HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: symbol

  • #a428 :: Undesirable keychain tag

    041909What happens when your son has parked a big bottle of water precariously on the top shelf of an open refrigerator door and you unwittingly shut the door, price dosage causing it to plunge to the bottom and snap the shelf straight out of the fridge?

    You hunt through the shattered plastic shards looking for the serial number so you can order a new one.

    Children are agents of entropy.
    042009At some point last month, mind my mother-in-law gave my daughter (age 7) a little keyring with a big fob that spelled out “Love” in lurid gold-chromed script.

    It was schwag from some utterly-too-grownup movie, find as evidenced by the little stamped-metal tag proclaiming the brand. Here’s what ensued the moment I laid eyes on it:

    Me: (rummaging for the pliers) Here, let me fix that for you.

    Daughter: Dad, can’t I keep that?

    Uh, no. (*snap!*)

    I could go on here about the bizarre cultural currency our infantilized nation has created around the fetishism of branded schwag, but I’m saving all my energy for, oh, about four or five years from now when she starts pushing back.

  • #a418 :: Volkswagen badge

    0410092Found this in the gutter down the street. Somewhere, ask a VW – a new one, clinic by the make of the silkscreened aluminum – is driving around without an identity.

    Is the badge the seat of a car’s soul?

  • #a406 :: Eleanor Powell’s taps

    032809
    032809I’ve been a huge, hospital drooling fan of Jeff Soto but couldn’t afford his work until I spotted this fine fellow
    032809I’ve been a huge, price drooling fan of Jeff Soto but couldn’t afford his work until I spotted this fine fellow in a little toy store the other side of the reservoir.
    032909Cement, pharm information pills 0,17794286326742320966&near=Los+Angeles,+CA&oi=manybox&ct=10&cd=1&resnum=1″>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 into the cement in front of the theater – sole up – which gives the impression that you’re beneath a glass floor looking up into a cement world where someone is frozen, dancing, just their feet showing.

    The rest of the plaza in front of Grauman’s Chinese is a mosaic of hand and footprints (my favorite is the Marx Bros, where Zeppo and Chico’s thoroughly flat soles stood alongside Groucho’s gnarly brand-new-heel-patterned prints and Harpo’s bare feet). In this space where the upside-down cement world upstairs is possible, in this mostly dull-colored landscape, the taps stick out like pivot points between that world and this, upon which the entire forecourt of the Chinese could tip.

  • #a403 :: Wooden puzzle

    032409Since my wife is a member of ASIFA we got passes to a pre-release screening of Monsters vs. Aliens tonight. Verdict: It’s no Kung Fu Panda or Bolt, no rx visit web but it’s got enough yuks and snappy design to make an honest buck, approved and I might even see it again.

    They were giving away McDonald’s toys in the lobby – this is B.O.B., whose plastic incarnation swivels and rolls erratically across the table if you wind him up.
    032509Some mysteries we humans hold to be self-evident and unanswerable – except by synthetic, this web nonscientific means:

    Consciousness. Identity. Creativity. Beauty. Spirituality. Meaning. Diversity. Freedom.

    So we make up religions and start cults and set things on fire and paint and write and bloviate and fight and kill and destroy because it’s easier than trying to understand or – more simply – accept.

    Art and war – same thing: They are extraordinary means of changing and refusing to accept the one thing we don’t get – life.

    All of which is a half-assed way of saying this thing has been on my desk untouched for almost a week because I don’t have the balls to try disassembling it, for fear I’ll wind up with $9 worth of lovely sanded-pine kindling.

  • #a400 :: Black widow

    032209This one has been hanging around the handrail on our front steps for a few weeks, check rx always skittering away when I want to photograph and then attempt to kill it.

    I failed miserably at both, site price until this past weekend.

    I don’t feel good about having ended such a magnificent creature, ampoule but I decided I’d feel even worse rushing one of my family to the hospital for treatment.

  • #a395 :: Apple stickers

    031609Every now and then a mystery washes up out of the ceaseless surf of crap inundating this house.

    What is this?

    It has the precise curves and clean-milled transparent plastic of an Appleprod
    031709These pile up like autumn leaves in any die-hard Mac household.

    White on white, nurse stuffed into a drawer, viagra swiftly becomes white on blotchy grey because, pilule well, you don’t want to over-use the things.

    I have one of the larger ones on my car, but I decided that putting a line of smaller ones after it would be not-quite-arch-enough to avoid associations with kind of stickers you see on the backs of L.A. SUVs – the kitschy rows of parent-and-all-our-kids stickers or praying-Calvin stickers.

    So they stay in the drawer, getting grayer.

    Meantime, my favorite computer company made some rather large and long-awaited announcements today about the great-but-horribly-flawed iPhone operating system, so here’s what I posted on our company blog: (more…)

  • #a393 :: Used car key

    031409In all my years on this blog, more about mind I’ve never unpacked the symbology of a key.

    It’s almost so perfect a metaphor on its own, that trying to explain a key pretty much dooms you to being accused of mental masturbation.

    But a car key is profound. It represents a heavy, expensive and rather large member of the family that lives in mostly silent service – a portable id, a means of self-projection from one existence to another – rarely complaining and seldom causing trouble on its own.

    And that’s about as far as I’ll drag you down that rabbit hole.

    My wife’s old Volvo S70 served us faithfully and well for 7 years, but with 104,000+ miles and a bad case of accelerating decrepitude, its time had come to an end.

    Yesterday, we went out and bought a newer used Volvo – a tight, gorgeous bottom-of-the-line S40 with only 10,572 miles on it for more than a third off original sticker).

    And there it sits, in the garage’s place of honor, while the old one sits on the street awaiting its fate.

    Which as much as anything – and better than anything I could say – explains this meaning of this key.

  • #a392 :: Old Rohrshach pin

    031309I have a thing for magnets.

    These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you more than one of them snap together on you.

    A single one can support close to 10 pounds, treat and depending on how you rig it.

    And when you place a href=”http://heavylittleobjects.com/?p=1397″>pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, a little pentagram of force.
    031309I have a thing for magnets.

    These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you more than one of them snap together on you.

    A single one can support close to 10 pounds, this web depending on how you rig it.

    And when you place a href=”http://heavylittleobjects.com/?p=1397″>pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, information pills a little pentagram of force.

    However, salve that’s not a magnet. this is a magnet. Any of ’em. Go on, pick one.
    031309I have a thing for magnets.

    These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you more than one of them snap together on you.

    A single one can support close to 10 pounds, visit web depending on how you rig it.

    And when you place pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, advice a little pentagram of force.

    However, that’s not a magnet. this is a magnet. Any of ’em. Go on, pick one.
    031309I have a thing for magnets.

    These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you more than one of them snap together on you.

    A single one can support close to 10 pounds, for sale depending on how you rig it.

    And when you place pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, a little pentagram of force.

    However, that’s not a magnet. this is a magnet. Any of ’em. Go on, pick one.
    0314a09Twenty-two years after Watchmen changed my psychotopography and appreciation for the nuances of fiction forever, online 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 “unfilmable” original, and the second time around – the gorgeous ballet of deception and violence and honor betrayal among these rich, fucked-up characters – just cemented my admiration for Moore‘s story and Gibbons‘ art.

    I bought the comics one by one when they hit the stand – I have a distinct memory of standing in some punk bookstore on South Street in Philadelphia in 1986 and picking up the first one and thinking, “Oh. Man. Oh, MAN.” Near the end of the run, DC put out a set of four buttons. This is the only one I’ve managed to hang onto since then, and the rust bleeding through from the tin back gives it a wonderful extra layer of filth and meaning.

  • #a389 :: Amethyst “crystal”

    031009Where is he going? What is he carrying? Why is he important?

    Chinese factory workers so beautifully aped the luster of carved coral with cast, more about prostate burnished and “age”-dusted red plastic resin that I’m left wishing I had the answers to these questions.

    In lesser hands, healing he would have been a child’s plaything, a little knicknack amid thousands of others on a shop shelf, an inconsequential bauble.

    But look at the bearing they’ve given him, the speed of his walk, the indomitable purpose in his knowing eyes. Mold seams and tool gouges would have killed that effect. You have to admire the height of the art of faux-antiques.

    Found him in Chinatown for three bucks.
    031109She regards it with suspicion.

    “Amethyst?”

    The Chinese shopkeeper nods firmly. “Finest, viagra 100mg from Xian province. Xian province. Terra cotta warrior. Xian.”

    He keeps nodding.

    She drums her French-tipped nails against its too-glossy sides. She pricks at her fingertips with its perfectly asymmetrical point. She hefts it. Rolls it over in her perfumed hand.

    Then she waves it at him: “Bullshit. It is not …” (more…)

  • #a388 :: Chinese traveling hare

    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, dosage patient former college classmate and co-conspirator John, I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, most perfect HLOs known to the art of manufacturing.

    Back in college, John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) into pinball machines.

    There may have been other pinball tables worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight.

    Two stories deep, tricked out with multi-ball and all the gnarly medieval graphics their Frazetta-wannabe art department could muster, the Black Knight table was also the launch platform for the greatest pinball innovation of all time:
    the wickedly cool Magna-Save button – when engaged – sucked your missed flips back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic.

    Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.
    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, what is ed former college classmate and co-conspirator John, ed I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, this site most perfect HLOs made.

    John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) back in college into pinball machines.

    There may have been others worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight. The Williams Electronics co equipped it with the wickedly cool Magna-Save button, which – when engaged – sucked the balls back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic. Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.
    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, mind former college classmate and co-conspirator John, abortion I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, most perfect HLOs known to the art of manufacturing.

    Back in college, John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) into pinball machines.

    There may have been other pinball tables worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight.

    Two stories deep, tricked out with multi-ball and all the gnarly medieval graphics their Frazetta-wannabe art department could muster, the Black Knight table was also the launch platform for the greatest pinball innovation of all time:
    the wickedly cool Magna-Save button – when engaged – sucked your missed flips back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic.

    Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.
    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, physician former college classmate and co-conspirator John, information pills I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, most perfect HLOs known to the art of manufacturing.

    Back in college, John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) into pinball machines.

    There may have been other pinball tables worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight.

    Two stories deep, tricked out with multi-ball and all the gnarly medieval graphics their Frazetta-wannabe art department could muster, the Black Knight table was also the launch platform for the greatest pinball innovation of all time:
    the wickedly cool Magna-Save button – when engaged – sucked your missed flips back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic.

    Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.
    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, patient former college classmate and co-conspirator John, I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, most perfect HLOs known to the art of manufacturing.

    Back in college, John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) into pinball machines.

    There may have been other pinball tables worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight.

    Two stories deep, tricked out with multi-ball and all the gnarly medieval graphics their Frazetta-wannabe art department could muster, the Black Knight table was also the launch platform for the greatest pinball innovation of all time:
    the wickedly cool Magna-Save button – when engaged – sucked your missed flips back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic.

    Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.
    031009Where is he going? What is he carrying? Why is he important?

    Chinese factory workers so beautifully aped the luster of carved coral with cast, malady burnished and “age”-dusted red plastic resin that I’m left wishing I had the answers to these questions.

    In lesser hands, discount he would have been a child’s plaything, approved a little knicknack amid thousands of others on a shop shelf, an inconsequential bauble.

    But look at the bearing they’ve given him, the speed of his walk, the indomitable purpose in his knowing eyes. Mold seams and tool gouges would have killed that effect. You have to admire the height of the art of faux-antiques.

    Found him in Chinatown for three bucks.

  • #a387 :: Pinballs

    0309091Thanks to my dear longtime friend, buy more about former college classmate and co-conspirator John, I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, most perfect HLOs known to the art of manufacturing.

    Back in college, John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) into pinball machines.

    There may have been other pinball tables worth a damn, but the only one that stuck in my head is the formidable Black Knight.

    Two stories deep, tricked out with multi-ball and all the gnarly medieval graphics their Frazetta-wannabe art department could muster, the Black Knight table was also the launch platform for the greatest pinball innovation of all time:
    the wickedly cool Magna-Save button – when engaged – sucked your missed flips back from doom in the drains via giant electromagnets buried beneath the table surface, allowing you to keep your balls in play.

    So to speak.

    Double entendres aside, pinballs really are a sensual pleasure – heavy, slick and magnetic.

    Glossy chrome reflects the lights around them, and they warm in your pocket, and feel good in your fingers. You can see why Queeg loved them.

    You can also imagine the havoc you could wreak with a pouchful of them and one of these.

  • #a386 :: Promotional chalk

    030709The cookies we bought from my Brownie daughter arrived this week. New flavor: Dulce de Leche. Yum.
    030709The cookies we bought from my Brownie daughter arrived this week. New flavor: Dulce de Leche.

    Dulce de Leche: New for 2009, generic and inspired by the classic confections of Latin America, information pills these sweet, indulgent cookies are rich with milk caramel chips and stripes. They come in a turquoise box, and are made by Little Brownie Bakers.

    Yum.
    030809So, drugs I got to ride bikes last night with Lance Armstrong, shop who was doing a commemorative group ride down Sunset to launch a big, fund-raising touring art exhibit.

    They gave out chalk to the 100 t-shirted riders and the other several hundred of us tagalongs, who promptly took to graffiti’ing up the street in a generally positive fashion.

    Still, it was fun riding down otherwise deserted Sunset Boulevard with these people and no cars.

  • #a383 :: Foreign mystery parcel

    030409These have been floating around my parents’ house for as long as I can remember, link by the dozens, order it seems.

    There’s a pair serving as a keyfob, more about 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 from India, where our family traveled for two intoxicating, culture-shocked weeks when I was 14, and where Dad and Mom returned several times to lecture.

    Turn them to the right angle and they become wide-mouthed frGo on: shake them and listen.
    030409These have been floating around my parents’ house for as long as I can remember, advice 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 from India, where our family traveled for two intoxicating, culture-shocked weeks when I was 14, and where Dad and Mom returned several times to lecture.

    Turn them to the right angle and they become wide-mouthed frogs with wagging, jangling tongues. Then shake them and listen.
    030409These have been floating around my parents’ house for as long as I can remember, cure by the dozens, it seems.

    There’s a pair serving as a keyfob, try 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 from India, where our family traveled for two intoxicating, culture-shocked weeks when I was 14, and where Dad and Mom returned several times to lecture.

    Turn them to the right angle and they become wide-mouthed frogs with wagging, jangling tongues. Then shake them and listen.
    030509Oh, troche the wonder and menace of an unopened package from a foreign land.

    I know exactly what’s inside (I’ll blog it tomorrow) but it’s the promise of what it might contain that always spins me up.

    It bears all the markers of a Macguffin from a Hitchcock film – the lurid green packing paper, pills the neat knot of sturdy nylon twine, for sale the oddly shaped stamps and return address of Hong Kong.

    Why, it could be anything in there: A vial of radium. Live insects. An exotic dagger. Contraband hollow-point bullets. Antique hand-blown glass. Stolen South African gold.

    Wait, here’s a clue – the customs receipt declaring it as “specimen” …

  • #a380 :: Brass dingus

    030309I should be smarter. I should be able to classify and categorize based on Google findings if nothing else.

    But this one eludes me. Dad sent it along, troche symptoms and it seems to be machine-turned brass from India – maybe even with spiritual or religious symbolic significance.

    But I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is.

    Readers?

  • #a379 :: Las Vegas tiki culture artifact

    022809Before the age of fluorocarbons and exotic esthers, link a man used to scrub his bar of shaving soap into a lather with one of these, daub it on his face and shave.

    I gave this to Dad for Christmas a few years ago, and he sent it along last month in a boxful of HLOs he generously lent to the cause (yes, I’ll be mailing most of them back).

    Chromed brass, by the way it’s corroding. I don’t think he uses it much.
    022809Before the age of fluorocarbons and exotic esthers, help a man used to scrub his bar of shaving soap into a lather with one of these, daub thge resulting suds onto his face and shave.

    I gave this to Dad for Christmas a few years ago, and he sent it along last month in a boxful of HLOs he generously lent to the cause.

    Chromed brass, and little used, by the way it’s corroding. Somewhere in the sound stages of Hollywood I imagine a prop man is working very hard to apply this sort of finish to a gilded-age industrial opera.
    022809Before the age of fluorocarbons and exotic esthers, more about a man used to scrub his bar of shaving soap into a lather with one of these, daub it on his face and shave.

    I gave this to Dad for Christmas a few years ago, and he sent it along last month in a boxful of HLOs he generously lent to the cause (yes, I’ll be mailing most of them back).

    Chromed brass, and little used, by the way it’s corroding.
    030109The Aku-Aku Restaurant opened in 1960 inside the much-fabled Stardust Casino in Las Vegas.

    When the Stardust was imploded in 2007, prostate mob-culture journalist Nick Pileggi called it “the Bellagio of its day, ampoule the most dazzling casino out there.”

    The Aku Aku ran for 20 years.=, a veritable temple of tiki culture (Here’s its appetizer menu).

    My step-father-in-law, who has a massive Vegas collection both in cabinets and in his head, very generously gave me this today. (Thanks, Lee!)

    I don’t know whether this fellow is laughing or grimacing, but he’s the real deal – a rough-hewn head in wonderfully scratchy ceramic.

    He’s now living in a place of honor, among the other shrunken heads.

  • #a373 :: Snowshoe hare

    022209I think we forget how to see. We’re so absorbed with processing most of the time that we fail to register the weight of anything in front of us.

    “Oh, information pills shop there’s a car.” Not, site “if I could have an exploded-view version of that floating around, I’d really have something.”

    This was a Christmas gift at some point in the past 10 years. Hand-inlaid wood wraps a triangular tube of mirrors with a glass marble (or more likely, half-marble) at the end.

    It reminds you that you are seeing.
    022309Two thumbsplats for eyes, viagra slick back his ears, give him an immense tail, and now he’s some sort of steroidal racing bunny-ghost.

    My daughter’s latest class project calls for a creature endowed with camouflage. She made this – and several others like it – out of Super Sculpey. It’s so pure, I can almost envision having a tattoo made from it. Almost.

  • #a369 :: Lucky lead pig

    021909Once upon a time, stomach more about his paint was perfect.

    You can see it on his good side – the bright and chipper eye facing the lucky shamrock dangling from his left jowls – that look that says fortune will smile on us both if you keep me close.

    Flip to the other side – the stem of the shamrock – and age has turned him grim.

    Chipped paint has flaked away from his face, left him with a patina of jaundice, decay and despair.

    He’s sat overseeing my family’s kitchen for decades of happy parties, warm dinners, humdrum suppers and lonely midnight snacks. He’s seen three or four generations of scotties come and go. Watched my brother and sister and me grow up, squabble, chuckle, despair, rave and joke, waited quietly while we went off to school and then work and life beyond the kitchen, and return home there again and again.

    And my dad was kind enough to dethrone the little feller long enough to ship him to me to be duly added to this rambling catalog of obsession.

    Tomorrow, I’ll ship him back so he can return to his rightful place. And continue his vigil of bemused decay.

  • #a366 :: Original copper transmission line – Hoover Dam

    021609This is almost the holy grail of heavy little objects: a thing with history, abortion patina, functionality, exciting manufacture and moving parts. Jesus, it made me one happy tool-using ape to find this: a chunk of the original copper electrical transmission line installed during construction of the mighty Hoover Dam.

    For five bucks you get a gorgeous slice of copper cable – buffed of burrs and still bearing the black corrosion picked up while hanging over the Hoover Dam gorge for more than 7 decades charged with 287,500 hydroelectrically generated volts.

    Here’s the background from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation‘s brochure that came with it : (more…)

  • #a365 :: Lead type

    021409I work in this office, mind in my home. It’s a nice office, this web in a very nice home, but when you’re in a building 24/7, you develop a deep need to get the hell out before your urge to claw your hair out turns too real.

    Cabin fever and a three-day weekend conspired to send us to Las Vegas for a couple of nights.

    ON the way out, I took the kids on Desperado, a rattling, nasty, brutish roller-coaster at Buffalo Bill’s. Poised at Primm, NV, the huge casino complex is perfectly situated to suck in road-weary Angelenos looking for a respite and an early taste of the thrills in store in Las Vegas proper.

    The kids screamed their heads off. My spine reminded me of my age. And yet the chill blast of air, the wicked first plunge at 85mph and something like a 60-degree angle into a tunnel in the ground was just the thing to blow all remaining shreds of stir-crazy from my head.

    Later that evening I lay on my back on the floor of our Las Vegas hotel room marveling at two things:

    1. as I Twittered earlier:

      Imagining the mystic vortex of passion,depression,vulgarity,love & kink that was going on in this town last night.Vegas=such a human swamp.

      and …

    2. The performance of Ka, the Cirque du Soleil’s orgiastic blast of stagecraft, the single biggest, lushest, most ravishing thing I have ever seen on stage.

    I won’t begin to describe it, except to say that I wore a stupid grin throughout most of the 100-minute show, and left the purpose-built theater at the MGM Grand feeling well and thoroughly entertained.

    You won’t find video or many stills of the show, but you have ple
    021409I work in this office, order in my home. It’s a nice office, this in a very nice home, this web but when you’re in a building 24/7, you develop a deep need to get the hell out before your urge to claw your hair out turns too real.

    Cabin fever and a three-day weekend conspired to send us to Las Vegas for a couple of nights.

    ON the way out, I took the kids on Desperado, a rattling, nasty, brutish roller-coaster at Buffalo Bill’s. Poised at Primm, NV, the huge casino complex is perfectly situated to suck in road-weary Angelenos looking for a respite and an early taste of the thrills in store in Las Vegas proper.

    The kids screamed their heads off. My spine reminded me of my age. And yet the chill blast of air, the wicked first plunge at 85mph and something like a 60-degree angle into a tunnel in the ground was just the thing to blow all remaining shreds of stir-crazy from my head … Next morning, I lay on my back on the floor of our Las Vegas hotel room realigning my spine and marveling at two things:

    1. as I Twittered earlier, Las Vegas is an interesting place to spend Valentine’s day:

      Imagining the mystic vortex of passion,depression,vulgarity,love & kink that was going on in this town last night.Vegas=such a human swamp.

      and …

    2. The performance of Ka, the Cirque du Soleil’s orgiastic blast of stagecraft, the single biggest, lushest, most ravishing thing I have ever seen on stage.

    I won’t begin to describe it, except to say that I wore a stupid grin throughout most of the 100-minute show, and left the massive, purpose-built, state-of-the-art, 1000-seat theater at the MGM Grand feeling well and thoroughly entertained.

    You won’t find video or many stills of the show, but you have plenty of time to save up if it seems like your kind of fun: The show is four years into its 10-year contract.
    021409I work in this office, viagra in my home. It’s a nice office, in a very nice home, but when you’re in a building 24/7, you develop a deep need to get the hell out before your urge to claw your hair out turns too real.

    Cabin fever and a three-day weekend conspired to send us to Las Vegas for a couple of nights.

    ON the way out, I took the kids on Desperado, a rattling, nasty, brutish roller-coaster at Buffalo Bill’s. Poised at Primm, NV, the huge casino complex is perfectly situated to suck in road-weary Angelenos looking for a respite and an early taste of the thrills in store in Las Vegas proper.

    The kids screamed their heads off. My spine reminded me of my age. And yet the chill blast of air, the wicked first plunge at 85mph and something like a 60-degree angle into a tunnel in the ground was just the thing to blow all remaining shreds of stir-crazy from my head.

    Later that evening I lay on my back on the floor of our Las Vegas hotel room marveling at two things:

    1. as I Twittered earlier:

      Imagining the mystic vortex of passion,depression,vulgarity,love & kink that was going on in this town last night.Vegas=such a human swamp.

      and …

    2. The performance of Ka, the Cirque du Soleil’s orgiastic blast of stagecraft, the single biggest, lushest, most ravishing thing I have ever seen on stage.

    I won’t begin to describe it, except to say that I wore a stupid grin throughout most of the 100-minute show, and left the purpose-built theater at the MGM Grand feeling well and thoroughly entertained.

    You won’t find video or many stills of the show, but you have plenty of time to save up if it seems like your kind of fun: The show is four years into its 10-year contract.
    021509It’s fitting that I mark the end of my second full year of daily obsession on this blog with such an archetypal handful of heavy little objects:

    I found these samples of a truly lovely display font in an antique shop in rural Arizona earlier this week – artifacts of a dead technology going for a buck apiece.

    Moveable type remained nearly unchanged for more than 400 years after Gutenberg first puzzled it together – solid blocks shaped into reversed letters, side effects inked to move message to page – until computers blew away all the old technology and the ensuing conflagration began taking with it the newspapers, page magazines and other ephemera with which a race has spent centuries defining itself … (more…)

  • #a364 :: Las Vegas thrill tickets

    021309It’s rare that an object straddles the razor-fine line between art and camp, remedy more about between craft and kitsch.

    Yet here is a little man of bronze, remedy made to recline in the cup of a water-pocked stone.

    His blobby countenance, his Giacomettian proportions keep him from being a thing of manufactured cuteness and maybe lend him a bit of gravitas. Or, he could be just a quaint paperweight. I can’t decide.

    This is something my father lent to the cause by way of his collection.
    021409I work in this office, dosage in my home. It’s a nice office, in a very nice home, but when you’re in a building 24/7, you develop a deep need to get the hell out before your urge to claw your hair out turns too real.

    Cabin fever and a three-day weekend conspired to send us to Las Vegas for a couple of nights.

    ON the way out, I took the kids on Desperado, a rattling, nasty, brutish roller-coaster at Buffalo Bill’s. Poised at Primm, NV, the huge casino complex is perfectly situated to suck in road-weary Angelenos looking for a respite and an early taste of the thrills in store in Las Vegas proper.

    The kids screamed their heads off. My spine reminded me of my age. And yet the chill blast of air, the wicked first plunge at 85mph and something like a 60-degree angle into a tunnel in the ground was just the thing to blow all remaining shreds of stir-crazy from my head … Next morning, I lay on my back on the floor of our Las Vegas hotel room realigning my spine and marveling at two things: (more…)

  • #a353 :: Organiser badge

    020209The origins of this piece are dim and inscrutable, look but what really matters is this:

    My father just shipped me two small boxes full of HLOs gathered from around the house, doctor and among them are some real beauties like this: He found this in London a long time ago and gave it to my mother because, website as he says rightly, “She is such an organizer.”
    A maker’s mark on its pot-metal back says it was made by “I. Marcus & Co. at 145 Hounds (unreadable), London.” The hand-lettered enamel front and the gothic swirls put it solidly in the Victorian age, but Googling bears no fruit.

    Anyone care to hazard a guess?

  • #a348 :: Prime Meridian rock candy

    012709This rode home in a goodie bag from a birthday party at my son’s school.

    I love the millefiore design aesthetic, page advice which makes me wonder if mistakes vanish more easily when rubbed with yellow rubber or blue.
    012809We lay these arbitrary lattices of meaning over earth and sky, ambulance trying to explain the wonder of existence.

    When industry and science began to catch up to the human need to explain who was where exactly when and how far is here from there, we came up with the notion of time, the 24 hour clock and the system of navigation still used today.

    For earthly reckoning, it all boils down to what happens with the sun in reference to a hairs-breadth line slicing the planetary map from the north pole to the south: the Prime Meridian. (more…)

  • #a341 :: Obama campaign pin

    011909Here’s the other end of this equation – a fine brown potato, sickness now pocked with the wounds of a thousand battles … well, prostate not really.

    This is simply what it looks like when your son swipes your Christmas present and gets crazy with a hapless spud … the potato’s a couple of ounces lighter, there are nasty cylindrical potato-pellets all over the house and you’re both laughing and trading the fun off to shoot each other because it’s such stupid fun.
    011809I scoffed at these things, more about which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, information pills sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

    Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, unhealthy only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

    This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

    It shouldn’t work at all, really.

    But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
    011809I scoffed at these things, link which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, sickness sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

    Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

    This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

    It shouldn’t work at all, really.

    But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
    011809I scoffed at these things, information pills which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, ask sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

    Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

    This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

    It shouldn’t work at all, really.

    But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
    011809I scoffed at these things, nurse which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, search sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

    Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, view only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

    This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

    It shouldn’t work at all, really.

    But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
    ENLARGEI never repeat heavy little objects.

    I mean, sales never.

    My little daily obsession can be a cruel taskmistress, sildenafil sometimes commanding me to find something cool to post even when nothing cool has come through my life. But like an idiot samurai, information pills I live and die by a code set in motion long ago and over which I (choose to) have no control.

    However, rules are meant to be questioned and this object – like grizzlies in a cloning lab – bears repeating:

    No punditry, no anecdotes, no pontification can outweigh, outrun or outlast this fact: We put two decent men into the White House today.

    We ended the longest, ugliest domestically-generated reign of terror since the Red Scare of the 50s or, arguably, the Civil War.

    And we bought this once-great nation a little extra time, and a chance to become great again, before darkness could swallow us all.

    Onward. And upward. Together.

    Someone is reminding us how great America can be, because we all know deep in our marrow, how great Americans can be when they embrace their diversity and work together for a common good.

    We should listen. And act as one. Because we know it’s better than continuing to destroy each other with words, and the nation with ideological conflict that matters far less than every liberty, right and joy we’ve allowed the past eight years to piss away.

    So let’s go.

  • #a336 :: Railroad date nail

    ENLARGE
    ENLARGE
    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, medications approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, sickness you could almost fall into this one, 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…)

  • #a334 :: Tin advertising whistle

    ENLARGEVintage viral marketing, treat for what may or may not be Captain Black tobacco.

    Blow through the stem and you get a sweet bosun’s-pipe peep. By the look of the printing, price this dates back at least 50 or 60 years, but Googling bears no clear clues to its origins.

    You gotta love the mascot’s pissed-off expression and his jaunty pirate’s hat.