From your friends at Significant Objects.

From your friends at Significant Objects.

From your friends at Significant Objects.

From your friends at Significant Objects.

From your friends at Significant Objects.

Object No. 5 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Dan Reines, has ended. Original price: $.50. Final price: $12.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

I think it was Ted Spain’s to start with, though I’m not sure. He used to take it to meetings, and on Fridays before the all-staff I’d see him filling it with gin from a bottle he kept in his second drawer.

No, serious! He knew I knew, too — he looked up once and I was staring at him like you’re looking at me, and he just sort of, you know — you want some? With a big smile on his face. I didn’t take him up on it, but sometimes I think I should have. I mean, pretty much that whole year before you got here, I should have.

Anyway. So Ted had it, and he did that pretty much every week for five months until he got laid off when they got rid of the design staff. Remember? Right before Easter too. And when he left, on his last day, he walked by my cube on his way out and set it on my desk, and it was full, and he winked at me and that’s the last time I saw him.

So that’s kinda how the Death Mug became the Death Mug. When Lara got fired, her and Manny and me went to the parking lot and did about five tequila shots each from it, and then when Sharon left to go take care of her mom in Seattle, she brought in some box wine and a bunch of us went over to the Piper and sat on the patio and drank it, and she drank out of the mug. And then she came back after her mom died, and they laid her off about six weeks later, and we did it again, only me and Tracey brought the wine this time and we made sure it was good wine.

“Nothing pink!” That was Tracey’s rule. Good rule, right? For wine? “Nothing pink!” Only he said it the way Tracey would say it.

So I don’t know. I guess it’s a, a thing now. It’s the Death Mug. We break it out every time this happens, or whatever. Three rounds of layoffs, plus Lara and then Tracey. And when Bette left to marry Evil Eye — God, she drank like half a bottle!

Anyway. I was wondering if you’d want to meet me outside. I have some gin in my car. It’s been there since Easter.

And then, you know. I figured I’d leave it with you, right?

We better not find one of these in a thrift store any time soon.

In response to email and queries in this site’s comments about buying a Significant Objects Mug (i.e., because of our project’s mug logo, which Joe Alterio whipped up for us in a hurry when we suddenly decided to retire our original logo, a Salvation Army shield parody), we did a little research and found that manufacturing an actual red mug takes a bit more savvy than we now possess. We’re looking into that and welcome your tips.

Meanwhile, we’ve devised something every bit as pleasing: The Significant Objects Mug Mug.

That’s right, we’re now selling a handsome mug upon which is featured a depiction of our own, even more handsome mug logo. Why is the mug logo Alterio created so perfect for our enterprise, you ask? To answer that is to explain the secret origin of Significant Objects! Read on.

O.G. S.O.

As I’ve mentioned in a few interviews, a mug was partially responsible for inspiring this entire project. Specifically, the mug above. I bought it years ago on a trip to Baltimore with my now-wife; and in 2005, I broke it. Obviously this mug had no particular marketplace value at the time I accidentally smashed it — yet I was quite stricken. To me it was irreplaceable, precisely because there was a nice story to it. (I’ll spare you.) And that got me thinking. . . (Why did I photograph the mug? I knew that some day I’d cross paths with Joshua Glenn and we’d create Significant Objects! But I threw the actual object away. C’mon, it was just a busted mug.)

Iconic

When Significant Objects launched this past July, a flurry of bloggers writing about the project picked the early S.O. shown above to illustrate their stories and posts — a Smiling Mug, bought by Josh, and given Significance by Ben Greenman. Josh has already written a bit about this mug in an analytical post on Significant Dishware.

The Significant one

The Halston Mug, which I purchased my first shopping excursion for the project, and which was given Significance by Mimi Lipson, was another important early object. A critique that a couple of humorless observers made about Significant Objects in the beginning was that we weren’t really being scientific. For instance, to demonstrate truly that our stories were making our objects more valuable, some contended, there should be a direct control group: the identical object, sold sans-Signifcance, at the same time. To these nitpickers, I say: see below.

Screen Grab -- Significance crushes the competition.

The Mimi Lipson-Significant Halston Mug sold for $31. This screen grab, made while the auction was still ongoing (and the Significant Halston Mug bidding was at $17.61) demonstrates that anybody who wanted an identical mug could “Buy It Now” for as little as $5.99. Why not do that? Because every other Halston Mug on offer was insignificant. Sure, you could buy one of the other mugs if you were only interested in getting your money’s worth. (Although frankly those eBay sellers are dreaming; I bought the S.O. Halston Mug for 39 cents.) But our mug was a mass-produced object converted (by Mimi’s story) into a one-of-a-kind Significant object. I rest my case.

"Inspired by" Norman Rockwell

There have been other mugs in S.O. history, and there will be more to come. But the Country Doctor Mug pictured both above and below, which featured a design “inspired by the art of Norman Rockwell,” is now one of the project’s memorable Insignificant (or Lost) Objects. “I grew to loathe the mug,” Josh recalls in the Significant Dishware post, “and finally I hurled it into the garbage.” I vividly remember Josh informing me that he had banished this object to the realm of definitive non-significance. I was stunned! I’ll admit that I had been fascinated by the lame “explanation” on the back.

Back Story

“You threw it away?” I asked, incredulous that Josh didn’t consider such a powerful manifestation of, well, bullshit, worth hanging onto.  “You’re right,” he replied. “I should have smashed it.”

He really hated that mug.

What will we do with the “royalties” from the Significant Objects Mug Mug? Since we’ve already purchased several SOMMs ourselves, we’re at least hoping that future sales will help defray our own costs.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Thomas McNeely, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $17.]

As a mug, it was useless: pot-bellied, so whatever we drank, herbal tea, cheap whiskey, cheap red wine, dribbled down our chins, as if we were children; the pouch behind the cat’s head, a promise of tidy convenience, worse than useless, good only for planting cigarettes like flags after we’d given up on it as a mug.  Its only redeeming aesthetic feature, the patina of mold we were never able to wash from the right side of its nose, at least offset its louche, ridiculous, wall-eyed gaze.

We found it on the back porch, a screened-in box tacked to our apartment atop a treacherous flight of stairs. Down the street, at one end, the last bus stop to the university between two liquor stores, at the other end, a park that looked dark even at midday, always deserted. We took boxes of junk by bus from our dorm, the tail end of our freshman year in college, both of us barely nineteen years old.

The day we found it: Late afternoon, early evening, scraps of cloud like red satin blankets, surcease of summer heat. We lugged plastic milk crates from the bus stop up the vacant street, past the liquor stores, trying not to talk about what your mother had said, that you were on your own.

As I put the key in the lock, my hand shook, thinking how flimsy it was, how easily it could be broken. It was our first time there without the landlord, a tidy, soft-spoken man whose sex life we speculated upon; everyone was a character to us, then.  I thought I should carry you across the threshold; maybe we did this, ironically; maybe I’m only imagining it.

I remember how our footsteps echoed, how doors creaked across bare wooden floors.  We roamed the house tentatively, as if it wasn’t really ours.  In the kitchen, you jimmied open the back door, which I’d forgotten, a surprise, a secret passage.

Outside, the wall of maples above the creek you had yet to discover had already darkened to shadows.  I started to speak, to warn you not to step through the hole in the porch; but you’d already turned, holding the cat mug like a prize, plucked from a cobwebbed corner, straddling the gap in the floor.

“It’s hideous,” I said.

“It’s wonderful,” you said.

“It’s wonderfully hideous.”

“It’s hideously wonderful,” you said.  “I like it.”

We washed it as best we could in the coughing sink. Tiny spiders erupted, scattered ahead of the rushing water.  We put it on a windowsill, saying we would clean it later, when we had soap.

On a curio shelf, we found a roach the landlord had left, and smoked it, and made love quickly, clumsily, on a sleeping bag on the bare wooden floor.  Sometime that night, I woke to the platting of distant gunshots outside.  I lay on the narrow strip of fabric, holding you, imagining our empty apartment, the cat on its windowsill watching us, the vast, encompassing night sky above.

May, 1987, Austin, Texas, two bedrooms, half a house, $225 a month; signs and wonders were everywhere, then: runes, tarot cards, the harmonic convergence, though we didn’t believe in any of that.

I wanted to call you, to tell you I’d found the cat, unpacking boxes in another house.  But it was late, and I didn’t know if you would answer.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Tom Vanderbilt, has ended. Original price: 75 cents. Final price: $37. This story was part of a special collaboration with Design Observer, where it was co-published here.]

If he had a personal philosophy, and if such things needed to be articulated, it might be called: the aerodynamics of everyday life. He wanted his surfaces clean, his leading edges freed from drag, he brooked no laggards in his drift. This served him well in his avocation, which, as systems operation manager for a large industrial concern (Imprinteon, a custom-printing operation), involved ensuring that inputs became outputs, with maximum efficiency and at minimum cost. But one would not go awry in ascribing his philosophy to his life outside work, which too bore the requirements of flight: streamlined, rigid, and with no ground attachments.

On this morning, however, headwind. First had come the ink debacle on line 37, as the Pantone 4604, “billowing sail,” rendered so truly on screen, seemed wan in substrate form — more “rippling sheet.” 10,000 college yearbooks were to be pulped. Then were the material flow issues in sector 4, some sort of line imbalance. His throughput was out of sync, and there was no parallel flow, no buffer. The first-pass yields were collapsing. He glared at the faded white sign on the wall: MTBF. Mean time between failure. Its scuffed adjustable wheels were calibrated to read “43.” They would have go to back to 1, tomorrow.

And then the mug. It was placed in front of him, on his padded desk calendar, eclipsing March 3rd. It was a simple thing, really, the sort they ran millions of in a year, being the DOD’s favored insignia contractor. Fortuna Favet Fortibus, it read, Fortune Favors the Strong. The error was so basic, so obvious, that he wondered if there weren’t some hidden layer of complexity at work here. Privately, he allowed that one might read the mug’s form factor in two ways: The wider, curved flare made most sense as the vessel’s egress point, so the lips could comfortably adhere to the contours. And yet in some kind of drink-ware equivalent of a Necker Cube, the brain might willfully invert the mug, so that the wider end could logically seem the stable base, as with the cooling towers of Three Mile Island.

But the lapse he could not comprehend was the handle orientation. For the logo to make sense in this latter configuration, this would have had to have been a right-handed mug; normally, this would make sense, but the 3rd Marine 8th battalion had a long-standing, obscure joke, which some colonel must have dreamt up years ago when this long-standing order was first requisitioned, that the 8th battalion liked to “drink with their left, and shoot with their right.”

As it was, it could have been worse. The flaw was found in an acceptance sample (it was a retrograde technique, but he was working on a refinement that he would debut at next year’s Logistics World) run about two hours, or 3000 mugs, into the lot. And here was one of those moments where he felt the keen sense of being at the center of things, of life in its great rushing cavalcade of risk and reward. Was the sample he had pulled a statistical aberration — one upturned mug among tens of thousands of mugs of proper disposition — or was it endemic of a system failure, a thorough corruption? Was he about to pull the plug on an otherwise stable process?

His assistant called out, the inspector was here. He put the mug in a file drawer to his left, and would later move it to a cabinet that he considered his own museum of error. “Have a seat,” he said, closing the drawer.