ground zero
On a recent business trip to Beaverton, Oregon, I found myself in the Streets of Tanasbourne surrounded by the comfortable and disturbing signs of the Gap, Banana Republic, Macey’s, Sunglass Hut, Hot Topic, the Macaroni Grill, and P.F. Chang’s. The [dis]comfort I experienced orbits the idea that simultaneously there is something both very wrong and very right about being able to walk into a clothing store, which exists in an eerie echo of our local Gateway a thousand miles from home, and buy the same unbranded, black t-shirt I purchase in Salt Lake City. If the mental conflict is not “right” per se, then it is convenient so extreme as to affect the façade of “right.”
One night, after training, I drove in widening circles in search of a local eatery for about an hour, after which, I wound up back at the Macaroni Grill. Earlier in the day, I asked around the vendor’s office for recommendations for a good place to go for dinner. The responses returned were all national chain restaurants. I was not of a mind to eat the simulation of ethnic cuisine reduced to the pap of the lowest common denominator. So I drove through the evolution of strip malls until hunger returned me to a known quantity at which I might find the approximation of food within a generously loose definition of my self-imposed eating regimen.
In the early ‘80s, before the world moved on, and when the Olive Garden was new to Texas, I recall driving an hour to eat at the closest location. Because my wife is partial to the idea of the Olive Garden (“You’re family here.”), I am reminded how mediocre their menu is a few times a year. I doubt any thoughts or questions of quality would have passed through the mind of me then, before the Wall fell. These days, though, the duality which permits me to both enjoy the unknown or to drift on autopilot through the sargasso gulfweed of the known, is of interest to me, watching myself.
Our culture seems hell bent on forcing the masses into the pyramid’s point of Hegelian unification. Anything genuinely new seems to be co-opted into the blender of the world, pulverized, homogenized, and returned for mass consumption, simplified to the single parting line of the simplest of moulds.
The evolution of the strip mall from elongated, open boxes to cleverly but uniformly disguised open boxes pushes us in the direction of unification. The gussying up of the building’s front seems to have elevated the act of shopping/consumption to the destination and experience of shopping, safely replicated within an extremely narrow band of structural DNA. This makes it safe for anyone from anywhere to walk into any national chain without the fear of the unknown.
Another evening on my Beaverton trip, I drove into Portland to see Powell’s Bookstore, and I was glad to find the bookstore laid bare and sprawling over an entire city block. It was good to wander, to refer to a map to find kinds of books in which I was interested, to ask for directions, and to not be in any of a thousand Barnes & Nobles.