The corperate media virus kills conversation.

Shopping centres, a monument to the endlessness of suburbia, giant consumer biodomes with everything you could ever want under the one roof. Out where I live it's all about the Eastland shopping complex... (a mobile phone conversation overheard whilst on the Ringwood connector train) So where are you, in Sanity, right, ok you're on level two, listen to me. What? Yeah, okay keep on walking till you see K-Mart. See it, okay okay, good. Now walk through till your in the food court. Do you see it? Yeah, walk all the way through and turn at the Mc Donalds and keep going till you get to the Big W. Got it, now just go up the escalator. Good okay, your at Hoyts, with what? TWO COKES! Cans or 1.25, look I got a 2 litre L.A Cola but it's only 2/3's full... as I said a whole consumer universe.


My favourite place in Eastland is the foodcourt.


For a start it is totally tribal, I can get lost in the subcultural wonderland, a table of teen goths talking trash about the skate punks two booths over who are eyeing off the old schoolers with their tartan, suspenders and leather jackets or denim vests covered in safety pins, Exploited patches and badly drawn Dead Kennedy's symbols scrawled in permanent marker. Every colour of the rainbow: scrawny emo kids with tight black pants and greasy fringes forever in their eyes, metal heads, ganstas with doo rags and one pant leg rolled up, ravers with huge reflective pants and fuzzy hats as well, each staking out a piece of real estate, claiming a set of tables as there own, staying there all day. It is like an open range zoo for youth culture stereotypes:

"And over here we have your common outer suburban goth pack, notice the black trench coats, dyed black hair and Lenore lunch boxes. In their natural habitat they pose little threat to others and similar to the native emo kids they are frequently targetted by ferocious bogans; the king predators of these lands."


But the most most awesome thing about this bad dream incarnate is the tables. It seems that nothing is too far for the advertising stategists of the modern world: Gone are the days of not being allowed to watch tv with dinner, at Eastland they have installed television monitors into each table top so that you are forced to eat off an endless advertising loop. It is amazingly difficult to ignore it, everytime you look down to aim your fork or find you napkin it is there flickering up at you. For very young, the elderly and the uninitiated this can be deadly, all conversation feezes, people forget where they are and who they are with as they stare headlong into the commercial void learning about account saver schemes and affordable dry cleaning. Aside from the stereotype gallery who have become immune through over exposure (like a junkies who must shoot up to stay normal) the food court is filled with tv zombies, eyes fixed, chewing slowly and completely unaware of their surroundings.


I guess it's the flip-side of reality tv, whilst the teev strives to get real, reality is busy trying to absorb as much television as it possibly can. I can't wait for them to have cameras everywhere so that they can just pump live footage of everyone (who at this point in my science fiction future will be forced by law to wear t-shirts provided by sponsorship corperations) onto the walls of our favourite shopping centre complex (which at this point in my science fiction future will have grown to encompass whole suburbs).


"Hi my name is Adrian and I am brought to you by Marlbro Lights and KFC, it's finger licking good!"