Dale Lately

Thursday, 7 June 2012

Man Is Born Free, And Is Everywhere In Chain Stores

The propaganda hits you the minute you see the sky-high brand name hieroglyphs. Giant smiling families gazing down over the entrance to a Mothercare. ‘M&S’ hanging like a massive totem. Floating retail commandments in single words, Breathe, Eat, Relax, Play...

About a year ago I went out on the streets in the thick of one of the worst riots in Manchester’s history since Peterloo, tail-ending the spectacularly violent summer of 2011 when a chain of British cities erupted in flames and looting. Having observed the hooded kids kicking in the doors of sportswear and mobile phone chain stores, I made the observation that for a generation programmed for retail, the sight of them looting a Foot Locker or a Carphone Warehouse wasn’t so much a street protest as a very forceful method of going shopping.

Only a couple of months later Europe’s largest mall opened up in Stratford on the Olympic site, a high security glass compound overshadowing the old indoor market, where proprietors are presumably looking forward to an Olympian record of bankruptcies now they have to compete with Xanadu over the road. It's colossal. Step out of the station and the sheer size of it knocks the wind out of you. You're wafted up a hill by obliging escalator beneath ceilings thirty foot high and giant flagship brands. Gleaming concourses mopped by immigrant sponges. Bent metal rods sticking out of the ground posing as sculpture. Downstairs there’s a prefab pub calling itself a Microbrewery with all the atmosphere of an antiseptic wipe.

One of the first things you notice is how small you feel. That’s what monumental architecture does, with its curtain wall cliffs, its glass canyons. It shrinks the human being. Just to get from M&S to Accessorize takes about two and a half days.

So why? Why does it all have to make you feel so insignificant?

Westfield Stratford isn’t a mall, it’s a monument. It’s a Great Exhibition Crystal Palace reborn for the age of retail. Just as that 1851 glass-walled construction embodied British might and bullishness at the peak of empire, so does Westfield justify shopping as the beating heart of the consumer society. It’s not agit-prop, it’s agit-shop. Covered arcades wide enough to house the chariot for a triumphal emperor? Spurious justification by government with words like ‘empowerment’ and ‘community’? Check, check. It’s not architectural shock and awe. It’s shop and awe.

Breathe.

Eat.

Relax.

Play.

Wandering around Westfield made me think back to those riots. Perhaps I was wrong, or perhaps I oversimplified things. I don’t think it’s incorrect to say unchecked materialism was one of the reasons people rioted, but it was only one of the reasons. There are lots of reasons why people riot. Because they’re angry. Because of peer pressure. I learnt a lot when I watched Manchester become a temporary minor war zone, and here’s one thing I learnt: that just like any other kind of social activity, a lot of the people involved are just sort of hanging round. No program, no target. As things got violent, some of them got violent. As things got nicked, some of them nicked things. It’s the way crowds work. Probably a good third of all the kids at the riots were little more than rubberneckers caught up in something they hardly comprehended. Throwing a stone at a luxury hotel, baiting a helmeted cop. Scooping up a discarded bottle of Evian or a bag of crisps, the way kids do. Some of them got prison sentences.

Eat.

Relax.

Play.

Breathe.

You look up at the Westfield Stratford complex and you know there could never be riots here. It’s a fortress protected by reinforced glass and CCTV. The ceilings stretch away from you. You’d never even reach.

I wandered out of the mall and onto the little bridge where an oily sun was descending over east London. Stretching away below me I could see late-stage preparations in the final push towards the Olympics: gates, watchtowers, electrified fencing, yellow coats, passes, wires, cameras. I watched it and I remembered back to that night. I recalled the broken glass and the flames and the sirens, and I thought about the other reason people riot. It’s one that I’ve never really come out and admitted, and yet it’s possibly the most powerful one of all, and it explains soccer hooligans, and pub fights, and the buildings burning in Athens, and lynchings, and just about any other descent into mob horror we see around us. I didn’t break the law once that night, and I don’t support looting or violence - but there was a moment when I stood watching the crowd surging and the glass breaking around me, and I can’t deny that I felt the thrill of it all. Perhaps that’s the final reason people riot. Because when you’re caught up in the whole thing, it’s just sort of fun.

Wednesday, 2 May 2012

Bonding with a Platonic Teaspoon

When you move to a foreign country you have to start all over again: buy back your life, reconstruct your existence. Plates. Bedding. Pens. Cutlery. I didn’t want to go to Ikea. I tried the local shops instead.

‘Have you got a teaspoon?’ I asked in my crap Spanish.

The grocer shook his head with a little laugh, like I’d asked him for one of the roof-tiles from the Alhambra.

´No, we don’t sell those here. Try the beautician’s,’ he said, pointing across the street.

‘A tea what?’ they snapped, in the beautician’s. ‘No, we don’t stock things like that. This is a beautician’s. Try the butcher’s, they might have it.’

I gave up and went to Ikea.

The Ikea in Madrid is annexed, as it is everywhere, on the end of a tube line as if it might infect the rest of the city. I emerged from the Metro and blinked. Someone had made the city disappear. Brownfields scarred by piled garbage and half-built houses, a deserted six-lane motorway. The crowd who’d emerged with me were already moving off across the parched earth, drawn by some common purpose towards a cloud-high sign screaming CENTRO COMMERCIAL. I followed them as if they were pilgrims broaching the Promised Land. As we neared the breezeblock Mecca of the shopping mall itself – more a collection of malls, a city of malls – an armed guard stood above silently watching our approach, like a sentry lining the castle ramparts. I half expected him to let off a couple of warning shots into the air.

Inside was the usual nouveau kitsch of every single mall I’ve ever been in – Paul Smith jackets and Zara miniskirts set to a muddled hum of muzak, mobile phone bleeps, iPod burbles. I navigated my way through an Esperanto of brandnames until I reached the Ikea at the back.

Now, the first thing you have to realize about Ikea is that it’s not a shop. It’s so much more than that. Ikea is a work of retail art, and here’s how it works.

Visitors were made to ascend immediately into an upper floor showroom tellingly labeled ´Exhibition’. Skeletal scenes from modern life snaked their way through a gallery space: rooms with no walls, cutaway suggestions of a lounge, a kitchen, a bedroom. A snapshot of life in the early twenty first century, covered in a skin of price-stickers. The only thing missing was human beings. Every installation was eerily deserted, as if it had happened moments after some global catastrophe: the dinner plates freshly laid, the wine uncorked, the cat flap still swinging. The end of the world as designer furniture.

And it worked. The place was artier than MOMA. Everything felt stylish and desirable; here, a plastic salt-shaker seemed an indispensible recipe for happiness. In fact the whole place made me want to move right in. Against the soothing soundtrack of hundreds of shuffling strangers, I realized why there were no shop dummies, no mannequins: we were the mannequins, dumbly dreaming our way through the showrooms. Ikea’s inspiration is to make you a part of the TV commercial itself. ‘Here’s paradise,’ it says. ‘And look, it’s only 8.99 Euros.’ The teaspoon I plucked from one of the drawers wasn’t a teaspoon: it was somehow generic, unblemished. A Platonic idea of a teaspoon. I realized, grasping its handle (POKAL, 7cm, 1.53E, Des. Johanna Jelinek) that I was forging a personal connection to that teaspoon.

That was the art. Downstairs came the money.

As you descend to make your actual purchases the dream promptly evaporates and the supermarket kicks in. Ikea the Promised Land becomes Ikea the Pound Land as salivating customers clamber over an Escher puzzle of flat pack delights, stock towering above you, sideways, downwards, on the ceiling… I stood back with a sort of mild terror as shoppers swarmed around me. The eagerness was overwhelming. You’d see elderly ladies lifting entire walls, ripping toilets out from their fittings. I watched a frail couple staggering out with what looked like half a house.

Eventually, dry-mouthed and beaten, I heaved a blue sack large enough to house a family packed with duvets, bowls, cutlery, plugs, bowls, desk lamps and Platonic teaspoons, and emerged blinking in the desert haze. The sun was low in the sky, an oily grimace haunting the horizon. The heat of the day was over and the landscape was eerily noiseless. If Ikea had been a frozen still life with no people, then here was more of the same. Concrete shells lay empty like the excesses of a Soviet quota. This was a construction boom deconstructed, a Mayan ruin left to bake beside a silent freeway. A guy with scary eyes tried to sell me weed as he passed on the pavement. There was nobody else around.

Shielding my eyes, I glanced down at the receipt in my hand. Seventy three Euros, it said, in flaky till-print. Seventy three Euros to buy back your life. Not bad, when you thought about it… I heaved the sack back onto my shoulder as I neared the Metro. Somewhere, down in the depths of the enormous holdall, I could sense the shape of a teaspoon.

Then I got the hell out of there and staggered back to civilization.

Thursday, 15 March 2012

Dale accidentally stumbles into a transcendental dance session – in Spanish

The door creaked open. I peered in, nervously. I didn’t have a clue where I was. I was exploring the crumbling honeycomb of my local Madrid ‘occupied’ squat centre, randomly stumbling down corridors and tiptoeing into interesting looking rooms. Most of the time they were empty. This wasn’t.

Twenty heads ranged in a big circle turned towards me silently.

A wiry guy in a white vest sitting on a chair at the head of the circle gave me a mystified glance.

‘You here for the session?’ he asked me in Spanish.

The room was dead silence. I gazed into the pool of hair beads, lip piercings, tattoos. Twenty pairs of eyes stared back. Even for my try-anything nature, this was pushing it.

I nodded as confidently as I could.

‘Er… Yeah,’ I nodded, in my crap Spanish, lowering myself gingerly onto a floor mat. The scuffling of my clothes echoed out over the plywood floor.

Puzzled, the leader continued to glance at me.

‘So you know what this is all about?’ he asked.

‘Er…’ I began to sweat under their gaze, my already fairly crap Spanish melting into incoherence. ‘The thing is - I don’t really speak much…’

I tailed off. They were really staring at me now. I´m fairly used to this whenever I´m forced to open my mouth in public over here. People´s conclusions go in stages. Their initial thoughts form after I´ve said a few words (is he special needs? Does he have a speech defect?) followed fairly quickly with the surmise that I must be from somewhere abroad, as I could see in their look now. Everyone in the room looked positively amazed that a tourist like myself could be so unbelievably hapless as to find themselves at a transcendental dance session. In tourist terms, this wasn’t just getting lost. This was going native, or faking it at any rate. I was transcendally lost.

I was really starting to sweat now.

‘That could be a problem,’ the leader said testily. ‘I mean you need to be able to follow my instructions carefully.’

I swallowed, and nodded. ‘Right.’

‘You see, we´re trying to build an atmosphere of trust here, you see? So that everyone feels comfortable.’

I looked back at him warily. Well you´re not doing much of a good job so far, I thought to myself, but didn’t reply.

I tried to nod diplomatically.

‘It´s just…’ the leader looked at me doubtfully, weighing me up for a few long moments, ‘I´m just not sure you´re going to be able to reallty participate.’

Another guy cleared his throat.

‘Oh, let him do it,’ he chipped in. ‘He looks like a nice guy.’

‘But listen to his Spanish,’ the leader said. ‘I mean, he hardly speaks it.’

The room looked at me sympathetically, as they might look at a small toddler who was struggling with its potty-training.

‘He´s doing his best,’ the other guy.

Other people from the group joined in, and a small democratic discussion developed, concerning exactly how crap my Spanish was. Throughout I lurked shame-facedly like a guilty defendant in court, beginning to wish for a big transcendental hole to come and swallow me up.

Eventually the leader sighed and clicked his knuckles.

‘Oh well, I guess we can give it a go,’ he said. ‘Question is, are you really ready for this? I mean, you do know what this whole thing involves, don’t you?’

My confidence faltered a little.

‘Sure,’ I said, through clenched teeth. ‘I´m ready for anything.’

The leader raised his eyebrows.

‘We´ll see,’ he muttered beneath his breath, but loud enough for me to hear.

He clapped his hands together and switched on a ghettoblaster to his side. A smoochey number by Sade oozed out over the room. Everyone else readily got to their feet like they knew exactly what to do.

‘The first exercise is hugging a partner,’ the leader explained. He looked at me again, solo and partnerless, then looked around the room. His gaze settled on a beefy looking guy in a wifebeater on the shoulder.

‘Ignacio, you can pair up with our newcomer here,’ the leader said.

The guy in a wifebeater gave me a once-over. He looked like he ate a tree for breakfast every morning. Out of people who I´d gladly hug, I reflected, you could fit several thousand on the list before him. You got the feeling he could do press-ups with his face.

He didn’t look like he was in the mood for hugging.

‘Make him feel welcome,’ the leader said, clapping his hands along to Sade. ‘Alright, everyone, let´s go…’