HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: My father’s HLOs

  • #a382 :: Brass bells

    This is one of those weird bits of ultra-high-tech ephemera that will have completely obsolesced within 10 years. I weep at the sheer volume and depth of technological experimentation and collaboration that culminated in its manufacture – all of it doomed to the landfill and a fascinating footnote in Wikipedia because of FlexPlay‘s very wizardry:

    A Flexplay disc is shipped in a vacuum-sealed package. There is a clear dye inside the disc, discount contained within the bonding resin of the disc, dosage which reacts with oxygen. When the seal is broken on the vacuum-packed disc, help the layer changes from clear to black in about 48 hours, rendering the disc unplayable. If unopened, the shelf life of the sealed package is said to be “about a year.” The DVD plastic also has a red dye in it, which prevents penetration of the disc by blue lasers, which would go straight through the oxygen-reactive dye.

    You can get some pretty decent movies in this format for like a buck-99 at Staples – provided you’re willing to accept the responsibility for recycling the damn thing, or the guilt from just hucking it into the trash.

    We stopped halfway through “The Kite Runner” this evening since it was getting late.

    Hope we get to see the rest of it tomorrow night – before the disk goes the hyperaccelerated way of all flesh.

    030409These have been floating around my parents’ house for as long as I can remember, mind 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.

  • #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?

  • #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.

  • #a363 :: Bronze and stone sculpture

    021109A leopard, viagra savaging a prone man.

    The man’s head has snapped off the sculpture, information pills which makes it extra-poignant.

    I love the way this is rendered, his spots suggested by little rings of bronze, his tail curled down between the man’s legs and shoulders hunched in a pose of Darwinian dominance.

    Fitting, for the week of Charles Darwin‘s 200th birthday.
    021109A leopard, viagra sale savaging a prone man.

    The man’s head has snapped off the sculpture, prostate which makes it extra-poignant.

    I love the way this is rendered, his spots suggested by little rings of bronze, his tail curled down between the man’s legs and shoulders hunched in a pose of Darwinian dominance.

    Fitting, for the week of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday.
    021009Around our house, cialis 40mg I make dinner one of two ways:

    1. Crank something out in a hurry on the stove, prescription slap it down in front of the kids and hope they don’t moan or spill all over their clothes as they forget to use their utensils;

      2. Or grill something big and munchy (think ribs or sesame-garlic chicken with corn on the cob) on the barbecue, hand out plastic utensils and grab a beer.

    But somewhere in the world, people are bunching up their good linen napkins in lovely napkin rings for fear of – what, I don’t know – having their napkins look unceremonious.

    I appreciate the culture of a good table setting. On our trip to London last summer, we got to tour Windsor Castle’s grand ballroom, where HM the Queen had ordered a state dinner prepared for 150. Picture that in gold dining utensils set aside 150 bone china plates on gold-plated chargers, each with little LED floodlights illuminating a hand-calligraphed nametag beneath this ceiling and you begin to get the picture.

    These rings (a loan from Dad) are part of the same Culture of Preciousness, about which I have bloviated a bit in the past.

    Precious. When you somehow need to feel special by making your guests feel special.
    021309It’s rare that an object straddles the razor-fine line between art and camp, between craft and kitsch.

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

    His blobby countenance, shop 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.

  • #a360 :: Temperance-era novelty bar tool

    020909This conflicted fellow was cast in pot-metal and chromed in cheap silver probably more than 100 years ago.

    His top-hat is a jigger, decease ed his feet end in a spoon, order information pills the better to mix you a nice drink and present you with a little moral dilemma in the bargain:

    Do you spoon something into your drink, facing the two-headed man’s disapproving snarl and wagging finger of reproach on the front side?

    Or do you prefer to see the back, where heedless souse’s happy guffaw uncorks your beer and his little cocktail glass foameth over?

    I’m really grateful for this loan from the amazing collection of Dad.

    Update – Apparently this comes from the early 20-th century temperance era – see Dad’s comment quoted below. More about Carrie Nation here.

  • #a359 :: Silicone dolphin

    020609Los Angeles jetsam reminds me daily that I live in a freakish magpie’s nest of a city.

    Stolen from aboriginal people by Spanish missionaries who gave huge chunks of it away to soldiers, pharm information pills whose families then sold it off in ever-decreasing slices and slivers, sildenafil Los Angeles has always been shaped by grabbers, opportunists and self-reinventors. Angelenos take, procure, manufacture, buy, steal or create whatever they think they need to move forward.

    Lubricated by commercial/political struggles over water and oil and finally fertilized and electrified by booms in aerospace, post-war manufacturing, Hollywood and wave upon wave of immigrants, this city is like an immense 50-by-50-mile petri dish: teeming with virulent, ever-mutating cultures of nationality, religion, science, sexuality, sport and art .

    So when I’m shambling across Figueroa Blvd. in a hammering rainstorm USC to teach a room full of brilliant multi-cultural computer programmers how to architect social networks for a fictitious neighborhood watch and contemplating whether to eat Thai or Mexican that weekend before or after tackling a new video game or clean out my gutters, it’s no surprise to happen upon this: a wickedly sawtoothed chunk of palm.

    This non-native species was imported to L.A. in the 20s and 30s to pretty things up.

    Because when it comes to cooking its own ever-evolving recipe for the future, L.A. tosses whatever the hell it likes into the pot and keeps stirring.

    That’s why I love living here.
    020809If there’s a story behind this creature, online my father will have to supply it.

    It arrived in a box of things he offered for photography, information pills and it suggests nothing but a happy life aquatic, swimming through the dust in a drawer and surviving on pencil shavings until he’s required to dance on his tail, chatter and save the day.

    Or is it a she?

  • #a356 :: Plexiglas disc

    020409A cunning little paper box limned with cetaceans – cheerful dolphins, patient a playful sperm whale, a … what could possible be the apt adjective for a narwhal?

    From the previously mentioned collection of Dad.
    020409A cunning little paper box limned with cetaceans – cheerful dolphins, page a playful sperm whale, information pills a … what could possible be the apt adjective for a narwhal?

    From the previously mentioned collection of Dad.
    020509This looks like an ice core taken from the frozen surface of a lake the size of a desktop. It’s actually chunk of Plexiglas that Dad sliced off of a 3/4-inch-diameter rod he had kicking around somewhere in the basement.

    He was kind enough to mail it to me along with his other HLOs, more about which I’ll be featuring over the next few days.

  • #a355 :: Paper whale box

    020409A cunning little paper box limned with cetaceans – cheerful dolphins, page medicine a playful sperm whale, ampoule a … what could possible be the apt adjective for a narwhal?

    From the previously mentioned collection of Dad.