Like hippos emerging through river foam (?), thumb Kinder brand Happy Hippos are hazelnut-cream cookie pods dipped in thick-grained sugar and given a few squirts of color in each eye just prior to put into individual cellophane wraps and released to a cute-susceptible public.
They’re also yummy.
There is a certain poetry to this tiny portrait of one of man’s oldest surviving places of ceremony:
A matrix of dots, physician etched or blown into a block of clear glass, pharm spells out Stonehenge‘s shape at palm size, giving you a portable tour of the place.
Here, no less than there, the broken circles of pillars and lintels leave you with nothing but awe and questions. How’d they do that?
But there, time really does feel stopped. Here it’s merely captured in a glassy snapshot, fetishized for the tourists. Of whom I am one.
Being at Stonehenge gives one the impression of having become stuck in time – an everlasting moment as you walk around these unmoving
The vehicular fetishes of young Britons of the 20th century line the crowded shelves of the marvelous Brighton Toy and Model Museum. This land-speed monster dates from the 40s or 50s.
The world’s hardshell exterior surrounds a doughy heart of kitsch:
Anything initially cool – the remote to a Nintendo Wii game system, health for instance – can impart its cool to common objects by simple mimicry. Bluntly put, treatment things that look like other definite things are automatically “better” because of the same dim-witted value system that allows cars to all look alike because no one’s brave enough to buck current tastes to design something original.
And so, sick a chunk of branded schwag – a cheap LED flashlight is made more desirable (and worth an hour-long wait in a game expo line with other dupes) by modeling it on the Nintendo game controller.
Sizzle sold, itch scratched, creativity avoided.
And while we’re at it, information pills sometimes you make mistakes so egregious that only wiping them out with a rubberized chunk of fish and rice will do.
My wife found this at our favorite Japanese supermarket, and kindly annotated it with another HLO – the venerable Post-It note – about which, more later.
My wife gave me this for my birthday a couple years ago, information pills to add to my growing collection.
Tiki culture is a marvelous cross-pollination of camp, what is ed partying and 50s mass-marketed hipsterism.
This one was designed, slip-poured, glazed and fired by Tiki Farm, but if you’re hunting for others, Munktiki turns out some beauts. You pull the hairbone plug from the back to fill him, then stick a straw through his fontanelle to drink.
And besides – sometimes, only drinking from the shrunken skull of a ritual victim will assuage the demons behind your eyes.
At the hallucinogenic nexus of pop culture, information pills American tastes and mass-production technology, here odd blossoms bud.
Here, nurse forming an icon of cool stealth for the amusement of the mobs calls for transparent violet jelly silicone.
What better way to say “They know nothing of his presence until his blade has already passed – and by then it’s too late.”
Something 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.
She waits, information pills coyly fanning her hair.
Demure yet voluptuous, site sensual yet pensive, she waits for the tide to rush in and bear her away.
At barely five inches tall, she weighs more than a pound. And she is magnetic, both figuratively and literally.
With no maker’s mark to introduce her, no indications of origin to lead us to her story, she’s a perfect blank slate for fairy tales.
She’s simply what you want her to be.
My wife found this excellent machine at a garage sale, and and garaged it in our bedroom alongside the others in her collection, physician which includes a purple travel trailer, stuff a hot-orange Stude custom and a thrashed yellow fuel tanker.
She’s a collector not of brands (Lesney, Dinky, Matchbox are all the same in her eyes) nor of mint-ness (most of her two-dozen little cars are chipped and beaten escapees from probably more than on e toybox). She collects something deeper: The inherent, undefinable coolness of body design, paint color, fit and finish – which is one of the myriad reasons I love her so.
The pot-metal chassis of this old Lesney declares it to be an “American Ford Station Wagon.” Looking at the beetled brows over its headlights, the slightly-sinking fins sprouting from its flanks, I’d put it at 1959 or 1960, the era in which America was detoxing from its sick jones for baroque styling – and stepping away, perhaps forever, from the height of automotive art.
Dig the tinted window plastic, two-tone paint and trailer hitch. If gas weren’t $4 a gallon, I’d be out hunting down the real thing on eBay Motors right now.
I hunted it down, this web searching from gift shop to gift shop in Kona last summer, stomach wiith a will.
I wanted something real – of bone – something distinct from the beautiful, sildenafil overly-copied and -cheapened polynesian talismans littering the tourist coast of Hawaii’s big island.
I eventually tracked this down at a shop specializing in such Oceanian symbols. Hand-tapered and shaped, from a single cow’s vertebra, it hangs from a nylon thong around my neck. The artist shaped the points to razor sharpness, around a circular space that keeps the points from severing my jugular veins in my sleep.
It is transparent to airport metal detectors, impervious to all the chemicals I bathe my body in daily
in the shower, inscrutably timeless in its design and beauty. It was an object of pure obsession until I found the right one, and fulfillment the moment I chose it. Even now I can’t say for sure why I’m so attached to it, but that it’s honest and powerful and beautiful.
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We plunge onward now, order from the sublimely simple to the ridiculously obscene:
My wife’s company made a licensing deal that left a storage room packed to the gills with sample toys. They emptied it last week, order and out popped these two hideous bastards. She concluded, rightly, that they belonged with me.
I immediately opened it and recycled the packaging – and with it, any hope of recalling the name of this particular pair of monster symbiotes crafted by the low-paid artisans who toil in overseas obscurity for the twisted, cash-bloated juggernaut McFarlane Toys.
But that almost doesn’t matter … (more…)
It figures that a freakishly shaped girl doll – one of the greatest, ailment most successful toys of all time – would have such cute props.
One day, cheap the endless toy-surf that washes through this house coughed up this itty-bitty soda-fountain treat, doctor and I had to ask my 6-year-old daughter what it was.
Somewhere in China, a low-paid worker pulled a plastic rackful of these out of an injection mold and hung it to cool. Another worker likely cut it loose, and a third daubed its top with creamy white paint …
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Amid the hard-packed, online shit-strewn dirt at one hilly intersection on our way home today, illness this gleamed up at me.
Someone lost an ocean liner. You can hold it in your hand:
Sleekness, power and gross tonnage expressed in a few grams of blow-molded thermoplastic.
Somewhere, either a toddler lost track of a toy he hasn’t the attention span to miss, or a parent or nanny grew tired of picking it up and left it in the trash, leaves and street-dust – rudderless and adrift.
It was the first thing she had put out on the thrashed card table at the group yard sale.
She had meant it that way, erectile a break from the failed career, from the crushed dream, from the gorgeous, neurotic, narcissistic jerk who gave it to her.
But here it was still: The last thing to be boxed up for GoodWill so they could sweep and put away the tables and retire inside for one more frozen Margarita and god knows what all else the evening held.
It should have sold earlier – hell, $1.50 knocked down to 50 cents, and it still didn’t move.
But after the fifth giggling kid in a row had left it with three fingers and thumb clenched around its raised middle digit she could bear it no longer and moved it out of reach, to the back of the table.
She restored its articulated knuckles to the graceful suggestion of direction it had held ever since … the thumb clasped around beneath the straight-angled index finger, others curled neatly beside as if to say “There, that way, go that way” … ever since Jason dumped her.
Was it pathos or bathos she was enduring now? She couldn’t be sure. The classics professor had been so ungodly dull.
She stared down at it, struggling to block visions of him giving her the box with puppydog eyes, of him stroking her breast with it, picking his ear with it, leaving it with pinky and thumb extended from fist in the corny-hippy Hawaiian “hang loose” gesture whenever he left in the morning.
Finally, she flipped it into the trash. Then she thought about it all the next day on the bus to art school.
Around age 12, side effects I got a gift: The high privilege of four crates full of vintage Marvel Comics, stored in my parents’ attic by a student.
I devoured them greedily, and as powerfully as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s bickering, conflicted, neurotically imperfect superheroes affected my view of graphic art and juvenile fiction, the villains hit me harder:
The Green Goblin, the Vulture, Paste-Pot Pete, Dr. Doom, and the one I loved most, Doc Ock.
Here’s the eight-limbed bastard, molded in high-impact thermoplastic by MediCom, the Japanese company that builds and sells Kubricks. He is a brilliant engineer, driven mad by the experiment that fused his mechanical arms with his body.
And he thirsts for blood.
I’m actually a little proud of this. I built one for everyone in our camp at Burning Man a couple years ago to mount on their handlebars:
I found a box of little “crystal” Yoda figure kits for a quarter apiece at a flea market. I glued each together, link drilled the base out and inserted a high-output Chinese LED.
I then wired the LED with alligator clips, running the wire through holes I drilled in a chunk of yellow-mirrored Plexiglas I had sitting around from a previous Burning Man …
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Vinny and I went fishing once. My best buddy since 6th grade A/V duty, viagra buy my (then) future best man. My good friend.
Out in his scruffy little 18-foot runabout with the asthmatic Evinrude – or was it a Yamaha – in Long Island Sound.
We set out from New London mid-morning, fortified with a cooler full of beer and sandwiches and a boxful of old sea tackle.
Swacked by a wicked sinus infection, I was popping 12-hour time-release decongestants, which slowly did the trick, so I felt well enough to sail.
The wind and sea were fair, the air about 75 degrees. It was a damn nice day for catching bluefish …
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