WE WENT TO A SHOPPING MALL, AND LAUGHED AT ALL THE SHOPPERS

ITEM: Photographer Michael Galinsky has published a book of photos of American shopping malls circa 1989 – complete with trendy teenagers.









This pretty much sums up why I look back on my teenage years with horror and revulsion. Every Friday and Saturday night, all the cool kids would cruise the local mall and hang out.

I hated mall culture. I thought it was superficial bullshit for people who cared more about being popular and fashionable and trendy – and more importantly, being seen doing it – than they did about anything important.

This was, of course, because I was unpopular, unfashionable and the polar opposite of cool. Also, I had no car and no money, so I couldn’t really get to the mall to hang out even if I wanted to.

But I didn’t, really. I was happier staying home, reading books and listening to my Rush, Pink Floyd, ELO and Black Sabbath records. My idea of a great Friday night? Staying up late writing stories, eating Doritos with picante sauce and watching Benny Hill and Night Flight on UHF.

I’ve long since gotten over my aversion to shopping malls, mainly out of necessity – Hong Kong is lousy with them, as is pretty much every major city in Asia that I travel to, but they do usually serve as giant multilevel convenience stores. They’re also usually where the CD stores and good English-language bookstores are. So I use them when I need them.

On the other hand, it’s kind of a drag seeing mall culture being exported to every corner of the planet. I can see the appeal in developing markets, in terms of job creation and boosting the local economy (assuming malls accomplish both). But I’ve also seen the tradeoffs. Here in HK, locally run businesses are being pushed out of the arcades in favor of mall chain stores that can afford the exorbitant commercial rent. And many of the chain stores just happen to be owned by the same three or four HK conglomerates who also just happen to own the property.

This is progress?

Mojo Nixon had a point.

A bunch of malarky,

This is dF

THE TWILIGHT SAGA ZONE, PART 4: BELLA’S BIG FAT VAMPIRE WEDDING

Breaking Dawn Part 1

Wedding! Honeymoon! Babies!

It’s not often I spend the first hour of a film thinking, “Please kill me.” This is one of those films. Okay, the first film also starts really slow. But this is the kind of pure schmaltz that you could only get from a teenage dream wedding and subsequent honeymoon (with money).

About midway through you start getting into vampire-human mutant baby problems, which is nice, and does present a few challenges for everyone because no vampire has ever gotten a human lady pregnant before – largely because human ladies generally don’t survive vampire sex, apparently, although luckily for Bella, Edward is sensitive to her needs (though not to the point of giving her more sex when she needs it for safety reasons, which is a shame as she was a virgin until their wedding night and WHERE ELSE IS SHE GOING TO GET THE SWEET LOVING NOW, EDWARD?).

So anyway, now Bella has a mutant baby in her tummy and the gestation period is apparently just a couple of weeks, and it’s also apparently drinking her blood from the inside. Which would be a great movie if it wasn’t this one, which takes a premise like that and makes it about as scary as an average family soap opera.

And that’s pretty much all that happens (though this is only Part 1, which means the studio wanted to include as much boring detail from the final book as possible, so they made two movies instead of one, which is all Harry Potter’s fault for being a better series).

I'm keeping my baby,

This is dF