wordsmithlind

I heard a violent rolling noise the other day in Berlin, a pounding noise, the tortured cry of despair.  Poe’s telltale heart was my first thought, but was quickly dispelled as I had nothing that big on my conscience.  I thought and I thought and nothing could I find, my finger landing nowhere near the source.  “What is that noise?”  I asked my friend.  “What noise?”  “That noise,” I said leaning my ear into the sky.  “I don’t hear anything.”  “Come on, you are kidding me, you don’t hear it?”  “What are you talking about?”  “It…sounds like rolling, like something rolling around.”  She humors my wayward ears and gives a listen.  “I don’t hear anything, you’re crazy.”  “I can’t quite figure out what it is—are you sure you don’t hear it?”  Not even a headshake, just a stare signifying the beginning of anger.  “Ok, forget it…ah!  I know what it is!  It’s Karl Marx rolling around in his grave!”

I was in the new (how new I am not sure, but it wasn’t there last summer) mall, Alexa, in Alexanderplatz in Berlin.  This monument to capitalism puts many malls in the US to shame.  This monument ensures the death of the GDR and its resurrection shall never occur.  In the heart of East Berlin, within minutes walk from the famous TV Tower, a four story mall, ironically colored Soviet Red (my joke: it is made from the bricks of all the former Soviet monuments that once graced the cities of Eastern Europe), sits massively waiting, beckoning the consumer with its mall smell (how is it that all malls, all across the world, seem to have the same smell?  Is there a special mall scented spray used to create this unique smell?), its strivings for mediocrity (I’ve been to malls all across the US and Europe, no matter where you are, the same people are shopping; the same mediocre breed), and its ambient mall sound (all malls sound the same, the same echoey conversation of nothingness reverberating off the high ceilings creating a welcoming social experience for even the greatest of social outcasts).  A greater mall could only have existed in the Soviet Union, where mall shops man.  Fortunately for the world, the Cold War focused around nuclear escalation and the manufacture of arms—not the size of one’s mall—thus the world was forced to wait almost 20 years after the fall of the Wall for the gift of The Great Red Mall.

photo by wordsmithlind

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