Behold. Fodder from the most über Tumblr you’ll see all day:
Via Heather Thompson. HAIL.
Tracy Widdess is currently accepting custom orders for her sublime horror and sci-fi inspired knitwear, but queue up quick! Undoubtedly, she’s about to be inundated with weirdos clients.
More images after the jump.
Coilhouse Issue 02 alum Kate O’Brien just finished a Tom Banwell-and-Bioshock-inspired shoot, and a few dreamy images have trickled out into her Flickr stream over the past 24 hours.
Model: Isabelle, photo/styling/editing :Kate O’Brien
I remember her uploading a bunch of in-progress photos of the helmet featured in these shots, and me being verrry curious about the forthcoming images. Kate pours a massive amount of time, money, and energy into building her own props and sets, often documenting the process in her blog. You can read all about this gold leather helmet here.
Apologies for the black bars, but we’ve had a few complaints about posting teh n00dz on the front page before, so please click the jump for bar-free pretties.
Let’s kick off the week with a little extra vitamin C:
(Thanks for reminding me, Dusty!)
All hail the caterwauling Carmen Orange. Venerated demigod of public broadcasting, mesmeric and disturbing in equal measure, she haunts the collective memory of multiple generations of Sesame Street-watching children. According to a couple of unconfirmed reports online, she was animated by Jim Henson himself.
You’ve already seen “Kittens Inspired by Kittens“, right?
NO?! YOU HAVEN’T LIVED. Just kidding. But still, watch that first. Then, watch this:
\m/
In memory of Satoshi Kon, The FAM presents Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories (1995), specifically the first episode of three entitled Metallic Rose, directed by Koji Morimoto and written by the late Mr. Kon. Metallic Rose tells the story of a space-faring salvage team who respond to a distress signal (in the form of a recording of Puccinni’s opera Madame Butterfly) emanating from a giant space station in a particularly dangerous area of the galaxy known as Area RZ-3005 or Sargasso. The ship’s two engineers, Heintz and Miguel, are deployed to investigate. Inside they find an opulent, rococo interior and a woman claiming to be an opera singer named Eva Friedal.
The true nature of Eva is something I won’t spoil, but it is safe to say that she is not exactly who she appears to be. Magnetic Rose then, in sci-fi shorthand, is a mash-up of the used, dingy, space-trucker aesthetics of Alien and the psychological mindfuckery of Solaris; and it succeeds admirably. And while it was based on a story by Otomo, it contains many of the themes that would define Kon’s work: the interest in the protagonist’s mental state and subjective reality. Two years later he would go on to write and direct his first feature film, Perfect Blue, and a brilliant career; but the seeds were sown here in the span of 40 minutes. If only that career could have lasted a little longer.
Baths is, apparently, one man: Will Wiesenfeld, whose debut album Cerulean was released on June 22nd of this year. That may or may not be important to you. Above is the video for the single “Lovely Bloodflow” and while I’m not sure I’m a fan of the song, the video is decidedly beautiful — following a mortally wounded samurai through a lush forest. Masked, otherworldly beings and the visions of a dying man abound.
via Pitchfork
An Armenian woman in national costume poses for Prokudin-Gorskii on a hillside near Artvin (in present day Turkey), look circa 1910.
This series of exquisitely beautiful images from southern and central Russia is already all over the web via the Boston Globe, no rx but Coilhouse has to post a heads up in case anybody missed them. Absolutely stunning. Boston.com editor-in-chief, buy viagra Alan Taylor, says:
“With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images.”
A man and woman pose in Dagestan, ca. 1910.
“The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time – when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948.”
The full gallery is viewable here, high res. Previously on Coilhouse:
Isfandiyar Jurji Bahadur, Khan of the Russian protectorate of Khorezm (Khiva, now a part of modern Uzbekistan), full-length portrait, seated outdoors, ca. 1910.
Motoring
In a new series titled Machine Punk, artist Laurie Lipton (previously on Coilhouse, with a cameo appearance by Caryn Drexl) skillfully renders a series of cumbersome, beautifully sprawling machines whose tangled wires and polluted textures conspire to create a sense of unease. Lipton states that the series was inspired by steampunk, but notes that the machines in her images run on “madness and electricity” rather than steam. “I was vacuuming one day, and noticed the amount of plugs and cables on the floor… a veritable wasp’s nest of wires and sockets connecting a hoard of gadgets and doo-dads intertwining around the house and my life. I was trapped like a fly in an electrical web. What had happened? Were these things making my life easier or more complex?” The resulting series features contraptions ranging from rickety flying machines to torturous exercise equipment, and critiques – among other things – CCTV surveillance, a broken recycling system, and the empty thought-calories of spending too much time online. Most of the images in this series are best enjoyed at a larger size, so click here to see them all.
Machine Punk will be on display at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles from November 5 – 28th in Gallery 1, side-by-side with artist and Coilhouse collaborator Jessica Joslin in Gallery 2. Also, if you’re a fan of Laurie Lipton’s ghostly older work, it’s worth mentioning that she recently collaborated with clothing company AllSaints to produce a line of t-shirts featuring the wraiths and skeletons of her previous work, and that some of these shirts are now on sale. [Many thanks to the awesome Coilhouse reader who sent this in – I received your submission a while ago, but can’t find it now to credit you! Was it via Twitter?]
The Fates
Very sad news out of Japan yesterday as it was confirmed that visionary director Satoshi Kon had indeed passed away, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 46.
Kon began his career as a manga artist, working with Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo. He wrote a section of Otomo’s anthology film Memories entitled “Magnetic Rose” and in 1997 he made his directorial debut with Perfect Blue. This was followed by Millennium Actress in 2001, Tokyo Godfathers in 2003, the television show Paranoia Agent in 2004 (featured previously on Coilhouse), and finally Paprika in 2006. At the time of his death he was working on the film The Dream Machine which may be released posthumously.
One satisfied customer.
Just a courtesy notice for those of you still seeking out Coilhouse Issue 05, which sold out on our site a while ago: you can still find Issue 05 in stores nationwide. Click here for a list of all the stores that carry Issue 05. We suggest calling the stores before you go over there, just to confirm that the issues are still in stock. Unfortunately, we don’t have an updated database of store inventory, just the list of stores we know received copies of Issue 05. If there are any other stores you think should carry Coilhouse, please let us know. We love hearing about places like Criminal Records in Atlanta and Powell’s in Portland… perfect candidates for Coilhouse! If you’re a bookshop interested in selling Issue 05, you can go through your wholesaler to get it. If you deal with someone like Ubiquity, Ingram, RCS or Last Gasp, they will hook you up. Thank you again for your support!
There are also two places where you can buy it online. For those of you living in Australia or New Zealand, you can still mail-order Issue 05 from our esteemed friends at Wildilocks. In the States, we recently learned that Last Gasp Books is offering Issue 05 for sale online. Atomic Books also had it, but it’s now sold out. It’s costs $12.99 at Last Gasp (as opposed to $15, which is how much it cost on our site), and it’s less expensive there because the copies Last Gasp has are unsigned and don’t contain the exclusive Dorian Grey art postcards which were included with the version of Issue 05 you could get directly from us. We hope to have something special for those who order directly from us for every issue.
If there are any other shops you know of that carry Issue 05, let us know! Thank you again for your support.