Rebel Prince

Is it safe to say that America has a love-hate relationship with shopping malls? Even their creator eventually came to despise what the American shopping mall had become. There’s an interesting article in this past week’s New Yorker (“The Terrazzo Jungle” by Malcolm Gladwell) on Victor Gruen (1903-80), Viennese architect and emigré:

Fifty years ago, Victor Gruen designed a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant shopping complex with a garden court under a skylight—and today virtually every regional shopping center in America is a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant complex with a garden court under a skylight. Victor Gruen didn’t design a building; he designed an archetype. [… He] may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century. He invented the mall.

Later in life Gruen fell into disillusion. His idealistic vision of planned community spaces, recalling European city squares, had been taken by developers in a different direction.

Malls, he said, had been disfigured by “the ugliness and discomfort of the land-wasting seas of parking” around them. Developers were interested only in profit. “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments,” he said in a speech in London, in 1978. He turned away from his adopted country. He had fixed up a country house outside of Vienna, and soon he moved back home for good. But what did he find when he got there? Just south of old Vienna, a mall had been built—in his anguished words, a “gigantic shopping machine.” […] Victor Gruen invented the shopping mall in order to make America more like Vienna. He ended up making Vienna more like America.

Related: review of Mall Maker, a Gruen biography; article entitled “The Corruption of the Shopping Mall.”

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Today’s Morning Edition featured a piece on jazz pianist and composer Fred Hersch, whose latest major work is a setting of poems from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Last spring I went to see him and his ensemble premiere it in D.C. It’s good stuff. Have a listen to the interview. (Other resources are also included on the linked page.) Hersch on “When I Heard at the Close of the Day”:

It’s really one of the great love poems. And when you think, too, just of the guts that it took to write that in 1860 about somebody of the same sex, that’s rather remarkable. As an… 18-year-old gay man, to read that was like “wow.”

His next D.C. appearance is at the Kennedy Center (Apr. 22-23). He’ll be performing Leaves of Grass occasionally throughout his tour, including Carnegie Hall next year. Good for him.

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How did I not hear about this earlier? Okay, so maybe I did, but it slipped my mind: a version of the Dangerous Liaisons tale, created for French TV and starring Catherine Deneuve and Rupert Everett, airs as a two-part miniseries on WE (Women’s Entertainment) tonight. Stellar casting, I know, but the reviews I’ve read have been mixed to negative, mostly due to a mediocre script. That’s too bad, but I’ll probably check it out anyway.

This adaptation sets the story in the 1960s, instead of the 18th century of the original. There will always be comparisons to the 1988 film directed by Stephen Frears and starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, et al., which is, yes, glorious. One review, in noting how this story has been adapted numerous times to different eras and cultures, mentions a Korean film titled Untold Scandal. Interesting. I might have to check that out as well.

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