Malls fill (or should fill) any normal, rational adult with a basal rate of disgust. They are generally populated with the two most unlikable ages of man, three legged man (the old) and almost two legged man (it is hard to call the ambling, sitting, and slouching of teens and tweens full blown walking), they flatter American's deluded love of choice (whenever a new store is put in, or is going to be put in, the posters do not say something like, "Coming soon, another store of the same slightly sexual clothing for girls", they always say, at least in the good, smart malls, "Coming soon, more choices"), and worst of all, like Abercrombie (& Fitch), they generally interact with you in an assaultive manner. Try making your way through a mall without having every sense as well as your physical body assaulted, and you'll be engaging in a task of Sisyphian magnitude. At the food court (I love the vague echo of both an actual exterior space, a courtyard, as well as a kingly court, fully of exotic foods and entertainment), you are assaulted by sample after sample of mediocre food that one would never eat outside of said kingly court (as an interesting side note, Panda Express, once a mall standby for its $5 plates of Orange god knows what meat now has stand alone stores. My brother, for one, loves them, though why one would eat food they have to eat at a mall outside of a mall is beyond me). At almost all the stores you are assaulted by sycophantic help (my sister-in-law, for example, was harassed about a $400 'leather' jacket that was 30% off. Her polite rejection was too polite, because apparently she could have saved another 30% if she was willing to open a credit card), but the worst, and in most case the funniest assault are the pop-up booths in the middle of the mall, where you can get anything from hair to your face embroidered on you underwear to a massage, because who doesn't want a relaxing massage while hundreds of strangers walk by.
In my case, I was assaulted by one of those hand-lotion face-crap booths. My sugar was low (I am diabetic) and I was eating some chocolate covered gummy bears that I bought at another booth for far too much money, because my sugar was low and I wholly misunderstood whatever credit card interest rate like pricing scheme the place operated under. So, I was meandering down the mall 'road', wondering what exactly I am going to do with $15 of chocolate covered gummy bears, when another booth person, clearly perceiving my weakness having already bought from one booth, offered me a free sample of lotion. I said yes, of course, at which point she started to rub my hands not with the free lotion, but with wet sand to ready my hands for said free lotion. The sand was special sand from Israel (because we don't have any sand here in America) with things in it that gave it its special properties (maybe this specialness of sand is the reason why the Jews were so happy that Moses made them wander the desert for 40 years after running away from their owners on an overground railroad). So while I was having my hands rubbed by this Israeli woman with Israeli sand she proceeded to ask me how my day was, why I was at the mall, and what I did. I told her I was a teacher, at which point she perked up because her mother had been a teacher before going into engineering. I retorted, with my usually modesty that masks my massively inflated ego and sense of self, that I did not have the mind to be an engineer, at which point she said something like, "well, we all cannot be smart" which, to be honest, almost sold me on whatever crap was in the sand that she was trying to sell me. So after massaging my hands with sand for a minute (how long the stuff needed to work itself into me) she wanted me to marvel at how soft my hands are, apparently because of the specialness of the sand. They were, to her credit, quite soft, but when I pointed out to her that I am pretty sure that if I used any abrasive material, like, I don't know, any other sand, the effect would be the same. She was not wholly happy about my deduction, but lotioned me up anyways and I was sent on my way. Of course, I now had throbbing, greased up hands that completely prevented me from eating my gummy bears for my low blood sugar, which was the whole reason I was in the mall in the first place, but at least I knew I am not as smart as an engineer.
The worst thing about malls though, is their deadness. They are static by design, and while I ironically use the language of architecture to describe them, they use the same language in their patterns (here I am borrowing heavily on the ideas, aesthetics, philosophy and the terminology of Christopher Alexander, probably the best living architect. Alexander became loved by computer programmers in the early 80's because he talked and wrote about the patterns he saw both in nature and in civilization, things like how city streets branch like trees, ebbing and flowing. I actually came across him in a philosophy class taught by a philosophy professor/computer programmer where the assigned text was Alexander's Timeless Way of Building, and in case you were wondering what he means by 'way', the way of the tao is what we are talking about. If you want to know how Taoistic Alexander is, he closes the book talking not about building anything, but about how when you cut strawberries, the thinner you slice them the better they taste because of the increased surface area. And if you want to know what Alexander has done with all of his money, he owns one of the finest collections of early Turkish rugs in the Western world, and has written about them in a book titled A Foreshadowing of the 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets that is out of print, but costs a paltry $400 used. I hope one day to be able to own the book, but much more affordable is his Timeless Way of Building, which I recommend as highly as a person can recommend a book. I actually no longer have a copy, or I no longer have a good copy because I gave my good copy to a former student who I thought would understand and be enriched by it the most, and I can no longer find my bad, excessively highlighted undergraduate copy as it is buried in a box in my attic. Alexander is most famous for getting into an argument with another architect, Peter Eisenman, where Alexander said Eisenman was "fucking up the world" by making ugly, inhumane buildings. In the same debate, Eisenman claims proportion and symmetry make him uncomfortable which should give you some idea asto the state of the souls of the people designing, or fucking up, the world around us). It is the deadness of malls, their lack of the 'quality without a name' that makes them the most assaultive in their post-modern echo of streets and town centers. They have no connection with the natural world, no connection to humanity, and no ability to change or alter. Even Detroit, being taken back by nature in some parts, is alive because it is nearly impossible to kill something built with the pattern language all architecture speaks with, and this place
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| Civita di Bagnoregio |
is an almost residentless 'city' that is actually falling off the side of the little hill it is on (that window in the background looks out onto the air where used to look into a home), but you would never say a mall, filled with people, is more alive than this place, that is, unless you have a ugly, distorted soul like Eisenman.
On a sidenote, today in class one of my male students had Abercrombie sweatpants and a female student on him, and she needed to get off because class was ending in 5 minutes and he needed to be able to walk.
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