The Abscondita Christmas Gift Guide
Helping you give a gift that packs a punch
The Abscondita Christmas Gift Guide
To buy a loved one something nice is all too easy. To place within their fledgeling collection an object that articulates the dual joy and burden of collectorship – a monument to the importance of gathering, keeping and, eventually bequeathing fascinating things – is a much more satisfying endeavour. They won’t thank you for it, but the universe will. It’s the right thing to do.
By all means, buy your family and friends Courtauld memberships and Le Creuset mugs. They will certainly like these things, insignificant though they may be. But our recommendation? Lump them with something more lofty – something that will endure. We have compiled six options to get you started below.
Kurt Cobain Prilosec bottle, available from Cardenas Auctions (est. $2000 - $4000)
Speaking of the burden of collectorship, why not saddle a well-meaning, grungey younger cousin with some bad karma? Give them this vile (sic) of Kurt Cobain’s, once containing Prilosec, supposedly pilfered (in poor taste) from his bathroom bin by a family friend. It might be just what they want. Who fucking knows?
On one level, it’s rather an unremarkable object. But the archetypal little orange bottle also strikes me as an interesting example of the fetishisation of (ab)using prescription drugs as distinct from illegal drugs; and the importance of this kind of use in the grunge aesthetic – perhaps having something to do with the abjection it implies.
Prilosec isn’t anything inebriating anyway; it’s omperazole, which is used for treating acid reflux and gastritis. But the bottle looks like drugs in a way that gets us brooding for rockstars. Beyond this fetishised surface, it recalls a truth: of the antagonistic role Cobain’s body played throughout his life. – Isaac Zamet
Viñales meteorite specimen. Available from Christie’s (est. $600 - $800)
Where were you on 1 February 2019? According to my phone’s calendar, I was calling Steve and cancelling a Class Pass membership. If you happened to be in Cuba’s Pinar Del Rio Province, you might remember the day’s events more vividly: around lunchtime, multiple sonic booms could be heard before a meteorite shower attacked the Viñales Valley. Miraculously nobody was hurt and we were left with a smattering of tiny, silver-flecked specimens like this palm-sized one – polished up and offered for sale by the good people at Christie’s.
Its face has the brutal, rough-hewn intrigue of one of Jean Dubuffet’s Paysages. Sitting on its recipient’s desk, it might serve as a reminder to be grateful that, in a world where objects like this are known to hurtle unpredictably towards the earth, they are alive, well and free of traumatic brain injury. – Phin Jennings
Valenki Boots. Available from eBay ($199)
The sky: high, black, frozen. Just you, a lieutenant, a priest and a handful of itinerant traders, waiting out a nightwatch somewhere liminal in the east. It’s true you can’t feel your nose or your arse. But your toes – they’re good. Why?
Valenki boots. Made from rolling, compressing and needle-felting wool repeatedly into a continuous shoe shape, these Ugg-rivalling stompers were produced in rural Russia for centuries before they became military standard in the 19th century.
I love the old-school felt-bottomed versions in particular; and they’ll do just as well for a morning sat outside Shreeji on your laptop as they will in Murmansk. Give the gift of unchillable toes. Frostbite be damned. – Isaac Zamet
Iggy and the Stooges, Raw Power LP, from the collection of Steve Albini. Available from Steve Albini’s Closet ($500)
When the transgressive and outspoken genius audio engineer and musician Steve Albini died last year, I was delighted to see some of his misanthropic missives resurface online. “I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth,” he told a producer asking for sample clearance in 2005. In a 1994 note to a music critic, he made a suggestion: “clip your year-end column and put it away for ten years. See if you don’t feel like an idiot when you reread it.”
Albini always had an opinion, which made him very good at his job. He honed the sounds of Nirvana, Pixies, The Breeders and PJ Harvey with the same violent clarity he wrote with. As his vast record collection is sold off, his copy of an album that matches the ferocity of both his sound and writing is a wonderful reminder that, if you want to be hailed as a creative visionary, you might have to tell a lot of people to fuck off. – Phin Jennings
Various historical playing cards. Available from Veritas Art, Ewbanks and eBay
Nothing says family time at the festive table like running out of stuff to talk about, entering a spiralling thought pattern about your congenitally sorry company, and hitting the ever-reliable: “Shall we play some cards?”
Why not kill two birds with one stone – a pack of cards and something to talk about – with these Abscondita-certified decks. The earliest is a 39 card hispano-American deck (est. $2000-$5000), likely produced by an indigenous Patagonian group in the early 19th century. Painted on rawhide, the deck follows the Spanish suit pattern of copas, oros, bastos and espadas (cups, gelds, clubs and swords). I’m not sure how to play with 39 cards, but I like the idea of rawhide at the Christmas table.
By the 1600s in Britain, the 52-card deck of the French system had become standard. A low-three-figure estimate strikes me as good value for this handsome George IV set of cards (est. £100 - £150). I like the vermiculated pattern on the backs, which, I find, lends the pack a cheerfully horny Regency vibe.
For a really provocative option, you could plump for this deck (£143), famously produced by the Pentagon, DoD and CENTCOM to help American soldiers identify ‘most wanted’ Iraqis during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Distributed directly to soldiers in the theatre of war, they evoke the tangential relationship cards have always had with war-making. For you, with a deck in hand, you can throw down some Gin Rummy with mummy in the company of some enemies of state, including the stern and rather full face of Walid Hamid Al-Tikriti, former governor of Basrah. – Isaac Zamet
Man, Myth & Magic back issues. Available from Oxfam (£100)
Imagine Aleister Crowley’s bookmarked Wikipedia pages were written with a little more panache and rigour, and illustrated with artworks by Chagall, Ensor, Breughel and Turner. This is what the contents of Man, Myth & Magic, a serial encyclopedia of the supernatural published in the early 1970s, resemble. In its pages, esoteric academics write vividly on a gamut of subjects including The Hutterian Brethren, the theory of Eternal Return and the life and work of 19th century Scottish medium D. D. Home.
If you know someone who might like to learn about the history of hysterical possession, uncover the origin of Igbo myths or simply look at some cool fonts, this is the gift for them. For the twisted aesthete in your life, I recommend pulling out and framing a single spread that fits their character – my own wall is adorned with the opening pages of a chapter titled “END OF THE WORLD”. – Phin Jennings