Lileks.com

Nostalgia is big business. Everyone in middle America seems to be yearning for that innocent, 1950s Norman Rockwell-style of life, complete with late summer baseball games, freckle-faced tykes, mom's home-cooking and smiling small-town neighbors always ready to lend a hand. Like all rosy stereotypes, this one is both true and false, but inevitably, it isn't long before some jaded, cynical, post-modern punk with a computer and an attitude will dedicate himself to debunking all this sentimental goo and give the lie to this remembrance of things past. The past as it will turn out, wasn't all that pleasant to live in.

And who better than James Lileks to make us reconsider ill-considered popular notions about times gone by? Okay, so maybe the balding, bespectacled, occasional conservative political columnist and Minnesotan wasn't the nose-ringed anarchist Columbia undergrad in Cultural Studies you were expecting, but the high-tech savvy and, better, the attitude are there. From the moment you see the opening screen, '50s ad of a brunette gardening, you know you're in for an irony-drenched trip down memory lane.

First, the good news. Lileks' site is absolutely enormous. There's his daily weblog which he calls, "The Bleat." There are pictures of over 200 postcards, a collection of bizarre money from around the world (including a special collection devoted to bills with scantily-clad women,) bad newspaper ads from the '20s to '60s, the world's worst comics, the most complete account of architecture on the Web of both Fargo, N.D. in 1950 (Lileks' hometown) and present-day Minneapolis, a writing archive and photo archives of what Lileks calls pseudo-artsy shots. Then, there's the Institute of Official Cheer.

The Institute (which is large enough to warrant its very own Web review) is where Lileks' combination of nostalgia and contemporary irony come together in one hilarious but strangely distressing formula. The Institute's motto is "Where the Past comes to Life — so we can promptly Beat it to Death Again," and Lileks certainly does a fine of job of thrashing it around. The Institute's very raison d'etre and content of the entire institute is to show how really, really horrible and distasteful the past was, and in Lileks' skilled hands the post war period of 1945-1980 comes across as one of the most disgusting and unrelievedly awful periods in American culture, a wasteland, a black hole which sucked in all notions of taste and/or class. The Institute is Lileks' encyclopedic homage to bad taste in America. And as we know, there's more than enough of that to spread around.

First, if you ever felt any hankering after mom's home cooking, forget it. Mom's home cooking was crap, especially if she used any of the recipe books found in the Gallery of Regrettable Food, Lileks' collection of unintentionally funny cooking ads and vomit-inducing photos of "food." You have been warned.

Next, there's Interior Desecrators. If you think that a collection of the most eye-poppingly bad '70s interior design isn't funny or that, "That 70s Show" is the height of television comedy, you still need to see this. It will induce a sense of marvel in how anyone in the '70s could have taken themselves seriously or even kept a straight face.

And it goes on. Photos of the Gobbler Motel and Supper Club, the grooviest motel in Wisconsin, "the place that made turkey famous 365 days a year," "where central Wisconsin meets the Concorde Age," is an eye-popping lesson in "futuristic" architecture. The Art of Art Frahm celebrates one pop artist's obssession with falling women's underwear and is an object lesson in how pervasive sexist imagery was until recently. Then there's the world's worse advertising mascots, the abominable Dorcus clothing line — the height of 70s chic — the photos of old celebrities caught in embarrassing situations and so on, page after page of it. Lileks is nothing if not thorough.

Of course, on such a large site, there's bound to be flaws. Lileks' commentary is mostly scathingly hilarious, but sometimes he really stretches for a comic metaphor. As for his writings, they have a sort of unmemorable Garrison Keillor sort of charm to them, and his weblog is neither better or worse than anything you'd find at Blogger.com, though his occasional caustic comments on bad movies he's seen are worth the read.

Nevertheless, Lileks' site is real find, not only as a source of Americana, but as a sort of vicious attack on sentimental conceptions of the past. Lileks clearly can be nostalgic, as shown by his collection of old postcards and photos, but the overall tone of the site is a heavy-handed irony and a sort of amused disgust at the crude commercialization of American pop culture. As a showcase of the steady and ever growing progress of bad taste in America, Lileks' site is unique and important.

— Barton Wong (bartonwong at hotmail dot com)