 The mall is our cultural pinnacle. It's the most visible point. Cultural trends that appear there have often travelled a long way, down a lot of weird and radical roads before coming to rest in these large, artificial, indoor, environments. Once a trend has been appropriated and slicked-out in the mall it's at the end of it's life. Ultimately, the cultural pinnacle has little meaning. The mall's an echo chamber. The real noise is in the street.  Example: When young women who identify with a particular sub-culture appropriate the fashions of older generations and wear them in new ways, a trend is born on the margins. They raid their mother's (or father's) closets, they frequent thrift stores and vintage shops. They are young and can wear a twenty year old dress, or out of date wedgies, or men's pajamas, and look cool and ironicly modern - that is the point. When centralized corporate fashion mongers pick up on these subcultural tendancies, target them, and bring slicker versions to the mall, the trend dies. Acceptance by the mainstream forces the sub-culture to look for new ways to establish itself. Being identified as a target market is an experience in cultural freedom and cultural death at the same time. When the market researchers figure out what you want to wear, to watch, to drive - they trip over themselves trying to get it to you. To woo you. To validate your good taste. On the one hand you have increased convienience and the freedom to buy the kind of things that you like in many colours and styles and in stores that you frequent. You also have a cultural reflection of your values and motivations (as far as they relate to buying things). Acceptance. On the other hand, you are culturally and morally reduced to a pair of shoes or some such product and the societal reflection of you (you, as a target market) comes in flat, impersonal, 30 second (or less) bites. Most people resent this on some level, I think. They resist the restrictiveness of it. It appears as if corporations are in the business of maufacturing Culture. But ultimately, corporate values and national marketing campaigns - while pumping a steady stream of slick material into the marketplace - lack sufficient meaning or purpose for the individual.
 >In the same way that centralized forces, like corporations, steal from the margins while they create their version of culture, people on the margins constantly steal from the centre and create new meanings. Like kids stealing from parent's closets - Andy Warhol took a dowdy can of Campbell's Tomato soup and made it modern. Japan took Mickey Mouse and gave him new history, the gay community took Tinky Winky and gave him a sex life, and the whole modern world took the internet from the United States Defense Department and turned it into a mass medium. This is as it should be. Culture afterall, is not static. Culture is where you live. In your body, in your time period, defined by the company you keep, the thoughts you think, the things you do, the things you love or hate. It exists NOW. Irrepressibly current, if traditional cultural practices have no present component, they aren't culture. We are making it up as we go along. We do this individually, on the margins, and from there, we take what's new and with great effort (or the help of corporations and government), roll it up that big cultural mountain into the centre and let it roll down the other side. It's impossible to know where the ball will stop rolling. It's always been that way. This document is solely the intellectual property of Cheryl Taylor, if you want to test my knowledge, click here.
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