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| December 2007 »
I wonder if the mortgage and credit debacle is a clue. Could it reveal one of the reasons poor or working people voted for Bush last time around? I wonder, because for working folks voting Republican is usually and traditionally a vote for Big Business, and therefore against the working man’s self interest.
In writing the following explanation of the current mortgage/credit collapse, I’m explaining it to myself as best I can. As I understand it, this is what happened. Loans, lines of credit and mortgages are all essentially lending money at interest. As long as it is guaranteed that the loans will be paid back, the loan is as good as money — better actually, as it accrues interest. I can therefore sell a loan I originally made to you to my pal Bob, a third party. And if you are good for repayment, the sale is as good as a money transfer and Bob is happy to purchase this promissory note. My pal Bob’s worth will increase in the future as you the debtor repay the loan, and my worth has gone up immediately, as Bob just paid me.
So, in various ways making mortgage/loans is like printing money — easy to do, and secure, if the payback is guaranteed. Prime Loans are so named because the risk of default is very low and repayment a pretty sure bet. The more loans one makes in this scenario the richer you can become. I can take the money Bob paid me for your promissory note and lend the money to someone else — I don’t even need more cash or capital.
One of the reasons this all worked, or seemed to work, is because of the housing and real estate boom. I know that loans — a mortgage for example — use a person’s house as a guarantee. Over the past years, the values of houses and condos were continually rising. So, if a mortgage holder defaulted on a loan, chances are the house, now the property of bank or note holder, would be worth more than the money that had been originally lent out. It paid to have suckers default on their mortgages(!), as long as the value of their assets continued to rise. And of course, no one believed that the rising cost of real estate and the boom in housing could ever end. Easy for me to say this in retrospect.
However, as one can imagine, anything akin to printing money is awfully tempting — maybe even irresistible — to avoid abusing. As assigning loans and mortgages became easier and easier, the temptation arose to give mortgages to people who in all likelihood wouldn’t be able to repay the loans. Subprime lending, which entailed a higher degree of risk, was redefined. Subprime rates are given to borrowers who do not qualify for the best interest rates because of their deficient credit history.
The recipients of such loans are often described as NINJAs — No Income, No Job, No Assets. Others were known as “liars”, because their claims of income and employment were never crosschecked. (I would think the burden for cross checking falls on the institution, no?) It seems that some banks were relaxing the standards for subprime mortgage loan approval, and assigning the loans in a way that increased the likelihood of borrower default or other loss to the bank. (See the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s testimony before the senate for further reading).
According to my business managers, this problem was compounded by the effect of the interest-only loans that everyone was signing up for: “These allowed home-buyers to pay only interest at a very low ‘teaser’ rate for two years, but after the two years, the rates can double and the payment will include principal as well. The result is that the homeowners can't afford the payments, and if they had planned to refinance after two years based on appreciation in the equity of their homes, that hope is gone because home prices have only dropped.”
In their heady euphoria, the institutions charged with monitoring the lenders and wheeler-dealers looked the other way as these iffy deals were made. It was just too tempting, I guess.
So, if one can sell a mortgage from a NINJA or a liar to Bob (without Bob knowing that’s the status of his supposed asset?), then the incentive to make more loans — to everyone — and sell them to Bob and to Bob’s friend is immense. The “value” of these companies and banks making, buying and selling these loans skyrocketed. And, why not? Very few people want to be spoilsports and actually look at whether or not these loans and mortgages have a good change of being repaid. Huge fortunes were being built on air — or on self-deception — like Enron and Tyco a few years ago.
Meanwhile the recipients — the workingmen and women who are barely eking by — suddenly have loan offers thrown at them by the truckload. They feel richer, more flush; things are going well it seems, and their situations improving. It’s not so hard to pay the bills. They worry less and sleep more. A sense of blissfully ignorant well-being pervades the land. The working class and the under- and unemployed assume that the Republicans are somewhat responsible for this new (virtual) wealth — and maybe they were. It would follow that Mr. Joe Average might vote for the administration seemingly responsible for his new sense of well-being. Now, the bills are coming due — the housing market stalled, as I understand it, triggering the collapse of the whole house of cards.
The other day I was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on TV with my mom and I noticed that there was a Jeff Koons bunny float/inflatable balloon in the parade! The humongous silver balloon was a blow-up replica of one of his shiny stainless steel versions of kitschy children’s toys. It was a bit of a shock: while the contemporary art world and some museums are a big deal these days, they’re still the preserve of a certain social set. And the audience for the Macy’s parade (on TV and on the streets), would seem to be contained in a separate circle in that particular Venn diagram.
C said that Tom Otterness had one last year, which makes perfect sense as his pieces are clever and funny and kids love them. The Koons balloon, not having a face and all, is kind of scary for the little tykes. We joked about what would come next year — a Richard Serra balloon? A big inflatable version of a twisty slab of rusty steel floating down Broadway?
What’s going on here? Who paid for this? These things must cost a fortune and I can’t find out who underwrote this thing. Who decided a Koons balloon should be included in a parade focused on children and children’s favorite characters? (The other balloons were Shrek, Mr. Potato Head, Kermit, Snoopy and Pokeman.)
I suspect that, as with all branding urges, once a product catches the eye of the public (or a specific subset of the public) and sells, then other consumers — in this case collectors and museums — will want the same thing, or as close to it as possible. Art dealers and collectors might then tactfully urge a successful artist to make more pieces like the one successfully branded, as the “brand”, the icon, is easy to sell and easy to identify. Within such a model, a successfully branded artist might go on to make more or less the same piece over and over again, with slight variations.
We applaud this stick-to-a-good-thing in a classic English shoe, a stapler, or a band saw, but in art it’s mystifying.
Oddly, in the fashion megaverse and some other retail areas, a brand, design or image accepted and successful amongst a tiny (usually wealthy) social demographic means that it will inevitably be desired by those lower down on the social and economic ladder, either via logo imprinted items, knockoffs, counterfeits or copies. The fact that the hoi polloi will now be interested in the item makes it naturally less interesting to the elite. It will go out of favor, and becomes last year’s model, soon to be relegated to the closet or the giveaway pile. If it’s too popular, it can’t be cool anymore. As a result, the creative folks, the designers, feel pressure to come up with a new and different line to appeal to these elites, and as quickly as possible. That’s why it’s called fashion.
Sarah R. suggests the development of fashion trends can occur in reverse as well. This happens all the time, as subculture style is appropriated and adopted by the designers or elite/wealthy, and then sold back to the masses. A classic example is of course the punk style of the mid-70s — by 1977, Cosmopolitan had a fashion spread featuring plastic and safety pins (the punks of course initially borrowed the safety pin from the working class culture where it was used to correct ill-fitting/torn clothing). The article ended with "To Shock is Chic" — so much for subversion! We see this again and again over the past 30 years: grunge fashion for instance, made it on to the runways in the nineties, and the big eighties revival started with street culture before it hit the couture houses. Today corporations have coolhunters to identify trends, and the designers look to them to tell them what will sell. She thinks the emergence of trends is less unidirectional and more of a multi-sourced dialectic these days. And the faster trends are identified, the faster new ones emerge.
Happily, this system of economic and social snobbery (along with the rapid appropriation of designs by the hoi polloi) has become a prod to innovation and invention. The designers and the creative teams have to constantly stay one step ahead of the knockoff merchants and the taste of ordinary folks. Elitism — a natural Darwinian part of sexual selection — is, in this system, a goad to creativity. Not only in the fashion world, but for anything that can be fetishized: electronic gadgets, video games, bands and singers, cars, bikes, and restaurants.
Oddly, it doesn’t seem to work that way in the realm of contemporary art. In the art world, once an artist succeeds in branding his or her name, the system seems to favor steering the artist towards the repetition of that object, with slight variations, for decades. The incentive for innovation and change isn’t there for some mysterious reason. With success, creativity often (not always) comes to a halt, and production begins. To be fair, there are plenty of exceptions, but the numbers that follow this rule are astounding — at least to me. Maybe my definitions are misaligned with those of everyone else?
Perhaps the explanation for this exception lies in the fact that art is not mass-produced, not in the same way as fashion or cars are anyway. Each object is somewhat (albeit subtly) unique, and if purchased, resides in the ownership of a collector or a museum — an individual or a single entity — and its public availability henceforth restricted. So, in order for the whole little art world to consume this brand, it can take decades of production by the artist and his or her staff. These days, Jeff Koons can have a bunny in the Macy’s parade, Richard Prince can print images on Marc Jacobs dresses, and Murakami can design the icons on Louis Vuitton handbags, which only reinforces the art brand as icon. The artist’s status is “safe”, possibly even enhanced, because the “originals” remain forever in limited supply and can only be afforded by a wealthy “discerning” few. However, it’s one thing to be enhanced by luxury goods and another to be featured on cereal boxes, and ads for hair products.
In the last few months there have been a lot of articles in newspapers and magazines about the danger that the new art bubble will burst. Recent auctions at Sotheby’s and Christies would either confirm or deny whether the ever-rising, astounding prices for contemporary art will continue to head skyward. The articles ranged in their positions, and most were simply about the bubble itself and what it means to contemporary art.
It was interesting and a little sad to me that most of the focus in these articles — and there have been lots of them — was on the sums and not the content of the art. But, as more than one writer implied, in many cases the money has become the content. In The New Yorker, Calvin Tompkins quoted a gallerist who stated that the value of artwork is now tied to its monetary worth, which means what it sells for at auction. In this system, you are a better artist because your work sells for more money. (Everyone knows this can’t possibly be true — monetary value is about desire, status and scarcity and not about quality. But according to this gallerist, this is the way it is right now.)
Souren Melikian, the auction writer for The Herald Tribune, was the only writer to offer an opinion on the quality of the some of the works on offer. He was scathing, intimating that a Van Gogh was not a very good one, and that a Picasso was “from his cartoon period”, which was not meant as a compliment. He didn’t venture into the contemporary territory too much, though he did submit that Hugh Grant’s Warhol (a portrait of Liz Taylor) was grossly overvalued in the press. The implication was clear: according to Melikian, our valuation criteria for art have become skewed, and money and the auction houses are responsible.
In particular, Melikian worried about the auction house practice of offering guarantees to favored customers selling “important” works. Assuring a customer a dollar amount for the work, whether it is sold or not, is a way for one auction house to grab a customer and a work from another house. In effect, the auction house buys the work and then becomes the seller. In Melikian’s words, “This is a flawed system. It distorts the principle of an auction that is supposed to be an open contest between sellers and buyers, with the auctioneer as a neutral arbiter.”
Of course, there are always fashions and trends in buying art, old and new. Various movements go in and out of favor — some artists become newly appreciated and others are forgotten. That’s where, on a longer time scale maybe, the art world is similar to the fashion world, although it’s dealing less with new creations and more with preexisting works.
An article by Jori Finkel in the Sunday NY Times mentions that certain powerful galleries are providing financial assistance to fund museum shows of their artists at museums (which increases the value of the work). And many of the same galleries now publicly engage in the practice of either bidding up the works of their artists at auction, or buying the works at premium prices, also a way of keeping the perceived monetary value of a work high. (If suddenly one can get the work of a premium priced artist for much less than the ascribed value, the value of ALL that artist’s work — much of it held by esteemed collectors, or the galleries themselves — will drop). This practice, not exactly Kosher, was once semi-secret though insiders knew it went on. It hardly makes for a level or objective playing field. Now, as with many things in the Bush era, formerly hidden practices are brazenly played out in open. The idea of shame has disappeared, probably because in a market driven, dog-eat-dog world, any practice that benefits you is in turn reflexively defined as legitimate.
Of course, the museums deny that their curatorial decisions are affected by the money coming in from galleries, but that’s simply too silly to believe. While the galleries may not be dictating what artists the museums show (though that does seem to happen), the internalized decision process among museum directors and curators cannot help but be affected by what is financially feasible. Some women don’t up and announce that they are attracted to a man because he has money — they just naturally find him more “attractive” and “interesting”. The knowledge of the money figures in some calculation performed by the amygdala region of the brain and voilà, one feels differently, strangely attracted.
One wonders if the quality work by emerging artists who fall outside of the circus tent will necessarily get lost. Some emerging artists are thrown into the limelight perhaps a little too quickly, with detrimental effects. Take some of the bands from the nineties: early on their work was overvalued and written about extensively, leaving them no time or room to develop as the branding process had already been set in motion.
The money amounts are truly astounding. In a speech delivered at the Burlington House in 2004, Robert Hughes, quoting Picasso’s biographer John Richardson, asserted, “[…]no painting is worth $100 million dollars” (though $100 million dollars isn’t worth $100 million dollars any more). He claims that these amounts inevitably distort the perception of any piece of art.
All that said, I find there is still a lot of interesting and inspiring work being done. In some cases the flood of money has allowed some lesser-known artists to be seen and funded, and in other cases the money carrot may unconsciously inspire some creative types to make stuff that they otherwise wouldn’t. Despite all the shouting, noise and crap, one can choose to look the other way and see something genuine and fascinating.
Caetano Veloso
Saw Caetano’s show last night. It was his version of a rock show. He had the audience singing along in Portuguese, “I hate you, I hate you”. Caetano mixed in some older songs with songs from his last record, Cê, which is lyrically angry and sad, and takes a minimal rock approach quite unlike anything else. There’s lots of space in the sound — sometimes the chords and harmonies, often pretty sophisticated in Caetano songs, are here barely hinted at. I wasn’t sure how this band — all young musicians centered around the amazing guitar player Pedro Sa — would handle the older stuff more familiar to the audience. They changed some of the older songs, giving them spikier and more fractured textures, but it worked. Lyrically, the differences may be more radical; the older stuff is generally sweeter than this new batch of songs, more often filled with turmoil and testiness. But this initial feeling of disquiet leads inevitably to captivation — even the cries of “I hate you” were somehow beautiful. They weren’t snarled as a punk or Emo band would do, but sung almost sweetly, and with a bewildered sadness that somehow those heavily charged words and feelings are bursting forth — the sadness of watching yourself say you hate someone.
It was my first time in the Nokia Theater, a weird underground corporate space. I ran into Stokes, who remembered that it was a big Times Square movie theater years ago. He said this was where he saw Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. For this show the “orchestra” area was standing, with some VIP balcony tables and then rows of theater seating further back. The sound was so good I didn’t even notice how clear it was until after the show. I don’t know if the theater’s remodeling should be credited for the sound clarity or Caetano’s sound mixer.
Tall and/or Wide News
On the way up to Times Square I passed the new NY Times building, whose lobby was all lit up. Beyond the atrium I could see masses of black-suited people at the far end. They must have been there for a grand opening — this new building, designed by Renzo Piano, has been under construction in my neighborhood for years. The Grey Lady gets a punk haircut is how I would categorize it. I’m sure there are some lovely spaces inside, and it will be a great relief for the employees to have more light, but the building seems unremarkable outside, and pretty big, imposing and tall too. Rather than being sequestered in a mere 14-story block of rabbit warrens, now the news media can gaze down on their former haunt and on the rest of us, as befits the US national newspaper (not counting USA Today and The Onion.) There is a new auditorium space adjacent to the tower, so it will be interesting to see if the Times begins to present music, speakers, symposiums and other events in that new space. That would be a welcome addition.
I can’t help but look at this new skyscraper and think, “They sure are optimistic ‘bout print journalism”. Or maybe they have plans, and are diversifying in ways I am unaware of. I myself read the NY Times and about three other newspapers online most mornings. I also look at a few blogs and other sites fairly regularly. I paid to be member of Times Select for a while, until they decided to make all that material available again without charge. I also pick up newsstand copies once or twice a week. I don’t know if I am typical, but if I am I suspect not too many people will be buying print journalism for much longer — most people will become accustomed to getting the news for free, as many folk already feel that they do when they turn on a TV in the morning as they get ready for work, or as they listen to the car radio on their commute.
Of course, much TV and radio is paid for by commercials, so the “free” part is a bit of an illusion. “Television Delivers People” as Richard Serra (yes, that Richard Serra, the iron man sculptor) wrote in a video piece he did decades ago. Television “delivers” the viewers, the audience, to the advertisers. The content, whether news or American Idol, is generally just sufficiently interesting to hold your attention through to the next commercial. Federal laws mandated that TV networks give a certain amount of time to news and “public affairs,” the latter usually relegated to dead time on Sunday mornings. Legislators in the past realized that an informed populace is essential for a democracy, or some semblance of one. Without those mandates I wonder how much less the populace would know. In other countries it’s easy to see that when one controls the news media one controls what people think. When it works best, the populace barely knows the news their getting is filtered and skewed.
In print, ads are massive and expensive. I admit, I occasionally glance at them and sometimes I read the ad copy. I suspect that the print newspaper costs a little more that its newsstand price of $1.25 to write, print and distribute, and those ads cover the losses. In glossy fashion and art magazines there are more pages of ads than there are of copy; the copy seems more like interruptions among the pages of gallery ads or pictures of petulant models. It’s fairly easy to see how these pages might pay for the rest of the newspaper or magazine.
Google has tiny ads on the sides and tops of their search pages. They’re fairly unobtrusive, which means they load quickly, don’t take up much room and can give the appearance of not being ads, but instead more unbiased, useful information. If I’m looking for something — tent poles maybe — and an ad at the side of my search names a retailer that sells them, I have been known to click there. These ads are generally filtered to be relevant to your searches; they prey on (or cater to) your interest at that moment. Online versions of newspapers and magazines have slightly larger, more intrusive ads than Google, though nothing like the full-page movie or fashion ads in the print media. There are often just a few per page. Here are some from a page in the Arts section of the NY Times. Two movie ads are paired with a (fascinating and hilarious) review of a Polish metal band.
I assume, without any justification, that to some extent these ads pay for the “newspaper”, or whatever one calls an online news source. They allow me to go to these sites for free. Once in a great while I do indeed click on those movie ads in order to see the trailer. I wish there was also a link to the Behemoth (the Polish band) website, or a streaming version of some of their songs, or a video clip of the concert. Sometimes there is. Whether a review can remain objective and link to the bands website or to their record company is an unanswered question. I think it’s risky, but it seems obvious and easy, UNLESS that record company pays for the link.
Anyways…this is a long round about way of asking if these teeny little ads pay for that big skyscraper and all the news trolls working in it? Is that really possible? Economically how does that work? It boggles my mind. It doesn’t seem feasible, but maybe I don’t know how much these little banner ads cost.
I also ask myself, if it is as unfeasible as I imagine, what will happen to print, or any form of journalism, as everything migrates online? The writers’ strike accurately points out that, at least for many of us, our computers are now our TVs. We watch streaming programs, from either a network site or You Tube or wherever, anytime we please. Some of these have adjacent ads and some have ads before the “show” starts. One doesn’t, to be honest, feel quite as captive to the ads as one did on traditional network TV, but that could be an illusion.
I wonder if a wiki online newspaper could work? Wikinews already exists, and its articles consist of both original and hybrid (i.e. cobbled together from other sources) pieces. If eventually it becomes impossible to have investigative reporters, foreign correspondents and writers spend time performing extensive research — as is the case more and more — then does the news media necessarily have to turn into a version of a White House press office handout, as it sometimes seems these days? Maybe not. Much reporting from various parts of the world already originates from bloggers and other “amateurs”. Admittedly, much of it is celebrity sightings and gossip, or tales of personal woe or prurient interest, but sometimes major stories and opinions missed by the official media erupt from blogs and other outside sources. And sometimes the truth emerges, as opposed to official lies. Danielle says that Wikinews was way ahead of the traditional media reporting for Katrina. If all the folks in every far flung town who have local knowledge, digital cameras, and an ability to write clearly (and accurately?) contributed a wikinews site, or to the Wikinews site, then wouldn’t that save the cost of correspondents, some investigative research (lots of folks adopt digging up info as a personal obsession), office space (that skyscraper), etc., etc.?
Well, I can’t imagine how that obsessive network of lunatic amateur reporters could be filtered to yield an approachable, readable, and vaguely trustworthy experience, but somehow dispersing and widening the net that catches news seems to have already happened, whether it’s in Wikinews or not. It merely awaits a structure, an (self-) organizing principle of which there may be some examples we can borrow from nature, from our neurons, from the various biological and ecological systems that surround us. (Lots of poop jokes based on intestinal based algorithms here, but anyway…) I can’t figure out why Wikinews isn’t filled with gossip, or news according to a retired Czech schoolteacher (which might pass their criteria test as well as anything) or hundreds of thousands of articles of purely local interest.
Someone, some group, or something is, I suspect, make selections and acting as a filter. There’s an aggregate of wikieditors out there making what amounts to a (partially comprehensive) news source. Would the wiki world be using some algorithm to sort through contributions? Surely news shouldn’t be featured according to what is the most popular — if it were we’d be seeing mainly to gossip, gadgets, sport, videogames and porn in a minute. As it is, it doesn’t seem anywhere near as comprehensive as, well, the NY Times, but time will tell. By policy the wiki world excludes reviews and such: there are no movie reviews, concert or CD reviews, or theater reviews. It might be opening Pandora's box to make the people’s choice available, but it might be all the more interesting. To some extent a critic’s job is to help us see (or hear) something we might otherwise pass over, or not take the time to investigate, and I doubt the herd will likely fulfill that function. But who knows?
Went to see Sufjan Stevens’s piece at the BAM. The first half was a new “cinematic suite” called “The BQE”. Various elements evoked semi-romantic film soundtracks and the Phillip Glass movies (there were three projected videos running simultaneously). But it didn’t matter; the nutty celebration was so inventive and wacky and sometimes genuinely loving that none of those connections affected my enjoyment.
The inclusion of hula hoops, both live and on-screen, juxtaposed with car wheels, Coney Island rides, fireworks and traffic at night, was out of left field and pretty wonderful.
The second half was a sort of greatest hits with expanded orchestrations. Essentially similar to, though shorter than, his last touring show, which was good.
Today was the NY marathon.
Wanted to bike to Long Island City, but the Queensboro Bridge bike lane was closed (for the handicapped they said, though it was completely empty). Took the Roosevelt Island tram instead (the view is from there), and rode down by the abandoned lunatic asylum. There was no one around. From the tip of the island one has a great view of the UN building and a rocky island filled with cormorants — an odd sight for NYC.
We had a snack at a nice Hunters Point café and watched outside as the cleanup crews picked up the piles of paper cups and tissues that had been handed out to the runners. Here the streets ran bright yellow with Gatorade — it looked like the marathoners had all peed themselves. A few stragglers limped and walked by, and I wondered if I would be privileged to see the very last person in the marathon, a sight more rare and more difficult to establish than who came in first. I think it was a man in a multicolored headwrap with a few-days-growth beard, who might have been smoking a cigarette as he made his way up the street, listing slightly towards the curb.
Social "Hateworking"
The Financial Times reports on the dark side of social networking sites:
Enemybook:
An adjunct to Facebook, with page additions so you can list enemies as well as friends.
Snubster:
Select Facebook contacts will be sent a snub that says they are now “on notice” or “dead to me”.
Hatebook:
A standalone site. Identical to Facebook except you befriend other haters. And you can build an “Evil Map” that tells you the location of your hater pals.
It seems to me that this was inevitable. Once you have the existence of social networking sites you have to take the bad with the good. While it might be nice to think that they are a place to meet “friends” and like minded folks, it is just as likely to be a place to make enemies, engage in gossip, spread rumors, scratch and claw. These are a big part of social life in the real world, and to think that the online world would just be about nice stuff and making friends, well…
Walk-in Videogame
My sister had the idea that we would take my parents to IKEA to look at possible replacements for their kitchen cabinets, counters, sinks and storage. I loved the idea of a trip to IKEA since I’d never been there ever. And as it was to be a look-see and not a buying trip, the pressure would be low. I was looking forward to the famous Swedish meatballs for lunch too.
IKEA is huge. We went up to the second floor where the shelves, sofas, tables and lamps are all arrayed into tasteful little room settings — rooms, but with mysterious tags hanging everywhere. Immediately I thought it was like entering a videogame world. Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity?
Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could**:
BESTA
HEDDA
BJARNUM
LERBERG
INREDA
EKTORP
GRUNDTON
BERTA
KARNA
One soon realizes that one of the goals of this “game” is to decide which cabinets, in which wood or wood-like material, would, could or should be combined with which counter materials, and then to match them to a particular style sofa and upholstery, and finally, to select the color and texture of floor material that would coordinate best with all the above.
There are free measuring tapes available to help you, dotted lines are painted on the floors (to help determine square footage), and personnel hover at computers waiting to guide you through the whole mix and match system — game spoilers, one might say.
Once one gets some of this figured out — scratch pads might help — moving on to the next level of game play is a possibility. One goes through the restaurant wormhole (the food was good) and emerges at the next universe: picking out the flat-packed cabinet and furniture bits stacked in a world of endless towering shelves. As far as the eye can see there are shelves, tall shelves, much, much higher than a person can reach. The weird language is used here too.
Of course, the tables don’t look like tables any more in this world, thus some conceptual skills are needed here. Memorizing some of those strange words helps a lot too, I would imagine. Players drift about here, aimlessly, haphazardly, but soon they begin to put the clues together and the young couples — there are a lot of young couples — pull what will become their dream home off the shelves and head for the checkout counters. Only when they get home will they know if they have truly exited the game, or if they need to return for another round.
**Where IKEA gets the names (from Wikipedia)
IKEA products are identified by single word names. Most of the names are either Swedish, Danish, Finnish or Norwegian in origin. Although there are some notable exceptions, most product names are based on a special naming system developed by IKEA.
Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)
Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
Bookcase ranges: Occupations
Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
Chairs, desks: men's names
Materials, curtains: women's names
Garden furniture: Swedish islands
Carpets: Danish place names
Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms
Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones; words related to sleep, comfort, and cuddling
Children's items: mammals, birds, adjectives
Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames
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