xtcian

7/24/02 I was treated to

7/24/02

I was treated to the opposite ends of the American Cultural Experience today; I spent the day at the Coralville Mall, and the night at an experimental electronic music performance. There was no cross-pollination between these two crowds, but both paid extreme imagination dividends.

First the mall: it's the same old sad story that every small town will tell you. "The mall moved in and ruined Uncle Pete's Bait Shop Downtown!" I understand the sadness that accompanies the development of a mega-mall, having seen downtown Chapel Hill gentrified to the point of utter meaninglessness, but you have to understand, I grew up in a mall. I came of age scooping ice cream for disgruntled shoppers at High's Ice Cream, I first saw "Poltergeist" and "E.T." at the Military Circle Mall, and my favorite place in all of London whilst growing up besides the London Dungeon – was Brent Cross (where, as family lore now has it, we always agree to "meet by the fountain" if lost). I don't see anything wrong with a mall – it has all the stuff you want in one place, and it's air conditioned. The outside of a mall is always dreadful, but you're not there for artistic reasons.

Iowa City has one such supermall on the outskirts of town, technically in Coralville, IA, and it's a fucking space station. There's a Best Buy, a Walmart, a Target, a Barnes & Noble you could land a plane in this thing. The Best Buy is unusually large (land in Iowa is cheap) and houses every gadget you could ever want in a testosterone-addled warehouse. It's the next best thing to porn for a guy; nowhere outside of a strip club is there a place where every single new object merits lingering attention.

I go to the mall not just because I like it, but because I think it's important to immerse yourself in regular America often, to keep you honest and to make your artistic ambitions realistic. While it's true that Tessa and I could only find a home in the hyper-intellectual ramblings of our friends surrounding New York, we do want to make movies and write books, and these are the people that are going to do the ticket-buying (god willing).

Clothes are continuing their southern migration to the bottom of the typical mall-going body; girls wear virtually nothing on top and low-slung jeans that flare out heavily near the ankle, and they spend shitloads of money on shoes. Breasts are everywhere, and skimpy shirts make the most of them. It doesn't matter if you're pudgy everyone is – the roll of tanned fat protruding out the bottom of the baby-tee is part of the plan.

This is Iowa, so you're not going to get the mind-bending horror fashions of the lines at Disneyland or the DMV (nor the circus-clown makeup of the Mormon chicks at the Orem Mall in Utah), but let's be honest: we're a fat fucking country. What's worse, you can see the "gonna be fat" pre-teens, the ones that would have been stick-thin in 1983, but have started on a trajectory of Biggie-size McNugget Meals that will end years from now with countless late-nite TV diet cures and prescriptions for Zocor.

I walked behind a gaggle of 15-year-olds, and I have to say, not much has changed since I did the same thing with Hampy, Lynn and Steve Shapiro. Replace my short O.P. shorts with huge, black, billowing denim jeans and you've got the same conversations about the same stupid people in your grade, the same longings to stake out a meaningful kiss with the girl at the cookie store, the same acne. The only real difference between the Coralville Mall and my own experience is the cell phone kiosks every fourteen feet.

Upon arriving home, I forgot to go to the Radio Shack, so Kent directed me to the other mall, the old Iowa City mall still limping along on Sycamore Avenue. The minute you walk in there, you know something's wrong: there's nothing like the fetid stench of a dying mall. Entire storefronts were up for lease, gangrenous empty husks threatening to spread their disease to the other stores. I actually had to walk into the sad, sad Radio Shack and ask, "Um, do you guys still sell stuff?"

Kent was psyched to house the seven or so guests from Pittsburgh, the touring experimental electronic gurus known as the Circuits of Steel. They're on the last leg of what looks like a massive tour, replete with hundreds of pounds of computers, dials, knobs, wires and mikes it's like a Wendy Carlos explosion. In order to truly understand their show, you need earplugs, a healthy desire to accept new expressions of art, a small understanding of what happened to music after techno, and the love of that gut-rambling punch a good speaker will give you when it hits the bass notes. They set up at Gabe's with Kent as sound mixer.

Manherringbone did some amazing stuff by swinging the mike around and letting the feedback loop into fascinating beats, making him the logical endgame of Roger Daltrey and a theremin. DJ's Climax Street and Syne Lapse Variate were amazing noise artists as well, but it will be a guy who calls himself Holocaust that will stick with me on this trip. To a backdrop of images alternately bucolic and horrible, this guy unleashed a torrent of noise so upsetting as to be cathartic. It wasn't post-apocalyptic, it was during-apocalyptic. He calls his music "digital hardcore motivated by political activism" and I fucking believe it.

You can't even see this stuff in New York City unless you're super-clued-in to it Manhattan has largely priced itself out of artists like these. They came from Pittsburgh and are performing in front of twelve people in a little club in Eastern Iowa. They are the cliff edge of where music and noise meet, and right now, at 3am, they are downstairs with Kent jamming on his Prophet. If anyone wanted to know where the most groundbreaking artistic expressions in the world are happening, the most bleeding knifepoint of new cultural thought, I think they'd be quite surprised. It's been Kent's basement for decades now.