Lava Lamps
The colorful rise and fall of Queer™ Art, Culture & Icons
The lava lamp is a stylish light fixture of dorm rooms and modern day opium dens. These hip items of decor were breathed into existence in 1963 by an English accountant. Isn’t it strange that this groovy fixture of counter-cultural decor should be the brainchild of a buttoned down bean-counter? Here’s what Edward Craven Walker had to say about his own creation:
“I think it will always be popular. It is like the cycle of life. It grows, breaks up, falls down and then starts all over again.”
A former RAF pilot and naturist (read:nudist), Walker created his lamp from an orange soda bottle and a weird homemade egg-timer someone had fashioned at his local pub. Compared to your stereotypical accountant, the now 82 year-old Walker is a bit of a weirdo, a misfit, an outsider — his outsider status informed his imagination.
The evergreen James Finn wrote a nice piece pondering the place of musicals, opera and showtunes as part of our shared Queer culture which made me think of lava lamps.
Do you know how these hippy-lights work? Basically you take two liquids, quite different in color and opacity which, for fundamental reasons do not mix, and place them…
