From “PREFACE to a DEPT STORE” from Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking. [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] A BOOK OF META DATA [STANDARDS] DOWNLOADED, RECIPES, WITH PHOTOGRAPHS FROM A FLEA MARKET (FOREWARD LAURA RIDING JACKSON) , by Tan Lin.
We believe expenditure takes place without meaningful exchange, or we get repetitive gestures without significance. Airports, shopping malls, and golf courses are the most pleasing, crisis-free, and logo-ized of landscapes. They are mood-inducing delivery systems, schematas of unimposed identifications that make irrelevant the distinction between pre- and post-consumption. A golf course like a painting is consumed in almost the same way time and time again. That is why golf is so relaxing. Golf courses, cineplexes and shopping centers fringe population areas and function in the same way that pastoral poetry, the coffee house c. 1680, short bandwidth radio, or the only movie theatre in a small town once did. They remind us that we need to fall in love again and again with something that is unspecific, very repetitive, and very very general. The lights of the Varsity Movie Theatre in Athens, Ohio, where I grew up, reflect each night off the bricks of Court Street, but the marquee now reads Taco Bell, and the old balcony and stage are now the site of tables and the gentle, illumined prices of tacos and quesadillas. Our most beautiful emotions like a movie theatre or the pages of a Chinese cookbook or the price of 16 ounces of Pepsi are routine and anodyne. Either they existed before or they existed previously. All our emotions vacation with incandescence as they dissolve. (73)
