Object No. 32 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Ron Currie Jr., has ended. Original price: donated. Final price: $41.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now. This object was part of a collection curated for Significant Objects by Paola Antonelli; the story was co-published on Core77.com.]

They were a silly thing to get so obsessive about, in retrospect. What can I say? I was in my early twenties, so I imagined my fixation on Homies would come off as a moderately hip eccentricity. Like, “He’s cool enough not to take himself too seriously.” Or, “He’s self-possessed enough to not care if anyone thinks that collecting arguably racist figurines is just, well, you know, kind of gay.” Something like that.

And that was exactly how she saw it, at least when we’d first met and were both perfect, before all the craziness that came not too much later. I had this tic — couldn’t leave the grocery store without popping two quarters into the Homies vending machine and turning the dial. Even had a little ritual I performed, like a muted rain dance, to ensure I didn’t get a duplicate. Early on, she found all this hilarious and endearing.

There were all kinds of ways she tried to brand me, but here’s the worst: she took my two favorite Homies, Shady and Wolfe, the first two I’d ever bought, and stuck them to the dashboard of HER car with Gorilla Glue. Without asking. We’d been together all of three months. She showed me what she’d done and she smiled and put an arm around my neck and said, “Don’t they go great with Dashboard Jesus?”

It was the first indication that I was in trouble. There were others to follow. Three years’ worth.

She was honest, though, I’ll give her that. She told me about both times she slept with other guys, for instance. The first one, I let it go. Maybe she was right, maybe I was withdrawn and hadn’t been holding up my end of the bargain. She’d had a rough go of things, too, really rough. They ate out of dumpsters when she was a kid. That stuff figured into my thinking. The second time I wasn’t interested in making excuses for her.

While she packed her shit I went downstairs and put my elbow through her driver’s side window and tried to unstick Shady and Wolfe, with no luck. I knew she’d be a while so I went to my buddy Jazz’s place and asked to borrow his jigsaw.

Jazz told me later, while griping about the two broken saw blades, that all I’d needed to do was pour some kerosene on the glue and it would break down. I tried this, and lo and behold. Shady and Wolfe made their way into storage, and eventually into the garbage, but that piece of dashboard went in a 4×6 picture frame. No, seriously. It’s right over there, take a look. That’s genuine Mazda 323 hide, my friend, and I earned every square centimeter.

Object No. 27 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Katie Hennessey, has ended. Original price: $2.00. Final price: $50.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

This little statue stood on the window sill in my favorite aunt’s front hall. Perched between plants of varying shapes and sizes, surrounded by shards of broken pottery and miniature ceramic elephants from the Red Rose Tea box, dappled with sunlight shining through the leaded glass figures of St. Francis in his garden and the mossy Celtic Cross, the woodland creature stood by her cauldron, day after day, night after night, for all the years of my childhood.

Indistinct at first, her jack-knived features came, for me, to represent benevolence itself. What was she cooking, there in her pot? Was it a witches’ brew of bark and herbs, meant to quell my fears and slow my speeding thoughts? Was it essential oils, drawn from petals and seeds, distilled into droplets and lovingly collected to act as a salve, summoning spirits long forgotten to soothe my aching unconscious?

I wondered who had made her, and of what type of wood. No one seemed to know. Was her burlap outfit, glued together and barely hemmed, some sort of disguise?

My aunt put holy water in the cup on special occasions, but from time to time my uncle used it as a shot glass. To each his own, I guess.

Object No. 25 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Vicente Lozano, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $37.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

This little smoking man did not appear in Inglourious Basterds. But he came close.

Back in 2007, during  development, Quentin Tarantino was visiting the Santa Monica bungalow of Kimberly Van de Hoeven. She had art directed an update of Amazon Jail and several other movies Tarantino admired; he wanted to feel out the possibility of her working on his World War II movie.

As Van de Hoeven recalled, they were sitting in her sun-flooded living room, making small talk about how Zodiac could have been a great movie, had it not been so slavishly devoted to ’70s period detail. When Tarantino noticed the figurine on the mantle, he jumped up from the sectional couch.

What in the hell was this? Tarantino grinned. He turned it over in his hands. The Smoking Man reminded him of his Uncle Gino, he said, down to the walleyes and stogie: a sheet metal union man all of his life. Examining it, Tarantino grew excited. He began waving the little man around.

See, this is what he was talking about. This Little Guy, he could be from the 1940s or the 1870s — it didn’t matter. He read as homey, that was the important thing, as one of those weird personal objects people had put in their parlors since I Love Lucy or before. This was where Zodiac had gotten it wrong, with its too devoted attention to scuzzed-out ’70s pirate FM radio.

With this Little Guy you could telegraph family, hearth, menace — all in one shot. How cool was that? Tarantino’s face had reddened alarmingly. Very, said Kimberly. She tugged at her yoga tank top and tried to smile.

There was a scene in the upcoming project, Tarantino continued. By now he was pacing. A Nazi officer interviewed a French Farmer who was hiding Jews. They would sit at a kitchen table.

Imagine Mister Smokes here, lurking in the background. We put him in a nook, we put him on the counter, right? As the officer asks questions the camera pans over the uniformed shoulder, past the farmer’s cowlick, up and into this sweet little manatee face, until it fills the screen. Tension, with a capital ‘T.’

Whatdayathink? Tarantino grinned. He looked proud as a schoolboy. That’s why you’re going to let me have him, right?

Kimberly threw back her head laughing. At that moment she thought: 1. Wow, he really acts like a Director and  2. This belonged to my grandfather, who escaped the camps at Blesdijke. No frigging way I can give it to him.

Van de Hoeven stuttered an apology, told him it was a family… thing. Tarantino reassured her it was cool. They finished their smoothies, shook hands. Quentin said he said he would be in touch. Two weeks later he called: they had brought someone else on board. But QT said he had a re-make of Viva Zapata! in mind, and that she was at the top of his list.

Object No. 21 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jason Reich, has ended. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $41.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

It had been gifted ironically, natch. His friend had spotted it at the mall, and wasn’t it awful? The grotesque smile and bizarre skyward eyeroll. And what was up with those pants? “You’d think someone qualified for this award would be smart enough to buy pants that fit,” his friend said, and they both cracked up. He accepted the statuette with glee, proudly installing it on his shelf in a place of honor between the train whistle sound effects CD and the circa-1971 Zion National Park mug bearing someone else’s name. World’s Best Father. Looking at it, you had to laugh. All those pathetic, Precious Moments-collecting, pewter angel-buying nitwits who actually shopped for gifts at Hallmark Gifts and sincerely treasured this kind of crap. Hilarious.

—–

She hadn’t taken it well when he finally pulled the plug. But what was he supposed to do? It was a big thing, to still not be sure about her after fourteen months. Sure, he’d had his fun over the years. Actresses, college girls, flat-out lunatics. Relationships stamped with obvious expiration dates. With her, it had been about something greater, at least until the doubts started to set in. He knew, in that way you just know things, that it was time. “You can’t be serious,” she snapped. “I mean, literally, you’re incapable of it. You expect to be taken seriously when your place is crammed with junk like this?” She was angrily waving something, a figurine, some gag gift a now-forgotten high school buddy had given him years ago and that he’d never had the heart to throw away. He held it dumbly as she collected the last of her toiletries, admiring again the character’s endearing grin, the appealing splash of color on its lapel. The little man on the pedestal was a doofus, no doubt, but he certainly looked happy, and what was wrong with that?

—–

Something clattered to the floor upstairs and he rose from the kitchen table to investigate, finally abandoning the crossword puzzle at this, the third interruption. From the door of the spare bedroom, he could see his four-year-old leaning against the dresser, trying not to cry. The older one, his son, stood quietly over the fallen object: a small statue, long ago placed on a high shelf, out of sight. He picked it up. The figure, with its bemused eyeroll, seemed to empathize. Kids, right? “Go play somewhere else, guys,” he said. “Mom’ll be home soon and we’ll eat.” They padded out, and he gently scratched the back of his daughter’s neck as she passed him, giving her the chills, eliciting a giggle. He moved to replace the figurine on its perch, then paused, enjoying the weight of it in his palm. The thing was so goofy. Looking at it, you had to laugh.

Object No. 15 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Shelagh Power-Chopra, has ended. Original price: $.25. Final price: $24.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

Annie won the doll after a giddy round of skee ball. A stooped man behind the dirty balls handed her the doll and she pushed it into my hand as she rambled over to the tilt-a-whirl with her brother. I held it by its feathered boa at arm’s length as if getting any closer would have induced a pox outbreak. I studied it as I watched the two of them tilt and whirl and bicker like an old married couple.

I couldn’t be sure of its nationality – it could have been Mexican, South American, even Indian? It seemed an amalgamation of nationalities, as if its creator had been harshly commanded: “I want a doll and make it colorful and enticing. What?? I don’t give a shit where it’s from!”

And its sexual inclination? Ambiguous at best: the eyelashes, painted by Liza Minnelli’s understudy? Or the lips: rotting guavas mashed by the fist of an angry Mexican servant? And those thick, blue bandages, covering the hurt of the world. Of course I tore them off – and what do you think I found? Pustules — rotten and mean like a festering mob of little elves. Then, I heard a small cry and looked up at her face.

“Señorita (oh, we have discovered her origins!),” she said, “I am lost. Please, I beg you, por favor, to return me to the suburbs.” “What are your wounds?” I asked gingerly, fearing she would leap out of my arms and run towards the tilt-a-whirl and get crushed, her little plastic limbs coiled violently within its gears. She answered solemnly, her red lips swaying from the heavy words. “I punish myself for seeking fama – la fama y fortuna! The goat’s parade – the lights, the smell of swollen Chorizo!”

The kids had just gotten off the ride and were dizzy; they grabbed my sleeves and laughed like wild hyenas. Annie seemed to have forgotten about the doll and rushed towards a cage full of bears. Later, I dropped the doll on a side street in town across from a simple house with a clean wooden fence. She smiled, her feather boa now drooped like a sickly flamingo, and limped gracelessly down the stone path to the door.

Object No. 78 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by R.K. Scher, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $157.50.]

Visitors never fail to ask about my squaw. It’s what I like to call her, although one of those visitors, an earnest young art critic, did try to impress upon me the incorrectness of the term. Small as she is in stature, the squaw demands attention. Hers are the only colors in my entire studio. I’m a Minimalist, after all… or as my art dealer has it, a Neo-Minimalist.

I used to enjoy telling the story of how I came by the squaw but one too many art collectors demanded her price. The story that doesn’t get told any more goes like this.

Not long after I didn’t graduate from high school, a crumbling cluster of old houses adjoining our property was slated for demolition. Exactly eleven acres of old-growth trees, two Spanish-style houses and three cottages would be razed to make way for a new suburban development. It would take all summer long and it was all I thought about.

My ideas evolved over time and became less ambitious when my parents forced me to get a job. That was when I abandoned plans to booby-trap the houses and create a homemade minefield.

Instead, every evening I took pictures of what was still there after a day of destruction and the space of what wasn’t. I made a detailed map of the whole property in pencil and erased each day what got knocked down and carted away. I spent a lot of time sitting on cut logs, stroking my old dog and taking in what happened when ancient root systems were hauled out of the ground.

One day I realized that I had to decide what to do about things that appeared instead of disappeared. The plan for the map was to end up with a blank page. I hadn’t figured on the things that get shaken out of an empty house when it’s destroyed: the objects fallen through floorboards or just left behind. There were some broken dishes, some sodden books, a bicycle wheel, a Frisbee, an empty coin purse… and the squaw.

The thing about the squaw was that she changed places. The first time I saw, and photographed, her, she was half driven into the dirt. The next photo shows her lying on some dead leaves. Then she disappeared for three days. The fourth day found her fifty yards away. This time, I plotted the location on my map, in ballpoint pen. It went on like this for weeks, an old souvenir hopscotching across a blanker and blanker landscape, followed by my ballpoint pen.

At this point in the story I usually got asked, Who was it? Did you ever find out who – or what – was moving the thing around? The answer is, No, I never tried. The day the pattern of her movements closed in on a perfect repetition is the day I picked her up and brought her home.

This is the pattern I have been drawing ever since.

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. 62 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by David Shields, has ended. Original price: 33 cents. Final price: $21.50.]

The Mute World War II Airman

ROYAL AIR FORCE (RAF) MEDICAL CHIEF All war pilots will inevitably break down in time if not relieved.

BEN SHEPHARD In the Battle of Britain, a stage was reached when it became clear that pilots would end up “Crackers or Coffins”; thereafter their time in the air was rationed.

DICTIONARY OF RAF SLANG Frozen on the stick: paralyzed with fear

MICHEL LEIRIS If this were a play, one of those dramas I have always loved so much, I think the subject could be summarized like this: how the hero leaves for better or worse (and rather for worse than better) the miraculous chaos of childhood for the fierce order of virility.

PAUL FUSSELL The letterpress correspondents, radio broadcasters, and film people who perceived these horrors kept quiet about them on behalf of the War Effort.

BEN SHEPHARD From early on in the war, the RAF felt it necessary to have up its sleeve an ultimate sanction, a moral weapon, some procedure for dealing with cases of “flying personnel who will not face operational risks.” It was known as LMF or “Lack of Moral Fibre.” Arthur Smith ‘went LMF’ after his twentieth “op.” The target that night was the well-defended Ruhr and the weather was awful. Even before the aircraft crossed the English, he had lost control of his fear; his “courage snapped and terror took over.” “I couldn’t do anything at all,” he later recalled. “I became almost immobile, hardly able to move a muscle or speak.”

JÖRG FRIEDRICH The Allies’ bombing transportation offensive of the 1944 pre-invasion weeks took the lives of twelve thousand French and Belgian citizens, nearly twice as many as Bomber Command killed within the German Reich in 1942. On the night of April 9, 239 Halifaxes, Lancasters, Stirlings, and Mosquitos destroyed 2,124 freight cares in Lille, as well as the Cité des Cheminots, a railroad workers’ settlement with friendly, lightweight residential homes. Four hundred fifty-six people died, mostly railroaders. The survivors, who thought they were facing their final hours from the force of the attack, wandered among the bomb craters, shouting, “Bastards, bastards.”

DR. DOUGLAS D. BOND (Psychiatric Adviser to the US Army Air Force in Britain during WW II) Unbridled expression of aggression forms one of the greatest satisfactions in combat and becomes, therefore, one of the strongest motivations. A conspiracy of silence seems to have developed around these gratifications, although they are common knowledge to all those who have taken part in combat. There has been a pretence that battle consists only of tragedy and hardship. Unfortunately, however, such is not the case…. Fighter pilots expressing frank pleasure … following a heavy killing is shocking to outsiders.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY It was a place where it was extremely difficult for a man to stay alive, even if all he did was be there. And we were attacking all the time and every day.

PAUL FUSSELL Second World War technology made it possible to be killed in virtual silence — at least so it appeared.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Doug Dorst, has ended. Original price: $3. Final price: $193.50.]

Figurine of St. Vralkomir (glass cover not included)

This is an icon of the fourteenth-century saint Vralkomir of Dnobst, the patron saint of extremely fast dancing. Handcrafted in a snowbound convent by the nimble-footed Sisters of the Vralkomirian Order, it was given to my grandmother—then a nine-year-old girl—as she boarded the ship that would take her to America from Dnobst, a narrow pie-wedge of land bounded by the Dnobst River, the Grkgåt Mountains, and the Great Western Fence of Count Pyør the Litigious.

Vralkomir was a competent cobbler, but he was brusque and taciturn, conversing only to the extent he was required to for business. His fellow citizens found him odd, and they would hurry back out into the year-round cold as quickly as they could. Some said his towering jet-black hat, which he’d knitted of his own hair, would trigger vertigo in those who stared up at it for too long. Many were annoyed by his incessant tuneless humming.

In the autumn of 1347, in response to a perceived slight from a Dnobstian maiden, the recently enthroned Tsar Nÿrdrag the Irascible (also known as “The Cowbird Tsar,” a Scandinavian foundling whom the previous Tsar and Tsarina unknowingly raised as their own) issued an edict banning fire in Dnobst. His armies confiscated every piece of flint and all the available kindling. When winter blew in, it was as cruel as Nÿrdrag himself. Icy gusts sent massive musk-elk rolling out of the forest like tumbleweeds. It snowed for weeks on end. Desperate and frostbitten, the townspeople (minus Vralkomir) huddled in the mayor’s house, which at least still had a roof. The temperature kept dropping. Death was coming, and they could do nothing but wait.

From a high window, someone saw Vralkomir leave his shop, glance around the empty village square, then trudge into the forest. He returned hauling a freshly cut tree. In the square, he sawed the wood into discs like the one you see on the icon. Vralkomir then hopped onto one of the discs and began dancing, dancing, dancing to the tuneless music in his head. He danced faster and faster. The villagers watched as he wheeled and spun and tappatapped, his legs and feet a blur in the subarctic gloom. A plume of smoke rose from under his feet, and he kept dancing, and then there was more smoke, and he danced on, and soon the wooden disc was ablaze. Vralkomir leapt to the next disc and set it alight, and the next, and the next, and the Dnobstians came out and gathered round the fires, drinking in the precious warmth, happy to be alive. The bearded man danced all winter, they say, as no one else in the village could duplicate his feat of terpsichorean ignition, and he died of exhaustion in mid-April, a beloved martyr. Some say he had stitched contraband flints into his soles; others claim he lit the fire with dance alone. My grandmother preferred the latter, and so do I.

My grandmother said that on frigid and moonless winter nights, effigies of St. Vralkomir may come to life and begin dancing, throwing sparks from their wooden pedestals. This was why she always kept the icon under a glass cover (which stylishly followed the contours of the saint’s mighty hair-hat). Unfortunately, I am a clumsy person, and I broke the glass last weekend while dusting. My wife now insists that I sell it, calling it “at best, a tacky, dust-collecting tchotchke, and at worst, a tacky, dust-collecting fire hazard.” There is no reasoning with her; she is descended from an unimaginative people who know nothing of heroes.

I hope someone will give St. Vralkomir the home he deserves. The icon is probably not a fire hazard, although for obvious reasons I can make no express guarantee.

[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 Blauheimer holding a “peace dove” on his cocked fist.

The statuette dates from the 1980s, but it is modeled after a real historical figure from an earlier time — the 1970s. 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 1970s 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.