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• Saturday, July 11, 2009 06:51 PM

  Zoom!

  And the point goes totally over their heads! Wow...use IKEA as an example of crap culture and the loss of craftsmanship and all the devotees of this desecendent of Scan (which was a hell of a lot more expensive because it was actually crafted by craftsmen) come out of the woodwork to defend their attachment to weird, non-standard-sized stuff that makes them feel like part of the process and this very defensiveness proves both Shell and Zacharek are precisely right about the love of disposable, cheap and essentially meaningless junk over well-crafted furnishings, appliances, etc.

  John Anderson argues "It's perfectly fine if the bed is too crappy to pass on to my kids, because I don't have any kids."

  Well hell, add a huzzah for the decline of family while we're at it.

  The example of the satisfying sound and feel of shutting a solid (vs. hollow core) door says almost everything. We live in crap dwellings built at a minimum and sold for the most profit that can be squeezed out of those dazzled by all heat and no light. The throw-away vacuum cleaner, same thing. The landfills of our nation (and I can remember when the word landfill did not exist) are packed tight with artifacts of our piece-of-crap culture, yet people rush to defend it if it has a European pedigree to go with its ill-fitting, lightweight and style-less qualities.

  And with the craftsmanship, argues shell, goes meaningful work. And this is even arguable?

  Just for the record, and not that a damn soul cares, less is more, small is beautiful, human scale works well with humans, the New Urbanism is just the Old Sanity, and crap is crap. Anyone here old enough to recall when "made in Japan" was an epithet denoting a piece of crap? They got their revenge for the nuking. Now China has replaced Japan as the biggest source of crap, only now Americans are conditioned to accept the crap standard as not only adequate, but highly desireable.

  We are a sad bunch, and we can't figure out why we're so god damned sad. We don't feel right, but we cannot look around and see what it is, materially, that makes us so spiritually vapid.

  Thanks to Ellen Ruppel Shell for such an important and insightful book and for Stepanie Zacharek for having the termerity to review it in a positive light, considering the fact that they and the rest of us on this little island of quality are surrounded by armies of Philistines who'd like nothing more than to run us all through with a nice, cheap, disposable plastic spear.

  Four stars each for the book and the review, and god help us, every one.

  —AJCalhoun Read AJCalhoun's other letters
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