I come to the heart of consumption in this town. The city council likes to separate Willis St and Lambton Quay into different ‘quarters’, but I can detect no distinction between the gleaming consumer items of one street and the other. The first image that strikes me as I come onto Willis Street is the postmodern shape of the Majestic Centre looming over the modernist Dominion Building. Perhaps this is a signifier of what is going on in the streets below.

The people here are in a hurry, signs all around clamour glossily for their attention. There is no hint here of amateur signs as in Cuba Street. All of these signs have felt the touch of a graphic designer, each of whom has attempted to encapsulate the spirit of each product within a single icon. Many of these shops could be in Melbourne, Auckland or Sydney and in some cases Los Angeles. The global stretch of capitalism is more obvious here than elsewhere in the city where small local shops dominate.

Everywhere one is confronted by what the Situationists saw as the spectacle “where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behaviour. The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialised mediations (it can longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense (...) the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalised abstraction of present- day society” (1983, fragment 18). Everyday life has become inseparable from commercial products. Enormous pictures of beautiful girls promise happiness if only you buy the clothes, the hair product, the shoes, the car... These pictures advertise beauty and glamour, but the reality on the street below is rather more prosaic.

The alleyways here are a far more civilised kind than those found on Courtney  Place, paved with bricks, with optimistic looking chairs inviting passers-by to buy coffee and some time to rest between purchases. The other end appears to take you somewhere quite pleasant, as opposed to the dingy carparks off Courtney Place.

Gazing into the window of a high-fashion shop, I am surprised to find the mannequins lack even the rudiments of a face. What does this mean? That it doesn’t matter what you look like? That the clothes will transform you in any case? Perhaps it is simply that the shop owner did not want any distractions from the close themselves, but it makes them appear somewhat like objects from Benjamin’s dreamworld. “To read those material fragments as a residue of a dream world” (Friedberg. 1993, p. 51).

That this is an area favoured by the City Council is obvious by the carefully manicured trees that dot the streets, and sparkling works of art that gleam in the sunlight like some giant braille message. What really drives it home though is that the manhole covers are decorated here, perhaps in an attempt to transform the most mundane realities of modern life into something fantastic and marvellous. Perhaps there is surrealist tendency in the council after all.

As I stroll down Lambton Quay, my attention is caught by a giant toy top, created as an artwork up an alleyway; a well appointed and polished alley, of course. When I get to the top, I see a tunnel, leading who knows where? Of course, I must follow it.