Poetry reading

I saw Noah Cicero and Tao Lin read tonight, along with many others from the 3:Am poetry magazine. They were all interesting and different. I bought Noah's book and I am going to read it tonight. Ok.

I am going to Boston this weekend--to drink a lot of beer and walk up Beacon Hill. I am reading the Harvard Design School's Guide to Shopping, which is edited by a guy named Rem Koolhaas who designs stores for Prada. The book is about how the modern urban experience is indistinguishable from the experience of shopping, and how in the near future there will be few public activities for people to perform besides shopping.

New York is like this. You walk through Soho, and I don't care how many small cafe's and galleries there are, it is basically a shopping conglomeration comprised of like 4 different corporations vying for customer appeal with their various brand names (Gap, Club Monaco, whatever). Walking around Soho, or up fifth avenue, or even through neighborhoods like Chelsea and the Meatpacking District, all one is capable of doing, really, is shopping. The non-retail buildings are all severly off-limits--accounting firms for the super-consumers or legal offices--and the fundamental properties of the shopping zones, which fluctuate based on customer needs, are impermanent and volatile. Stores close, stores change, stores maintain brand homogenaity while shifting product lines, but at the end of the day the modern urban experience is really based on the transitive yet singular properties of modern-day marketing.

Architecture and retail are basically opposites. Architecture is firm, atemporal, permanent, fixed, while retail demands constant and vigilant modifications. It exists to give the person a singular experience, and yet different architecture yields different experience. Stores incorporate various design elements, and even the occasional set-piece, stores ultimately present themselves as white spaces capable of being shifted at a moments notice. They are always changing. However, despite the plasticity of the store, all stores yield the same experience. Walking through a store is, in a way, comparable to walking through an art gallery. Most art galleries are made to show of the paintings in as invisible a manner as possible.

But retail is hardly in the business of engaging its customers intellectually with its products. I do not mean that clothing design lacks expression; I mean that the ideal manner of manipulating a consumer in a retail environment is to get the person to forget who he is, forget the outside world, forget what he is looking at, and ultimately to forget and ignore his conscious rational thought process as he purchases the product based on the subconscious scripts of how one acts in a store. Every retail experience is the same experience, despite the malleability of the medium. Architecture, the ultimate static art-object--it can't be moved or taken out of its context-- derives its potency by ensuring each architectural experience is different.

Walking into any store, from Armani to J.C. Penny, a person experiences essentially the same phenomenon. Basically, one is coerced, through a lack of stimulus, to make the purchase. Think about it: the background music is made not to be listened to, the air temperature is calibrated to make a person forget that the store is, shockingly, located somewhere on earth that has weather, the various passages through the store are easily traversed and fairly seamless, and the final act of purchasing, ideally with a credit card, should have as few hitches as possible. The ultimate non-experience.

This is why malls, and ultimately urban retail centers, die; retail works wonders so long as people are drawn to the location; as soon as boredom sets is, there goes the neighborhood. Furthermore, any modifications on the part of the stores are geared towards engaging a person only in a manner which is condusive to mindless purchasing.

Which is why New York, a city replete with stores and little else, kind of loses its allure for me. Unlike western European cities, which limit retail space and hours within a city, New York, and most American cities are idealized versions of the free market--that is, they are basically one giant marketplace. Which is a big fucking bore.

This will hurt American cities. New York's biggest tourist attraction is Times Square. Apart from the Broadway shows, most of the things people want to do on Times Square relate to shopping. Let's go to the M&M factory. Let's go to Toy's R Us. Let's go to that store with the gigantic stuffed bears. These are not experiences, however, in the vein of the Eiffel Tower, or the Empire State Building, or the Tower of London. These are carefully calibrated consumer non-experiences; they function to create that sense of wonder, sure, but at the end of the day, stores are itching for a sale. Therefore, they must continuously modify themselves to achieve their capitalist imperative of generating profit. In a city built from the connectivity of retail outlets, one essentially experiences the detritus of urbanity, the aspects of city life (short blocks, wide sidewalks, the sensation of being surrounded by buildings) that lend themselves to a more effective shopping experience.

These stores are not New York experiences, they are simply the best of the best retail experiences. Most people probably get all this. But considering that one of the principle manners of urban renewal is to bring a lot of retail into a city to bring the rich folks back to the streets, I am worried that America is setting itself up for more problems. Urbanity now equals shopping. And what does shopping equal? The quote I took from Koolhaas's guide and put in the heading of my last poem is the best summary: when you walk around a place of absolute vernacular integrity, where people are also shopping, you think of Disney World.


Ok. More Songs about Buildings and Food.