Minnesota newspaperman James Lileks, whose site is your one-stop destination for sharply-annotated pop culture ephemera, has unearthed another beauty and is posting four pages a week through the summer, apparently in lieu of sleeping, because I swear to God the guy does not sleep. This time it's the food-and-dining giveaway Key Magazine, covering Los Angeles in summer 1962 — or, as Lileks accurately dubs it, "the last days of post-war California."
It's a different era – men smoked and drank Chivas, restaurants had plastic vines and straw-covered bottles, beef was King, and you snapped your fingers to music instead of waving your head up and down. You can hear the nylons go skrrr-skrrr-skrrr, the click of heels on tile; you can smell the hairspray and the Old Spice. It's a world any of us could enter and understand right away. But sometimes it seems as distant as Rome.
This is the thing about Lileks. Anybody can scan a pamphlet they scored at a flea market and slap the pages on a website; it takes an aficionado to place the material in context. The fact that he does it with such wit and style only makes his many, many mini-sites more irresistible. There's a lot of this stuff floating around. Nobody floats it like Lileks.
