Guestblogger Liz Ohanesian is a Los Angeles-based journalist who covers music, manga, art and more for LA Weekly.
Photo: Shannon Cottrell/LA Weekly from "An Evening with the Unfamiliar"
You've probably seen The League of S.T.E.A.M. on Boing Boing before, as both Cory and Xeni have posted their videos. In addition to videos, they do interactive live performances at parties across L.A.
The basic premise is that they hunt supernatural creatures with steampunk-inspired gear. If you see them at an event, they usually have a few display tables set up where the League will demonstrate how their props work. They'll also take partygoers on ghost hunts or chase after vampires throughout the venue. I've seen the League perform a handful of times over the past year and it's always a good time. They've appeared at nightclubs and Comic-Con parties as well as their own events. For those who will be at Dragon*Con this year, the League has a short in the convention's film festival.
Guestblogger Liz Ohanesian is a Los Angeles-based journalist who covers music, manga, art and more for LA Weekly.
Photo: Josh "CuriousJosh" Reiss/LA Weekly, Labyrinth of Jareth 2010
Labyrinth of Jareth is an annual two-day masquerade ball in Los Angeles. The theme revolves around faeries and goblins. Costumes, or formalwear and a mask, are required. I wrote about Shawn Strider, who organizes LOJ, for LA Weekly's LA People issue, and have blogged about the event on Style Council a few times (most recently, today).
LOJ has a massive cast and crew. All throughout the night, there is a DJ spinning on the dance floor, stage shows and interactive performances throughout the venue. There's a storyline that links everything together, but if you're going as an attendee you won't know exactly what's happening. If, however, you're following LOJ on Twitter throughout the event, you might get some clues.
This year I went to LOJ on the first night of the masquerade, called Goblin Clockworks, with photographer CuriousJosh.There were a lot of people who stood out at the party, but the stilt walker in the above photo—dressed in what looks like a steampunk giant robot costume—sticks in my mind.
Boing Boing reader Lord Baron Joseph C.R. Vourteque of the group SteamPunk Chicago shares photos of this spectacular home-modded gizmo with us, and says,
For the past month my friend Evad and I have been working on our (Extra-ordinary) Aural Fusionoscope & Amplification Machine, a glorified pseudo-Victorian way of saying "DJ rig."
Do pray pass the smelling salts, for I believe I may faint from sheer delight.
From the specs:
[T]his was originally a Numark CD-Mix 2 which I purchased from my good friend Orvtronixx. We built a wooden box around it and then got down to the lengthy task of expanding the audio ins & outs from the back of the box. After much soldering (and gnashing of teeth) we successfully installed a balanced XLR out, three RCA line-ins and a 1/4 in" microphone line in. We re-routed the main RCA unbalanced master out to a small speaker that is housed just below the vintage cast-iron Phonogram horn to act as the DJs personal monitoring system and re-routed the main mic out into a small microphone housed in the the smaller 1920s Ford car horn (which we repainted in black and copper). We then took a 1940s radiator, took it apart and housed the transformer in it. All in all the entire rig is an all in one system; though for large clubs we highly suggest running the XLR outs to the main sound.
[ View large, view very large.] I presume this is the map they used to guide their steam-powered dirigible airships to Luna back in the late Georgian/early Victorian eras.
I'm a couple of weeks late on this one, but I don't think these images have been appreciated enough around the 'net. The LA Weekly's Liz Ohanesian attended the Malediction Society's Steampunk Ball in Los Angeles recently, with photographer CuriousJosh, and met someone with the best steampunk gear I've seen in a long while.
"This is perhaps the best steampunk outfit that isn't a Star Wars cosplay," says Liz. Boy, do I agree.
Mark Becknauld says that his outfit for the event wasn't based on any existing characters. Instead, his intention was "keeping the actual punk portion in steampunk." Becknauld, who reserves his steampunk outfits for special events like San Diego Comic-Con, Bat's Day and theme parties, made his armband out of brass, leather and copper. It took about two months to complete.
Becknauld's goggles were crafted from solid brass. He designed the eyewear, which includes a brass piece over one eye that can open and shut, but had it made by a craftsperson in France. It took about six weeks for him to receive the final piece.
This trilobite-shaped DIY vehicle was created by "Oilpunk" enthusiasts Kyrsten Mate + Jon Sarriugarte, with help from fellow makers Amy Jenkins and Tansy Brooks.
A lovely new video for Modest Mouse, by Bent Image Lab's Nando Costa. The video incorporates stop motion, visual effects, and motion graphics techniques, and tells the tale of an artist who enters his personal sanctuary and is "presented with a hand-crafted drawing tool that assists him in materializing his mental impressions."
Through drawing circular patterns, the machine discharges an endless web of yarn that guides him through his visual representations of his memories. The story progresses to reveal that he is divided between two worlds, one of dull reality and the second of warped memories. In the process of finding a way out of his consciousness, he is trapped between the two competing spaces, which eventually inflict lethal damage, acting as metaphors to self-destruction.
Eileen Gunn sez, "Michael Swanwick and I have dragged steampunk kicking and screaming out of the Victorian era, slapped it about a bit and tossed it, still writhing, into an Art Deco cityscape. Tor.com editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden described our story, Zeppelin City as "a stew of Metropolis, King Kong, Brazil, and the Critique of the Gotha Programme" and has published it as part of Tor.com's Steampunk Month. Michael and I worked on this story for so long that-- well, suffice it to say, as Michael does, that when we started it, the technology was cutting edge. Is it really steampunk? You decide. The fabulous illustration for the story, by Benjamin Carre, totally captures the cityscape with autogyro and zeppelin."
Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan is the first volume in one of the most exciting new young adult series to come along since Uglies (or, for that matter, The Borribles). Leviathan is set in an alternate steampunk past, in which the powers of the world are divided into "Clankers" who favour huge, steam-powered walking war-machines; and "Darwinists," whose hybrid "beasties" can stand in for airships, steam-trains, war-ships, and subs (they even have a giant squid/octopus hybrid called the kraken that can seize whole warships and drag them to their watery graves).
Set on the eve of WWI, the story's two main characters are Aleks, the incognito orphan of the freshly assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand (fleeing his murderous uncle Emperor Franz Josef from Austria to the safe haven of Switzerland in a liberated battle-walker); and Deryn, a Scots girl who has dressed in boys' clothes to muster into Britain's Darwinist air-corps and finds herself a midshipsman on the Leviathan, a floating ecosystem a quarter-mile long, made up of whales, bats, bees, six-legged hydrogen-sniffing dogs, and all manner of beasties that make her the meanest thing in the sky.
Filled with gripping air and land-battles, political intrigue and danger, science and madness, Leviathan is part Island of Dr Moreau, part Patrick O'Brien. And to top it all off, the volume is lavishly illustrated with fabulous ink-drawings of the best scenes from the book, executed in high Victorian style by Keith Thompson. Thompson also produced contrafactual propaganda maps of alternate Europe for end-papers.
Westerfeld writes gripping, relentless coming-of-age novels that are equally enjoyable by boys and girls, adults and kids, and Leviathan is no exception. I'm looking forward to volume two -- and many more to come.
Leviathan is also available as an unabridged 8-hour audiobook on DRM-free CDs for a very reasonable $20. The reading is by Alan Cummings, who absolutely nails it, and the production -- bed music, editing -- is just superb, bringing the whole swashbuckling tale to life.
Drew sends us The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, "An occasional webcomic detailing the adventures of Babbage and Lovelace. Much of the dialogue and ideas taken from Babbage's autobiography and Lovelace's letters, thereby proving that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. The artist is an animator and it shows in the splendid life and expression of the artwork."
Cherie Priest's zombie steampunk mad-science dungeon crawl family adventure novel Boneshaker is everything you'd want in such a volume and much more.
Boneshaker is the story of the Wilkes/Blue family, a storied Seattle clan whose three generations unmade and remade the city through a series of scientific and martial adventures that are recounted with great relish and verve. First, there's Leviticus Blue, an arrogant mad scientist who developed a great tunnelling machine (part of a Russian-sponsored competition to improve Alaskan gold-mining) and undermined the city of Seattle, releasing the Blight, a poisonous gas that causes the dead to rise, and to hunger for the flesh of the living. Then, Maynard Wilkes, a prison guard in Seattle, committed an act of great mercy and bravery by releasing the prisoners in his care before they could be blighted, losing his life in the process, and becoming a hero to those left behind the walled-off city of Seattle, and a pariah to the settlers in the Outskirts beyond the wall. Then there's Briar Wilkes, the widow of Leviticus and the daughter of Maynard, who is scraping by in the Outskirts, trying to outrun her reputation but unable to, and unable to escape Seattle because of the great Civil War that is eating America with martial trains and dirigibles and great armies. Finally, there's Ezekiel Wilkes, the son of Briar and Leviticus, who has snuck back into the walled city, wearing an antiquated Blight-mask, to discover the truth about his father.
And that's where the action kicks off, with son and mother chasing one another through the Blighted city of Seattle, avoiding the zombies, befriending the Chinese laborers who run the great machines that suck clean air from beyond the wall into the sealed tunnels beneath the city, trying to escape the clutches of the evil Dr Minnericht, the self-appointed king of Seattle (who may or may not be Leviticus Blue), befriending rogue zeppelin pilots, armored giants, and steam-powered cyborg barmaids.
It's full of buckle and has swash to spare, and the characters are likable and the prose is fun. This is a hoot from start to finish, pure mad adventure.
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Cherie Priest's zombie steampunk mad-science dungeon crawl family adventure novel Boneshaker is everything you'd want in such a volume and much more.
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