HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: Model

  • #a430 Spun aluminum pillbox

    042109A Halloween candy bowl kept at the back of our cupboard finally (pardon the pun) gave up the ghost.

    Used to be you would reach into it for a tasty treat, drug and a little infrared sensor triggered an animated rubber witch’s hand to snatch at yours and a voicebox would rasp, thumb “Trick or treat!”

    This morning we reached in to find the rubber-encased, cotton-stuffed digits had gone the way of all silicone flesh.

    I’m loving these thing
    042109A Halloween candy bowl kept at the back of our cupboard finally (pardon the pun) gave up the ghost.

    Used to be you would reach into it for a tasty treat, more about and a little infrared sensor triggered an animated rubber witch’s hand to snatch at yours and a voicebox would rasp, “Trick or treat!”

    This morning we reached in to find the rubber-encased, cotton-stuffed digits had gone the way of all silicone flesh.

    I’m loving these things so much, they may even get the Object of the Month award.
    042209I’m at the far end of the wire.

    The warmth of the crowd rises up into the moldy canvas peak of the tent here. It pours from their eyes, search their upturned, prostate open mouths.

    I toss the balance pole into the air, pivot the other way, catch the pole and head back across the wire.

    Their glasses glint up at my sparkling soles, my cartoon skirt.

    Light from the fresnels spangles the tent through the beveled reflections of all that eyewear.

    I stroll to the other side.

    And this image from our apartment is what I focus on behind my eyes.

    God DAMN it, Seth. You left me.

  • #a402 :: “B.O.B.” toy

    032309Me: Aw, rx crap, side effects I don’t know what I’m going to shoot tonight, I don’t have any good objects to photograph.

    Daughter: How about my popsicle?
    032309Me: Aw, pilule crap, I don’t know what I’m going to shoot tonight, I don’t have any good objects.

    Daughter: How about my popsicle, Daddy?

    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, price but it’s got enough yuks and snappy design to make an honest buck, buy 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.

    The movie industry turns out billions of toys like this in dozens of fast-food-premium deals every year, and somewhere there must be a gimme otaku whose walls are lined with every movie tie-in toy ever made.

  • #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.

  • #a324 :: Fuse-Bead eyeball

    ENLARGEMy son shambles in, diagnosis decease his hand covering his brow.

    “Dad, I hate to tell you this, but I’ve got a terrible case of pinkeye.”

    “What??? Oh, no. C’mere, let me see.”

    He turns and I see this fantastic Fuse-bead concoction clapped to his face.

    It’s still warm, fresh from the iron.

    I’m doubly thrilled – a) that he’s making a gift of it to me and b) that it’s not really fuckin’ pinkeye.

    In seconds, we’re both cackling like idiots.

  • #a315 :: Z-card

    ENLARGEHave I mentioned these?

    I got a motorcycle in my stocking this year.

    I picture myself cut about an inch tall from 1/8″-thick styrofoam, approved clad in teeny, remedy tiny laminate leather, my shiny mug grinning. Flat helmet under my flat arm.

    Peace to all out there. I hope yours has been a warm and strengthening holiday. I think we as the human race have a lot of work ahead of us.

  • #a310 :: Blown glass Indian chief

    ENLARGEWe decorated the tree a couple days ago, there and tonight we threw a massive Christmas party – I spent most of the day cooking ribs (27 racks) and gumbo (probably six or eight gallons) for 100 good friends, web colleagues and family.

    It was a swell time.

    At the height of it, diagnosis a toddler knocked a glass ornament off the tree. It shattered on the floor, an instant galaxy of pink shards … (more…)

  • #a295 :: Chocolate laptop

    ENLARGEThe company Christmas party went off tonight as it always does – a full-blown bash with excellent food and good company.

    The capper to the meal was a créme brulée in a little chocolate box, cialis 40mg topped with this emblem cast in dark and white chocolate.

    I always choose the cruelest month to do my no-refined-sugar fast, so I Ziploc’d this and tossed it into the freezer for later – which either renders the message it carries deferred, undelivered or simply held in suspended animation.

    I do so crave chocolate right now.

  • #a283 :: Million-dollar bill bible tract

    enlargeThis fine object puts the specie in specious:

    Someone at the Christian organization LivingWaters.com worked very, information pills very hard on this piece of counterfeit. The four-color printing and gravure work are fine anough to pass the “holy, shit, WTF is that” moment after you’ve picked it up and still can’t believe it’s not money – that split second before you turn it over and learn the truth … (more…)

  • #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…)

  • #a276 :: Plasticene scottie

    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…)

  • #a259 :: Polly Pocket shoes & handbags

    ENLARGETiny accessories for teensy simulacra, dosage mind these silicone shoelets and bagettes piled up in my daughter’s room until her obsession with Polly Pocket wore off and she tired of them and moved onto a new obsession.

    At some point, here she got it into her head that she could sell them on eBay. I think she’s more excited about selling something on eBay than making any money off them.

    She laid out a neat arrangement – I helped with the shoes – I shot the 14 dolls, 20 dresses, two shirt-and-pants sets (for the two boy dolls) and the tiny furniture, and next week when it’s art/music/internet night again, we’ll put it all up on eBay and see who bites.

    She’s 7.

  • #a255 :: Bakugan set

    ENLARGEIttybitty, approved spherical monster-robot-creatures, physician about the size of a large marble, with rare-earth magnets in their butts. Roll them or drop them down onto a sheet-tin battle card and spring-loaded wings, necks and feet flip out. Grrrarrrghh, I guess. Nobody ever went broke overestimating the obsession of 9-year-old boys. If I were a kid I’d be raving about this to my parents on a daily basis. Like someone I know and love.

  • #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)

  • #a251 :: Valve caps

    ENLARGEHot rod culture coughs up the kitsch once again: Dice-shaped valve caps that say, treat “I’m a-gamblin’ with my life in this heap! I’m a risky man! Don’t trifle with me, information pills ‘cos I don’t care what happens next!”

    Only these magnificent little bastards rode around on my thrashed ’62 Schwinn for countless street miles and six visits to the playa, and that hot-rodder patina of mock chrome is flaking off to reveal the cheap, Chinese-made hearts of vivid red plastic within.

  • #a250 :: Big Bro Slig

    ENLARGEIn some lights, web my 9-year-old son is my very heart dancing around outside my body, discount a handsome, smart, innocent, brave, funny, sensitive boy.

    In others, he’s a degenerate, unwashed, mouthbreathing game addict who would rather live a fantasy life through his hunched shoulders, twitching thumbs and unblinking bloodshot eyeballs than virtually anything else, including eating, talking, sleeping or paying attention to you.

    In other words, he’s a chip off the old block. Which as much as anything explains why he gets to play only 30 minutes on school nights and 60 minutes on weekends.

    This Lego creation is a slavishly true model of a Big Bro Slig, one of the army of bioengineered freaks that try to kill you in Oddworld, Munch’s Odyssee – the lad’s current drooling obsession, which he talks about pretty much non-stop.

    Don’t even ask me about how he almost ruined Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath for me permanently – two full years after I decided it was the greatest video game ever created.

  • #a215 :: Bus

    ENLARGEParallel to the spine of the bus:
    LEYLAND
    ROYAL TIGER COACH
    MADE IN ENGLAND
    BY LESNEY

    (and then just beneath the engine compartment)

    #40

    From my wife’s collection.

  • #a214 :: Miniature tempura

    ENLARGETiny morsels of molded silicon, tadalafil hand-daubed to an irresistible crunchylookingness. Only 900 yen. The linchpin to a successful front-window display in your 1:8-scale restaurant.

    From the same niche of Japanese collectibles culture as this

  • #a191 :: Metal ant

    enlargeA birthday gift from my aunt. I kid you not. Eight rods of steel, remedy buy artfully bent, and welded to three metal spheres. Where’s he off to? What’s his business?

  • #a167 :: Stonehenge keychain

    ENLARGEThere 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

  • #a154 :: Antique race car

    ENLARGEThe 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.

  • #a146 :: Wiimote flashlight

    ENLARGEThe 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.

  • #a141 :: Sushi erasers

    ENLARGEAnd 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.

  • #a140 :: Shrunken-head tiki mug

    ENLARGEMy 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.

  • #a120 :: Silicone clown fish puzzle

    enlargeA lifetime of desiring and acquiring manufactured things has warped my brain, diagnosis reprogrammed my very lizard DNA, I’m sure of it:

    This toy’s translucent color and pungent, exotic-plastic aroma make it seem good enough to eat.

    I pull it apart into convenient, bite-sized pieces, and consider the options: reassemble? Or devour?