Acquired Taste
Seeing family over Christmas piqued me with guilt over my long-neglected role as Clan Archivist. I've been given boxes of old photos and slides to arrange, catalogue, and store for posterity. Why posterity would give a damn about us I've yet to discover.
Most of the photographs I've seen many times over. But the slides are a surprise. Partly because my father stopped developing pictures as slides in the early 1970s, and partly because it's been 20 years since the last working slide projector in the family went where the woodbine twineth.
Recently I learned how to work my Epson scanner to make jpegs from slides, and that's what I spent the last week doing.
Among the revelations that sprang from the slides boxes is the design sensibility of my grandparents on my mother's side. I remember them well, but I had forgotten what they used to do to their houses. And now, as it pops up on my screen in lurid colors, I miss them. I look on their works and tremble with a combination of chagrin and delight. These people who made me had the utterly American combination of bombastic bad taste and the heart, and the cash to indulge it.
I loved them dearly: they had big hearts and taught me many lessons. Her parents were imigrants, his grandparents were. They came from the streets, literally -- boarding houses and reform schools of Philadelphia. My Nana was orphaned as a child, my Grandpop worked himself up through the Navy Yard. They eloped to Elkton, Md., when she was 16.
By the 1930s, they had made it. And here's what they made of it. Click on these for larger versions, if you can take it.
This actually is a detail of a picture of my Nana and my Aunt Edna, her sister, circa 1950. I zoomed in on this table lamp and decoration.
Here's my mom and I in a bedroom in my grandparents' home in 1961. Note the padded headboard. And nobody should be allowed to do that to wallpaper.
That's little me, celebrating Christmas, 1962, seemingly oblivious to the murderous psychedelic red of the chair and the wallpaper. Acid trips couldn't hold a candle to my grandparents' house.
More wallpaper desecration. Here's a peek into their dining room, cropped off from a picture of my Nana gazing up at the "money tree" (just visible on the right) that their neighbors gave them when they were set to move to Florida. It says something about your decorating when your neighbors get up a collection and give you money to leave town.
With the help of the "money tree" my grandparents retired to Boca Raton, Florida, in 1963 and got rid of all their hideous old furniture, replacing it with hideous new furniture. Somehow the big, loud old stuff had a kitschy warmth. But this .... They decorated the whole house in Louis-the-someteenth. Louis the Prima, I think. Here's the front of their living room. Note the textured paint on the ceiling: a huge spiral of scallops that personify, more than anything else I've ever seen, the delightful experience of "bedspins."
Those two big-ass chairs? I have them now. They effortlessly combine tackiness and indestructability. They're Bassett, I think; a solid make. Since I recently got married, Amy and I have an excess of stuff. I recently e-mailed my sister to see if there was anything she lacked in the way of home furnishings. Her response was, "I'm not taking those chairs!"
Here's the back of the living room, looking out toward the screened-in porch where we ate breakfast. Note the green shag carpet. Note Cardinal Richeleu's color TV set.
The couch. The wall. The mural. The horror. I don't know where they found this guy, but when my grandparents bought this house, they had some painter come in and cover selected wall space with some sort of vaguely Mediterranean scenes, all in one color of blue. It's the kind of decor you might see in a sea food restaurant that was routinely closed down for botulism.
Most of the photographs I've seen many times over. But the slides are a surprise. Partly because my father stopped developing pictures as slides in the early 1970s, and partly because it's been 20 years since the last working slide projector in the family went where the woodbine twineth.
Recently I learned how to work my Epson scanner to make jpegs from slides, and that's what I spent the last week doing.
Among the revelations that sprang from the slides boxes is the design sensibility of my grandparents on my mother's side. I remember them well, but I had forgotten what they used to do to their houses. And now, as it pops up on my screen in lurid colors, I miss them. I look on their works and tremble with a combination of chagrin and delight. These people who made me had the utterly American combination of bombastic bad taste and the heart, and the cash to indulge it.
I loved them dearly: they had big hearts and taught me many lessons. Her parents were imigrants, his grandparents were. They came from the streets, literally -- boarding houses and reform schools of Philadelphia. My Nana was orphaned as a child, my Grandpop worked himself up through the Navy Yard. They eloped to Elkton, Md., when she was 16.
By the 1930s, they had made it. And here's what they made of it. Click on these for larger versions, if you can take it.
This actually is a detail of a picture of my Nana and my Aunt Edna, her sister, circa 1950. I zoomed in on this table lamp and decoration.
Here's my mom and I in a bedroom in my grandparents' home in 1961. Note the padded headboard. And nobody should be allowed to do that to wallpaper.
That's little me, celebrating Christmas, 1962, seemingly oblivious to the murderous psychedelic red of the chair and the wallpaper. Acid trips couldn't hold a candle to my grandparents' house.
More wallpaper desecration. Here's a peek into their dining room, cropped off from a picture of my Nana gazing up at the "money tree" (just visible on the right) that their neighbors gave them when they were set to move to Florida. It says something about your decorating when your neighbors get up a collection and give you money to leave town.
With the help of the "money tree" my grandparents retired to Boca Raton, Florida, in 1963 and got rid of all their hideous old furniture, replacing it with hideous new furniture. Somehow the big, loud old stuff had a kitschy warmth. But this .... They decorated the whole house in Louis-the-someteenth. Louis the Prima, I think. Here's the front of their living room. Note the textured paint on the ceiling: a huge spiral of scallops that personify, more than anything else I've ever seen, the delightful experience of "bedspins."
Those two big-ass chairs? I have them now. They effortlessly combine tackiness and indestructability. They're Bassett, I think; a solid make. Since I recently got married, Amy and I have an excess of stuff. I recently e-mailed my sister to see if there was anything she lacked in the way of home furnishings. Her response was, "I'm not taking those chairs!"
Here's the back of the living room, looking out toward the screened-in porch where we ate breakfast. Note the green shag carpet. Note Cardinal Richeleu's color TV set.
The couch. The wall. The mural. The horror. I don't know where they found this guy, but when my grandparents bought this house, they had some painter come in and cover selected wall space with some sort of vaguely Mediterranean scenes, all in one color of blue. It's the kind of decor you might see in a sea food restaurant that was routinely closed down for botulism.
