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It took us a long time to warm up to Dar Williams. She seemed like a better groomed, more temperate Ani DiFranco, or a Nanci Griffith without the twang–a little boring, a little forgettable. However, her new album, My Better Self, is a revelation. These catchy urban folk songs display a wry sense of humor and a gift for narrative songwriting. The highlight, “Teen for God,” is a funny, frightening, and dead-on character study. Two covers, Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” with guest Marshall Crenshaw, and Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” a duet with Ms. DiFranco, highlight a thread of political commentary; on the whole, this collection comes up first as fun to listen to, and second, as unexpectedly thought-provoking.

The stranger the artist, the more faithful the fans; isn’t that the standard equation when it comes to music? Case in point: Fiona Apple’s followers waited six long years for this album, and when it reportedly was scrapped by its label for lack of “an obvious single,” outraged fans mailed thousands of real and faux apples to Sony CEO Andrew Lack in protest. (Just imagine the fruit flies in his office.) Then someone leaked eleven of the album’s twelve songs on the Internet. Remember, “fan” is just the root of “fanatic.” But on hearing some of those songs, we remembered, too, that what Apple lacks in fat cells, she makes up for with a sexy, rhythmic, and uncommercial sort of genius. This recording shows she’s grown up, but not out of that.

Count on music folks to ignore all that flapdoodle over “freedom fries” and the pouring of French vintages down the commode. Here in the Twin Cities, a musical partnership has been growing since 2000, when French reed player Michel Portal and record producer Jean Rochard visited and recorded Minneapolis with the help of several local musicians. Since then, a talent exchange has bloomed between the two countries, culminating in this festival, which brings together French and Minnesotan artists for jazz, rock, folk, Celtic, and hip-hop performances. Highlights include “gypsy jazz” guitarist Dorado Schmitt, British saxophonist Evan Parker, and Ursus Minor (pictured here), a collective that includes American jazz players and French rappers.www.surseine.com

Here’s your chance to hobnob with royalty. Norway’s Crown Prince Haaken Magnus will be in the audience on opening night of this performance of Peer Gynt, featuring the Norwegian National Opera and VocalEssence. Henrik Ibsen’s classic tale of an adventuring scoundrel destined to a fate worse than hell is both disturbing and highly amusing, partly because it’s only after the anti-hero has “disgraced” scores of ladies around the world, including a troll’s daughter, that he learns his deeds have won him an unhappy afterlife. The full 120-piece VocalEssence Chorus and orchestra, conducted by Philip Brunelle, sings Edvard Grieg’s haunting opera score; the inclusion of dancers, soloists, and a hardanger fiddle promises to make this performance entertainment fit for a king. 651-224-4222; www.ordway.org

As stage personalities go, Jay Farrar tends to be a bit of a mute, but his shows are still iAs stage personalities go, Jay Farrar tends to be a bit of a mute, but his shows are still inspired occasions, because his evocative, road-weary songs are that much more powerful when he’s actually on the road. Having reformed Son Volt after a seven-year hiatus, Farrar’s returning to a bigger rock sound on Okemah and the Melody of Riot. Its songs call on vast literary and American roots influences, and veer between introspective folk stylings and driving storms of guitar. It’s good to see Farrar collaborating again; he seems to enjoy his fellow musicians more than he enjoys his audiences. And that’s okay by us; Farrar’s shaken voice, which seems to revive Carter Family ghosts, has won us over more than any stage banter could. 612-332-1775; www.first-avenue.com

I don’t get out much, ergo my love for vicarious road trips. As an armchair traveler, it’s important to choose your writer as carefully as you would a travel companion. This has become a more difficult undertaking in recent years, however. The booming “adventure travel” sector of the industry has spawned both a motor coach full of adventurers who have explored the farthest reaches of the Machu Picchu gift shop—and, concurrently, writers who bill themselves as adventurers because they didn’t bathe for a while and got a rash.

For example, Charley Boorman and Ewan McGregor (yes, the actors) were only briefly at risk of being taken seriously in Long Way Round: Chasing Shadows Across the World, their account of a four-month, twenty-thousand-mile motorcycle trip. They seemed unaware that forsaking personal hygiene is also part of the universal lexicon, like a smile but not as welcome. Nomad: Journeys From Samburu was going along swimmingly until the author, Mary Anne Fitzgerald, talked to Gandhi on the phone, in 1992: Reception was good, credibility suffered. In another travelogue, two legendary mountain men got tired and thirsty pulling a cart across Mongolia for some two-hundred-odd pages. Who knew? In a collection of women’s travel stories, a goddess celebrated her womanness in the Amazonian jungle, but my impression was that almost any environment would have done the trick. Note that I can’t recall the titles of those last two volumes, so avid was my disgust when I abandoned them.

Even they couldn’t match Kira Salak’s The Cruelest Journey, however. While the book-jacket wallow put her firmly in the Robert Pelton, danger-is-my-middle-name category (“Adventurer, explorer, a real-life Lara Croft … ”—isn’t it enough to slander huge swaths of real explorers and adventurers, but Angelina Jolie, too?), in reality, Salak managed to talk the National Geographic Society into backing her six-hundred-mile “solo” kayak on the Niger River to Timbuktu, so she was intercepted every few days by a photographer and a fully stocked party barge, and couldn’t ever have been really short of cash. Recounting her adventures in The Cruelest Journey, Salak complains about the Sahara being hot, about being tired, about the bugs being bugs, about the river being choppy, about the people being curious and poor and continually asking for money (after she spreads around gold coins like candy), and, the last straw, about getting dysentery once. Perhaps this was uncharted territory for Salak, but most eight-year-olds would not be surprised by these facts of African life. I hope she never drives across Kansas and writes about it.

About fifty pages into this cruel literary journey, I was forced to review the author’s credits. “Wisconsin state mile record holder” caught my eye. Of all the states to choose for such a claim. The American record holder for the mile, Suzie Favor Hamilton, resides in Wisconsin and set many amazing records at UW-Madison. The Wisconsin state mile record assertion could not be confirmed, and neither could Salak’s grasp on reality.

 

Sure, adventure is subjective, but I feel cheated when I find out that Indiana Jones counted eating medium-rare hamburger as a risk. The reader ends up carrying all the exaggeration, self-absorption, and delusions of toughness that don’t fit in the backpack. On the other hand, the innocent who can’t be trusted to make it home with jam and bread, the hopeless bumbler, the quintessential foreigner squinting at his AAA map of the Sahara—this is the person with whom you want to travel to the ends of the earth, literally or literarily. From the moment he is duped into buying the travel espresso maker until he finds it crushed at the bottom of his rolling duffel upon his unheralded return, he is a first-rate companion. Luckily, my armchair travels have hooked me up with a number of writers who were not vexed to find that mountains were high and rivers wet.

A London couturier (he liked to say he was in ladies’ knickers), Eric Newby gamely responded to his diplomat friend’s cable: CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE? The result is a wry account of their appallingly flawed assault, in 1956, on Mir Samir, a 19,880-foot peak in northeastern Afghanistan that was then, and is now, one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Newby’s experiences make A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush as fascinating from a historical perspective as it is an engaging travel tale. There’s no presumption of adventure or exploration, but neither is there complaining; frostbite, dehydration, and encounters with well-armed tribesmen are treated as minor annoyances. In fact, instead of their exploits being lionized, the badly nicked-up duo are dressed down upon their return by the old-school British adventurer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who labels them “a bunch of pansies” before striding off in his crisp khakis. Ouch.

Of course, Brits have the natural advantage over Americans when it comes to travel writing. They are funnier than Americans. They travel more and whine less. And that’s probably why native Iowan Bill Bryson lived in England for twenty-two years. He got funny and traveled more after that. Perhaps you know Bryson from his very popular A Walk in the Woods, but I feel he was at his best in Notes From a Small Island (1999). In Notes, he tramps around England, describing the green countryside and capturing the repressed silliness that seems to be the hallmark of English character. (Admittedly, I also like Bryson because something about his expression in the book jacket photo strongly suggests my Westie, Rascal.)

A pasty academic, Nigel Barley (that’s right, English), “does anthropology” on the Dowayo people of northern Cameroon and proves out the European reputation for being peevish when his front teeth are removed with pliers. (He had complained of jaw soreness after the “road” ended in a fifty-foot embankment and his face met forcefully with the steering wheel, so the procedure was clearly indicated.) The Innocent Anthropologist (1985) is a benchmark of scientific erudition and should not be avoided due to lack of interest in anthropology or Cameroon. The intrepid Barley returned to the Dowayo, with a slight speech impediment, to document crazy rites of passage in Ceremony: An Anthropologist’s Misadventures in the African Bush.

Rif Haffar is not English. He’s not an anthropologist, he does not suffer if he can help it, and he makes no bones about enjoying the material comforts that a salary from a California dot-com job offers when traveling around the world. What could be a recipe for boorishness, however, turns out to be Away From My Desk (2002), a refreshing, funny, and unapologetically American look at various faraway points. Haffar revels in the plush towels and complimentary bathrobe at a five-star resort in Dubai. He calls Bombay “dirty” rather than “colorful,” not because he’s complaining—it’s just a statement from a guy who likes his sewage on the side rather than over easy. Odd as it may be, these assertions are extremely rare in travel writing. Almost as rare as a traveler who’s comfortable in his rich American skin.

Another Brit who could easily get away with a moniker like “adventurer” or “explorer” is Redmond O’Hanlon. The Oxford-trained naturalist enlisted his nightclub-owning friend to accompany him on an outing into the deepest Amazon, before the whole place was made into salad forks; he called his account of their travels In Trouble Again (1988). O’Hanlon describes with unrestrained glee the effect, on his own body, of a host of tropical insects, fungi, bacteria, poisonous spiders, and tiny fish that set up shop in one’s private parts using retractable barbs. Again furthering scientific exploration at his own expense, O’Hanlon shares a hallucinogenic herb with some of the local Yanomamo to vivid affect. The reader learns, among other things, that even the most mysterious depths of the Amazon seem familiar turf compared to O’Hanlon’s gray matter.

If great female travel writers are few and far between, then those who are not on some sort of awful pilgrimage of the soul are even scarcer. The plainly stated My Journey to Lhasa (1927) is one of the most recent non-transcendent narratives. Alexandra David-Neel, dressed as a Tibetan peasant, not only penetrated the forbidden (to outsiders and infidels) city of Lhasa, but also, en route, contributed substantially to what little was known about the culture and fantastic topography of Tibet. Her writing is not funny and she is given to colonial paradigms, but cut the woman some slack—traveling with only a few local porters, she managed to conduct Himalayan surveying (in a good wool skirt and proper leather boots) that was not attempted again for some fifty years because it was too difficult.

Either through some sadistic flaw in my character, or perhaps a disbelief that The Cruelest Journey could maintain the level of ignorance and self-absorption manifested in its early pages, I stuck with it to the crying end. And was punished. Salak reaches Timbuktu after what seems like an eternity (to readers and undoubtedly the locals), but was actually less time than some kids spend at summer camp. In a crowning moment, she reveals a heretofore unspoken but deeply held desire to free some slaves in this ancient desert city. Never mind that her understanding of the culture was slightly muddier even than her acquaintance with its climate—Salak again throws around enough of National Geographic’s coin to buy freedom for a couple of souls, if not quite enough to change a centuries-old society. The newly freed slaves’ gratitude was tempered by the fact that they were separated from their families, homeless, and unemployed, but not wanting to dwell on these details, the book ends abruptly with Salak reflecting on her accomplishments over an in-flight cocktail. Eeeuuuwww. That made me so uncomfortable. Like I had sweated and not showered for two days and was covered with sticky sunscreen and sand fleas. And millipedes.

Ikea has sold more than six million Swedish meatballs since opening its outpost in Bloomington last year. The trumpets announcing the opening almost convinced me that the End Times for snotty overpriced design had finally arrived. People were flocking to Bloomington as though to Lourdes. You had only to enter this cathedral of immaculate consumption to emerge transformed, a few hours later, from exposure to the miracle of factories in the third world. Those meatballs might be the driving force for the whole operation—its fuel pellets. You need them, because shopping Ikea takes energy. Golf-cart-like transporters are available to the lame, the halt, and those who cannot find the strength to traipse the vastness of the place under their own steam. From your ceremonial opening ascent up the long slope of the entry escalator to your passage through the store’s labyrinthine intestines (occasional signs posted for “shortcuts” are like the offer of a gastric bypass) to your release like spent silt through the alluvial delta of the check-outs, the experience is one of being eaten, digested, and excreted by an organism much bigger than yourself. After a final grand slalom through the towering racks of the warehouse, ejected at last to the consumer cool-down area just beyond the cash registers, you can regroup at the end with a hot dog that costs only fifty cents, then buy more meatballs to take home.

Ikea is solicitous even as you’re headed out the door: If it’s raining outside, you’ll get a dollar off on an umbrella from a bin full of them by the checkout, all furled in chrysalis and waiting to spread its Ikea logo. You may be coming back through that door a few days later, though, returning purchases that didn’t pan out, or that fell apart. Off to one end of the long row of singing cash registers is Ikea’s “As Is” department, a room full of returned, damaged, and broken merchandise, as well as shopworn display pieces. It’s instructive to cruise this section and pick through the casualties: office chairs without seats, like headless chickens; mattresses that didn’t have enough bounce; computer desks that didn’t compute; bookcases and storage units with failed joints, broken hinges, missing parts. The As Is department is like a morgue; there might be no better place to study the anatomy of works of mass-produced industrial design, not only products with weak ankles and things made out of spit, but also brilliantly conceived ideas that, cut open, reveal how they tick.

Recently, a friend picked up a bookcase from the As Is department. Helping her assemble it, I discovered the lengths to which Ikea’s designers will go to simulate an honest thing. The bookcase appeared to be made of solid sticks of low-grade knotty pine glued up butcher-block style, a use of material meant to signal (I guess we’re supposed to think) Ikea’s abiding concern for ecology, letting no scrap of wood go to waste. One of its sides had a ragged hole in it, splintered as though it had been hit with a forklift. “That’s funny,” I thought. “If this were solid wood that wouldn’t be a hole—a dent, maybe, but not a hole.” Tapping on the side and a few of the shelves, I found they weren’t solid but hollow. Those strips of pine were much thinner than I’d thought—only an eighth of an inch—and they were glued flatwise to frames. This wasn’t butcher-block but an imitation of it constructed like a hollow-core door. It seemed odd that Ikea would go to all this trouble to make one cheap thing simulate another just as cheap until I realized that, constructed this way, the bookcase’s components weigh less and can’t warp; they stay flat, so assembly holes can be relied upon to line up properly, making it easy to put the bookcase together. Deconstructing Ikea’s shrewd use of sophisticated manufacturing techniques, seeing the way its designers redeem materials of inferior quality and keep parts dimensionally stable, I couldn’t help but feel a confusing mix of admiration for such resourcefulness, and dismay at such shameless counterfeiting of appearances.

 

Here’s what I’ve bought at Ikea since it opened:

• A whole mess of candles.

• A whole mess of compact fluorescent bulbs.

• A couple of shower curtains.

• Two paper lamps in the form of a chambered

nautilus.

• Four dinner plates made in Portugal, a design

with a lip that makes a plate easy to hold.

• A mattress, covered not with stupid chintz

roses but in a calm neutral gray fabric.

• One easy chair, a knockoff of a seventy-year-old cantilevered design by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and the only chair Ikea sells that I find truly comfortable. Apparently, a million people agree with me on this one—the Poäng (a name with an unsettling similarity to Pyongyang and one that made me break my policy against buying anything involving umlauts) is Ikea’s single most popular chair. Manufactured in huge volumes in China, last year it sold for ninety-nine dollars; this year it’s seventy-nine dollars. I design and build furniture myself, but up against a chair that retails for seventy-nine dollars, I throw in the towel—I couldn’t even begin to buy the materials for that price.

Ikea’s approach to design is brutally reductive. The company makes no bones about it, boasting, “We start by designing the price.” Its designers have made an art of it. They’ve also made an art of piracy, but to my eye their knockoffs, including the Poäng chair and some of their rattan furniture, as well as their takes on Finnish glassware, Danish flatware, the Luxo lamp, and other lighting designs, almost invariably lose something in translation. A lot of the things in Ikea’s catalog look to me like fifty percent of someone else’s good idea, compromised aesthetically and in the quality of their construction. Price being the paramount consideration, it’s hit or miss whether anything holds up. The consumer colludes in this, figuring the thing was so cheap to begin with that it’s no great loss if it falls apart.

Driven by price, Ikea moves like floodwater, seeking the low ground, locating many of its manufacturing centers in developing countries. This leaves consumers in the developed world strangely marooned on the high ground, still consuming, like berserk wood chippers, whatever’s thrown into our maws, but now without the capacity to manufacture goods for ourselves. All over Asia, the Middle East, and South America, factories with hundreds of sophisticated CNC (“computer numerically controlled”) machines are cranking out crates of furniture day and night so that—to put it in adspeak—“savvy consumers” can feather their “starter homes” and virtually hip “urban lofts” for next to nothing.

Professing concern for the environmental and economic consequences to the people who produce its goods in the third world, Ikea’s ad copy in its catalog has, as a friend puts it, “some mumbo-jumbo about ‘sustainably managed forests,’” playing to everybody’s concern for ecology. She thinks a big part of Ikea’s appeal comes from “that Swedish do-gooder aura … we like to think it rubs off on us when we buy their stuff.” Already heavy users of antimicrobial wipes, we’re susceptible to the fantasy of hygienic Swedish design because, I suspect, deep down we feel ourselves to be terminally besmirched. Ikea makes you feel that you’re scrubbed clean in the sauna of its ethics—that basically the whole world is Sweden, or like you have it in you to be a neat, clean, simple Shaker —just fill up that big floppy yellow bag.

Never having been to Ikea’s factories in China, Thailand, Pakistan, Indonesia, or Brazil to see how green they are, I don’t know if Ikea really walks the walk, but a stroll through its Bloomington store serves to show how good the company’s designers are at seizing on the potential of native ecologies and existing cottage industries. They’re able to create something out of practically nothing. I admire, for example, one of their rocking chairs, the PS Gullholmen, a curious design made of banana leaves. Banana leaves! Now I want to see if Ikea can do anything with all that lint from clothes driers.

Ikea isn’t immune to its own fantasy of down-to-earth design. Its products make gestures toward practicality but don’t necessarily embody it. A kitchen table in the store last year endeared itself to me because it so clearly meant well; it aspired to be useful, but had been designed with such blithe disregard for the laws of physics that it was all but doomed to self-destruct: Its thin Formica top sat on a slender steel frame, which had no rails or stretchers down near the ground, nothing to brace it and keep it from wobbling. Anomalously mounted at one end of the top was a serious-looking woodworking vise, the kind you’d see on a cabinetmaker’s bench. Your hopes for it deflate once you realize that if the vise were ever used for sawing or planning or pounding nails, the table would flip over—if its legs didn’t give way first. But it could come in handy as a big four-legged nutcracker—every kitchen needs a nutcracker.

To be fair, few of Ikea’s designs are quite so disingenuous as that. Sometimes they come up with a thing so cleverly minimal in its use of material that I’m tempted to buy it out of comradely solidarity with the designer behind it. For example, they make an assortment of clothes- or linen storage units that remind me of lightweight tents, and have that same nomadic appeal. The frames are made of thin steel rods that clip together, over which are stretched shelves and sides made of translucent white nylon pack cloth. In one variant, you can Velcro two modules together to form a unit that has six casters and opens like a clamshell. When it’s empty you could pick it up with one finger, but it can hold the contents of a chest of drawers.

Ikea finds its way into every nook and crevice of domesticity—living room, bedroom, bath, kitchen, garage, the kids, the pets, the back yard. A one-stop Tank ’N Tummy of design, Ikea makes us instant connoisseurs of everything from cheese graters to wardrobes, toilet brushes to potted plants. They can get you all set up, down to the tchotchkes, figurines, and framed photos of Paris that spell “good taste.” It’s like a dream that’s been predreamt for you. Wandering from model room to model room, trying on tableaux to see how they fit, you could put together a place for yourself without ever having to set foot in another store. The bookcases in the model living rooms are accessorized with actual books, to show you that these rooms could be settings for the thinking of deep thoughts: One shelf, for instance, is stocked with three or four running feet of remaindered copies of Gift Med En Kommunist, the Swedish edition of Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist.

It’s a little late in the day to bemoan the industrial revolution, but I can never go into Ikea without feeling that those towering racks and pallets piled high with goods are diminishing us in some crucial human way. The scale of the place is crushing. It exerts a bending force; it kills the little guy. The catch, of course, is that Ikea also serves the little guy, and does it through economic strategies that are pretty damned smart: “It’s true socialist furniture for an egalitarian democracy,” is how a friend of mine describes it, a characterization hard to dispute. The abundance of cheap, bright, sunny goods that spill from Ikea’s cornucopia might be all that keeps us working poor from rising up to loot the castles of Minnetonka and the palace at Versailles.

After a trek through Ikea, you might still have a little left to spend on cookies from the grocery beyond the checkout stands, but all this bargain-rate plenitude comes at a cost; it bites us back. I’m talking about what our appetites exterminate, about the extinction of certain kinds of skill, the passing of which I mourn in my bones. Ikea might truly be the nicest, most well-intentioned swarm of locusts you’d ever want to meet, but such operations consume rooted material cultures of potters, weavers, woodworkers, and metalsmiths the way bulldozers consume forests. In its hunger for markets, the global economy of which Ikea is so much a part is obliterating lines of human knowledge that can be passed down only by hand, literally, from the experience of one living, thinking body to the next, through the practice of apprenticeship. All that guild and tribal memory, all that cumulative mastery and skill, begins to go the moment someone parachutes in with a laptop and a gift from Gucci for the chief, the mayor, or the special economic region’s commissar. From that point on, an artisan can expect to punch in, fill a hole on an assembly line, slap bar code labels on boxes, and forklift them onto ships and trucks—until some cheaper place to do this is unearthed.

 

As architecture, the composition of Ikea’s south elevation, the one facing the Mall of America, reminds me of the great works of de Stijl and Russian constructivist design, and—inescapably, though he would have abjured the comparison—the art of the late Charles Biederman, Red Wing’s great master of structure, color, and composition. When viewed from a point distant enough to take it all in, the play among the façade’s interpenetrating planes and fearless color is an architecturally beautiful sight—a colossal block of cobalt, the vibrant yellow of its signs a full day’s dose of vitamin D. But Ikea’s hangar in Bloomington makes a midget of anyone who visits it. Families in all-conditions shopping vehicles wheel into the ramp and tumble out of their Toyota LandOwners, Cadillac Fitzcarraldos, and Honda Lunchboxes to go streaming through the store like ants. The building’s IKEA signs always look to me like eight-foot high misspellings of IDEA, and that idea was the Bauhaus, where Modernism’s utopian dream of a democratized, hygienic, industrial simplicity was first elaborated. But the world, as Europe’s visionaries saw to their horror, is not so simple; the world is dangerous—it breeds desire. Last year, two people were trampled to death in a stampede at the opening of an Ikea in Saudi Arabia. In August, people were injured in the crush to be first through the door at the grand opening of an Ikea in one of the poorer sections of London. To be driven by price is to be driven mad.