HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#79 :: Swashbuckler

Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Basil Rathbone, Chow-Yun Fat - all those Hollywood swordsmen lacked the visceral threat you'd feel from the sight of a man standing there, blade in hand, eager to have your guts for garters. In ages ruled by steel, sword wounds could range from nasty duelling scars and fast, deadly heart-strikes to horrible intestinal gashes that caused you to wither and waste until you succumbed to septicemia. You could die by katana stroke, claymore hack, wakizashi slice, rapier thrust. You could kill with edge or tip, flat or hilt. You might have been a king's musketeer, a cut-throat highwayman, a samurai or a norse raider. You might have been this guy, a distant cousin of Melville's Queequeg, with rippling muscles and a savage elegance. But you would likely never have been cast in milk-blue plastic until you were centuries gone from the one fight you ever lost, and toymakers saw the need to preserve, reproduce and merchandise your last, best stance in the only color-batch available that week of the cheapest molding material on earth.

#78 :: Wisdom Tooth

At one point about five years ago, the pain in my head grew so extreme that I paid a man to put a pair of extremely strong pliers into my mouth and rip this out of my skull. I don't recall how he braced my head. I don't remember what I said beforehand, or afterward. I do remember hearing and - despite the Novocain - feeling the hard "SNAP" of the roots breaking off a bit of bone from the floor of my sinuses as it came free. And there it sat on a bloodied bed of gauze. I gaped, pulling together my splintered wits. Two fillings stared back. He turned it over, and I saw the massive cavity that had prompted the pain and the extraction. I keep it around as a lesson for the kids. Their dentist says they do a great job brushing. I'm chewing gummis as I write this.

#77 :: Bobble-head - Brian Jordan

I don't follow the Dodgers. I don't even follow pro sports. But somewhere in that vast terra incognita is a cult of collectors who fixate on bobble-head dolls, and one of them found its way into our house. No longer the purview of rear decks and lovers of boxer dogs, the bobble-head has become big kitsch business. You can even get a bobble-heads of Martin Luther and wife Katy.

#74 :: Cocktail umbrella

Why does the drink need shade? Are the ice cubes kept cooler and the booze more potent from their not melting? Are we supposed to feel exotic, or more relaxed when drinking an umbrella drink? More Asian, perhaps? It may or may not have originated at that temple of Tiki culture, Trader Vic's. It is usually made of bamboo or cardboard ribs on a toothpick spine, cloaked in printed rice paper that bleeds when wet. Yet it is fully functional, opening from a furled oblong to a broad, light-cheating circle. I remember it from countless Shirley Temples I was plied with when young, and from those first salutary sips of the handful of zombies or drunken bastards I dared drink in college.

#73 :: Wooden Index File

This is an artifact from my time as an old-school newspaper reporter. It held index cards on which I had written the names, numbers, titles and affiliations of hundreds of sources, contacts, friends and chance acquaintances. The deck of 3x5 cards was blackened with thumb-dirt and furry-soft at the edges from constant consultation - how many times did I pull the Simi Valley City Council's card? How many times did I search for Rocketdyne's flack, my buddy Alan's cell phone number, the mailing address of the Ventura County Courthouse for yet another Freedom of Information Act request? Like a fool, I think I threw them out when I went digital. The box of varnished, tongue-and-grooved maple is as solid and venerable-looking today as it was the day I bought it at an antiques store 19 years ago. It closes with an authoritative *clack*.

#72 :: Navajo Silver Lizard

A Navajo silversmith cast this in sterling silver. The Dine (DIN-eh) as they prefer to call themselves, make a living doing business with each other, ranching, running stores and schools and businesses - and with tourists crossing tribal lands, by selling crafts like this from roadside stands in and around Monument Valley and the Four Corners area. From the tourist's side of the equation, it's a tiny glint of cunning grace in the dusty, ragged glory of a southwest road trip. From the artisan's viewpoint, one I can only guess that it's a symbol of considerable significance, crafted with industry and art, in a form that's easy to duplicate and sure to sell for a good price.

#71 :: B9 "Robot"

There was no archetype before this one. Not Rossum's Usuform Robots, not Die Valse Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, nor Robby nor Gort. Brave, smart, wary, endowed with brittle humor and tinged with sarcasm, he rolled on treads, but off-camera could apparently climb the steps to the Jupiter 2 though it was never explained how. He is all of 3-½ inches high, endowed with a little clockwork motor to make him glide. But in reality, he has a cult.

#70 :: Pulls

Too meek for bones through my septum, too square for even tattoos at that point, I was a square, square newspaperman, covering murder trials, city council meetings, disasters and defense contractor fraud for the L.A. Times. Magpie hunter-gatherer at the core, though. My inner automobile was probably a clapped-out maroon Checker cab cruising SoHo on plush air shocks, five dozen little charms, figurines and baubles dangling all jerky-sparkly from the headliner, the shift lever, air conditioning controls and mirrors. Straight-backed courtroom benches and drab city rooms forced my gray Volvo exterior, so I could merely dream a mobile cocoon of avocado naugahyde and faux cheetah, woofers bumping techno and deep dub. These little bits were all that showed, beads from an import shop wired to the zippers controlling the crisp black leather Filofax that controlled my conscientious, deadline-tight career. Today's research/multimedia environment has me balanced more easily somewhere between the two, wearing an earring, living out of an abused cellphone/pda full of phone numbers, lists and e-books, and ghost-piloting a mental TR6.

#69 :: Monocular

The aesthetic of brushed aluminum and blackout metal is as distinct a flavor of modern physical culture as gingham and daisies, bakelite and chintz, mahogany and stained leather. A wave ripples through me as I write this, and I flash on alternate molecular realities - strawberry roan gelding motorcycles; rocket gantries of hardwood and stucco, carpeted with bokharas and kilims; tricycles of flesh, bone and hair, and sneakers of diamondplate steel. Quick - an earthquake renders the earth around your house into Jell-O - literally. Liquefaction soil becomes dessert, a sticky-sweet confection into which the foundation of your 30-ton house begins to sink like the spoon in a playful child's bowl. What do you grab before you bolt - the album of family photos rendered in colored sand? The satchel made of baseball mitts? Your 3.2-megapixel digital-zoom canteen? Your herbed salt-pork laptop containing your life's work and your exhaustive research records on the mysterious transmogrification of all matter? Maybe you grab the last real thing you can see - a hard, cold, efficient little pocket telescope - so that you can bolt to higher ground and watch from safety as the house sinks beneath the shimmering green surface with a wet, sucking roar.

#68 :: Vinyl Frog

Somebody in a factory somewhere peeled two cast-vinyl frog halves out of a still-hot mold. The air reeked of curing toxins, raw polymers. She glued them together with adhesive or heat, and took up a spraycan or an airbrush to dust the top of the thing (along with all of its brothers, maybe laid out on a tray) with lurid, poisonous red. She let them dry a bit, maybe while pouring the next batch of vinyl, and then returned; she considered the red trayful of red frogs, the red under her nails, the smell of it in her nose, for only a second or two - likely, her boss was counting her output - and then grabbed a brushful of black: quick socks for the feet, and a couple dozen spots down its back. On to drying and packaging they went, and back to the cycle went she - mixing the vinyl again.

#67 :: Rubber bullets

Back in college one night, we saw a wall of smoke coming around the corner on Halloween. Being a wannabe photojournalist at the time, and thinking, "fire" I grabbed my camera and ran - straight into a cloud of tear gas. Needles in the eyes, claws in the lungs, I doubled over, immediately capacitated along with about a dozen other people who had fallen victim to someone's asshole idea of a prank. I spent the next half hour coughing and weeping the shit out of my system, sucking down Cokes at the pizzeria. Cops have some pretty impressive nonlethal weapons at their disposal. Here's another one: Fired from shells that fit standard-issue riot guns, these don't incapacitate, but they definitely sting and deter. I've never experienced them first-hand - these were fired at a press-and-public show-and-tell day for the Ventura County Sheriff's station in Thousand Oaks a few years ago, along with bean-bag projectiles, which are shot from fat 37-mm shells from the police equivalent of grenade launchers They had teargas shells, too. Fortunately, they chose not to demonstrate those.

#66 :: Balloon Anchor

Half a dozen of these lined a throw-rug dance floor at our 2-year-old neighbor's birthday party last weekend. Three balloons were tethered to each, at just-above-head level, so that when you moved among them you had the sensation of being a blimp coming to berth among its brothers in an open-air hangar. It was festive, fun, and testament to the crisp, playful design sense of our neighbor's mom, the architect. The balloon anchor is purely purpose-built - heavy and cheerful, and better than tying balloon strings to chairs or toddlers' arms. But of all the artifacts from our throwaway culture, this has to be one of the least-biodegradable: A sheet of mylar wrapped around a sheet of plastic with a cardboard buffer disc and a hard-plastic tie-off strap - all wrapped around a 12-ounce chunk of cement. C - E - M - E - N - T. It's a permanent thing designed to protect a temporary thing - something that could last hundreds of years in a landfill, for the benefit of preserving a toy with a one-day life span. What must the factory floor in Mexico or China look like, as they roll off the line - glittery and stolid? What must its employees think of their handiwork's target users' lifestyles and wealth? And when the party's ended, and the last lungful of helium has been sucked from the last balloon for yet one more hysterically high-voiced rendition of "Follow the Yellow Brick Road," how many are just thrown in the trash?

#65 :: Sea glass

The kharmic simplicity of sea glass is staggering, if you think about it for too long in a stoned-sort-of "... Whoa ... " manner. Made from - essentially - melted sand, glass is poured, blown, molded and fused into bottles that we use to carry beers to the beach which, when enough of them are drunk around the fire, are flung back into the ocean to shatter on the rocks, where the sea and the sand slowly massage and corrode them into pearlescent little artifacts that - left uncollected, eventually dissolve back into sand. No chemicals enter the process, but for the trace residue of beer or schnapps or milk of magnesia (seablasted cobalt blue glass was the rarest and most glorious of finds when we were young) that is washed away by the sea. It is a process of wilful, combative manufacture, first by man, then by the ocean. Or perhaps it's the other way around. I can't recall where I found this piece. As sea glass goes, it's nothing remarkable, probably an old-fashioned green Coke bottle. But I've had it forever.

#64 :: Fangs

Maybe it's teething memory, or the id-transforming monster-fantasy value, or maybe it's just having played hockey with a clear rubber mouthpiece in place against the blows for a couple of adolescent years, but I connect with something very deep when I put in a set of these. They were plain white (but secretly day-glo) polyvinyl plastic when I was a kid. Now they come in neons, but they still bestow power, scare value, whenever you slip them in. It's hard to be grumpy wearing these.

#63 :: Wedding Ring

Words and a picture won't do this justice. So, bare facts: On April 9, 1994, an extraordinary woman said yes to me and put this on my finger.

Today, 10 years later precisely, to the very minute (4:49 p.m. on 04/09/04) she called me just as I was reaching for the handset to call her, and asked breathlessly, "What time is it? I don't have my watch." The woman who has slept with me in tents and beds, on couches and floors, who understands that the great bat swarm of Carlsbad Caverns exits the cave mouth every night to hunt at the rate of 5,000 bats per minute. Who went with me to Moab, Manila, Manhattan, Guangzho, Beijing, Acoma and the Great Salt Lake. The one who brought our extraordinary children into the world and made them funny and loving, who is sick for chocolate chips, art nouveau, Will Smith and the desert - and the one who tangoed with me 10 years ago tonight, until our feet hurt too much (I trod on her, unable to handle half a glass of champagne) and we switched into gym socks and Chucks, she in white, me in black, and danced some more while our friends, full of Filipino food and good cheer, caroused around us. The ring is something I designed, of white gold with a single sapphire. It bears the same inscription as hers - inpsired by our love of numerological symmetry and Little America. It says, 4:49 and, for the name of an obscure, but progressively-named little town in Mississippi that we once passed through, "ONWARD." I took it off and put it into her hand for these photos. I very rarely take it off. It is heavy and, if dropped but once, could roll somewhere very far out of reach, so I keep it tight around my finger.

#62 :: Folding Loupe

The Akihabara, in Tokyo, teems with geeks. More electronics shops, game boutiques, appliance megamalls and circuitboard salvage yards are crammed into a few square kilometres there that probably anywhere on the planet. You can build a mainframe from components, buy top-of-the-line synthesizers costing millions of yen, feed your fetish for porno video games or indulge your love of heavy little objects to the Nth degree. Shoppers flow through stalls and alleys, pausing to squint at spec sheets and microchips, to fondle controllers and machine interfaces, giving it the air of a hive into which someone has pumped a calming smoke. It's the place William Gibson probably visited while dreaming up the Sprawl in the seminal Neuromancer. Two shopkeepers there took such an interest in my bulky Pentax 6x7 camera that I felt guilty about walking out empty handed, and scored this little metal loupe - a folding magnifier for viewing slides and negatives - something I actually needed at the time. I've had it for 12 years now, and the folding mechanism is still tight, the glass still clear.

#61 :: 3-D Glasses

I'm a stereophotography junkie. I've shot nighttime 3-D Kodachromes painted with filtered flash, and manufactured my own stereopticon slides with a Stereo Realist camera ever since seeing a transcendent show of stereo photos at Rhode Island School of Design when I was 20. I've used these headache-inducing anaglyph glasses (and others like them) to decode monster mashes like "Creature from the Black Lagoon" and countless comicbooks ranging from the stupid and juvenile from the naughty and juvenile, as well as the wonderful publications of the Stereoscopic Society of America. If you haven't squinted at the miracle of 3-D in movies like "SpaceHunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone" or "Parasite" then you've been denying yourself a heady visit to the gimmicky world of sensationalist cinema auteurs such as William Castle. The fun part after a long spell of wearing these is taking them off and noticing how the whole world is tinted blue for the left eye and red for the right, your rods and cones rebelling against the insult.

#60 :: Daguerrotype - Mother and Child

She might have been a stern widow, a pinched matron, a god-fearing churchgoer who distrusted photographers and was sitting only because her husband demanded a keepsake of her and his young son. More likely, she froze her face to meet the demands of modern daguerrotyping, which required subjects to sit still for a minute or two at a time. The baby, more animated, makes a happy blur of noncompliance. Daguerrotyping deposited silver directly onto a sheet of glass, making it permanent, lustrous and extremely difficult to re-photograph without getting a lot of reflections. A rainbow halo of heavy metals tinges the image, which rests in a velvet-lined, gilt-edged frame case, its mock-leather exterior of lacquered cardboard embossed with Gilded-Age curlicues.

#59 :: Torpedo level

Most torpedo levels are crafted from wood or plastic - I have a fluorescent orange plastic one in my toolbox - but this one is an odd variant on the classic carpenter's conscience. Crafted from a forged block of aluminum, a steel plate, a pair of screws and a oil-filled capsule, it seems stolen from a prop house on the set of a machine-age science fiction melodrama. Though apparently quite old - research on its label has proved fruitless - it hints at the future that never came true, when utopian cities of curved, computer-designed crystal might have made something like it completely obsolete.

#58 :: Tree Pod

These trees grow all up and down the block - similar in leaf to the pepper tree, though I'm not sure of their family or type. Every spring, they shed green seedpods about 10 inches long, each one filled with 15 or 20 coffee-brown seeds. The birds usually get to them before the kids do. My son handed me this one day on our weekly walk to buy the Sunday paper. Emptied of seeds, and browned and split by the weather, it still looks useful and vital, an object-lesson in symmetry and unitary design.

#57 :: Thumb Piano

Fashioned from a gourd, a hardwood plank and some scraps of metal, this elegant little instrument is called mbira in central, western and eastern Africa, where it originated. It was a Christmas gift from my parents many years ago, I've played it with my kids on my lap when they were just a few months old, then a year, and more, until their thumbs were long enough to reach the keys. Intimate, resonant and beautifully tactile, it invites play and defies mastery because of the counter-intuitive left/right shattering of your expectations of how the scale should run. But you can make chords with a single thumb, and a little chorus with both. For a kludgy, digitized sense of what it sounds like, try this Flash-based thumb piano. For the real thing, go to any good music store and ask.

#56 :: Prescription sunglasses

The world is full of mediocre, overpriced, cheap knockoff sunglasses that break the second a 2-year-old grabs them or they fall 5 feet to the floor. Since I'm sadly addicted to UV-blocking lenses, I have burned through two or three pairs of sunglasses a year for most of the past 20 years. I resolved a few years ago to get a permanent solution that handles the fact that I'm almost bat-blind - minus the sonar hearing - as well as hopelessly clumsy. For a while, I wore these hideous rose-tinted Lennon tea shades with spring temples - the only thing available at the Simi Valley optometrist across from my office at the time. I kicked the hell out of them, my eyes eventually got worse, and it was time for a change. I picked up these $350 Oakley frames for $60 at a factory sale (it pays to have friends whose ex-wives toil for groundbreaking industrial-grade fashion factories) and for about $20 bucks more than a standard prescription, I had Oakley grind the lenses for them - largely because no standard lens shop would touch 'em. The optics are hyper-real, focusing light not just from in front, but from the peripheral range of vision. Made of some miracle metal, the frames are heavy, but perfectly molded to my fat head. Sometimes when I drop them, the frame clips pop off and spit out the lenses in a horrific clatter. I put the whole thing back together again, and move on. I haven't been able to damage them permanently yet, but I'm working on it.

#55 :: Boot charm

The cult of miniatures has been with us for millennia, since someone first pinched clay to form the head of an animal. We carry small objects on our keychains - tools, keepsakes, souvenirs, symbols, tangible avatars that project the same insouciance we believe is innate to us, or that emulate the spirit or attitude of the people we wish to become. Someone had this boot on her keychain once, and lost it in traffic. The iridescent green mock-leather was chewed magnificently by some unseen force - maybe the crunch of a single tire or a semi's worth. But the laces and stitching have held in place, as tight as the day some worker in a craft shop in China or Macao or India first sewed them up. It is no more than an inch high.