I think I went in this thing. It looks like the giant heart exhibit at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute Science Museum. We were from the D.C. area so I don’t know what we are doing up north, but I have a pretty strong memory of going though this and being very impressed.
(Source: ratak-monodosico)
One of my most powerful dream memories from childhood was flying around the Rocky Mountains in a tiny little personal helicopter like these.
Helicopters For Everybody - 1951
I bought this radio sometime in the early 1980s on a trip to New York City. The mouth moved in response to sound coming from the radio so at times it could appear as if the mouth were singing along to the song. I thought it was the coolest, an example of the amazing things that one could get in NYC, things that would never be available in suburban Northern Virginia where I was from.
Even today, I like the restraint of the designer - a simple white cube with nothing more than big red lips on it. It’s cheap, it’s plastic, but it was definitely a new kind of cheap plastic thing. A cheap plastic thing that was simple, and even refined in it’s own way. And where it departed from it’s rigorous minimalism, it did so in such a goofy way, with these big Rocky Picture Horror Show / Rolling Stones red lips that we laughed along with the designer when we saw it.
I also remember the store it came from - well, I don’t remember the name of it, but I believe it was in SoHo, and it was kind of an emporium of cleverly designed gadgets and gifts like this radio. I thought it was the greatest place - a big open room filled with weird and cool things. In my memory, I believe it was an early precursor store to both the high end designey gift shops like Mxyplyzyk in Greenwich Village or even true ‘design’ stores of the nineties and early aughts like the now defunt Moss or Karim Rashid’s shop in Chelsea. But in actuality, it may have been closer to the gift section of an Urban Outfitters or even a slightly higher end Spencer’s Gifts. Well, if anyone knows the place I’m talking about, let me know. Or even the name or designer of this great radio.
#radio
The way I figured it, the only way it could be truly instant was if you just grabbed a spoonful and put it directly in your mouth. Why bother with the laborious extra step of adding milk?
Hershey’s Instant Tin with Boy (by Neato Coolville)
“I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.”
Dorianne Laux, Moon in the Window
(via fleurishes)
