No New York: No Wave Girls

ShadowPlay

Digging through the back rooms of rock photography history often means slogging through self-aware ridiculously posed press-packet-ready photographs.  Why is it that the brief flicker that was Post Punk/No Wave in New York has such a disproportionate  number of the most amazing photographs?  The fashion is timeless because it’s not fashion at all: fashion is self aware and dictated by the tastes of others. I don’t know what you call this.  Amazing?

No Wave Ziggy: hotter than Bowie ever was. (sorry, thin white duke.)

Lydia Lunch: Teenage Jesus and The Jerks

“Statement Necklace”

Ziggy Stardust Lives. . .hotter than I remember, too.

David Arnoff’s photographs capture the stark heart of the sound that became no wave.

Anya Philips: There for everything that was anything in New York, and dressed to steal the scene. That’s creating something all by itself.

Debbie Harry shot by Chris Stein

Ida No of Glass Candy: Showing us that it’s all still new

 

My Blood Valentine: Greatest Love Stories in Rock and Roll

They say you can’t be both and artist and muse. . .but I’ve scavanged the internet to find the Bonnie and Clyde couples of the music and art world for images to use in my new series of shirts: images of great couples who helped each other change music, art, fashion, and culture at large.  The photos speak for themselves: some of these stories have tragic endings, and some (Lux and Ivy of the Cramps are my favorite example) are still together and wicked and as talented as ever.  Who are your favorite examples of duos from the art, music, or history? Extra points for including photos!

If you’re curious about the end result, check out etsy.com/shop/CrateDiggers 

Postapocolyptic Chic: Upcycling with Inner Tube Rubber

Hello there,

Last night I attempted a indoor-lighting photo-shoot, playing postpunk LPs at loud volume while all around me the children (ahem, undergrad college students) howeld (literally) in to the night.  Now, I lived in football towns before (Athens Bulldogs? or Dawgs, as they said?) but I have never heard such madness: it’s like the world has ended and various tribes roam the streets shouting out obscure chants, howling in unison when they pass another group of fellow tribespeople, fighting viciously when they meet a hostile tribe (like University of Virginia.) Actually, it’s 9 am and I can still hear them! My God! I must be old. But truly, in Athens, GA, the students at least tried to seem cool.  I never thought I’d say this, but I really miss those pretentious hipsters.  They only howled when roaring drunk. And they dressed better.  I suppose I’m just homesick, let’s move on to my real subject; but first a couple photos from last night all for sale on etsy.com/shop/CrateDiggers btw!

But as I said, Inner tube rubber: here are a few of my creations. I’ll explain how I made them as best I can, but I reccomend doing your own experimenting.  I couldn’t find any really useful tutorials on this subject, and once I’m a litte more experienced I intend to write the first: I hate it (but respect it, too) when people keep their creative process a secret.  Imagination is unlimited. Tell us what you figured out at let us fly from there. . .anyway, if anyone knows of a good tutorial on inner tube rubber jewelry, share it with us? I’d be so grateful! Here are my First Tries:

Feathers:  I cut a leaf-like shape, snipped out the stem at the end, and proceeded to use quick snips to fringe on both sides.  I cut curving fringe towards the bottom of the feather to give it realistic movement.  Then I went back in and cut my fringes in half. In the process bits were removed entirely, which opened up the design and allowed you to see the individual fringe in places.  Then I went back in and used short nips of the scissors to give each fringe-tassel an angular (as in not squared off) tip.  I wasn’t happy with the dull black so I used a Sharpie to give the rubber a glossier black.  I covered the back of each feather in silver ink and brushed the tips of the fringe on the front side in silver as well.  It’s very subtle and doesn’t show up here, but I  like the effect.

Punk Collar:  I cut a fresh tube into wide bands, slanting the scissors to give each piece a triangulat shape.  I overlapped the pieces, gently curving them to create a semi-circle to sit nicely on the breastbone.  After MUCH trial and error, the best way I found to attatch them was to sew a X (cross-stich) connecting the pieces in the CENTER of the overlapping edge.  If you sew along the TOP of the necklace, the pieces fan out wildly: you’ll see! So, center stich, and re-enforce them or use a glue as well so it’s punk-rock-sturdy.  I then sharpied my thread (I didn’t have black, and decided I didnlt like the contrasting look after all) and agan inked the rubber to a blacker shade of black.

Glass: Now, I still havent learned to cut straight strips of this stuff.  I hear a rotary cutter works well, otherwise it requires more patience then this girl has.  Then again, I have to be able to finish each project in one sitting.  I took a glass tile which I had been hoarding,knowing it was too pretty to throw away, and looped each edge through a thong made from the rubber strips.  You could use a twig painted silver instead, or any pretty, vertical object that would be otherwise difficult to stick to anything.  Ran jumprings through the rubber thongs using a safety pin to make the hole, and attatched to chain.  Oh yeah, same trick with the safety pin/jumprings on the first piece.  Add a closure.  If you are lazy, a safety pin will actually not look bad here.

Feather Necklace: I took the feathers from the first paragraph, threaded them on a wire under a piece of white turquoise, and threaded it on my chain (although a rubber or leather strip might have looked better.)

These things aren’t up for sale officially, but email me if you’re interested, $10 will be fine since they are first-runs, $15 for the collar as it took for bloody ever.  free shipping. Hell, you know what? The first reader to comment receives the piece of their choosing FREE.  I am new to blogging and I don’t know how to share my blog’s exsistance or find other wordpress blogger yet.  Don’t laugh please! I’ll figure it out and then I’ll feel rather silly, but in the meantime, the first reader to say hello may have one of anything I’ve made for free, because they are surely awesome.  (Except that Fall dress! I bought the American Apparel black dress to print on in Miami, which cost more than I’d spent on groceries in a month. Plus I’ve already worn it and it looks bangin’ 😉

Wow! Now I see how hard it would be to write a proper tutorial! As I head up to the workshop for the day I’ll bring my camera this time.

xoxoxo as always,

Susan Renee

whtelightwhiteheatdesign@gmail.com

Neon, Rubber, Silver, Spikes

I have been working with all sorts of new materials, specifically cold porcelain and recycled bike rubber:  tutorials in the next post! Also, I’ve re thought the entire process I use for printing: I’m going to use hand-drawn images only, instead of raiding the past for Public Domain treasures.  I’m actually to hyped with new ideas to blog, I think I’m heading up to the studio and will return with photographs and how-to’s.  My etsy shop will be amazing! Only hundreds of hours of work to do first! Funny, people forget that art making is a real job. Even I forgot until I realized the scope of the work ahead of me. . .having no business background, or common sense either, I’m forced to re-educate myself.  Damn my liberal arts degree, it was fun but I suppose it’s time to lean about thrilling things like tax IDs.  Oi vey! But tonight, I’m purely a Maker in Experiment Mode, the most fun place to be.

Heart-Shaped Box

It’s a gray .  day, a typical mountain day: cool mist rolling in off the foothills, the shouts of fans of football and life in general echoing through the streets. The students here don’t affect the coolness of students in other college towns: they’re just overflowing with an annoying vibrancy, innocence, and enthusiasm. Yesterday a box arrived containing plastic body parts, a disassembled oversized Barbie doll. She’ll be my “model,” and now all that’s left to do is borrow a camera, photograph my wares, and see if the internet is interestedI can’t deny a certain creepiness about having a life sized human in our home: while the cats are nonchalant, she’s scared the crap out of me twice already, even though I know she’s there! Something about catching a human-sized shape out of the corner of your eye.  I guess I’m fully committed to the retail thing now, because it’s just plain weird to have a human-sized doll without using it for a practical purpose.  Although I do feel the impulse to name the poor thing.  That box of body parts reminded me of a Hole song, or a serial killer movie.

Here are some images of my new t’s without the benefit of their new model:

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Maker’s Madness

Maker’s Madness; A condition in which one cannot look at an object without seeing it in another form.  For instance, I just painted our deck light like the Jam bullseye.  I am ignoring our company to experiment with printing via wax paper. Fail, BTW! So far Blender Pens and actual transfer paper is all that works for me, thought I’d love to learn screenprinting if I had the cash.  Today I’ve made at least 15 shirts, gorgeous, and stupidly gave one away already to a fellow who flattered me by taking a fancy to it.

I hope to find a way to deal with my fear of marketing; and I simply hate spending money on things like packaging.  I suppose I should create an attractive postcard or print featuring my work and a summary of what my “business” will do?

The next big question: who, in specific, do I help? Aurora House is too far away, perhaps a local or international recovery network?

if anyone’s reading and has a sensible streak, please do advise me!

Any ideas for musicians to feature?

Love and good mojo,

S

Wed, Aug 20, 2014

There are a thousand ways to forage the soft pieces of yourself. The metamorphosis of flesh into iron is not something done all at once, perhaps because that would break a person. I suspect it’s because we are so full of hidden recesses where what is tender, sincere, and innocent can stay curled away. It is amazing, the perseverance of gentleness. And so the hardening must be done piece by piece: we do not know what we can bear unil we have bourne it.
I was born safe, which means I was born into fears, the luxurious fears that only the first world coddled can afford. Need I list them? You surely can glance inward and find enough to make my point for me. Carcenogenic pesticides. Terrorist attack. Rejection, living alone. Dying alone. Needles, heights, hospital machinery, virus, pathogen, beesting. Food allergy. Second hand smoke. Humiliation, mutilation, divorce, death. The future, deep rough waters.
Do you think I’m going to tell you I faced down my fears, one by one? Don’t worry, it’s not that kind of story. It’s a true one. I will tell you this: behind every fear is a wish. It pulls us towards the edge of the cliff: haven’t you felt that? Haven’t you stood on the edge of a very high place, solid on your feet and yet somehow afraid that you will propel yourself over the edge. I defy you to stand with your toes over the ledge, look down into the appropriately dramatic abyss, and tell me that you don’t feel something pulling at you. I have no idea what it is: I certainly don’t want to die, I doubt you do. . .so what is it that pulls us?
I suppose I prepesent an extreme, which is why I feel I have a right to talk about this, whatever this is, at all. I came into the world so sensitive, so empathetic, so fearful and fragile, tender and gentle. I grew in a valley cupped by blue mountains like the hand of God himself. I lived with my father, who loved language, jazz, and solitude. I remember him wrapped in quilts sitting at his typewriter, shotgun ear-protectors layerd over earplugs layered over the innate absence of a writer in the process of his work. I would pass this huddled and strange image as I padded down the hall and out into the yard, unleashing our silver-furred, yellow eyed Weimeraner from the teather attatched outside the faded red doghouse. A ring of bare dirt surrounded the cyrpress tree which sheltered the doghouse. We were bad pet owners, lost in our own velvety sadness, and she was forever straining at the end of her chain barking wildly at the world beyond the dirt circle. Unleshing her was like firing a shot, you had to pull her back to get enough slack to release the clasp on her collar, and in that instant her beautiful body of silver-velvet wrapped muscle would fly out into the field beyond the yard, running wide joyous circles but always returning to me like a falcon. The widening gyre. I believe I had no choice about what happened to me, it was a thing that had indeed been slouching towards me from conception. Or I was the beast, slouching towards my Bethlahem of blood splattered tiles and hungry shades. But then, the dog and I would explore the wooded hillsides, the tick-filled grassy pastures, knarled orchards and stands of trees circled darkly and twisted, suggesting a dangerous magic. I just soaked up that beauty, and grew. When I was old enough for school I was bird thin with the hair of a cast-away Disney princess, honey-blond curls tangled with bits of burr and pine. I kept my fingernails long, but always with earth underneath. I dressed myself in strangely inappropriate clothes, tight-knit black and red garments, tiny versions of the 80s tramp aesthetic tinged with punk: my mother had sent me combat boots from Berlin, and I had stolen a violet lipstick from the purse of a beautiful poet while she was drinking with my father in the kitchen. I had a makeup case which my grandmother had accepted from a hooker who needed Dillauded but didn’t have the money. My grandmother was generous, I would have let the bitch get sick. So, yes, I knew stories like this, but I was still basically raw to the world. If we’d had TV I might have been a little stronger. As it was, I didn’t understand sarcasm, irony, or that everyone didn’t read and love Yeats. I was all love and fear. Then the world opened its maw and took me in.
The prison guards in Miami didn’t know that about me, didn’t know that I was ever such a creature, and this hurt me more than the cold and cuffs. By then I was hard, though, quite forged, and so even that didn’t hurt very much. I think about the women I was shackled to, us forming a long line like the chain gangs in old movies, myself a small white spot in a line of darker, stronger women. For some reason they had not issued me a jumpsuit and I was still wearing a pure white dress, an angel’s dress, and in my mug shot I look strangely beautiful, my hair cascades around my bare shoulders and my eyes look as if they are gazing out at a park in springtime. By now, this wasn’t a terrible fear come to pass so much an an inevitable right of passage. A maternal Puerto Rican car thief put her arm around me when the brutal cold cell had me shaking and chattering my teeth. I leaned into her warm bulk and we listened sadly to the screams of a man being beaten on the other side of the door. It went on a long time. His voice gave out, the shrieks became muffled as though through viscous liquid and finally sank to a lowing, animal sound. We were all very tired. When I think about those women I love them all, I love them all way more than I love you, reader. I want to bath each one in milk and rosepetals, give her handmaidens and gowns of silk, and set each upon a throne next to a devoted king, where they can survey their kingdom’s rolling fields of wheat and smell jasmine on the evening breeze, where twice a year each and every person will form a line that snakes for miles as they wait in line to kiss her slipper. For luck. And for honor.