Peter McCollough: Seven Ways to Sunday

September 1, 2010 at 7:28 pm, filed under Americans, Street, Travels and tagged Children, Consumerism, Mall of America, Minneapolis. Leave a comment permalink or follow comments RSS feed for this post.

In the beginning of August, during our month-long drive from Maine to San Francisco, Miki and I took a break in Minneapolis. Tim Gruber and Jenn Ackerman were kind enough to let us stay at their house while they were shooting in Las Vegas which gave us some time to relax and explore. I had never been to Minneapolis, and taking Tim’s advice, the first place I went was the Mall of America. If I were to explain the Mall of America to someone who had never been, I would say it’s like someone took the consumerism and vanity of Los Angeles and the big and excessive taste of Texas and then merged it with the “so normal it’s weird” culture of middle-America. It was my favorite part of Minneapolis. I went back two other days to walk about, take pictures and just watch. Much like the over-the-top Minneapolis cheeseburger called the “juicy lucy,” the mall seemed to be crafted on the basis of too much. An intended over-indulgence where participation carries a benign ridiculousness that negates any sense of gluttony. Walking through 4.2 million square feet of American consumerism felt like traveling inside a hive. And in the middle of the mall, which is where I spent most of my time, is an amusement park much like the eye of a storm with roller coasters and all. It is chock-full of eye bleaching colors, junk food, noisy rides, screaming children, etc. Being from California, the mass consumeristic buzz that causes borderline hysteria was familiar. It was what, as an outsider, I enjoyed about it. And I’ve realized that I find it most fascinating when it manifests in children. Not only because it is the behavior of children that allows the most unfettered look into the parent’s and the society that are raising them, but also because studying our children is like seeing into the future and the culture to come.