Object No. 93 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Kate Bernheimer, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $104.50.]

A long time ago, I was very poor and often traded my body for cigarettes, Chelada, or food (in order of preference). I had two children — both daughters — and together we lived in a motel on the coast. It was a knotty-pine kitchenette cabin, and came furnished with a teapot, a few chipped flowered plates, some utensils, and bedding. The cabin overlooked a paved parking lot and beyond it, the beach. If a man came to visit, I sent my youngest girl out to find driftwood and starfish and shells. (Her sister was in kindergarten, so always gone in the morning.) There was no market for these trinkets among tourists; but they were precious to my little girls, truly their only possessions. We washed them and kept them along the edge of the porch rail and inside, on the white windowsills, which otherwise were very empty, apart from a pink horse my youngest had found in the woods. That pink horse! How she loved it. Once when she had gone a very long way to gather her treasures — all the way under a natural tunnel inside the cliffs, which led to a narrow beach that would trap you and kill you if you were stuck there during high tide — an old woman with pink hair approached her and sang her a song. My daughter told me about this old woman, but I didn’t believe her. Later that week, my girl brought home a sea urchin, closed. She said that when the sea urchin opened, the old woman would return and that she had promised then to bring us good luck. I got an empty jar from the cupboard — it had once been full of beach plum jelly but had been long gathering dust. We walked down to the edge of the ocean and filled it with water. Back in the cabin, we placed the closed sea urchin carefully into the water, where it sank and stayed closed. The next morning my littlest girl didn’t wake up and the sea urchin had bloomed. It was on her grave that my other daughter placed the pink horse. Then she too was taken — by the high tide — the very same week. She’d gone into the magic tunnel. Now I do nothing but drink Chelada all day, haunted by pink. Pink urchins, pink cigarettes. Pink horse, pink horse, pink horse on the grave — if ever the pink horse flies into the sky, your daughters will come back to life. The pink-haired old woman sang that to me once when I passed out in the sand. For now, there you stand in the dark of the wood — beautiful, all-powerful, and silent. Pink horse, you are everything, and everything is everlasting in you.

Object No. 87 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Merrill Markoe, has ended. Original price: 59 cents. Final price: $21.80.]

Any image that has been carefully placed in an antique gold frame embossed with angels and laurel wreathes becomes transformed in to something elevated and celestial. “All you need to know about this old person/building/animal/plate of food/scenic vista/bleeding martyr is that it is sacred to me and  holds a very special place in my heart,” the frame seems to tell us.

But what if you are the kind of person who wishes to remember the bad times? You believe there is wisdom in being surrounded by cautionary tales; reminders of your most fatal blunders. How else to remind yourself to never again respond too quickly to a seemingly harmless social invitation and risk becoming mired in an evening so vile it undermines your sense of self worth? So you bring home a memento of that detestable event: a whimsical cocktail stirrer or a personalized matchbook. But where do you put these wretched things? Or the snapshot you still have of that person you dated who stole your credit card and talked with a phony English accent? Let’s not forget that former best friend of yours who calls to brag about the good things that happen to him by disguising them as disappointments, tragedies and inconveniences. “I’m so depressed,” he says, “That deal I closed has moved me in to a much higher tax bracket.” Then he leaves you with a faux ironic  autographed photo of him standing in between Spencer and Heidi. You need a place to put that unpleasant souvenir of friendship gone sour. One that will admonish you never to take his phone calls again. Ditto the business card left behind by the tech guy who came to fix one broken USB port, dissembled your entire internet connection, refused all blame, and insisted on getting his full fee.

Well, some people put these things at the center of dart boards. But that has become a cliché. And why run the risk of attracting unwanted dart games? No, when you want to demean an image, hold it up to spite and ridicule and single it out as something worthy of scorn, you want a frame that conjures a rage like the one that overwhelmed that Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush. You want a frame that says “I step on you with my bare dirty feet.”

This poorly articulated caricature of a foot wearing a flimsy multicolored flip flop sits atop a frame that boldly declares, “Whatever I have enshrined here is something I hold in contempt. He/she/it is sub-par in every way: cheap, shallow, unimaginative, disposable, as void of any real value as the very worst, most despicable gift catalog. And just like the frame itself, they too are under the false impression that they are adorable and a welcome addition wherever they go.” May they eat every meal for the rest of their lives from a plastic plate festooned with Santa’s adorable helpers, listening to a never-ending loop of the opening line of “Up Up and Away,” by the Fifth Dimension.

Object No. 84 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Betsey Swardlick, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $26. This story is the third in a three-part series produced in collaboration with The Center for Cartoon Studies. ]

Object No. 77 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Nick Asbury, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $11.61. ]

Kenny is a funny clown

Kenny is a funny clown.
He sees the whole world upside-down.
Kenny is my best friend.

The day before Kenny was born, he said
“I bet I can live life standing on me ’ead!”
Kenny is from the North of England.

Kenny sometimes says to me:
“I am the King of Comedy!
Just don’t ask me to do stand-up!”

It’s funnier when Kenny says it.

Kenny’s favourite food
is upside-down cake.
Except he calls it right-way-up cake.

Kenny likes to chat up the ladies.
He says “Hey! I’ve fallen for you baby!”
and the ladies all fall head over heels
and Kenny says “Now you know how it feels!”

Kenny says he has to move on.
“It’s time I stood on my own two feet,
paid my way in this world,
met some new people, maybe a girl!”

Kenny will make someone very happy.
He’s a stand-up guy for an upside-down chappy.
He cheers you up on the days you’re down
and turns any frown upside-down.

Kenny has also asked me to mention
that he is an expert breakdancer.

So long Kenny! See you around.
Keep your feet in the clouds
and your head on the ground.

Object No. 67 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Matthew Klam, has ended. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $15.75. ]

I acquired this object at a flea market in the parking lot of a bilingual high school. Its little hands are smooth flippers. I believe it to be quite valuable, possibly antique, based on dates of patents listed on the ornate bronze panel on the inside door. Chinese in origin. Solid cast iron. Quite heavy. Designed to resemble the lead character of the short lived American cartoon, “Chucky the Chicken.” I never saw that show. There are knockoffs out there, and research indicates that knockoffs are made of brass or cheap plastic, but this one is well built, from original specs.

You may keep it in your car. You may keep it in your home. You may carry it on your person.

Be warned. There is a loud clicking sound coming from the control module.

For a while I kept this in my glove compartment. The original instruction manual mentions that the magnetic field it emits can change traffic lights from red to green. THIS DOES NOT WORK. Also, you will cause a pile up!

If you decide to keep it by your bed (as I did) and begin seeing colorful lights reflected on the walls and windows as you try to sleep, DO NOT WORRY AS THE OBJECT IS OPERATING NORMALLY.

DO NOT touch it or disrupt the cycle as this will cause IRREPAIRABLE HARM and may give you a POWERFUL ELECTRIC SHOCK. KEEP AWAY FROM CHUCKY UNLESS INSTRUCTED BY CHUCKY HIMSELF.

• Phase 1/Initial Phase: Transmission of messages.
• Phase 2/Functional Phase: Chucky cycling normally.
• Phase 3/Unity Phase: Walls bleed beautiful colors.
• Phase 4/Perfected Phase: Controller/controlled.
• Phase 5/Paradise Phase: Identity of Supreme Dictator revealed.

Chucky said to me, “HELLO MY LITTLE FRIEND. I am your GOD. Shift administrative tasks to your REPRESENTATIVE IMMEDIATELY. Prepare for LOVE SYMBOL.

Ha ha. And well we know what that love SYMBOL is now, DO WE NOT?

Certainly this object may have other uses. Keep it as an antique vase or planter, or with slight modification use as liquor locker, gun cabinet, bomb safe, champagne cooler, cocktail pitcher, etcetera. Dental detail alone is worth the price. Cannot verify that all parts are included. Cast iron is in excellent condition, however: do not microwave!!

Do not touch the outer shell with your tongue. Do not form contractions. FOLLOW THE MANUAL. Do not attempt modifications. Try to keep the dust out of his middle. CLEAN the inside WITH YOUR TONGUE if your TONGUE is long ENOUGH. THIS IS NOT HARD TO DO if you stick your tongue out. FARTHER. A LITTLE FARTHER.

N.B.: Cast iron may actually be ceramic. Bronze panel and inside door may be difficult/impossible to locate. Instruction manual not included.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Joanne McNeil, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $20.50.]

Among the many misconceptions that prevail about my great-grandfather, Hartford Townes Hastings, the most infuriating is the idea that he was a disinterested playboy benefactor, squandering the family fortune on “women and dreams,” as the New York Sun obituary put it. He was reserved, but kind and idealistic, a vegetarian since childhood. I never saw him drink or cuss or eat more than a few bites of anything. I believe history will redeem him as a frustrated artist, rather than a failed businessman.

After Amherst College, rather than a position at the family surgical dressings business, he went to Paris to create “surrealist craft art,” elaborate wood carvings and collage. None of his work survived the return back over the Atlantic, although he salvaged parts of “Birds Nesting in Quilted Landscape.” He stored the ceramic eggs and mushrooms, dried flowers, and bits of grain in an old pill box and preserved it in glass. My great-grandfather kept the “little grain thing” at his bedside for twenty years, as a reminder never to give up on art.

In 1925, he married my great-grandmother Rose Fox Townes Hastings, the daughter of a New York police officer and the face of Elizabeth Arden’s first print ad. Together they conceived of The Museum of Modern Craft. It opened in 1941, when the world had other priorities. In fact, it was a thinly disguised plan to display his own art, as “Pierce Mancini.” He even displayed the grain keepsake near the entrance, attributed to his pseudonym as “Wistfully, lingering away in the Heartland, 1929.” Due to enormous losses, the museum closed seven years later. The building was sold to the city and turned into an administrative office. My great-grandmother divorced him shortly thereafter.

His tea importing business was a disaster, he lost millions in multiple real estate developments, and a typhoon flooded the small island he purchased in the South Pacific before the 300-suite artist colony could open. The idea behind each of these pursuits was that one day he might secure the funds to reopen The Museum of Modern Craft.

Later in life, at the encouragement of Joseph Cornell, his best friend since Andover, my great-grandfather returned to his “surrealist crafts,” scouring junk shops from Cape Cod to the 6th arrondissement for anything to cobble together. He and Cornell had plans to create an entire city of old dollhouses. The project was abandoned after Cornell’s death in 1972. I have the sketches for it, as well as thirty-seven of my great-grandfather’s unfinished pieces.

My great-grandfather declared bankruptcy in 1992 and died in 1995, in a manufactured home in Woods Hole. I found his “little grain thing” among a dozen other thrift store treasures in a cardboard box marked in black sharpie, “For Joseph.”

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Nathaniel Rich, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $57.]

Do you ever struggle to remember insignificant facts? Facts so small and irrelevant to the natural course of your life that you wonder how you ever learned them in the first place? And yet your inability to recall them infuriates you. Who was the actor in that Greek film, you know the one with Melina Mercouri, from the sixties? What do you call the stick that leprechauns carry? What’s your cousin’s girlfriend’s name? Is it “Man on the Run,” or “Band on the Run”? Who is that famous autistic lady who writes about what it’s like to be an animal?

The answers to all of these questions and more will be answered when you come into proud possession of the Rhinoceros Knows. Whenever you feel stumped, simply rub its nose (also known as its “horn”). You will feel a jolt of energy in your neurons, your synapses will grow extra sticky, and your frontal lobe will throb pleasantly. Also, the rhinoceros’s eye will, ever so subtly, twinkle.

And then, in no more than five minutes, the answers will come: Phaedra is not a Greek film, but an American film set in Greece; the actor is Tony Perkins. Shillelagh. Candace. “Band on the Run.” Temple Grandin.

One warning: the Rhinoceros Knows must not be misused. Should you try to retrieve a more significant memory (“When did I first tell him that I loved him?”), the Rhinoceros Knows will shut down. From its eye will descend, ever so subtly, a tear. It will know no more.

Study the image of this talisman. You will see that the body is heavily crosshatched, as an elderly palm or a balled-up sheet of aluminum foil that has been carefully unfurled and pressed into its original form. These creases are important, for there is exactly one for every question you are permitted to ask. Do not go over your limit. The total number of creases is unknown, and impossible to count, but woe to the person who asks one too many questions. On that occasion, as soon as you rub the rhinoceros’s nose, you will feel a rather violent knock behind your forehead and your short-term memory will vanish altogether. You will be left only with the answers the rhinoceros has already given you, and your brain will cycle through them, nonsensically, for the rest of your life.

You must pass the Rhinoceros Knows on to another person before you reach that point. Trust me. It is a waking hell.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Rob Baedeker, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $17.82.]

Baron Von Blauheimer “Muscle Dove” Statuette

This is a porcelain statuette of the Baron Von Blaueheimer holding a “peace dove” on his cocked fist.

The statuette dates from the 1980’s, but it is modeled after a real historical figure from an earlier time — the 1970’s. The man is my uncle, Ray-Ray “The Baron” Von Blauheimer, and he is depicted here in his full baron regalia, which doubled as his only clothes.

In the 1970’s it was still rare for a grown man to go to work in a lace cravat and petticoat breeches, especially if that man, like Ray-Ray, worked as a garbage collector for the City of Newark, NJ.

Ray-Ray was a bundle of contradictions: sensitive but hard-edged; coquettish yet vengeful; fastidious but filthy. A compassionate civil rights activist, he was also a bodybuilder who delighted in beating up hippies.

This statuette represents Ray-Ray’s attempt to reconcile two sides of his personality. The cocked fist is a symbol of the fight-ready posture he adopted so many times at pool halls, punk-rock concerts, and fondue orgies in the 70s, while the white dove atop his hand represents his message of peace. As Ray would say, “It’s up to you, friend. Give peace a chance … or taste the Five Knucklemen of Von Blauheimer!”

Uncle Ray-Ray ordered this statuette of himself through a Chinese toy company whose advertisement he found in the back of a “Beetle ‘n Bonsai” magazine. The statuette was modeled after a full-size chainsaw sculpture self-portrait that Ray-Ray made one night when he was loaded on strawberry daiquiris. He sent the photo to the company, Wen Hong Toy, and they produced the custom miniature. The paint — the matching blue touches on the shoes and eyes, the brown strokes on the moustache and eyebrows, and the faint blush on the cheeks — was added by Ray-Ray himself, on another night when he got shellacked and weepy on frozen mango margaritas.

This item is in “Very Fine” to “Very Horrible” condition, depending on your values.

There is a small chip in the dove’s head from when Uncle Ray-Ray threw the statuette at the television during Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural address.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Matthew De Abaitua, has closed. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $15.50]

My Daddy shouts at me when I go near the piggy bank, and he screams when I turn it upside down. So l leave the piggy bank alone and tell my baby brother and sister to leave it alone too. The piggy bank is the family curse.

One day a week my Daddy is good to me, and he teaches me that words that sound the same can mean different things. Like were and wear. Like sentence and sentence. He listens to me as I read my stories and when I am finished he tells me how talented I am. I like those days. But on working days he is mean and tells me to shut up, before he has even heard what I am going to say. My Daddy’s working days are hard, so hard. You wouldn’t believe how hard they are.

Because of Grandad, our family has to keep the piggy bank with us always. Grandad met the devil coming out of his wardrobe and the devil promised him death, death right there and then, and Grandad said no, and so a deal was struck. If the piggy bank goes out the back door, death comes in through the front door.

On pay day, one half of all the money that crosses the doorstep goes into the piggy bank. Daddy comes back from his job making safe the gas in the iron lungs that rise and fall across our town, rise and fall like the valves of the trumpet he plays on our birthdays. He takes out his pay packet and pinches half of the notes between his fingers and hands the money to Mummy, without looking at it. It is Mummy’s job to place the tribute into the cursed pig.

Daddy gets angry so suddenly, it makes it hard to breathe. I know he doesn’t mean it. I tell him not to be so angry with me and he stops, and he looks sad. I’m a big girl. I know how hard the days of grown-ups can be, so hard you wouldn’t believe.

Saturday is shopping day. Mum and I look around the shops. In the toy shop Frank, my little brother, plays with the train track, and he screams when the time comes for us to leave. None of the clothes fit Mummy right. There is nothing for us to buy. I see the scooter I want, the one with the special wheels. I go to the pig to see if there is money in it but the pig has eaten all the notes and left only coins.

Once I walked into the living room and found the piggy bank choking on our money. Greedy piggy. I slapped it on the back and the money rattled back into its belly. When I turned it upside down, the money had gone.

This is the family curse, the same thing every week, the same for my Daddy as it was for Grandad and the same it will be for me, when I am older. Mummy looks for the bad hairs on her head and pulls them out. Daddy rolls moaning in his bed. I take a deep breath. The pig swallows and winks.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Claire Zulkey, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $5.50.]

Apparently, people collect these things. I’m not sure I understand why. Is it for the candy? I find that hard to believe. There are so many better candies than Pez that it’s not even funny. Me, I’d rather eat a sugar cube than a Pez (or do you say “a piece of Pez?”) And the loading! Forget about it.

Perhaps people collect them just for the sake of collecting. Again, I don’t get it. I just think of all those dispensers lined up on some cheap cabinet or dresser, falling over with the slightest disturbance, knocking each other down, lying there in a pile, collecting dust… it makes me sad, and a little irrationally angry.

But you see, this particular Pez dispenser just reminds me so much of my father. An old boyfriend gave it to me for a Valentine’s Day present, and while I think he meant to give it to me to facilitate a breakup (i.e., “Here’s a terrible present clearly indicating how much I don’t care for you so why don’t you just dump me already?”), I was quite taken with it.

My father left my family when I was seventeen, and I thought I had put him out of my mind but this dispenser just brought him right back. His teal shirts. His oddly-shaped ears. The strange, simple expression that conveys both happiness and pitiful stupidity. The thing about this Pez dispenser is, I felt like someday it was going to help me decide if I miss my dad, or if I’m just really glad that he’s out of my life. If I looked hard enough at it, I’d know.

On a side note, he may have had a dumb expression on his face most of the time, but my God, did Dad have a head of hair on him or what?