All For a Mardi Gras Day: PVC Magic Pipe

 

              Pipes have been around for almost 6,000 years, but the Babylonians were old-school and used clay.  If only they had plastic.  If only they had PVC.   Like Mardi Gras, polyvinyl chloride was invented in France, but took some time to catch on in America.  Invented in the 19^th century, it was brittle and unready for commercial use, but the addition of new plastics popularized it and by the mid-20^th century several nations were refitting and constructing sewage and water pipes with PVC.  

            But more importantly than sewage and water, PVC has artistic applications as well.  It is a thermoplastic resin with a low heat stability which means you can use heat to reform its shape.  As Mardi Gras fast approaches, krewes shift their attention to detail.  Big picture stuff slides away and is replaced by the tedium required to do a job all-the-way-right, to produce a product that doesn't just look cool from a distance. While the Krewe of Ragnarock’s Horse inspires awe because of its color and size, its details cast an additional layer of wonder upon any proximal reveler.  Some of the most fun details involve PVC pipe.   For the pale horse, with guidance, I used PVC to make chain links and ribs for the horseman.  A similar process can be done for many projects.  Here's how I made the ribs (the chain links were made in a similar set of steps):

Most steps are featured in pictures below.

1) Determine desired shape of pipe.  Cut it to length (table saw)

2) Create a mold of desired shape by drilling holes in a board to wrap the pipe around. 

3) Heat the PVC pipe all around but especially near the middle or where you want it to bend.  You will see it to start to lose its rigidity and droop. 

4) Shape it to the mold on the board. 

5) Let it cool.  After  a couple minutes, it will harden again.
6) When you have created all your pieces, prime the connector pieces with PVC cement primer.  Wear gloves because it is purple and difficult to remove from skin or fabric if spilled.
7) Coat the inside of the connectors and ends of pipes with PVC cement.
8) Connect the pieces into connectors.  If you are making chain links make sure you weave your links with each other. 
9) Paint!
*There are lots of variations of these steps possible you can perform to fit your desired project.  The most important feature of PVC for crafting is you can reshape and connect it!

Use a propane flame to soften the pipe.

Form the pipe to a desired mold using screws on a board.

 

PVC chain links.  About 30+ feet of it.

The skeletal legs and arms of the rider of our Pale Horse

Working the PVC arms and legs like puppets.

How to Make Plated Armor for a Horse's Ass

All For a Mardi Gras Day Part 2: How to Make Plated Armor for a Horse’s Ass

            The plan was to rebuild the horse.  In its first year it had been a steampunk Trojan Horse. Its revelers were not hidden, and they had no plans to sack in the city, but the surprise of intention remained the same.  To surprise, to cast wonder, to turn adults into children, engaging their curiosity and love of novelty and imagination, without disallowing them the privileges of being adult, such as drinking and partying in the streets of your city.  This was Mardi Gras.
           This year, the Krewe of Ragnarock hopes to engage that same wondrous spirit, to abstract the experience of a party with the surprise cross-imagery of life-death celebrations, mocking the idea of definitive endings. The horse will be the Pale Horse from Revelations, the forerunner of the End of Days, but with a fun Dia de los Muertos twist. The horse was intended to intimidate, to scare the religiously weak, and then delight everyone with sugary skull-colors and a festive spirit.  Naturally, it would require colorful armor.  

            I showed up to my first krewe-build day hungover.   I had too much wine and daiquiri the night before and struggled to perform basic tasks that morning like locking my bike or opening doors.  I wanted to make a good impression on my peers who were worked in engineering, construction, and design.  But New Orleans' nights sometimes have their way with you and reduce you to a fumbling vessel.    I showed up early to confess my diminished state to Porter, the head constructioneer, a builder of things, with oak branches for arms.  He wielded powertools like they were dinnerware (but more safely) and exhibited a casual comfort around dangerous tools exhibited by people who spend a lot of time around dangerous tools.   On my bike ride over I imagined him asking me to use torches and buzz saws and esoteric cutting machines I had never heard of before.  I imagined splaying my hand into five pieces. Or maybe just my slicing off my smallest fingers. 

            The horse's head loomed over the top of the gate while I struggled to lock my bike up again.  I confessed to Porter, “My mental and physical faculties are compromised, so if you have something easy, you know, maybe I could do that and warm up to something more.”

            “Ok,” he said, putting down a propane torch.  “Have you used a grinder before?”
            "No."
            "You want to cut some metal?"

            He put a plastic face shield and plugged in the grinder, a tool with a circular face like a sander but with sharper edges and more torque.  A garbage bag in a corner revealed a few dozen empty espresso bean cans, each the size of a waste paper basket.  He pulled one out then stabilized it with his foot and began to cut the top off with edge of the disc.  Hundreds of sparks volleyed against his face and legs.  Hot metal on metal screams.  It is no birdsong.  He cut the first can and then took off the mask and handed me the grinder.  
        "How about it?" he asked.  
         This was my nightmare.  But I still had some control over my body, I told myself, and finished my third liter of water that morning.  I was raised to respect power tools’ ability to sever digits, but not to fear them because, well, they’re useful.  If I wasn't willing to risk a finger, then what use would I be in building a war horse? How could I proerly mock death on Mardi Gras day and ride the horse with any sense of pride??  What would the trojan soldiers have said?  They would call me a coward, or some part of genitalia.  I hoisted my wool socks to cover my own legs and cut the tops and bottoms of fifteen cans.  I maintained all my extremeties. But when asked to bevel the tips of a bundle of PVC pipe, I gave the grinder to someone else.  Instead, I took the propane torch, ready for another task.

Porter and Megan.  Mama and Papa Horse.

           

How to make armor plates

1: Use a grinder to cut the top and bottom of thin aluminum cans. 

2: Use garden shears to cut the cylinders and lay them flat as a sheet of metal.

3: Cut cardboard into desired shape and then trace it with a marker onto sheet of metal.  In our case, the shape was something like a large tear drop.

4: Use garden shears again to cut out shapes.

5: Paint armor plates desired color.  We painted ours turquoise blue, red, and then left the other third silver.  We painted a black border trim around each plate.

6: Layer the plates on the skin (canvas cloth) of the horse’s ass like roofing tiles. 

7: Power drill them into the canvas and corrugated plastic material underneath.   

Next post: How to make Foot long chain links with PVC pipe and a torch

All For A Mardi Gras Day Part 1

Mardi Gras is a phenomenon.  It is challenging to relate its details, imagery, and feeling to anyone foreign to the experience.  Last year, I spent several days after the festival scribbling in notebooks and thwacking at my computer’s keyboard in some foggy attempt to explain what I saw and felt, but all of it was unintelligible.  I could have stayed sober, took notes, asked questions, and stood to the side, but Mardi Gras demands participation, and to abstain from it is to misunderstand it altogether, and what fun would that be.

            This year I'd like to creep up on it from a different angle in an effort to explain it.  To write about Mardi Gras in anticipation, to describe the days before it arrives and take part in its preparation by joining a krewe.  There is a favorite song by Dr. John, “All on a Mardi Gras Day,” about the day itself, but it is easy to forget that such revelry requires commitment, spirit, and sweat in preparation for it.  The following posts, turning that phrase, shall be dedicated to that idea, the active anticipation of my new favorite day of the year, “All for a Mardi Gras Day.”  The first post is introductory and explains why I joined a krewe: 

                If you search the internet for the origins of Mardi Gras you’ll get a myriad of possibilities.  The holiday dates back as early three hundred years ago or as late as four thousands years ago.  Some historians link the holiday to Lupercalia, a Roman festival of fertility and spring cleansing that honored the she-wolf Lupa and the forest God Pan.   In my first Mardi Gras, I superficially drew my mythological inspiration from Bacchus, who I always associated with the wild rites of spring and my own desire to drink and be merry and let loose.  But Pan, perhaps, was much wilder.  He was half-man and half-goat. He had a large penis.  He once seduced the moon.  He was audacious enough to challenge Apollo to a musical competition, and according to poor Midas, Pan won.  Apollo gave Midas donkeys ears in retribution.  Later, Pan died, the only God that ever superceded his own limits of immortality.  To celebrate him, Roman men ran the streets naked and slap women’s backsides in stride. 

            Others say that the Catholic Church invented Mardi Gras by creating Carnival season as a persuasive tool to convince Pagans to give up their savage rituals and prepare for Christian lent.  A day of all-you-can-sin merriment before 40 days of piousness.  Carnival’s latin roots are in the word Carneleveman, meaning Farewell to Flesh.   Mardi Gras, as we recognize it today, began on the bank of the Mississippi, sixty miles south of New Orleans, and more than three hundred years ago.  The French explorer, Iberville, landed on the bank, and recognizing that France was celebrating Fat Tuesday, founded the first Mardi Gras in the region, naming the bend of land Point du Mari Gras.   The festival grew over the centuries.  Walking parades featured masked men and mules--instead of tractor engines--pulled the floats.  Even then, the people were wild, and violence almost halted the festivities.  Officials tried to stop the holiday but the people simply liked it too much.  The parades got bigger. The floats got bigger.  Women and black men created their own krewes, fomenting the notion that Mardi Gras stardom is accessible to everyone, not just wealthy white business men from the Garden District.  And now, Mardi Gras, today brings in more than a billion dollars of revenue to the city, cementing its necessity to the people and the government.  All in all, that is long history of partying. 

          My first Mardi Gras was a blur.  It is hard to describe the toll six days of city-wide partying and loss of inhibition takes on the mind and body.  It took days to get my life back in order, and what I was left with was some hodge-podge of incongruous images as memories. Jesus and a female bunny-human standing on top of a hippie van.  An army of revelers with boxes of wine feeding pedestrians on St. Charles Avenue being led by a guerilla marching band and a faun.  A student telling a story about running away from gun shots on Claiborne Avenue while eating a snowball, "I kept running, fast, but I never let go of it.  It was good," he said and rubbed his belly.  A Jew for Jesus rabbi playing guitar on the levee, singing folk songs in the key of G about our sins, "She has super-gonorrhea 3," he sang, and "Is his penis circumsized?/I don't really know"   And a 25 foot long steampunk Trojan horse on Mardi Gras morning. 

        The warhorse was an emblem of the experience.  A singular image that made sense only at Mardi Gras.  Confirmation that all of it was real and unreal.  Two dozen warriors from the Krewe of Ragnarock pushed it through the Marigny and into the French Quarter. It blared rock music and had a cannon that fired confetti and purple smoke.  I tried to board it but a warrior blocked  me with his plastic sword.  "I don't think so," he said. "You'll have to sign a waiver."  I was in no state to sign waivers. 

         But a year later I found a different way to board the horse.  To pay my dues and join the Krewe of Ragnarock, the revelers responsible for its construction, and for planning its reincarnation in this year's St. Ann's Parade.  It will be a different experience.  I will not be directionless, sporting the go-where-you-wanna spirit, sniffing out trails of fun (a fundog?).  Instead I will have an anchor.  The horse.  Its corrugated plastic head my compass.  But a warhorse is not born but made.  There are 48 days until Fat Tuesday.  And a lot of work to do in preparation for the party.

Check out the Krewe of Ragnarock online for some amazing photographs and background.  http://www.kreweofragnarok.com/