of night.” You can’t tell the story of Spreepark without mentioning the story of Norbert Witte, as told by journalist Julia Jüttner.

An affluent funfair operator known as the “King of Carousels” to his friends, Witte walked into trouble when he decided to invest in Spreepark after the reunification of Germany. The son of a carnival performer and grandson of Otto Witte, an acrobat/swindler who once managed to be crowned as the King of Albania, Norbert Witte built his own carnival empire from humble beginnings. Together with his young bride Pia, the daughter of a bumper-car operator, he purchased one roller coaster (“The Catapult”) and began to tour with it, amassing eight rides over the course of two decades.

Photo by Matthew Borgatti.

At first, Spreepark seemed like a lucrative investment for Witte. But after the government eliminated 3,000 parking spaces near the park, people stopped coming and the park went out of business. Witte relocated his family to Lima, Peru, with the hope of bringing over Spreepark’s rides and establishing a new park called Lunapark. However, Peruvian customs officials refused to release all the parts of the rides, and the family quickly slid into poverty. Ultimately, Witte was caught smuggling 76 pounds of cocaine (worth $14 million) back to Germany in the mast of the “Flying Carpet” carousel. Norbert Witte received a lenient 6-year sentence in Germany, but his 21-year-old son, stuck back in Peru, received a jail term of 20 years. In a heartbreaking interview with Spiegel Online, Pia Witte elaborates further.

Unlike the story of Spreepark’s ruin, Matthew’s photos aren’t all that tragic. In fact, unlike most typical, ruin porn-tastic shots of abandoned theme parks around the world, his photos reveal the park’s vibrant, frenetic second life. Vinyl stickers depicting the step-by-step construction of an origami swan adorn a swan boat’s plastic neck. One of the dinosaurs still standing dons glam-rock makeup crafted from neon adhesive tape. A layer of graffiti art slowly encroaches upon the abandoned rides, often giving them a strangely modern look. Perhaps it’s because the German authorities seem pretty lenient, occasionally allowing fashion shoots, filming, and festivities such as “concerts, art installations, performances and a burning man” to take place in the park.

As hinted in Matthew’s photos, the future is bright for Spreepark: this summer, a new project called Kulturpark will set up a three-week artist residency camp producing public art inside Spreepark’s walls. Artworks will include “ecological grafitti, sustainable bicycles, a ping pong competition, learning events, radio station, [and] storytelling projects.” The public opening will be June 28 – July 1st.

Photo by Matthew Borgatti.

Mignon, 2012 by Jessica Joslin

Jessica Joslin is in Scottsdale, Arizona right now, installing and celebrating a big solo show at the wonderful Lisa Sette Gallery: “Birds chirping, cacti and magnolia trees all around… sipping coffee and feeling excited about my opening tonight, and about the many other shows soon to come!” By all means, if you’re in the neighborhood, go say hi! Jessica’s creatures are even more enchanting in person.

On a related note: many of our LA readers will be excited to know that there’s another Twin Peaks art show happening (including this lovely new creature, named Waldo, by Jessica) later in the month; this year it’s Fire Walk With Me-themed. The opening is April 21st.

Above you’ll find the official video, directed by David Lynch, for the title track of his new album Crazy Clown Time. It is officially a thing that exists. In it, Lynch narrates a series of Lynchian events at a Lynchian backyard barbecue as they transpire on screen in a manner sort of like singing but not really. It’s as if a film student set to work to reconstruct a David Lynch movie as related to them by someone who had had a few too many drinks. It may be the best David Lynch parody ever made.

(NSFW, unsurprisingly.)

Via poetv

Robotic Lion & Warrior illustration by Greg Broadmore for Jess Nevins’ article in Issue 05.

Those of you who own Coilhouse Magazine Issues 03 and 05 will remember Jess Nevins’ pieces on Russian and Chinese pulp. You may have also seen Jess’ Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, his many comic book annotations, or his writing on IO9. As a librarian and author, Jess has an uncanny skill for unearthing rare gems from the realms of pulp and sci-fi, such as the world’s first lesbian science fiction novel (published in 1906), the first cyborg horror story (“The Steam Arm,” 1834), and steampunk poetry from 1867. Jess Nevins can give you the entire history of mad scientists in the industrial age, provide a thorough overview of genderbending in pulps, and hypothesize whether Cthulhu appears on a 300-year-old gravestone. In short, Jess Nevins is a kind of biblio-archaeologist, discovering and preserving beautiful relics from fictional ages past.

His latest endeavor focuses on superheroes. Specifically, superheroes from comics’ Golden Age, which lasted from 1935 to 1949. The project is called The Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes, and Jess is currently raising funds on Kickstarter to produce a book and a website (which will include a free download of the book’s manuscript) to catalogue 2000+ superheroes: everything from “floating eyeballs and centaurs” to “robot brains and super rabbits.” Jess needs to travel to Michigan State University in East Lansing to study up on all of these wondrous things, and estimates that it will take two weeks to get the research done. The money raised by Kickstart will go towards subsidizing Jess’ travel and building the site. The project may have hit its modest funding goal, but believe us, the bare minimum is never really enough. Plus, Kickstarter projects that raise substantially more than the required amount often have a way of evolving and deepening into even bigger, more beautiful work (for instance, Molly Crabapple’s Week in Hell or R. Stevens’ Diesel Sweeties e-book).

In celebration of Jess’ ambitious new project, we are releasing a full, free PDF of his article from Issue 05, titled “Sherlock Holmes vs. The Fox Woman: A Brief Tour of Chinese Pulp”. Lushly-illustrated by Greg Broadmore and Paul Tobin, the article provides a sweeping overview of Chinese Pulp from, from moon colonies to pirate queens. Enjoy!

Jim Lo Scalzo’s beautiful short documentary on the Salton Sea:

Deep in the desert of southern California sits one of the worst environmental sites in America—a former tourist destination that has turned into a toxic soup: the Salton Sea.

The sea was born by accident 100 years ago, when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal; for the next two years the entire volume of the river flowed into the Salton Sink, one of the lowest places on Earth. The new lake became a major tourist attraction, with resort towns springing up along its shores. Yet with no outflow, and with agricultural runoff serving as its only inflow, the sea’s waters grew increasingly toxic. Farm chemicals and ever-increasing salinity caused massive fish and bird die-offs. Use of the sea for recreational activities plummeted, and by the 1980s its tourist towns were all but abandoned.

The skeletons of these structures are still there; ghost towns encrusted in salt. California officials acknowledge that if billions of dollars are not spent to save it, the sea could shrink another 60 percent in the next 20 years, exposing soil contaminated with arsenic and other cancerous chemicals to strong winds. Should that dust become airborne, it would blow across much of southern California, creating an environmental calamity.

Much of the footage is filmed in and around The Salton Riviera, a former resort built by entrepreneur M. Penn Phillips, old footage of which Scalzo expertly contrasts with images of the now dilapidated buildings and piles of dead fish. His eye for composition is the real star here, though, and he captures some stunningly haunting images of this increasingly barren wasteland.

Via The Fox Is Black

The ghostly garment resembles magically symmetrical wisps of smoke curling around the model. Below, diagnosis zip ties are used to create a striking crown of thorns.

These images are from a series called “LastBreathe” by fashion designer Robert Wun. A recent graduate of the University of the Arts in London, capsule Wun creates textured, sale airy garments such as the ones pictured here. This series was photographed by Bobby Sham, and the model is Lauren H.

[via JUST_MONK3Y]

This beautiful, scary TED talk by Kevin Slavin discusses the power of phantom, unfathomable algorithms to alter human behavior and physically reshape the world that we live in.

Cue up the Pi soundtrack, sit back, and enjoy. [via raindrift]

Thank you, kid-named-Jav-dressed-like-Gandalf-and-doin’-the-mongo-longboard-thing-for-the-sake-of-a-very-silly-joke. Thank you.

Author Harry Crews. The tattoo is an excerpt from E. E. Cummings’ poem “Buffalo Bill”. (“How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mister Death?”)

A great and grizzled powerhouse of American fiction has left us. He was 76 years old. A wild Southern gent with a penchant for heavy drinkin’, Harry Crews wrote like he lived: hard, bloody, sharp, gritty. His ex-wife, Sally Ellis Crews –with whom he remained great friends after they divorced for a second time in 1964– informed the AP on Thursday that Crews had long suffered from neuropathy: “He had been very ill. In a way it was kind of a blessing. He was in a lot of pain.”

Crews wrote beautifully about pain. Speaking about his own books: “The smell of blood is on them […] the sense of mortality is a little too strong.” That may very well be true. But like blood, they are also as rich and vital as all get-out. If you haven’t experienced his world before, but appreciate the output of writers like Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner or Bukowski, you will likely find loads of gruff and stalwart reassurance in the work of Harry Crews.

A forthcoming memoir by Crews is slated to be published in the near future. Long before his passing, there’d been a lot of talk of reissuing his full bibliography in digital editions and beyond. Here’s hoping.

Visit HarryCrews.org, which features many essays, interviews and portraits. Some sagacious quotes from the hellion below.

Harry Crews. Photo by Oscar Sosa for The New York Times.

“I never wanted to be well-rounded. I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.”

“If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.”

“Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. … It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.”

“There is something beautiful about scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.”

— Harry Crews