Aztec Fridays

Yesterday on my recession Friday, we started off with a breakfast at our local Jack-in-the-Box, which was kind of nice as the uptown one on central made an attempt to upscale itself with high, cafe-style tables by the front windows. Next stop was the giant Fry's Electronics, the big box store that for some reason looks like a Aztec temple. It's beyond kitch, with the giant fake stone snakes, and the life size tableus of natives bearing consumer electronics, but the whole thing is so surreal and arbitrary, I actually find it much more preferable to the typical steaming piles of stucco I see everywhere. I'm sure I'm reading too much into it, but the fact that its an electronics store in the form of a temple strikes me as commentary on consumerism as nearly religious worship. Make sacrifice unto HD.

[Actually, I am reading way too much into it. Apparently, Fry's Electronics attempts to theme most of it's stores. There's a "pre-1960's Indianopolis 500" theme in Indiana, an oil-derrick theme in the Houston store, and oddly, stores that use an Alice in Wonderland motif with life-sized characters. Aztecs were a native group in Mexico, but as we're in Arizona, I don't see how they could make the connection. Saori was wondering where do you even find contractors who carve giant foam sculptures.]

Anyway, after Fry's we went to PV mall to look for a swimsuit for Saorichan. We had mixed luck- she found a suit she liked for a price she didn't so its off to the internet for some comparison shopping. I picked up a new hat, and we wandered through the various stores. PV seems to have stablized itself. Last time I was there about a year to two years ago, there were a lot of shuttered stores, and it seems like there were only one or two closed storefronts.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the indoor mall typology is on its way out the door. The retail trend which follows the financing trend is that they are being supplanted by outdoor malls. Typical form is a "district" or short pedestrian street lined with boutique retail, dining, and entertainment surrounded by a lake of parking and the entire thing ringed by a chain of big box retail stores. If you're in Phoenix; Desert Ridge, Tempe Marketplace, Mesa Riverview, San Tan, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

We finally got around to watching our latest Netflix disc, Chungking Express by Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love, 2046), which tells the story of two Hong Kong cops and their love lives. Tony Leung stars as one of the cops, and there was another Japanese actor I saw in John Woo's Red Cliff who played the other cop. Apparently shot in two months while Kar Wai was editing another much larger epic, this is a much simpler, lighter movie than his other works. The story centers around a food stand which sells everything from fish and chips and chef's salads to pizza, where the two cops, who never actually share the same screen, come to eat and relax. The story is okay, its more about the characters and their relationships. Singer and model Faye Wong is a lot of fun to watch as she plays one of the food stand staffers who secretly loves one of the cops, and she is constantly grooving to the same song, "California Dreaming." I liked it more than Happy Together, and 2046, but I didn't think it measured up to In the Mood for Love.

The style is great, his camera loves the culture and city of Hong Kong, its internationalism, its frenetic pace and neon signage, the packed vegetable markets in the tropical heat and concrete, the incredible density and labrythine urbanism, even the griminess. It makes me want to pack up and head straight to Hong Kong. American filmmaker Quinten Tarintino geeked out over this movie so much, he introduces the film, and actually created a line of special US releases to make sure that the film would be exposed to US audiences.

Thinking about Tarintino, it makes me wonder if there are "filmmaker's filmmakers," or possibly, "architect's architects." Can they be judged in the same way? Or is it only valid to evaluate and compare works? Tarintino might camp out at the theater to see the latest Wong Kar Wai work, as George Lucas might to see a Kurosawa film, or John Lasseter (Pixar) for Miyazaki (Ghibli), but so would so many other people. The cinema is so accessible and directly experienced that it makes me think that the reasons the Tarintino's and Lucas's go to the movies is not so different why you or I go to the movies.

Fundamentally, maybe its not so different with architects and architecture. Yes, if Tadao Ando designed a gas station a hundred miles from my house, I would drive to go see it just because it's Tadao Ando's work. Like a movie, architects and designers would be interested in the details and craftmanship, but I think really at the end of the day, what is most compelling is the spaces that are created, and I think everyone really does appreciate architecture in that same way, whether or not they even notice it. Perhaps people like being certain places and its just that industry people pay closer attention to the causes of what makes a space nice. There's differences of taste, and also of ambition of course. Scottsdale Fashion square mall has a nice atrium, you could say the sliding glass roof and ambient daylight and bridges are nice architectural features, but no one but architects will pay close attention to them. But people pay money to see Gaudi's unfinished Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, which is a space that grabs you and shakes you. Designer or no, most people say "wow."