If you missed it, likely because you were up at five in pursuit of Incredible Deals, are a complete moron who is in the thrall of the worst aspects of American culture, or simply doing your damndest to hasten the total system of capitalism, the last stage before the Worker-s Paradise (it’s the holiday, pick your favorite rationalization — mine should be evident), today is Black Friday, called so because it is typically the day a retailer-s revenues for the year creep into profitable territory (how this is precisely calculated could certainly be a good topic for Cecil Adams), black being the color of profit for accountants. I am surprised that some dimwit hasn’t recommended moving Thanksgiving up a couple months to provide those holding Federated stock a little more breathing room.
Anyway, you should be out, frantically buying things today which should provide the scrim of identity through brand affiliation, or simply because you fear the total collapse of the economy.
You have to admit that-s a clever gambit — after a century of wealth concentration though the exploitation of labor, we get told that consumer spending is the engine of the economy; even as your real wages decline yearly, you are being threatened with the imminent collapse unless you borrow money you don-t have to buy things you don’t need. If consumer spending is so essential to the economy, you think we’d get a tax break or something.
Or, if you are a fan of Adbusters — San Francisco urban hippies who would rather lecture you, Democratic voting, blue state NPR supporter, for using the wrong type of hemp shopping bag than going out and meeting people for whom mindless accumulation of worthless goods does actually provide self-esteem, and figuring out some way of changing that (it-s not by making clever clever black sneakers, or vandalizing — sorry, appropriating, billboards in that hotbed of conservative thinking, the Bay Area, that’s for sure) — you know today is Buy Nothing Day. Just like the bad math that christened Black Friday, I can-t quite figure out how to calculate this one either. Should I feel bad because IÂ “bought” rent today, because I don’t live in a squat? Because I’m about to go buy a sandwich (from a local merchant, I promise!) instead of hanging out at the food co-op?
But their hearts are in the right place, even if the tactics are flawed. Everyone staying home today would only mean they go tomorrow, or the next day. Getting people to think in the logic of consume less is likewise a futile exercise, and it smacks of middle class white liberal arts students who aren’t cognizant of the fact that most Americans are acutely aware of how little they consume — all things being relative. An Xbox instead of dental care is distraction (at a discount; the next step down the ladder is simply MD 20/20). It’s unlikely that someone who suffered through an under-funded public education is going to sit around reciting Auden on Friday evenings (and, besides, have you played Call of Duty 2?).
One could take the high (optimistic) road and argue the steady creep of free market democracy will, in some generations, provide greater freedom and comfort to larger swaths of the world’s population than any other social order, or take the low (pessimistic) and argue that it leads to an historically unprecedented middle class, the nihilism and selfishness of which we are entirely ill-equipped to modify, even as the advertising of those excesses dangerously alienates larger and larger numbers of people who have better access to more deadly weapons and concepts with each passing year. We can imagine an idyllic New Urbanist dream, but the truth of SUVs and gated suburban communities knitted together by the underclass service sector is, and has been, the American Dream for some time. Like or not, conspicuous consumption is our mantra and nadir all at once, and unwinding this helix will also destabilize our teetering economy, or so warns the Fed.
In a town that is the standard bearer for much of this, today must be our most hallowed day (I’ve got a private sale invite for later — whoo hoo!). And our most sacred space should be marked by what? You betcha: a mall. Last week, the Port Authority decreed for once and for all that it remains unbowed by fundamentalist theocracies, demonstrating the best advertisement for freedom is benumbing bureaucracy, and introduced the Freedom Mall. I’m sure that name is taken by a more martial edifice elsewhere, and if I were feeling more clever, I’d come up with a more scathing moniker, but really, if you aren’t sickened by the renderings accompanying the article, my attempts at pithiness won’t dent your hide.
Likewise, there’s a more trenchant formal critique to be found in the bland deployment of spec office over retail, cobbled together by a ‘galleria’, but that would be admitting there was something there worth discussing. Take a look at that rendering: the scabrous security cladding of the Freedom Tower extends well beyond the roof line of the mall, and will, in and of itself, be larger than most downtown buildings. The spiky PATH station (about to be saddled with three levels of retail) hides behind a corner. Remembrance by committee and blender: pour in a pile of bad ideas and press ‘liquefy’. And this is before we’ve received the early renderings of the inevitable squiggle and ripple from Mr. Ready for His Close Up Ghery. Hopefully someone will make tee shirts saying “My Loved One Died for Freedom, and all We Got was this Lousy Mall.” Or, as a very incisive friend has remarked, Sacred Footprints would make an ideal name for a shoe store.
Who is doing this mall, by the way? Westfield Properties, the previous leaseholder, was bought out for a pretty penny (after making not so quiet noises that they, by contract, had a right to demand replacement space regardless of whatever the ‘Master Plan’ dictated — that was back in the quaint days when fully rational people were saying perhaps shopping would not be the appropriate act for the memorial grounds).I’m sure the disposition of this detail will bring a fresh round of craven back room dealing, fronted by mealy-mouthed egoists (that would be, um, Pataki) or humbled but striving opportunists (Doctoroff). But why waste the anger late on this most holy of American days? Next week will inevitably bring an unforeseen turn of the screw.
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I buy black on the outside, because black is how I consume on the inside.
If you missed it, likely because you were up at five in pursuit of Incredible Deals, are a complete moron who is in the thrall of the worst aspects of American culture, or simply doing your damndest to hasten the total system of capitalism, the last stage before the Worker-s Paradise (it’s the holiday, pick your favorite rationalization — mine should be evident), today is Black Friday, called so because it is typically the day a retailer-s revenues for the year creep into profitable territory (how this is precisely calculated could certainly be a good topic for Cecil Adams), black being the color of profit for accountants. I am surprised that some dimwit hasn’t recommended moving Thanksgiving up a couple months to provide those holding Federated stock a little more breathing room.
Anyway, you should be out, frantically buying things today which should provide the scrim of identity through brand affiliation, or simply because you fear the total collapse of the economy.
You have to admit that-s a clever gambit — after a century of wealth concentration though the exploitation of labor, we get told that consumer spending is the engine of the economy; even as your real wages decline yearly, you are being threatened with the imminent collapse unless you borrow money you don-t have to buy things you don’t need. If consumer spending is so essential to the economy, you think we’d get a tax break or something.
Or, if you are a fan of Adbusters — San Francisco urban hippies who would rather lecture you, Democratic voting, blue state NPR supporter, for using the wrong type of hemp shopping bag than going out and meeting people for whom mindless accumulation of worthless goods does actually provide self-esteem, and figuring out some way of changing that (it-s not by making clever clever black sneakers, or vandalizing — sorry, appropriating, billboards in that hotbed of conservative thinking, the Bay Area, that’s for sure) — you know today is Buy Nothing Day. Just like the bad math that christened Black Friday, I can-t quite figure out how to calculate this one either. Should I feel bad because IÂ “bought” rent today, because I don’t live in a squat? Because I’m about to go buy a sandwich (from a local merchant, I promise!) instead of hanging out at the food co-op?
But their hearts are in the right place, even if the tactics are flawed. Everyone staying home today would only mean they go tomorrow, or the next day. Getting people to think in the logic of consume less is likewise a futile exercise, and it smacks of middle class white liberal arts students who aren’t cognizant of the fact that most Americans are acutely aware of how little they consume — all things being relative. An Xbox instead of dental care is distraction (at a discount; the next step down the ladder is simply MD 20/20). It’s unlikely that someone who suffered through an under-funded public education is going to sit around reciting Auden on Friday evenings (and, besides, have you played Call of Duty 2?).
One could take the high (optimistic) road and argue the steady creep of free market democracy will, in some generations, provide greater freedom and comfort to larger swaths of the world’s population than any other social order, or take the low (pessimistic) and argue that it leads to an historically unprecedented middle class, the nihilism and selfishness of which we are entirely ill-equipped to modify, even as the advertising of those excesses dangerously alienates larger and larger numbers of people who have better access to more deadly weapons and concepts with each passing year. We can imagine an idyllic New Urbanist dream, but the truth of SUVs and gated suburban communities knitted together by the underclass service sector is, and has been, the American Dream for some time. Like or not, conspicuous consumption is our mantra and nadir all at once, and unwinding this helix will also destabilize our teetering economy, or so warns the Fed.
In a town that is the standard bearer for much of this, today must be our most hallowed day (I’ve got a private sale invite for later — whoo hoo!). And our most sacred space should be marked by what? You betcha: a mall. Last week, the Port Authority decreed for once and for all that it remains unbowed by fundamentalist theocracies, demonstrating the best advertisement for freedom is benumbing bureaucracy, and introduced the Freedom Mall. I’m sure that name is taken by a more martial edifice elsewhere, and if I were feeling more clever, I’d come up with a more scathing moniker, but really, if you aren’t sickened by the renderings accompanying the article, my attempts at pithiness won’t dent your hide.
Likewise, there’s a more trenchant formal critique to be found in the bland deployment of spec office over retail, cobbled together by a ‘galleria’, but that would be admitting there was something there worth discussing. Take a look at that rendering: the scabrous security cladding of the Freedom Tower extends well beyond the roof line of the mall, and will, in and of itself, be larger than most downtown buildings. The spiky PATH station (about to be saddled with three levels of retail) hides behind a corner. Remembrance by committee and blender: pour in a pile of bad ideas and press ‘liquefy’. And this is before we’ve received the early renderings of the inevitable squiggle and ripple from Mr. Ready for His Close Up Ghery. Hopefully someone will make tee shirts saying “My Loved One Died for Freedom, and all We Got was this Lousy Mall.” Or, as a very incisive friend has remarked, Sacred Footprints would make an ideal name for a shoe store.
Who is doing this mall, by the way? Westfield Properties, the previous leaseholder, was bought out for a pretty penny (after making not so quiet noises that they, by contract, had a right to demand replacement space regardless of whatever the ‘Master Plan’ dictated — that was back in the quaint days when fully rational people were saying perhaps shopping would not be the appropriate act for the memorial grounds).I’m sure the disposition of this detail will bring a fresh round of craven back room dealing, fronted by mealy-mouthed egoists (that would be, um, Pataki) or humbled but striving opportunists (Doctoroff). But why waste the anger late on this most holy of American days? Next week will inevitably bring an unforeseen turn of the screw.