Hell 1.0

Last week, Andrea Harris wrote:

For those who were born too late and therefore are under the impression that the Seventies was a gloriously innocent time of day-glo colored discoball party fun fun fun, that decade was actually when the American character was sunk in neurotic depression. We ran from Vietnam like a bunch of scared big girls. The economy sucked. Cynicism and selfish, destructive behavior was rampant. Cars were hideous junk painted ugly “earth tones” like crap brown, condensed-milk yellow, ketchup-stain red, and garbage can green. (My father’s giant boat of a ’73 Ford LTD was that color. Driving it was like trying to pilot the Hindenburg on the ground.) Fashions made men and women look like clowns. (Two words: plaid pantsuits.) The divorce rate, the drug-crime rate, the venereal disease rate — everything bad went up.

And plenty of it landed in your living room along the way–James Lileks reposts the entire original “Interior Desecrations” site from the late 1990s, the inspiration for his best selling book a few years later. For the full visual horror of the 1970s at its plastic craptastic worst, click here and keep scrolling until your eyes bleed. For my Electronic House magazine review of his 2004 book, click here.