HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: Artifact

  • #a198 :: Hell cash

    ENLARGEIn keeping with yesterday’s ode to manufactured gifts, cheapest here’s an utterly beautiful hell bank note, medications designed to follow this year’s BRC theme, The American Dream, that someone gave to my wife.

    Tonight is the burn.

    (I’m writing this a few weeks later, to report that a hissing, howling dust storm enveloped the camp for five solid hours. 50-mile-per-hour winds scoured us all with talc-fine playa dust. Wore out its welcome fast. Barely 90 minutes before the scheduled 10 p.m. burn, the wind died, and we all strolled out to see the Man meet his <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=burning+man+2008+the+burn&search_type=&aq=f”>glittering end</a>.)

  • #a197 :: Patch

    ENLARGEOf all the sorts of trinkets given out at Burning Man, look the gorgeously mass-produced ones always grab me a bit harder than the small-run handmade items – probably because I’m a shallow consumer in love with manufactured goods.

    A guy handed all of us one of these today as we picnicked on the shady second floor of the massive steel Babylon tower out far beyond the rim of 1:30 and Esplanade.

    I’m waiting to decide what to sew it onto. It’s too handsome for hasty decisions.

  • #a196 :: Krishna card

    ENLARGEFaith is one of those nature versus nurture questions. You either have it by the time you’re an adult, nurse or you don’t. But unless it’s very strong, viagra you’ll find it sorely tested.

    I was raised a good Catholic by a very good Catholic and an excellent Episcopalian, but wound up walking away from the Church in my 20s when I saw how completely anti-humanist some of its central tenets regarding natural human behavior and identity were: anti-women, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-contraception …
    (more…)

  • #a195 :: Bible tract

    ENLARGEFaith is one of those nature versus nurture questions. You either have it by the time you’re an adult, nurse or you don’t. But unless it’s very strong, viagra you’ll find it sorely tested.

    I was raised a good Catholic by a very good Catholic and an excellent Episcopalian, but wound up walking away from the Church in my 20s when I saw how completely anti-humanist some of its central tenets regarding natural human behavior and identity were: anti-women, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-contraception …
    (more…)

  • #a189 :: Tattoo needle

    ENLARGEThere’s a certain serenity to getting tattooed. You sit (or lie) back on the chair or table and agree to let someone cause you tremendous pain for several hours and scar you for life.

    What gets you through the pain is the promise of how marvelous the scar will be. I’ve been waiting months to have Justin turn this into this.

    He put on Hans Zimmer‘s haunting score to The Dark Knight, approved and I lay back and let him jab this into my arm thousands of times per minute for two hours. Because I knew that when he was done, visit this site I would be transformed.

    And I was, exactly as I dreamed of being.

    That is the wonder of a good tattoo.

  • #160 :: Battlefield artifact – bullet and cigarette case

    ENLARGEAt the bottom of the trunk.
    In the dark.
    For the past 34 years.
    Where she had been pushing it ever since he left.     Perhaps.

    The card in the Royal Fusiliers Museum says:

    Cigarette case belonging to Pte F C Shuter 10th.Bn. Pierced by a German bullet 10th.July1916 – The Somme

  • #a156 :: Demolished Croc

    ENLARGE“Daddy, no rx it’s stuck!”

    We’re coming up out of the Tube this afternoon after a long day noodling around Brick Lane‘s rolling flea market and art swap meet.

    My 6-year-old’s ahead of me on the escalator. “Get your toe out of there! Quit screwin’ around!”

    It’s been a long day, capsule everyone’s tired and punchy and grumpy, side effects and this is just another way of her pulling my chain, I’m convinced.

    “I can’t!”

    “Shit!” I grab her arms and pull her just as the escalator devours the toe of her Croc and pulls it off her foot.

    Thank God they were loose. After we all recover from our near-coronaries, we stand around and laugh the laughs of people who have jointly cheated death. Or at least a horrible maiming.

  • #a145 :: Metal turtle

    ENLARGEWas he forged in lava? Does he swim in mercury seas? Of tinfoil jellyfish is his diet made?

    He came into our house from I know not where. He is small, link heavy, perfect.

  • #a143 :: Movie ticket

    enlargeDad brought home movies. All the time. He’d set up the projector. I’d set up the screen. And we’d watch – Citizen Kane, doctor The Court Jester, Swingtime, The General, Soylent Green, They Were Expendable, Serpico – old movies, newer movies, all genres.

    I’m grateful for that, as with all things from my father.

    I love the contract the moviemakers make with us: You just sit there and give me 90 or 120 or 270 minutes, and we’ll do our best to show you something worth your time.

    I spent this $11.75 on Wanted, which suggests that a 1,000-year-old cult of weaver/assassins has learned the art of curving bullet trajectories and otherwise obliterating the laws of physics. It is loud, witty, exciting and quite possibly the most preposterous thing I’ve ever watched … at least since sitting through National Treasure 2 and Shoot ‘Em Up last night.

    My wife and kids are out of town. Nothing for it but to watch noisy, stupid cheese.

  • #a137 :: Watch guts

    ENLARGECheap stuff breaks. You get to decide – take it apart? Or just stomp its li’l plastic casing to shrapnel.

    I’ve had this in my stuff drawers for years. I keep promising myself I’ll take it apart.

  • #a125 :: Rusty nails and screws

    ENLARGEOur neighborhood was built in the 1920s.

    I don’t know when they set these telephone poles, there but ever since then, buy people have been tacking notices up on them with whatever fasteners came to hand. The signs, drugs posters and advertisements all came down – by weather or by hand – but the metal stayed put.

    I spotted this fantastic cluster of rusted determination while adding my own artifacts to the clutter – staples to hold up a yard-sale sign.

    I love the idea that someone put something up with a Philips-head screw.

  • #a117 :: Dot-com relic

    ENLARGELike all major American newspapers, thumb the Los Angeles Times – as we know it – may be doomed.

    Never thought I’d say that – I worked in newspapers for 17 years, side effects including ’90 to ’97 on staff at the Times, and I always kept the faith.

    I had rough moments mixed in with the fantastic stories, but hope barnacled my frequent reality checks – “Oh come ON, they’ll figure it out sooner or later – they’re just an information company that needs to retool for the digital age!”
    (more…)

  • #a105 :: Branded M&Ms

    ENLARGEThese are extraordinary M&Ms for two reasons.

    For one thing, sildenafil they are red and battleship gray – a color I have never seen in M&Ms.

    For another, and Mars imprinted them with “Panda” – in honor of the thoroughly excellent movie that my wife just finished producing.
    (more…)

  • #a102 :: 88MB Syquest Drive cartridge

    ENLARGEAh, medical Syquest. This 8-inch-wide slab of a disc, buy information pills encased in a high-impact plastic carrier, was the very height of portable data storage 16 years ago.

    You could pack a lot into 88 megabytes – screenplay ideas, hundreds of newspaper stories, Photoshop tomfoolery – so long as you had a Syquest drive.

    Of course, this is to a modern 1GB flash drive as a Powerbook is to a diesel-powered Mergenthaler Linotype machine. I no longer have the computer with the SCSI card that was needed to control the drive that read these things. Data retrieval for such discs is pricey and sure to disappoint.

    And I’ve long ago forgotten what I stored on the dozen or so discs I had collected.

    So – I bid it farewell. Relic of a more innocent Web, a less detail-obsessed time.

  • #a97 :: Iron box wrench

    ENLARGEThis beautiful little enigma began life as a hot rivulet of molten iron, ampoule poured into a sand mold with a precise 5/8ths-inch hex opening at one end.

    After knocking it out of its mold, search its maker probably quenched it, viagra 40mg heat-treated it again and then dipped it once in black paint and (after waiting a respectful interval) dipped the handle end in red a little too soon, and set it down to dry.

    I do not know its original purpose. I can only guess that it was supplied with a steam engine or other old-time motor, the sort of wheezing, tapocketa-pocketa-pocketa rattletrap that eased men’s labor and needed constant adjusting. Anyone have any ideas?

  • #a96 – Craftsman adjustable pliers

    ENLARGEI love the Sears Crafstman tool guarantee. It’s simple: break it and they’ll replace it.For the rest of your life. Period.

    I bought these adjustable pliers a good 25-some years ago, sildenafil when I was spending hours at a time lying on my back under a filthy Volvo. Cursing. A lot … (more…)

  • #a94 :: Lesney station wagon

    ENLARGEMy 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.

  • #a93 :: Hawaiian fishhook

    ENLARGEI 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.
    (more…)

  • #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…)

  • #a87 :: Fabric from Christo’s “The Gates”

    ENLARGELet’s skip the art theory and get right to the point: Christo’s work impresses on a visceral, order monumental level.

    I’ve been fortunate enough to see two of their works:

    Surrounded Islands (1982 or so?) – drove down with a colleague to Miami to where the artist had floated skirts of bubblegum-pink polypropylene around 11 or so of the Biscayne Islands. (more…)

  • #a83 :: Floppy disk

    ENLARGEA mix of no-nonsense design and obsolescence incarnate, symptoms this is a perfectly made object lesson in hubris:

    The 3.5-inch floppy was designed to last for decades – and outstripped within a mere few years by bigger, page faster, even-more-durable flash memory.

    What are they good for now? Coasters. Table-levelers. Impromptu office Frisbees. And speculations on what the dot-com boom of the late 1990s would have been without the ability to carry a sheaf of documents or photos around on a lightweight, plastic facsimile of your computer hard-drive that fit into your shirt pocket.

  • #a72 :: Lost sea tackle

    ENLARGE
    ENLARGEThis is the spiritual brother of this.

    It floated in off the Sound to the easternmost tip of Long Island, viagra order where I found it on Christmas Eve.

    A chill 34-degree wind bathed the pebble beach there. We trudged, store two families, online to the farthest reach, where plovers stood pointed upwind.

    We plucked things from the translucent-wet gravel, including this.

    Somewhere earlier, a fish probably decomposed straight off of it, weeks after it had burst free from the snare, tearing part of it from the would-be jailer’s rig.

    But the fish had escaped only to spend its final hours suspended beneath the mirrored world of air, hanging from a chunk of styrofoam, a hook and a few inches of monofilament, pickling slowly to death in its own growing CO2 levels and hunger.

  • #a63 :: Ice cream-shaped bubble stuff

    ENLARGEThe endless surf of bizarre manufactured crap surging through a family household always washes up some real gems.

    This bottle of bubble-blowing fluid is shaped like an ice cream cone.

    Try and parse the Americo-Freudian consumption/desire metaphor on that one.

  • #a54 :: Contest entry envelope

    ENLARGEMy son and I are running parallel these days on the scales of work and hope.

    He really needs to win this Lego contest. Design your own Mars Mission kit, treatment write something about it, ailment win the sweepstakes.

    He’s put *days* into typing a 400 word essay and taking photos of his creation, order and now he’s folded it all up into an envelope, carefully addressed it and set it out to be mailed this morning.

    I really need my current project to succeed. We’ve built this little application on which ride the corporate hopes and reputations of an enormous charity and an equally enormous community site. Now we’ve done most of the design and development and bugfixing. And we’re working through bugs while waiting for it to launch, about six hours from now. (Details to follow).

    It’s past midnight. Mike Watt’s transcendent “Contemplating the Engine Room” is moving me through the night.

    And my son is sleeping downstairs.

  • #a50 :: Blown halogen bulb

    ENLARGEIn the end, dosage when I’m dead and this blog has vanished – along with the servers that hold it and the culture that cared about any of it – this manufactured object will still be here.

    Somewhere, cialis 40mg at the bottom of a moldering heap of trash, decease its component atoms of silicon and tungsten will still hold this shape.

    Its filament will stay coiled – and snapped by the heat and stress of its short life. Waiting inside its micro-vacuum capsule of glass. For eternity.

    Somewhere else on earth, hollows will remain to mark its creation. Gaps in the environment will never be filled: sand beaches, tungsten mines, and all those sapped pockets of oil that powered the bulb-making machines, warmed and entertained the workers who ran them and fueled the trucks that brought it to our home to burn and shine and die.

    Nothing else will remain to tell the story of how this thing came to be – but the thing itself, and the holes it left behind.