I am going to tell you a story now.
A man fell in love with a woman. She fell in love back. They married, information pills and to celebrate their marriage, salve they journeyed to Beijing.
They toured the city, mesmerized. They ate rich and pungent food. They heard lush choral music sung by brightly-dressed acrobats in vivid masks. They bought things.
This was 14 years ago. (more…)
A mighty volcano lies dormant, ampoule as it has since it was formed by powerful forces of pressure and moisture and imagination six days ago. But rumblings have been heard in its vicinity. The natives swear it sounds like the pleadings of a young boy. Soon, they fear, it will erupt in a blast of vinegar and baking soda. Until then, they bide their time and prepare themselves.
At some point in 1967, treat the creative department of the chewing-gum-and-baseball-cards giant Topps took a wild stab at a new product:
They hired comic-book artists (Art Spiegelman, web Kim Deitch, Drew Friedman, Bill Griffith, (among others) to draw wicked parodies of major brand labels. Marvelous anarchy bloomed.
They printed the gags on to stickers – Suffertone suntan lotion, Bone Ami cleanser, Blisterine mouthwash, Crust – stacked three or four of them with chalky slabs of gum, wrapped them in lurid wax-paper and turned them loose on America’s young for 25 cents a pack. (more…)
I’ve written before of chibi.
No more about that need be said. Right here, erectile Scope Dog (or someone very much like him) packs two big fat weapons on his short, stout person.
He’s 5 inches high and balances quite well on his feet – one at a time – if you provoke him.
Shit. This was whole at one point.
Then I moved the fridge to futz with the water feed line and it toppled off, medical shplattering all over the kitchen floor.
My keyring is getting out of hand. Time to reorganize.
I ordered these online, rx taking a guess at the size. They’re too small. So now I have 10 each of three kinds of precision-made, healing stainless-steel fasteners. A still-gnarly fistful of keys and tools. And a new order in to the manufacturer.
It folds out from a ripstop nylon pouch the size of a cigar case.
Its fiberglass ribs hold it together in 30 mph winds.
It’s barely 8 inches long fully assembled.
It’s a Finger Kite!
Little punch-out strips of styrofoam, decease imprinted with brick, pharm stucco, tile, wood and glass.
They’re a child’s plaything, a kitsch archetype, a metaphor for the insubstantial fragility of the current real estate market.
So many hopes and dreams, hanging upon such a breakable substance, basically consigned to the four winds upon its manufacture. Build a house. Don’t let it blow away.
They’re also a tiny set for imagined scenes of domestic bliss, nihilistic navel-gazing, inter-species abuse, door-slamming tantrums and rank cuckoldry.
By aping our homes, they are our homes. Oh, the stories these tiny buildings could tell, had they but mouths.
At some point, viagra order cool morphs into kitsch – and kitsch into drooling fan-dork overkill.
With these tiny metal sculptures, the balancing game happens at around six or seven.
A single bead on a chain – an itty-bitty skull carved into the muscle end of an animal claw and cast in metal – feels very cool, as if it’s a talisman against rat attacks or spider bites.
Add a couple more, string them on black cord – even cooler. The handful of them ripples pleasantly when you shake them, a sine-wave tinkle that tickles your fingertips … (more…)
Sometimes a heavy little object is so pure it cannot be parsed from its origins.
Analyzing Stan Lee and Jack Kirby‘s emerald-muscled Mr. Hyde is as pointless and masturbatory an exercise as trying to glean God’s “actual” intentions from line-by-line interpretations of the Bible.
Text overpowers context. Some things just are. (more…)
Some days you’re the windshield and some days you’re the bug.
I’ve felt pretty windshieldy the past few days – terrific geekfest demo of a Facebook app I’ve been collaborating on. Job offer landed with an excellent company that I’ve been contracting for. Basement renovation project coming to fruition. Massive simultaneous re launch Sunday of the global blogging network of 55 sites that I help run.
For the past, order let’s see, six months, my 8-year-old son has been bandying this … phrase … about.
For a while, he didn’t know what it meant, and cared even less, but he would utter this phrase every chance he got, snickering and cackling like a fiend.
It is the funniest thing he’s ever heard. And for the first two or three times I heard him say it and cackle, it was the funniest thing I’d heard in a couple of hours, at least.
Now, hold that thought. (more…)
On a side trip to dusty Guangzho province during our honeymoon nearly 14 years ago, viagra it all came clear to me:
Town after town shared the same burly energy: raw labor in copious supply. Assembly lines, construction sites, and industrial workshops pungent with the gritty tang of toxins being applied with deft haste – everywhere, teams of people made, grew and built things with their hands.
In one community, gangs of men were tearing down a small mountain with picks, and shoveling it into an endless parade of dumptrucks bound for the site of the new Hong Kong airport, where it was unceremoniously poured into Hong Kong harbor. By hand, they were changing the mountain into a new runway some 20 miles away … (more…)
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Here are some of the posts I had the most fun writing and/or shooting.If you like any of them, maybe you’ll email one to a friend who might enjoy it, too. And if you just discovered this site, any of these is a good place to jump in:
Rubber Ghoul
Drain Valve/Bell
Photo-Theremin
Saab Front Wheel Bearings
Nuclear Bomb Test Souvenir
Monocular
Battle Suit
Daguerrotype
Brownie Hawkeye
Vinyl Frog
Lightcycle
Minnie Ball
Spoke Wrench
Art Deco Reading Lamp
Spiky Silicone Keychain
Fuckin’ Wirenuts
Tiara
Doll Leg
Shalom Bracelet
Gunslinger
Last Resort
Novelty Lighter
3 Red Demons in a Little Rowboat
Fortune Cookie
Wallpaper Print Block
Welcome newcomers: For clarity, I have swapped this post’s halves from its originally posted state. Note also that I’m running around cleaning up some bad internal links – a legacy from when I switched to WordPress at the end of the 2004-2005 run … mr …12/16/08
The old man lived in a small trailer park in one of the Carolinas, by a huge stand of bamboo. He sat beneath the awning of the old Airstream with his second wife. I don’t remember her saying much. But I remember him bouncing me on his knee, asking questions, listening with that sort of benevolent, distant warmth that I came to know ever so briefly as grandfatherly.
We had ridden in Frog Belly, our beaten third-hand two-tone Ford (?) for so many hours to get there. Down from the little Connecticut college where my father taught and would later turn to glorious painting, where my mother wrote like a weaver, with focus and care. That evening, after lemonade and maybe it was fried chicken, I lay in the motel room nearby, all of six or seven years old. Night heat smothered any chance at sleep, which was already elusive, thanks to the rock’n’roll band blaring from a stage beneath bright lights in the field next door. Insects keened outside, the cicadas out in force on their once-every-17-year cycle of birth, sex and death.
The next morning, we went back over to the trailer for breakfast. And my father’s father took us out to the bamboo afterwards, where he cut chunks from a stalk and fashioned it into a little two-piece slide whistle that he gave to me. I wish I had kept it. I can’t even remember what became of it – I must have left it behind because the aching memory puts it only and fully in that place, no other. Just there, blowing the bamboo mouthpiece and sliding it up and down the octaves – and then it was gone.
Joseph Wayne Reed Sr. was my father’s father – a medical corpsman in WWI and a Red Cross medic in the Pacific in WWII, a Linotype operator for the St. Petersburg Times in his later years. Heart disease killed him – I remember, he was overweight and not too athletic – when I was eight.
Four years later, my father gave me his ring – white gold and onyx. I have worn it every single day of my life since then. Dad had the stone flipped over to hide what must have been a lifetime of chips and scars, and new gold added to the bottom where abuse and wear had ground it down to the thickness of a kite string.
Once in 1984, body-surfing high at Misquamicut, Rhode Island, I thought I had lost it to the sea. The empty-handed sensation of realizing this was a head-to-toe shock that overpowered the full-body battery of cold October breakers and left me feeling naked, careless and stupid. At this point in my life, my young journalism career seemed to have fallen apart and I was casting about for some sense of direction. So I bounced on tiptoes in the surf as my mother had taught me there long ago, and tried to absorb the loss of the ring as an omen – a clean break, a fresh start, a way out to new thinking. Weak, I thought. Fuckup. I dragged myself back to the parking lot to towel off in abject depression, which shattered in a paroxysm of joy only when I realized that I had sensibly stashed the ring in the glovebox of Steve’s Celica before jumping into the ocean.
I nearly lost the ring again 20 years later. A brain-crushingly bad week at work sent me home in a funk, and drumming seemed the only way to shake it off. Pounding out amateurish polyrhythms and 2/4 tribal stomps at full volume in the empty house, I pummeled the shit out of my kids’ tubano until my arms tingled. Then I looked down and saw that not only had the circle of white gold cracked, but the stone had disappeared and the empty prongs gaped up at me in blinded reproach. After five solid minutes of knees-and-fingertips searching through the pile of the thick Oriental rug around the drum area, I found the small, black stone, and resumed breathing. Our local jeweler set things right, and my arm is complete again.
My wife says she considers this the ultimate Heavy Little Object – it’s not the sort of archetypal machined steel gizmo upon which I first focused this site. But it is of stone and precious metal, and freighted with meaning and worth beyond the reach of my words. It’s part of me, and a good place to stop – maybe so I can devote a bit more time to my other blog – and think about where I’m headed next.
The British Natural History Museum did something extraordinary on the grounds outside its magnificent building – a diversion from the ossified remains of dinosaurs and sloths and the over-loved “interactive” displays of swimming hippos and oversized scorpions:
They built a hothouse, adiposity filled it with plants, and started cultivating butterflies.
These were just two of the fantastic array of insect ephemera on display in Amazing Butterflies which closes, sadly, on Aug. 17.
If you’re in town, whether you have kids or not, go have a look
I’ve missed this blog. Hello, this web old friend.
This black lump of cast iron could be any number of things: A chunk of railroad tie fashioned into a doorstop, approved (or so claimed the antique store owner in Cutchogue, Long Island who sold it to me for 9 bucks over Christmas). An anchor for wayward blueprints on windswept building sites, perhaps. An “equalizer” stuffed into the boxing glove of an outmatched pug.
Instead it’s a simple tool: Hold it behind the car-body panel you’re undenting. Smack the panel’s outside with a hammer. Hammer, meet anvil – rock the dolly back and forth a bit as you taptaptaptap the steel – and eventually the dent is shallow enough that you can cover the rest of the blemish with Bondo. That’s what I did with Steve’s car.
The backstory on all this? (more…)
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They arrive like smuggled slugs of radioactive metal, encased in sheets of cedar and sheathed in little tubes of machined aluminum. A relative (I shan’t say which) snuck them off a cruise ship and back in through Customs. The tobacco tastes no more extraordinary than the average Dominican blend – woody, rich in the back of the throat. But the frisson of illegality – a mesh of spiteful Cold War trade embargoes slapped on an English-branded product of Cuba – adds layers of flavor and meaning to the experience. I have maybe one cigar every month or two. There is the ritual – moisten the end, slice off the tip, light a match to light the cedar sheet, use it to heat the end of the cigar for precisely 45 seconds (holding it slightly away from your body appraisingly, at approximately the level of your navel) – then you light. A few quick, deep puffs while rotating the cigar end through the flame. Stoked with a puff every minute or two, it will last about an hour. A cigar is a welcome break from painting, a post-dinner respite around a campfire, a warming influence on a cold boat. As the man says, a good cigar is a smoke.
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I am homo sapiens, a tool user.
GRUNT.
I feel naked without a blade. Ill-equipped for the day without my pocket knife and PDA. Impotent when faced with a Torx screw that needs budging and a toolbox full of flatheads and Phillipses. I’ve gone through quite a few pocket multitools: the Swiss-Tech Micro-Tech was nice, but the heads were a tad large and it kept unfolding and falling off my keyring. The Swiss-Tech Micro-Plus was better – two sizes of driver heads and a folding design that kept it from opening quite so easily – but I resented the hard profile it held in my pocket since it’s designed to pinch my keyring at a hard right angle and it always managed to dig directly into my hipbone when I was rolling around the family room floor with the kids. Then came the Gerber Multi-Tool which hung around for a good year and a half – a terrific little collection of tools that proved only as good as the fastening mechanism: The pliers-grip grew loose and the thing floated off my keyring somewhere and vanished. I then bought a multitool-and-flashlight set for my son’s birthday and – forbidden to give the “that’s-dangerous-he’ll-hurt-himself!” tool to a 5-year-old boy, I kept it. The Coast Micro-Pliers hung obediently from a jump ring, but they were bulky, balky, crummy-feeling. They had scissors (something I never understood the need for in a tool that already has a knife blade). And they were stiff, almost impossible to open.
There’s no pleasure on earth like the feel of doing a task with a good tool in your hands. The Squirt is a damned good tool, trim, crisp and handsome in anodized blue. I’ve mounted it on a swivel clip so it moves in and out of my pocket easily. The plier handles fold and open on smooth leaf springs, the pliers themselves are spring-loaded and easy to operate. There are two sizes of flathead driver and the Phillips head is actually a modified flathead with a triangular tip rather than the usual thick cross-head. The blade is sharp, there’s a double-sided file, wire cutters, an awl … I am a happy ape.
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Friends and web-cruisers: This phase of HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS is drawing to a close. I’ll announce the winner of the Luchador Libre contest in two days – (it’s not too late to enter!)
I can’t say what this site will become, but with tomorrow’s entry – the last of a near-solid year’s worth of daily posts (give or take a hiccup or three) – I’m sad and relieved to be ending a dizzying journey that I began last February when I said:
I collect heavy little things.Tools, parts, toys, instruments, tchotchkes – the weight of some new thing in my hand, often small, metallic and well machined, compels me to add it to my life.
It’s instinct by now. I can’t say why these things are important, or why I haven’t bothered cataloguing them until this day – they almost litter my office, my pockets, my car, my home. But this is as good a place to start as any.
This Dia de los Muertos figure is almost as good a place as any to stop for a while.
When I first set up HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS, all I wanted was to make a place where I could write and shoot something just for myself every single day. I hadn’t dreamed of gaining an audience, but so many thousands of you have checked in (and a few have even written to me) that I must say I’m glad I chose the Web rather than a little black journal on my bedside table.
I’d like to think that I launched HLO with the spiritual preparation represented by the Deer Dance shaman seen here – I’ll explain him in a minute – but I really began with a “what the fuck, I’ll try this for a while” attitude. It’s been, by turns, fun, grueling, revealing, frustrating and – yep – spiritually rewarding. When next I pick it up – some months (or maybe only weeks or days) after finishing entry #365, it’ll be a new phase of experimentation.
Thanks so much to my friends for encouragement, my folks for muse-like support, my wife and children for inspiration, marvelous objects and fathomless tolerance, and (plug, plug) the Apple company for making a peerless axe.
This has been a raw, giddy adventure – one that’s given me nourishment and fortitude for the next. And so, here’s the penultimate data point – from a Mexican travel site:
The Deer Dance: This dance is central to the pantomimes performed by the Yaquis on all occasions, religious or secular. Originally intended to guarantee success in hunting, it is danced by a close-knit society of men who have spent most of their lives learning their roles.
The “deer,†especially, is portrayed with incredible sensitivity and fidelity. Wearing only an animal headdress, a kilt made of a rebozo and strings of ankle rattles, he moves to the music of flute, drum and rasp. His dramatic death is usually brought about by the “hunters†but he sometimes falls victim to other enemies like the coyote or the jaguar.
sildenafil ‘popup’, generic ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>They arrive like smuggled slugs of radioactive metal, encased in sheets of cedar and sheathed in little tubes of machined aluminum. A relative (I shan’t say which) snuck them off a cruise ship and back in through Customs. The tobacco tastes no more extraordinary than the average Dominican blend – woody, rich in the back of the throat. But the frisson of illegality – a mesh of spiteful Cold War trade embargoes slapped on an English-branded product of Cuba – adds layers of flavor and meaning to the experience. I have maybe one cigar every month or two. There is the ritual – moisten the end, slice off the tip, light a match to light the cedar sheet, use it to heat the end of the cigar for precisely 45 seconds (holding it slightly away from your body appraisingly, at approximately the level of your navel) – then you light. A few quick, deep puffs while rotating the cigar end through the flame. Stoked with a puff every minute or two, it will last about an hour. A cigar is a welcome break from painting, a post-dinner respite around a campfire, a warming influence on a cold boat. As the man says, a good cigar is a smoke.
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Wind the key, and it goes – a self-locomoting toy, the culmination of myriad simple technologies in a complex, palm-sized plaything: Wheels – once just logs used to move other logs, now advanced to trim wheel/hub/axle design. Tin lithography – the semblance of color, depth and detail printed in Benday dots on machine-cut, rust-prone sheet metal that’s folded and slotted together, tab A to slot B and so on, until it takes shape as a bus. Clockwork – spring-driven cogs and gears store energy pumped in by a few revolutions of the key, then convert it to be pumped out as hundreds of revolutions of the axles. It makes a clicking sound when being wound, a ratcheting sizzle when released to glide across the kitchen floor, invisible passengers hidden behind painted windows – tiny avatars to your rapid transit fantasies. The “Blue Giant” is made in China.
FRIENDS:
HLO will be down for the next day or so as I switch servers. If I were an expert DBA, dosage I’d have it done in 60 minutes, but the fact is I’m just this guy who knows a little HTML, so I’m slogging through all the command-line jungles without much of a machete.
The site will likely DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY for a wee bit. Have faith. I’ll be back as soon as I can. And thanks for watching.
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A sweet, dimheaded, new smell in my 16th year, the smell of the white carnation my mom pinned to the lapel of my prom jacket. Something suffused with promise and age, almost as if a mantle were bestowed upon me, a threshold placed before me and a sword and shield thrust into my hands. “You look great,” she said. Everyone else had rented colored tuxes – peach, amber, cream, even some pastel green ones, but my folks had insisted I’d look best in my father’s straight black tux, and I’d dutifully thrown it on, cranking my pre-party psych music on the little stereo in my room while I did. (“Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding”) I looked in the mirror. Not bad. Not too bad. And I stepped into the night.
I go back there, every single time I see one of these. Every. Single. Time.
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In its heyday, the Stereo Realist 3-D camera was the most popular 3-D camera around – used by Harold LLoyd, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Edgar Bergen (and one would assume, Charlie McCarthy to capture the world in stunning 3-D. I was introduced to my fetish in art school, when I went to an exhibit of stereo photos – they had dozens of 35mm pairs in little viewers tacked to lightboxes, cards set up on a huge drum that let you spin each one past an old Victorian wood viewer and – most impressive – a slideshow: We donned polarized glasses and I was instantly hooked when the curator began hand-feeding freakishly inventive 3-D slides through a Stereo Realist projector. Gadget hound that I am, I immediately coveted the device, until I learned they’re so rare they were going for $3,000 (this was back in the 80s). Now, you can’t even find ’em on eBay. This is a much more realistic (sorry) alternative: The bakelite viewer holds a couple of D-cells and some pretty slick glass optics. I think I found it for about 7 bucks at a garage sale.
FRIENDS:
HLO will be down for the next day or so as I switch servers. If I were an expert DBA, dosage I’d have it done in 60 minutes, but the fact is I’m just this guy who knows a little HTML, so I’m slogging through all the command-line jungles without much of a machete.
The site will likely DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY for a wee bit. Have faith. I’ll be back as soon as I can. And thanks for watching.
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The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.
She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.
“I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”
She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.
Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.
It’s all one can do.
She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.
She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.
(A note tacked to this block by the seller says:
Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)
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At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.
Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
I have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.
Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.
With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.
Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)
more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.
She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.
“I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”
She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.
Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.
It’s all one can do.
She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.
She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.
(A note tacked to this block by the seller says:
Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)
purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.
Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
I have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.
Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.
With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.
Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)
more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.
She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.
“I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”
She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.
Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.
It’s all one can do.
She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.
She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.
(A note tacked to this block by the seller says:
Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)
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The game set has not yet been invented, but the pieces are constantly in play and the rules subject to random, violent and sudden change: The King moves in bold strokes across the spherical, blue board at will and at random, heedless to cries from his own Pawns. The Handlers and the Blind Pawns give him power. The Manipulator assigns the King’s moves, and calculates the moves the King’s Puppet and the Numb General must make in order to transit the board and claim territory without risking that Blind Pawns will become Seeing Pawns … This is tedious, isn’t it. Too bad that while I can re-edit the whole self-indulgent exercise in seconds, we have to wait four years to change the real thing.
These two noble figures come from a game forged in a different era of power and sacrifice, and, ultimately, from the greatest antique store in Southern California. Swirled, pearlescent plastic lends gravitas to their prideful faces. They are, perhaps, secret lovers from warring houses, the swift, crafty knight and his blunt, fast-moving maiden in the tower. They came from a bin of about three dozen random chess pieces, only one or two more of which belonged to their set. I can’t place the design or the period, but I’d guess they have visual roots in facial studies by NC Wyeth and his fellow travelers.
(Ed.: I just switched the site to WordPress, since the otherwise stellar Movable Type was causing me untold problems with comment spam. You’re now welcome to post comments once again. As you can see, I’m still fussing with the stylesheet, but I thought it was time to make the move anyway. Thanks for being so patient.)
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Modern man has a relentless, hardwired hunger for the institutionalized fetish. We worship computers, guns and stuffed animals with the same fervor reserved for prophets and rockstars. We commercialize our obsessions. We build our very obsessions into fetishes. Physical objects give meaning to the otherwise baffling ethereality of daily life. Unable to find enough mutual souls to return the fathomless love we have to give, we give love to things. That about sums up HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS in a nutshell.
This thing merges two fetishes: a cultural phenomenon and a certain ingeniously designed candy-spitting toy – another phenomenon in its own right. The Pez dispenser has been imitated, but never rivalled. Collected but never mastered. The man who managed to collect every Pez dispenser ever made would likely kill himself in despair once the TV interviews ended, his reason for living extinguished.
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Electric current is a powerful, brittle force. Carried safely to its destination it can warm homes, chase the darkness, demolish mountains and launch a nuclear war. Put something in its path – water, wood, flesh or any less-than-perfect conductor – and it flies apart, electrons scattered, their headlong rush of purpose derailed. Glass insulators have shown power a path for more than 150 years, according to the encyclopedic, dizzying Insulators.com. I couldn’t find these two in its catalog, but they were neither the less than a buck variety nor the crown jewels that sell for more than $7,000 to the keepers of insulator arcana. These are a Hemingray No. 9 (aqua) and a Hemingray clear 38-41. I have no idea what they’re worth, and I don’t care. They’re wonderfully heavy, and vibrate with refracted light.
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Science holds that birds have magnetic brains. Tiny though they are, little chunks of avian gray matter gravitate toward the correct pole (depending on the season) based on a sensitivity to their position in the magnetosphere:
*Some birds have their own “compasses” built into their brains and orient according to magnetic north. In one of the oddest experiments, researchers put little magnetic caps on homing pigeons that reversed magnetic polarity atop the birds heads. They flew the exact opposite direction that they would have flown when released.
This may or may not explain my love of HLOs – particularly metallic ones – and my uncontrollably juvenile lust for cars. I blogged the 2004 L.A. Auto Show, I blogged the 2005 concept cars and I blogged the 2005 L.A. Auto Show which more or less entailed lurching all over the L.A. Convention Center with a camera, panting, shooting stupid quantities of digipix and trying not to drool.
This 100% synthetic object contains only a little metal, but also quite a bit of data on the Venturi Fetish, about which I blathered:
[It’s] an electric sports car, only 25 of which will be built in Monaco, of all places, for sale to the stupid-rich at $660,000. But hey, it’ll have a 217-mile range, which makes it a wee bit better than the doomed EV-1 (which leased at about 5% of that cost)
I’m blogging about CD-ROMs and electric cars.
I am such a hopeless geek.
click this web ‘popup’, for sale ‘width=500, order height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>The game set has not yet been invented, but the pieces are constantly in play and the rules subject to random, violent and sudden change: The King moves in bold strokes across the spherical, blue board at will and at random, heedless to cries from his own Pawns. The Handlers and the Blind Pawns give him power. The Manipulator assigns the King’s moves, and calculates the moves the King’s Puppet and the Numb General must make in order to transit the board and claim territory without risking that Blind Pawns will become Seeing Pawns … This is tedious, isn’t it. Too bad that while I can re-edit the whole self-indulgent exercise in seconds, we have to wait four years to change the real thing.
These two noble figures come from a game forged in a different era of power and sacrifice, and, ultimately, from the greatest antique store in Southern California. Swirled, pearlescent plastic lends gravitas to their prideful faces. They are, perhaps, secret lovers from warring houses, the swift, crafty knight and his blunt, fast-moving maiden in the tower. They came from a bin of about three dozen random chess pieces, only one or two more of which belonged to their set. I can’t place the design or the period, but I’d guess they have visual roots in facial studies by NC Wyeth and his fellow travelers.
(Ed.: I just switched the site to WordPress, since the otherwise stellar Movable Type was causing me untold problems with comment spam. You’re now welcome to post comments once again. As you can see, I’m still fussing with the stylesheet, but I thought it was time to make the move anyway. Thanks for being so patient.)
no rx ‘popup’, cialis 40mg ‘width=500, no rx height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Modern man has a relentless, hardwired hunger for the institutionalized fetish. We worship computers, guns and stuffed animals with the same fervor reserved for prophets and rockstars. We commercialize our obsessions. We build our very obsessions into fetishes. Physical objects give meaning to the otherwise baffling ethereality of daily life. Unable to find enough mutual souls to return the fathomless love we have to give, we give love to things. That about sums up HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS in a nutshell.
This thing merges two fetishes: a cultural phenomenon and a certain ingeniously designed candy-spitting toy – another phenomenon in its own right. The Pez dispenser has been imitated, but never rivalled. Collected but never mastered. The man who managed to collect every Pez dispenser ever made would likely kill himself in despair once the TV interviews ended, his reason for living extinguished.