The basic remit of The Simpsons is to present a familiar, common experience in the backdrop of some outlandish premise. While the show has mixed up that balance a bit in recent years (ex) Bart sells secrets to the Chinese government because Homer won't buy him a new bike), back in the day, when it did things right, it felt very familiar. In Season 9 Episode 24, "Lost Our Lisa," Lisa is taken down a peg when she realizes that, despite her precautions to the contrary, she has inadvertently gotten on the wrong bus. The show really does a good job portraying her growing anxiety as she realizes she's desperately lost.
Today, I realized the same thing.
It started with getting metaphorically lost. Today, I did something I do very, very rarely: I went to the mall to try on some new clothes. Specifically, new jogging shorts. At the beginning of this jogging season, I had three pairs of jogging shorts, each a few years old. The first two succumbed rather quickly to holes and tears. The last pair persevered, briefly, but finally the holes (and smells--don't use a single pair of running shorts, folks) convinced me it was time to face my nemesis.
And nemesis it is. The mall is the Moby Dick to my Ahab, and like Ahab, I responded by staying away from it at all costs. (Okay, I never read Moby Dick.) I hate traveling out of my way to get there. I hate depending on strangers for help with shoes and changes rooms. I hate looking at myself in the mirror and deciding whether these clothes suited my personality, and then having to decide what my personality was and whether I had one. Really, every shopping experience is an existential crisis waiting to happen.
But I went. Reluctantly, sluggishly, I went. I walked through the grocery store, and bought Portobello Burgers (which they don't sell at the closer grocery store, than you very much, Sobeys). I went to the GameStop and pointedly did NOT buy a game (which took a lot of the willpower I'd reserved for the clothes, sadly). And then, armed with my $100 gift certificate (thanks for the birthday present folks! Even if it was for the 2010 birthday. Did I mention I really avoid shopping?), I stormed in, bought two pairs of shorts, and left. I don't want to talk about prices, because 1) It's Sportcheck and 2) I think I overpaid, but let's just say there's not much of that giftcard left.
And then I had to take a bus back to the University, in which case I felt literally lost. Taking buses is still a new experience for me. September 2010 marked the first time I had a proper bus pass, and I still look at them with suspicion. I mean, pay money to get somewhere you can get with your own two feet? That's some racket, buddy. But at the same time, I recognize that they supply me with a mobility that even the bike doesn't. Coming out from the mall, I didn't know which bus to take. I'd taken the express line there, but I was fairly sure it didn't go back the same way (which, thinking on it now, is ridiculous; I know that express route, and it absolutely goes back that way). And the 9, my next safe bet, wasn't coming for another half hour. So, I got on to an unknown bus, the 31 line and hoped for the best.
I was reading for the first few minutes, so I didn't actually notice until a good way into the ride that I had no idea where I was. The street signs were unfamiliar, the streets foreign, and the people on the bus weren't students (most of my bus rides are to and from the university. Including this one, since the university is a bus hub. So I'm used to mostly seeing students for fellow passengers.) I felt like I'd stepped out from the world I knew into one I didn't. I thought I was working inside a system I knew, a system I had mastered, but I was faced with the realization that the world was more complex than I knew, that the city I thought I had understood had layers that were beyond my experience. I felt humbled, and disturbed. I felt lost. In short, and I'm not too proud to say this, I felt like a spikey-haired, yellow-skinned eight year old.
And then the bus turned up into a street I knew, and then we pulled up to the university, and I got on another bus and went home.
Sadly, the happy ending is rarely the narratively interesting turn.
Later Days.
Showing posts with label mall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mall. Show all posts
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
One Hundred Pages of Solicitude #5: Shopping Towns USA
"No democratic society can flourish without law and order which, when appleid to the physical environment, necessitates planning. In a complex and highly mechanized society environmental planning safeguards the basic human rights. By providing the best conditions for physical and mental health, it protects life. By establishing barriers against anarchy and the infringements of hostile natural and man-made forces, it protects liberty. By the creation of a humane environment it invites and encourages the pursuit of happiness." --Victor Gruen and Larry Smith
Today's century of scribbling is Shopping Towns USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers by Victor Gruen and Larry Smith. Published in 1960, the book is, essentially, a how-to guide for planning a mall. The first hundred pages cover the prerequisite elements: the knowledge the developer needs, choosing the location and site, getting the zoning permits, acquiring the tenants, and financing the affair. The second part, planning, I only read up to the planning team, the planning schedule, desinging the site, and a little bit of planning the surrounding areas.
I'll be honest: this book wasn't quite what I'd hoped for. What attracted me to this book wasn't so much its subject as its first author, Victor Gruen. For those not intimately versed in the history of modern commercial architecture (and really, if you're not, then what have you been doing with your life?) Victor Gruin is the architect responsible for creating the modern mall, or at least popularizing its use in the USA. A search of the all-knowing wikipedia told me that Gruen was a committed socialist until moving to the States, and I thought that this background made an odd fit for the creation of a site destined to be associated with the worst of American consumerism and capitalist consumption. Thus, any book he wrote on design, I reasoned, would probably be an interesting read.
Sadly, it wasn't quite to be. Mostly, the disconnect is that I was looking for something theoretical, whereas Gruin and his partner, Smith (an economist), were much more interested in creating a practical model. Thus, we have chapters on the basic components needed to create a shopping center to begin with. Some of the principles are interesting enough. They emphasize unity and communication between the principal designers, the architect, the entrepreneur, and the real estate developer. And they are very big on designing the building so that people are forced to leave their cars when traveling from store to store. After all, they say, people in cars aren't buyers; pedestrians are buyers. But all in all, it's not what interests me in the subject of spatial design.
The introduction is a little more interesting, in terms of theoretical fodder. Gruin and Smith see the shopping center not only as a source of commerce, but also as a source of community, and a response to decentralization of cities, and suburbanization in particular. The effect of the suburb, they argue, is to make people more and more remote, and the shopping center fixes that problem by bringing people together. Their model for comparison is the Greek market, or agora. And, in fact, it reminds me of yesterday's reading, from McLuhan. At one point, he describes an anthropology case where an African village argued for the removal of indoor piping; they didn't like the way it stopped them from gathering at the communal well. At the same time, I don't think McLuhan would have supported Gruin's model; as he says a few times, you don't respond to present situations by borrowing ideas from the past.
From an upbringing in rural Saskatchewan, I have a different take on malls than most of you city-slicker types. The closest mall was a half-hour drive away, and it paled in comparison to the malls another hour drive away in Saskatoon. As I grew up, I had the strange privilege of watching store after store in that mall get replaced by temporary outlets, lower priced commodities, or, more commonly, nothing at all. Walking through a mall on its way to closure is an eery experience. There's a definite tie between community pride and the local mall (also national pride, as shown in the quotation above), and there's a strange feeling when going through a nearly collapsed mall that the community has failed. That's when you realize just how inoculated we are in capitalist ideology, that even the site of failed commerce creates a sense of anxiety. It's a somewhat ridiculous response, given that the real community businesses are usually single-shop stores located elsewhere, but when they go bust, it's just a single business going down. When the mall goes, it's an entire network that's gone. But I suppose malls in general are going down everywhere, as a result of decentralization and electronic commerce, and so forth. I think it's a little different in a small town, though, because it's easier to see the decline of the entire area in the fall of a business.
Not that the dilapidated mall I'm referring to signaled the fall of this town, though. I think I'm just rambling a bit, so I'll switch tracks.
The book came to my attention when a video game book I was reading--"Die Tryin'" by Derek A. Burrill--had a chapter on the arcade and its relation to the mall, with Gruen mentioned as the founding force of mall activity. The death of the arcade is an often cited historical point in video game history, as it represents the shift from communal gaming happening in public to communal gaming online. But that's not what occurred to me when reading this book. Rather, my mind was drawn more to video games that featured malls, namely the Dead Rising series. I've talked about them before, so I won't do so here, but what really struck me was the similarities and differences in designing a real world commerce space and designing a video game space--I'm not the first to come to this revelation, but spatial design in video games is really a wide open field.
Notice how all discussions lead back to my research interests? That's the sign of an academic, all right.
Verdict: If you're looking for a guide on how to design a shopping center situated in the economic reality of 1960s America, this is the first place you should go. If you're looking for a guide on how to design a shopping center for 2010s America, try Amazon.
Would Read the Rest?: Maybe the case studies and epilogue. Otherwise, I'd be better off reading one of the biographies on Gruen, or maybe seeing if he wrote any retrospective books later in his career.
Later Days.
Today's century of scribbling is Shopping Towns USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers by Victor Gruen and Larry Smith. Published in 1960, the book is, essentially, a how-to guide for planning a mall. The first hundred pages cover the prerequisite elements: the knowledge the developer needs, choosing the location and site, getting the zoning permits, acquiring the tenants, and financing the affair. The second part, planning, I only read up to the planning team, the planning schedule, desinging the site, and a little bit of planning the surrounding areas.
I'll be honest: this book wasn't quite what I'd hoped for. What attracted me to this book wasn't so much its subject as its first author, Victor Gruen. For those not intimately versed in the history of modern commercial architecture (and really, if you're not, then what have you been doing with your life?) Victor Gruin is the architect responsible for creating the modern mall, or at least popularizing its use in the USA. A search of the all-knowing wikipedia told me that Gruen was a committed socialist until moving to the States, and I thought that this background made an odd fit for the creation of a site destined to be associated with the worst of American consumerism and capitalist consumption. Thus, any book he wrote on design, I reasoned, would probably be an interesting read.
Sadly, it wasn't quite to be. Mostly, the disconnect is that I was looking for something theoretical, whereas Gruin and his partner, Smith (an economist), were much more interested in creating a practical model. Thus, we have chapters on the basic components needed to create a shopping center to begin with. Some of the principles are interesting enough. They emphasize unity and communication between the principal designers, the architect, the entrepreneur, and the real estate developer. And they are very big on designing the building so that people are forced to leave their cars when traveling from store to store. After all, they say, people in cars aren't buyers; pedestrians are buyers. But all in all, it's not what interests me in the subject of spatial design.
The introduction is a little more interesting, in terms of theoretical fodder. Gruin and Smith see the shopping center not only as a source of commerce, but also as a source of community, and a response to decentralization of cities, and suburbanization in particular. The effect of the suburb, they argue, is to make people more and more remote, and the shopping center fixes that problem by bringing people together. Their model for comparison is the Greek market, or agora. And, in fact, it reminds me of yesterday's reading, from McLuhan. At one point, he describes an anthropology case where an African village argued for the removal of indoor piping; they didn't like the way it stopped them from gathering at the communal well. At the same time, I don't think McLuhan would have supported Gruin's model; as he says a few times, you don't respond to present situations by borrowing ideas from the past.
From an upbringing in rural Saskatchewan, I have a different take on malls than most of you city-slicker types. The closest mall was a half-hour drive away, and it paled in comparison to the malls another hour drive away in Saskatoon. As I grew up, I had the strange privilege of watching store after store in that mall get replaced by temporary outlets, lower priced commodities, or, more commonly, nothing at all. Walking through a mall on its way to closure is an eery experience. There's a definite tie between community pride and the local mall (also national pride, as shown in the quotation above), and there's a strange feeling when going through a nearly collapsed mall that the community has failed. That's when you realize just how inoculated we are in capitalist ideology, that even the site of failed commerce creates a sense of anxiety. It's a somewhat ridiculous response, given that the real community businesses are usually single-shop stores located elsewhere, but when they go bust, it's just a single business going down. When the mall goes, it's an entire network that's gone. But I suppose malls in general are going down everywhere, as a result of decentralization and electronic commerce, and so forth. I think it's a little different in a small town, though, because it's easier to see the decline of the entire area in the fall of a business.
Not that the dilapidated mall I'm referring to signaled the fall of this town, though. I think I'm just rambling a bit, so I'll switch tracks.
The book came to my attention when a video game book I was reading--"Die Tryin'" by Derek A. Burrill--had a chapter on the arcade and its relation to the mall, with Gruen mentioned as the founding force of mall activity. The death of the arcade is an often cited historical point in video game history, as it represents the shift from communal gaming happening in public to communal gaming online. But that's not what occurred to me when reading this book. Rather, my mind was drawn more to video games that featured malls, namely the Dead Rising series. I've talked about them before, so I won't do so here, but what really struck me was the similarities and differences in designing a real world commerce space and designing a video game space--I'm not the first to come to this revelation, but spatial design in video games is really a wide open field.
Notice how all discussions lead back to my research interests? That's the sign of an academic, all right.
Verdict: If you're looking for a guide on how to design a shopping center situated in the economic reality of 1960s America, this is the first place you should go. If you're looking for a guide on how to design a shopping center for 2010s America, try Amazon.
Would Read the Rest?: Maybe the case studies and epilogue. Otherwise, I'd be better off reading one of the biographies on Gruen, or maybe seeing if he wrote any retrospective books later in his career.
Later Days.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Shadow of the Bat, or, the Story of the Unsensible Purchase
When I was fourteen, I put out an order for Final Fantasy Tactics for the Playstation. Because of its rarity at the time, it was used, cost me $70, and took six weeks for them to find a copy. And I thought that it was the most effort I'd ever go to to buy a game.
I was wrong.
When I was twenty-three, I jogged to the nearest EB Games one wintery evening to get a copy of Dragon Warrior VII for the Playstation 2 on the first day of its release. They were out, but they said that the other store had one--the catch was that I had to make it there before 9:00, closing time, and it was already 8:30. It was a very, very quick run. And I thought that it was the most effort I'd ever go to to buy a game.
I was wrong.
Today, I paid an exorbitant amount for a deluxe edition copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum for the Xbox 360. (Folks, that's where the birthday money you gave me went. I'm sorry.) And if I ever put more effort into getting a video game, it will be because I'm stealing it from the Tower of London.
A friend of mine once complained that his family bred good value studding bulls, but no one local would ever come and take a look at them; they all went to places like Texas. I suggested that part of this was, when it comes to a really big, rarely repeated purchase, people don't just want the product, they want a journey, a story that shows all the effort they underwent to get that product. In the antique game, for example, you're selling the history as much as the object. In a similar vein, Michael Benedikt, in the book he edited, Cyberspace, says that in a true cyberspace, travel should not be instantaneous, because the journey is an important part of the human experience of travel.
We are both wrong.
Or, at least, we're both missing an important proviso: when the difficulty of the journey reaches a certain point, it's no longer a good story anymore, it's just a pain in the ass, and actually makes you resent the end product.
Wanna guess how this relates to me getting Batman?
My brother gave me a phone call yesterday to inform me that EB games was having a limited, half-off sale of the game. (Which was awesome of him, BTW.) Now, in the city of Blank, there are two EB games; they are 12 km from each other, and approximately 7 km each from my apartment. This will be important later. I decided to run out to one of them--literally. It was a good run, and best news of out this whole affair is that I'm back to being able to do 7km without much stress, which bodes well for future longer runs. Yes, I'm sweaty and disheveled and not really in any condition to be in a mall, but I wasn't going to be there for long.
Or so I thought. I talk to the clerk, and he tells me they're sold out, but expecting a second shipment by 2:00. It was, at this time, 11:00. So I myself some lunch, (I went to New York Fries; I've been craving them for ages. Not as good as I remember. So the second good bit of good news is that I've got that out of my system.) It was a long wait; thankfully, I had my Ipod, and a book on tape. (Chesterton's Club of Queer Trades. Review to follow. Preview of Review: that word meant something different back then.) At 2:00, I come back, and the guy says their shipment's been delayed, and probably won't get there till tomorrow. But he calls the second outlet, and they have a half dozen copies left--first come first serve.
Well, I've gone this far and this long. So decided to go to Mall B. It's 12 k, though, and adding the distance home from there, it would be 26 k total, which was not what I'd signed on for. So I went with the bus. (Good thing 3: got over mild phobia of public transport. It's not a phobia, it's just a distaste for paying money for something my feet do on their own.)But I wasn't carrying change, so I needed to get some cash back on a purchase. (Which I did at the Shoppers; final good thing, I got those razor blades I needed.) And then I was on the bus. I asked the driver if the bus went to the other mall, and she said yes. What I should have asked was if it was the fastest bus that went to the other mall. An hour later(slightly faster than I could have run it; very slightly), I was at mall B, glad once again for my Ipod and the melodic voice of Franz Ferdinand.
If the game had been there, this would have made a tolerable story, in which the final goal was reached. As it happened, the store had sold its last copy of the on-sale version 5 minutes before. (Bad thing 1) But they still had 2 $85 deluxe edition copies.
I shouldn't have. I know I shouldn't have. That much money would have bought one, maybe even two books off of my comps list. But before you judge me too harshly, remember that I had just spent 6 hours waiting for this moment. Six hours of mall people, bus people, and jogging. I needed to have something to show for my efforts. Even if it was a game I barely even wanted anymore. So I bought it. It turned out to be in this huge, cumbersome box in a bag, (bad thing 2), which meant my plan to run back home was even less of a good idea, which meant the bus again. Now, the store didn't offer cashback, and neither did the first five other stores I checked, so I had to make a withdrawal at the ATM, pay the service charge, then break the subsequent $20 with an inane purchase (Bad Thing 3) , all to get the change I needed.
Apparently, though, this bus changes its number half way through, so I had to get off while there was still two kilometers to walk with the big, awkward bag (Bad thing 4). One kilometer from my apartment, the handles break (Bad Thing 5). Five hundred meters from my apartment, I trip (I kid you not) and twist my ankle and hobble the last distance. (Final Bad. Bad: 6, Good: 4. And let's face it, they weren't that good.) As for the deluxe package, the biggest bonus seems to be the plastic batarang on a plastic stand. Totally not worth a 'deluxe' label. (Although it is sitting on top of my TV, because, really, what else am I going to do with it?) (That's also not quite true; though not advertised as such, the coolest part of the deluxe package is the faux-leather with string binding wallet that the manual comes in. I could find a use for that.)
So, after all that, how is the actual game? Can it be so good that it overcomes all the financial and emotional torment?
I have no idea. I need to catch up on all the comp reading I skipped first.
Later Days.
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