FOR THAT PERSON WHO HAS EVERYTHING

A "MY READING LIFE" column by Elinore Standard as it appeared in the December, 2004 issue of The Record Review.

Works mentioned in this piece: Gigi-Gugi, Interior Desecrations, Gallery of Regrettable Food,
Philadelphia Main Line Classics, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia.


FOR THAT PERSON WHO HAS EVERYTHING




Ah, what to get that person who has everything? A book is usually a safe
and often welcome choice. I remember the time long ago when I pouted my way through Christmas and several days thereafter because the books I had hoped for were not beneath the tree. My parents thought it was a waste of good money to buy something that could be so easily borrowed from the local library.
Now it is more convenient to buy a book online than it is to drive to a bookstore. By using e-mail you can have Amazon send boxes of books to your door, and because we live in such a crazy world, you can pay for them with virtual plastic. Too tempting by half, but there are always ways to rationalize.
One way I trick myself is to buy books for somebody else, getting the vicarious thrill without the guilt of spending (hear this, O my parents!) money on myself. I recently heard Daniel Pinkwater reading Chih-Yuan Chen’s’s “Gugi, Gugi”( Kane/Miller, 2004), a children’s book about a family of ducks and an extra large egg that rolls into their nest (“Mother duck didn’t notice, she was reading!”) on NPR and it sounded so charming I knew I’d have to order it for my granddaughter, but lucky duck me, I’d get to see it first.
I recently saw an ad in “Publishers’ Weekly” for “Interior Desecrations: Horrible Homes From The Brass Age of American Design” by James Lileks (Crown, 2004) and I thought, hmmmm, this could be good. I recollected a split-level with its avocado-hued kitchen and a New York City apartment with avocado trees growing from pots nobody ever watered, brown-tipped leaves sprawling across a grimy ceiling. I thought of orange and white daisies on contact paper, and brown upholstery. I saw fake wood paneling and shag, shag, shag. Was it this horrible? Could it possibly have been The Age of Aquarius? Mr. Lileks brings it all back in a compendium of bad taste. Spare us a 70s home décor revival; current lifestyle rage for the 40s and 50s is bad enough.
I don’t know who you’d actually buy this book for. Not for your mother -- I hope not. You might get it for yourself, just for reassurance about the way we do not live now.
If you want to really make yourself queasy, try “The Gallery of Regrettable Food” by the same author. Salt! Sugar! Starch! Oh, boy, it is all there in revolting photographs the author gathered from various magazines and cookbooks, heavy on the 1940s. You can get both of Mr. Lileks’s books – packaged together by Crown – from Amazon for about $30.00.
“Gallery of Regrettable Food” includes such sections as “Cooking With 7UP”, “The A.1 Guide To Better Sex”, “Submit To The Power Of Ketchup”, PLUS! The really awful photographs, This book is so much fun and if you enjoy it, you’ll love Mr. Lileks’s website, “The Institute of Official Cheer”. That’s www.lileks.com. James Lileks has a regular column in the Minneapolis
“Star-Tribune” and he gets crazy stuff from the newspaper’s archives and from unconventional far-flung sources. The site has links to his collections of matchbooks, postcards, motel architecture, 70’s figure skating costumes and routines, etc., all with his own funny and often raunchy commentary.
There is one link I laughed my head off at: the illustrated “Dorcus Collection” presumably a long-forgotten men’s clothing line. Lileks has a good time with the black and white fashion photographs and his ad copy describes “Miracle Breethe-Thru shirts for hot days on the links or our swank, absorbent evening wear.” Now that’s Dorcus! I say “presumably” because it dawned on me Liluks made it all up.
Perhaps just a quick browse through the old recipe books at the back of your own kitchen shelves will satisfy an appetite for pure camp. I’ve got a real honey titled “Philadelphia Main Line Classics" put out in 1982 by The Saturday Club of Wayne, PA, and now in its seventh printing, a total of about 80,000 copies, thank you very much. I am impressed by the fifteen or so recipes for dips: curry dip, hot clam dip, deviled ham dip, caviar dip, crab dip, blue cheese dip, and so on, almost all based on a lot of cream cheese. Remember sour cream and dry onion soup mix: the ubiquitous dip for potato chips? Those were dippy days.
This is your basic Lileks-style canned cream soup, mayonnaise and crustless white bread recipe book, backed up by staples like canned onion rings and bottled artichoke hearts, frozen Cool-Whip and, yes, that universal solvent -- Cheeze Whiz. This collection puts the retro back into retro, heavy on the canapés. And, think: no offensive garlic or exotic spices to annoy your palate!
Maybe down there in Philadelphia they are still serving this stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised; they certainly were when I left. True confession: I like a lot of it and right this minute, I wouldn’t mind having a nice hot helping of celery casserole, (p. 283).
And if the domestic arts are not their thing, and you are desperate and really can’t think what to get that somebody, there is the “Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia”, (printed in Germany by Steidl/Fuel) containing photographs, drawings, and text, all part of a personal collection of over 3,000 tattoos signifying gang, clan, and ethnic membership gathered over years by prison attendant, Danzig Baldav. This may be an idea for an ambitious US prison worker or anthropologist in need of a thesis topic. We Americans could also use our own decoder for all that body ink.


Elinore Standard is the co-editor of ‘”Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading” (Carroll&Graf, 1997).