Courtesy of Lileks:
…neon is the most entrancing and civilized form of signage ever invented – and… the 30s and 40s style was adult and sophisticated in a way nothing has touched since. But for an adult culture, I suppose you need lots of – what’s the word? – adults.
Anyone care to discuss?
Lileks can turn a phrase pretty nicely, but for my money, he distills down to little more than yet another “Ohhh, things were so much better back in the day” type of person. What’s odd about Lileks is that he fetishizes an era he wasn’t even around for.
I don’t think people fetishizing an era they didn’t actually live through is all that uncommon… think of Civil War re-enactors, Ren Faire folks, or even just latter-day greasers (I’ve known a few who weren’t even old enough to remember Fonzie, let alone the real age of greasers).
I agree that Lileks is sometimes a bit too enthusiastic in his denunciations of the modern age (even as he uses its tools to memorialize his father’s day – irony), but I do think he’s on to something about earlier decades seeming more “adult.” Perhaps “sophisticated” would be a better description. Days when restaurants weren’t decorated like a 13-year-old’s bedroom and the “think of the children” mentality wasn’t quite so prevalent.
But perhaps I’m guilty of fetishizing, too. 🙂
This is only somewhat related. Would have been a better comment for your Kindle post, but maybe we’re getting closer to the future than we think. You gotta love this for the wow factor:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html
That’s pretty wild, Keith… I imagine there could be some real privacy concerns associated with this system (I’m thinking of the word cloud that comes up on the one guy — not that you’d really be projecting tags on the chests of people around you, but if you’re able to get a flow of information based on simply seeing someone… perhaps that person doesn’t wish to be “seen”).
The “Minority Report interface” seems to be something a lot of people are working towards… I’m kind of indifferent to such a thing myself beyond just the “wow, I remember that in a movie” factor. What I hope does NOT come to pass is the personalized and highly intrusive advertising. “Hi, Mr. Bennion, how’d those underpants work for you?” None of your freaking business, you hologram!
I think Lileks is simply reacting to the egalitarian nature of our newest “new technology.” Back in the 30s and 40s, just about everything that appeared in public (be they neon signs, newspapers, books, magazines, etc.) was made by a select few (the “adults”) and consumed by everyone else (the “children”).
Today, production (and, more specifically, customization) is so cheap that the “adult” crowd isn’t as exclusive as it once was, resulting in a much wider variety of styles, tastes, designs, etc.
The culture is richer, but necessarily, harder to define for future Lileks-like historians…
I think there’s a distinction to be made between what Civil War re-enactors or Ren-Faire folks do and what Lileks does here. Displaying a fascination for a certain period to the point of re-enacting is one thing, but I seriously doubt that when you really push a Civil War re-enactor on the point that they’d genuinely want to live in that era. Ditto the Ren Faire people. Lileks, on the other hand, really really wishes the world were like it was in the 1930s that exists in his head when the world was run by ‘adults’.
(And frankly, looking through history books, I don’t find it obvious at all that the world’s concerns back then were any more ‘grown up’ than they are now.)
Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting this kind of response to this little topic!
Brian, I have to admit I’m not entirely sure of what you’re saying vis a vis production, customization, etc. Perhaps I’m being dense after a long week in the comma mines. And Jaquandor, I’ll bet a lot of hobbyists fantasize about living in another era, at least an idealized version of it, which is all I see Lileks doing when he goes off.
My own take on Lileks (and the line I quoted above in particular) is simply that he prefers the aesthetics of the mid-20th century to modern design (as do I, at least when it comes to architecture and cars and, to a lesser extent, clothes), as well as what he interprets as the social atmosphere of that time. I think the “adult” comment that seems to be raising so much ire is a reflection of Lileks’ politics. He’s pretty obviously conservative about most things and sees our society post-1960s as increasingly permissive and lacking in manners, taste, and common sense, i.e., immature and/or unsophisticated. He reminds me of David Gelernter, actually, who lamented our loss of respect for authority figures and other societal changes in his book on the 1939 World’s Fair (which I wrote about here).
I’m not here to defend Lileks and for the record, I don’t agree with a lot of his views. However, I don’t think it’s difficult to argue that the mid-century era was more “adult” in certain respects. Pre-60s America appears, from our vantage point, to be more cultured, better mannered, more socially cohesive, and, well, classier, for lack of a better word. It was also, of course, far more repressed and seething with various political and social problems that would soon be coming inevitably to a head, but romantics don’t tend to consider those things, do they? It’s like when I start pining for the 1980s. Geo-politically, socially, and economically, that decade was a mess, but that’s not what I think of when I get all nostalgic.
If you really pressed me, I probably wouldn’t really want to live in any other era than the now, but the truth is that I often feel uncomfortable with this time for various reasons. I think that’s all Lileks is expressing when he gets curmudgeonly. He identifies with a previous generation’s world view more than the one that prevails today. I can understand that…
What I’m saying is that back in the 50s/60s, the media that we consumed was authored by a select few, since the tools required to produce mass media were expensive and hard to come by.
Today, mass media is online, interactive, and almost free to produce. And so everybody does it.
When those who define the culture are limited to an “elite” few, it’s easy to see them as the “responsible adults” catering to us “kids.” When anyone with a web browser and a credit card can mass produce music, video, magazines, t-shirts, coffee mugs, advertisements, and the like, it’s easy to see the culture as “overrun by the kids.”
Clear? No? Ah well…
Ah, I understand now, and I think I agree… but I don’t think that’s what Lileks means when he says “adult.”
I think he’s talking about the overall “quality” of the culture during the time he reveres. When middle-class people read far more books (and far more literary books) than we do now, when people wore hats and gloves to go out, when folks had cocktails after work, etc.
I don’t know… maybe all that really is related to what you’re saying, i.e., the 50s culture was seemingly more mature because it was being guided by a handful of people who made it that way. But I think what he was getting at was the relative level of sophistication and decorum. At the very least, people used to dress better… 🙂