Imagine the exuberance and pageantry of a Renaissance fair but add about 400 years and you’ve got Indie Market’s third annual Steampunk Day and Fashion Show. Held on Sunday in Brooklyn, the gathering of steampunk enthusiasts, some calling themselves COS-players and others professional fashion designers, brought out a healthy phalanx of photographers and shoppers looking to pick up the hippest Victorian-era accessories (jewelry, fancy hats, and so forth) for their own, often home-made, ensembles.
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Today at Flavorpill, we loved GOOD’s infographic version of the most controversial books in America. We found out what Conan O’Brien was really thinking during his 60 Minutes interview. We wondered how someone would react to spotting one of Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s oil paintings in our apartment. Total conversation piece. We considered dropping $1000 to have ’90s rocker Juliana Hatfield write a personalized song for us. We realized that skinny jeans, do in fact, serve an important function. We chortled over the “Is It Steampunk?” Flowchart — it’s so funny because it’s true. We wished that the New York City Department of Buildings would leave Shepard Fairey alone. We wanted Hollywood to stop mining our childhood for sequel ideas. We got a kick out of Ironing Man. And finally, we wanted to thank Yeasayer’s Chris Keating for introducing us to some of the band’s more obscure influences in a new mixtape.
With The Dream of Perpetual Motion, author Dexter Palmer embraces multimedia, offering video, audio, a screensaver, and an online art gallery to accompany his steampunk opus.
Narrated by perpetual storyteller Harold Winslow from his prison aboard the zeppelin of a mad inventor, Palmer’s novel explores love’s uncertain place in an increasingly technological world. Part psychological prison diary, part Kafka-esque alternate reality, the book bends genres with a balance of wry humor and self-aware glee.
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Steampunk’s distinctive blend of Victorian age sci-fi/fantasy and steam-powered modern technology has shed some of its geeky connotations in recent years with unexpected mainstream recognition. Emerging from literary origins in the ‘80s, the movement’s artistic subculture has since taken on music, art, movies, fashion, and DIY gadgetry — all in the name of dark, neo-Victorian fun. But with Dexter Palmer’s buzzed steampunk-inspired alternate reality The Dream of Perpetual Motion
out this week, there’s no indication that the original literary movement has lost any of its, ahem, steam. To get caught up on the action, be sure to check out these essential steampunk books.
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Steampunk has been a surprisingly pervasive trend for the past couple of years. It seems to pop up everywhere and it fascinates us — after all, it’s only a delicious mixture of literature, fashion, history and nerdery, some of the world’s best things. According to Google Trends, the first blips of steampunk activity on the web surfaced in 2005, but nothing the least bit significant started happening until 2007, when there was a sudden upsurge in interest. Since then, the trend — as a design aesthetic, as a cultural reaction, as a concept — has been invading movies, videogames, and hugely influencing certain branches of the DIY movement (just check out Etsy.)
So after hearing the news of the continued struggle of the world’s first steampunk bar (!!) to get a liquor license, we thought we’d offer a little moral support by taking a look at the evolution of steampunk — and how it led us, perhaps inevitably, to a bar in Brooklyn. Check out our timeline and find out where to get steamdrunk after the jump.
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What’s even hotter than a potbellied hipster or dressing like the ’80s never ended? According to the latest dispatch from the New York Times, embracing the fashion and decor of the late 19th-century. While many one-off elements of the aesthetic have had their moments in recent years — and we have the fedora somewhere in our closet to prove it — in this trend piece, the Times is clearly talking about a look that’s more head-to-toe. Extreme is the new normal.
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