LETTER FROM LOS ANGELES
By Linda Sandoval
“ …when I got there there was no there there”
Gertrude Stein
The Grove at the Farmers Market in Los Angeles is what they call a destination mall, but what our destiny might actually be at this place seems to shift, expand and evade. Crowded together like wary, moiling hunting packs we dazed consumers must battle our way out of the intricate maze of the parking structure, past the fancy concierge station and into the Outdoor Town Square Vaguely Italian Village Style Piazza. We are then channeled into an apparent destination of Banana Republics and Victoria’s Secrets. And, as an accompaniment to our purchases, we are lured by strings of theme restaurants offering trendy al fresco dining, indifferent food and really big martinis. Between stores we are invited to pause and marvel at the huge fountain that does a pre-programmed dance to tunes like “That’s Amore.” We stop to gaze at statues and ponds and bridges, stone pathways and fairy lights. At Christmas time there is a hundred foot tree with bulbous red plastic ornaments and a flying Santa reminding us to buy gifts with which to curry favor, express love, or ward off rejection. These are the details that provide a setting to our individual movies starring ourselves. But, our true destination here is always in mid-script and being revised according to the laws of supply and demand.
The Grove strives to provide a small town sense of community to the Los Angeles Consumer Culture and, judging from the vast numbers of people mashing about, the Grove is highly successful. All of us, strangers to one another, maneuver the streets of the Grove and let a kind of nostalgic theatricality of “placeness” comfort us as though we live in a real small town full of recognizable folk who share a safe and comfy, communal history. It cleverly distracts us from the loneliness of detached recreational acquisition while cashing in on that very pastime.
Sometimes though, the spell is broken.
I’m standing in a store aptly named “Anthropologie” and sifting through a long vat of sale items that seem like bargains because they are only twice as expensive as they should be. It’s very crowded around the sales trough and many other customers are also excavating. I get an uncomfortably rough shove from a lady standing next to me. She carries a heavy shopping bag from the American Girl Place, which knocks into my ribs and this is because she, in turn, has been pushed violently in the stomach by her young daughter. The daughter carries a fancy American Girl doll. She has obviously just reached the consumer boiling point and will not stand another moment of trolling for things to buy.
“I WANT TO GET OUT OF HERE! NOW!” she screams.
The woman turns to me and scowls hatefully. She grabs her daughter and pushes me aside, again nearly knocking me over, as she rushes for the door. Somehow I have crowded into her private Today’s Movie Of Purchases and, by merely standing next to her, am at fault for her daughter’s outburst. I have witnessed the nasty side of their day together and I must be punished for that trespass.
Truthfully, I am in sympathy with the little girl as I have also visited American Girl Place. I can certainly understand how she could become wigged -out and overloaded after shopping there, especially when forced to view the piles of grown folks’ clothing and trendy house hold goods that are for sale at Anthropologie. Because, no matter how appetizing stuff may appear to be at first, after awhile it’s just stuff and after another little while it’s all just really annoying, useless, infuriating stuff.
It’s often like that, even at the American Girl Place, a destination store at the western entrance to The Grove. American Girl Place sells an overwhelming array of very expensive dolls and their accessories to girls between the ages of 8 and 13. The dolls represent a veritable pageant from the pages of American history. There is Kaya, the Native American girl, Felicity, a girl from revolutionary days, Kirsten a Norwegian immigrant girl struggling on the prairie, A turn of the century girl, A depression girl, a World War II girl and a contemporary girl, plus a Latina girl from the American Southwest and a slave girl from the Civil War era, and others. A child can even order an American Girl Doll to match her own hair color and skin tone thereby making a replica of herself as a part of history.
These dolls are from all economic classes and racial backgrounds yet each doll has exactly the same facial features. I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing. If it means that we are all equal underneath the color of our skin, then I guess it could be okay in a kind of PC sort of way. But it might just mean that it’s cheaper to make all the dolls with the same face and that commerce is the bottom line to this supposed diversity.
The dolls all have narratives that are collected in a series of smartly written books that tell very practical stories about problem solving while teaching young readers about American history. All of the dolls possess a dazzling array of tea sets and school desks, beds, tables, chairs, trunks, eye glasses and even their own dolls and all these accoutrements are beautifully detailed, historically accurate and fabulously expensive. (The horse and carriage for the revolutionary era doll is $237.00) Besides the dolls and their paraphernalia, this really rather amazing store contains a theatre where live plays about The American Girls Dolls are performed with professional actors, a doll hospital for ailing dolls, a doll beauty parlor for spiffing up dolls, a restaurant for mothers and daughters to have lunch or high tea with their dolls, a book store, a photography studio for taking pictures with the dolls, a clothing store so little girls can dress up like their dolls, a doll museum with well produced films all about the dolls and their stories. It is an Extreme Doll Land where on any one given day I can see lines of little girls dressed like their dolls and winding their way with their mothers through the pathways of The Grove and crowding through the big front doors of the American Girl Place. A family can spend an entire day there and drop a huge amount of money and never even have to speak to the real American girl who might be munching scones at the tea table nearby, let alone take the time to know girls who cannot afford the merchandise at this store.
It’s good that little girls can get together for a special lunch with their mothers. It’s just fine to concoct entertaining ways to teach girls about history. It’s helpful to give girls messages about being strong and self -reliant. But do these messages really need an immense consumer fantasy to make them valid? Unfortunately, the real message here is that it is necessary to be flooded with commercial goods to be informed and that we need to spend in order to belong. I suspect, that this endless collecting of stuff and more stuff isolates little girls; isolates all of us. We are numb to our dolls, others and ourselves.
Hence the shoving-match in Anthroplogie. An American girl pushed to the point of violence and her mother forced to acknowledge the invisible, (me) as a visible witness to the carnage. What is missing for us three American girls caught in this unpleasant narrative? The little stories that we can tell ourselves about ourselves, in this case, are not so positive. In fact there are rather ugly morals to be drawn. And where are our fabulous accessories? Buried in Anthropologie.
Maybe it would have been better for that little American girl to be home with her real friends selling real lemonade to her real neighbors. And when they get cross and bored with each other they might busy themselves inventing real solutions to avoid bloodshed.
This is exhausting, this shoving and bumping and shopping. So for me, and plenty of others like me, who need to avoid our own melt -downs, there is the trolley. It is a San Francisco style double-decker cable car that we Grovers can ride back and forth between the few short blocks of stores. I’m sitting on the top level and peering into second stories, which offer a bit of a different perspective to The Grove landscape.
The dark upper floor of Party America appears on my left with its sad collection of pneumatic Mylar balloons stuck to the ceiling. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, they say. CONGRATULATIONS! WELCOME BABY! in blue or pink.
A tall monument -like sculpture wings by me. It is called The Spirit of Los Angeles and is made up of two golden angels. A well-muscled male angel holds the legs of a petite female angel who is desperately trying to fly away but I guess the male angel doesn’t want her to leave or something. It’s really rather confusing. The poem that goes along with The Spirit of Los Angeles states:
Firmly panted under my feet is a land that cries for freedom.
Firmly planted in my heart are the people who long to live as an eagle flies in boundless skies, rising…(Noel Donfeld, 2000.)
Okay, crying for freedom I understand. I have just recently heard this crying for freedom in Anthropologie. I have heard that cry inside my own head for the past several hours. But what’s with the male angel not cooperating? The little female angel wants to get out of the mall but the other angel says, “No!” Is that the “Spirit of Los Angeles?” Hold’em down before they get away!
The trolley driver rings the bell next to the faux Italian chandelier on the ceiling of the Cineplex. Throngs of people get off the see a film. They are happy. They have arrived. We continue. The furniture floor of Crate and Barrel floats by, as do the distant upper floors of Barnes & Nobel where all of the actual books are hidden. There are more al fresco diners, this time, course, sitting on balconies.
The trolley comes to rest at the opposite end of the mall from American Girl Place where there is another destination store and also the most impressive bit of architectural reproduction at The Grove. I would say that if the Grove is a little Italian village, this building is the little Italian cathedral in the village and it is complete with a duomo and ringing bells on top. Except, rather than the faithful attending mass we have the mass selling of jeans in The Cathedral of Abercrombie & Fitch.
Instead of the friendly neighborhood priest to greet us there is a friendly, nearly naked man standing in the doorway with his jeans unbuttoned and his muscled chest bared and oiled. Instead of a choir there is generic and deafening music with that horrible synthetic digital bass that wrenches the central nervous system. Just beyond the live model in the doorway is a truly ugly, massive, concrete looking mock -up of poor Michelangelo’s “David.” But unlike the original sculpture this “David” isn’t completely naked; this one is graced with concrete underwear. Instead of religious frescos there is a towering mural of mostly young men taking off their clothes and jumping into ye old swimming hole. As the mural climbs up behind the flights of stairs, I can view more frolicking folk rendered in various stages of undress. The females in the painting tend to be in slips. Some are drinking wine. Many of the revelers are holding riffles that are, disturbingly, aimed at we shoppers, the big game. Is Abercrombie & Fitch not only the end of the line for the trolley but really the end of the line?
There are three stories of jeans, sweatshirts and t-shirts. The top floor is supposedly women’s clothing but I really can’t tell the difference; it’s all kind of genderless, yet male.
I look into the undersides of the duomo. Most cathedral domes are designed to lift the spirits of the worshippers and help them feel that heaven is within reach. This one, though, is painted a dark, brownie brown and has an oppressive quality as though it is meant to hold us inside. No spirits could wing up through this fudge.
The whole store is painted this very dark color of brown, and/ or lined with dark heavy wood paneling, which forces a person to peer very closely into the piles of clothes in order to see them at all. And, because of the sameness of the clothes they still don’t really seem to exist. It’s like that chapter in Alice Through The Looking Glass where Alice is delighted by all of the beautiful things on the shelves but when she tries to really see what’s there, all of the beautiful things disappear. In Abercrombie & Fitch all is obscured by chocolate cupcakeness with we shoppers providing the filling.
There are nearly naked, live models on each floor and they are smiling greetings to the brown-blinded shoppers until they see me and then they look kind of ashamed. Some are really blushing. I’m at least twenty years beyond the usual demographic for Abercrombie & Fitch, so it probably feels like their mom caught them doing something that they meant to hide. Again, I am being judged for witnessing possibly inappropriate behavior and therefore undermining the fantasy at hand. What kind of boy fantasy can exist with Mom lurking about?
To be honest this American Boy Store makes me yearn for American Girl Place; at least it was quieter, with cheerful shades of pink, not brown and there were all of those families trying to make their daughters happy. One of the reasons American Girl Dolls were invented was to help little girls stay safely tucked in childhood where they would be protected from the Barbie Doll Sexual Influence. Here at the cathedral it’s too late for that. A few years down the line and only one destination store away, sexuality is rampant, is male, and is for sale.
Streams of lonely shoppers. We’re all here as supplicants shuffling through the piles of cotton; an orange hoodie, a lime green one, harvest gold, burgundy. Every single blasted hoodie is branded with “ Abercrombie & Fitch” so even when a person escapes they never really escape. The jeans are the kind where you have to lay on the floor to zip them up. They are very low cut too and butt cracks are in evidence everywhere. There are huge photographs of male torsos. It’s sad to me that they don’t even rate the dignity of a face. Sexuality is bursting from the walls but before it hits the floor it becomes deadened, homogenized and anonymous. The life force is extinguished in chocolate brown celibacy.
For me it’s clear that I don’t ever have to come back here. What’s the point? I don’t need any of this stuff and this stuff has not been designed to attract me. I am priced out and aged out on both ends of The Grove and that is probably just as well.
However, I am part of a very large aging consumer population, which has yet to be properly tapped. That’s a scary thought. I dread to think what the next, soon to be realized, destiny of commerce might be for my generation. I can imagine clever and frightening geriatric wonderlands that remind us endlessly of the good old days that are gone forever. Instead of an Italian village it might be some sanitized version of The Hog Farm, with a scattering of brightly colored fake buses and trailers and vats of Electric Kool-Aid, this time spiked with Zoloft rather than L.S.D. Our flagship will be wired too, so that we can be wheeled in front screens to observe the fictionalized versions of our far- out, drug addled, politically adventurous, youth. There will be al fresco dining off a tray- tables stacked with bowls of organic oatmeal, and yoga classes where we will lie in the corpse pose for hours, dreaming but no longer remembering our dreams. Hand stitched, rainbow colored restraints will tie us in our wheel chairs and secure us to the bed rails at night.
Still, we will have our moments of sly humor and subversion when an occasional evolved inmate screams out for all of us:
I WANT TO GET OUT OF HERE! NOW!!!
We will know, even in our dimming consciousness, that soon, at a certain and very quickly approaching moment, absolutely no one will have any ability to hold back the flight.