When the Mall Empties Out
Plus, How To Get Lost, Illustrated Poetry & Falling-Down Barns | jan22.2023
‘Phone Boy.’ | An idle clerk at a shop devoted to the youths — where are the youths? — desperately seeks stimulation. | Huntington Mall, January 2023 | TheStoryIsTheThing.com photo
By DOUGLAS JOHN IMBROGNO | January 22, 2023 | I have been walking around the local mall lately, officially entering my pre-dotage. (‘Oh, no, you’re a MALL WALKER,’ my twentysomething daughter texts me.) Yet, I am also intrigued by The State of the Mall, these formerly commercial Shangri-La dream states, where — pre-Amazon Prime — everyone went, fulfilling the atavastic urge of all sapiens to gather together, forage, eat, and see and be seen.
In a series of photographs a few weeks ago, I mused on one Mall State, after experiencing the retail desolation of Town Center Mall in the heart of West Virginia’s capital city. (‘It’s No Longer a Mall Thing.’) That photo-essay stated incorrectly that: ‘At least for a hundred miles in any direction in my vicinity, nowadays most malls are shadows of their former glory.’ Yet a recent visit to my neighborhood Huntington Mall in Barboursville, W.Va., after an absence of more than a half-a-decade, reveals a mall with most storefronts occupied, unlike the white-wall-to-white-wall vacancies at the — it must be said — spooky Town Center Mall.
‘There Used To Be So Much More To Clean Up.’ | A janitress un-smudges the middle of the mall. | Huntington Mall, January 2023 | TheStoryIsTheThing.com photo
Admittedly, as you view the photos I share today, know that I was dropping in on a weekday afternoon. The place may be livelier on weekends. Still, the American mall’s moment has clearly come and departed or is rapidly going. (Excuse me, a delivery guy just dropped onto my porch the 9th delivery this month of something I used to buy at the mall …)
Not a few once-bustling malls are now decrepit, abandoned, vandalized wrecks, more suited for horror film location shoots or ‘ruin porn’. Photographer Seph Lawless strikingly documented lost malls in his 2020 book “Abandoned Malls of America: Crumbling Commerce Left Behind" (as well as on his Instagram feed, and his website). Lawless is quite the Richard Avedon of ruins.
‘Where Am I Going To Put All This Fizzy Candy and Who’ll Buy It?’ | A clerk ponders that day’s manifest in search of sweet tooths. | Huntington Mall, January 2023 | TheStoryIsTheThing.com photo
In a 2020 CNN profile, ‘Inside America's eerie abandoned malls,’ Lawless nails the specific appeal of the mall in its heyday, a feature that kept so many generations of us not just wanting to go to them, but needing to:
"Malls were communal spaces; they were gigantic chat rooms before the internet ever existed."
Nowadays, we chat and overshare our mood-of-the-moment, if not our most extreme emotional states — from how we feel about the people we dislike to how we hate our life — in a torrent of tweets, posts, and here’s-a-closeup-of-my-nostril-hair selfies. At least at the mall, you could duck into Spencer’s Gifts, to be soothed by slow-bubbling lava lamps or be titillated by racy retail offerings sold nowhere else, after you got sick of your friend group or parents. The social media version of taking-a-break-from-them is funny cat videos and happy dogs. (Like, really happy dogs writing songs with their paws …)
Getting Lost
Sometimes, you just want to get lost. But there are good ways, and not-so-good ways, to handle being lost. Below is an advance look at a video to be featured in the Winter 2023 Issue of WestVirginiaVille.com. It’s an ‘illustrated poem’ shot in the revitalizing (for me) marshlands out in Greenbottom, W.Va., beside the Ohio River. The video is just two-minutes-and-some change long, but it poses a key question on what we may learn from being lost. And I don’t just mean losing our way through the woods.
CLICK TO VIEW VIDEO
Regular readers of TheStoryIsTheThing know I have been experimenting with animating poems (such as this and this and this). I have since found a small, yet global subculture celebrating what others call “poetry film” or “video poetry.” So, I entered “How To Get Lost” and some of the work linked above into the 2023 Cadence Video Poetry Festival in Seattle; the Arts Visuals and Poetry Film Festival in Vienna; and the International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia. I’ll have arrived as a global artiste when I get to jet to Germany to screen a poem and, then, seek vegetarian Wiener Schnitzel to celebrate, if that’s even a thing. Is that a thing? It should be a thing.
What It Feels Like, Some Days, Inside My Head
‘The Leaning Barn of Wayne County, West Virginia,’ located out near Porter’s Fork Road. | December 2022 | TheStoryIsTheThing.substack.com photo by Douglas John Imbrogno
A Note About Notes
As part of researching the “sorta memoir” I am writing, I have been poring though old boxes of my life’s detritus. (A word whose most artful definition, for my purposes, is: ‘Organic matter produced by the decomposition of organisms.’ The book will be about decomposing in some notable locales — Paris, Ireland, as well as West Virginia — but, then, re-composing myself and thriving after such decomposition.)
I came upon a notebook I carried while bouncing around Paris and the midlands of France, south of Clermont-Ferrand, in the formerly volcanic heartland of Gaul. This was in the late 1970s, before easy access to printers and scanners. I forget the specific details on the creation of this palm-sized notebook. But I must have transcribed from a songbook some favorite songs, in preparation for playing them on my further travels.
View more of these seriously anal-retentive renderings of other songs (“Aragon Mill" and “Can’t Help Falling in Love”) at the link below. Plus the backstory of how, for one brief, shining moment, my French-Moroccan buddy Maloud and I harmonized across the volcanic hill country of France. That was after he finally learned how to pronounce the lyrics to Elvis Presley’s version of “Blue Moon,” which he had only ever learned phonetically, his ear pressed to a transistor radio as a boy.
LINK: THE ART of the SONG LYRIC
Speaking of Boys
Here’s a poem any parent or grandparent with a dreamy kid may appreciate. It was written after one long-ago night, standing on an Appalachian mountaintop, gazing up at the night-light show of the universe with my boy.
“Outer Limits”
Dots of satellites,
slow-moving stars
high high overhead,
always circling the
marble of the earth,
pass by well past
midnight, far above
the push-up Appalachians,
deep in the American outback.
On one stands my son,
eight-years-old and
gazing, dreaming, staring
deeply into outer space.
Thinking of aliens.
You Can Have This Haiku For a Buck
What can I say? Sometimes, you have to write a haiku about the Dollar Store.
Guess you're one of the many too young to remember a time before malls and Amazon. Long ago, we had these establishments called stores that had individual locations and addresses on named streets, distinct personalities, and honorable histories. They occupied vibrant places called downtown where after shopping neighbors gathered in places like Taylor's to buy something to read, meet friends, and linger over a coffee. I never lived there, but would guess that's what planners remembered when they built Charleston's downtown mall. Darned shame what became of it from the looks of that photo. The failure of small-city downtown culture may be where the decline of America began.