“Secret Mall Apartment,” a Protest for Place
modernagejournal.com
modernagejournal.com
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-accidental-room/
That's sociopathic.
I'm still processing the whole thing myself to be honest, it was all quite a lot, traumatic, but once day I'll write a book about it.
> Dardaris had entrusted her pooches to the care of a dog-sitter, who was Tang’s then-girlfriend, in the fall of 2019 while she acted in a play in South Carolina, she previously told The Post.
> Tang snuck into his girlfriend’s apartment when she wasn’t home and viciously tortured Dardaris’s white-furred companions Oct. 24, 2019.
> After fatally beating Alex, Tang was accused of taking Frankie to the building’s rooftop and punching, throwing and kicking him.
And he served no jail time and just got a slap on the wrist. Completely insane behavior, who does that?
It reads very much like two parties got into one startup for different reasons. The OP wanted to make some money, others felt there were other motivations to pursue, OP stopped paying attention (or never had the trust of the other parties) and it all fell apart.
You got someone who is known to "fight against the man" in an an anti-social way, that has self proclaimed anti-capitalist tendencies, and that joins the ultimate instance of capitalism of all, ventured backed startup
what could go wrong
"Getting he ass 4: Chasing ideologues"
And yes, unless they were running their own generator somehow, which the article doesn’t seem to imply, they were stealing
I applaud this kind of creative individualism. It should scare the people who think they're entitled to private property even when someone smarter comes along to whistle their same tune.
If the little rat fools the big rat into losing, they still lost. In business, in resource competition and in legal proceedings too.
Please edit swipes out of comments. It's one of the first and most important things we ask for in the Comments section of the guidelines.
You could speculate, automatically snapping to the least charitable assumptions, or you could actually watch it and find out.
(Everything in the apartment was purchased, and they anonymously gave money to the mall management every month by slipping an envelope of cash under the office door saying "thanks for the utilities.")
No. That's apples and oranges, especially when you're talking about feelings. "Your crawl space" is part of a very intimate and personal space: your home. This space (a void of the type where construction workers don't clean up their trash) was part of a impersonal and pseudo-public space: a shopping mall. Your analogy doesn't hold up.
It's a very interesting piece. Here we are talking about it, it's kind of interesting to figure out, what does "palmotea" define as "pseudo-public space"?. In my experience in art practice, it is hard to participate in a conversation with people who define things by what they are NOT.
That said, to me, a great strength of a lot of performance art is its ability to attract high drama personalities. But it is tautological to say that drawing the participation of high drama personalities occurs because the art trades on obnoxiousness?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privately_owned_public_space
> ...the phrase in its broadest sense can refer to places, like shopping malls and hotel lobbies, that are privately owned and open to the public, even if they are not legally required to be open to the public.
Otherwise, you're kinda going off the rails. My one and only point is there are important differences between a home's crawl space and a weird unused space in a shopping mall that make your specific appeal to "how your wife will feel" invalid.
This secret mall apartment is more akin to a homeless guy having a hidden camp in a verge near a highway than anything to do with anyone's home. If you're going to appeal to how someone would feel, you've got to get the emotion right.
Either way it doesn’t matter. Even if they did everything completely by the book within their moral framework, they are still taking something and keeping it for themselves.
Imagine if they had bought out an old strip mall, church, etc. and converted it into a makerspace, an art studio, a shelter, a daycare, etc., and ran it off donations. Think about how much more powerful of a message that would be. Yes, we can defeat capitalism, by reclaiming space and giving it back to a community which is self-supporting. Go forth and build things for others instead of yourself.
Nope, was much edger to sit around in a concrete room and play video games, though. Needed the rush of pretending to be a movie star and going where you’re not supposed to. If you want something, just take it.
If you think there is a better community to be made, make it. If yours would be the better movie, then shoot it. If your moral framework is superior, then live with it. When you bitch about the morality of something you can't control, you are contributing less to society than wastoids playing Crash Bandicoot in an abandoned Five Below.
I’m not claiming to contribute to society, or make some grand statement, or re-define anything. The artists are. They have a higher bar to clear.
It pisses me off because they’re so smug about being confidently wrong. It would be one thing if they were just scrappy thieves and lived up to it, but they are also arrogant rat bastards who feel the need to lecture others. Fuck them and all their self-absorbed, Kombucha-chugging Hollywood cronies.
I had much the same feeling reading Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this Book. It was not enough to say “Here’s how to steal from old people and grocery stores.” He had to say, “Here’s how to steal from old people and grocery stores, and also here’s why you are totally justified in doing so because They are evil and different from Us, The Good Guys.” It was sickening.
This art project was in response to real estate developers taking the sspaces that they already had in old warehouses and knocking them down to build this mall. If you're interested in getting more information about what they actually did and why instead of what you assume they did and why, you should watch the movie. The worst that's going to happen is it's going to confirm every superficial assumption you're making about them.
I'm not saying I agree with that position, I'm saying that's a position that is at least internally consistent (if at odds with our current legal framework.)
for years i had been wondering why we didn’t have apartments/condos directly attached to malls, particularly in cold climates, so when the articles first started coming out about this it definitely scratched an itch. the movie has a ton of video footage they filmed back when they were using the space, including footage of them sneaking the couches, furniture, and 1000s of pounds of cinder blocks in. it’s pretty gripping in that “omg can they pull this off!!??” kind of way.
I have heard that Manhattan has buildings like that, as well.
For the simple practical reason of going outside is somewhere between deeply unpleasant and actually dangerous.
Whittier, Alaska is a good example.
Having never seen the movie myself, I can sympathize to the take in the linked article. Once I finally spent time in a major city as someone who grew up in more rural suburbia, I could see how entire buildings and districts "switched off" for certain parts of the day or week, disused, underutilized, and segmenting society off into neat little pockets of specific activities - just like suburbia does. It's cold and lifeless, compared to the "lived-in" feelings of more international metros (NYC springs to mind as the only American equivalent, and even that's disappearing one building at a time), and I could totally see why a rebellious artist (or several) might protest a building designed to operate for a third of the week just to remain lifeless the other two-thirds.
More recently, an early mall in Providence (within walking distance of the mall in the article) was converted to tiny apartments: https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-first-shopping-mall...
This is an extremely strange framing; there's nothing anti-left in caring about sick children and the victims of terrorism.
There might be other places in Honolulu. Because space has such a premium there, there are a lot of odd/conforming layouts in many different buildings, that it could be very easy to construct something in a corner or dead-end.
There are many walkable parts to the city and bus transportation, many people get by without cars there.
Just don't add to the homeless population there please. It's sad to see families with children in diapers, living in tents at a park :-/ It is not a place to "re-invent" or "discover" yourself, or "start-over".
the Freedom Tunnels where the crew did their filming are miles and miles of unused tunnels under Manhattan, formerly used for trains. once the trains stopped using them people built entire shanty towns, the director of Dark Days got thousands of hours of footage of the people inside one of these shanty towns. it’s amazing what the crew got footage of. people building entire little shanty houses and little villages. wild stuff.
i mean, i wouldn’t have lived there, but id be lying if i didnt admit a part of me finds it amazing what they threw together. for years, entire secret shanty villages right under the city with small village sized populations.
It's fine to say you did something cool because you could, in fact the coolest things are done just because. Adding commentary that it was a protest for stolen / wasted space, spare me the minutes please
Go read about the Paris Commune, Villa Road, Pieds Plats, Frances Street, or that group who squatted in NYC until the city capitulated and turned the buildings into low income housing.
What evidence do you have that they aren't genuine about their reasons, given it's not at all uncommon for squats to exist as a form of protest?
Art can exist for the purpose of protest. Art can exist for the purpose of profit. Art can exist "for the lulz".
Who made you the arbiter of art?
Jeez, you'd look at Guernica today and complain Picasso was an SJW with an attitude like that.