Uninteresting Places
popula.com
popula.com
I don't know... does she have a hot ass?
I apologize.
Vaporwave etc is absolutely fascinating.
It's also dead now.
That kind of mix of nostalgia and disdain is the essence of Sedaris, i think... A cloying love for the past with a solid recognition and disdain for the terrible parts of it. Mid-century modernism accompanied with a side of unrelenting homophobia. The familiar atmosphere of home, suffused with the cigarette smoke that will eventually, slowly, painfully kill your mother.
Like most comedy, there's a question of punching up vs punching down. Punching up is funny: sticking it to the homophobes is great. But punching down is mean and contemptible... So it all comes down to whether you, in the audience, see Sedaris as a survivor/escapee of suburbia, or as some New York literati come to talk about how much your mall sucks.
"Punching up" vs "punching down" is this weird trope that materialized in the past couple years as a way to argue "making fun of MY preferred groups is not allowed." But there are many successful professional comedians who don't agree with it, and "punching down" on the rubes is in fact a time honored genre of comedy...
I think the mall is such a uniquely American phenomenon. As you write about, it's been the community center for so many normal people in the past and those times are changing. In the homogeneous country I'm from, that place used to be the church, now it's probably the pub. In the US, while there are many churches, they don't seem to be the place where people meet across communities - that was the mall.
What we have in common is that whether it's the US, or where I'm from, these communities are dividing and moving online and it's worrying. Having the liberal elite come in an sneer doesn't help, in fact it's a symptom of the issue. The liberal elite (which I guess I'm a part of) are the ones least affected by this fraction and division and the ones most easily able to pay their way out.
Thanks for writing.
The cultural/economic elite are, like you say, cushioned somewhat from this. For example, a membership to "The Wing" in NYC or other expensive social clubs provides that physical space based in a shared identity. In my town, an area that was once a thriving arts district with inexpensive warehouse spaces for galleries, co-ops, etc. has been replaced with numerous luxury hotels and housing/businesses that cater to well-off students.
I'm left wondering how we can create popular alternatives that provide the basis for social cohesion. Re: the mall, if people can't at least have a place to bump into each other in line or sit at the food court together, I worry we'll continue along a bad path. I work in parks and recreation so I gravitate to public parks as a solution. They're places where it's normal to strike up a conversation with a stranger, there's no pressure to spend money and so on. There's been a conflict here over a restaurant and apartment/business complex being built into our main downtown park, drawing criticism that the park is effectively being privatized.
Obviously I'm not a social scientist, these are things I'm exploring from my perspective while watching a city change over the years. But COVID especially has me thinking about how we will rebuild public life and avoid an existence where we are connected primarily by social media and understanding life through the superficial aesthetic/media categorizations it fosters.
Non-place or nonplace is a neologism coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to refer to anthropological spaces of transience where the human beings remain anonymous and that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places".
https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/course...
From what I've read online the inclusion of shopping malls is a bit contentious because for many friends they served as a central meeting & hangout place. And as a result of that kind of transcend their primary purpose. I can certainly see why people hold a strong nostalgic (possibly even melancholic?) attachment to malls in particular.
Now I live in Singapore, another place with heat, humidity, rain, mosquitoes, and reptiles eager to ruin your day. What it has that Tallahassee doesn't: literally dozens of malls. :)
It’s hard to defend the existence of malls. I think they’re a symptom of larger problems concerning community design. I also think that they encourage excessive commercialism. Still, none of that changes what the mall means to me.
A typical exciting night went like this: parents dropped us off and picked us up (too young to drive). Sometimes I'd carpool with friends, sometimes we would just meet there.
We might catch a movie (two screens were typical, maybe 3, so they could fit a theatre attached to a mall unlike today's 24-screen monsters).
Then we would hit the mall video arcade -- some malls even had two arcades! -- then the ice cream shop or Orange Julius ... this was before food courts... then browsing or shopping at KB Toys toy stores, Spencer Gifts, and Encore or Walden Books (especially the Dungeons & Dragons section in the book stores).
But the primary reason for going was to socialize. We would pass other groups of kids walking up and down the mall like us, looking for something do but really just enjoying being together but never admitting that to each other. That wouldn't be cool.
Sometimes we knew those other groups of kids, sometimes not, and on rare occasions a fight might break out or at least a chase through the mall.
I didnt go into the department stores really, unless they had a toy section or maybe a sports section, but i think the girls went into them for makeup, etc. Claire's didnt exist yet and neither did Victoria's Secret or Target.
When it was time to go, we'd call the parents on pay phones if we hadn't prearranged a pickup time, then wait outside if it was summer.
I remember seeing E.T. in theatres in this manner in the summer of 1982. And later, Rocky III.
Simple memories of fun childhood times when we were learning independence.