Object No. 99 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Edward Champion, has ended. Original price: $1.50. Final price: $56.]

The resilient ruffians ran away with the geisha’s canes just after she refused to perform a classless act. While it was true that the geisha dramatized the occasional lowbrow feat, befitting an object of her status, even she had her standards. She’d wobble her elliptical hips within a studded hula hoop forged from painful tungsten alloy. She’d gorge on great sticks of fire while her blind part-time assistant hurled jeweled daggers round her anatomical outline. And if wanton clients had serious dinero — particularly that shiny new oval currency with the Prince Albert piercing — she’d even flash a bit of flesh, relishing her total control over the crowd. The bobbled harpies working the onyx alleys could hike up their skirts for a sou, but she knew every sector on her body was insurable and she remained committed to securing the compensation befitting her curvy carapace. It hadn’t been easy to work her way up from the snowbound steppes without a rep, but she stage-managed her prestige through her divine Venetian valet de chambre.

However, she needed her two canes to get around.

Now wobbling atop a safe surface, the geisha ruminated upon the false proposition with unintended consequences. The three men had imparted intent to pay serious cash, approaching her with necktie paradoxes she decided to disregard. The geisha asked what they would like, shifting her harsh all-business larynx into a soothing dulcet tone. One claimed that his nether enormity was so round and imposing that it confounded the sensors scanning allplace from space.

“Don’t speak like that to a lady!” snapped the trio’s ringleader, who slapped the boor with a mesh metal glove and jabbed him in the anatomical vicinity of recent boasts.

“You’ve bifurcated my loins!” cried this sausage-laden braggart.

“That’s overstating things,” said the ringleader. “It is exquisitely rude to speak of your insufficient indignities before one of the finest entertainers that this village has to offer. There are subtler ways to elicit a response.”

The ringleader then whispered his lewd request into the geisha’s ear.

“I will not!” shrieked the geisha.

Talks were aborted, but there was a struggle. The self-proclaimed longjohn purloined his trophy.

The final indignity came with the ringleader’s second sordid offer that involved swapping one art for another. But was it so venal? Which line was straighter? The geisha had initially squawked in commerce-laden consonants. Instead of shedding seven veils, she could pilfer from faux furriers and highwaymen expanding their chicanery to a global stage. She reminded herself that she wasn’t getting any younger and that vocations were adaptable. And the new art presented an atonal atonement, an opportunity to correct the scales. Who needed seven notes when there was a human register?

The ruffians returned for their answer. She assented, and the trio gained a fourth member. The run would last longer than any half-baked phantom of the opulent. The new vocation defied objectification and required no crutch.

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. 86 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by (Slate contest winner) Matthew J. Wells, has ended. Original price: 75 cents. Final price: $54.]

Booth 106 was the regular table of Evelyn Nesbit — it’s where she was introduced to Charles Dana Gibson, who used her as the model for his famous Gibson Girl drawings; it’s where she met the young John Barrymore, who became her lover and got her pregnant twice (once in the booth itself and once in his apartment); it’s where she was introduced to architect Stanford White by fellow Floradora Girl Edna Goodrich; and it’s where she met her future husband Harry Thaw, who murdered White at Madison Square Garden on June 25, 1906.

Originally surrounded by red velvet drapes, the booth is now open and unlit. On the wall is a photo of Nesbit from her Gibson Girl days and beneath it, on a small shelf, is a little jar labeled “BAR-B-Q Sauce.” The jar was originally purchased by Nesbit as a gift for White — whenever White would meet her for dinner, he would order ribs, and she paid the waiters to always keep the small jar full of sauce at the table for White’s special use. Very special, according to suppressed trial testimony after his murder — allegedly, the ribs weren’t the only things White covered in barbecue sauce behind those drapes.

After White’s death, Booth 106 was roped off as a sign of mourning, a RESERVED sign was placed on the table, and per Evelyn Nesbit’s wishes, once a week the bartender would refill the BAR-B-Q jar, as if in preparation for White’s eventual return. The table went empty for almost two years (not even Nesbit sat at it), until the afternoon of January 5, 1908, when Harry Thaw sailed into the Naughty Pine, plunked himself down at Booth 106, ripped up the RESERVED sign, tore down the red velvet curtains, draped them around his body like a winding sheet, and demanded a shave. When told that he was in a bar and not a barber shop, Thaw cried, “Then I’ll do it myself,” whereupon he pulled out a straight razor, stropped it on his leather belt, and taking the BAR-B-Q jar, proceeded to slop sauce all over his face as if it were shaving cream. Then, pretending to stare into a mirror, he gave himself a blood-soaked shave while humming “I Could Love A Million Girls,” the song that had been playing when he shot White in the face.

“You must be a lunatic,” said one of the waiters. Thaw just smiled at him. His first trial for the murder of Stanford White had ended in a deadlocked jury; but the next day, when his second trial began, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

***

NOTE: This story was also published at Slate.com. Read more about this winning entry, and the runners-up, here.

Object No. 58 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Tim Carvell, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $35.]

On December 17, 1948, the Humboldt twins entered the world, Jerome screaming, Luke laughing. This pattern held. Jerome grew up to be as petulant, difficult and miserable as Luke was cheery, optimistic and polite.

Their father, Max, owned the Humboldt Tiny Decorative Box Corp., the main employer in Ossipee, N.H. He grew to hope Luke might one day take over the business. After all, Luke loved crafts — at the age of nine, he’d papier-mâchéd a doghouse in a perfect replica of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wingspread House. (The doghouse remained sadly unoccupied, as Jerome’s cock-fighting ring had placed the family on the ASPCA’s “watch list.”) But at his wife Sheila’s urging, to avoid the appearance of favoritism, in 1969 Max willed the business to both boys.

This was a horrible mistake. Not six months after drawing up the will, Max died from what is known in the decorative-box trade as “varnish lung.” (The coroner tactlessly described Max’s lungs to Sheila as “the shiniest I’ve ever seen.”) At the time, Luke was in Ecuador with the Peace Corps, teaching tribal children appliqué and découpage. And so it fell to Jerome to lead the company.

To everyone’s surprise, Jerome leaped at the opportunity. Far from lacking interest in the family trade, he’d quietly written a manifesto, “On the Morality of the Small Box,” arguing that tiny boxes were a means to liberate the world from falsehood — and any box that failed to do so was “a plywood sin.” He swiftly redesigned the company’s wares, banishing all forms of decoration; the factory soon produced only severe black boxes, adorned with 9-point Courier declarations: “Love is a precursor to sorrow.” “Joy fades.” “Pets die.”

The boxes were a disaster. Within six months, business had tapered off to zero, and the payroll dwindled to one: Jerome. Ignoring the pleas of the townspeople, Jerome persisted, drinking heavily and hand-making his grim boxes late into the night.

What happened on Christmas Eve, 1970 was, Sheila insists, an accident; out of deference to her, let us say that it was. That night, Jerome accidentally fell into the hydraulic laminator, having accidentally disabled its safeguards. The machine swiftly rendered his body into a shiny oblong disc of viscera. Horrifically, his body was found by none other than his brother, who tiptoed into the factory early Christmas morning, hoping to surprise his father and share tales of his Ecuadoran glitter co-operative, only to find his brother’s pressed corpse.

Such an event might have broken another man. But Luke worked through his grief, throwing himself into designing his brother’s coffin. To accommodate the corpse’s unusual shape, the container was necessarily round, and he decorated the lid with a tender photo of Sheila cradling Jerome. (A photo, Sheila later confided to friends, snapped moments before Jerome bit her.) But the night before the funeral, the casket remained maddeningly incomplete. Then Luke’s eyes lit upon the inscription on one of his brother’s boxes: “To one person, you may be the world, but to the world, you’re only one person.” And he realized that it needed but a slight tweak. In what became number 3 on Small Box Monthly‘s list of the 100 Most Significant Moments of the 20th Century, Luke Humboldt reached for the paint. He wrote: “To the world, you may be only one person, but to one person, you may be the world.”

The next morning, as the casket was lashed to the roof of a hearse, an onlooker muttered, “Now there’s a box someone might buy.” And Luke — looking out upon the unemployed citizens of Ossipee — knew what he had to do. That very evening, he started producing small replicas of Jerome’s splendid coffin. To you, this may be just one small box. But to Luke Humboldt, this box contains the world.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Annalee Newitz, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $10.]

At this point most people realize that getting marketers involved in space travel is a bad idea. But fifty years ago, right before the Martian economy collapsed, there was a craze for luxury space cruises to the Belt. Usually that meant a visit to Ceres — dipping into the exotic attractions of Bachelor City — and then a tour of the lesser asteroids along with a drive-by photo op at the mines.

A million little cruise companies started running these things, trying to come up with the most unusual and cunning destinations. Space Beach is the most famous of these, partly because of the scale of what the company did. They took about a teragram of Belt dust that miners and trawlers had collected over the decades, wrapped it an atmosphere bubble, wired it for gravity, geoengineered a quick seaside biosphere, and called it “the only beach floating in space.”

Who wouldn’t want to float in warm water, looking out at a field of stars, with the color-streaked, glowing blob of Jupiter in the distance?

For a while, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing ads for Space Beach or getting swag with their logo on it. Every thrift store in Bachelor City has a few of their coconut cocktail cups, mementos of a time when people still thought coming to the Belt was a naughty adventure. Usually they’re not too expensive, though in another decade that could easily change.

This Space Beach cup is particularly special because it’s in mint condition — it came directly from the estate sale of an old video celebrity who retired to Valles Marineris. She took one of the first cruises to the “beach floating in space,” before the horrible accident that led to today’s atmosphere bubble regulations.

Things may be a lot safer in the Belt now, but you can still revel in nostalgia for a more dangerous, bygone age. Sure, you’d be taking your life in your hands, but wouldn’t it be worth it to bask under sunlamps on a beach made of ancient, pulverized asteroids?

[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 toward 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; their 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 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.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Stewart O'Nan, has ended. Original price: $3. Final price: $71.]

Every evening when Henry came home from work, without fail, he set his briefcase on the marble-topped table in the front hall, climbed the stairs to their room, faced the dresser and emptied his pockets before hanging up his jacket and tie and washing for supper. Occasionally one or the other of the children shadowed him as he performed this ritual, eager to obtain a final, binding permission or appeal an earlier verdict of hers, but Emily actively discouraged this, as she discouraged outright lobbying at the table. She tried to make his transition from office to hearth as relaxing as possible, to the extent that she refrained from following him up, even if she’d spent the afternoon fretting over some pressing domestic issue only his considered input could resolve.

The tray in which he deposited his wallet and keyring and change had been his father’s, a period piece which seemed by its design to represent a bygone and overblown masculinity she associated with Anglophile prep schools and stuffy hunt clubs. A painstakingly detailed mallard’s head, forged from some cheap metal, rose from the partitioned rosewood dish, as if half of it might be employed as a decoy. Emily had never liked the duck, as they called it, despite its sentimental origins, but now that Henry was gone, she couldn’t part with it.

Neither could she use it. The change, which Betty dusted every other Wednesday, had resided there since Henry had gone into the hospital, eight years ago, and while Emily took no great pleasure or comfort in the meager hoard, every other Wednesday after Betty left, she made a sober reconnaissance of the duck. Only then, reassured of the order of things, could she sleep.

So it was with more than mild surprise, the week after Easter, that she noticed the two quarters which sat on top (one heads, the other tails) were gone. Kenneth and Lisa had visited the weekend prior. Immediately she suspected Sam, and just as quickly chided herself, knowing his sensitivity about his troubled history. The possibilities weren’t numberless, though, and as she lingered in her nightgown with a soothing Bach prelude playing by her bedside, she realized that whether she wanted to or not, she would never know the solution to this mystery, and rather than let this new arrangement stand, she scooped up the remaining coins, shook them in her fist like dice and dropped them back in the dish, thinking, already, of what she would tell Betty if she happened to ask.

[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 for this Significant Object, with story by Adam Davies, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $14.50.]

Authentic

MR. YODELS

Love Totem

The “Sylvia St. Etienne” edition

This is the only witness to — or, some say, the cause of — the tragic death of
legendary chanteuse and muse to famous Ecuadorian footballer

Francisco Chavarria

NOT AN IMITATION!

Condition

The artifact is in good condition.  Some slight damage, consistent with the violence of the wreckage, on the Tres Marias rabbit headpiece and on the hand-painted ovoid eyes.  Otherwise the piece is exquisitely preserved, including (as required by the folk magic tradition) Mr. Chavarria’s “plasma donation.”

The Mr. Yodels Tradition:

Jacob Tauxe, the notorious “Swiss Voodoo Houngan” from Bern, designed the original line of ceramic Mr. Yodels figurines employed by frustrated suitors as love totems.  By a feat of acoustic engineering yet to be explained satisfactorily, all custom-made Mr. Yodels figurines produce a distinctive upper-and-lower register song — the “love yodel” — when placed at an open window by which the loved one walks, provoking powerful spontaneous feelings of pair-bonding, veneration, and leghumpery.

Dangerous and unsanctioned Do-It-Yourself models — those made without knowledge of the proper techniques or precautions — are rumored to be responsible for the unions of Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett, Woody Allen and relatives, Elizabeth Taylor et al., Chrysler and Daimler, and others.

The “Sylvia St. Etienne” Mr. Yodels:

Caracas, 1956.  The fiery Ecuadorian striker Francisco Chavarria meets the legendary Hollywood songstress Sylvia St. Etienne, best known for her sultry interpretations of “Ashes in my D-Cup,” “Cabana in Urbana,” and “That Was It?”

For seven glorious, champagne-drenched, strawberry-inserting, mogul-free weeks the couple was inseparable — until Ms. St. Etienne met the mogul Sven “Big Krona” Uggla.  Then they separated.

Heartbroken, and publicly humiliated, Mr. Chavarria vowed to get her back, but Ms. St. Etienne was — as they say in Monte Carlo — “avec mogul.”  With no other recourse to intercourse, the jilted footballer traveled to Switzerland and implored Mr. Tauxe to fashion for him the most powerful of all Mr. Yodelses. But the Swiss Voodoo priest, bitter over Mr. Chavarria’s last-second game-winning header over the Swiss, refused.

Desperate, Mr. Chavarria fashioned his own Mr. Yodels, ignorant of the necessary protocols, and tied it underneath the passenger seat of Big Krona’s BMW 507 roadster, thinking, you know: The windows will be down. Gotta work.

Only ten hours later, after Sylvia St. Etienne gave the last performance of her life, singing the hits from “Hurry Up, These Sheets Itch and I’m Sweating,” “Waiter! There’s a Jackass in my Demitasse!” and “Side-Saddle Won’t Work,” she drove off into the night with Big Krona and plunged to her death in a mountain gorge.

All that remains of the great singer are her treasured recordings—and, now, available for the first time to the public, from the estate of Mr. Abernathy Hastings of Newport, this gloriously preserved Mr. Yodels.

Look at the eyes:  you can almost see what Francisco Chavarria saw.

Witness the ears:  you can almost hear what Francisco Chavarria heard.

Observe the mouth:  you can fit a Bud Kinger in that thing.

Reserve set low by request of the estate, this auction represents a rare opportunity to own the last remaining vestige of one of the 20th century’s most tragic love stories.

It may also possibly crack walnuts.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by James Parker, has closed. Original price: $1.25. Final price: $15.53 ]

“You know, of course,” said the periodontist, as he bore down with his scalpel, “that Nancy Pelosi is insane?”

Floyd Haruspex, gaping and nearly prone in the chair, made no answer. The question had been rhetorical anyway.

“She is, excuse me, batshit crazy… Any pain?”

“Ngh-ngh,” answered Floyd, emphatically. Halfway through this operation to fix his receding gums and he was feeling no pain at all. The left side of his mouth and face had in fact become a miraculous region of pure psychology. No sensations, only… impressions, intuitions, insights. Ah, Novocain.

“Let me know,” said the periodontist, whose name was Dr. Soundgarden.

But now Floyd like a saint was gazing beyond this earthly scene, gazing over Dr. Soundgarden’s meaty white-clad shoulder and out through the window. Rainy ocean sky. Undifferentiated sub-glare. A vast range of numbness. Somewhere out there was Diagnostic Jones with his pack of Harley-riding Illuminati, all pushing their hogs through the last frontier of mechanical endurance en route to the big kahuna, the king burrito, the cosmic giggle-osaurus. And Prima Materia, alchemical sex-siren. Tying one on in some cheesy maritime bar no doubt, with several new friends of the fishing or dope-running persuasion. Would he, Floyd, ever get the chance to dissolve and coagulate with her — to produce with her the philosopher’s stone? Yeah, right.

“What’s happening with this country right now, I’d like to go to sleep for ten years.” Dr. Soundgarden was talking again, while his hands in their bloodied plastic gloves made squinching sounds in Floyd’s mouth. “Sleep for ten years, wake up, maybe things’d be back to normal. Know what I’m saying?”

Floyd inclined an eyebrow à la Errol Flynn. He was at the shoreline, and some sort of John Bircher was fixing his gumline. Karma was a pretzel sometimes. And he hadn’t even begun to think about the kitty plate. Why had someone left it in his car last night, this little milk-saucer with the face of a cat painted on it? He had floundered heavily into the driver’s seat, with the bar-reek on him, to find it propped on the dashboard like a rebuke. The cat was ginger-ish, with a distant, unreadable expression. “And the same to you, partner,” Floyd had mumbled, tossing it onto the back seat and scraping at the ignition. He’d never owned a cat. He didn’t like cats. Which was not to say that he didn’t understand the cat thing: he knew any number of ex-radicals and tired misanthropes whose single connection to the world-as-commonly-experienced was via some sullen feline. Barney Breaks, for example, the P.I. he’d hired to spy on his first wife. Pissed-off to the core. A disenchantment with humanity that was truly cosmic. Now there was a cat guy.

Could it have been Barney who left the kitty plate in Floyd’s ’66 Chevy Impala? As a message that his darkest apprehensions re: Prima Materia were about to be realized?

But Barney had joined a cult three years ago: the Joy People, out of Humboldt County. Never been heard of since, poor bastard.

Besides, the cat on the plate wasn’t giving a message. If anything, he was withholding a message. That’s what cats did, right? Unlike everything else, they refused to signify. And Floyd, in the periodontist’s chair, began to shake with unphraseable laughter.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Ben Greenman, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $32.08.]

This object is best known from its appearance in the 1939 film No News From the Navy, a comedy starring James Wilton as a hapless midshipman who cannot set aside his seafaring ways, even when he is confined to dry land as a result of an injury.  Wilton’s character (who is called, simply, “Sailor”) competes for the affection of a young woman named Evelyn (Mary Hannan) despite the opposition of her father (Gordon Howard) and a larger, determined suitor (Kenneth Lopp). The film is a second-tier comedy, but there is one classic scene in which Sailor shaves before taking Evelyn out on a date. He is clearly accustomed to shaving aboard his ship, and as a result, he is constantly attempting to regain his balance, despite the fact the floor is level and stable. The critic Leonard Folsom has written that “The unheralded Wilton has a scene that combines the physical complexity of a Chaplin solo with close-ups of inexpressive expression that rival the finest moments of Keaton.” At the beginning of that scene, Wilton uses this smiling mug as his shaving mug, and while he sets it on the shelf above the washbasin midway through, it remains, as Folsom writes, “an oddly compelling focus of the film so long as it is onscreen, enormous in its diminutive size, menacing in its cheer.”

There are other shaving mugs that resemble this one, but none was created as this one was: by hand, with the assistance of a kiln, by a famous surrealist sculptor. This one was. In fact, it was wheel-thrown and fired by the Belgian artist Paul Coppens in 1932; Coppens, of course, was part of the group of artists supported by the patronage of Edward James. “I have dreamed of a smiling shaving mug,” Coppens wrote to James in June 1932. “A sketch is attached. It looks like a face, of course, because a face is the only thing that is capable of smiling (or is it?), but it also looks like a tooth, because a tooth is the only thing that is capable of showing when a face is smiling. In addition, I have noticed that daily washing rituals, including shaving, are illogically equated with the whiteness of teeth. But there is more to the image. Look at the handle. It functions like an ear visually, but as there is only one, this figure is incapable of ‘smiling ear-to-ear,’ as the idiom has it. In addition, I have recently learned that ‘mug’ is a slang term for the human face in some parts of the English-speaking world. (Ironically, this practice comes from the fact that beer steins were fashioned in the human image, and unattractive specimens of our race were said be ‘mug-faces.’)” Coppens’ piece, which he called Tooth Fils (the wordplay refers both to dentistry and to its small size), was part of the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936.

How Tooth Fils came to be in No News From the Navy is simpler than the creation of either work. James Wilton, who himself trained as a painter and considered himself an acolyte of, if not a participant in, Surrealism, attended the exhibit, acquired it, and insisted that it be in every one of his films. As there was only one film, this is a condition that history has found easy to satisfy.