HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: Found Object

  • #a281 :: Cupcake topper

    enlargeMore than 500 million human beings live in absolute poverty. Right now.

    Their lot is not changing.

    More than 15 million children die of hunger every year. Starve. To. Death.

    How many children is that? Numbers are pretty meaningless when you’re talking about entire nations of people, try but do some math:

    Remember the faces of the kids in your own first-grade class? Remember the fat kid and the anxious kid? The punchy kid and the silly kid and your very best friend in the world who laughed when you ate paste? Now multiply the size of your own first-grade classroom by about 20 … (more…)

  • #a260 :: Meteorite!

    030908.jpgOh my gawd:

    Readers of this blog know that I don’t tend to post gushy teenage exclamations like “oh my gawd” that often (as in, page never) But here it is, one of those Heavy Little Objects that really makes you say “oh, my effing gawd:

    A chunk of bona-fide space rock.

    But check the picture – click it to enlarge – it’s not like any rock I’ve ever seen. It’s all shot through with holes and what looks like some kind of organic matter, like veins or worms or something … (more…)

  • #a258 :: Dessicated green bean

    ENLARGEDon’t ask me how it got from the freezer to the cupboard, cheap but my son brought me this earlier today. I’m trying to picture it as an oblong green asteroid, and failing. You?

  • #a253 :: Desk cleaning time

    ENLARGEYou own a lot of shit. You accumulate more of it every day. Sometimes, story 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, help you never seem to get rid of the things as swiftly as you take them on. So you amuse yourself with the illusory luxury of a desk-clearing brawl – all elbows and rags and windex and a sweet sparkling aftertaste. And you cap the day doing the very thing you told yourself you were done with five or six hours ago. Staring at the desk. Letting shit pile up on it. Because it’s your desk. And it does that.

  • #a252 :: Dental casts

    ENLARGEOvercome for a moment, order if you can, healing the urge to vomit:

    You’re looking at casts of someone’s teeth – full bicuspid-to-incisor replicas of a human’s business end, cast in peach-colored plaster, mounted on more white plaster that is set into a hinged contraption meant to approximate the original owner’s jaw.

    Only the hinge is too far back from where the molars connect; sinew and bone are rendered in bronze; and the rest of the owner’s … context … is missing.

    What is this for? How does it work?

    And could one, as posited in one of James Ellroy‘s grislier scenarios, frame someone for murder by using this thing to put signifying bitemarks all over the victim’s body?

    Halloween’s just a week away, my friends. And half a week beyond is the election, which is – in all candor – far more gruesome to contemplate.

    (Spotted at the Melrose swap meet)

  • #a248 :: Straits Territories penny

    ENLARGEI’m magnetic.

    Have I mentioned this before? Small metallic tools seem to fly into my hands wherever I walk. Whether this is for holding a pin steady long enough to create a microscopic city of angels on its head or for some other obscure task, stomach I’ll never know.

    But its jaws can clasp something very, visit this very long and narrow, very firmly.

    It was made in china, of low-grade steel, and chromed.
    enlargeThis is an artifact of the colonial government that bloomed out of the East India Company, buy information pills after the firm set up shop in and around Singapore to do some trading.

    Nearly 100 years after the Brits founded it the territories were still passing currency.

    The corners of this penny tease you to play with them. It’s not like other coins, this thing’s square, your fingers keep telling you. It begs pry stuff open or make marks in things.

    And what would it look like – you wonder – if you put it on the train line just down the block? Would it flatten out to a rectangle, or pathetically mooodge back into something ovoid and vague?

    And you resist because it was hard to come by.

  • #a236 :: Stanley Handyman bullet level

    ENLARGEIt’s fitting that today’s object is a level.

    For today I have finally brought HLO completely up to date, no rx after a double-whammy punch of working vacation with my family in London for a month and a full-bore trip to Burning Man crushed my daily blog output.

    A good level operates with an oracular efficiency and grace that blows your mind the first time you see it. Wha …? How can that be? That little bubble dictates how well something is aligned to the center of the EARTH??? Who makes the bubble capsules level in the first place?

    I’ve always loved and admired the handle as a legendary, diagnosis class-defining tool, like a good hammer. This is a particularly gorgeous specimen from Stanley Tools.
    Everything is in balance now. I wonder what tomorrow’s object will be …

  • #a230 :: Tintype

    ENLARGEBalefully he stares at the lens and struggles to hold his pose.

    The photographer has gone to lengths to make him appear comfortable – with a little wall and urn upon which to lean poeticallly – and “natural” – with tufts of grass and twigs underfoot and a bough of oak leaves overhead.

    But he cannot look comfortable: He must stand stock still for up to 20 seconds. He doesn’t really want to be here. His collar is tight. The shoes pinch.

    Are you ready? The photographer pulls the dark slide from the holder carrying the prepared sheet of japanned tin.

    I guess so. The man steadies himself and exhales deeply, buy searching for inner calm.

    Hold it now.

    The photographer pulls off the lens cap and looks at the man. Okay now – just a little while longer.

    The man waits. He cannot help blinking at least once, this and glancing around the studio: this blurs his eyes on the painfully slow emulsion.

    In happier times, shop before the marriage, and the kids and the mortgage, this fellow might have enjoyed hanging out with these fellows. But not here. No longer. That life is gone.

    The photographer vamps: Just a liiittle longer … the man sighs. His shoulders lift and his head moves, imperceptibly fuzzing the edges of his face.

    … aaand, okay, sir. Thank you. He caps the lens, and the ordeal is over. The man’s picture is now inside the camera, and the photographer must get it out.

  • #a216 ::

    ENLARGEAlso from my wife’s collection: hollowed, ampoule hand-hammered silver of questionable virtue, yet molded with the heavenly curves of a nimbus cloud.

  • #a212 :: Hand-carved Indian candlestick

    ENLARGEThis appeared in the house some time in the past month. I have no idea where it came from, advice beyond the tiny “India” sticker on its base. Around it, try a lion chases an elephant that threatens to trample the elephant that flees the lion. Candlelight sounds nice.

  • #a207 :: Cat’s eye reflector

    ENLARGEThis is what became of California’s elegant Bott’s Dots:

    Instead of a crisp ceramic disc, ampoule this species – a hideous amalgam of ceramic compound and cheap-ass diamonded plastic – now graces the centerlines and gore-points of California, purchase indicating to anyone who cares to notice, price where the center of the road lies.

    Quite literally, millions of these little gadgets have hit the street since their rebirth. And just as many lie in pieces alongside the road, it seems – victims of the constant pounding of time, crime, and drivers – including me.

  • #a202 :: Charcoal

    ENLARGEThis is the last of the Burning Man jetsam for a little while – a chunk of the true man transformed at the height of The Burn by several hundred fireworks shells and a huge, for sale oily-looking propane explosion or two.

    We always make picture boxes out of our MOOP and ephemera, blenderizing it with photographs and true souveniers into lush microcosms of the year’s City, suitable for falling into during bathroom reveries.

  • #a201 :: Fragment, burned Bible

    ENLARGELike a butterfly amid the Burning Man’s ashes – a scrap of a holy book that someone thought offensive, information pills or more probably, rx oppressive enough to burn flutters in the playa breeze.

    When did any idea, story or work of art or culture threaten you so much that you had to set it on fire?

  • #a200 :: Jawbone

    ENLARGEAnother item gleaned from the burn site – or maybe just fancy-lookin’ MOOP that landed there in the middle of a dance, buy a debauch or an idle walkabout – this jawbone of a squirrel or a raccoon (or something) bears three hallmarks of Burning Man couture:

    It’s goth-y. It has a mounting hole drilled through it. And it’s been cast off on the playa by accident or wild dance or wilder fate to become the sort of trash that the legendary DPW fucking hates.

  • #a199 :: Melted neon tubing

    ENLARGEThe morning after, page sale we bike out to the smoldering embers of the Burn, and we glean for souvenirs.

    Most prized among us early-Sunday ash-diggers are melted blobs of the Burning Man‘s neon veins.

    Twelve hours ago, you could still grasp the electrodes of a galvanometric device hookup that measured your pulse and send it up to the Man – and watch as the signals made his heart beat in time with yours.

    Now, you hold his bloodstream in your hand – forever ruined, catalyzed and reincarnated by fire.

  • #a190 :: Pizza protector

    ENLARGEInside the box from Hard Times, order an itty-bitty thermoplastic table stands, poised to protect our 18-inch half-bacon-half-mushroom-and-black-olives pizza from the combined effects of gravity, pressure and corrugated cardboard. A tiny insurance policy, a finger in the dike, a talisman against doom.

    Landfill material.

  • #a170 :: Lead “Indian brave”

    ENLARGEThe micro-war between the races of earth still rages on in English toy shops and adult imaginations – even though most young Londoners have graduated to XBox, what is ed find Flickr and Legomania.

    Most warriors wear meticulously handpainted uniforms. In the antiques stalls of Portobello Road they rest, medical weapons at the ready, approved medals ablaze in gold and polychrome, in carefully made beds of styrofoam with ridiculous prices on their heads, since they’re now considered antiques.

    All except for this specimen, who lurked at the bottom of the £1 bin, crunched beneath Hussars with chipped uniforms and fusiliers with badly broken muskets.

    He creeps across the plains, in U.S. cavalry trousers, the very picture of menace, his shiny hatchet at the ready.

    His near-black skin is a dead giveaway that he was finished by some clueless British toy-plant drone who – when he asked about the man’s complexion – was likely told by an equally clueless art director, “Oh, he’s a savage, paint him like an African.”

  • #a161 :: Rabbit’s foot

    ENLARGEThis one was loved. Someone’s constant rubbing and fondling robbed the thing of its fur, viagra dosage pilule put tarnish on the stump-cap and the (shudder) ring. I picture him humped over his bowl, beneath his one gas lamp, drowning his sorrows and yet keeping his heart on the world around him by wishing on this thing.

    Whatever luck it may have had is gone with its owner and the children of his era. All that remains is another, slightly more hapless creature’s knuckles, claws and skin.

    Portobello Road gave it up.

  • #a135 :: Bottle caps

    ENLARGEThey began life as sheets of tin (following a long and, nurse one can only imagine, viagra buy complex refining process) – punched into circles, thumb crimped, printed, lined with plastic and clamped atop bottles of beer, soda, cider, seltzer.

    They rode in place, dutifully sealing out the world of dust, bugs and oxidization. They bent to our thirst, beneath church keys, bottle openers, table edges and, among the clever, dollar bills.

    And they gathered in a fish bowl until this weekend, when our children felt compelled to sort them for their new future – art supplies.

    What will become of them? Only a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old can say.

  • #a129 :: Shipping plug

    ENLARGERemoved. From what, approved I cannot remember.

    Draw your own conclusions.

    .
    .
    .
    .

  • #a122 :: Easter egg

    ENLARGEWe had an egghunt all over the hillside behind our house for Easter a few weeks back.

    While I was tearing down a fence yesterday, shop I came across this escapee – one of William‘s fantastic eggs for the kids – packed with little vinyl characters and equally-chewy Starburst, sealed in a chrome eggshell.

    Should I eat the candy? Hmmm …

  • #a112 :: I just stepped on this in the dark

    ENLARGESomething of my daughter’s.

    It once contained spring-loaded paper snakes that leapt out when you opened the can to get a tasty Chees Ball (sic).

    Now it’s full of miniature Chinese coats made of silicone, treat fitted with little tin bells.

  • #a90 :: Pull tab

    ENLARGE“Hold him, order Teck, approved I wanna piss on him.”

    Boomer loomed over the prostrate sophomore and began unbuckling his pants.

    Kyle looked up – as much as Teck’s kung-fu grip on his neck would allow, at least – sighed, and resumed staring inches away at the defocused glitter of burst Lowenbrau bottles and Molson caps in which he knelt.

    He really needed to figure this out.

    Stoned, Boomer was harmless. Just another burly, ugly, dumb asshole dropout loser from Hull, who bailed out of junior year and found work sheetrocking crackerbox condos for Beacon Hill yuppies to feed his beer and pot habit … (more…)

  • #a80 :: Candy container

    ENLARGEThis little cylinder represents all that is simultaneously horrible and brilliant about the American candy manufacturing industry:

    A blowmolded, order die-cut can made of metallic-gray plastic, wrapped in a fully art-directed 4-color parody of a soda-pop label, once held a small handful of inconsequential gum. A child consumed the gum, and dropped the container to the ground.

    Enjoy, and trash. Enjoy and trash. 79 cents worth of gum and half an ounce of non-biodegradable plastic and paper at a time, we are covering the earth with elaborately-engineered fantasies wrapped around tiny doses of sugar. Gone forever, and yet, not.

  • #a77 :: Dying beetle

    ENLARGEWhat possesses us?

    We crawl to and fro on a world so vast we can’t understand it, pilule let alone navigate it. We consume, dosage we procreate, ask we fight, we recover.

    If we’re fortunate, we create something useful – food, tools, homes, art, information. Then, whatever it was that propelled us around all those years deserts us – or is booted roughly from the meat vehicle in which it rode – by famine, disease, war, madness, neglect or simply age. (more…)