Strip Mall of the Ancients

In July 2006, I attended the SOBO Summerfest in Boulder, Colorado. This was a pretty forgettable affair – some uninteresting jam bands and some merchants giving away sports bottles and power bars-- but certainly nothing to write home about. What caught my attention, though, were the staging grounds themselves. The revelers gathered in a strip mall parking lot, backing up against a row of shops: used sporting goods, knickknacks, a diner, classroom space for knitters, mountaineering equipment repair, and the now empty Social Security Administration office. It is a commonplace that America is losing public space – town squares are abandoned in favor of strip malls on the edge of town. The first strip mall is thought to have appeared in Kansas City early in the last century, and we’ve continually moved further out along the road ever since. This de-centering has left an indelible mark on virtually all American cities; even Boulder, which in many ways is a beacon for the success of central town planning. So placing the Summerfest in a parking lot was an obvious choice, logistically. SOBO refers to South Boulder, not really a neighborhood proper, but simply that part of Boulder south of the rest of town (duh). The out-sized strip mall here (actually several interlocking strips) is the hub of activity in South Boulder, and I’m writing in a coffee shop in the strip mall right now. The structure does actually have a name, the Table Mesa Shopping Center (not the Table Mesa Strip Mall, a more accurate, but rather less grandiose title), though no one actually refers to it as such. I’ve heard it referred to as ‘the shops’, ‘the hood’, ‘the café’, ‘the strip mall’, and only very occasionally as SOBO (always said with a snicker of derision). These monikers reveal a certain familiarity – a speaker would only ever refer to ‘the shops’ if the listener was certain to know what was being referred to, otherwise it would be hopelessly vague. Furthermore, it is precisely this familiarity that goes against the expectation of pessimistic critics, historians, and preservationists.

Conventional wisdom has long said that as a community moves away from its center, its cohesive identity will evaporate. However, the millennial predictions of the city’s disappearance have not come to pass – or, rather, the outcome is just a little more complicated than predicted. For instance, sitting here as I am, looking through the coffee shop window, I see many familiar faces: Pyramid-Head Guy[1] just walked past, the women from the cooking school next door are taking their break, the banjo hippie has made an appearance, and I’m always hopeful that Camo-Man[2] will show up again after a long absence. So, that sense of community once engendered by the town square has not really been lost, it has just moved to the outskirts of town. Despite the rather dismal state of this strip mall, I find that I’ve become quite attached to it. It is my cultural and communal center, even in spite of its shortcomings. Things are not the same as they were before, however, in that pre-strip mall state of urban bliss. Indeed, in important ways our relationship to the city has changed, though this change is complicated. But there are several threads here, so let me slow down and try to pry them apart.

The centerpiece of ancient Greek architecture was the agora – this was, in fact, hardly a piece of architecture at all, it was a plaza. It was largely an empty space, but one in which the most important social events occurred. Surrounding the agora, however, was the stoa. The stoa should seem to us strikingly familiar; it did not differ substantially from a strip mall. It consisted of a long, low roof, supported by columns, backing against a wall. Most were one story, though several were two-leveled (like much of the Table Mesa strip mall). In terms of its actual structure, the strip mall differs from the stoa most substantially in that the wall which originally backed the Greek stoa now has shops behind it (the stoa held vendors selling wares, but not shops, proper). So it is not without a certain amount of irony that the strip mall, perhaps most denigrated of modern structures, should be essentially the same as a Greek structure, whose culture is still often heralded as the architectural high-water mark. The historian R.E. Wycherly called the stoa a work of peculiar genius, but I think that is really overstating the case. Quite the contrary, the stoa seems to me to be an obvious development: a wall and a roof. Clearly, similar structures have appeared in many cultures at many times, and are probably close to automatic.

It is likely one of the oldest architectural designs; there may be genius in the first moment of architectural awareness, but that it should take the form of a stoa is no big surprise. Visiting the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, I was struck that artisans selling their wares outside the monument at Wounded Knee had aligned their handmade awnings in perfect strip formation, parallel to the highway. The stoa/strip mall may be the architectural vernacular supreme. So what’s the difference? The difference is that relationship between the stoa and the agora that existed for the Greeks. This does not properly exist any more. The agora was shared public space – Socrates engaged in dialogues here. Now we have parking lots (though I think philosophy still proceeds here[3]). Is this a bad development? Not necessarily. As heir-apparent to the Greek civilizations, widespread appearance of the strip malls is nicely nostalgic but the transformation of the agora into a parking lot is peculiarly American. The strip mall, in dispensing with the agora, becomes an architecture peculiarly suited to the road. It is an architecture of movement. Think of the word itself: strip implies an elongated strand, itself already directional. It also implies the removal of something, in this case a center. The strip, once denuded of its agora, is reduced to only direction, an arrow pointed onward. Movement; travel, but without a destination. So, the SOBO Summerfest had to make use of a parking lot. But the parking lot is only a momentary agora. Most of the time it’s a temporary resting place for cars. And this is telling, too. Not-quite-dead space, a repository for our stuff before we are back on the road again.

Parking lots, and not just those in front of strip malls, are the frequent centers of public events now: concerts, farmer’s markets, pottery shows, dog shows, roller hockey. And this is very clever, in a certain way. Public space has broadened its use. But really, it’s just a response to a lack. We need public space, and we’ll invent it if its not readily provided. The parking lot provides this opportunity, but in a somewhat sadder way. The parking lot is public, but it's also tenuous – sadder, wiser. We might buy our organic vegetables here in the morning, but we also come here to fight and smoke cigarettes at night. This after-the–flood attitude has been amply shown in movies from Heavy Metal Parking Lot to Say Anything, where the kids without dates hang out aimlessly behind the gas station. The strip mall as such, though, is well overdue for a more serious study. A glossy photographic coffee-table volume just depicting strip malls would be welcome, indeed. So, even if goaded by a lack of options, we still come to the strip mall for various revelations – I, myself, once performed with a band at a strip mall (as Jonathan Richman put it, “Couldn’t stay inside talkin’, had to get outside rockin’”). We come here to celebrate, but we know we soon will have to move on (to another strip mall?). So, it is with that sense of existential whimsy, but wistfulness that I walk past these shops. The strip mall is in constant change – here the book store has closed down, and the homebrewer’s supply has relocated. But now we have an Indian grocery and a dollar store – so I can cheaply buy out-of-date Chocolate Lucky Charms. It's human nature to grow attached to certain features of our environment, but at the strip mall our attachments are continually unsettled. With the Greek stoa/agora, this must have been much less the case. On the strip all bets are off. I am always hoping that Camo- Man will reappear – clad only in camouflage trousers, constantly playing hacky sack, blasting Tom Waits from his camouflage truck. For a season he literally lived here, and could be seen every time I passed, bringing a weird constancy to the strip. But, of course, he eventually moved on, presumably to another strip mall, kicking hacky sacks off another roof.

This article originally ran in AmericanNerdMag.com on July 3, 2006.

[1] Pyramid-Head guy is a bookish, genial young man who appears to be wearing a medium sized pyramid on his head, under a blue windbreaker. In addition, he is always wearing sunglasses over duct tape – the duct tape is directly applied to his nose. My wife once observed him looking up transdimensional harmonics in the dictionary at the library.
[2] Camo-Man, obviously, wears camo pants and, not obviously, nothing else. I once saw him leap from the strip mall roof, terrifying soccer moms strolling past with their soy chais. He may summer in the mountains. More on Camo-Man later
[3] Transdimensional harmonics anyone?

Cracking Eggs in the Self-Aware Diner: Prolegomena to an Aesthetic

This essay is reprinted from AmericanNerdMag.com. It originally ran July 18, 2005.













This morning I had breakfast at Dot's Diner, just about the tastiest place a person can go for morning fixins in Boulder, Colorado. When I'm there, I order a vegan breakfast burrito. This burrito configuration doesn't appear as such on the menu; it's my own twist on their existing breakfast burrito. I've now ordered it so many times that the staff knows immediately what I'll be getting when I walk through the door. I've become a regular, and that's a comfortable position to be in. To be completely honest, I harbor a secret desire that Dot's will name the burrito after me; that some day my name will appear on their green laminated menus. And what an honor that would be! I'd have entered into the mysterious pantheon of diner namesakes, those faceless geniuses who have begotten many an omelet and sandwich across this fair nation.

There's no place I would rather eat than a diner, and Dot's is among the best. At Dot's, as with any diner worth its salt, the heaviness of a coffee mug in one's hand while leaning into a vinyl booth is uniquely satisfying. After all, the beauty of a diner isn't the food, anyway (or at least not entirely), it's the ambience; or, more accurately, the context. The diner is the quintessence of American eatery. No other variety of establishment quite matches it for the rawness of Americana found therein. But this much is obvious. Everyone involved knows that they are embedded in a time-worn tradition. And this, in itself, is a bit of a predicament. Because people who run diners know that they are serving up hot plates of American quintessence, they market their diners as such. That is to say, diners are, more often than not, explicitly marketed as diners, just in case you're apt to miss the point.

And just what do we make of such an establishment? Such a place is no longer a mere diner, but a Self-Aware Diner, which, to be sure, is a yolk of a different color. The Self-Aware Diner has discovered itself. It announces its own identity from tack-on mansard rooftops. We might think of the Self-Aware Diner as having reached maturity, no longer tolerating the indiscretions of the searching youth. But, as any diner devotee will tell you, the Self-Aware Diner isn't where we really want to be, is it? Diner self-awareness is a cause for concern. We, the coffee drinkers and omelet eaters, want to eat at a real diner, whatever that means, and a diner that loudly displays its dimerism seems, well, phony, doesn't it? Bill Griffith, author of Zippy the Pinhead, refers to the phenomenon as the meta-diner: a diner that's about being a diner. Doesn't this seem like a problem? What happened to the diner that was about breakfast? And, isn't this essentially what Plato was so worried about in writing The Republic? Plato didn't want meta-experiences, he wanted to get right to the heart of reality, or at least as close as possible. And what could be more real than a burger and fries (or more phony than a burger and fries that attempts to capture the national zeitgeist)?

The worst offenders among the self-aware bunch make themselves pretty obvious. If you've ever been to the Rock & Roll Runza in Lincoln Nebraska (and I think we can assume that we've all been there, right?), you'll know the symptoms. Upon entering the restaurant, one experiences a time-warp. But instead of being back in the 1950s as they actually were we emerge in sickeningly nostalgic bizarro 1950s, where the employees look like the cast of Grease, you can eat in the replica of a '57 Chevy, and if you're lucky, Elvis himself (or a pimply-faced sixteen year old in Elvis-guise) will croon for you. Notice, also, that it's the "Rock & Roll" Runza, not the "Rock" Runza. This is a place to go for the safe, fun-loving, good times of Bill Haley and the Comets, not the threatening near-Satanic posturing of AC/DC (for the facsimile of danger, one heads on down to the Hard Rock Café, a slightly different breed of Self-Aware Diner). Sure, the themed menu items are fun, but, to any one in search of a real diner, such a place is unsettling. Everything is phony, a mock-up – and, of course, this is precisely the appeal. For a discerning public, who wants an eatery both safe and fun, staged dinerism is precisely what's called for. If you're looking for a controlled and predictable, yet innocently fun dining experience, you'll want to be in the Self-Aware Diner. Properly speaking the Rock & Roll Runza isn't really a diner at all, but a fast-food joint masquerading as a diner. But, of course, what they ultimately offer to customers isn't authentic diner fare, but a nostalgic redressing of post WWII-innocence and optimism.

The real thing, on the other hand, is an unknown; there's just too many X-factors, and, for a lot of people, the threat of finding oneself in a dive (and not faux-dive, mind you) is too great to be risked. And, easy as it is to find a Denny's, Perkins or IHOP (Self-Aware Diners, all), why flirt with danger?

Diner self-awareness is not a fleeting phenomenon. The Self-Aware are here to stay, and they're sinking into public consciousness. The problem is what to do with these places? Vincent and Mia dance in a Self-Aware Diner in Pulp Fiction, and enjoy the parody (though, notice that the film opens and closes in a "real" diner – or at least a less-self-aware one, anyway). Ghost World's Enid expresses disgust with a Self-Aware Diner, but ultimately enjoys the kitchiness, which gives her a chance to make fun of the dupes that the diner suckers in. The patrons are dupes because they are un-aware of, or at least accepting of, the diner's self-awareness, and Enid feels superior because she's clued in. She knows that the whole thing is a sham. But, ultimately, this turns back upon itself – after all, she's a patron, too. Later in the film when Seymour watches Blueshammer, the Self-Aware Blues Band (though unaware, presumably, of how bad they are) he feels awkward – he's looking for real blues, and isn't satisfied just with being clued-in. So, how should we react? Can we make fun of Self-Aware Diners while still enjoying them? Or is it better to retreat in disgust?

Let's pause for a minute to consider self-awareness as such. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt suggested that second-order awareness was the identifying characteristic of personhood. That is to say, if you can think about yourself in abstract, you're a human. Thus, a human, as opposed to what Frankfurt called a "wanton" would not only think about eating at a diner, but would think "I'm a person who likes to eat at diners." But, failing, that you're dealing with a different kind of animal (well, okay, you're dealing with an animal). But, how should we translate this into the world of dinerdom? The Self-Aware Diner not only thinks about burgers and fries, but thinks about how such foods are emblematic of its status-as-diner. This is second-order awareness. And does this mean that Self-Aware Diners are, in fact, human? More and more, I'm reluctant to respond with a no… But, self-awareness doesn't really stop at the second level, anyway.

Both humans and diners are also capable of third-order awareness. One could guess that the Pulp Fiction diner has not only second level awareness, but third level awareness, too. It not only knows that it is a diner, but knows that it knows that it is a diner. Put another way, the Pulp Fiction diner knows that it's a diner, and also knows that you, the patron, knows it's a diner, and, further, knows that you know it's a diner that knows it's a diner – and, thus, that its appeal is its pretense toward irony. The deceived patron slurps his soda thinking, "hey, here is a diner that is really trying hard to be a diner – hilarious! I love it!". While the diner itself knows that that is why the patrons are here – and that that is precisely the point. So, the patron's ironic stance fails as long as the diner is more aware than the patron. This may be Enid's mistake in Ghost World, too. She accepts the irony of being at the diner, but it still managed to draw her in, and the experience, while initially amusing, is ultimately unsatisfying. But, of course, now that you're in the know, you can trump the third-order awareness diner with some third-order awareness of your own. It's not exactly a vicious circle, but a vicious, upwardly moving double helix.

Among humans, self-reflexivity is prized. The more aware we can be the better. But with diners, quite the opposite is true. The mythical "authentic" self-unaware diner, lurking somewhere deep in the heart of a rural no-man's land, is the holy grail of dinerdom. It'srecognizable by a few hallmarks: lifeless food, ancient décor, palpable weariness. Of course, what's most important is that the seed-cap wearing patrons have no pretense that they're doing something emblematic of the American zeitgeist (and no awareness that lunch can exist at varying levels of meta-meaning, anyway). They're just getting a bite to eat. Which makes you, the discoverer of the authentic diner, an interloper. You'll have discovered a hidden tribe in a dark continent. The diner's practices will be ultimately inscrutable, untranslatable. And to the diner's true patrons, it won't be worth asking questions about. But actually, as I've already mentioned, the authentic ur-diner is a mythical creature, and like all mythical creatures, it's a useful fiction. This is not to say that seedy rural diners don't exist – they do, but their status as authentic is merely a useful counterpoint to the Self-Aware Diner's existence as phony. Will immersing ourselves in increasingly primordial diners really solve lingering self-reflexivity questions? It's really hard to say. A friend of mine went on a quest to find the diviest diner in his vicinity, but, two diners in, he gave up. He couldn't handle their strangeness, and so went back to eating at Self-Aware Diners.

I recently visited the Happy Chef restaurant in Mankato, MN. I was attracted by the statuary. In front of the Happy Chef, greeting travelers on highway 169 is the Happy Chef, a two-story statue of a beaming chef, triumphantly holding a spoon aloft. At its base, one can push a button to hear Happy Chef's delightful jokes. Happy Chef statues used to be commonplace, though now the Mankato location is the only one still standing. (Though apparently, some derelict chefs still exist in unwitting locations). Diner statuary is a funny thing. The Happy Chef announces to all passers-by, "Hey look at me, I represent dinerdom." Thus, the Happy Chef is definitely self-aware. But, because, there's only one Happy Chef statue left, it can make a claim to a certain authenticity. The statue is a genuine relic from a Self-Aware Diner; its authentically inauthentic. And this exposes a crucial point. Self-Aware diners are still real places, at the same time that they're phony. Sure, they're mock-ups pretending to be something that they're not, but real people still eat there.

I'm a regular at Dot's Diner, which is, itself, certainly not unaware of its status-as-diner. Nevertheless, the occurrence of regularity itself speaks to its reality. The regular is the time-worn, and so, one could conclude that diner self-awareness is itself becomingquintessentially American. Thus, the Self-Aware Diners get what they were after, though in a clearly unintended way. To those diner purists looking for reality in imagined unawareness, I recommend a change in strategy. In retreating from the phony, we are apt to miss something that is itself real, and that is unreality. I'm not necessarily saying we should embrace it, either, but it is something to be aware of.