Doing the Arcades of Fire

BY TAHI MOORE

Yeah so I'm back from the lands of reasonably large shopping malls, so I thought I'd check out some arcades while the perspective is still there.

CHEAP IS GOOD>
The only op shops I found in cheap clothing land had unworn RRL jeans from 1992 for a thousand dollars. I don't know what that means either. After all the struggle last month for an okay pair of jeans, I found myself focusing on increasingly small details to the point where everything became fairly ugly here and there if not all over. It's time not to look too closely. I turned on the radio and didn't bother changing the station. I drove to the op shop where the clothes are 2 dollars a kilo. Either someone had come through earlier or there wasn't much there. I still filled up a sack. I saw some cheap Mondays in Singapore that were almost white, so I got all the really light blue jeans I could. After a bit of basic re tailoring I had some good jeans for eighty cents. Sure you gotta take your chances in these places, but my god, come on. Try to get something you want, that you see people wearing every day, in all the shops in several countries, only to not find it. There it is, sitting on some online shop somewhere that won't ship anything outside of wherever they are. The biggest online shoe store in the world. Come on. All you have to do is stick it in an envelope and write an address. How hard can that be? I guess you can go through a third party international online shopping delivery service for eighty dollars.

THE ARCADES>
Okay so went to St Lukes arcade. What did they have? Um. I'm not sure. Oh yeah. No. Lots of chunky sporty shoes, with the flat broad soles. Well I thought, maybe the time has come for Onitsuka Tigers. I'll go buy a pair.

First we gotta check out Onehunga Dressmart arcade. Here's a few things. In Barkers there were plain t-shirts in a tasteful grey on sale for 30 dollars, which I couldn't handle just yet. In the Converse shop there were some dark blue canvas boat shoes in women's sizes that I thought were good. Um. Some Black Adidas Puffy high tops that came in small and huge. I didn't try any on, so I don't know how they go when worn. The thing about this online shopping stuff is it's tricky trying the stuff on, and when you find something you're sure you'd like, it ends up being a taunt from the strange bureaucracy of capitalissyium . It's true. I don't think they care about money. they just want to not give you anything. it's always available somewhere else. Maybe it's about exclusivity. Lots more chunky shoes. I went to Sole in Vicky Park Market to get some of those shoes that I suddenly decided were good now. I've been to all these places, and there's probably better shops somewhere, I don't know. I'm not that smart.

So In this Sole place, there suddenly weren't any Onitsuka shoes any more. There were always heaps before. I looked around a last time and found one pair, so I got them. These are the ugliest shoes I've seen in a long time. They're mostly purple. They're samples that the shoe co must have sent in case the shop wanted to order some and they didn't because they were TOO UGLY. Maybe sports shoes should look like sports shoes and be ugly and all that, and casual shoes should be minimal and inexpensive, and street shoes should come in brown and black leather, not have logos seared into them, have thin soles, not be pre-distressed, have round toes of varing degress of pointiness depending on how swanky you feel, and should avoid any kind of chunkiness unless they're actually work boots. Or maybe I'm thinking it's good to either dress very well or very badly. Perhaps boredom is the only adversary.



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