Vacation II: Day 8 – That’s just the start

The usual drill for Saturdays, vacation or not, is that Maura goes shopping with her mother, and I stay home an complete my list of weekly chores in quiet solitude. On this Saturday, however, the alternator on Maura’s mom’s car shit the bed, and I found myself accompanying my wife to Market Basket and the Burlington Mall.

I used to visit the Mall quite a bit, as it housed the only Electronics Boutique, hobby store, and Suncoast Video in the immediate vicinity. In recent years, my trips to that one-stop temple of retail commerce dropped off to almost never, due to the shrinking level of disposable income that came with home ownership, the stores I frequented going belly up, and the ease of simply ordering what I want off the internet. My long abstention from mall-going gave today’s visit an aura of hyper-reality that I found hard to shake off.

It’s strange to see place which serves a traditionally middle class suburban demographic attempt to posit itself as “upscale.” That goes a long way toward explaining the Mall’s high turnover of rental occupants. A good third of the shops or restaurants that had been there on my previous visit were gone, either replaced by something new or obliterated by seamlessly constructed barriers sporting an Orwellian “COMING SOON: MORE CHOICES” in pastel green paint along their entire length. I suppose it’s an inevitable consequence of the fallacious “If you build it, they will come” marketing dictum, because I don’t see the chubby, balding dads wearing System of a Down t-shirts, the various soccer moms conducting fierce holding actions against the onset of middle age, or the mallrats resembling animate Bratz dolls, which together represent the majority of the mall’s clientele, rushing out to the grand opening of a store dedicated entirely to selling overpriced crystal geegaws.

...and so another dream dies in the painful throes of a defaulted small business loan, clearing space for the next contestant in the unending game of Capitalist Darwinism.

The unrealistic pretensions of class can partially be blamed on the petty tyrannies of local planning boards, who are more inclined to roll over for projects pitched as “high end.” The same folks who finger the rejection stamp during the entire duration of a proposal for a new Dunkin Donuts will fall all over themselves in offering concessions and easements for a granted-to-fail-within-a-year boutique.

Yesterday night, on the way back from dropping Maura off with a friend, I swung by a recently constructed “lifestyle shopping center” built where the Burlington Raytheon campus used to be. What, you may ask, is a “lifestyle shopping center?” It certainly isn’t a strip mall with delusions of grandeur, anchored by establishments that play off an upscale reputation while almost never frequented by the truly rich. Strip malls are crass and cater towards the proles; “lifestyle shopping centers” feature stores like Coldwater Creek and Thai restaurants.

I visited the place because there’s a Borders there, and while I’m not keen on big chain bookstores (or paying full price when I can get something cheaper on Amazon), there was a new Horus Heresy book released a couple weeks back. Amazon doesn’t discount Black Library (which publishes the series) titles, so I decided it would be just as easy to do cash and carry for the title, and should I happen to see anything else that caught my eye…

Borders is Borders, and there’s no sense at yelling at the rain for being wet, but what really threw me off about the shopping center was its design. The place is laid out like a Mediterranean villa crossed with Fort Courage, which is a bit of a mindfuck for a provincially-skewed New Englander like myself.

Malls (along with television) have long been the hammer and anvil by which American culture gets panel-beaten into a uniform flatness (which is then sprayed with a glossy Californian sheen). The only thing I came away with from my college linguistics class was that it was determined that the ubiquity of generic teenspeak was carried from the Left Coast across the country by the vector of overlapping shopping hubs. The process has usually been syncretic and gradual, though. The pastel-and-white faux Florentine arcade of the Burlington Mall is downright subtle compared to the springing up of a red-tile and stucco-bedecked monstrosity in the land of Minutemen and colonial farmhouses.

The entire time I was there I felt like a tourist in my own homeland, completely cut loose from any sense of locational context. Indeed, if I was grabbed off the street on a balmy summer evening, blindfolded, and dumped off in the parking lot, I wouldn’t be able to tell if I was in Riverside, California; Gary, Indiana; or a mile and a half from my house. It’s nothing that hasn’t been remarked upon before, but the sensation was so unsettling I felt compelled to mention it. It was as if I had stepped into the world of Richard Matheson’s “The Creeping Terror” (cited in Mike Davis’s excellent Ecology of Fear), where fungal spores turn the entire continental United States into one big Los Angeles.

In the story, Bostonians chose mass suicide over assimilation. After these past forty-eight hours, I can totally dig their reasoning.

The Freeze – This Is Boston, Not LA (from This Is Boston, Not LA, 1982) - I'm always amazed and delighted when I see this compilation get props from punk fans around the globe, even if most of the tracks are fast-rather-than-good hardcore. This brief mission statement of a title track was used (minus the final f-bomb) in TV commericals for the Newbury Comics chain of stores during the early 1980's.

Sparks – Shopping Mall of Love (from Music You Can Dance To, 1986) - Rollercoaster was on cable the other night, and that otherwise lame excuse for POV shots featured a performance by the Mael brothers. It was nice diversion from the monotony, and perhaps the filmmakers would have been better served by inverting the proportion of scenes featuring roller coasters to scenes featuring the band performing.