Journey to Stamford's Mall: Consumption and the City

                The scream of the alarm doesn’t wake me up, though it certainly establishes my mood.  What rouses me is the squeal of the reversing clothing truck making a deposit across the street.  Uniformed kids giggle and smack ropes on the school’s pavement below.  All I can see are the books, perhaps the wrong books but many of the right ones, covering my floor.  The truck screams on.  I rub bleary eyes and agree to a reluctant will, “Yes, I’ll call Dad.”  It has been too long—I should have called days ago.  We need to talk about malls.  I haven’t been to a mall in a long time and didn’t want to go back.  I’ve been debating what to write about for months now and I think I found it.

                 From the dustbin:  Maybe I’d write about being a hack tour guide.  I could rant and foam, “Long Islanders come to this museum simply to consume their grandparents’ past.  This isn’t a public good, it’s a disfigured saccharine nostalgia we now label immigration history.”  Sounds tedious.  At least people know something about their past, even if rosily revised. 

                Another dud, coffee shops.  Perhaps I could travel along Fourth Avenue—maybe the local stops— randomly exiting along the route.  I would inhale coffee beside coffee comrades and discover what lay beneath the hush of these crowded rooms.  Was there any caffeine solidarity?  Perhaps I could talk to people.  “Hey, how’s it going?  I’m working on a…”  Maybe from this assignment I could meet one, just one to connect with.  And between the vapors and slurps we could talk about it all:  school, ambition, writing, Murray Kempton, Christopher Hitchens, and New York faces that resemble gamblers who played a game and lost.  We could talk of coming from other places (no one left is really from New York) and we could tell each other what we hoped to do here.  I wonder what I would say?  Perhaps we could sweetly remember who we were and lament our strange becoming, from long before, in whichever “crabcrass frontier” we left:  two butterflies nostalgic for an earlier slug life. 

                 I walked to the toilet.  A protracted, rather dehydrated deposit.  I don’t’ trust the faucet water and can’t afford bottled.  In my pocket, a wallet with no money in it.  Consequently, no coffee shops.  The paper is due.  Damn it.  Back in the bedroom Lenin stares at me from the floor:  What is to be done? 

The cereal tastes like old gum.  Between insipid chews, I finally relent.  Okay, I will go to the mall.  He wants us to “consume” something, right?  I’ll say I did.  Twenty dollars spent on a round-trip ticket plus a five dollar “foot-long” for the ride.  That’s “consumption” enough, right? 

On the train, I snack between nappers whose open mouths hack and I-Pods tinkle.   I reach South Norwalk station in an hour and my girlfriend Emily is waiting.  She thinks I’ll buy her something at the mall.  A short ride away, there it is: the yellow hyphen of a traffic barrier beside our portal.  Welcome to Stamford Town Center!  Free parking.  Right on. 

                 The parking garage is like the one at Midway where, in a short time, Dad will pick me up for my last holiday break.  Real life, a life after school, is coming in May.  We’ll walk slowly from the airport and chat, like we did during my breaks from Teach for America in New Orleans.  He’ll be impressed that my flight was early and we’ll watch our breath disappear as we enter the car.  Charlie Wilson will sing us home and I’ll tell Dad about the mall, probably not about the assignment.  I’ll just tell him about the mall.

 Inside the mall, Emily enjoys watching me as I play the “stranger in a strange land” bit, scribbling notes and watching the ebb and pulse of Stamford’s “normal life.”  A life similar to what I remember so well.  I want to understand this mall and ones like it, to see it with new eyes.  I want to see who’s in it, and understand its inner workings.  

                 I approach a booth.  “Good morning.  Do you have a directory, maybe an information packet about the mall?”

               A small woman hands me a Directory.  Sponsored by BMW.  It reads, It’s better to look good than to look lost.  The woman in the booth has an ill-fitting bridge above naked bottom gums, “Enjoy your shopping.  Have a good day.”

                 I wonder if she grew up near the ramshackle tenements that were here before the mall.  Did she or someone she knows watch the bulldozers rip apart the playgrounds?  Maybe she’s the return of the repressed, a modern ghost with a gummy smile.  Maybe her family came here a century ago Jacob Lawrence-style:  riding the crowded trains, hoping to earn a living in the now closed and half-forgotten factories and shipyards.  Those long ago days when this country made things, not just sold them.  Maybe her family lived in the ghettos on the north end of Pacific and Canal before St. John’s towers—a glass and steel condominium—was plunked down in their place.  A new bedroom community for commuters.  A bedroom community.  A community of bedrooms is a community of secrets. 

                  Emily guides me upstairs.  Half-understanding why I’m here, she smiles and stands beside me, watching the shoppers below.   The interior ceiling rises upward like the hull of a mighty ship.  Gothic cathedrals did the same, stretching knaves to the sky in order to awe incoming worshippers.  I’m in a cathedral…of a kind.  And as I look out, I hear splashing, skating, walking, talking, singing, and ringing.  The spotless floors and plastic plants bring back the past, the malls I remember skipping through as a kid.  Wandering through and keeping in my Dad’s slow shadow, discovering new dynamic tenants.  Over the heads of shoppers I think of Larkin, too, asking in his old forsaken church, “For whom was built/This special shell?  For, though I’ve no idea/What this accoutered frowsty barn is worth,/ It pleases me to stand in silence here.” 

                  Here, in Stamford Town Center, there are 130 stores and restaurants to observe and 853,000 square feet to lurch across.  Hulking anchors like Macy’s and Saks are bright and perfumed.  In display cases, lithe mannequins wear Christmas boas.  Filene’s, a 160,000 square foot store (roughly a fifth of the mall) sits empty.  Closed in 2005, the hollow interior is shut and concealed, like a grandfather who dribbles.  My Dad would show me similar empty stores at his mall when I was a boy. 

                  For eighteen years he was the manager of “Marquette Mall,” a small center in our Indiana hometown.   A smoky dive like “Robin Hood” would go bankrupt and a shiny franchise would swoop down, like a cuckoo in a neighboring nest.  Dad would lock his office and then walk me through the mall to show me the transforming stores.  It was exhilarating watching those empty rooms reborn—the carpets uprooted, the bald walls covered, and the intestine wires dangling from the ceiling, waiting to be connected.  So much activity, so much movement.  I wanted to remember each rip in the carpet, each leftover receipt and where it lay—so that when the new store opened, I could run up to the very spot where I remembered it, and “see” its disappearance, like a mirage. 

                  All activity in Stamford’s mall is regulated and superintended.  Cameras, like shiny black nipples, roundly pop from the walls.  How many men sit hidden behind these walls, watching me watch them?  Do they notice?  Do they care?  The octagonal elevators have stripes of lights across them.  Fat women enter with handled paper sacks.  Abs like washboards cover the bag.  They push a button and the chamber swims up the wall like a hungry paramecium.  The escalators, those man-made waves, run and shine beside the elevators.  Each moves a group of Spanish-shouting kids down, down, and finally spits them onto checkered tiles.  The boys wear diamond-crusted crosses and walk quickly, smiling at one another.  One dramatically stops and rubs a spot of dirt off his shoe.  The girls cover their mouths, shut their eyes, and throw their heads back, laughing at the goofy boys.  They end up sitting near a large interior stage on one row of crowded bleachers.  A performance is beginning.

                   A choir of public school kids (who else could they be) sing off-tune, voices clanging against one another like bad wind chimes.   A bow-tied teenager in the third row, obviously a bathroom crooner, closes his eyes for a solo.  He’ll remember tonight’s mall crowd watching him, only him.  He’ll probably remember a larger crowd and he probably ignores their iced sodas, the soft belches, and the phone texts being sent.  His eyes are shut, after all.

                  The fountain at the center of the floor is brilliant in design and ingenuity.  A calming flow of water trickles and patrons pass.  It’s a calming talisman in this bright cathedral.  You don’t need to hear their thoughts.  What should I buy?  For whom?  How much should I spend?  Should I buy this for myself? Do you think it will fit?  Maybe we should look downstairs?  What do you think?  Will he like it?  But all is quiet but the singing and the trickling fountain.  Coins shimmer from its bottom like sunken treasure.  I wonder who plucks out the money?  What wishes are attached to those coins? If I plucked a penny from the water would the ceiling’s black nipples send men in ties to arrest me?  ATM’s flash along the hall.  The walls will shit money and customers will throw it in the water.  

                  “You’ll never believe what advertisement was on the bathroom wall!”  Emily, emerges from the toilet, smiling.  She hands me a shiny piece of stationary, “Stamford Town Center:  Shopping is my workout.” 

“Nice find,” I say, dropping it in my folder. 

“And look at this!”  She motions to a sliding advertisement, one that moves several ads by means of a timer.  One reads, “A gift certificate is like unconditional love, it’s good anywhere.”  I haven’t bought Emily a gift yet.  I look over at two women, one far shorter than the other, eyeing the same shirt with concentrated interest.  If each held the shirt’s arm, who would finally submit?  The disputed is not a breathing baby, but an $8.99 shirt.  Who would arbitrate their feud?  Within each, Desire and Possession.  Swift described these two challengers in a race:

 Desire, the swifter of the two,
Along the plain like lightning flew:
Till, entering on a broad highway,
Where power and titles scatter'd lay,
He strove to pick up all he found,
And by excursions lost his ground:
No sooner got, than with disdain
He threw them on the ground again;
And hasted forward to pursue
Fresh objects, fairer to his view…

                 One of the women shouts, “Bitch, you know I had it first.”  The shorter woman walks away, tossing the shirt to the ground. 

                 Across the hall from the fizzled feud and revolving advertisements is a longish line of strollers, led by camera-wielding mothers.  The tires on the strollers seem big as Michellin’s.  A large platform covered in oversized ornaments stretches upward like a multi-tiered cake.  Light flows out of three busy stores across from the cake’s platform.  On its top, Stamford’s Santa sits with a whispering child on his knee.  Pop machines glow along the snake of waiting mothers.  They coo and make faces at impatient toddlers.   In front, a skinny elf efficiently writes upcoming names.  Where is the money?  Well done.   I can’t even see it exchanged and, more importantly, neither can the kids.

II.

                  I had asked my Dad about enclosed malls—what was the philosophy behind their construction.  He spent thirty years in centers similar to Stamford Town Center.  He was the man behind the curtain, interested mainly in the bottom line.  And his concerns were simple: maintain the shopping center, increase profitability, and collect rent. 

                  My Dad is a man of permanent contradictions.  He’s inert, but watches nothing but active sports.  He has worked as a manager of people his whole life, but styles himself a misanthrope.  If discovering the house was on fire, he would snatch his camera from the table, put on a coat, exit the house, and watch it burn.  He would take pictures, not for any artsy or nostalgic hooey, but for the insurance claim.  “When did Noah build the ark, Brett?  Before the rain…before the rain.”  He is unsentimental, pragmatic, and hyper-rational.  Yet with a strange emotional detachment from the objects he owns.  But nobody is totally immune.   “No meaning but in things,” said William Carlos Williams.

                 When I graduated college, Dad started a new job, sent my sister to school, and began coping with a troubled marriage.  Dad found a new way to channel stress.  His attachment to things had remained consistently low—he probably still cares very little about what he owns—but ironically, in recent years, Dad has amassed an array of odd collectables.  Though he doesn’t directly mention them, they arrive on his person and rest on his walls.  Their number is growing. 

                  On holiday breaks, I would arrive home from teaching and discover perhaps a dozen pairs of colorful “Air Force Ones” littering his bedroom floor.  On the wall, like trophy scalps, hangs an ever-increasing hat collection.  On Dad’s closet rack there swings a series of precious Mitchell and Ness jerseys.  All of them blazoned with logos from defunct teams and defunct leagues now long forgotten by all but a few committed fans on Ebay.  To Dad, these jerseys are cultural capital.  It seems the only individuals he truly respects are those who recognize his jerseys as rare gems.  Who but a fellow traveler, a Loose Balls reader, would recognize the” Minneapolis Lakers”, the “Pittsburg Condors,” and the strange name, “World B. Free”? 

And then there’s his numerous autographs—zany signatures of the Isley Brothers, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Denzel Washington, Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Maze, etc.  My sister was gifted a signed Titanic poster.  Tina Turner, Frankie Isley, and Robert DeNiro were his selections for me.  For my mother, Celine Dion.  Why?  Perhaps to manipulate new technology?  It probably seems magical to a Baby Boomer to click on a button and in two days receive a weighty package.  Or maybe it’s the unending hunt for bargains?  My Dad has the patient saavy of a rug merchant.  Discovering a deal, however slight, creates in him a compulsive, arresting desire to “pick something off quick.”  Or maybe he simply buys online to strike a bargain?  In our family “you gotta make moves…gotta keep movin…gotta make some shit happen,” specifically when it is buying time.  He approaches shopping with the single-mindedness of a termite.  He will proudly arrive with a deck of coupons and dusty, but never forgotten, gift certificates.  He’ll shop on discount days, buy from the sale rack and (on that same rack) hunt for flaws. 

For Dad, there’s always a deal to be found or a discount to be negotiated.  Unlike the amateurs I saw circling Stamford, Dad was a professional, the quintessential shopper.  There are even rules:  “You gotta get there early—be the early bird, not the yard bird.  The yard bird gets chopped.”  Shopping days were ritualistic, prescribed.  Cleaning the house to “That’s the Way of the World” was followed by a forty minute drive to thee shops.  We were inevitably serenaded by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes or some other soulful variation—Dad quickly discovered free downloading.  The complex we shopped in was an Indiana bedroom community closer to Greater Chicago’s outer rim.  Entering the stores on those shopping days, there were rules.  Keep time.  Watch the sales.  Meet in ninety minutes.  Always try on pants.  And finally, when in doubt, throw it out.  Along with the rules, came new terms and phrases.  My sister and I never wanted to choose something that was labeled weak—or unbecoming in Dad-speak.  And you must never choose something that’s too salty, jivey, or old—that’s expensive, urban-black, or blandly traditional. 

He’s 6’8 and “three bills,” as he says.  He’s a big man, with a handsomeness I see in myself, but rarely is he intimidating.  In fact, he comes across as so nonchalant and unassuming that a dullard cashier would seem foolish if she denies him.  If she is squeamish about a meager number he throws out, he’ll chop the air with rational hands and lean in close to make his point.  He’ll also affect an oleaginous tone: “So, c’mon, what can you do for me?” They melt and he pays.  It’s always the same.

I asked him about the centers we shopped in and ones like it, what made them tic?   “Look,” he told me over the phone.  “If you’re an owner, and you want to blow life into stores like mine in Chicago, or even the centers we shop at…especially when you’re saddled with shit stores…you add stuff.  You add lighting, color, a circus, anything that’s income producing.  The best retailers are in tune with selling.  Selling anything…everything!   In the malls, we limited the amount of drinking fountains—sell ‘em a pop—and did whatever we could to extend the customer’s stay.  You want long hallways, rides for the kids—pure moneymakers—and cheap food.  The longer you retain shoppers, the more likely you are to sell them something.  For example, the average shopping visit is forty one minutes…”

               “How in the hell do you know that, Dad?”

                “I know my shit.  Listen:  If you can extend that with a food court, card show, or tree-lighting, say, up to 60 minutes…you are twice as likely to sell something.  Hell, we’d pump smells into the common area!  It’s pretty simple, just put a fan in the HVAC systems and pump it in.  People get hungry and buy food.”

Dad would have liked the Stamford mall.  “Quality stores…high end,” he’d probably say.  I remember when I was a kid, seeing a skating rink in the middle of his mall, Marquette Mall.  I couldn’t skate, but I liked watching the girls in tights whirling like dervishes across the floor.  Now I remembered, from Dad’s details, something else.  Surrounding the skaters were little umbrellas, food kiosks, which sat beside the rink like sunning frogs beside a pond.  Under the umbrellas was whatever your stomach could handle:  fried dough, ice cream, pizza.  I still can smell the hot dog steam.

                  “It comes down to the bottom line,” he says, “A sales threshold.  Say a tenant makes $250,000 a month.  With every additional dollar they make, a percentage goes towards the management company.”

                  “You mean, you?”

                  “Not me, the company.  It’s smart.  We’d identify stores near the sales threshold and place an arts and craft show or something dynamic in front…push up their numbers so we’d get a percentage of the extra cash.” 

                  I realized from the years he did this work, I rarely asked him how and if the properties he worked at varied.  He would drive two hours to work at Brickyard in Chicago.  Four hour commutes when he worked at Malan in Detroit, though during those years, he lived in Michigan during the week.  Now he’s back in Chicago travelling an hour and a half twice a day.

                  “Well, were all of the malls you managed the same?” 

                   “Hell no!  The 80’s and 90’s were the life and death of enclosed malls.  At Brickyard Mall, you remember, that old Cary brick factory on the south side.  After the factory went bust, it was turned into a mall.  Mostly a middle-class Polish and Italian neighborhood, it went Black and Hispanic.  50% of shoppers were young black men, ages 15-21.  That’s rare.  We had the number one volume Foot Locker in the country.  You remember that woman, don’t you?  At Foot Locker?  Our mall had the highest per capita of shoe stores in the country.  You and I were standing in line.  Like everyone else, we were buying the new Michael Jordan’s.  I think you were in seventh grade.  That woman in front of us had just paid over $750 for her kids shoes.  She said, “This month, the rent just go’n have to wait!”  He chuckled.  “Unbelievable.”  I thought of teacher’s conferences in New Orleans.  Students would misbehave, fail, and I’d call in their mothers, always mothers.   I remembered how the mothers would work double shifts, never see their kids, and cry.  They’d tell me they just wanted to make their babies “happy.”  The kids would sit next to their crying mothers and look at their shiny shoes.  I didn’t tell Dad about the conferences.   Especially, after what he told me about the music. 

                     “That same year, Tony [Dad’s boss], didn’t want the black boys loitering during African American month—you know, when they did those music programs.  The murder rate was rising in Chicago and he didn’t want trouble.  So he told us to pump loud classical music in the common areas…keep ‘em moving.  Tony knew they [the boys] didn’t want to listen to that shit.  Hell, I wouldn’t either.”    

“But, Dad, those two, Marquette and Brickyard, were the same.  They were just huge, enclosed malls—“

“Yeah, but the other two places I worked at were primarily outdoor (strip) centers.  At Malan Realty, a pretty good little company, they sent me around to those tiny ass centers… from Detroit to Lawrence, Kansas.  They had my big ass rolling across the country, you know…upkeep, to check shit out.  See whether or not the centers were up to snuff.  You, remember, you went on a few trips…” 

I remember Dad taking pictures of the weeds flowering in the asphalt and the sunken, cracked drains.  “Unacceptable.”  And I remember Dad hating signs that broke terms of the lease, those dangling rope signs or two-sided chalkboard signs along the patron walkway.  Dad would stridently approach a storefront and begin cutting down their signs.  He often wore shorts, even in winter, and never provided personal information even if asked.  I think he liked the confrontational gamesmanship of it, knowing in the end that he had the power.  Why schmooze when he had a lease? 

                        One time, in a darkly funny episode, Dad rolled up to a storefront in his Intrepid, I was in the front seat.  He leapt out like a puma and cut down a hanging sign with a switchblade he had bought from E-bay.  He popped the trunk, and grabbed a large chalkboard sign with curled letters, Magik Nails!  The storeowner came outside and screamed in broken English, “You can’t take sign!”  Dad, walking away in my Nike slip-on sandals, replied dismissively:  “I’m from the management company.  You can’t have these.”  The man looked as if he saw a chicken wearing socks.  “Okay.” Vanquished, he walked back into his store and Dad grinned like an overfed cat.  We drove to Ruby Tuesday’s for a victory meal.  Only recently have I thought about that man in the nail shop.  What did he say to his workers when he returned inside?  What if his daughter was one of the workers?  I never told Dad I thought about the man.

                      “Well, what’s the new center…the one you work at back in Chicago, Town Square?  You told me it was a “lifestyle center,” that sounds different than the outdoor centers Malan leased?

“It’s a new idea.  These places are mostly in the southwest, you know, because the weather’s nicer.  People can shop outside all year round.  They’ve got it all:  retail shops, post offices, restaurants, clothing, jewelry, botox, plastic surgery, pediatricians, dentists, orthodontists, audiologists, chiropractors…basically a node of necessities.  Anything you can buy.  We give the center Wi-Fi, sandwich shops, and make it feel like home.”

                      “You don’t get botox at home, Dad.”

                      He laughed.  “Where does your mother get it?”

                      “She never used to get it.”

                      “I guess things are changing.”

                      “Do you remember that saloonkeeper, Al Swearingen, on Deadwood?  Dan Dougherty, Al’s hatchet man who carried out all of Al’s bloody orders?  He says to Al, “Goddamn, I hate change.” Al says, “Change aint lookin’ for friends.  Change calls the tune we dance to.”

III.

                         Emily has to get back home.  We’ve been in the mall for several hours.  The bright lights are making me weary.  She goes contra dancing tonight.  When we moved up here from New Orleans we didn’t know anybody.  We were cut off, like buoys after a squall.  We haven’t really made friends, so she likes going with me to do my assignments.  She thinks I’ll become a great journalist.  I think I’ll end up a sad teacher, no jobs for journalists today.  People don’t want to know about the world, they just want to live in it.  We often talk over meals we cook from internet websites and I’m losing weight.  We discuss the strange culture of the Northeast:  Connecticut’s unsmiling latchkey kids and the cartoonish suburbs.  We talk about the city, too.  We talk about the disposable renown of shitty actors on advertisements, the frowzy hipsters who try too hard, and the yuppies who work too much.  We even talk about the grumpy old New Yorkers whom we both actually like.  We talk about how they enjoy our laughing at their cranky asides as we wait in line.  But many of them are leaving, if not already gone. 

                          And so she goes to dance.  Sweaty hapless men spin her around in a community center and she smiles because she wants activity.  I’ve tried, too.  I joined the P.G. Wodehouse Society and Byron Society—mostly comprising oldsters wearing pony tails and wine-soaked neckties.  We quote Bertie Wooster and try to remember lines from Manfred.  The meetings are quiet and the speakers are tolerable.  I don’t have any money, but the organization leaders want new blood.  “Will you bring a friend to the next meeting?”  Probably not.  “Sure. When is it, next month?”  Another month to wait.  Emily drops me off at the train station with a smiley kiss.  “I’ll see you soon.” 

                          “Yeah.  Thanks for the ride.”  I smile sadly and walk to the ramp.  I don’t tell her that I cry on the rides back.   I rock from side to side in the train car, thinking of my Dad.  I can already see myself reentering my apartment, seeing the piles of spilt books and the hours of typing ahead.  He’s probably travelling home now, too.  What would it be like to drive an ninety minutes twice a day?  His XM radio is on ESPN and he’s rolling on I-94, hoping I call.  His boss’s wife is dying and his twenty three year old secretary is pregnant again, unmarried, and living in her parent’s basement.  He talks about these two like they are family.  He fired the secretary last week for missing too many days. 

He’ll wind up in the driveway as I exit in Grand Central.  He’ll pet the dog, throw the keys on the table, and shower with the door open as I cut across Manhattan, reviewing my notes and drawings of Stamford.  He’ll pass the autographs and hats in his room without looking at them and sit in his chair.  He’ll eat a heated Lean Cuisine and wait for my sister to call. And when she does, he’ll smile and tell her I called to talk, of all things, about his center.  “What the hell’s he up to now?”   

                            “Beats me, Dad, Brett does his own thing.” They’ll laugh and in the spring when school ends, Dad will be proud of me.  He’ll tell me how the real world works and I’ll buy new interview clothes.  I’m sure I’ll find a deal with ease.

Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard, the author of (among other stories) “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” would have enjoyed the presidential election of 2012.  This campaign so devoid of ideas and so rich with agreed upon fictions would have been a bleak backdrop for one of Ballard’s own stories.  He died in 2009 just as the forty-year delusion of debt-fueled growth eradicated the middle class utopias he so often fictionalized.

 Ballard’s world was one of abandoned swimming pools and empty hotels; a post-political suburban wasteland populated with self-servers and mobs.  His last book, Kingdom Come, pushes a recurring focus—middle-class consumerism—to a weird and undercooked conclusion. 

In it the former advertising executive Richard Pearson returns home to suburban Brooklands after his father’s death.  What ensues is part detective story and part speculative fiction.  Pearson is an astute observer of consumerism’s effects on Brooklands population.  It’s a place where “the only real things are mirages.” 

As is usual in Ballard’s late fiction, characters are shallow and are mainly responsible for transmitting and debating his novel’s rich ideas.  In one scene a character says:

We have to prepare our kids for a new kind of society.  There’s no point in telling them about parliamentary democracy, the church or the monarchy.  The old ideas of citizenship you and I were brought up with are really rather selfish…“

Later, when mankind’s precious “rights” are invoked a character says:

What’s the point of free speech if you have nothing to say?  Let’s face it, most people haven’t anything to say, and they know it.  What’s the point of privacy if it’s just a personalized prison?  Consumerism is a collective enterprise.  People here want to share and celebrate, they want to come together.  When we go shopping we take part in a collective ritual of affirmation. 

In the Ballardian world, the empty lives and lonely crowds are a product of an Enlightenment project gone horribly wrong.  He explored this territory in Cocaine Nights and Millennium People.  In the former, early retirement in a world without work—“a billion balconies facing the sun”—leaves only darker pleasures to be explored.  A sleepy community becomes the playground of pleasure-seeking nihilists. 

Kingdom Come imagines a neo-fascist vigilantism somewhere between the airport and the ‘burbs.  Ballard’s characters include cardboard demagogues, the giggling herd, and toughs who fetishize symbols and violence.  And throughout the novel’s twists and turns there is the lurking memory of Brownshirts and the ustasha—the undead specter of 20^th century nihilism. 

The novel is, in effect, a Counter-Enlightenment work.  Having explored man’s crooked nature in books like Crash, which explores the sexuality of the road accident, Ballard’s vision is of a fascism birthed from the consumer economy.  Instead of the torch-led fury and coordination of a Nuremburg rally, contemporary society has the high-pressure orderliness of the supermarket. Instead of the Freikorps roughing up rabbis, our age has suburbanites in St. George Crosses truncheon-thumping immigrants.  And glowing above it all is the dome of the Metro-Center, a shopping complex from Albert Speer’s sketchpad.  It is a modernist cathedral that is visible from everywhere in town—a comfortable bowl for the listless, insatiable goldfish mankind has become.

But like Cocaine Nights, Ballard’s last novel swings at empty air:  Consumerism is not fascism.  Yes, technology has eliminated work.  But no iron safety net has caught the supplanted workforce.  Instead of a billion balconies, the population endures austerity.  Instead of bored vigilante violence, a generation of sex workers and lettuce-pickers scrambles desperately to survive.  The shrinking middle- classes may “dream of violence” in Ballard’s novel but in reality they mostly abuse themselves through self-loathing, anti-depressants, and a delusional hope in long dead notions of “fair play.” 

Both Ballard and his friend and advocate, the political philosopher John Gray, have a critical handicap in their critique of the Enlightenment project:  Their only muse is the nightmare and their only material is the supposed “crooked timbre” of mankind.  One must remember, in 2011 millions of people disgusted by greed and the consoling fictions peddled by their betters put the lie to these authors’ dark portents.  The most satisfying illusion today is the belief that one can resign himself from the challenges of history in a retreat to the study.  The puppet characters in Ballard’s last book have much to teach about humanity’s dark purposes, but their creator still had much to learn about man’s complex and surprising nature. 

Granny Squibb's Lemonade: The Whole Story

By BRETT WARNKE

NARRAGANSETT—100 years ago Sarah Harris, whose ancestors settled with Roger Williams in his new plantation experiment, was married and became Sarah Harris Squibb.  In the 1930s her family built a beach house in Saunderstown where she, her husband George, and her two boys would spend peaceful and breezy summers sailing Narragansett Bay and gazing at Jamestown while, of course, sipping iced tea.

                Sarah was born and raised in Providence and lived their all her life.  She was an athlete, dancer, sailor, bowler, dressmaker and a pianist who spoke French and gardened.  She received a citric-charged recipe from her mother in-law and passed it around amongst friends.  Granny would  conjure batches of home brew using black tea, juice squeezed from fresh lemons, granulated cane sugar, spring water from their well, and mint that grew wild by the brook.   Robin Squibb, Sarah’s granddaughter said:  “Everyone in South County seemed to have her recipe.  They’ve made it and served it at weddings and social events for years.”  For roughly 60 years Rhode Islanders have been drinking the tea but it was only in 2009 that it became available in stores for purchase.

                The product comes courtesy of Robin Squibb who recently left her job as a script supervisor in the New York film business, having worked on films as various as Mississippi Burning and Analyze This.  When asked about her work she said, “It was a difficult, competitive, tense business and I worked in it for 35 years.”  She paused and said with a grin, “Let’s put ‘30’ in your article instead.”

                She now works on Rhode Island movies, owns Granny’s beach house in Saunderstown, and since 2003 has lived on Benefit Street in Providence.  “When I’d make the iced tea for people, they kept telling me, ‘You should sell this!’  So, I started doing my research,” Squibb said.  The difficulty of producing the tea was the laborious task of finding a viable formula for the fresh ingredients.  “You can’t make it the same way I did at home with fresh mint from the garden,” Squibb said.   She hired three food chemists who produced 20 different stillborn variations.  After they gave up with a shrug, it seemed Squibb’s investment was a busted flush.  She went through 52 more trials until she discovered the perfect commercial formula with number 53.  “Feel free to throw the fact that I don’t have a clue what I’m doing,” she said.

                    Squibb made additional investments into her product, forged connections with local dairies—who produce their own teas—and then ferreted out the right distributors.  By the end of 2009 Squibb’s tea was in 40 stores and now is selling in over 200, including Roch’s in Saunderstown and Belmont’s and Dave’s in Narragansett.  Today, the new mojito flavor has outsold the original and tapsters around New England are incorporating the drink into their boozy mixtures. 

Squibb praised the Rhode Island Development Council, Small Business Development Center, and Brown University’s Rhode Island Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship for helping her start up.  Most recently, Squibb’s business plan was a finalist in Rhode Island’s 2010 Business Competition and one of her iced tea bottles had a cameo in Jennifer Aniston’s The Bounty Hunter.

                Asked how Granny Squibb would feel about the product Robin paused and said, “I think she’d like it, though I doubt she’d like seeing her face on a bottle.”

South Country Rhode Island Poetry

By BRETT WARNKE

WAKEFIELD—At a small gathering in Hera Gallery, this reporter was fortunate to hear two local poets recite a few samples of their poetry.  But why poetry?  Let’s try an experiment:  Tear off a piece of this newspaper and write down as many advertising slogans as you can.  (Pause).  Now that you have run out of room and wasted the ink of two pens borrowed from your sassy waitress, in a spirit of apology, recite for her three poems you memorized in the last month.  (No takers?)  In here lies the dilemma of the poet.  We are in a noisy and speedy world with little time allotted for reflection.  Yet we can see that the world which sustains us is diminishing the numinous powers of language.  The poet, so ignored and sidelined in American culture (though even Plato said they should be banished from the city), describes the experience of being alive; she listens to our stories and pithily puts the contours of existence into text.     

The first poet, Mary Mueller, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry by New Verse News.  She read her poems in a steady, quiet voice.  Wearing a deep red scarf she recited short poems such as “Minnesota,” about returning (emotionally and perhaps physically) to her home in the Midwest.  In it, we are taken to a darkly familiar place with dead cornstalks standing as “withered sentinels.”  Then, as if by an act of engulfing repression, clouds descend “blanketing the earth in mist/anointing the soil/taking souls back.”  Other poems like “Dionysis in Pawtucket” had a sprightly mood with Mueller’s characteristic lush imagery.  Mueller also read her poem, “Poetry Reading, The Towers, Narragansett” which evoked the same anticipation and wonder from the Gallery reading:

We wait upon the words/like night cats/alert to a twig’s snap/or a stirring of air/as it brushes the ground like silk,/a geisha turning to bow/as she attends the hint of a sigh.  We wait upon the words/to tell us a bedtime story/pure as a lullaby/and grim as the brothers’ tales/that send us off to dream/in sweet awe of night terrors.  We wait upon the words /that make us smile/not knowing where mysterious heat begins or ends/as we carry it from the tower/in a chalice white as a spring orchid/to meet the ocean mist.

            With a presence that could not differ more radically from Mueller’s, Julie Hassett completed the night’s reading.  Hassett alternated between chatty personal stories and poems about the emotional distance in her own large Irish family, as well as divorce, self-discovery, privacy, and motherhood.  In one poem, “Crime Scene” she writes of a friend with cancer:  “Look/You twist your head, display a necklace of tumors/just below your skin, insist that I witness/four round knobs,/popping to the surface, my eyes stopped/by the shock of the thief/snaking his way through your lung,/your lymph nodes, back for a second attack,/four fingertips pressed to your throat/as we both choke.”

            The last evening in the poetry series is March 3 from 6-8 but a project next month will focus on artists drawing about poetry and poets writing about art.  You can access poetry by these writers at www.origamipoems.com and can discover more about events at the gallery at www.heragallery.org/.

The Perils of Paddleboarding

               “I have never seen someone fall off a board more than you,” Jim Brugman told my blushing self.  Brugman is a surfer, skater, and gifted instructor at Middletown’s Island Surf and Sport.  With nearly two dozen surfboards, boogieboards, skimboards, and Stand-Up Padlleboards, Brugman has transformed a surf bum lifestyle into a busy career.  And while he usually spends fourteen-hour summer days teaching, facilitating, or officiating at Surfer’s End, he spent a futile afternoon attempting to get this oafish reporter balanced on a paddleboard.  Brugman’s young sun-scorched instructors assisted the numerous and diverse patrons (ages 7-70) while he drove me to Third Beach’s stiller waters.  After all, to Jim I was a fresh fish. 

Admittedly, I left Middletown in shame, but I had arrived with confidence.  A former lifeguard, a once-decorated captain of a swim team, I am, in sum, a waterbug.  Surely, I thought, pedagogue Brugman would have a dull time with Poseidon as his pupil. 

                Jim produced two boards. My thick blue paddleboard was nine and a half feet, though boards vary in sizes.  I placed my size fifteen hooves on this baby of a paddleboard and felt the high-density plastic rock beneath my feet.  Brugman modeled how to bend the knees (to mere mortals this gives balance) and keeping the chin tipped upward (a haughty move which would come easily). I was handed a paddle.  To fit my lengthy torso, its extendable was stretched to the limit.  The ideal paddler dips the blade alongside the board and sweeps backward before swapping hands and doing likewise on the opposite side.  I eyed Jim’s slimmer, sleeker board.  It would be my promotion if I could survive this first round of simple stand-and-paddle.

                With a push and an exclamation my baby board and I were off!  And though it handled like a combine, the ole’ girl was steady.  Jim’s paddle sliced through the water; I successfully mimicked these movements and held in my unsubtle paunch for Mercury’s clicking camera.  Beside me, I saw aged windsailors and other lazy paddlers.  With such mellow company, I demanded a rush.  “Jim, I need the open water!”  The instructor agreed.    

               Jim said that the Atlantic never had calmer waves than the day I took his board into Surfer’s End.  So, it is not with a little shame that I admit that even with such pygmy waves, I tumbled off like a pickled cyclist.  I collapsed sixteen times before I stood up once.  Each time I stood tall, at the slightest movement, I felt the need to rinse and repeat.  After the sixteenth dousing, miraculously, I could briefly stand.  I regained the vertical with verve but lasted a mere five minutes.  By collapse number twenty-six, I took a hint.

This vanquished paddler headed for shore and saw a mother—in the mid-afternoon of life, surfing by me with a smile.  It turns out that she was a true natural.  To my added disgrace, both she and her skilled son (Jim offered him a job) came from a land–locked state and took to the boards like a fish to—No!  I’ll just call them lucky.  Keep the boards waxed, Jim.  I’ll be back. 

  

The Family Band: Robert Randolph's Steel Guitar

                  Robert Randolph and the Family Band will be performing at Charlestown’s Rhythm and Roots Festival which takes place Sept. 3-5.  He will be playing songs from his new album, “We Walk This Road.”  The album is linked together by six “segues.”  The legendary T Bone Burnett, the album’s producer, plucked these eighty and ninety year-old songs from public archives.  Each segue’s brief, muffled, and often a capella clip is the kernel from which Randolph’s album pops. 

                  Randolph’s “Dry Bones,” for example, came out of Mitchell’s Christian Singers’ “Them Bones.”  The album’s bluesy, short lyrics snap in quick bursts leaving the end of each line ready for a clean tambourine.  But instead, Randolph leaves it bare.  The result is a balder more traditional blues feel with a mild guitar, the heavy thump of drums, and the barbershop repetition of the chorus’s catchy lyrics. 

Randolph’s clear if thin voice stands mostly unsupported in songs like “I Still Belong To Jesus” and “Don’t Change,” succeeding beautifully in the former.  The song’s moody guitar is present just enough to remind the listener why Randolph has toured with Eric Clapton and been ranked one of the greatest guitarists of all time.  Other songs like “Shot of Love,” “If I Had My Way,” and “Walk Don’t Walk” Randolph’s sister offers sassy support.  

                  His band is not called “The Family Band” for nothing—three cousins are also members. 

“We Walk This Road” also offers a smoother, undulating version of John Lennon’s “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier.”  Lennon’s older and coarser version bursts with sporadic exclamations of horn and voice beside short guitar scratches.  Meanwhile, Randolph’s song is hammered together with the pulse of drums and sustained guitar riffs, giving it a cruising, acid-rock quality. 

                  Watching how Randolph’s band adds flesh and sinew to the “dry bones” of nearly forgotten blues is intriguing.  Impressively, the older songs lose none of their original force.  Instead, in “Traveling Shoes,” the locomotion of the original lyrics is kept alive through chugging drums and the unified chorus of the “Family Band.”  What roots music like Randolph helps listeners remember is that rock, rhythm and blues, and western music didn’t come from the head of Zeus, but from men in zuits.  And before them, these soulful melodies were harvested in gospel choirs, smoky night clubs, trains headed north in the Great Migration, and even earlier on Southern plantations.

                    Randolph’s own “House of God Church” has a tradition of pedal steel guitar.  He grew up in Essex County, New Jersey and watched older guitarists play during service.  Prohibited by his family from listening to anything but Christian music, the fifteen-year old Randolph began playing pedal steel tunes himself.  “When I was nineteen,” Randolph writes in his album insert, “I knew I wanted to take another path than the people who played traditional pedal steel to take it to a whole new level.”

Mark Steinbach: The Organist

Brett Warnke.  “Steinbach to Play at Wickford Festival,” Southern Rhode Island Newspapers, Time Out.  Published July 13, 2010.

Providence—The bright summer afternoon light lanced through Sayles Hall’s wooden rosettes.  Ascending a narrow staircase I could feel the music through the walls.  All 3,000 tubes of Brown University’s famed mechanical organ seemed to exhale as Mark Steinbach, the perched shoeless player, concentrating,   tickled the keys. 

Steinbach, a lecturer, instrument curator, and Brown University teacher was preparing for his upcoming performance.  The Kansas-born organist will play for fifty-minutes at  St.Paul’s Episcopal Church at 55 Main Street, South Kingston; his 2pm concert will be held during Wickford’s Annual Art Festival (July?-?).   

Wearing black ankle highs and a maroon t-shirt he smiled and greeted me but immediately his attention returned to the organ.  “This organ dates from the Impressionist era when notes were muddled and nearly indistinguishable from one another…I just look at it and think, ‘This organ is so 1903.’”  The man cannot sit still.  Steinbach is taller than average but, he has the lithe, compact build of a yoga instructor.  He leapt from his lotus squat at the organ, swung open a slim door, and nimbly scaled two stairs.  “This,” Steinbach said forlornly, “is the organ chamber!”  The anatomy of tubes, pipes, and wiring seemed to be his second-self.  As he pointed to pipes imbedded in a wooden frame my rear rubbed up against a wire.  A deep, ornery, bowel-blast came from the adjoining tube.  “And what did you have for breakfast?” Steinbach said with a grin.          

Before I could finish scribbling a sketch of the pipes he continued, “Now, St. Paul’s organ is different than this beast.  That one is technically considered the ‘oldest organ in use in a church.’  Different than Brown’s, it’s designed in a Baroque style so the listener can hear-- each—distinct-- note.”  He explained the pre-Christian organs in Greek and Roman ampitheatres and detailed how in older organs the air was pumped into the tubes by hand.  The oldest organs in Europe dated from only around 1300 AD.  Apparently, the Christian Medievals remembered the bad old days in pagan Rome where—forced into the arena for bloodsport with slaves and beasts—the organ honked out music to die by.    

 My writing’s furious pace started to cramp my digits.  Thankfully, Steinbach suddenly paused and sat down facing the organ, “You’ve heard of ‘pulling out all the stops?’”  I thought about my achy fingers.  “Well, these knobs above the keys are stops—they control the loudness and tones of a pipe organ.”  He briefly paused.  “I just love the organ.  I can’t sit still.  It’s like dancing!  My feet.  My legs.  I dance on the organ!” 

But when discussing composers and the selected works he would be performing, Steinbach slowed down.  For now, his tentative program includes works by Jean-Philip Rameau, J.S. Bach, Philip Glass, and Mozart.  Steinbach is excited to perform Rameau’s obscure sprightly work about a chicken.  “It’s hilarious!  Look,” he points with one hand while the other jigs between keys, “Co-co-co-co-co-dai!”  He tells me about lesser known pieces and how they are lost to Time.  Bach, for instance, was criticized by his contemporary Adolf Scheibe for being “turgid and sophisticated” and wasn’t known for funny stuff. Yet his pieces could warm the heart of even the most leathery cynics, like pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran who once said, “Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure.”  Steinbach agreed. “Oh, Bach… a musician is always looking for new composers to keep the [musical] language fresh, but Bach is the parent you keep going back to.“  Steinbach mentions an obscure humorous tune Bach wrote, “Coffee, coffee, I must have/If you want to enchant me/Give me some coffee.”  “He must have been a caffeine addict,” Steinbach said.  Remembering a J.M. Coetzee’s quote, I recited it to Steinbach:  “Why is it to Bach and Bach alone I have a longing to speak?”  Steinbach eagerly nodded, “Exactly.”

Some new organ music Steinbach will perform is two parts in a “radical” five moment work called “Dance” by Philip Glass.  Since “Glassworks” release in 1982, the New York composer’s mathematical precision and his repetitious, shifting, and evolving patterns have met with both hostile assault and wild praise.  Steinbach played a thrilling minute of, “Mad Rush,” my favorite Glass piece, before stopping to point out, “Glass is like Bach.  At first he sounds so simple, but if you look closer, he offers endless surprises.” 

Steinbach had nothing but compliments for the cutting-edge rhythmical patterns in Glass’s major period.  “His work is a free trip.  And you can take the word trip however you want it!  It works on you over time….it sets up expectations.  After playing for twenty-five minutes—halfway through—I’m physically exhausted.  It’s so consuming; it plays with your concentration.  By page thirty four I’m on a runner’s high and by page thirty-five I’ve reached nirvana.  And yet by page forty-one I’m sad that it’s ending.”     

But Steinbach insists that organ music be heard live.  “Can you hear this on a CD?”  He kicks the pedals emitting the tube’s hushed whisper, like a portentous gas leak.  “Unless you’ve got a thousand speakers you haven’t heard it.”  My lungs nearly collapsed as he slammed the keyboard in riot, like a discalced Roderick Usher, “Can you hear this on a CD?!”