I Won a Green Mylonit!

Warning: IKEA RAVINGS AND RANTS

I went to bed and hoped the Mylonit (IKEA blown glass lamp shaped like a sea anemone) would be mine.

I have a blue one and a white one but I clumsily broke one back in spring in my drunkenness and miss it.

I thought that one was green, but Lee insists it was red, which is a creepy enough color for a hallway console table, and now that the red light district part of my life is over I suppose it was an appropriate act of destruction.

The greener Mylonit is much harder to find anyway, he reminds me. He says it was never in the stores and it's very rarely for sale online.

As I said, we have the blue and the white one (the latter one is the one the ghost clicked on that autumn they were doing things all over the house) but I know eventually I'll break one of these even without drinking so it's a good idea to have the green one waiting.

There was a blue one for sale insanely cheap also by the same seller, so I bid on it but felt greedy for doing so and so bid very low to be fair-minded.

I was happy to see someone outbid me on that one and didn't have to pay much at all for it. I had only gone a little over a dollar over the minimum bid.

IKEA made millions of these things (the Mylonit lamp) and they were in the stores for years but they've already vanished (par for the course with IKEA lighting) from EBAY and other online sources. Usually when they come up they start at thirty dollars, and this seller started them at 6.99 each with very fair shipping.

Getting rid of the MYLONIT was one of those moments when I realize IKEA had no clue as to which of its designs are classics that will not go away.

They did the same thing with the LYKTA lamp, which I have now seen in about a thousand music videos and in the set design of about half the television shows out there (especially the fashion-themed shows).

This would have assured them of constant sales of this item for the next five or ten years. Instead they will replace it with some crappy, uninspired lamp like that TAPPAN (that's not the name; I've mentally blocked it I think) or whatever the hell it was called that still fetches a good price on EBAY even though it gives me nightmares. We bought one of those to sell only a few years back and it's still sitting in a closet somewhere because I can't bring myself to lie for the entry on Lee's site and say it's a good purchase opportunity. It looks like something K-MART came up with. It probably cost 38 cents to make. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but someone could have probably been much more inspired with twenty-eight cents.

That IKEA lamp I called constructivist actually is a wonderful light at night. The pictures of it in broad daylight unlit didn't do it justice at all. "Nightlight by Tatlin."

I didn't think I'd use it at all and now I love it.

I am a lamp junkie and have a lamp fetish.

I almost bought an Italian lamp from the sixties last night as well because it was just being given away.

It was an Italian's idea of Saarinen's line. It was definitely ADAPTED and made Italian so it ended up coming out like a ship's funnel in a Fellini movie (maybe And the Ship Sails On?)

Oh, I probably made that up. The ship in that Fellini movie was incredibly ugly and squarish, wasn't it? It didn't look as though it was really a ship at all. Who designs a square ship to move through water? DING! DING! FELLINI METAPHOR ALERT!

Imagine how an Italian designer would cross a shoe horn shape with a ship's funnel shape and then imagine the shoe horn upside down in a dark plastic that looks almost like Bakelite. The light would come out of that small upper open part. That's what that lamp looked like. Quite cool.

I would like to create an Odd Lamp Museum.

I would like to create a Wonderful Pillow Museum.

I would like to create an Unusual Planter Museum.

Do you have a vote for the ugliest one of any of these?

I think my ugliest lamp award would probably be that "ceiling basketball" lamp that makes a comeback every few years.

They sold it at SEARS in the seventies, I'm fairly certain.

Wasn't it a bicentennial lamp with a red, white and blue "basketball" (presumably glass)?

One of the best things about the hilarious trannie bad taste flick Girls Will Be Girls is Evie's purgatorial "Bicentennial Room." The room is filled with items like this from 1976.

Evie pretending to ride her exercise bike in there: "Oh, I use this room all the time!"

Coco picking up magazine and blowing dust off it: "Uh huh. Oh look! Cher Allman is thinking about having her first plastic surgery."

I think the basketball lamp had a red metal rim with it but don't think it had any netting or faux-netting.

I can't believe I never saw that in a seventies porn film.

Someone should do a mock sevenite porn film where the "starlet" (already on her back and "acting") can't stop looking at the SEARS-issued basketball ceiling lamp and it completely undoes her nascent porn "career" and results in her living a completely different life.

I suppose I should still include that basketball ceiling lamp in my imaginary museum, because the museum should have a HALL OF HORRORS, just like Tussaud's or one of the Ripley's Museums.