II. Ikea’s Conspiracy to Smash Romance
Ikea furniture is necessary for the success of Apple’s antistuff doctrine. Not only because Ikea furniture eschews the future (its nihilistic furniture is designed for bivouac living), but because of its nefarious effects on domestic life.
When one conspires with one’s partner to construct a piece of Ikea furniture, it is a harrowing task and speaks volumes of the faith one has in one’s relationship. No matter that faith, it will most likely destroy the love affair or at least irreparably damage it, sewing the seeds for its imminent destruction. The instructions, supposed to be universal and written in pictograms, are embedded with tiny details, extremely easy to miss, that are absolutely vital to the success of the project. Wrong assembly results in nightmarish frustration, squabbling, and despair. The instructional manual always warns of impending death as well, casting a fearful morbid pall over the (ideally) mundane job of shelf building.
Why does Ikea make their manuals into time bombs of discord? Because Ikea wants couples to break up. Each breakup results in more bachelors and bachelorettes, which results in more Ikea products sold. Abandoned love affairs result not only in abandoned dreams but abandoned furniture, abandoned apartments, abandoned housewares, abandoned throw pillows and end tables left in the rain on the road or given away as Craigslist clutter.
Breakups are attractive to the Apple-iKea alliance for the isolation they ensure. An isolated population is more easily manipulated, misled, shorn of its possessions, its self-respect, and its sense. Romantic dissolution is the ultimate example of the imperialist’s tried-and-true “divide and conquer” strategy. These corporations want the desolation of love: a population alone, miserable, confused, and in a state of self-loathing sexual desperation.
Both Apple and Ikea are closely linked to the pornography industry, aesthetically, philosophically, and economically. While home computers’ popularity and ubiquity stemmed from their use as cryptoporn proliferators, both Ikea and Apple’s designs stem from the ideology which spawned modern-day “adult” programming: Nordic functionalism. Indeed, the ideas of Nordic functionalism—a design idea which eliminated the buttresses, gilding, and facades of old architecture in preference for clean lines and modernity—resulted in the modern pornographic paradigm. Though functionalism began as a version of Le Corbusier and Bauhaus architecture, it ended as a total weltanschauung.
Along with the frills and indulgences of old-time design, this doctrine of socialistic simplicity swept away the clutter of the old world’s baroque and courtly sex play and distilled it into the highly efficient erotica that is now standard fare. From its late-sixties beginnings (when Denmark led the world in decriminalizing smut), Norse pornography has been, like a science expo, brightly lit and clinical. An exposition of dispassionate technique and disregard for feelings, touch, communication, and affection. Form furiously follows function. Porn action, instead of being a lascivious sleaze-fest (replete with contrived story arcs) as it was in the “blue” era of “smoker” flicks, began to resemble lab work with moans and groans inserted like test data; pellets fed to rats.
What was the purpose of bringing sex into the light? Scandinavian design was an art of transparency. No obfuscation or sentimentality. Proscience and antireligious. Absorbing this philosophy, Danish and Swedish pornographers spearheaded the well-lit, unsentimental nudes which appeared later in hardcore “triple-X” features, ridding the world of the sentiment, treacle, and pretense of the Pompeo Posar/Bunny Yeager “cheesecake” era. The “girl next door” was duly evicted and her place rented by brusque sex workers in an assembly-line brothel. Ikea shelves are storage’s unsentimental analogue. Frank, dispassionate shelves concerned with getting the job done, eyes glued to the bottom line. Beds are futons, a type of mattress originally used in Japan by prostitutes. Finnish cloth by Marimekko eschews plaids or complex patterns for simple, uncomplicated Rorschach blobs so one’s living room becomes a psychiatrist couch of lurid—yet frank and clinical—revelations. Swedish and Danish furniture looks like the gear from a low-budget film production: director’s chairs, boom lights, and simple pallets.
Facebook—and other devices for social control, neighbor spying, and mass surveillance—get their great power and ubiquity from the promise and lure of sex. Easy sex for free from multiple partners is the inferred reward. If people are coupled, in domestic bliss, this is less easily manipulated. Ikea wants to keep the population in a state of romantic flux. This is the reason for the hawking of sexual freedom, caprice, and whimsy as a bedrock of liberal civilization, as opposed to old control models which relied on sexual repression.
Ikea is ultimately a junior partner of the ascendant Apple megapower, which wants to erase history, strip people of all their belongings, and rehabilitate total poverty and cosmic displacement as modern, sleek, and fun. All this for complete control and ownership of the entire globe. Ikea has accepted the lieutenant’s role in this unholy alliance. Like Apple, Ikea sneers at planning, permanence, and real possessions, beyond their ephemeral bric-a-brac. They suggest that the dorm room or living room or bedroom is just a momentary resting stop before we all become ultraefficient digital matter, buzzing at, around, and within each other in an eternal orgiastic cyber-cum-athon. But always orbiting the Apple deity: life-giver, death-merchant, illusionist; that from which all else originates.
How long before we’re convinced that hands, arms, legs, and appendages are just bothersome? The cyberlords have already convinced us that maps, paper, pens, and even push buttons are somehow incredibly inconvenient and clumsy, leaving us scraping and pawing like drooling bug life on their flat and sleek digital dildos. Google’s search engines, maps, etc., have likewise taught us to refrain from using our apparently out-of-date and hopelessly inefficient brains. What’s next? Giving up all thought, consciousness, history, and agency? It’s all just in the way.
“Hoarders” are the only thing standing between these incomprehensibly rich, all-controlling, degenerate, digital despots and the absolute destruction of any deviant or alternative consciousness—and indeed any nonofficial history or interpretation of the world. We must therefore say: ALL POWER TO THE PACK RATS!!
Help a “hoarder” consolidate and safe-keep their things today. Lend them money to rent a storage locker. Volunteer to help them keep their things at your place. Their stuff is the final shred of resistance to the destruction of all non-Apple-approved human endeavors.
4
The Rise and Fall of College Rock
NPR, Indie, and the Gentrification of Punk
OF ALL THE TYPES OF ROCK MUSIC, perhaps the one that is least considered and most overlooked is “college rock.” Like today’s “indie rock,” it was named for the circumstance of its proliferation, rather than some characteristic or aesthetic of the music (such as heavy metal, noise, punk, grind, et al). Anthemic and clever, college rock produced clean pop songs which still resonate with listeners today. But what was college rock exactly and why did it disappear? And why is there no cult of stalwarts who maintain its legacy, as there is with nearly every other subcult of rock ’n’ roll (goth, ska, mod, punk, rockabilly, etc.)? There is, for example, no Robert Gordon (seventies rockabilly revivalist) or Paul Weller (the second-wave “modfather”) figure of college rock rallying a “college-rock revival”; at least not on the near horizon.
Though usually associated with groups of the early 1980s, college rock existed for a short time before and afterward as well, through the heyday of college radio. The genre’s groups, though often signed to major labels, did not typically enjoy mainstream popularity but were instead cult favorites—a musical counterpart to the then-popular “midnight movie” craze where gonzo flops and campy outrages were displayed to a knowing, fun-loving, and unpretentious audience. (Of course, some of the college rock groups—such as Talking Heads, Violent Femmes, and REM—eventually became
