Cardboard furniture, Bruiser Wolf (My $tory Got $tories), and Mecha Elvis sofubi.
and we back and we back and we back and we back
At YBNBO, Thursdays are for links, private Google searches, music, media, culture, the internet, and shopping.
The internet influences what we do offline. What we do offline affects how we use the internet.
Sofubi: Mecha Elvis and Soviet-era astronauts.
I came across Mecha Elvis while loafin’ around and Googling kaiju this past weekend.
He is a sofubi: a particular type of Japanese soft vinyl toy molded from plastic. You may be familiar with sofubi by way of Ultraman or Godzilla—characters still made into toys today—but those are mass-produced by major brands who only wish to replicate the aesthetic of the real thing.
Today and always, the most impressive sofubi are made by hand-sculpting, hand-waxing, and hand-pulling hot plastics out of molds, then cleaning and trimming off the extra bits before tucking them into plastic bags and stapling them shut with bi-fold cardboard. The good shit uses the exact molds of decades past to recirculate vintage toys. Or, on the designer end of sofubi, creators make new molds of entirely made-up (and often absurd and/or cute) characters to invoke a vague idea of a past era of plastic. Sometimes they’re bootlegs.
Sorry to say, Mecha Elvis is not based on an existing IP. It’s also sold out, and unless you wanna drop a ton of yen on a shiny new plastic toy (which I do because I like niche things) with global shipping and import tax, it’s not worth the hunt.
What is worth it, IMO, is dropping $80 on a reproduction of a 1960’s toy, which I absolutely fucking did.
Hong Kong sofubi producer Awesome Toy re-created a Soviet-era blow-molded cosmonaut toy originally produced in the 1960s. These tiny, one-color (usually yellow), 4.72-inch tall toys are hard to find today, and if you can manage to spot one it’ll have small dotted eyes, maybe “CCCP” written on its helment, and no articulation. It might look like this:
Awesome Toy’s reprint is obviously shinier and cleaner, yet carries the distinct features of a vintage plaything: a blush and red-tinted face, cheeky roundness, and a casual lack of detail.
If you wanna know more about sofubi, I highly recommend reading Dan Orlowitz’s feature at Japan Times, Plastic fantastic: Examining the global obsession with Japan’s soft vinyl toys.
You should read this story and cry like I did.
Today I had a meeting in San Francisco. I scheduled a haircut for eleven in the morning. I had to wait fifteen minutes for my cab to the neighborhood where the meeting and the haircut would occur. It rained. The rain soaked me.
I arrived at the salon. The hairstylist asked me how I’d like my hair. I started taking my glasses off. I regarded myself in the mirror. Rain had soaked my hair and my clothes. I looked like a guy who didn’t care enough to own an umbrella, much less care what his hair looked like.
“Hey,” I said, “I’m just gonna say. Um, I really care about how my hair looks.”
The hairstylist gave me a tiny laugh.
“Well, alright man, so do I.”
“I mean — I just kind of wanted to say that. I don’t think I ever say that. I used to have — I think, I mean — I feel like I used to have great hair. I used to really like my hair. And I don’t like it anymore. I haven’t for, um, a couple years.”
“Aw.”
“I mean, you do a good job when you cut it; it’s just — I feel like I’m just not being honest when I come in here and I say, ‘Oh, just give me a haircut, I guess’. I feel like I’m not being honest. I really want a good haircut. When I don’t have good hair I don’t want to wear nice clothes, and when I don’t want to wear nice clothes I don’t want to look in the mirror, and when I don’t want to look in the mirror I don’t know what I look like, and then I don’t know what people see when they look at me, you know? At that point, am I even a person? I don’t think I’m even a person at that point.”
I didn’t actually say all of this. I said some of it. I might have even said a lot of it. Either way, what if Osamu Dazai had a Snapchat? That’s what I’m going for, here.
Tim Rogers, “just like a hamburger; exactly like a hamburger”
Flat box my living room.
Not much is worse than moving.
I’ve never had the luxury of (being able to afford) paying someone else to move the things I love into another home or apartment. So the thought of cardboard furniture seems liberating. Flat-packing my desk or couch and fitting it into my car by my lonesome so I don’t have to load it into a U-Haul and ask my friends if I can treat them like companies do their employees when preventing them from unionizing and pay them in pizza to help sounds fantastic. Add that to freely moving your lightweight furniture whenever needed, assembling it without tools, and recycling it when its life is over seems like a win-win-win-win situation. Chairigami makes triple-reinforced cardboard to support my comically flat ass from busting through, say, one of its chaise loungers or “sofas.” Prices aren’t too bad if you like your furniture to double as statement pieces.
Of course, just as many downsides to cardboard exist. I can’t spill anything on this stuff or risk it becoming soggy and weak. No jagged edges or misuse of forks or pens either, or risk stabbing my furnishings. And because these things are essentially massive scratching posts, I can’t own a cat. (Sorry, Sando.)
I’ve been on the hunt for a bookshelves lately and further down the wormhole of cardboard ones only show pricey alternatives to Chairagami. Design Italy has a $500 set of shelves that quite literally looks like a cat scratching post and Room in a Box has way more inventory, but at the price of the more expensive euro.
It would be great to see an entirely modular system with panels of cardboard of some sort—it doesn’t seem like it’s tough to find or even do yourself.
Chuuuune in: Bruiser Wolf - My Story Got Stories
Bruiser Wolf raps like he’s buffering. To put it another way: Wolf lets words linger and float around before accelerating to the next bar to deliver his punchline. It’s a fun trick that gets a listener into actively deciphering lyrics, and, like many of his labelmates at the Danny Brown-led Bruiser Brigade Records, it’s made funnier with a cartoonish voice. His style is that of a slower Suga Free and he delivers a level of introspection I’ve come to expect from Detroit rap. Wolf is good.
Anyway, been listening and running to My Story Got Stories since it dropped on Friday. Highly recommend you do the same.
A watch I want.
Who needs a Hamilton PSR (Pulsar) when you can grab an Armitron Griffy for a fraction of the price? Like, a tiny fraction. ($35.) No, it’s not as flashy, display-modest, or . But I’m a sucker for a cheap digital watch, especially a retro-forward one. Plus you can grab this thing at Walmart. And honestly, it’s classicist if you don’t.
you better not be online is written by Kevin Cortez and Emilio Calderon.
It is a space in which both authors share thoughts about music, film, coffee, food, culture, and humanity.