Week Five • Tommy's Adventure in the Westfield Mall

This week, I wanted to read other classmates’ blogs and read what their experience was out in the Los Angeles Metropolitan region. Almost immediately, I was drawn in by Tommy's exploration of the Westfield Mall. His introduction was catchy and his humorous description hooked me in, making me want to continue reading it to see what else he had to say. However, as I read on, I found that while that very humor was attention grabbing (here and there), it was also a drawback in which several of his jokes don't make much sense. He later, at the very end of his post, relates his observations of the Westfield Mall to David Harvey's article about "built environment" as well as references David Sibley's Mapping the Pure and the Defiled.

Here's my comment to his post:

Hi there Tommy! To start off, one of the reasons why I wanted to make a comment on your post was that I found myself strangely drawn to your descriptive introduction (the other was that I actually just visited the Westfield Mall with a friend this afternoon for fun, haha). At first, I wasn’t sure where you were going with your writing and this eerie ghost story like tale until you stated that your location of topic was the Westfield mall.

One major thing I would like to address is the humor in your post. In the beginning, I was laughing at the jokes you made, finding them clever and catchy and ultimately adding a unique and personal style to your writing. However, as I continued reading several of your jokes stopped making sense and the amount of it became distracting as some aspects of your post felt superfluous and/or irrelevant. It was also very unclear what your point was in different aspects and the first large portion of your post sounded something more like a comedy blog than of one expressing observations in an analytical way. In other words, I mean that it was, in my opinion, far too heavy in the hilarity and extremely lacking in analysis and other observational elements such as demographics (just to name one).

 It isn’t until the end of your post that you lay down relations and references to a couple of our readings (which I will be giving my own input about later). My suggestion is to lessen the amount of jokes you present and make more short analytical comments. For example, when you brought of the security guard and gave some brief insight on how no large malls, in seems, are without them as well as maybe why they are present. I would have liked to see more of this (maybe even in a bit more elaboration) and less with the comedy so that you don’t lose your readers’ attention (and it would also make the several jokes you do make, sparingly, funnier). In the briefest of words: blend your humor with professional and insightful analysis.

On another note, I loved what you said about malls being “consumer spaces designed to make you feel at home, as if the actions you perform there are natural and abide by codified laws of this new built environment”. I never really thought of it this was and now that I look back, every mall I’ve been to certainly does feel as if everything we do (shopping, loitering where permitted, wandering around with friends) is natural and expected. Those of us who have the money to spend are able to move about and spend money freely in contrast, as you mentioned, to the poor who are discouraged from the start from even entering the consumerist area. I’m glad to see that you took note of this and referred briefly back to Sibley’s Mapping the Pure and the Defiled because we see this harsh segregation between the mid to high income and low income individuals and groups practically all around us. The mall and any other location where capitalism is at is finest and maximizing profit is the goal, is a perfect example of this separation in which the idea of it in itself (a place to spend money) is the force that drives these two economic groups apart.