Books acquired in a dead mall, 26 June 2017

I had been awake for almost twenty hours when I walked out of the Warner Center Marriott’s arctic AC into the concrete heat of the San Fernando Valley. My wife had to work for a few hours, so I was looking for a bar or something—something other than the hotel lobby (or LA traffic).

There was an enormous mall across the street, the Westfield Promenade. I entered by the AMC Theatre, one of the only five businesses remaining in the sprawling two-storied mall (it’s over half a million square feet). It was over 100 degrees outside in the Valley’s afternoon heat, and the mall was unairconditioned, stale, expansive but somehow stifling. The place appeared entirely empty except for a stray bored AMC employee scrolling through her phone. (Later, I’d see a man sleeping on a table and an inattentive security guard). A sad scatter of arcade games defined a loose threshold between the AMC’s going concern and the rest of the mall, which was clearly dead.

There’s something wonderfully Ballardian about dead malls—their vastness, the traces and ghosts of commerce stamped on them, echoes of a lost vibrancy that simultaneously suggest new and even unimagined future possibilities.

I love dead malls. I was born in 1979, and these kind of malls–the kind best summed up in their vitality in a film like Fast Times at Ridgemont High—helped to define my youth (even if I defined myself in part against the mall and mall culture): I bought the Breeders’ album Last Splash on tape at Camelot Music; I suffered through Stone’s Natural Born Killers; I ate at the weird cafeteria, cornbread squares and Jell-O squares wobbling on ugly green plastic trays.

Once, I saw Glenn Danzig browsing at the B. Dalton book store.

Of the half dozen remaining stores in the Westfield Promenade, only one is a retail space—oddly enough, a bookstore—Crown Books, a large spot that looked like it once sold new books but now seems to only sell old  books, many of them Christian. Half of the space also seems to double as a Halloween store. The power went out twice while I was in there.

The hardbacked spine of Gerhard Kopf’s novel There Is No Borges caught my attention. It was part of a large section of “clearance” books (although everything in the store seemed to be on clearance). These books were a dollar each or five for a dollar, a mathematics that screams, Please haul these away for us. (Earlier that day at the Charlotte airport, I’d paid three dollars for 16 ounces of bottled water).

Here are the covers of the books I paid not quite 22 U.S. cents for (after taxes). Please excuse the horrid hotel carpet in the background:

(Later that night my wife and I walked a few blocks past the dead mall to the live mall—an outdoor mall, vibrant, green, bustling with children and their adults and pets, music, water, chain stores, and boutiques, and crowded restaurants. There wasn’t a bookstore there).