gin martini, extra dry, and no garnish please.

The luscious surface depictions and sensual vibrancy of Zola’s, Au Bonheur des Dames are the first “fictional” accounts of shopping experience and culture that I have read. Respectively, Zola’s textual scenes are stunningly vivid renders of mid 19th century French street life and architecture. Zola’s physiological depictions are quite accurate and comparable to contemporary acts of shopping. Shopping’s lucid and lusty tendencies are resilient and lurk within our own capitalistic economies. The act of shopping; the desire and purchase of goods is not new. Apart from romantic desires for “authentic” material goods, Bonheur’s shopping experience is for amateurs. To shop is a fragment of the activity lexicons legible at current consumption destinations. Multiple programs and functions, all the desirable amenities, inhabit one “revenue envelope”. Keller Easterling describes these conditions as real estate cocktails. Multiple, networked, politically diverse ingredients are mixed, generating a delightful “spatial product” that we enjoy and demand more. Furthermore the experience is all accurately tabulated in spreadsheets and data logics so we consistently receive the SAME. The latest shopping megalopolis’s achieve experiential VARIETY by supplying hokey gimmicks and perks; roller coasters, tropical islands and nutcracker skyscrapers, similar to those fresh lime wedges or extra green olives. Easterling goes beyond the “window dressings” and costumes, to agitate the multiple layers of encrypted camouflaged coding to understand all the ingredients. Easterling is not interested in the physical foreground, but the networked background that seems to lurk in a territory of political neutrality. As Denise ventures into chapter four she begins to experience that inexplicit network. As for me, I would like a gin martini, extra dry, and no garnish please.