April 10, 2009
Found this in the gutter down the street. Somewhere, a VW – a new one, by the make of the silkscreened aluminum – is driving around without an identity.
Is the badge the seat of a car’s soul?
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April 9, 2009
Fifteen years ago today – at 4:49 p.m. on 04/09/94, I married the love of my life. Tonight, we drove up to a romantic dinner overlooking Los Angeles, and exchanged lovely gifts and the sort of bedazzled soliloquies to each other that come only from hearts truly and fully in love with each other.
The gifts [...]
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April 1, 2009
Put aside for a second how thoroughly doofy Crocs can seem, here is an entire empire built on two simple facts: a) Americans’ uncanny knack for making, buying and trashing once-used disposable crap and b) our love of cheap customization.
You stuff Jibbitz into the holes of your Crocs to declare your individuality to other [...]
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March 28, 2009
Cement, 6925 Hollywood Boulevard.
My oldest great friend, Vinny is in town with his lovely wife, Robin, and we’re doing the tourist thing. Some 71 years ago, Eleanor Powell left behind these words:
“To Sid –
You’re “taps”
with me
Eleanor Powell
Dec. 23 – 37
And then they helped her sink a pair of bright steel taps [...]
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March 14, 2009
Twenty-two years after Watchmen changed my psychotopography and appreciation for the nuances of fiction forever, they finally got it completely right.
We saw it again this afternoon, and fell even deeper into it than we had at the midnight premiere at the Dome a week earlier.
The movie is an extraordinarily accomplished telling of the great [...]
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March 4, 2009
These have been floating around my parents’ house for as long as I can remember, by the dozens, it seems.
There’s a pair serving as a keyfob, another set tied to a Christmas ornament, it seems, and various bells clinking around amidst their never-ending and unintentional collection of heavy little objects.
I’d guess they came [...]
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February 21, 2009
This is meta: I usually shoot objects while looking through these. If I flip the metaphor, is there a little me down there on the stand running around behind the lenses with a camera, shooting up?
Even spectacles have weird dreams.
Filed under: Adornment, Instrument, Tool | Comments (0)
February 2, 2009
The origins of this piece are dim and inscrutable, but what really matters is this:
My father just shipped me two small boxes full of HLOs gathered from around the house, and among them are some real beauties like this: He found this in London a long time ago and gave it to my mother [...]
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January 24, 2009
This nation has bought into the culture of preciousness from the very first needlepoint sampler of the earliest Don’t Tread on Me flag.
We can’t say we invented it- I think we can thank the Egyptians or the first culture that ever created chubby little fertility-goddess fetishes for that.
But the U.S. has a by-God [...]
Filed under: Adornment, Ephemera, Facsimile, Jetsam, Miniature, Tool | Comments (2)
January 21, 2009
I never repeat heavy little objects.
I mean, never.
My little daily obsession can be a cruel taskmistress, sometimes commanding me to find something cool to post even when nothing cool has come through my life. But like an idiot samurai, I live and die by a code set in motion long ago and over [...]
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January 10, 2009
This was explained to me as “the lightning bolt which destroys ignorance.”
Here’s what this page says about the Tibetan vajra:
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December 31, 2008
William Randolph Hearst had a thing for guns.
The newspaper magnate and industrialist (and model for the titular character in Citizen Kane) had his name put on rifle events in the 40s and 50s, and they’ve been resurrected lately for reasons that may or may not bear Googling.
This badge was awarded to some [...]
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December 27, 2008
I rarely post two distinct objects together – usually it’s a thing or a group of like things.
But these two landed on my desk last night – a gift from my son and a piece of office equipment (you decide which) and they spoke to one another.
Filed under: Adornment, Found Object, Life form, Tool, symbol, weapon | Comments (0)
December 12, 2008
My son’s collecting these – Chinese insects preserved in two layers of resin – a clear dome over a glow-in-the-dark bed.
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December 8, 2008
To be fair, this has pinholes in either end, making its utility as some sort of glorified golfball-sized bead more apparent.
But I prefer to ignore the hole, and imagine it as a prop from Her Majesty’s weekly bingo game, held secretly in the rooms beneath Buckingham Palace.
It’s made of porcelain and fired with a [...]
Filed under: Adornment, Art, Artifact | Comments (1)
December 6, 2008
California is a land of exiles. For that reason – among many others – I love it.
Anyone not born here has come to explore, to self-reinvent, to escape forces of oppression or boredom or hopelessness left behind.
This westward tide has flowed for centuries, pulling wave upon wave of Spaniards, gold-rushers, dust-bowled Okies, Sinaloan [...]
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December 3, 2008
Dammit.
The little fuckers have been partying under my desk again.
I’m finding tiny shoes. There are nasty scuff-marks on the wall about an inch off the floor, and wet spots in my shoes. Someone punched a dime-sized hole in the sheetrock, and there’s a one-square-foot patch of the floor reeking of small beer. [...]
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November 30, 2008
If you believe in the primacy of the American union, you’d be within your rights to believe that joining the American Newspaper Guild would give you job security.
Two things have dashed that myth for me: First, I spent a good six weeks, Monday through Friday sitting on the sidewalk outside the Philadelphia Inquirer building [...]
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November 17, 2008
just about rice-sized
spotted by the trash can one day
crushed, it will not sound
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November 15, 2008
“Dad, check it out. I made a robotic hand.”
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November 11, 2008
When we were still a-courting, she and I drove 2,200 miles around the American southwest in a rented convertible in the space of a week.
We slept beneath the stars and in seedy motels. We lolled in the open ragtop beneath towering mesas in Monument Valley, and muggy midnight at Four Corners. We noshed, we [...]
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November 2, 2008
We hold these things close – our beliefs.
They guide our acts, they govern our thoughts, they control how we vote, whom we love, what we do in the dark.
And we bind ourselves to these intangible self-truths with talismans – headdresses, tefillim, hair shirts and medals.
This is an odd little find – it looks [...]
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October 24, 2008
You own a lot of shit. You accumulate more of it every day. Sometimes, you have to pick through it to get your desk clean. And you make little piles. That might or might not be photographs of your life told in debris. And yet, you never seem to get rid of the things as [...]
Filed under: Adornment, Art, Artifact, Blahg, Ephemera, Facsimile, Fetish, Found Object, Instrument, Jetsam, Life form, Miniature, Model, Objet, Part, Tool, Toy, symbol, weapon | Comments (0)
October 16, 2008
This lump of polished, lustrous stone – so fetishy I can’t even decide what to do with it yet – came my way for $2 at the swap meet last weekend. It has a wondrous weight and feel in the hand. And it’s made of this stuff which gives it a symbolic potency far deeper [...]
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October 15, 2008
THE U.S. MEDIASPHERE (Oct. 14, post-debate) (HLO) –
Joe the Plumber. Indeed.
Look, this blog isn’t political.
I don’t dump my heart out about the government here. Most days, this stuff is just one more step in my years-long tabletop parade of things.
But please, if you’re thinking of voting for one would-be U.S. president over the [...]
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