With the evening of the Fantastic Contraption reception approaching this weekend, it’s time to introduce another participant of this wondrous exhibit.

Two pieces from the Dark Peculiar Toys series

Viktor Koen is a Greek-born artist specializing in digital illustration. He’s a professor at Parsons in New York and has his work regularly published in Time, Newsweek, Esquire, Money and Forbes among others.

Two pieces from Koen’s Damsels in Armor series

The body of Viktor’s work is huge, but my favorite of his series remains Transmigrations.

“Transmigrations, Cases of Corporate Reincarnation” is 24 portraits of high executive title holders that return to life as insects. It’s a series that combines theories and research on social insects, traditional and contemporary corporate structures, job descriptions and reincarnation scriptures (more specifically the controversial teachings of Pythagoras on transmigration of souls). They personify symbols and weapons of their trades in a number of levels, some instantly visible and other hidden, avoiding the obvious and the expected.

Beyond the Kafka aspect of this project I love the actual shapes these creatures take on in their transformed states. Imagine these human-sized insects buzzing among the rest of us, brandishing their tools and being very, very busy.

A few more human insects beyond 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.”
3. 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!

9. Russia! Magazine, Winter 2008

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.”

Like every other sentimental mooncalf who watched too many Merchant Ivory flicks as a young girl, I continue to allow the actor Julian Sands to occupy a very special place in my heart, despite everything. Never mind Warlock. Or Harem. Forget Boxing Helena and Biker Mice From Mars. Put these sundries from your minds, my dears. Recall only A Room With A View, and Sands’ convincingly heterosexual ravishing of Helena Bonham Carter in a field of poppies.* It remains, to this day, one of my top picks for Most Romantic Moment in Cinema (seconded only by this tender scene from Myra Breckenridge).

I also happen to be a HYOOOGE fan of the Italian horror director, Dario Argento, so when I heard that he and Sands worked together ten years ago on an adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, I was quite curious! Why had I never heard about this movie before? Why?! I promptly Netflixed it.

“I gotta be MEEEEEEE.” Julian Sands in Il Fantasma.

Why, oh, why, indeed. Yes, Sands and Argento work seamlessly together… in a So-Bad-it’s-a-Festering-Masterpiece kind of way, their combined efforts cradling the budding psychosexual genius of Asia Argento like two slices of moldy sourdough bread wrapped around a generous dollop of indeterminate ooze in a rat salad sandwich.

The movie is quite long, and something tells me few of you will appreciate the full length version as much as I did. Luckily, Genevieve, a brilliant columnist over at Defenestration Magazine, has provided us with this MST3K-worthy “abridged version”. I laughed, I cried, it was better than… that other Andrew Lloyd Weber musical. Enjoy:

Parts II and III under the cut.

Tesla’s got bedroom eyes.

Oh, my, yes! Happy belated birthday, dear Nikola. Your Coilhouse whelping day party continues with this booty-electrifying Musical Tesla Coil rendition of the Ghostbusters theme song, courtesy of Dr. Zeus. Nerd up.

Twink poses with The Haunted Corset, an Ebay find that terrified me so much I had to give it away.

If Nikola Tesla were alive today and he went to The Edison, he’d be pissed. “Why’d they name it after that guy?” And since it’s his birthday today (thanks, John Colby, for the reminder), we’re going to rename this incredible venue The Tesla for the next 24 hours in his honor.

So… looks like there’s some electric kissing party going on up in this joint! Happy Birthday, Nikola! The designer here is Mother of London, creating a sequel to the panoramic shoot that showcased an earlier collection – the first interactive, 360-degree fashion shoot ever created. Photographer Will Pearson came to LA from London to do this follow-up, and what you’re seeing here are preview stills – a taste of what’s to come, yet phenomenal images in their own right. When the panorama is complete, you’ll be able to navigate around The Tesla until your head spins.

Allan Amato (aka Venus Wept) was the art director for the shoot. Models above are Ulorin, right, and Evan, left. Hairstyling by Linh Nguyen, NoogieStyle and Jamie Gatlin. Makeup by Daven Mayeda. You can see more images from this heart-stopping shoot on Allan’s blog. There were many more models involved, including some very cute boys.

[More Images From This Shoot]

P.S. – Over at CoilSpace.com, we were able to salvage everyone’s images, even if you didn’t email. There are probably twice as many as there were before. Enjoy, and thanks again!

Left: Ballerina. Right: Apollo and Daphne.

She died before I was ever born,  but she’s been with me all my life. Nadya Rusheva was only 17 when she succumbed to a brain hemorrhage in Moscow. She left behind ten thousand drawings – a fragile, incomplete catalogue of her teenage fascinations with Greek myths, Pushkin’s life, Bulgakov, Byron’s poems, War and Peace, and other bits and pieces from history and literature.

L: Pushkin and Goncherova. R: The Transfiguration of Margarita

She once said that she lived the lives of the people she drew. Her drawings are simple, impulsive – some might even say they’re amateurish – but there’s something to them,  a spark, a keen insight, a visible love. For example, when she illustrated The Master and Margarita (which Zo and I blogged about), it turned out that her drawings of Margarita bore an eerie resemblance to Bulgakov’s wife – whom Rusheva had never met.

L: Saying good-bye to Fox. R: Self-portrait.

She’s virtually unknown in the West –  not even a real Wikipedia page – but in Russia, she’s beloved by generations for her combination of tragedy, whimsy, youth and the adult-like insight that sometimes appeared in her work. Young fans still visit her museum and leave behind poems and drawings. On her Livejournal fan community, people swap scans of her drawings and write dedications. And a new film about her called “Secret Signs” recently came out in Russia.

Rusheva was born in 1952 in Mongolia to a Bolshoi theater designer and a ballerina (both of whom, I believe, are still alive today), and died in 1969. Some say that she was exploited to make the Soviet education system look good. I found two translations of the same document that claim that, upon being discovered, Rusheva was forced to produce artwork at a grueling pace so that the regime could hold her up as a paragon of Communist artistic training. One translation outright states that she was worked to death, but other (and better translation) doesn’t imply this. I’d never heard this before, even though I knew her work since childhood, thanks to my parents’ immense book collection. I could see it being true – despite the irony that Master and Margarita, one of her favorite books to illustrate, was banned when she drew it.

After the jump, my favorite Rusheva drawings (there’s lots!) and more.

While it’s my sincere hope that the wondrous Coilhouse Gushfest: Getting to Know You continues unabated, I can’t keep sitting on my hands with this one. Grace Jones has just released a new video for “Corporate Cannibal”, the first single off her forthcoming album, Hurricane (which features collaboration with Tricky, Brian Eno, and others). May Day is more heart-stoppingly badass than ever before:

(Via MusicSlut and Ectomo.)

Is she not fierce?! Like some creepy UrSkek, come to inform us of the Great Conjunction. And the lyrics… checkit, they’re all Free and Accepted n’ shiz:

Employer of the year
Grandmaster of fear
My blood flows satanical
Mechanical, masonical
And chemical… habitual

Jones performing at Meltdown in London last month.

Rawr. As previously mentioned on CH, Ms. Jones is my choice for It Girl of the 80s. Hell, let’s make her It Girl for ’08, as well. She’s sixty, she’s sexy, she’s scary as hell, and we should all bow before her fabulousness.

Wow.

Just, wow.

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 news is a few days old at this point, but I feel compelled to ruminate for a moment on the following: Ian Curtis, the late singer of Joy Division, has been robbed. The tombstone decorating his final resting place, inscribed with “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, was taken from the grave on July 3 – just a few days ago. The obelisk had graced the grounds of a Macclesfield cemetery for over 28 years.

Photo by BogartCat on flickr

After the initial shock comes confusion. I find myself tormented, waking in the night and screeching a question to the blackened skies: why? With no one to answer, I am forced to speculate. What can be done with a tombstone, one that, as the drummer pleads, can’t be sold on eBay? Is there a black market for stolen tombstones? If so, what would the price be for such a rare artifact?

Perhaps the thieves wanted the stone for their garden? It could be fashioned into a bench near a reflecting pool, for late night contemplation. It is also possible to build the tombstone into a wall of a house, use it as a centerpiece at a banquet or a slightly morbid headboard that keeps nagging lovers in check. One could even use the tombstone to anchor their boat or stop pets from entering certain rooms.

Come to think of it, the possibilities are endless here – I can really see the appeal of dredging up a priceless memento for personal use now that I examine its true potential. What do you suppose has been done with the Ian Curtis tombstone? We’d love to hear your ideas. And if you’re reading this, thief, I hope you’re as imaginative as us. Or on your way to return the stone, which would make you a lot less of a scumbag.