Farewell to Xanadu

documenting a mall-walk in May

Last month, I closed the chapter of my life having to do with the American Dream Meadowlands mall, a place which feels like it’s played a key role in the pandemic’s surreal distension of the timeline. As a bittersweet send-off to that project and the time I spent on it, I invited poets and friends to gather at the mall for a “tour” of the mall which I had recently learned was built not far from Rutherford NJ, the birthplace of William Carlos Williams (who wrote in Spring and All lines that had perhaps as much to do with American Modernism as with American Dream Meadowlands: “The pure products of America/ go crazy…”)

Another William, my friend Will Adamowicz, composed and produced a musical accompaniment to a site-specific “guided meditation” recorded for the experience. It’s also permissible to listen to it in other settings, but it’s best with headphones.

There were also leaflets to scatter around the mall, printed in the hopes that unaffiliated mall patrons might also listen to the meditation on their own.

Finally, I asked those present to assist in writing a collaborative poem in a Google Doc, to be called Spring and Mall:

In the end, more than a dozen of us descended upon the mall, and aside from some minor troubles finding one another, a great time was had.

Below are some pics from the mall tour. I wish that I’d taken more, especially now that I realize I likely won’t be returning to American Dream for a long time, if ever. It’s good to define the shape of a life by these kinds of contrasts—to know that the course of the rest of my life will be defined—in a minor, but still not insignificant, way—by the absence of American Dream Meadowlands/ Xanadu. That said, I’ll miss it.

PS - there are still some copies of Xanadu kicking around, if you’d like to keep the Dream alive.

Yrs,

Joshua

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