The left wall of the shop was covered with underground magazines and newspapers. All those promising titles: Angry Girl and Bitch. Slits & Tits and Heroic Heretic. All these fierce chick zines that claimed to be überfeminist but sounded like S & M porno magazines. Liberation, apparently, had to be appropriation, with double A batteries and a double D bra; pert Betty Paige bangs and no apologies.
She noticed Josh walking slowly toward the coffee bar. He wore a sports coat, corduroy with elbow patches. These days it was either that or the cable-knit cardigan. He looked like a Midwestern professor lately, less young prep and more middle-aged uncle. She found it a bit affected, not that clever. But Josh was a very affected, very formal guy, no matter what he wore. He caught her eye and barely acknowledged her as he approached. He did have such remove. That part wasn’t affected. That part just was. It was enormously alluring to her for reasons she didn’t care to fathom.
“How’s Sissy?”
“Great. We had fun.” She had told him she was spending the night with Sissy. Which was really the plan, until she just decided otherwise. Josh sat and took a sip of her coffee. He frowned a bit.
“Where did you guys go last night?” He didn’t look at her but at the newspaper he had in his hand.
“Here and there,” she said.
“Right,” he said and opened the paper. He was reading The Wall Street Journal.
Together they walked through the ever-expanding ultrahip retail center. Miranda hated it. It was a mall but not called a mall; it was really postmall, a series of attached indoor stores with the sensibility of independent boutiques. Whether they were corporate chains or not (many were owned by corporate chains), they appeared quirky and eccentric. There was a tattoo emporium. A store for DJs, with underground twelve-inch dance records, turntables with slip mats, and metal-braced “coffin” boxes for carrying the records to the clubs. A cineplex showed foreign and independent films. Even an art museum in the basement with video installations. The centerpiece was a large, trendy clothing store called Suburban Guerrilla.
Josh and Miranda wandered into the store, lost and mesmerized in the low-intensity way only an airless retail space can induce.
“The Gruen effect,” Josh said.
“What?”
“When you become narcotized by the retail array, when you enter the shopping soma, the enticement overload.”
Miranda nodded vaguely.
“I’ve been studying it. How the placement of doors and windows can manipulate psychological states. The very architecture makes you feel small and submissive. Victor Gruen was the first to recognize that if you are forced through a series of shops before you find the poorly marked exit, and if you hear music of a certain tempo, and if the lighting is right, you will reach the disassociative state in which you will be vulnerable to suggestion. You will feel the urge, or desire, for impulse purchases.”
“Really,” Miranda said, wandering absently toward a table piled with books, candles, shirts and throw rugs, all done in the same three shades of green-blue. She examined a rack of clothes. There were fake vintage dresses with bohemian patches. Gauze and macramé peasant dresses. Lace-trimmed camisoles next to a poster of Carole King’s 1971 Tapestry album. Angel sleeves and high-heeled boots. Clogs and granny glasses, but also tube tops, denim short-short cutoffs, roller skates. And finally a whole rack of fat, colorful, striped clip suspenders next to long-sleeved sweatshirts with puffy satin rainbows sewed on them, circa 1976.
Josh picked up a reissue of the Silver Surfer comic book from a table piled with puka-shell necklaces just like David Cassidy used to wear in the ’70s. He walked past the selection of graphic novellas to Miranda, who was looking at an earth-art display. A huge poster of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty hung overhead, and underneath were books on contemporary environmental art and land art of the ’70s. There was a DVD on Andrew Goldsworthy, and leaf-patterned bike messenger bags as well as vintage Greenpeace buttons and some vinyl Jackson Browne records in plastic sleeves.
“It’s not just the Gruen effect, you know. It’s the way everything is no longer organized by category but by subject. By theme, everything is tied together by associations of theme,” Miranda said.
“Yes. On the Internet one thing leads to another in this nonlinear, associative way. Increasingly the world will imitate the Internet in how it processes information. Like Allegecom opening its drug superstore in imitation of its hugely successful retail website. The first physical store to spin off a website. Brilliant.”
But Miranda wasn’t listening. She was distracted by one last themed section. The walls were covered in black, and the clothes on the display racks were all black. There were books on anarchy and radical environmentalism. Big coffee table anthologies. But there were also triangle-shaped black scarves for sale — just like the ones the anarchist blac bloc kids used when they busted windows at Niketown and Starbucks last year. Just like on TV.
“Jesus,” Miranda said. Josh came over with a big smirk on his face. He picked up a calendar with “Paris ’68” on the cover, and each month featured a different Situationist graffito. There were posters for Godard’s Le Petit Soldat and the remaster of The Battle of Algiers and a booklet of Weather Underground communiqués. A datebook with a cover photo of Bernardine Dohrn in a miniskirt holding a fist in the air. A vinyl shower curtain with a drawing of Subcomandante Marcos, and a note attached explaining the sales helped the Chiapas Zapatista movement. Ripped and safety-pinned clothes arranged in piles by boxes of vintage Doc Marten boots. And from a lacquered faux milk crate, Miranda pulled out little silk-screened patches meant to be pinned to shirts (never sewn!) that said “Sabotage” and “Anarchy,” exactly like the homemade patches the kids on the street wore. One even said “D.I.Y.” (Do It Yourself). She looked at Josh. “This is totally appalling.”
He smiled broadly. “This is the purity of capitalism. There is no judgment about content. You have to marvel at its elasticity, its lack of moral need, its honesty. It is the great leveler — all can be and will be commodified. Besides, what’s wrong with Emma Goldman being sold at the mall as a cool accessory? It is still Emma Goldman, isn’t it?”
“A confused context is the essence of alienation,” Miranda said.
“Who said that?”
“I did. I think,” Miranda said. She picked up a deck of playing cards. “New Left Series.” Each card had a different photo on the front, biography on the reverse. Dave Dellinger. Mario Savio. Abbie Hoffman. Mark Rudd.
“But you’re looking at it all wrong. See, capitalism can exploit your desire and exploit your need to subvert its exploitation of your desire. It revives — reinforces — itself on the blood of its critics and their critique. It embraces contradictions. It revels in irony.”