Monday October 08, 2007

UNTERMENTION. James Lileks mourns the demise by legislation of old motel signs on the highway. I am not unsympathetic. But:

...we give these people a smooth serene road, carefully designed to bring them from one planned community to the next with a minimum of visual friction, and the spoilers put up loud contentious honking signs that reeked of the Almighty Dollar. You know, ugly godless totems like this:

[visual of old matchbook motel sign from the author's collection]

Well, we showed them.

Our signs our primitive; the lawmakers must act. Jeebus. This is what annoys me to no end about the 60s, to cram it all into a tidy convenient decade; the overculture and the underculture ganged up on the great Middle, for different reasons but with equal gusto. The Middle was Crass, in the eyes of the overculture; Phony, in the eyes of the underculture. Now here we are a half-century later, and people will build websites detailing the few remaining examples of postwar roadside architecture, documenting the survivors, eulogizing their demise.

No one organizes a petition to save a building the underculture built, because they didn’t build anything. Ah well. Onward Garden Soldiers.

One thing sticks out: underculture? What's he mean? There's no referent in the preceding text. In the context of a thousand Lileks Bleats, this may mean hippies and beatniks -- you know, they hate phonies, it was in The Catcher in the Rye. And they never built anything but yurts and the Burning Man; they were all about tearing things down, smashing the state etc. Presumably these hipniks, fronted by a crying Indian, collaborated with Lady Bird Johnson to remove neon from the highways, leaving Lileks to shake his fist at the countryside.

Maybe it refers to the earlier part of the essay, in which Lileks talks about how great it would be if we could put more people in prison.

The middle class always gets it in the neck in Lileksland. You'd think they'd organize into a voting bloc or something.