Object No. 41 of 50 - Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this item, with story by Carl Wilson, has ended. Original price: $3.00. Final price: $20.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

Wetnet Constitutional Group: Auratic Object Background Report

1

Archive fragment: John Forsythe (voice) as Charles “Charlie” Townsend; Farrah Fawcett-Majors as Jill Munroe (1976-77, recurring 1978-80); Kate Jackson as Sabrina Duncan (1976-79); Jaclyn Smith as Kelly Garrett; Cheryl Ladd as Kris Munroe (1977-81); Shelley Hack as Tiffany Welles (1979-80); Tanya Roberts as Julie Rogers (1980-81); David Doyle as John Bosley.

2

Limbic archive trace data: At public school in Lansing, Mich., 1978, subject Derek F. is made to carry the Object to lunch every day by his mother, who dresses him in over-tight velour sweaters and corduroy “floods” [no trans. available] and has misread her ten-year-old son’s interest in a popular show. As the larger boys daily thwap his tailbone and head with its milk-swooshing bulk, they bark out “Sabrina! Sabrina!” and laugh.

The term catches on so robustly that in schoolyard argot it long remains an all-purpose insult, more androgynous than “gaylord,” as subject’s younger sibling Krissy F. finds out to her cost after frugal Mom hands-her-down the Object in 1983. This despite there being a Kris on it too.

Aural trace clip, semi-musical (folkloric): “Sabrina, Sabrina — chipmunk cheeks suckin’ on a weena!”

3

Academic archive, Popular Culture Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, y. 2012, contents page: Kristoph Finkel, U. Mich., “I Was Kate Jackson When Kate Jackson Wasn’t Kept Cool: Gender Trouble, Thermality and Referent Disposability in Promotional Ephemera of the Jiggle Age,” p. 87. Text missing. Journal archive ceases with this number; as do records of all cross-indexed journals after this year.

Mass media of the period contain multiple refs.; typical heading: “Prop. 11: Palin gives humanities funds electoral wedgie.”

4

Network1 archive, kitschisthenakedtruth.com, Jan. 13, 2018, 11:17 a.m.: Repulsive developments today in the saga of packrat D.A. Finkel, whose death I reported Friday. When they found his body it seemed a sad reminder how the hunter-gatherer joys of our pastime risk blurring into pathological hoarding. The truth is much worse.

You’ll recall how Angels collectors flocked around when word leaked he owned one of only three existing “Sabrina’s Snot” irregulars among C.A.’s lunchbox beverage collectibles. The Dubai-scale bidding enabled him to retreat completely into his Spellingesque Malibu-Barbie estate in New England till it collapsed around him. But now water-damaged diaries recovered from the infested heap reveal the item was NEVER an authentic misprint. Finkel wrote in graphic detail of employing his collectibles in acts of self-abuse; the smears on Sabrina’s nose were a side-effect — which by opportunistic coincidence matched the patterns of the prized irregular LBCs.

My own nose smells a lawsuit. But in fact his treatment of his treasures is an affront to all preservationists. Leave your votes for best way to perpetrate a Finkel on the creep’s own corpse in the Comments.

5

Archival gap, standard causes.

6

Archive fragment, Age of Service Outage, scan of handcopied “Grauman’s Guide to Salvation”: Angels were worshiped by 20th-century Americans who followed Charlie Christ. Deities included Sabrina, a young witch of beauty and renown whose parables were told in brightly colored illustrated scriptures. … One ritual object was a blue chalice from which was drunk consecrated liquid, which celebrants believed physically became the blood of Charlie, who wore a black hat, oversized shoes, mustache and cane, and manifested primarily by “speaker phone.” The last known such relic was reclaimed by Shanghai as part of Greater Chinese patrimony prior to the Errancy, the Correction and the Second Errancy.

7

Archival void, standard causes.

8

Proposed wording for constitutional passage: After votes are counted and confirmed, the Auratic Object shall be conveyed by drones to the bio tank of the successful candidate for Chief Admin. As confirmation an image shall be uploaded to Reality during Inauguration. Satisfied of its authenticity, the Regulator General shall recite: “As in every transfer of power since the Wetnet went omni, the Auratic Object has been transported to rest at the side of the new Admin’s bio tank. This repository of history, the sole surviving physical artifact of human culture, represents both the humility of our origins and the tenacity of our purpose, as coded to be so preserved by the founding Admin, Finkel the First.”

This amendment to add “and confirmed” (to avoid repetition of the recent Hanging Sabrina electoral irregularity) is recommended by consensus of the Regulatory Group.

(End Report.)

Object No. 89 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Maud Newton, has ended. Original price: 59 cents. Final price: $24.50.]

This astonishing “Cracker Barrel” artifact appears to be a souvenir of modern vintage, representing a down-home North American restaurant-and-country-store chain that upholds Christian values by refusing to hire gay people. In fact, the object dates to the Bronze Age and was unearthed last week in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, on what is believed by several prominent archaeologists to be the site of the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Alongside the artifact lay a charred cuneiform tablet that listed all five towns of the Pentapolis (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar) that were destroyed by the Lord with fire and brimstone while Lot and his family fled.

As scholars at the site quickly translated the tablet, they discovered a parable that directly contradicted the reasons given in Genesis for the devastation God wreaked on the inhabitants of those late, sinful cities. The Sodomites, in this account, were punished not for gay sex, but for for failing to offer the proper hospitality to several strangers, who were homosexual men, and for trying to force their daughters on the men. The Sodomites had barred the visitors from their homes, bars, and restaurants, engaged in discriminatory hiring practices, and invented and frequently employed the insult “faygele.” Same-sex unions, under any name, were prohibited.

Enraged that the people had apparently failed to apprehend the full meaning of the rainbow promise he had made to Noah after the flood, the Lord waved His hand. Volcanic lava rained down, killing everyone but Lot and his family — and a few Cracker Barrel employees, who escaped, carrying this artifact with them.

On initial inspection, strange markings on the underside of the cuneiform tablet appeared to tie the Cracker Barrel escapees to The Illuminati, but this linkage could not be verified, for, although it was handled with utmost care and in accordance with the strictest archaeological preservation methods, the tablet turned to salt the moment the initial transcription was complete. Then a ram began to baa nearby, its horn caught in a bush. Seconds later a rainbow appeared in the sky. Fundamentalist groups in the United States have now denounced the rainbow as a sign of the End Times. They continue to frequent Cracker Barrel, however.

Object No. 68 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Ben Katchor, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $42.]

This beautiful, but slightly worn, example of early 20th century porcelain “bookware” was manufactured and distributed free-of-charge along with newly printed copies of the “Maine Revised Statutes Annotated” — a dreary compendium of state laws.

This example, formed in the style of a small, shallow aperitif or snack dish, holds 50 salted peanuts. It was meant to encourage lawyers and public advocates to acquaint themselves with the latest revisions to state law.  On one dishful of peanuts, a reader could make his way through several Titles and Chapters of the book.

This example of “bookware” cemented the connection between justice and eating within the professional classes of Maine. Each chapter was keyed to an estimated number of peanuts. The worn edge of the dish is evidence of the late-night reading of an overweight small-town lawyer.

Title 17, Chapter  131: MISCELLANEOUS CRIMES
17 §3951. Abandonment of airtight containers (REPEALED) 15 peanuts
17 §3952. Dangerous knives (REPEALED) 23 peanuts
17 §3953. Disorderly conduct (REPEALED) 8 peanuts
17 §3954. Disturbance of public meetings (REPEALED) 12 peanuts
17 §3955. Dumping rubbish on another’s land (REPEALED) 15 peanuts
17 §3956. Electric fences: 8 peanuts
17 §3957. Failure to report treatment of gunshot wounds (REPEALED): 18 peanuts
17 §3958. False alarms and reports (REPEALED): 9 peanuts
17 §3960. Peeking in nighttime (REPEALED) 34 peanuts
17 §3961. Placing obstructions on traveled road (REPEALED): 15 peanuts
17 §3962. Regulation of radio waves; disturbing reception (REVISED) 8 peanuts
17 §3963. Riding with naked scythe (REPEALED): 17 peanuts
17 §3965. Defacement of state facilities; possession of paint (REPEALED) 7 peanuts
17 §3966. Animals in food stores (REVISED) 12 peanuts
17 §2904. Use of phonographs for profane or obscene language (REPEALED): 45 peanuts

The Maine Revised Statues are now available online.

Detail.

Object No. 59 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jen Collins, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $20.50.]

For my 9th birthday, I begged my mother to take me to the iron-on decal store at the Meadow Glen Mall. I had seen some older boy wearing a sweatshirt with a glittery rip-off of the Superman “S” shield saying SUPERBRAT, and I had to have one. By the time I convinced my mother, they had run out of the decal. So I settled for a glitter Garfield on a royal blue pullover hoodie. I was crazy about Garfield — he loved lasagna and hated Mondays, just like me. I had all his books and my friends would come over and read them. This was awesome to a 9-year-old in 1983. I wore the pullover to the arcade, to sleepovers, and to my first track meet.

I wasn’t a Superbrat anyway. I did have a whoopee cushion, though, and a ketchup squirt bottle with a long string in it — both gifts from my father, a wiseass. Naturally, I always picked the 7Up Uncola glass from the kitchen shelf, except for when he picked it first. A few times, when we were watching TV, he stole it from me when I wasn’t looking.

For my 13th birthday — a few days before it — my father left us. A Monday morning. He was packing his briefcase for work while Ma was packing our lunches for school. He came into the TV room, kissed my little sister on the forehead and told her, “Do good today, OK? ABCs?” Then he side-hugged me and said, “See ya latah, Ambah.”

When I got home after track practice that night, my mother told me my father wasn’t coming back. “He left you a present,” she said.

“An abandonment present? Is that customary? No thanks.”

“What can I tell you? He’s an asshole, he’s always been an asshole. At least he remembered this year.” She put a package on the kitchen table, wrapped in newspaper.

It was shaped like an Uncola glass.

[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.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sean Howe, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $20.51.]

It’s difficult work, wooing Donna. For one thing, the rhythms of my courtship are constantly interrupted by the lustful swarm of others, many of whom clumsily flirt with her. I’m impressed with the way she puts up with their transparent designs. She smiles, returns their jokes, and fleeces them of their tip money. Then she pivots, floats to me, and tells me about her dreams. Sometimes we discuss literature. I’ve been trying to get her to read Eliot’s Romola, but she says “it’s too intellectual for me.” She doesn’t give herself enough credit.

The hardest part is how to keep myself occupied while she’s busy. I’ve found that it’s best to set myself up at the end of the bar; it curves around, which provides me with a view of potential interlopers. Sometimes I can see, out of the corner of my vision, Donna glancing my way. Maybe it’s just to see how I’m doing with my drink, or maybe she’s stealing a look at my face. But I fix my eyes on the top shelf of liquor, looking busy. Sometimes I can feel my face vibrate, and my heart beat faster. Like when you lie to someone and try to look them in the eye.

She was smiling at me Thursday night, when I followed her to the stairs and I realized she was already drunk. She dropped the bottle opener through the slats, so we just smoked and listened to the rain. When I said goodnight I tried to find the balance between slurred speech and an overly enunciated farewell. I don’t want to give away my feelings until the time is right.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jennifer Michael Hecht, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $10.50.]

Kathy can remember how she left both of her ex-husbands but she can’t remember how she left Jeffrey. She can remember a phone call that seemed to finalize that she was leaving him with his father but she isn’t sure when that happened or why. Kathy is pretty and rich, but she loathes herself and everyone except Jeffrey. When she is with Jeffrey she loathes herself less, except she gets some sharp stabbing pains of it. She has been with him a lot lately, so has been drinking a lot less.

She is awake alone in the middle of the night. The very nice man she lives with is asleep in their bed at the top of her town house, two flights upstairs. She can turn on lights, make normal noise with a beer bottle against the table. She is drinking a yellow beer with lime in it. The house is warm but not warm enough for no pants and Kathy is wishing pants weren’t two flights away. For the time being she isn’t moving. She’s only had one beer since she got up, but she drank more than a few the night before.

Kathy is smoking a joint in the kitchen and looking at Michael Phelps on a Corn Flakes box. Phelps won eight gold medals swimming in the Olympics and then lost his Corn Flakes endorsement deal because of a photograph of him smoking a bong. Kathy’s boyfriend saw a pre-bong cereal box at the supermarket and snatched it up. He likes things like this. Now the Phelps cereal box has been mounted prominently for many months on a kitchen shelf. Phelps is in the pool up to his neck, holding up one finger and smiling like crazy. She takes a hit and smiles back at him. She replies to his “We’re number one” finger with her own. She rests her lighter on a ceramic figurine of the “Hakuna Matata” guys from The Lion King. Kathy had been to Kenya with her second husband and people there said “Hakuna matata” the way we say, “No problem,” and they pronounce it like a machine gun, fast and hard.

Kathy had grown up with Baloo the bear in Jungle Book as her icon of happiness through low expectations. The bare necessities, the simple bare necessities, the bare necessities of life. As she remembered it, you just eat whatever you find under a log. Kathy is on her second beer. The paper towel wrapped around it is wet from bottle sweat. Drawn-out syllables are playing in her head, “Haah koo na ma tata, what a wonderful phrase. Haah koo na ma ta tahh, it’s no passing craze.”

Kathy picks up the ceramic figurine and closes her hand around it. It is cooler than room temperature, its shape massages her tight palm and fingers. She considers throwing it at Phelps, just to see which way the box would fall but decides it would seem hostile. She chooses instead to duplicate the warthog’s position. Leaving the beer in the kitchen, but bringing the figurine, Kathy walks into the parlor and looks down at the rug. Mutters “Jeffrey’s pillows,” and eases herself down to them. She puts one pillow on her belly, as if it were a meerkat. Closes her eyes.

[The auction on this Significant Object, with story by Mimi Lipson, has ended. Original price: 39 cents. Final price: $31.]

From AW: The Lost Diaries

Wednesday, June 13, 1979

Halston was having a birthday party for the Dupont twins, so I glued myself together and cabbed to the Pierre to pick up Bianca ($5). She’s still mad at Victor about the sweater, but I think it’s really because she found out that he went to Mick and Jerry’s black and white party at Mr. Chow’s. Bianca’s ass is really getting too wide to wear Halston.

The party was fun. Halston had a birthday cake made up that looked like a giant popper. Victor was passing out these ugly coffee mugs that said “Halston” and had sketches from the fall line on them. Mugs, like from a truck stop. They had wavy American flags on them, too, and when I asked Halston why they had the flags, he said, “Don’t you think it makes them so much more butch?” Maybe I should get some mugs made up for Interview. Are they camp?

Thursday, June 14, 1979

Woke up tired from sleeping on my back so I don’t get any more wrinkles. I’m going use to the vaporizer instead from now on, if I remember to. And I’m still black and blue from the B12 shot that Martha Graham talked me into.

I don’t want mugs for Interview anymore. I’ve decided that they’re tacky. I thought about saving my Halston mug for a time capsule, but I gave it to Brigid instead. She’s probably just going to throw it out or give it to the Salvation Army or something.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story Mark Frauenfelder, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $23.]

Matt saw the tiny blue bottle on the third step of the main entrance to the Los Angeles Central Library. It was next to a sleeping man, obviously homeless. A $100 bill, rolled-up, was protruding from the bottle’s open neck. Matt slyly scooped up the bottle on his way into the library. He hid the bottle in his fist until he got to a desk with side partitions.

A chipped decal on the bottle read, “Arrow De Luxe Apricot Flavored Brandy.” He pulled the rolled-up bill from the neck. When he unrolled it, it was a just note printed on what looked like a $100 bill. He’d picked up these phony bills before. They were religious tracts. What kind of religion tries to win members by pulling a dirty trick? he wondered.

Matt dropped the note on the ground and pocketed the bottle. It looks like an antique, he thought. I might get some money for it. He barely made it to the computer card catalog when the bottle appeared in his mouth. The oddly ribbed neck protruded from his lips, while the rest of the bottle uncomfortably occupied his mouth, pushing his tongue down and preventing him from closing his jaws completely.

He pulled the bottle out, tossed it on the table. It spun and skidded across the table, clanking on the floor. He walked quickly towards the exit. In five seconds, the bottle reappeared in his mouth. This time he yanked the bottle and threw it on the ground. It made a loud noise when it shattered. The other library visitors looked at him, startled. Matt ran. The bottle returned to his mouth, intact, before he was outside. He looked for the sleeping man, but he was gone.

He ran down 5th street, throwing the bottle onto the sidewalk every time it appeared in his mouth. After nineteen attempts to get rid of it, it felt like it had gotten bigger. What had the note said? He went back into library to look for it. It wasn’t there. People stared at the crazy man with the blue thing sticking out of his mouth, crawling on his hands and knees. He finally found the note under the shelves near the desk.

This time, he read it:

This bottle is going to appear in your mouth in two minutes. If you pull the bottle out of your mouth, it will reappear in your mouth in five seconds. If you attempt to prevent the bottle from reappearing in your mouth by filling your mouth with another object, you could choke or burst your cheek when the bottle returns to your mouth and displaces the object. In addition, every time you remove the bottle from your mouth, it will grow in size by one tenth of one percent. Unless you sell the bottle to another person and money changes hands, the bottle will remain in your mouth until you die. When you die, it will go back to where you found it. You must reveal this paragraph verbatim to anyone you attempt to sell the bottle to.

In the days that followed, Matt stopped going to work. His wife left him, even after he demonstrated to her the bottle’s cruel magic. He drank yogurt, applesauce, and blended food though a straw. He couldn’t sleep. He was afraid to pull the bottle out of his mouth again. He did it one more time, though, setting it next to a penny on a black tablecloth draped over a chair. He snapped a photo of it with his cell phone camera. He rushed, not giving the camera’s autofocus enough time to do its job. The photo turned out blurry, but it would have to do.

Maybe if I write the description as a work of fiction, he thought, someone will buy the bottle.

[Bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Luc Sante, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $17.79.]

Only now do I feel free to tell my part in the theft of the famed Light of the East diamond from the home of Roscoe and Mindy Furgarden in Beverly Hills in the summer of 1979. The 517-carat colorless gem, one of the world’s largest, had disappeared and reappeared many times in its tangled history. Its latest reemergence, among the effects of the Marquis of Glendale, had occasioned a crowded and contentious Sotheby’s auction that was won, to the dismay of all, by an anonymous telephone bid placed on behalf of the Furgardens.

The identity of the winner was sufficiently well concealed that the Furgardens felt no hurry to stow the diamond in a vault. Mindy needed to spend time staring at it, in her boudoir, where the illuminated five-part dressing mirror enhanced and multiplied its splendors. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut, though, and happened to tell her very best friend, Sheila Showpony, all about it on the terrace of Sheila’s Elizabethan cottage in the Hollywood Hills, right when my friend Craig was crouched nearby, cleaning out the pool filter.

Craig wasted no time organizing a crew of four to heist the rock. Sully was driver and lookout, Rat the lock specialist, and Craig and I were set to penetrate the boudoir. We frankly had no idea how to go about fencing the thing, but it was too rich a score to pass up. We learned that the Furgardens would be attending a charity polo match on the evening of June 18th, leaving the house in the care of their housekeeper, Mildred Swing, who was known to suffer from narcolepsy, and a retired cop named McDrain who acted as majordomo and security guard. McDrain’s weakness was the dog track, so we faked a hot tip on the sixth race to get him out of the house.

As we pulled into the driveway, the night was clear and we felt confident. Rat eased open the rear service entrance and we were in. We tiptoed up the stairs and found Mildred watching The Rockford Files in her room, her eyelids drooping. We easily found the master suite; within, the second door we tried led to Mindy’s boudoir. And there on the vanity lay the biggest diamond any of us had ever seen, lying casually on a chamois cloth like a naked movie star sprawled on a satin sheet.

Then the lights went out. We never found out what happened — had we cut an electric-eye beam? But we went into action mode. I wrapped the stone in its cloth, secreted it in a pocket of my jumpsuit, and we ran, bent low, down the carpeted hall and the carpeted stairs. We jumped into the car and made straight for our safehouse on the outskirts of Burbank, listening for sirens.

We yanked all the shades down and turned on a single light. I pulled the package out of my pocket. With slow, dramatic gestures I unwrapped it, only to discover… a Sanka ashtray. It was about the same size. In the dark I must have — I didn’t want to think about it. The others left me bleeding in an alley with the ashtray jammed into my mouth. I hung on to it for years as a bitter reminder, but eventually I drove to the nearest Goodwill box and shoved it in. And the stone? It disappeared that night and was never seen again.