STEAMPUNK

STEAMPUNK

A Retro Design Movement That's All About the Future

Whether you love it or hate it, it's here to be mainstream-ed. The New York Times profiled it last weekend.

Steampunk style clothes and designers have been around for a long time as have authors, performance artists, and musicians (DeVotchKa, Rasputina, Abney Park) around the world. The local Burlesque reviews and caberet shows are appearing in most every town across the country. Some people are over it and think it's silly but I like the return to this bygone era and admire the beauty and creativity.

Kat Bret has a nice photo portfolio and you can see how she pulls from different periods so skillfully. She really captures the clothing and style of that dark, mad max melancholy, steampunk, whateverthefuckyouwannacallit genre. You're welcome. NSFW

"The term "steampunk" is a play on cyberpunk, a type of near-future science fiction where rebellious hackers use handmade tech to wage virtual warfare with corporations and governments. Steampunk was a term used almost jokingly as a name for science fiction that was set in the Victorian era as opposed to the virtual future, but which still featured rebellious protagonists utilizing strange technology. In steampunk, the punk is not a computer hacker, but a mechanical one. I do believe the pendulum has swung."



Abney Park

for more on Steampunk:
Workshop | PaperMag | Wired | Jake von Slatt | Jeff Vandermeer | Datamancer | Treehouse | Flickr | More Flickr | Maker Faire

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W E B T R A I L

W E B T R A I L

Prada Rehab Rock - Damien Hirst and his ex-junkie friend Antony Genn team up to rock out Fashion Week (soberly). link

Stripes, Harlequin, Rubber, Vinyl are themes of Designer Gareth Pugh. His creations are more akin to fetishwear than fashion, but that's a bad thing, why? The old guard aren't sure whether to salute him or shoot him. Fall/Winter 2007 collection hereand Spring 2007 here.

Big City Orchestrae will be heading to Europe in September for their first tour overseas in six years! Great news, Ninah Pixie! link

Dave Nitsche - Conceptual Photography link

This graying hippie makes the nightly, winding climb 18 feet to her cozy bedroom. She wakes to roosters' crows and the scents of dewy soil. Over breakfast, her view is a jungle of towering trees, no hint of hustle and bustle.

Shawnee Chasser lives in a treehouse above a secret garden in the middle of Miami. For 15 years, she has lived atop the 1.5-acre nirvana of green trees and farm animals behind a row of houses 10 minutes from downtown. And she advertises on Craigslist and rents out rooms for $380 a month. Really. link

Fuck the DNA - The evolution continues with the return of Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV link

Revenge of the Weirdos? The decidedly nonconformist Animal Collective takes New York. link

The intelligent want self-control; children want candy. --Mevlana Rumi (1207 - 1273)

***UPDATE: Wow! I had the title (W E B TR A I L) set on font 150 instead of 150%; hope I didn't make anyone go blind.

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The Life Of Roderick Romero

Roderick Romero has a boyish face and a sideways grin. He wears his hair in reddish-brown braids that fall to his waist (it was last cut in 1990, when he took a Swiss army knife to it in the middle of a concert he was performing with his band, Sky Cries Mary.) His strong forearms are covered in tattoos of voodoo and Santeria symbols and illustrations from the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore's firefly poems. While he has been many thing -- rock star, yogi, premed student, aspiring tennis pro -- his current incarnation may be the most unlikely: His is a tree house designer, and his growing list of clients includes Sting, Donna Karan, Val Kilmer, and Julianne Moore.

This new career began in 1998, when a friend asked him to contribute an art piece to an outdoor exhibition she was curating in Bald Hills, Washington. "I told her I would build this big nest," Romero says, "and you could sleep in it." He had no idea he would tap into a national fascination with tree houses.

For the next nine months, Romero was firmly steeped in the world of his nest. Like a bird, ne gathered fallen twigs and reeds and vines from nearby trees and then had to figure out how to build something structurally sound, sustained at 30 feet off the ground. "It was coming straight out of the ether," he says. "I had no idea what I was doing. It was purely conceptual, but it had to be engineered well. It had to be safe." The result was a creation that looks sort of like a bearded bungalow perched among the branches of a giant leaf maple.

When his brother saw the nest, he requested one, so Romero built him the Eagle House, a pine and cedar trapezoid that straddles four trees in the Cascade Mountains. A few months later, Romero was visiting Sting and his wife, Trudy, at their home in Tuscany (Romero knows them through the yoga world). He told them about his first two tree houses, at which point Trudie asked, "Why don't you build us a tree house?" And so came tree house No.3.

For more information on the treehouses, Click Here.

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