Hasta La Ideas

Chronicles from America’s disaffected, pre-digital youth

On the brink of adolescence my best skate buddy Tim and I found a statue of the Virgin Mary with red paint on it in the woods. Convinced that this was the site of a recent Satanic ritual, we gathered the other neighborhood kids and went with flashlights in the dark to investigate further. As we huddled around, I spent most of my time trying to feel up the girl who lived across the street from Tim. I was making serious headway when we saw a car pull up at the edge of the woods and hit the brakes. Convinced it was the Satanists, we scattered like rats.

Experiences like this made me naturally inclined to love the new book, Live…Suburbia!, a collaboration between Max G. Morton and Anthony Pappalardo. Anthony grew up not far from me, and we actually share some friends, although we’ve never met. But clearly we shared more than that—skating, trying to impress girls, looking for porn in the woods, rumors of suburban Satanism and a love for the rebellion of rock, specifically metal, punk and hardcore. Max brings a darker, if not unfamiliar vibe to the collection of short stories and photos that make up the narrative loosely centered around drugs, family life and metal, calling to mind the older burnout kids who all somehow looked like Metallica’s Cliff Burton.

Live… Suburbia! are the stories of Max and Anthony’s youth, of my youth and the stories of a million kids like us that knew that there had to be more out there than what people were telling us at school, in church or on the news. Disaffected youth rebelling through skating and punk rock might be an old tale, but what’s most fascinating about this collection of stories is the era when they took place.

This was a time without Internet, without the constant, ubiquitous ability to know everything about anything at any time. The bands we loved had to be discovered through commitment and caring meant devouring mixtapes, scouring Thrasher magazine, combing over liner notes, collecting fliers and doing our best to glean any and every piece of information from any source we could. This lack of readily-available facts also created an incredible culture of rumor, with Skinheads and Satanists and druggies allegedly lurking around every corner, and sometimes they actually did.

Punk and hardcore purists will enjoy the points of reference and personal tales, but ultimately these are stories about the mystique of rebellion and the passion it took to pull it off in a time before it was made easy. Live… Suburbia! is out on 27 September 2011 and is available for for preorder from Powerhouse Books and Amazon.

All photos from Live…Suburbia! by Anthony Pappalardo and Max G Morton, published by powerHouse Books.

Children’s toys transformed into creepy robots

For the last few years artist Cathy McClure has been applying her background in metal design to her obsession with mechanical toys in a variety of shows around the country. McClure’s process, centralized around taking different motorized children’s toys and stripping them of their fur and stuffing, tears them down to their absolute basics. From there, the pieces either remain in their naked plastic state or McClure casts them in a variety of metals from silver to bronze. The resulting pieces, eerie and at times haunting, expose the high level of engineering those goes into what most would write off as simple children’s toys.

Her work from the “Curiosities” series sells online from the Moss shop.

Australian jewelry designers band together to creatively promote their works

More than an online boutique, Melbourne Metal Collective is an artist-run retail concept for Australia’s up-and-coming jewelry designs with a strong focus on the community of craftspeople who make them. MMC hosts exhibitions, pop-up shops and more to highlight the fresh roster of bright minds currently making up their site, which includes Estelle Deve, Hamish Munro, Henson, Polly van der Glas and Young Hunting.

Alchemy—MMC’s first exhibition and pop-up store—reflects the consortium’s sophisticated earthy vibe, recalling the ancient Greek practice of melding metals. For the opening, the Collective commissioned a short film by South African director Michael Matthews, highlighting pieces and adding to the collective’s overall creative atmosphere.

Working primarily with raw materials (at times including hair and teeth), together MMC designers evoke a strong sense of mysticism and urban simplicity. Each offers their own style, but through a seemingly shared interest in the past, the collective creates beautiful pieces that transcend time.

Select works from each of the designers are available from the MMC shop, where you can also find out more about what the Melbourne-based collective is up to next on their blog.

Master jeweler applies her metalsmithing talent to sculpture

Massachusetts-born beauty Jill Platner, known for the beautifully organic forms of her exquisite jewelry, has always yearned to apply her metal-manipulating skills to her passion for sculpture. This week, realizing the career-long dream, she opened a month-long show of her sculptural work in NYC.

Platner discovered her love of metal working in NYC while attending the Parson’s School of Design, getting into the jewelry business as a way to accumulate enough cash to make sculptural pieces. Years later, operating out of the same Soho space, she’s managed to create a fantastic installation. Produced under an ambitious timeline, the project started three months ago when Platner rallied a team of friends and colleagues to produce the series of pieces, a play on scale following the form of many of her well-known jewelry designs.

Resulting sculptures, constructed from steel, copper and bronze, resonate with Platner’s strong, elegant style. The hearty, interactive pieces are meant to live either indoors or out and, like her jewelry, beg to be touched. In the gallery setting, the dramatic installation uses harsh light to cast shadows across and through the pieces, creating silhouettes almost as enchanting at the work itself.

Check out the installation at 111 Crosby street in New York City (next door to Platner’s store) from now until the 31 May 2011; it is open daily to the public from noon to 5pm.

Milan 2011: London designer Philippe Malouin will present a rug made of chain mail in Milan next week.

Called The Yachiyo metal rug, the piece is handmade from galvanised steel wire rings in a Japanese chain mail design with twelve loops attached to every two central rings.

The piece took 3000 hours to make and is named after one of the makers.

Photographs below are by Ivan Jones

Dezeen’s top ten: rugs and blankets »

The rug will be on show at via Gaetano Sbodio 30, Milan from 12-17 April. See all our stories about Milan »

The information below is from the designer:

The Yachiyo metal rug

This year I have been doing quite a lot of research on, and work using, metal – the Yachiyo metal rug is a result of this research. It is a piece designed to last many lifetimes, it is virtually indestructible and it involves thousands of hand-manufacturing hours, since it is impossible to make by machine.

The Yachiyo metal rug is made using a very intricate form of chain mail. Having investigated various types of chain mail, ranging from traditional/medieval manufacturing techniques to more contemporary, machine-made chain mail patterns, we chose to draw from the Japanese ’12-in-2′ chain mail method. Not only did we find this type of chain mail to be virtually indestructible, but it also created a very stable membrane – structural yet flexible – not dissimilar to a tight hand tufted rug.

Having explored ideas for a range of furniture made using this technique, we chose to create a rug because the attention is focussed solely on the 2D object itself, the craftsmanship can be better admired this way.

The metal rug is completely handmade from galvanised steel wire, the same type of wire that is used to make animal pen fencing in farms. The looped wire is taken and, using a metal rod connected to a power drill in a timber frame jig, wound into a tight coil. This coil is then removed from the metal rod and hand cut into small rings. These are riveted together one-by-one in the Japanese ’12-in-2′ pattern, which consists of 2 central rings with 12 perpendicular rings connected around. This process is painstakingly repeated to create the rug.

The final piece presents an isometric rectangular prism which we created, through playing with ideas of perspective, so that a two dimensional object like a rug could visually spring into the 3D realm. Each of the three colours within the rug is a metallic coating, which is industrially electroplated onto the three distinct parts before they are assembled together by connecting rings one-by-one.

One of my amazing interns Yachiyo Kawana has worked on this project from the beginning, which is why the piece is named after her. It is also very fitting as, like the chain mail method, Yachiyo is Japanese.

The entire rug was handmade in London by Yachiyo Kawana, Greg Austin, Carlo Cialli, Anna Perugini, Vic Margevich, Maria Kuzmenko, Midea Diomideia Kolani, Xue Dong, Khadija Durbar, Jade Blair, Zahra Rajaei, and it required more than 3000 hours to make it.

See also:

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Wooden Carpet by Elisa Stroyzk	Dark Side of the Moon by Martin Mostböck	Losanges by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec