This morning, obliged to take a roundabout route in to NigeCorp - the Corp that never sleeps - I found myself on the Sunday morning sidewalks of Croydon (truly, as the great Kristoferson says, There ain't nothing, short of dying....). This mini-Megalopolis gets weirder, more futuristic and more disorienting every time I reluctantly set foot in it. But the weirdest thing was making my way through an open, still deserted shopping mall. Without the shops open and the movement of people around the vast space, these malls make no sense at all - and, heaven knows, they are not made for getting through or out of; they're designed purely to suck you in and draw you through the entire 'retail experience' before spitting you out, lighter by a walletful. A mall when it is not performing this function looks like nothing - a gleaming nothing, all vitrine and fascia, void and without meaning, a purely retail topography, bathed in denatured light.
I did, after several bewildering changes of level and direction, find my way through and out, onto the street - where, miraculously, in the midst of a world with no apparent meaning or purpose but consumption, and dwarfed by the gleaming skyscrapers all around, this survives. 'Qui dat pauperi non indigebit' is the motto over the entrance. What would stand at the entrance of the monument malls of our age? 'Shop, you bastards'? Fortunately, these unreal spaces will not live so long...
Sunday, January 20, 2008
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Jim Crace has a whole novel about this phenomenon, Nige. Check out "Arcadia."
ReplyDeleteO yes - I only know it by the title. Thanks Susan.
ReplyDeleteTo most people ( that is most sane people ) Birmingham Central Library is an ugly concrete box but when the council proposed to knock it down protestors emerged to insist it was part of the nations heritage. Mark my words, Nige, there are people now living who thrill to the sight of a shopping mall and who will demand their preservation.
ReplyDeleteThere was a nice article on the mall in the Xmas issue of The Economist.
ReplyDeleteThanks Johnny - I've printed that for later reading. Good to see 'and fall' in the title...
ReplyDeleteAn excellent piece, Nige. It's true that much of modern life seems dedicated to abstractions like 'spending money' and the actual people required to embody & serve this abstraction feel as out-of-place as they would on an alien planet. As you say, much of the modern urban environment 'makes no sense at all'.
ReplyDeleteThere are old colleges, shops, museums, hospitals, that have aesthetic power, but so many modern buildings seem to have been designed by computer programmes; or aliens; or human beings who may as well be aliens. There's simply no trace of the human in them, they are purely dedicated to their abstractions.