From your friends at Significant Objects.

From your friends at Significant Objects.

From your friends at Significant Objects.

Object No. 37 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Colleen Werthmann, has ended. Original price: $3.00. Final price: $11.50. Significant Objects will donate proceeds from this auction to Girls Write Now.]

During the Sacraments, cheat out. That way the whole church can see you, and your parents can get a nice picture, not just the back of your head.

“In my thoughts, and in my words, in what I have failed to do, and what I have done.” Pretty much covers your bases. Except when you do something partway. I guess you add those kinda things in during the silent part before “Amen.”

Overhead swoops and dots for eyes. Manufactured craftsmanship. Keep ’em affordable for the poorer folks, the factory folks. The Ford plant donates the shirts for the softball team at St. Agnes.

Cute when the kids get their First Communion, though. Usually draws a big crowd. They like to schedule it on Holy Thursday, but that’s a bit of a downer. Makes the kids feel sorta crummy. Best to do it on a Sunday morning.

The altar kids (boys and girls, now!) pick their nails during the homily, hoping nobody’s watching. They wear nice pants and nice shoes under their cassocks, no sneakers, definitely no sneakers. Scheduled depending on who has a swim meet, who’s got ice time, who’s visiting their relatives. In the sacristy now, one of the Eucharistic Ministers is always around ahead of time. You know, just in case.

Disillusionment is a box of Communion wafers. 1000 quantity. Sale price $11.89, originally $16.99. You save $5.10!

In the ’80s, when AIDS came out, the Church was like, “It’s OK to take Communion with your hands, not have the priest put it on your tongue.”

It’s not the words, it’s what’s in your heart, that’s what the priest said to my grandma, when she cried, age 102, that she couldn’t remember the words to the basic prayers any more, tears sliding into her ears. Clutching and picking at the blankets. Remember what we talked about, Eileen? It’s not the words, it’s what’s in your heart. And she would repeat her new prayer, her prayer of trying so hard, over and over.

Object No. 2 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Mark Binelli, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $10.49.  Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

Shortly after I made my First Communion, my cousin Rodney showed up at my mom’s. He’d also just made his First Communion, though at a different church. It was so recent, I still had this plastic First Communion cross, a gift from my great-aunt, propped on my bookshelf. My mom always disliked my aunt, and had commented in some oblique way on the chintziness of the gift, as if it should’ve been a cross made of solid gold or poached elephant ivory or something, as if Jesus would’ve been psyched about that. I didn’t mind it, though.

Anyway, it turned out Rodney, that morning at church, had, in a rather impressive feat of legerdemain, only pretended to eat the communion wafer the priest had placed in his outstretched hands — only very old parishioners still took the wafer directly on their tongue — and instead had palmed the thing and snuck it home. It was a pretty motley act of civil disobedience, a nine-year-old’s equivalent of writing in a porn star for mayor or burning a twenty-dollar bill. Still, now he had this piece of Eucharist, which he unwrapped gingerly from a square of toilet tissue. He didn’t know what to do with it.

On the grass-colored carpet between us, the host, slightly speckled, looked like a bit of shell from a broken bird’s egg. I said how do they make them so perfectly round and flat. Rodney said there’s probably a factory upstate. I pictured a conveyor belt, with monks snatching up the bad ones. (You don’t want anyone getting a host that’s burnt, or cracked, or shaped like a profile of Nixon.)

Finally Rodney suggested that we could have a black mass. The host had been consecrated, after all. I thought this sounded like a cool idea. In a fit of inspiration, Rodney grabbed my Communion cross and flipped it upside-down, making a Satanic altar.

Upside-down, the gold chalice on the cross looked just like a bell.

Rodney said the way this would work was, you got to say a prayer, only it would be to Satan, so you could ask for anything, not just good things — you could ask for wishes God would not only not grant but actually punish you for thinking.

We dimmed the lights and closed our eyes. At one point, I opened mine a crack, and the light from my desk lamp was hitting the cross in a way that made it seem to glow. I quickly closed my eyes again. That was the first time I thought my evil prayers might be answered. But I was never able to levitate, and Tina George’s blouse never spontaneously popped open on the playground.

About six months later, when the most hated homeroom teacher at our school got cancer, Rodney did pull me aside and whisper that that’s what he’d prayed for. I didn’t believe him, though.

Still, you should be careful with this thing.

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 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. 63 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by J. Robert Lennon, has ended. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $21.50.]

The day after the day I turned seventeen, three weeks after the recital in which I received the award for distinguished effort in solo violin performance, five months after my older brother was arrested for dealing cocaine and thrown out of college and came home and ever since had been living in his old attic room which he had transformed into his personal domain during the last semester of high school when he had the argument with our father which our mother believed had contributed, however indirectly, to the stroke which killed him some weeks later, I stood on the stair landing gazing out through the tiny hexagonal window overlooking the back yard and saw my mother gardening there, and her bent form among the vegetables moved me, yes, but in an unexpected way — somehow the sight of her vertebrae humped underneath her purple blouse and the thick white bra strap visible through the fabric, even from here, filled me with anger, for the way she had pushed me, the way she had forced me to practice the same pieces over and over again those cold afternoons when I alone was sitting beside the radiator perspiring through my thick sweatshirt, and though my mother was frail already at forty-eight, worn down by the relentless belittlement of my father, I wanted to march down the stairs and tell her she had ruined me, that I hated her, to smash my violin against the cracked and disintegrating cement cherub that stood in the center of her flower garden, which my father had bought her in a happier time, or perhaps a time in which unhappiness was still latent, not yet fully expressed — but instead I reached out to the squat and ugly little end table that stood in the corner of the landing and took into my hand the nearest of her china figurines, all of them together a mystery, for they were cheap and tacky and beneath her deluded sense of herself as the wife of a man of wealth and power, which my father was not, rather he was a second-rate businessman in a third-rate city, and in any event dead now for three years; and when my brother came loping down the stairs from his room, reeking of weed and holding between his chin and extended left hand an imaginary violin, which he limp-wristedly sawed at with the imaginary bow in his right, while emitting a mocking squeak intended to represent my playing at its worst, I turned to him and punched him with all the strength I could muster, shattering both his nose and the choirboy figurine in my hand — and my brother fell back against the stairs gagging on blood, and I felt the shards of choirboy slice through my palm and the muscles of my fingers, which even at that moment I understood would take six months to heal if they ever healed at all, ending my nascent career as a classical performer, and I wish I could say that it was with satisfaction that I regarded my brother lying on the carpeted stairs with his hand over his other hand over his face, and that it was with relief that I regarded my ruined hand as the fingers jerked open, raining blood and choirboy pieces onto the oriental runner, but in fact I felt neither, I felt only the foolishness that accompanies any discharge of rage, and the very beginnings of shame as my mother, as though sensing this disturbance through the hexagonal glass and sixty feet of late spring air, turned her kerchiefed head to squint up at the house where everything she had hoped would make her happy was continuing to fall apart.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sloane Crosley, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $57.66.]

Alec Baldwin never had a Bar Mitzvah. The non-fact of this, the bloated lack in the calendar of his mind, haunted him. How could he be a sterling example of manhood to little Billy, Danny and Stevie if he wasn’t even a man himself?

Then, in 2002, Alec attended the International Conference of Music and Theatre in Chicago, Illinois where the keynote speaker was one Michael Jackson. The conference, previously held in The Drake hotel, had moved to the Marriott. But Alec, who had ignored e-mails regarding the venue change, showed up at The Drake.  Furious, he called his then-4-year-old daughter just to bitch about the situation.  That’s when he heard someone shout his name. It was Michael Jackson himself.

Michael too had gotten the right address wrong. Or the wrong address right.  He urged Alec to join him in the bar, where they ordered sidecars and a ramekin of Kahlua for Michael. The two men, as they would come to find out over the next few hours, both turned 13 in 1971.  As celebrities do, they kinda sorta knew each other from being famous. Though one was more so than the other.  In 1971, Jackson went solo.  In 1971, Baldwin walked to the 7-11, got a Slurpee, and drank it while doing his homework.

As the night stretched on, it came out that Michael had also never been Bar Mitzvahed. He also wasn’t Jewish, a fact which saddened Michael almost as much as it did Alec.

“Let’s do it tonight,” said Michael, dipping his pinky into the Kahlua and sucking on it, “let’s have a joint, belated Bar Mitzvah. I can arrange for us to have a rabbi and a caricaturist here in 10 minutes.”

“Tonight?” chuckled Alec. “Who’s bad?” He shook his head.

In the end, they compromised. If they couldn’t have an actual Bar Mitzvah, they at least wanted the trappings. Maybe a sombrero or a pair of boxers that read “I Danced My Pants Off At Michael & Alec’s Bar Mitzvah!” They journeyed to the gift shop, and found exactly what they were looking for: A whole shelf of rainbow sand-filled horses. Beautiful plastic stallions with long necks that reached above the snow globes and miniature Sears Towers. They each bought one and took them outside.

“Now what?” said Alec.

“Now,” said Michael, unscrewing the cap of his rainbow steed, “we write two things on slips of paper: our hopes and dreams and how we think we’re going to die.”

“Isn’t that three things?”

“And then we put the paper in this horse and shake it down to the middle and bury it in our backyards, and say a Jewish prayer when we do.”

“Jesus, you’ve really thought this out.”

“It’s just how my mind works,” said Michael, ripping a piece of scrap paper from his day planner.

He borrowed a pen from the doorman, which Alec kept. Alec finished first.

“Caught on your hopes and dreams, huh?” said Alec.

“No,” Michael scribbled solemnly, “it’s just that I know exactly how I’m going to die and I want to get every detail in there.”

And so they shook their notes into the sand and parted ways, promising to bury their horses.  Which Alec did as soon as he got home. But Michael, whose motivations were more about a good party than a spiritual reckoning, completely forgot about the entire episode. He wasn’t even unpacking his own suitcase by this time.  A Neverland butler took the sand horse down to the basement, and threw it in a cardboard box marked “MICHAEL’S RANDOM CRAP.”

There it sat for 7 years, gathering dust. I know, it was in a box. But whatever, there was dust. It’s a big house to clean. The sand horse was not among the pricey Access Hollywood-exposed gems of the Neverland auction. It was simply overlooked. This is not only a beautiful specimen of kitsch, but it contains the hopes, dreams, and death visions of Michael Jackson. The sand, it should be noted, has never been poured out.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Rosecrans Baldwin, has ended. Original price: $1.50. Final price: $26. ]

The North Americans refused accusal. Constructed great cities and gave their names to them and let them crumble and then walked away. Disappeared in The Big Sand. Said never to apologize and seldom to slow down. Who judged on souls, some anointed, some not. That’s what the relics show. People of the small picture.

Shown: Totem of North American Perry Atlas. He found it tissue-wrapped in a rental car. Atlas, cell-phone salesman, who gave up his marriage and family in Knoxville, Tennessee, for a week’s affair with a bartender who was post-pregnant and couldn’t help but look around for what came next. Miscarriage, and Atlas later homeless in Shreveport.

Then carried by two murderers — killing from self-loathing, having already killed four — on a drug spree through Illinois. One with a gun, one with a map. They were bragging, lurching towards Springfield, and hit a Wendy’s. Robbed a hundred bucks from the register and found two hands in prayer on the counter and palmed it too, propped it up on the dashboard for good luck. An accident, a heart attack striking the driver that evening, killed both, and that was that.

Finally, the totem of North American girl Dahlia, who received it in the mail from her sister, Mocha, who was always sending her dumb shit, those small praying hands being the last straw, said Dahlia; they’re being, duh, obviously a reference to how Mocha saw Dahlia’s prospects in life (without a prayer); Dahlia’s suicide securely severing their relationship.

Nothing survives. The American dream mutated to its rest, but it was doomed from day one, so were the Americans. So are we.

—from Exhibition Captions of Gao Jianqing Sanderson, Doomsday Collector (ICBC Wal-Mobil, 3055)

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Adam Harrison Levy, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $15.50. This story was part of a special collaboration with Design Observer, where it is co-published here.]

Now that Budd Schulberg has died, the story of how I stole this plate from him can finally be told. I was researching a documentary film and I had taken a bus out to his house on Long Island in order to interview him. Schulberg wrote the screenplay for On The Waterfront (“I coulda been a contender”), named names for the House Un-American Activities Committee and, during World War Two, arrested Leni Riefenstahl, the famous filmmaker. Not many people know that.

In my capacity working on documentary films, I’ve met a lot of famous people and stolen great stuff from them — Harry Belafonte’s precise V5 roller ball pen, Liza Minnelli’s ashtray, and a used Kleenex from Debbie Harry’s red leather handbag. Some people collect autographs from famous people. I collect things.

These things represent the defining moments of my life. By stealing objects from people whose lives have been important, I celebrate my encounter with them (at least that is what I tell myself in order to explain what otherwise might be termed theft). A Kleenex is a Kleenex (even when smeared with lipstick) but when its Debbie Harry’s Kleenex, it becomes truly important, and it gains even more importance when it joins Belafonte’s pen and Minnelli’s ashtray in my collection. Right?

So it was a crisp fall afternoon and I had taken the Hamptons Jitney out to see Schulberg, who lives near the ocean. He picked me up in his car. He was ninety-two at the time, and his head just about cleared the dashboard. We made it back to his house more or less in one piece.

We sat down in his living room, which was a jumble of really great stuff. On the mantelpiece was his Oscar for On The Waterfront (patina chipped and damaged and way too obvious to steal), a signed photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald (framed and therefore too clunky), and a number of seashells (too cute).

I asked Schulberg questions about his life. During World War Two, he had been a member of John Ford’s film unit. His mission was to find and edit Nazi film footage to be used during the Nuremberg Trials. It was the first time that film was used as evidence in an International Court of Law. I was impressed. My own work demands that I view video clips on YouTube.

While he was talking, I spied the plate — which contained some loose change and three paperclips — on the credenza. Something about the simplicity and modernity of its shape reminded me of an Eero Saarinen Tulip Table. The artfully incoherent placement of the stars was like a Dada backdrop. The plate was clearly mass-produced. It called out to me. When Schulberg doddered off to take a leak, I slipped the plate — change, paperclips, and all — into my bag.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sarah Rainone, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $41.]

As my husband and I were driving back to New York after my mother’s funeral, I spotted a general store on the Rhode Island-Connecticut border, the kind that exist solely for those who forgot to bring something back from Newport or Block Island or Martha’s Vineyard or wherever. Judging from the weathered sign and the rusting trinkets out front, it seemed decades old, and yet I swear I had never seen it in all my travels along this stretch of I-95. Strange.

My husband looked puzzled as I pulled into the gravel driveway. “I have to go in.” He started to open his door but I stopped him. “And I have to go alone.” I was not in the store two minutes when I saw the plate. Let me explain.

After my mother became ill, I traveled to India in search of the secrets of eternal life. While my studies proved inadequate to save her, I learned a bit about yogic chanting, namely that the sweetest chants are the ones sung to Krishna — the mischievous youth who liked butter, enjoyed hanging out with female cowherds, and who just happened to be the human incarnation of the great god Vishnu, tasked with no less a chore than the preservation of the entire universe.

When I returned to the States with my newfound knowledge, my mother said she appreciated it, but I think she was humoring me. She was Irish Catholic and didn’t see the sense in taking off to India when the Holy Spirit was everywhere.

When I saw this plate, I knew there was something about it that was both Indian and Irish, something that transcended the religions that divide nations and men. I bought it immediately and would later discover that much like St. Patrick who had driven the snakes from Ireland, Krishna had tamed the serpent Kaliya who had previously been poisoning the waters of the Yamuna river, killing the cowherds on its banks. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

This plate is about cowherds, about shamrocks, about Ireland, yes, but it is also about liberation, about preservation, about eternal life. And if you purchase it, my only wish is that you do not eat corned beef from it, without first thinking of Krishna.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Glen David Gold, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $56.50.]

Hell, of course, has a hierarchy; it is by definition all hierarchy. As James Blish noted, any act of magic requires harnessing the work of one demon at a time. Those who answer the call are subalterns, grumbling Malebranches whose job otherwise is to stir the pitch into which politicians are tossed. Think of them as the enlisted men.

The officers — the ones who disdain pacts with sorcerers — are demons with actual names. Above them — the majors and colonels — are the 400 primal sinners envisioned by Albertus Magnus in Ein Katalog der Kritiker die Ihren Eigenen Berichten Glauben. Higher still are the 13 evil forms identified by Eliphas Lévi before his mysterious fall from the window of l’abbaye du psellus. Unspeakably powerful, the generals above them are Belial, Othiel, and Qemetial, of whom Aleister Crowley wrote “Let no man see these dark shapes before the final dawn approaches.”

And ruling them all, Lucifuge Rofocale, tyrant of hell. At his fingertips are the powers of the 15,485,863 (a deconsecrated prime number) demons below him. Controlling him? Unlikely.

However…

The possibility of summoning this ur-demon has frightened the most rational of scholars. In the age of the Enlightenment, Athanasius Kircher is said to have torn crucial pages from the Voynich manuscript’s cryptic sections on herbs and astronomy to prevent exactly this evocation. Nonetheless in the course of several generations, the mysterious Eruditi di Nerezza managed to file away the procedures required. When the Collegio Ghislieri located the single necessary talisman, their sanctuary — stone towers and all — burned to the ground with no survivors.

And yet tales of the talisman remained.

Etchings in The Grand Grimoire, assembled in 1522 by Alibek the Egyptian, indicate it would depict one of the pseudo-Solomons, a bald-headed figure, bearded, in supplication. He would show wear on his knees (from prayer) and his bib (from feasting on mysterious flesh). He would hold a hammered copper tray of offerings (four serpent eggs dyed in rosewater) in his left hand. His right would be extended in the anatomically-difficult position of first and last finger splayed, center fingers adjoined, making in other words the sign of the sage bound to Baphomet.

The base would be verdant green, textured grass, representing nature trampled by the self-determination of man (and by extension, of demon). The figure would appear to wear the skin of a golden bear he had slain himself, surmounted with a red silk cloth representing sacrifice, and leather shoes made from the skins of his enemies. His trousers would be blue, and have no significance.

Descriptions at this point traditionally conclude with a warning/exegesis on the nature of desire. An object is only an object unless invested with manna, animal spirit. In short, all authorities from the Deum te Inharmonium onward have noted power does not tend to give itself up. Thus the talisman’s guardian must desire power with a single-minded lust, slaking off any vestige of humanity like a snake shedding its scurf.

In order to use a demon, you must believe in a demon. Which carries its own price. The pact will get you all that you want, but, as it will be provided by demons, nothing that you keep.