But we don’t think that you should pay slavish attention to what business people, especially those who believe themselves fit to judge things about which they know nothing, say are their “needs” because we do not have any confidence that without more philosophy than most of them possess, they have the least idea what those needs are. We merely note that conceptions of need that have given us such outstanding examples of business expertise as British Leyland, Rover and RBS seem strange instruments with which to assess institutions that enabled such legacies as those left by Bacon, Locke, Hume and Wittgenstein. We are, to adapt one minister’s words, intensely relaxed about having assisted the country to this filthy rich legacy.
— Cambridge professor Simon Blackburn, via Steven Poole on the ‘need’ for universities to ‘make greater contributions to the economy’.
What is it about IKEA? We all know that they sell self-assembly furniture and homeware at affordable prices, and that much of it is well-designed; I’m not sure what I’d do without their ‘Billy’ bookshelves. But it would be rather naive to cite that as the sole reason for their success. To put it another way, what makes a trip to IKEA different to any other big shop? Why that scene from Fight Club? Why IKEA Heights? Why do we love itso much?
I don’t exclude myself from the cult of IKEA. I always come back with a pocket full of those little pencils. I like looking through the knife-free cupboards and the remaindered Swedish-language novels on the shelves, wondering what impossible families could possibly occupy these rooms. They look like sets for a film that’ll never be made, so elegantly harmless they might be designed for a mental patient on parole; the modern equivalent of the padded cell. Yesterday I saw a middle-aged man in a suit seated behind a desk in a mocked-up office, chatting idly to a woman beside him, and he seemed so at ease in his surroundings I genuinely couldn’t tell whether he worked there or not. I like fantasising about secretly living in IKEA, like Charlie Chaplin lives in the department store in Modern Times, and having to survive off stolen meatballs, gravlax, and those nice little iced cakes. Then I’d be discovered by security and it would turn into the absurd shoot-out at the end of Mr and Mrs Smith — the confusing, Escher-esque architecture of their showrooms seems to invite senseless destruction as well as nurturing the nesting instinct. But I always leave tired and disappointed, annoyed by the crowds and by my own sense of failure to consume, drifting around on the same old low blood-sugar low that always follows long visits to museums and usually necessitates the purchase of a large bag of mini Daim bars.
‘Home is the most important place in the world’, says their latest advertising campaign. But if home were really the most important place in the world, then why would we go to IKEA? Of course, it doesn’t really mean your own home as it is now — it means an imagined utopian space, the future envisaged as a series of spacious rooms bathed in eternal daylight and furnished with a range of attractive and complementary objects. There is no hard sell here, only a dream of consistency and coherence at once beautiful and terrifying.
One day in 1948 or 1949, the Brentwood Country Mart, a shopping complex in an upscale neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval in twentieth-century music. Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of the émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, was examining grapefruit in the produce section when she heard a voice shouting in German from the far end of the aisle. She looked up to see Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music and the codifier of twelve-tone composition, bearing down on her, with his bald pate and burning eyes. Decades later, in conversation with the writer Lawrence Weschler, Feuchtwanger could recall ever detail of the encounter, including the weight of the grapefruit in her hand. “Lies, Frau Marta, lies!” Schoenberg was yelling. “You have to know, I never had syphilis!
— Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
God doesn’t care about technology. From the immortal Time Bandits:
‘…And soon I shall have understanding of video cassette recorders and car telephones. And when I have understanding of them, I shall have understanding of computers. And when I have understanding of computers, I shall be the Supreme Being…’
Recently my parents put me in charge of converting a box full of old mini-VHS tapes to DVDs. Since we have a VCR/DVD burner combo-machine, this is no trouble, but it does mean that I have to sit and watch them recording in real-time to make sure that everything is working all right — okay, technically I don’t have to watch them, but I like to, since I haven’t seen many of them in full before. So far most of them are pretty boring, apart from one amusing sequence which involves my dad and my younger sister reclining in a deck chair and putting my baby sister to sleep by rolling her pram down a very small slope, and then hauling it back up again on a piece of string. Otherwise, there is a lot of six year-old me playing and not much talking. My parents are almost always in the background or behind the camera. For the most part I don’t remember any of the particular days on which I was filmed, but I do remember particular toys and clothes, the air and smell of certain places. Childhood play can seem as indecipherable to adults as serious grown-up conversation is impenetrable to children, though that’s not to say that we can’t find beauty in the mystery of both.
I’ve always been interested in the particular kind of electronic noise associated with technology from the late twentieth century, that which lies somewhere in between digital and analogue recordings; the kind associated with worn-down magnetic tape, the crackle and hiss of the audio cassette, the VHS snowstorm. The mechanical thump and rattle of the floppy disk-drive. The fuzzy output of fax machines, and the shadowy reproductions of the photocopier. The touch-tone phone and the wailing prayer of the dial-up modem. Perhaps most of all, the grainy, flickering quality of TV signals, which is now soon to be switched off altogether in favor of our glorious new digital standard.
Through these imperfections, something is revealed, even if that something turns out only to be a nostalgia filtered through poor VCR tracking. Whether it’s camcorder footage or a TV rerun, video from that era has a certain special tone as unique as anything produced during the golden age of Technicolor. The sounds of wind and waves seem to carry better on magnetic tape than on any other medium. Bright colours and textures seem to glow from the screen, eradicating detail but creating a kind of over-lit impressionism; clothes were brighter then, and so, it seems, was the world. Perhaps all memory in the modern world is necessarily yoked to the recording media of its time.
There are plenty of differences between L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the film adaptation, but what I found most interesting was the book’s insistence on the hard physicality of its characters — not only that some of the more violent, Grimm-ish moments of the book were stripped out for the movie (remember the part where the Scarecrow wrings the necks of forty crows, or the part where the Tin Man gets dropped off a cliff by the flying monkeys?) — but what does Dorothy eat? When does she bathe? Where will she sleep?
And the Emerald City isn’t really green. The people there wear spectacles with green-coloured lenses, but at the movies, we get Technicolor; the equivalent in deception, perhaps.
