Running the zombie Christmas mall gauntlet

it’s Christmas again…and that means a visit to (dramatic chord)… The Mall.

The Zombie Christmas Maul

It’s the same every year. The endless shuffle of zombiefied shoppers, drifting around shiny glass-and-glitz caverns, a mass of humanity with glazed eyes and shopping bags, punctuated by toddlers who lurch aimlessly out from the crowd, shrieking and hyperventilating. There are teenage boys who smell like they’ve just showered with a cocktail of propionic acid and brevibacteria, girls who giggle and text somebody three feet away, just because they can, all endlessly circling like – well, endlessly circling things who like circling endlessly.

And then, in the midst of this glittering temple to the worst excesses of shallow consumerism and the transient disposability of post-industrial A-gen society…Father Christmas. He’s moved here from the North Pole apparently.

There’s something about these places that turns the brain to mush and reduces people to zombiefied numbness. I am not allowed to punk them – you know, do the zombie walk behind these  shoppers and murmur ‘braaaaaiins’. Well, I can, but She Who Must Be Obeyed has to walk on the other side of the mall atrium for a while afterwards.

But honestly!

It’s done deliberately. People buy more if their mind’s switched off. And I have to feel sorry for the poor folks that have to work in these places. Malls are the twenty-first century equivalent of the workhouse when it comes to conditions.

Every mall I’ve been to from North Sydney to Lower Hutt to Bangkok has been exactly the same. The Australia and New Zealand ones even look the same. Is this the unity in diversity beloved of anthropologists?

I’ve got readers of this blog from Melbourne to Florida, from the Netherlands to Cape Town, from Houston to New York to France to Moscow to Dunedin. Am I right that it’s the same everywhere? The look. The raw horror of it all. The commercialism? The mindless advertising. The glitz. The ….the…

“Braaaainnns….”

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012 

Shopping for a really spectacular pair of trousers

Last Sunday my wife and I went to the local mall looking for a pair of trousers. About ten minutes into our slow zombie shuffle with the other shoppers through glitz-riddled corridors of terror I leaned over and murmured to my wife, sotto voce, ‘Brains…braaaaaiiins…’

Alas, the escape code didn’t work. We had to get the trousers anyway. She Who Must Be Obeyed prefers Nattily Dressed Husband to Slob-o-Scruff Spouse of the Shed. Then we had to brave the parking lot with its endless lines of circling cars. I swear I saw at least three 1957 Plymouth Furies.

I would ask whether there’s anything weirder than these malls. But of course, there is. In the Netherlands, a gentleman transformed his dead cat into an RC helicopter. Don’t laugh, it’s true.  Must ask my relatives if it’s flown over Soest.

What’s the weirdest (and funniest) thing you’ve discovered this week?

Coming soon: something not weird at all. A launch and a contest. Watch this space.

Copyright (c) Matthew Wright 2012

Heads up folks – are you ready for the zombie apocalypse?

My sister has a plan for handling the zombie apocalypse when it comes to her home near Utrecht. A scheme for the instant when they burst into her workroom moaning ’hersenen… heeeeersenen’ (well, they’re Dutch undead…)

She’s a fabric artist who dyes and spins artisan-craft wools. The spinning equipment, she tells me, is easily able to defeat the living dead. She hasn’t detailed her ideas – but I guess if you see a headline like ‘Soest zombies gemaakt om te breien’, you’ll know what happened.

Got me thinking. That apocalypse might happen anywhere. Do I have anything in my writing office to deal with the ravening dead? If I was in the US I’d give the zombies a burst with the kitchen cupboard Mac-10 before advancing on the undead horde with the family Mossberg .410. If I were an Australian I’d flick a couple of boomerangs, stuff the nearest zombie into the esky, slam the lid, then parade out in my budgie-smugglers and strike them all blind. Or if I were Bear Gryllis, I’d turn the first into a survival shelter, four into firewood, and make the rest into a helicopter to fly home..

However, I live in New Zealand. No spinning wheels. No guns. There are budgie-smugglers, but I don’t own any such shreddies and never will. Am I gonna die? No chance. You see, I have the ultimate anti-zombie device.  In fact every Kiwi home has one – and Peter Jackson showed us what any good Kiwi zombie hunter could do with one. Bwahahaha! Yup – the common or garden rotocut. Eat spinning steel, undead zombies!

So – when zombies burst into my writing office, I’ll be out the window, into the shed, and desperately tearing at the pull start on the old Masport. Ours is a bit hard to start…Hmmn… Niggling worry. And I do have one other little niggle too. If the living dead outnumber the living 1,500,000,000 to 1, who says somebody else will be the zombie? Just asking, you understand.

What would you do if the zombies burst in while you were quietly working on the computer?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

The epic fail Alan Turing fast food adventure

I don’t know if it’s just me, or whether the world is generally a funny place but doesn’t realise it. I went into a fast food franchise the other day and this happened:

Me: I’ll have a large caramel sundae to take away, thanks.
Attendant: Sure. Small, medium or large? (Actually he said ‘Suresmamedorla”, but I could lip read)
Me: Er – large.
Attendant: Caramel, chocolate or raspberry? (‘Carmachokorasry’)
Me: Um, caramel.
Attendant: Sure. Eat here or take away?

I’ve had similar conversations with lift control panels. I know it wasn’t the poor guy’s fault – these jobs numb the mind and they have to follow the script anyway. But it was pretty funny, in a kind of epic Alan Turing fail way.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

The 2011 Christmas Zombie Mall Shuffle

It’s Christmas again, and yesterday that meant it was time for She Who Must Be Obeyed to drag me off to (drum roll) The Mall.

As far as I am concerned malls are vampires that suck money and will-to-live, all glitz-and-mirror with endless rows of cheap jewellery shops, pedicure booths and smartphone outlets. They are identical from Melbourne to Luton – hey, I even found one in Bangkok (the Siam Centre) that could have been transplanted from anywhere else. All of them home to endless hordes of once-were-humans, the shopping dead who amble vacantly in witless circles, slack mouths breathing that dread word  – ‘credit caaaaaaard…’

Shopping in the mall for me consists of hurtling into the place, picking up essential bloke stuff (1/16 PzKW VI Tiger I model, engine oil, power tools, that sort of thing). Then getting out. Fast.

The Zombie Christmas Maul

She Who Must Be Obeyed has other ideas: ‘That’s a nice coat. Try to look interested. Now we need to get cards and. OOOH, SHINY! Yes, we need to get to the – er – Matthew, stop wandering off. CROCKERY SHOP! Oh how about those towels, we need new towels, why don’t we sit down at this coffee place or try that Indian take-away even though it made you sick last time and…IS THAT A FLYING SHARK?’

There is no escape. Malls are the Hotel California. Even if you can find an exit, it’s guarded by armies of young mums with toddlers zing-splat bungied to their wrists, four year olds who back into you, randomly squealing like ambulatory car alarms, dads with a blank look and hang-dog expression, honk-voiced teenage boys who smell, old ladies with walkers, lost husbands…and…and…

Bah humbug.

Copyright © Matthew Wright

Doing the Zombie Christmas Shuffle redux

The Zombie Christmas Maul

The other week I blogged about the annual Zombie Christmas shuffle in the local mall. And here’s the photo I took. 

I had been vaguely thinking about making an image that conceptually represented the impression of blurred confusion and jarring light that turns mall denizens – living, breathing humans – into shopping zombies. I was fresh out of ideas, of course. But in the end I didn’t have to worry. A cellphone held over my head while riding down an escalator, indoors, did the trick. Not enough shutter speed – and voila!

Edith Piaf, I believe, once said that it was necessary to exploit faults in order to get the edge. Too true. Braaaains…!

Christmas Zombie Shuffle Shoppers

It’s coming up Christmas, and that means it’s time for the annual zombie shuffle. Zombies. I hate ‘em. My brother-in-law once told me that he hated zombies too. He meant the ones in Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001).

The zombies I find irritating inhabit shopping malls most weekends, especially at Christmas. I realised it a while back when I was in my local mall – funnily enough, the one Anna Paquin used to go to when she was growing up.

As a writer I’m always on the lookout for different angles on ordinariness. And something struck me. Zombies. The place was full of ‘em. Not the George Romero variety from that mall in Dawn of the Dead (1978), or even the pub-denizens of Shaun of the Dead (2004).  But zombies all the same. Real ones. People slowly shuffling around with their minds switched off and no apparent notion of where they were or what they were doing.

I think cynical designers work over those malls to make that happen, all glitz and glass – flashy, echoing and disorienting. They’re the same everywhere you go, and deliberately so. Customers part with more cash that way.

And that’s where real zombies come from. An insight into the deeper human condition, maybe. I doubt I’m the first to have that thought – in fact, I suspect Romero thought of it first, a quarter-century ago. Later, I’ll blog about vampires – not the imaginary ones who suck blood, I mean real people who suck money and self-esteem.

But enough already. I gotta go Christmas shopping. At the mall. “Braaaains….”

Doing the sushi zombie walk

No instant digital gratification here - this is from analogue film. I took this on the Rue de Lafayette one night in 2004, hand-held at 1/16 and f5.6, which was pushing the 100 ASA Fuji stock I was using pretty hard.

As a writer I am occasionally lucky enough to review books. And a while back I reviewed a history of Wellington, which I used as an excuse to openly compare the Courtenay Place restaurant district to the Rue de Lafayette in Paris, where I once ate snails. The Kiwi version is on fast-forward and in microcosm.

Last night – not quite Halloween, but close enough – I was on my way to eat raw fish at the Courtenay Place sushi train and ran into a zombie walk . Maybe thirty people, white-faced and bloodied, lurching from one bar to another. Pretty convincing apart from the occasional break-out to answer a text. (“Braaains – braaains – oh …[tap-tap-tap]…er, where was I? Oh yeah…braaains…’).

Call it art? Sure. Do the French enjoy such amusements? Maybe. Kiwis do. And hey, this one’s for a novel.