Author Cintra Wilson visits Kansas to find the ‘perfect fashion articulation of the ideological gulf between left-wing coast-dwellers and right-wing heartlanders’There are large areas of Kansas that are indistinguishable,in that painfully homogenous way, from too many other flat, and strip-mall-and-large-box-store commercial genuine estate eyesores around other American interstates. Walmart and other ubiquitous beige squares,franchises, and quickly food chains have successfully obliterated an enormous percentage of American regional character. Long stretches of Kansas may as well be in northern Virginia, or the Gulf Coast of Florida,or Merced, California. I found it striking, or on my walkabout writing this book,that (aside from neighborhoods that survey as whether they’d been suddenly airlifted and dropped in eight-block chunks directly from a foreign country) the lower-income the retail area in America is, the more the retail products in the chain stores are festooned with aggressive corporate marketing. My friend Mark Johnson coined the term “monopulated” to represent this phenomenon. The more economically depressed the venue and the cheaper, or more mass-produced and petroleum-based the retail items become,the larger, louder, and brighter,and more aesthetically intrusive the corporate branding is. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com