The Marshalite

Down at Bicentennial Park in Chelsea the other week, I came across this blast from my past: a mechanical traffic signal.

I was extremely taken with this sign when I was a child, whenever we drove through a particular Edithvale Road / Nepean Highway intersection beside the railway line. This would have been in the mid to late seventies. The sign was still functioning then, its jaunty white arrow eternally making its way round and round, no longer actually signalling traffic since that function had been taken over by traffic lights. It was like a heritage building that no one could bring themselves to tear down.

It has something over the current equivalent in that it clearly shows the driver exactly how long they have to wait. It puts me in mind of the failure of digital speedometers in cars. Drivers want a visual reference and the radial clock is infinitely better for the purpose than the digital display. Take that, technological determinism!

The Bat Computer tells me it was called the Marshalite, designed by Charles Marshall in 1936 and is an Australian original, utterly of its time. The last one running was on the Nepean Highway so no doubt the one I enjoyed as a kid was the last of its kind in the world.

Museum Victoria has a fully restored one on display.

Toy Story, with Buzz and Woody (Allen)

The model for this stuffed toy appears to be another person called Woody…

At the Reading Cinema in Sunbury, Victoria.

Steamer trunk office

I’m calculating what I would have to sell to get my hands on one of these.

This is the Mayfair Steamer Secretary Trunk, made of “Vintage Cigar Leather”, whatever that is.

The blurb reads:

Crafted by antiques dealer and furniture maker Timothy Oulton of London, our oversized steamer trunk armoire is configured as an ingeniously designed secretary.

– Reproduction antique steamer trunk
– Handmade of distressed vintage cigar leather over a solid wood frame
– Aniline-dyed leather has an antiqued, vintage look
– Accented with over 3,000 hand-hammered brass nailheads
– Features a pull-down desktop and multiple drawers, cubbies, wire management and bookshelves
– Lined in leather-edged canvas
– Stands on wheels for mobility and closes for storage and privacy
– Leather-bound corner brackets, leather-wrapped handles, oak slats with a tobacco finish and cast-metal antiqued hardware
– No two are exactly alike, making each trunk truly unique
– Leather is resistant to scratches and becomes softer over time and with use, contributing to its antiqued patina
– Dimensions: 39″W x 29″D x 76″H

Now all I need is the New York loft to put it in.

Pump that Expressionist bass!

“If they were alive today, what speakers would Max Beckmann or Edvard Munch buy”? I know I’ve asked myself this questions thousands of times.

Question no longer. The Altec Lansing Expressionist Bass FX3022 Speaker has arrived.

Forget about bass booming at your shins. The Expressionist Bass features twin desktop speakers with subwoofers built right in the base of each one. Separate 1.5-inch drivers deliver mid and high frequencies so vocals and details come through with brilliant clarity. And an auxiliary input gives you the convenience of connecting any MP3 player.

And what sound should I play through my Expressionist Bass speaker? Why, a scream, of course.

Es-Presso

Psychologists tell us that we unconsciously favour the physically attractive. Beautiful people earn more, are more likely to be employed in an interview, get better service in shops, are smiled at more than the rest of us, and generally preferred in innumerable ways every day of their blessed lives.

I have a similar prejudice about inanimate objects. I think beautiful things are going to be better, more efficient, easier to use than ugly things, and I want this to be true and will maintain it against all evidence to the contrary. (I seem to remember reading something along the lines that useful things are necessarily beautiful, but that’s a different matter).

So it is that I want this to be the best coffee maker in the world.

I’ve never tasted a cup of coffee from this machine, but I want it to be perfect. The design is so starkly brilliant, so simple, in contrast to the overpriced contraptions that look more like Victorian steam organs than something that might make a decent cup of coffee, that I want it to be good.

It is called the Presso, and it was designed by Patrick Hunt, of design consultancy Therefore.

There are several nifty videos of it being demonstrated on youtube.

Can you tell I’ve been enjoying my coffee lately?

The hand-made thing

Almost all the time, the objects we use in daily life – the door handles we turn, the glasses we drink from, the pens we write with – were made by machines. At most, someone somewhere has simply screwed a few pieces together never touched by human hands.

Further down the scale of economic fortune, down to the bottom, where life is a daily struggle of subsistence as it was for our ancestors, the fewer machine-made objects you will find in their original state.

Down there among the people whose lives resemble the rag-pickers and mudlarks of Dickensian times more than they do yours or mine, the machine-made objects have already been used and discarded by others.

Lately I spent some time in our quirky local shop ‘Just Planet’ in Sunbury, created by my friends Lee and Norman. They sell all sorts of objects with an implicitly internationalist agenda: things like Fair Trade coffee and chocolate, toys for children, organic this-and-that, all in a happily cluttered space. But apart from the excellent coffee, I like to go there to see the large range of hand-made things.

Recently, my wife bought me a little tin guitar, only a few centimetres high, to go on my keyring. The strings are made of wire, the face of the guitar is from an aluminium drink can, while the clips holding it together and the sides and back of the guitar are made from an old sardine tin. I’m amazed how hardy it is. It will certainly last for years.

It is also ingeniously designed.

I’m sure no pencil ever touched paper, but it is design nevertheless. Done in the mind and the hand.

I’ve since bought a tin car, made from an insect repellant can, with working tin wheels, a steering wheel, seats, and even a transparent windscreen.

Appropriately it looks like a Volkswagon. I say appropriately because the VW spent the longest time in continuous production of any car. It will run on just about anything including banana skins (I saw it in a documentary), and it was for decades the car most likely to be owned by the working poor around the world.

Here’s to hand-made things.

Signalman

Driving back from Adelaide last week, we stopped to feed a hungry baby at the truck-stop town of Tailem Bend, on the Princes Highway. This is the first time I’ve ever been there when it wasn’t 40 degrees*, which was nice.

Highlights of Tailem Bend include a magnificent bakery. I particularly enjoy eating whatever I’ve bought there while sitting in the park and admiring Tailem Bend railway station. This time it was open and I saw that it included a little ‘museum’, which was a room dedicated to a collection of objects straight out of the dowdy world, when railway stations were objects of civic pride. I can’t begin to describe the architectural style of this building. It seems to occupy some Edwardian category all its own.

I tried to pick a favourite object, and my heart beat with desire when I clapped eyes on this lovely signalman’s cap. Most of all I was touched by the beauty and pathos of its crest. I’m not sure what a signalman actually did. I suppose he was an important man, but this was a time when even council street sweepers wore crisp uniforms and peaked caps.

What a beautiful thing that crest is. What an object of enduring style. It signifies pride in one’s job and position, no matter how lowly. It has the flourish of fine copperplate handwriting; official but not stuffy in the least. The opposite of stuffy, it’s almost jaunty.

*For international readers, forty degrees is very hot.

Fashion and the art of motorcycle maintenance

I have never actually driven (as opposed to been driven on) a motorcycle. I imagine it’s wonderful and exciting, but I’m frightened to death of… well, death. I like the idea of several inches of steel and glass around me as I hurtle down a highway at speeds likely to result in mutilation should I come suddenly into contact with a stationary object.

But this stuff is so damn sexy I would get on a cycle just to have an excuse to wear it.

An outfit from France called Les Ateliers Ruby make these vintage-style helmets that are things of beauty. Their website is also a thing of beauty.

Thinking that there couldn’t possibly be a retailer in my country I was surprised to find that there is in fact a stockist in Sydney, Deus Ex Machina, who fill in the rest of the picture; the kinds of jackets, T-shirts and indeed motorcycles that provide an excuse to be seen in the street wearing a gorgeous helmut without frightening small children.