A Tree Filled with Angels: The Visionary Worlds of Jim Woodring and William Blake

Please welcome the second guest post by artist and writer Eden Gallanter! Eden previously brought you an illustrated post on dancing, physics and Mannerstist painting titled The Tango, the Quark, and the Allegory of Love. In this post, Eden discusses the ways in which hallucinations have influenced the work of Jim Woodring and William Blake. Enjoy! – Nadya


Jim Woodring, “Divornum – or Life After Man”

Although Jim Woodring is a contemporary American cartoonist, fine artist, and writer with a strong cult following, and William Blake was a 19th Century English poet and painter who lived most of his life in poverty and obscurity, these two men shared a common source of artistic inspiration: both experienced visual hallucinations for the majority of their lives.


William Blake, Jacob’s Ladder

These visions (or apparitions) are clearly at the heart of both artists’ work, serving as gateways into another world that contains deep human truth and startling strangenesses. One account of Blake’s earliest visions, which remained full of the Christian iconography of 19th century England, describes the four-year-old Blake screaming for his parents upon seeing the face of God at the window.  A few years later, he saw a “tree filled with angels,” and was saved from a thrashing by his father for telling a lie by the sympathetic intervention of his mother.  Most of Blake’s hallucinations depicted the most beautiful and spiritual of the Christian themes.  He also could see and speak to deceased friends, and saw angelic figures and other celestial beings mingled among the everyday ladies and gentlemen of England.


William Blake, Ghost of a Flea

Blake was considered to be a gentle madman by his contemporaries, and although some prominent writers regarded him with interest, his work was largely unrecognized during his lifetime.  Upon encouragement by his friends, he painted some of the apparitions he saw, most famously his Ghost of a Flea.  Blake’s lovely otherworldly visions, interpreted by him as divine inspiration, gave a confident shape to many socially deviant beliefs and practices.  Blake had many ideas about religion that were frankly considered heretical (most notably his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which described a unified vision of the cosmos, where both satanic and angelic realms were a vitally important part of a holy and just world).  Due to numerous references to the sanctity of romantic love and the necessity of its liberation from oppressive conventions such as duty and possession, Blake has been claimed as one of the forerunners of the Free Love movement in the 19th Century.  His poetry is full of rejections of the Christian virtue of chastity, and his writing advocated the removal of bans on homosexuality, prostitution, adultery, and birth control.  Blake is said to have lived a happy, quiet life: poor, obscure, and content simply in expressing his visions in his poetry and painting.

For Those of You About to Burn, Grimes Salutes You

Excited about driving to the playa to destroy yet another pair of Demonia platforms? This video may be for you.

In the newly-released, self-directed video for her song “Genesis”, Grimes dons a Daenerys Targaryen-meets-Sailor Moon getup, rides through the desert, wields a fiery sword, and cuddles with an albino python. However, it’s rapper Brooke Candy, looking very cybergoth 2002, who steals the show. All that’s missing from this video is The Vengabus.

[via Marina Galperina, who adds, “I can’t even tell if this is #PLUR.”)

See also:

Interactive Skinfashion by Local Androids


“Like living organisms; a breathing artificial skin garment with pulsing veins (air is pumping through the veins to simulate a pulse), ambulance the pulse increases when you approach and the neckpiece deflates on touch as sign of trust.”

Designer duo Local Androids consists of Cor and Leonie Baauw. Their work is a stunning techno-chthonian amalgam of 2D and 3D, capsule traditional and digital imagery. With assistance from engineers Ralf Jacobs, unhealthy Daniel Schatzmayr, and Berend-Jan van Dijkhey, Local Androids created this “interactive skinfashion”  for the 2012 Technosensual Expo, which will be running until September 2 in Vienna.

Via E. Stephen of S.N.A.F.U., who says “Long Live the New Flesh!”

Pussy Riot Art and Protest


Free Pussy Riot! #freepussyriot from Peaches on Vimeo.

Well, it happened. The Pussy Riot verdict has been announced. The girls have each been sentenced to two years in prison for performing their one-minute “punk prayer” in the Christ The Savior Cathedral to protest Russia’s fusion of church and state. “Even though we are behind bars, we are freer than those people,” said Pussy Riot band member  Nadezhda Tolokonnikova from her glass cage on the last day of the trial. “We can say what we want, while they can only say what political censorship allows.”

Protests are happening around the world today. Above, a protest video by Peaches that was released three days ago. The video features performers who support Pussy Riot from around the world, including Kate Nash, The Knife, Lykke Li, Miike Snow, Peter Bjorn and John, Light Asylum, Deichkind, The Hives, Dave Catching(EODM), Screamclub, J.D. Samson, Marshall Crenshaw, Wayne Kramer, Bonaparte, Margaret Cho, Dave Hill, Nick Zinner, Jake Shears, Bun E Carlos, Narcissister, Sheila Chipperfield, Bronson Hankins, John Renaud, Fya Hopelezz, Margaret Saadi Kramer, Miss Guy, Sir Honey Davenport, Saskia Hann, Empress Stah, and Vice Cooler.

Below, a free poster by Molly Crabapple. Download the hi-res here. Print, post, mashup, and share. (Or buy a limited-edition 17″ x 22″ print to support their legal fund from Molly.) FREE PUSSY RIOT!

Gundam Style.

Paging Ross Rosenberg. Ross Rosenberg, sovaldi please report for doody.

, sovaldi sale

and 0,40,0″>
(Via Ariana, of course.)

Related tidbit, courtesy of Kittydoom:

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(????)? Oppan Gangnam Style

?(???)? Eeeeyyyy sexy laaaaaadyyyy

The Incredibly True Adventures of Gerda Wegener and Lili Elbe


Gerda Wegener, Cuckoo, 1920. Note the fallen black mask on the floor: it repeats in many of Gerda’s erotic paintings.

This is the true story of turn-of-the-century lesbian romance, erotic Deco illustrations rife with harlequins and crinolines, the world’s first male-to-female sex reassignment surgery, and the 1950s pulp novel that brought it all to light.

The story begins one hundred years ago. In 1912, artist couple Gerda and Einar Wegener arrived in Paris, hoping for greater prosperity and freedom than their conservative hometown of Copengahen would allow. They checked into the Hôtel d’Alsace, where – they were shocked to learn – they had been placed into the very same room where Oscar Wilde had once died twelve years earlier. The couple spent the next few days reading Wilde’s works out loud to each other. The forbidden sexuality, transformation, beauty and tragedy in Wilde’s work was reflected in the couple’s following years together.


Gerda, left. Lili, right.

In Paris, Gerda quickly became well-known for her sensual, free-spirited illustrations. Her work often featured a mysterious beauty with a stylish short bob, full lips, and beguiling brown eyes. In 1913, the public was shocked to learn the identity of the mystery model: Gerda’s husband, Einar. Einar was transitioning to living life openly as woman named Lili Elbe.

Anne Geddes: Beneath the Diaper

As has been previously discussed (albeit briefly) on Coilhouse, many of us are morbidly fascinated by the oeuvre of Anne Geddes, and quietly suspect she may be the devil incarnate.

Apparently, we are not alone:

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’s better than Kinkade.

[via Jezebel]

Blingtastic Sexbot Restaurant Opens in Japan

Robot Restaurant. Or, as jwz calls it, “Chuck E. Cheese: Judgement Day Version”.

The new restaurant (official site) is located in Shinjuku’s Kabukich? district, a neon-lit pleasure paradise also known as “Sleepless City” and renowned for its host/hostess bars, love hotels and nightclubs.

The restaurant is said to have cost 10 billion yen (or $130 million dollars). It features LED-encrusted tanks, cabaret girls, and gigantic fembots that can be steered with joysticks (one video also appears to show them being controlled via motion sensor.)

Admission to the restaurant costs 3000 yen (or $38). The fee covers seating, a simple meal, and an hour-long performance featuring Japanese taiko drums, a vinyl-clad marching band, a motorcycle performance, tanks and a B-52. More images can be found at Crunchyroll, Japan News 24, and Nippon News.

Now if we could get Freeform Delusion to go in there and circuit-bend a few things, this place would actually be perfect.

More Than A Fashion Designer: Aoi Kotsuhiroi

Aoi Kotsuhiroi: creator of the The Official Shoes of Tumblr.  The France-based designer’s dark, textured art-fashion pieces have certainly made the rounds, but did you know that Kotsuhiroi is also the photographer, poet and model behind these creations?

Kotsuhiroi’s website feels like a fleeting vision. Page after page of large-scale images reveal a mysterious world full of fetish objects, in both senses of the word. In a series of fragile, dreamlike images reminiscent of Sarah Moon, Kotsuhiroi’s adornments appear to radiate profound magical power, while making your fetish platform boot look like a pair of flip-flops by comparison.

In addition to fashion and photography, Kotsuhiroi has the sensibility of a writer. Rather than releasing her work in collections, such as”AW12,” she releases them as chapters of a book on her site, which is rife with poetry. On Twitter, she describes herself as a novelist. Follow her to see what she does next!

Fitness Ace Power, Gangnam Style

Yesterday, GreatDismal tweeted a link to this stupefying Fitness Ace Power infomercial from South Korea. And Ross blogged about the music video for PSY’s mega-viral Kpop song, “Gangnam Style“. (A short time later, Ross experienced some sort of drug-induced psychotic break, and has since been in self-imposed latex bubble isolation in an undisclosed subterranean cell block several miles below the earth’s crust. But that’s not particularly relevant to this post.)

Today, courtesy of Sarah Deaton (because Ariana asked for it), here are two great tastes of Daehanminguk that taste great together. Enjoy!