…because Pam Spaulding at Pandagon had a kind word to say about James Lileks. Not his Bleat or Screed blog, fortunately, or for his regular column in the Strib which I find tediously twee, but for his masterful book, Interior Desecrations. You have to have lived through the 1970s to be able to understand how tacky things got for a while there—someday I’m going to have to dig up that old photo of myself in a polyester paisley print shirt and bell bottoms just to put the younger generation of readers here into shock.
While I’m in a “what were they thinking?” mood, I’ll mention one shock we had in this otherwise nice 1950s era house we own. The upstairs is carpeted bright red…no, scarlet, a flaming crimson color, which was discombobulating enough. In addition, though, one of the upstairs bedrooms was wallpapered in bright ♣ green shamrocks ♣ .
It was one of the selling points, actually. I figured if we ever had trouble making the mortgage payments, I already had the decor to open a bordello for leprechauns.
Interesting idea, but the scene I’m picturing involves little men in green biting your ankles and taking breaks to chortle things like “Think you’ll be gettin’ me gold as easy as that?” That’s the best case scenario. They could be like the ones in that awful movie.
Most places allow you to redecorate when you purchase them — you don’t need to keep ugly carpet for fear of mortgage payments. No really!
At least one can feel some affection for 70s fashion, even if it’s deprecating. (Which is just like the affection I feel for Lileks, come to think of it, except that he’s such a dick when it comes to politics.) No one will remember fashion from the 80s and 90s as being anything special, if the current retro trends are any indication.
My father still has his old discarded-tire-tread sandals. And my mom still has her harvest gold KitchenAid stand mixer and an avocado crock-pot.
I gotta say, though, that at least to my mind, the ’70s design sensibility is a hell of a lot more tolerable than the ’80s design sensibility.
I gotta laugh… And it’s not just the tag line about a bordello for leprechauns.
Ah the joys of Avocado and Harvest Yellow…
My wife has secreted away the photos of me in a rust colored tuxedo with W-I-D-E Lapels and a “Peach” colored shirt. That was from the mid 1970s at her senior prom. The wild long hair and a Grizzly Adams beard finished the Grisly Ensemble. I’m pretty sure she’s saving those for blackmail purposes.
We won’t go into the disco era clothing that I had to wear while prostituting myself playing thumpa-thumpa disco drek to pay the bills. I had a frilly shirt that would have made Desi Arnez and Tito Puente jealous. Then, EVERYONE who was a anybody wore that wild stuff.
I’d rather spend time at a nerd prom/dance any day.
Scarlet Carpet? Was it that 6 inch deep pile sort of stuff that tended to swallow small dogs in it’s knap?
Damn…
PZ, you didn’t say anything about the giant octopus attacking the Nautilus, c. 1971.
I LOVED my pink paisley print shirt, especially those little-bitty collars with a BUTTON!
That’s just pure evil! I’m all for keeping history alive, but for the 70’s and early 80’s, I’m eager to make an exception.
Martin
My favorite Lileks production has always been the Gallery of Regrettable Food. Have to say, though, that I must give a look to the new Bad Parenting Advice site!
As for the 70s fashions: But I like avocado and harvest gold appliances!
At least your carpet was a single flaming red color. I stayed at a house in Colorado once for a week (it was owned by people as their summer home who rented it out by the week for church groups), and every room had a different duo-tone shag carpeting. Blue and green, red and pink, orange and yellow, brown and tan. In every room. The light fixtures were all very odd flower-like contraptions in garish green and pink and yellow. There were also stuffed dead animals everywhere, including a goose posed as in flight hanging down from the ceiling in the living room. Go 70s?
Yeah, we figured that out. The shamrocks are gone, as of last year — we painted over them.
Carpet is more expensive to replace, though, so it’s still there.
Ugh, the ’80s were horrible, at least as horrible as the ’70s. Admittedly, I wasn’t around for the ’70s, but my parents hung on to their avocado and harvest gold appliances for decades, and the carpet in the house was a two-tone, mottled bright orange/dark orange mix thing, that was replaced mid-’80s with a strange multi-tone green carpet that looked like we had an algae problem inside the house. We had lampshades that were vertical orange cylinders around each bulb. The worst were all the home electronics made out of cheap plastic with the really fake looking wood-grain stickers on the sides.
Technically, there are other means of coming to this knowledge, such as buying a house in which the harswood floors have been covered over with shag carpeting. Harvest gold, I think.
My solid oak hardwood floors were covered with green shag. Now, I have no carpet at all…
In my view, the 80s were pretty horrible from the standpoint of pop music (overproduced and trite) and politics (think Alex on family ties). But Americans did start to develop better taste in other things, particularly food. E.g., to many Americans in the 70s, Chinese food was opening a can of Chung King “chow mein” and pouring it over some fried noodle snacks. Or if you don’t believe me, there’s always the Weight Watchers 1974 recipe card page (Rosy perfection salad: http://www.candyboots.com/wwcards/rosyperfection.html ). Actually some of that stuff would have been scary in the 70s I think. By the 80s, you could order a salad that might have real feta cheese and greens other than iceberg lettuce. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but all of a sudden it was possible to find a large variety of ingredients, fewer of them canned, and people began to duplicate authentic cuisines from elsewhere instead of just starting with the name and applying their warped imagination to determine what it might entail.
Got my first car in the ’70s (a humongous Buick). The previous owner had installed shag carpeting. Ah, my toes loved that shag. Those were the days.
I didn’t have to live through the 70’s, just had to live in my parents house. Which went sadly un-redecorated since the 70’s. Sky blue rotary phones, white with green sunburst thingy formica countertops, avocado shag carpeting. And the lamps. Dear god, the lamps. The best was going through the closet though. My dad never got rid of this brown polyester shirt with patterns of clouds and trees on it.
As I said over at Pandagon, that is the advantage to having stodgy conservative parents — I was spared the horrors of avocado green, gold, and orange. My mom doesn’t like any of those colours, and the majority of their decor is basically off-white, white, beige, brown, and various wood tones. Yes, it’s kind of boring, but if the alternative is multiple shades of snot-green, vile orange, and bile yellow, boring is good.
Then again, my parents had a lot of money in the late 1960s when they got married, so they were able to buy a lot of quite tasteful, expensive furniture, much of which they still have. Their dining room set is to die for, and not a smidgen of Harvest Gold anywhere.
Thank you James Lileks (perhaps the only funny right-winger in the universe) for making me appreciate my parents’ stodgy decor.
You must be living in my parents’ first house. I grew up on oak flooring until c.1970 when they covered it with broadloom in — yep — harvest gold (though not shag, IIRC). In that mid-50s subdivision, hardwood flooring was standard original equipment, and getting wall-to-wall carpet was considered moving up in the world. But before you think too badly of that generation, keep in mind that urethane varnish had not (I think) been invented yet. Keeping an oak floor looking good required regular waxing and polishing — my mother had this big noisy machine to do it. My generation has gone the other way: we either bought new houses which came with carpet over the OSB subfloor, and “upgraded” to hardwood later (but now with maintenance-free plastic coatings); or bought older houses, ripped up the carpet, and sanded, stained and urethaned the beautiful old wood that had lain hidden for lo these 20 years.