I’m about 30 years too young to “miss” 1950s decor. My grandparents might have, but they didn’t keep any of it, and I guess I’d consider that a “revealed preference”. I don’t miss the decor of my childhood or young adulthood and can hardly even remember it to be honest.
Likely I said this before but it’s interesting to watch “I Love Lucy” and see how similar their lifestyle is to today’s. The difference between 2025 and 1955 is much smaller than the difference between 1955 and 1885. There’s a lot more smoking, and they don’t have as many (or as fancy) TVs in the house as today, and there’s only the one phone usually, and they don’t make coffee the same way I do. But the process of making breakfast for a family is about the same, laundry isn’t much different, etc.
The living room in the video thumbnail appears to be anachronistically huge. I can remember my grandparent’s houses, built within a decade of the 1950s, and they had no rooms approaching that size. My living room (built 1990) isn’t even that big, though the ceiling is higher. I see homes built since 2010 with living rooms that size.
Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn examine the Russian Hoax Caper, both at its political roots but also and more personally on its journalistic basis, with a fulsome review of the relations of recent revelations embedded in their proper context of documents and events circa 2016-17. This is genuine, committed analysis folks (2:09:39): https://www.youtube.com/live/bkDJoIM5yIs
Its kind of an idealized sitting room maybe from a 50s sitcom
NC…”The difference between 2025 and 1955 is much smaller than the difference between 1955 and 1885. There’s a lot more smoking, and they don’t have as many (or as fancy) TVs in the house as today, and there’s only the one phone usually, and they don’t make coffee the same way I do. But the process of making breakfast for a family is about the same, laundry isn’t much different, etc.”
Obama used National Public Radio’s (NPR) Steve Inskeep, a host of Morning Edition, to help spread propaganda about Russia.
At the time, viewers didn’t know they were being duped, but with hindsight, it’s easy to spot an obviously nervous Obama setting the hook for the Russia lie — that Trump worked with Russia to steal the election from Obama’s Democrat choice, Hillary Clinton. That lie that cost the U.S. millions of dollars in investigations, led to a bogus impeachment of Trump, sent some Trump associates to jail.
Not sure I miss period decor except for bits and pieces. I’m for my grandparents’ era. I don’t miss the cooking, either, except in bits and pieces. My mother was given to experimentation, with her scrapbooks of recipes, ‘Mrs. Rombauer’, &c. I appreciate her efforts, but sometimes experiments do not succeed. The casserole is a culinary form best forgotten. My father was a griller. Much smaller repertoire, but great stuff.
==
What I miss is my parents’ elegance, their capacity to cooperate, and the standards of conduct which were modal in their generation. Ann Althouse some time back posted a clip derived from some home movies taken in her parents’ house on New Years’ Eve, 1954. Men (most of them veterans) in dress shirts, ties, and brush cuts clowning around to music on a record-player. The women in handsome frocks and cat’s eye glasses puffing on cigarettes. Some of my contemporaries have done quite well with their lives, but on balance we will never be as good as they were.
All of this brings up crucial questions about the Russiagate documents found in the secret room in the FBI’s headquarters. The first and most important question FBI leadership must ask is: Did the FBI preserve the original electronic versions of all of the burn bag documents in a 36 CFR § 1236.20-compliant records repository as required by the Federal Records Act?
As someone who has spent his entire career supporting federal records management at all levels of the government — including the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) — I can assure you that the answer to that question is no.
The next question then is this: Since the digital originals of the burn bag documents were not properly preserved in a certified records repository, where are they? If the creators of the electronic records cannot produce every original digital version of the burn bag records, this would imply the records were illegally destroyed in a coordinated Russiagate coverup. The legal implications of this would be staggering.
but he goes on
Unfortunately, the converse of this is not much better. If the creators of the digital versions of the burn bag records are able to produce the originals, there will be no way to prove their authenticity, integrity, and provenance. Nor would there be a way to prove that other unidentified electronic records related to Russiagate have not been hidden or destroyed.
Worse still, such unreliable records would not be admissible in a judicial proceeding under the government’s own Federal Rules of Evidence. And convicting anyone at the FBI for Russiagate crimes based on these burn bag records would be virtually impossible.
In November, national security strategist and bestselling author J. Michael Waller reported that NARA’s second-highest-ranking official, former Chief Records Officer Laurence Brewer, took a demotion in July 2024 to move to the DOJ to serve as the director of the DOJ’s Office of Records Management Policy.
Why would Brewer make such a move? Could it have been to support the destruction of Russiagate records that would be incriminating to the Obama and Biden administrations, while also lending credibility to the DOJ’s corrupt records management program, all in preparation for a potential return of Donald Trump to the White House the following January?
I say that this classic Robert Creeley poem is about classic 50s Beat decor — the hip wicker furniture available long before Pottery Barn.
_________________________________
A Wicker Basket
Comes the time when it’s later
and onto your table the headwaiter
puts the bill, and very soon after
rings out the sound of lively laughter—
Picking up change, hands like a walrus,
and a face like a barndoor’s,
and a head without any apparent size,
nothing but two eyes—
So that’s you, man,
or me. I make it as I can,
I pick up, I go
faster than they know—
Out the door, the street like a night,
any night, and no one in sight,
but then, well, there she is,
old friend Liz—
And she opens the door of her cadillac,
I step in back,
and we’re gone.
She turns me on—
There are very huge stars, man, in the sky,
and from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of apple pie,
with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it,
and I eat it—
Slowly. And while certainly
they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket
of these cats not making it, I make it
Essentially, our young Beat poet has gotten stoned with friends, gone out for dinner, barely managed to pay the bill, then roamed around a bit before running into Liz, who gets him stoned again, drives him to another party where he eats pie á la mode as a transcendental experience of munchies, then falls asleep in some wicker furniture as the party goes on.
That’s my take anyway. It’s one of Creeley’s most famous poems. The critics usually gas on about the existential, sexual or Freudian themes they find.
Like any good magician Creeley never explained.
“Essentially, our young Beat poet has gotten stoned with friends,..”
Seems LSDish
“David Foster on August 5, 2025 at 11:16 am said:
”See my post Retrotech 1925: Domestic Technologies
Worth reading.
Interestingly, decades ago I asked a woman, born in 1880’s what was the best invention in her life.
She had seen telephone, radio, tv, automatic transmission and power steering and brakes, air travel and more. Immediate response, “automatic clothes washing machine”
Yesterday, Neo posted Saturday Night Fever opening vid. Basically, John Travolta working at paint store, get’s secretly sent out the back door to another store to get paint, get’s sidetracked a couple of times while customer at first store waits. Finally arrives with customers paint an hour later.
Just went to auto paint store to get color matched quart of paint for my car. I was the only customer. Took over an hour.
Now, I hafta wonder if they sent an employee out the back door to another supply house.
“Essentially, our young Beat poet has gotten stoned with friends,..”
Seems LSDish
fullmoon:
Thanks for the reading the poem! I can see why you might say that, based on the verse:
______________________
Picking up change, hands like a walrus,
and a face like a barndoor’s,
and a head without any apparent size,
nothing but two eyes—
______________________
Nonetheless, in the late 50s/early 60s one had to be pretty clued into elite circles for access to LSD.
At that time Creeley was just a no-name, knock-around, early thirties Beat poet. However, he was a serious stoner then. Boozer too.
He did write a poem, “On Acid,” in 1969 as part of a longer work. It was such an unremarkable poem that I can’t find it online. I’ll quote the first verse from the Collected Creeley:
______________________
On Acid
And I had no actual
hesitancies, always
(flickering) mind’s
sensations: here, here, here
…
–Robert Creeley (1969)
huxley on August 5, 2025 at 5:39 pm said:
“Essentially, our young Beat poet has gotten stoned with friends,..”
Seems LSDish
fullmoon:
Thanks for the reading the poem! I can see why you might say that, based on the verse:
______________________
“Nonetheless, in the late 50s/early 60s one had to be pretty clued into elite circles for access to LSD.”
Definitely. As it became more readily available, it was made illegal. The government was concerned about kids flying off tall buildings and potentially interfering with aircraft traffic at SFO
“The governors of Nevada and California each signed bills into law on May 30, 1966, that make them the first two American states to outlaw the manufacture, sale, and possession of the drug. The law went into effect immediately in Nevada, and on October 6, 1966, in California.”
I’m not a big fan of Mid Century Modern, and Mom’s taste was more on the French Provincial side, but STG, my sister still has the the exact wrought iron patio furniture in this vid!
And we both mourn the glass ‘Poodle’ lamp that somehow slipped through our fingers…
The 1st round of suburban living was a little raw – in Levittown, the kitchen cabinets were of plywood. Not yet covered with Formica. Postforming of fancy moldings was not yet invented.
As a former New Yorker my nostalgic tastes go back to pre-WWII Art Deco buildings with charming, yet modern window treatments (casement windows and glass block, anyone?)… they also had groovy geometrical niches and other plasterwork that coexists well with the modernist IKEA aesthetic.
And large closets!! A friend renovated a NY apartment and now has a home office in a huge closet that once housed a Murphy bed.
I’d prefer to retrocede DC to Maryland so the Democrats can’t use a temporary majority to add two senators. Though, from the condition of Baltimore, it appears to be state policy in Maryland to just let their ill-governed jurisdictions burn.
Sputnik chandeliers! 🙂
I inherited the metal dinette table from my folks, although the chairs are long gone. One of our sons lives in a house that still has the pink and mint-green tiles in one bathroom (the original one), and they painted over the yellow metal tiles on the kitchen wall. Several of the bedrooms had circus motifs on the walls, which we also had, although ours was made by my mother and not store-bought. I had never realized it was the trending decor.
Frankly, I do not like the “spare elegant lines” of the furniture of that era, which I found very uncomfortable, and we never had any of it; mostly comfoatable over-stuffed chairs. Our sofa-bed was a design I’ve never seen elsewhere: the seat and back were a single unit that flattened out to make the bed, and the area underneath was a storage box for linens.
As for what was the most significant technological change from the late 19th to 20th century: the washing machine wins hands down. I remember going to grandma and grandpa’s farm, which featured the newest version, with an electric wringer above the tub.
Our Mission Site in Wyoming, where we were the last two summers, had the original ranch wash-house, which contained a variety of clothes washing appliances, beginning with the plain metal tub and progressing through various improvements in function (two tubs connected by a wringer came next) up to three different styles of electric machines. The school kids on field trips were a little dubious when I told them they were looking at high tech, since they only associate the term with computers and phones.
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I’m about 30 years too young to “miss” 1950s decor. My grandparents might have, but they didn’t keep any of it, and I guess I’d consider that a “revealed preference”. I don’t miss the decor of my childhood or young adulthood and can hardly even remember it to be honest.
Likely I said this before but it’s interesting to watch “I Love Lucy” and see how similar their lifestyle is to today’s. The difference between 2025 and 1955 is much smaller than the difference between 1955 and 1885. There’s a lot more smoking, and they don’t have as many (or as fancy) TVs in the house as today, and there’s only the one phone usually, and they don’t make coffee the same way I do. But the process of making breakfast for a family is about the same, laundry isn’t much different, etc.
The living room in the video thumbnail appears to be anachronistically huge. I can remember my grandparent’s houses, built within a decade of the 1950s, and they had no rooms approaching that size. My living room (built 1990) isn’t even that big, though the ceiling is higher. I see homes built since 2010 with living rooms that size.
Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn examine the Russian Hoax Caper, both at its political roots but also and more personally on its journalistic basis, with a fulsome review of the relations of recent revelations embedded in their proper context of documents and events circa 2016-17. This is genuine, committed analysis folks (2:09:39):
https://www.youtube.com/live/bkDJoIM5yIs
Its kind of an idealized sitting room maybe from a 50s sitcom
NC…”The difference between 2025 and 1955 is much smaller than the difference between 1955 and 1885. There’s a lot more smoking, and they don’t have as many (or as fancy) TVs in the house as today, and there’s only the one phone usually, and they don’t make coffee the same way I do. But the process of making breakfast for a family is about the same, laundry isn’t much different, etc.”
See my post Retrotech 1925: Domestic Technologies
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/74391.html
The Federalist, “Watch How Obama Used NPR To Launder Lies About Trump And Russia In 2016” —
https://thefederalist.com/2025/08/05/watch-how-obama-used-npr-to-launder-lies-about-trump-and-russia-in-2016/
Not sure I miss period decor except for bits and pieces. I’m for my grandparents’ era. I don’t miss the cooking, either, except in bits and pieces. My mother was given to experimentation, with her scrapbooks of recipes, ‘Mrs. Rombauer’, &c. I appreciate her efforts, but sometimes experiments do not succeed. The casserole is a culinary form best forgotten. My father was a griller. Much smaller repertoire, but great stuff.
==
What I miss is my parents’ elegance, their capacity to cooperate, and the standards of conduct which were modal in their generation. Ann Althouse some time back posted a clip derived from some home movies taken in her parents’ house on New Years’ Eve, 1954. Men (most of them veterans) in dress shirts, ties, and brush cuts clowning around to music on a record-player. The women in handsome frocks and cat’s eye glasses puffing on cigarettes. Some of my contemporaries have done quite well with their lives, but on balance we will never be as good as they were.
The Federalist, Don Lueders: “Records Management Compliance At The FBI Is The Key To The Case Against The Russia Hoax Conspirators”, subhead “Records management compliance at the FBI could end in convictions of the Russia hoax conspirators, or it could be the reason they walk free” — https://thefederalist.com/2025/08/05/records-management-compliance-at-the-fbi-is-the-key-to-the-case-against-the-russia-hoax-conspirators/
but he goes on
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/3490220/rust-belt-celebrates-renewal-steel-industry/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfJHwO4wr2M&list=RDrfJHwO4wr2M&start_radio=1
I say that this classic Robert Creeley poem is about classic 50s Beat decor — the hip wicker furniture available long before Pottery Barn.
_________________________________
A Wicker Basket
Comes the time when it’s later
and onto your table the headwaiter
puts the bill, and very soon after
rings out the sound of lively laughter—
Picking up change, hands like a walrus,
and a face like a barndoor’s,
and a head without any apparent size,
nothing but two eyes—
So that’s you, man,
or me. I make it as I can,
I pick up, I go
faster than they know—
Out the door, the street like a night,
any night, and no one in sight,
but then, well, there she is,
old friend Liz—
And she opens the door of her cadillac,
I step in back,
and we’re gone.
She turns me on—
There are very huge stars, man, in the sky,
and from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of apple pie,
with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it,
and I eat it—
Slowly. And while certainly
they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket
of these cats not making it, I make it
in my wicker basket.
–Robert Creeley (published 1962)
_________________________________
Essentially, our young Beat poet has gotten stoned with friends, gone out for dinner, barely managed to pay the bill, then roamed around a bit before running into Liz, who gets him stoned again, drives him to another party where he eats pie á la mode as a transcendental experience of munchies, then falls asleep in some wicker furniture as the party goes on.
That’s my take anyway. It’s one of Creeley’s most famous poems. The critics usually gas on about the existential, sexual or Freudian themes they find.
Like any good magician Creeley never explained.
“Essentially, our young Beat poet has gotten stoned with friends,..”
Seems LSDish
“David Foster on August 5, 2025 at 11:16 am said:
”See my post Retrotech 1925: Domestic Technologies
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/74391.html”
Worth reading.
Interestingly, decades ago I asked a woman, born in 1880’s what was the best invention in her life.
She had seen telephone, radio, tv, automatic transmission and power steering and brakes, air travel and more. Immediate response, “automatic clothes washing machine”
Yesterday, Neo posted Saturday Night Fever opening vid. Basically, John Travolta working at paint store, get’s secretly sent out the back door to another store to get paint, get’s sidetracked a couple of times while customer at first store waits. Finally arrives with customers paint an hour later.
Just went to auto paint store to get color matched quart of paint for my car. I was the only customer. Took over an hour.
Now, I hafta wonder if they sent an employee out the back door to another supply house.
“Essentially, our young Beat poet has gotten stoned with friends,..”
Seems LSDish
fullmoon:
Thanks for the reading the poem! I can see why you might say that, based on the verse:
______________________
Picking up change, hands like a walrus,
and a face like a barndoor’s,
and a head without any apparent size,
nothing but two eyes—
______________________
Nonetheless, in the late 50s/early 60s one had to be pretty clued into elite circles for access to LSD.
At that time Creeley was just a no-name, knock-around, early thirties Beat poet. However, he was a serious stoner then. Boozer too.
He did write a poem, “On Acid,” in 1969 as part of a longer work. It was such an unremarkable poem that I can’t find it online. I’ll quote the first verse from the Collected Creeley:
______________________
On Acid
And I had no actual
hesitancies, always
(flickering) mind’s
sensations: here, here, here
…
–Robert Creeley (1969)
Curious
https://www.racket.news/p/why-would-media-report-on-public
Why the corporate press is dead
huxley on August 5, 2025 at 5:39 pm said:
“Essentially, our young Beat poet has gotten stoned with friends,..”
Seems LSDish
fullmoon:
Thanks for the reading the poem! I can see why you might say that, based on the verse:
______________________
“Nonetheless, in the late 50s/early 60s one had to be pretty clued into elite circles for access to LSD.”
Definitely. As it became more readily available, it was made illegal. The government was concerned about kids flying off tall buildings and potentially interfering with aircraft traffic at SFO
“The governors of Nevada and California each signed bills into law on May 30, 1966, that make them the first two American states to outlaw the manufacture, sale, and possession of the drug. The law went into effect immediately in Nevada, and on October 6, 1966, in California.”
Heh. Photo at link: https://x.com/emzanotti/status/1952859059952009469
The Post Millennial, “Elon Musk backs Trump over federalization of Washington, DC after DOGE staffer brutally beaten” — https://x.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1952874798155268157
DC is a cesspit, sho’nuff.
I’m not a big fan of Mid Century Modern, and Mom’s taste was more on the French Provincial side, but STG, my sister still has the the exact wrought iron patio furniture in this vid!
And we both mourn the glass ‘Poodle’ lamp that somehow slipped through our fingers…
The 1st round of suburban living was a little raw – in Levittown, the kitchen cabinets were of plywood. Not yet covered with Formica. Postforming of fancy moldings was not yet invented.
As a former New Yorker my nostalgic tastes go back to pre-WWII Art Deco buildings with charming, yet modern window treatments (casement windows and glass block, anyone?)… they also had groovy geometrical niches and other plasterwork that coexists well with the modernist IKEA aesthetic.
And large closets!! A friend renovated a NY apartment and now has a home office in a huge closet that once housed a Murphy bed.
I’d prefer to retrocede DC to Maryland so the Democrats can’t use a temporary majority to add two senators. Though, from the condition of Baltimore, it appears to be state policy in Maryland to just let their ill-governed jurisdictions burn.
Sputnik chandeliers! 🙂
I inherited the metal dinette table from my folks, although the chairs are long gone. One of our sons lives in a house that still has the pink and mint-green tiles in one bathroom (the original one), and they painted over the yellow metal tiles on the kitchen wall. Several of the bedrooms had circus motifs on the walls, which we also had, although ours was made by my mother and not store-bought. I had never realized it was the trending decor.
Frankly, I do not like the “spare elegant lines” of the furniture of that era, which I found very uncomfortable, and we never had any of it; mostly comfoatable over-stuffed chairs. Our sofa-bed was a design I’ve never seen elsewhere: the seat and back were a single unit that flattened out to make the bed, and the area underneath was a storage box for linens.
As for what was the most significant technological change from the late 19th to 20th century: the washing machine wins hands down. I remember going to grandma and grandpa’s farm, which featured the newest version, with an electric wringer above the tub.
Our Mission Site in Wyoming, where we were the last two summers, had the original ranch wash-house, which contained a variety of clothes washing appliances, beginning with the plain metal tub and progressing through various improvements in function (two tubs connected by a wringer came next) up to three different styles of electric machines. The school kids on field trips were a little dubious when I told them they were looking at high tech, since they only associate the term with computers and phones.