Hair and Bass in an Age of Apathy

I just moved back to New York from France, and it is my 36^th birthday. I say this because there is a mist of unconscious nostalgia permeating the air around me these last two weeks, which certainly influences the ideas in this blog. There is a natural result of being back in August in the States, and that is I am in my car more often going to work with partners and clients in nearby States. My European friends and family stay at beaches until the start of September. I was happy to discover that I could get XM Satellite radio in my car, which meant for me (so I thought) a chance to listen to NPR continuously, rather than surfing for new stations when between cities. I have done some of this, but listening to tales of the end of the IRAQ war for hours made me feel sad and old at the same time, which is difficult on a birthday. So I switched to music stations, and instead of listening to my favorite jazz and classical stations I listened to 80's metal and 80' rap. These stations must exist to transport people of my generation, and it has worked to do that. It has not really worked to get me out of the aging and moving funk though. The reason is that the music was so original. The contradictory crispness and saturation of Guns and Roses; the revolutionary, sad, yet hilarious raps of N.W.A. When this music came out I listened to it of course. I eventually was even a DJ and played a lot of it. The 80's and 90's were looked at as a musical cesspool, while a large portion of society looked backed to Beetles era rock, and Dylan protest music as the last throws of civil consciousness in popular culture. This made some sense, as my generation was more politically apathetic than the previous, and wars were only being fought in secret, leaving no official regime to fight. Also the economy appeared to be strong, at least as it was presented by Reagan and Bush I. Growing homelessness and the rampant spread of AIDS were mostly ignored by popular music. I feel nostalgia then not for a time of progress, but for a time where certain segments, like metal and rap, were innovating, and expressing not necessarily politically useful anger, but instead personal rage against loss, emptiness and marginalization. This made it perfect teenage music.

It seems now that perhaps contemporary serious jazz musicians and classical performers are revisiting some of this music, by deconstructing, reinterpreting, and in a sense calming the fire to find the remains of red hot embers. I have heard Vijay Iyer play M.I.A and Michael Jackson, I have heard Yaron Herman play Nirvana. I have heard Brad Mehldau play countless 80's and 90's rock, punk and rap classics his own way. The band Wake Up!, who I was proud to perform with last week, doesn't dissect directly but with full force refers to those genres , bringing us backward into the past and forward into the future at the same time. I am not sure if this is a nostalgic journey for them, but for me taking the morsels of interest from the past and finding a musically relevant voice for it gives us a history while influencing the present. This is not new of course, as Dvorak, Stravinsky, Chopin and Liszt all used folk music as a basis for the creating of a contemporary symphony. I guess the sad part is that the music of my youth is now the ruins of a time passed. It is a folk history of big hair bands with killer guitar solos, and bouncy cars with giant sub woofers. In other words, I am OLD.

POÄNG or Wassily

Would IKEA be the utopia of 20^th century modernism? Is it the populist achievement of revolutionary Bauhaus design, the architecture industrialization of Mies Van der Rohe, and the physical embodiment of Mondrian minimalism? At first glance, or from some distant academic watch tower it would appear so. IKEA would also seem to be an internationalist victory of sorts. The Swedish behemoth offers sleek design, at cheap prices, and nearly everyone goes there at some point to either buy furnishings for a dorm room, a first apartment, a baby’s room, or for some of us a seemingly lifetime of bookshelves and dressers.

This summer I visited Weimar Germany, where my main tourist goals were to see the Goethe and Schiller homes. Still, having taken a great Bauhaus class at MoMA in 2005, my friends and I visited the Bauhaus museum, which was the site of the original Bauhaus school and studios. The Bauhaus is interesting as it was really the combination of industrial means, towards high art, for the purpose of providing design for all of society. It moved away from its original arts and crafts ideas to do this, and produced some of the most recognizable furniture and architecture that we associate with the 20^th century. The museum was interesting in both its contrast to Goethe’s romanticism, and its large picture similarities. That is Goethe was a singular artist and scientist, but was a populist in many ways. Bauhaus did the same, but for a new age in which individualism was being replaced by group efforts politically, such as communism, and consumer industrialization such as cars. The Bauhaus artists were futurists as much as modernists, in that they were predicting a future of modularity, simplicity and raw form. How nice it would be to see them as the prophets of this institution, IKEA, which so many of us use?

I believe however that IKEA representatives one of two options where the Bauhaus prophecy is concerned. In the first IKEA is the future that the Bauhaus had predicted and influenced, and it manages to fill me with emptiness and anxiety, or this is not at all what the Bauhaus had actually wanted, and I would therefore be drinking schnapps with Walter Gropius and complaining of long days shopping, and weekends with Allen wrenches.

My dislike for IKEA comes with a certain amount of both guilt and plain old self doubt. After all I should be happy for IKEA and all of the shoppers who have filled their homes with those products. The stuff looks nice and it’s cheap. The problem for me is that it sucks the creativity of choosing a living place, creating instead a delusion. We feel that we are going to IKEA, which is a gigantic warehouse, and can choose the furniture that is right for us. In fact though, everyone who is even a little bit like us will buy many of the same things. We have friends with the same pieces we have. My daughter’s bed is the same as her friend’s bed. As Pete Seeger laminated in his song about suburbanization called “Little Boxes”, he sings “they all look just the same”. 

The possibility that this is not what the Bauhaus envisioned is also very convincing. The need to assemble cheap particle board for hours is not the same as mass producing a Bauhaus chair and selling them as a complete chair. Another key difference to me is the IKEA inclusive look, which I do not relate to Bauhaus. That is, people buy all of their furniture from one store, so the styles are basically all the same, even though the designs are called something different. Bauhaus and other twentieth century minimalism stressed repeatability and simplicity, but every artist had a unique interpretation of what that was. Mondrian and Malevich were geometrical but nothing alike, as are Eames chairs and Wassily chairs.

This all may be me again putting off IKEA assembly, while my wife slaves away at them. It might also be that I am a snob, and would like to buy more expensive furniture. I don’t think though that either of these is the main reason. Mostly IKEA causes me anxiety, and I am trying to understand how such a nice place with such a nice philosophy can do that to me, even though I love to eat meat balls and drink lingonberry juice. I think it is because I recognize that there is something cynical about IKEA. It is a dream, and idea and now a way a life, which is based not on creativity and people, but the perception that it is. The Bauhaus may have been for the masses, but it was designed with care and creativity by individuals. IKEA is a mega company of committee design led by market analysis and quarterly stock valuations. This is not to say that it isn’t useful. It is just a not the dream store of the Bauhaus or me.