American Ilxors who were teenagers in the 80's...

Christ, I wish.

i.e covered in Flesh for Lulu posters, Union Jacks and full of expensive stereo equipment

You've shattered one of long cherished illusions about you, Ned.

Ferris was the one listening to "Temple of Love" for 1000 times on repeat...on his tape deck.

i didn't even know who cabaret voltaire WERE till i saw that poster in ferris's bedroom. so, uh, no.

I have no idea what was on my walls when I was a teenager in the 80s, but I can be pretty sure it was uncool.

But I had a Commodore VIC-20. That was pretty cool. Right?

waht, Ferris was a secret goth?

my room didn't look like Ferris' no - that kid is ludicrously rich (and loathsome, really the only sympathetic person in that movie is his sister). I do have pretty clear memories of what was on my wall in high school tho - various portraits from music mags, a collage of Beatles stuff, a few actual posters (Sgt. Pepper's, REM, Ministry)

My bedroom was orange with orange shag carpet, it was covered with books in huge piles; it was also covered in records but unlike F.Bueller I only had a crappy little record player in there. I had like two posters, one of Dr. J. and one "Hang in there baby" that I put up semi-ironically. I had a lot of 3x5 cards containing Zen sayings and bits of poetry tacked up on the walls too, and in one corner my friend Dave had written some stuff on the wall in ballpoint pen. My room was so disgustingly slovenly that a picture of it was used to illustrate a school newspaper article about messy rooms -- I was the editor of the paper, and didn't even know it until we were on deadline so I couldn't even kill the picture. Plus it was a basement room so there was only one window and all I could see was the backyard lawn.

Also had a basement room. A James Bond poster, one of those life size Captain Kirk standups, and random pages with pictures of cool bands torn from Rolling Stone. Some floor pillows, a ratty rug, a rainbow bedcover. Sadly lacking in glamor.

i respect the ability to work up a good hate at ferris bueller

no. there was no technology of any kind apart from the stereo, for one thing. i did have the walls covered with promo album covers (the cardboard window fliers you could find piles of at record stores) and photos and whatnot from rolling stone and spin. also, courtesy of the pothead son of the family who lived in our house before us, my bedroom ceiling was papered in a glitzy silvery red-white-and-blue star pattern. i did keep my drumkit in there for a little while, but it got consigned to the basement pretty quick (the barn, in warm months).

I didn't have a stereo, I had a "boombox" that sat on a little baby-blue trunk.

to be fair, Ferris didn't even have a piece of shit car.

My walls were covered in old scratchy 45's that I found in a box somewhere. Hits of the 60's and 70's. It was pretty cool, actually.

My weekend bedroom at my father's house in suburbia was my step-brother's room during the week. On one wall, we had the classic Scarfaceesque sunset wallpaper. Through it, you could still read where my brother had written his name at age seven. On the other wall, he had constructed this amazing mural/college of Metallica from dozens of Hit Parader and Circus magazines. After he joined the navy in 1989, I tried to continue the tradition with photos cut from RIP, but it just wasn't the same.

I was always jealous that Ferris had a keyboard in his room that made fart sounds.

haha kenan i wanted to decorate my (adult) basement room in old 45s and my wife was like 'why the hell would you want to do that?' UH CUZ ITS AWESOME?

Mine was not dissimilar.

there was this weird 80's thing about child-like young adults with rube goldbergish contraptions set up in their own homes - weird science, pee wee herman, ferris bueller ... ????

Ferris also had a HUGE Bryan Ferry promo poster circa Boys and Girls!

two of those three examples were perpetrated by john hughes, tracer

weird science, pee wee herman, ferris bueller ...

also Back to the Future

i had lots of books and records in my room. and clothes on the floor everywhere. some things never change. i remember taking down a beatles poster and putting up a poster of adam ant. this was 1980 or 1981. the end of an era. and the beginning of my new wave. still had a black sabbath poster up for years though. and a squirrel bait poster.

My room was small but it had a bookshelf stacked with weeks of Melody Maker and NME//records and cassettes under the bed and in each corner of the room//a great LOUD JVC boombox I still remember fondly//Siouxsie "Hyaena" promo poster on one wall (big white one with all the band) and the Cure "Concert" poster (smaller, black one with all the band c. 84 stacked on one another) on the facing wall. My drawing table by the window. Lots of mini comix and Weirdo/RAW issues... Nothing like Ferris' room!

i remember taking down a beatles poster and putting up a poster of adam ant. this was 1980 or 1981.

i remember my sister a few years later than that taking down adam ant and putting up bruce springsteen.

no

Mine was nothing like Ferris' apart from the mannequin in my bed.

no.

83 = sabbath, floyd, maiden, priest
84/85 = dk's, black flag, saccharine trust
86 etc = swans, big black, sonic youth, die kreuzen, live skull

On my wall I had a hand drawn Sharpie version of Meat Puppets' Out My Way cover (not a very successful reproduction). And the usual mag clippings, esp. from a 1985 Spin article on SST bands. And other "poetry" and lyric fragments, also Sharpie.

i don't remember all the people i had pictures or posters of, but i definitely had a photo of heaven 17. i think it was from rolling stone, and i think they were in a boat.

..was your bedroom just like Ferris Buellers?

No. It was more like the dorm room in Real Genius except that I had the Who @ The Marquee Club poster.

I was a teenager in the 70s and I had a poster of Che, baby.

my room didn't look like Ferris' no - that kid is ludicrously rich (and loathsome, really the only sympathetic person in that movie is his sister).

this is so sad.

One wall was crappy paneling, and two walls were a bizarre mixture of pullouts from Hit Parader and Smash Hits and full-page ads from NME. The last wall had all the names of all the bands I liked Sharpied on it. The highlight of my decorating career was a four-dollar Lloyd Cole poster I bought at a record fair. Good times.

stence otm.

ferris had a simple minds poster too, iirc.

I had to share a room with my sister so this presented its own set of problems. She had no posters of any kind and yes I did have a contraption Heath Robinsonned up to the record player so that I could pull a string from my bed and record would drop, then tunes would issue forth. This was for torturing my sister with Smiths records first thing in the morning.

My friends and I were teenagers when the Hughes movies came out and had intense discussions about how much the art direction of the rooms sucked, and how much better our stuff was. Suffice it to say we did know who Cabaret Voltaire were and why they named themselves that well before then - blame the nice people who worked in Northern Lights. Because of them, I had first pick of all the Smiths promo posters in Minneapolis and wallpapered my side of the room with that, JAMC, Cocteaus, Bunnymen and New Order. Plus a few leftovers of Bowie and Peter O'Toole that were too good to lose.

my room didn't look like Ferris' no - that kid is ludicrously rich (and loathsome, really the only sympathetic person in that movie is his sister).

Jennifer Grey? Wasn't she an annoying little bitch. I seem to recall so, or am I mixing films up here?

she was extremely jealous of ferris plus she hated minorities ("speaka da english?!?!?!?").

I had a ton of Cure posters, plus a BMW poster and a poster of Momma from "Throw Momma From The Train" (??????? wtf, 15-year-old me).

lol at Shakey identifying with psycho hosebeast sister

oh but you woulda banged her nonetheless, dan.

at least i would. okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyy, time to get coffee.

oh but you woulda banged her nonetheless, dan.

WELL DUH

:D

Charlie Sheen would have shoved a needle up your arse for stealing his girl.

oh like he's reeeeeal intimidating.

Dude, he was at the POLICE STATION. He was s'posed to be bad ass.

Actually, man, did I hate that movie. Similar to my My Little Pony dislike. It's up there. Foam frothing hatred.

i hated the tortured rich friend sub-plot in ferris. that dude is so annoying. i kept hoping he would kill himself.

Cameron is the best part

"Oh YEEEEEEEEEEEAH"

I still haven't pinpointed the message in this movie but I like it anyway

such controversy, and before 9 am eastern!

it must be said, i haven't actually seen the movie in years. a whole lot of years. i probably haven't seen it since before the t.v. show was on. i enjoyed the t.v. show.

I don't really need to see this movie anymore. It was a huge pile of stinky crap that forewarned what Hughes was going to be pooping out in the next decades.

I'm pretty sure Ferris Bueller didn't have bizarre pink and yellow wallpaper (at least I didn't have a floral pattern in there). I had a good number of Madonna posters, a lot of stuff from school plays and dance concerts, and a good number of ballet-related items as well (I'm sure my pointe shoes hung on my wall for a while, also posters).

Hell I think my room was like Ferris' and I'm not even American.

I have never seen the Ferris Bueller. I had some decent posters up at various times. I think I had a Psychedelic Furs poster, though the memory is hazy. I definitely had a Fabulous Poodles (!) poster at some point, which wasn't overly cool. I was listening to lots of punk and post-punk and Krautrock and electronic music and experimental music and free jazz and reggae and also progressive rock and so forth. I was never cool though.

When I was in college I had a Siouxsie (with militarist version of Japanese flag in the background) poster and a Joy Division ("Love Will Tear Us Apart") poster.

My room was so disgustingly slovenly that a picture of it was used to illustrate a school newspaper article about messy rooms

When our house was broken into (yes--the only time I ever was burglarized was when I was living with my parents in a nice suburb), one of the church ladies said something like, "Look what they did to his room!" but my mom said (either then or only after the church people had left), no, that's the way it always looks, which was true.

I had primitive technology. When my brother got married, I inherited his already 3rd hand stereo, the speakers for which let out a loud death rattle every time I turned the stereo on.

Oh yeah, lots of books, too, of course.

http://www.pixelsurgeon.com/admin/shared/images/ferris_big.jpg1115531753

http://fusionanomaly.net/ferrisbuellersroom.jpg

http://www.80s.com/saveferris/images/ferris/fake2.jpg

every generation gets the ferris bueller they deserve.

http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g103/dmyers_2006/Zach_Braff.jpg

So who's Mia Sara now?

Parker Lewis pwns Bueller.

I spent remarkably little time in my bedroom so I never really bothered decorating it much. It had a hideous old shag carpet and fake wood panelling on the walls and the entire house, built on a hillside in Sausalito before the '06 earthquake, had settled to the point where there was nary a window sill or door jamb that had a real 90 degree angle in it. Outside my window was an apricot tree. On the walls, I had a poster from Pier 1 or some such place of a tree-lined road in France, several Michelin maps of Britain and Europe that I used to plan the several trips I made there. The floor was invariably covered in books I was reading, the notebooks of my puerile writing, and here and there were piles of clean and dirty laundry. On the bed was my tortoiseshell colored old cat, Trinka, if not me or the both of us.

haha kenan i wanted to decorate my (adult) basement room in old 45s and my wife was like 'why the hell would you want to do that?' UH CUZ ITS AWESOME?

:)

I can't remember much of what was on the wall, but I do remember "I Can See Clearly Now" by Johnny Nash. Man, what a great song.

I have it in ones and zeroes now, of course, and it sounds much better.

Also featured: "Different Drum" by the Stone Poneys. My closet door was covered with three large pics of Bruce Springsteen.

Parker Lewis pwns Bueller.

OTM - I wonder if any Ferris-boosters have actually seen the movie recently. The smug assholishness/sense of entitlement is through the roof.

The Mia Sara character was based on the daughter of the producer, who was also called Sloane. Imagine the disappointment at my college, where a rumour festered that Molly Ringwald would be in our year and instead we got Sloane bloody Tanen, who writes kids' books now.

did anybody's bedroom ever have the over-decorated/every-single-inch-occupied style that movie teenager bedrooms always have? Like every single kid of every single class or subculture always the contents of the mind of an overzealous set-dresser blow up and splatter on the walls

I was a pre-teen in the 80s, and I pretty much stuck with the floral wallpaper my mom picked out. My older sister, who was much cooler than me, had one wall covered in Absolut Vodka ads, the rest in "trippy" murals her friends painted. Guess who mom liked best?

my room is still covered in hardcore fliers and band posters. my mom has preserved it like a museum.

aside from all her extra shoe boxes everywhere.

i too had orange shag carpet. I had a poster of The Knack. And also fold-out posters of weird critters from some kids' version of Nat'l Geographic.

wanna hear something funny: back around 1983 or so my mom decided she wanted to re-do the wallpaper in my room. so we tore the old wallpaper off and it was just bare wall for awhile. Me and my best friend Lance proceeded to cover EVERY INCH of the walls in my room in horrible cartoons and drawings (or really good ones in the case of Lance who is a great artist) and bad OMD lyrics and New Order lyrics and very "punk" anti-society slogans. PLUS, Lance's friend Doug drew this HUGE portrait of nastassia kinski on the wall too! and even better, Lance and I got really mad at Doug for some reason so we ruined his portrait by putting a swastika on her forehead(!!!!) how evil is that? we were evil kids. Then my mom wallpapered over all that stuff. But it's still there! And whoever bought my parent's house is gonna get an eyeful if they ever decide to redecorate.

it's like a really scary time-capsule just waiting to horrify someone.

hahahaha
wow

If only there were photos. There WERE photos I hope.

no photos! i can only imagine what my mom was thinking when she was putting the new wallpaper up. she was really good at ignoring things that were troubling though.

also, y'know, she'd might've been de-sensitized by yr older brother's teenage time. i'm guessing.

I had one rock poster 'til I was 16 (Lou Reed, damned hard to come by & a terrible poster I just put up because I'd been looking for one for so long), then when that frayed I left things blank except for a couple of small paintings-done-with-colored-ink-from-bottles that my gf & I made (v. gothy stuff) & the Charles Simic poem that I kept taped above my typewriter.

this is true. she had seen it all by then.

x-post

when i was 16 and sent away to bad boy school in 1984 i had weird stuff on my dorm wall. i do have a picture of that somewhere. lots of jessica lange and that ac/dc devil kid from new jersey and a cointreau ad and the chemical formula for lsd written on notebook paper.

in my one year of college in 1987/88 i had a border of magazine covers with madonna on them that went around the room! what was i thinking??!! and the big posters i had in that room were ll cool j, lou reed, metallica, jesus & mary chain, and madonna of course. and above my desk where i wrote were pictures of live skull, rat at rat r, swans, and sonic youth.

and in philly at the tail end of the 80's i had pictures of a gerhard richter painting, joan didion, hubert selby jr and winnie from the wonder years up over my stereo. and other stuff that i forget.

okay, that is all my 80's wall talk. we will never speak of this again.

madonna room border!!

i was 13/14 in 88/89 - we lived in a rental house and my room at the time was decorated mostly with maps and posters from national geographic magazines. i was happy with that and didn't seem to realize anything about the vast world of posters out there. also a couple kind of weird/pretty paintings of flowers i'd done when younger. nicknacky things (glass animals, small toys) and books on dresser, desk, sidetable. stuffed animals on bed. y'know. i had a small red tape+radio ghettoblaster - still listened to top40 radio, plus pop music tapes and beatles, genesis, northern soul, random stuff that was around. also had a secondhand coleco-vision computer and dot-matrix printer that i practiced my swearing with. i slept on the same futon from age 11 to 18.

sounds like a groovy world to me, rrrobyn.

every once in a while when i was in high school i would attempt to go all zen and be clean and calm and kung fu and i would move everything out of my room except my bed. i desperately wanted my brain to shut up. it never lasted long.

yeah, that's kind of why i could never do the floor-to-ceiling posters and stuff that a lot of kids i knew did - too much to look at everywhere too much
i think i maintain exactly the same kind of desk/work space as i did when i was 13 though - half-organized stacks of miscellany - anything out of sight is forgotten about
(swiffer duster is my friend. but only b/c my mom told me we should be.)

[[[hi scott how's work? - the kids are only now having dinner - we were at that banjo picnic but sorta forgot to eat anything. they had a blast though]]]

I think I had a Journey poster on my wall for a little while. I shared a room with my brother until 1982. It never really did feel like my own room actually

being a teenager in the 90s in maryville is KINDA like being a teenager in the 90s

http://www.bradfordshellhammer.com/archives/patrick_nagel_woman.jpg

i mean 80s!