11:08 p.m. - 2002-04-17
your ad where?
Sunshine passes through tinted skylights and, before it can reach the potted palms below, is cold-filtered through cubic tons of climate-controlled mall-air and diluted by the low-energy electric light that seeps from unobtrusive sconces. The result is a comfortable, squint-free, shopping environment. An environment in which the patron's eye can wander unfettered by the ignoble tasks of dilation or contraction (unless of course said consumer chooses to step away from the esplanade and freak out amidst the black lit, heavy metal splendor of the Spencer Gifts poster room...). Avenues of marble tile stretch longways unto their respective anchor-store vanishing points and sideways, wherever they don't abut the threshold of a vendor's unit, tuck beneath massive panel walls of stucco or sheetrock. Notice that the walls don't quite touch the floor, and that this gap is stitched discreetly with an even bead of Dow 740 structural building sealer. We'll see this throughout the mall, because nothing is tied together with baseboard or delineated by trim. Each massive structural element remains sort of free-floating. Hence the building as a whole, or rather the "wholeness" of the building never asserts itself. Deferring graciously instead to the facades lining and defining the midway. This is mall-chitecture. The retail industry went through some sort of paradigm shift back in the day, and found that the then-new concept of marketing products to consumers lent itself better to the ancient bazaar setup than to the (modern) free-standing architectural statements of the department stores. This not only allowed vendors to be replaced as their products fell out of fashion, but let whole chains reinvent themselves for the mere cost of a new facade (remember when Banana Republic sold pith helmets, and the Gap used have like sort of a hippie hay-loft vibe?...the real tragedy though, as I happened to find out on a foray into the Glendale Galleria this past holiday season, is that Hickory Farms, the joyous plastic meat-barn of my youth, has reinvented itself as this sort of understated glass and steel environment that I found alarmingly free-sample free. No smoky cheeses 'neath the new industrial track lighting, no errant toothpicks on the polished concrete floor...it was like the fucking Meat Gap or something). So stores became more like billboards than buildings, and the building itself is now more a matter of generic utility. Does the whimsical neon squiggle over by the food court actually convey to anyone a feeling of whimsy? Probably not, but as a piece of signage designating (in the international language of mall-chitecture) the presence of a food-court, it succeeds.
So...I'm standing on the corner of Hollywood and Highland, eating a fast-food chicken sandwich, staring across the intersection at the evil new mall there. That building in which the Academy Awards were just held. We did the finish work on a giant, horrid, nightclub up on the fifth floor. The kind of job I guess a lot of carpenters might want to put in their portfolio or something...y'know, high profile. For those career-minded types who might give a shit about that kind of thing (that don't enjoy the luxury of this weird calm that comes in the wake of complete disillusionment). Anyway, despite any pretense the management of said structure may make otherwise, it's still a fucking mall. Not the archetype mall of my youth described in the construct above (our sunshine comes pre-filtered out here in LA and, instead of the old convenient-signage-and-intuitive-floor plan strategy, this new mall seems to have taken a confusion-engenders-reckless spending-approach...I also found the premises woefully Spencer Gifts and Hot Dog On A Stick deficient), but a mall is a mall is a mall. So, I'm standing there on the opposite corner, and I'm thinking. Mostly about how the contents of this chicken sandwich tastes not so much like chicken as like overcooked human finger with mayonnaise, but I'm also considering intently the pedestrians on the boulevard. You know that quote "If you build it, they will come"? This is just like that...only the opposite. 'Cause these mall-types have been walking up and down Hollywood Blvd. since as long as I can remember. A critical concentration of mall-energy that probably made this Hollywood & Highland thing inevitable. But it makes me wonder, if mall-chitecture represents the ascension of a fluid, facade-oriented, architecture of economic utility over the Modern, monument-to-economic-inevitability type architecture of the department store era...what does this generation of consumers represent in the grand evolutionary scheme of things? Generic units hungry to be defined via consumption? A population more fascinated by the esoteric nuances of the facade than interested in the structure upon which it is erected? Fuck if I know. But there is something about mall culture that makes me fear the meta-aesthetic status quo.
Let's see if I can explain it.
Through commercial-media inundation, American culture has increasingly become the province of industry...that's obvious, right? And were it just a matter of exposure to too many commercials engendering a national state of materialism, I don't know that I'd really care. Because in a purely materialistic society, product quality would represent the ultimate objective, and commercial media would exist to extol product virtues. It would be a Ron Popeil World, and that might be kind of kooky. What we have now though is a state of um....material idealism. A ghost-culture created by commercial media and experienced either vicariously through television, or peripherally through consumption and that's the fucked-up part. Purchasing the right product can signify the extent of one's cultural participation. Hence, products, around which this commercial culture was conceived, have become advertisements in and of themselves for one's commercially generated cultural identity.
The product has ceased to be the ding-as-sich, and the ideal to which product possession alludes is a media construct.
It's like Plato's goddamn cave in here, the mall.
Anyway, I think the moral of this story is we don't take any more work at the mall...although I do have one good memory from that gig. When you're dealing with sleazy nightclub types, and there were maybe three exceptions to that categorization on this entire job, getting paid tends to be a bit of a hassle. So I think it was the third invoice in a row where we'd been given the runaround, and the accountant who was allegedly going to write our check slips out of the building while we're working upstairs. Gone. Unreachable, we're told. So my partner (who needed the bread more than I did that particular week) flips out, marches downstairs (ok ok, he took the elevator), and affixes another copy of our invoice to the dude's desk...with a framing nail and a hammer. This, I think, came as a surprise to the staff...who only knows Bill as a big, patchouli-smelling, dreadlocked vegetarian. (I, on the other hand, remember when he was a 240 lb. skinhead fresh out from Long Island.)
So we got paid.
