Word: ikea
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
LIGHT IT UP When you think of halogen bulbs, those omnipresent black floor lamps from Ikea may come to mind. But a new bulb from Philips will turn any fixture into a gale-force illuminator for $5.99. Halogena is the size of an ordinary incandescent but so intensely bright that Philips had to turn down the wattage from 75 to 40 for those bulbs that will take a star turn lighting the fabled Times Square ball on New Year...
...idea of "yuppie angst" seems inherently oxymoronic. Yuppies are clean-cut, clear-headed people with successful jobs, shiny new sport utility vehicles, a weak spot for IKEA furniture, and happy families barbecuing behind white-picket fences. With such stability in their lives, what could yupsters possibly have to be all worked up about or dissatisfied with? Well, precisely that: stability. As Brad Pitt's character Tyler Durden mentions in Fight Club, thirty-somethings are the "middle children of history:" forgotten in the shadow of those who come before and after them. Yuppies are expected to make it through somehow, become...
...most people try to counter feelings of listlessness with activity, motion, movement. Yuppies seem to take this to an extreme and counter feelings of extreme ennui with extreme activity-i.e. violence; repress your IKEA-fueled angst long enough and it'll explode in your face like a computer at midnight on New Year's Day 2000. Aggression seems truly to be the key to defusing the ticking time-bomb of yuppie angst. This is obvious in Fight Club: the entire movie is centered around the premise that yuppie poster boy Edward Norton finds escape from his micromanaged world only...
...effects of yuppie angst on the rest of the world-that post-yuppie generation bit by their own species of the Y2Kare bug. Just as middle-management yupsters lashed out against the oppressive ineffectuality of upper management, so too did young up-and-comer twentysomethings feel oppressed by the IKEA angst of their yuppie superiors. Darwin would have had a field day-suddenly angst is an inheritable trait, passed on from one generation of the urbanite species to the next. Unlike their forefather-oppressors, however, the post-yuppies had no outlet for their angst. They couldn't claim a cultural...
...same self-referential tricks as Smith's movies as an antidote to the violence of yuppie angst. The Clockwork Orange-esque rejoicing in mayhem that characterizes so much of the movie is contrasted with its many self-referential moments (without giving too much away...): the bizarre walk through the IKEA catalog; the moment when movie projectionist Tyler Durden, discussing the "change filmstrip" blip that appears on movie screens, points to the one on the screen of the movie he is in; and a final revelation about the relationship between Durden and the narrator. Unfortunately, these po-mo asides...