Post #81002 by DaneTiki on Mon, Mar 15, 2004 3:46 PM

You know, I don't see too many "Whipped Cream and Other Delights" anymore. I think the album's ubiquity on the thrift-store circuit (not to mention the detournement of the image) has catapulted it into some kind of weird hipster limbo, such that it can no longer occupy the same category as thrift store albums.

What I've seen way too much of:
Books: None Dare Call it Treason, mid-1970s gardening/fix-it/cosmetics guides, mid-1980s schlock novels, Michener, Hemingway, old Nat'l Geos.
Records: You'd think, by looking at thrift store album selections, that no one in this country listened to anything besides over-produced 1980s country, 1950s crooners and really, really bad and obscure heavy metal.
Bric-a-brac: Do you ever, searching for tiki items, just scan over the melange of bric-a-brac and feel sort of depressed? Jumbled together, it's incomprehnsible -- odd shaped pieces of wood with meaningless writing or illustrations on them, glass bulbs filled with fake dried flowers, endless seas of forlorn tourist sovenier coffee mugs ("Orlando!""Santa Fe, 1985"), chipped reproduction beer steins, tacky brassware and silver so deracinated that it doesn't even tarnish. Why did anyone buy it in the first place? Who thought it was cute? Did somebody give it as a present? Did the person who donated it to the thrift store feel guilty because of that? And don't even get me started on the art. Sure, the matadors and sad children are great kitsch, but what about all the really, really awful kitsch art? The mass-printed seagulls-and-surf in ultra-muted pastels? It's repulsive. Only the promise of an occasional triumphal rescue of a tiki object from this morass keeps me coming back.