While enclosed shopping malls suspended space, time, and weather, Disneyland went one step further and suspended reality. Any geog...raphic, cultural, or mythical location, whether supplied by fictional texts (Tom Sawyer's Island), historical locations (New Orleans Square), or futuristic projections (Space Mountain), could be reconfigured as a setting for entertainment. Shopping malls easily adapted this appropriation of "place" in the creation of a specialized theme environment. In Scottsdale, the Borgata, an open-air shopping mall set down in the flat Arizona desert, reinterprets the medieval Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano with piazza and scaled-down towers (made of real Italian bricks).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shopping malls are liquid TVs for the end of the twentieth century. A whole micro-circuitry of desire, ideology and expenditure fo...r processed bodies drifting through the cyber-space of ultracapitalism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then it doesn't Matter that the deaths come in the wrong order. All has been so easily... Written about. And you find the right order after all: play, the streets, shopping, time flying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with obje...cts, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall w...as opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the futu...re which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future--with a shopping center for twice the population, with a school building already built, with churches constructed, with parks and playgrounds and swimming pools. These were as essential to building a suburb as the prematurely grand hotel had been to building a city in the wilderness. In large developments where the developer had a plan, and even in the smaller developments, there was a new kind of paternalism: not the quasi-feudal paternalism of the company town, nor the paternalism of the utopian ideologue. This new kind of paternalism was fostered by the American talent for organization, by the rising twentieth century American standard of living, and by the American genius for mass production. It was the paternalism of the market place. The suburban developer, unlike the small-town booster, seldom intended to live in the community he was building. For him community was a commodity, a product to be sold at a profit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have been a-shopping ... all this morning, to buy silks, caps, gauzes, and so forth. The shops are really very entertaining, es...pecially the mercers; there seem to be six or seven men belonging to each shop; and every one took care, by bowing and smirking, to be noticed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »