Don’t get me wrong, I love her dearly, but what the heck has gotten into Carly Simon’s cornflakes lately, huh?
Exhibit A: A plastic surgery skit:
Below, Simon explains how to apply make-up so that you look ten years older than you are:
More Carly Simon webcam zaniness after the jump!
The novelist Ewan Morrison came to prominence in 2005 with his excellent collection of short stories The Last Thing You Read. Since then, Morrison has written three novels, Swung, Menage and Distance, which are amongst the best new fiction published in the UK over the past decade, and if you haven’t already, do go read him.
Ewan’s a clever man, a former TV Producer and Director, who has now created Tales from the Mall, a project he describes as ‘a book of short stories and facts about shopping malls, it’s a compilation of aural history and urban folklore; it’s also an ongoing video project. It might turn out to be a new kind of book app.’
Over the past few months, Morrison has been interviewing staff at various malls thru-out Scotland and the north of England - cleaners, car park attendants, retail agents, designers, town planners and security guards:
‘...recording their tales, confessions and anecdotes and on the way discovering a lot about how the modern world actually works and how consumerism effects and transforms people on a subconscious level.
‘People actually love shopping, and hate themselves. The two things are connected.’
He has compiled this information into short stories, some of which he has made into animated video clips. Now, in an exclusive interview with Dangerous MInds, Ewan discussed his thoughts, ideas and ambitions for Tales from the Mall:
‘I know that Malls sound boring - it must seem a bit like writing about airport terminals or trains stations, but it’s not. Malls are, it turns out, one of the most important subjects in the world. They are really the homes for the worlds leading multinational corporations and are portals to the non-space of globalisation.
‘Malls create cultural conformity and eat away at the values and traditions in all countries they move into. They also spread virus like. GAT, NAFTA, the IMF, the World Bank – these international trade and loan agreements are all about malls. “We will give you this billion dollar loan on the condition that you privatize certain tracts of land and facilitate these corporations” – that’s how Malls spread.’
This spread has been aided by recent political and cultural events.
‘Since the fall of the Berlin Wall the developing world has been hit by a shopping mall pandemic, while ironically in the US malls have started dying-out at capital moves east and the US landscape has surpassed the point of retail saturation. The UK jumped on the bandwagon in the Thatcher era, and now is building new malls to deal with the problems caused by malls.
‘Malls are not just places where some people shop. Malls are all about temp labor and sweatshops and unsustainable resources being repackaged into cycles of planned obsolescence. Malls are about the artificial manipulation of desires and the expansion of sexualised youth culture into our daily lives. They are about making everything including people, increasingly disposable. They are about living on credit and working in repetitive jobs that make you desire an escape. You see, this is fascinating.’
From his many interviews, Morrison has uncovered what he describes as some “astounding” things. For example, the “check-out girls” or “till Jills” suffer from high instances of deja-vu and amnesia; mall car parks are often used as a “try-out space” by some transvestites; malls have even become a safe, go-between space for divorced parents to hand the kids over to each other on restricted visitation times.
‘I’ve also come up with a theory about how consumerism is encouraging divorce, and how the sexualisation of retail has resulted in malls being magnets for extreme behaviors.
‘These are important facts of recent history, which can only really be told through the medium of storytelling. I’ve quite simply been retelling other peoples tales, in much the same way Dave Eggers did with Zeitoun.’
But Morrison has been doing more than re-telling tales, he has also invited stories, poetry and videos from the public, via his site and through The List magazine, all of which have been ‘eye-opening, very telling and moving.’
‘One is about losing virginity, another is about losing a child, another is about shoplifting, and another still is a poem inspired by a mall fountain. I’d like to get more of these coming in.
‘Doing this project shown me the hundred small ways that people resist and modify consumerism in positive ways every day, even those at the bottom of the pecking order who clean up other peoples crap from shopping mall floors. Some of the funniest and deepest tales have come from cleaners and car park attendants. The biggest discovery of all is that mall workers have really funny, dark stories to tell, and that storytelling is a really big part of how they make their anonymous, repetitive jobs bearable.
‘So as well as stories that I’ve re-told, and a few I’ve made up, the idea is to have a book- as-portal, which has at its core nine key stories (named after retail outlets) and around that people can contribute their own mall tales into a growing archive which is open ended and open access.’
This possibility of an app for the project means the book ‘would keep growing over the years as new audio, video and written material comes in from other people. After a decade the thing could be immense.’
‘The idea however is not to castigate, critique or damn shopping malls. but to treat them as a culture in much the same way that historians and archivists treat dying tribes or folk songs. I’d originally thought that Malls might prove barren ground – that really consumerism is empty and has no stories to tell – but I turned out to be wrong. There’s an amazing diversity and richness in people’s mall tales.
‘Over time I realised I wanted to dig out the history of malls and how they’ve come to dominate the globe, and it turned out no-one had actually compiled a decent and readable history yet. So that too has become part of the project.
‘The history of the mall is really the history of American style capitalism. On the local level, I was amazed how the self identity of my city - Glasgow - is blind to it’s own reality. People from Glasgow still tend to look back with nostalgia’s soft focus to the days of heavy industry on the River Clyde. The fact is that Glasgow has had a life post-post industrial decline. It is perhaps because Glasgow is so full of old communists that the reality has not been accepted – Glasgow is now the UK’s leading mall city. It has the second largest amount of retail space per head, next to London; it has five vast malls, one on each of its tributary roads. Its central street is the only one in the UK that has a mall at either end, which makes it “the seventh largest retail avenue in the world”. So part of my project has been to own-up to the fact that Glasgow is incredibly consumerist, and to find out how the city came to be like this and how it operates. How it effects people.’
Ultimately, Morrison believes the mall will die out:
‘I predict that Malls will start shutting down in the UK, as they have done in the US, and also that we will start to see malls targetted with violence, vandalism and political demonstration in the coming years of austerity– as people look for a representative symbol to blame and attack. Bricking a building is easier than attacking a brand logo. Malls in Europe will burn, as the department stores they put out of business burned back in the late 80s.’
If you have any stories, comments or would like more information about Tales from the Mall then check here.
More ‘Tales from the Mall’ after the jump…
A collaboration between one Cecil Stokes (1910-1956) and Bing Crosby (natch) sometime in the ‘40s, an Auroratone film was apparently meant to be used in the treatment of mental disorders. As one does. The colors and crystal patterns are indeed quite lovely and Der Bingle and his organ are dreamy (or something).
More about Auroratone films here
With thanks to Devin Sarno
Iowa City Police have released a composite sketch of a man they believe is a witness to a fire at 421 S. Dodge St.
Investigators are still working on identifying a witness who would have been around College Green Park and/or 421 S. Dodge St. on Saturday, Jan. 29, between 10:30 and 11:15 p.m.
The witness is described as being between 5-feet, 10-inches and six feet tall and wearing a dark colored coat and pants. Anyone with information about the identity of this person is asked to contact Investigator DJ Steva at 319-356-5284.
Police ask that anyone who sees someone matching this description to call the Johnson County Communication Center at 319-356-6800.
GEICO and Caveman could not be reached for comment.
(via The Smoking Gun and Press-Citizen)
The City of Austin is renaming the Solid Waste Services Department and they’re asking for the help of the public in coming up with a new name.
Unless there’s a huge come-from-behind surge from Austin Feces Brigade, the winner is going to be The Fred Durst Society Of The Humanities And Arts.
I love living in Austin for many reasons. One is it’s a city with a sense of humor. Our town slogan is “keep Austin weird” and we are.
I wonder if Fred Durst will be attending the christening ceremony?
The City of Austin is renaming the Solid Waste Services Department to better reflect all of the services the Department provides, including recycling, garbage collection, yard trimmings pick-up, street sweeping, litter abatement and litter control, household hazardous waste disposal, storm debris clean-up, Zero Waste initiatives and community outreach & education. We would like your input on the three new department name ideas below. You can cast a total of three votes, and as many as three votes for a particular name. Just click ‘vote’ to the left of the name to cast your vote. You can also provide comments on any of the items or suggest a new name of your own. The deadline to vote and comment is Thursday, February 10 at midnight. Thanks for your input! Stay tuned: the new department name will be announced in late April 2011.
Click here to place your vote. You can also suggest a name.
Among my favorites are: Ministry Of Filth, Taco Bell, Austin Feces Brigade, George Bush Memorial Shit Pile, Zombie Disposal Services and Austin Dept. Of Are You Gonna Eat That?
Via The High Definite
“Wherever you are, you’re turned on by nature… a high in itself, or add to any other kind of high.”
(via Cake Walk New Orleans )
Cairo-based British journalist Sara Carr continues to bring some fantastic street-level photojournalism from her adopted home city, including some shots of the spray-paint agitprop going on in the capitol.
Carr and some others have just assembled a Cairo offshoot from the Occupied London site, reporting on the ground, and along with Democracy Now, it’s proven a great item to add to your Egyptian Revolution RSS. They’ve already posted twice on today’s ruthless and unsurprising pro-Mubarak raid on Tahrir Square.
“No to Mubarak, no to Nazif, no to Sorour”
(Refers to Ahmed Nazif, Prime Minister for past 7 years until yesterday, and Ahmad Fathi Sorour, speaker of the People’s Assembly since 1991 and first in the official line of succession as President after Mubarak)
“Down with the regime” with inverted “Eagle of Saladin” coat of arms from the Egyptian flag.
Stencil of Mubarak; underneath, the Arabic word “Irhal”, meaning “Leave”.
Philip Marlowe and James Bond are two of the greatest fictional characters of the 20th century, and this is what happened when their authors, Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming met for a BBC radio program in July 1958.
Fleming and Chandler talk about protagonists James Bond and Philip Marlowe in this conversation between two masters of their genre. They discuss heroes and villains, the relationship between author and character and the differences between the English and American thriller. Fleming contrasts the domestic “tea and muffins” school of detective story with the American private eye tradition and Chandler guides Fleming through the modus operandi of a mafia hit while marvelling at the speed with which his fellow author turns out the latest Bond adventure.
Chandler sounds slightly squiffy. Fleming breathless. Even so, it is a moment of literary history, as both men, wary at first, reveal some slender truths about their lives and work.
“…You can write a very lousy, long historical novel full of sex and it can be a best seller and be treated respectfully but a very good thriller writer who writes far far better …there’s no attempt to judge him as a writer.”
“[Philip Marlowe] is always confused… he’s like me.”
Previously on DM
Driven by Demons: Robert Shaw, James Bond and The Man in the Glass Booth
12ozProphet, “the largest graffiti, street art and pop culture community online”, collaborated with film maker Justin Hogan in the creation of this short documentary on graffiti legend and pop culture icon Futura 2000.
Leonard (Futura) talks about the early days of being a street art pioneer, his experiences with The Clash, Madonna, life in Brooklyn and his current projects.
