Artist Sarah Frost studied hundreds of YouTube videos which showed kids how to make paper guns. Guns that are probably a little too detailed and detailed for the purpose of kids. She’s revamped the whole paper and tape arsenal based on their instructional videos and the result was scary good.

“Arsenal,” Sarah Frost, Apr 14 – May 14, PPOW, New York

I’m surprised I survived the 1990’s. I was small and fragile and looking back at the toys…I can’t believe that at some point someone didn’t need my dental records and an eyewitness account to identify me. I was young and naïve and bleeding a good portion of the time. Yeah, mostly bleeding. I had a daunting sense of adventure; made worse by the fact that I was armed with some of the most dangerous toys in the history of time.

“Helmets? We don’t need no stinking helmets!”

Actually, we probably did…

10 Pogo Balls

Now these toys may seem innocuous and fairly safe, but that was only if you used them correctly. I know of maybe 3 people who actually did. They were pretty boring if you didn’t find clever new ways to play with them. In a time of skateboards their were ramps and in the time of pogo balls there were roofs (more on this later). When friends weren’t trying to find the maximum height they could jump from in which these things would stay intact, they were using them indoors. That was where the danger really stemmed from. Pogo Balling was only fun if you had an obstacle course and limited space; only indoor Pogo Balling seemed challenging.

Talk about a bull in a china shop? More like Courtney Love at the Waterford Crystal factory after a bottle of Stoli and a handful of Xanax. You could go one, maybe two rounds before breaking something expensive (like a vase or an arm), so you had to make those runs count. And when you did, you often counted out allowance money afterwords to help pay for the damages. Stupid Pogo Balls…

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