One of the appeals of being a critic is that one can easily derive pleasure from attacking something or someone. It's easy to jump in, make judgments and snide remarks, then go hide behind the First Amendment and stick one's tongue out at everyone who accuses one of taking cheap shots. What I'd like to think I do when critiquing something, however, is try to be fair to the subject while backing up my criticisms with facts.

Except this time.

I'm suspending my doctrine of fairness just to devote an article to the sinister and unappealing new shopping center at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, cleverly titled Hollywood & Highland. At least Universal's City Walk is up a hill and out of everyone's way. But anything that has the indecency to plop itself down at the busiest intersection in Hollywood and take up a city block in the process is asking for an ass-reaming.

I can't think of a better motif for this essay than ass. All this glitter and glamour and money and hype and all I can think of is ass. First of all, when you take the subway there, you come out of the ass of the underground snake and onto Hollywood Boulevard, which smells like ass. The mall itself wends around the backside of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, which now has doors in its ass for easy access to and from the mall. Atop the mall are two elephants seated upright; "Shop here under the asses of elephants."

But from above, the main section of the mall vaguely resembles a dilated vagina. After all, this IS Hollywood.

The developers of this monstrosity were no fools. They knew full well that there would be no revolution in retail shopping to warrant more than an average number of visitors to this place.

But suckering in the heavy tourist traffic apparently wasn't enough. They used both geography and theme to their advantage. The Babylon Court section of the mall is slanted so that one sees the El Capitan Theatre to the south and the Hollywood sign to the north.

During the daytime, anyway. At night, all you can see to the north is a mini-mall that has a donut shop and a cheese steak sandwich place — and an assload of traffic going by.

The main pedestrian entrance on the south side is where you'll find "The Road to Hollywood," a winding path through the courtyard that ends up at the north end of the mall, where you'll find a large therapist's couch. Naturally, the road to Hollywood ends right next to California Pizza Kitchen. The architecture pays homage to, of all things, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance. Ancient silent film: retail shopping. Duh.

But what is by far more subversive is the uber-theme of the mall. It isn't merely selling your basic higher-end mall crap. It's selling the idea that you too can be famous. Entombed in the ground — in mosaic tiles, I shit you not — are anonymous quotes from actors, screenwriters, directors, composers, and so on (but apparently no agents) about their humble beginnings and the big success they achieved when they came to Hollywood.

Now, according to a "press release" on the official web site, the idea was to let visitors "experience in part, the dream of coming to Hollywood, and relate that dream to their own hopes and goals." Well, as they say in "press releases" back in my hometown of Van Nuys, "Bullshit." If the theme of the mall was to help shoppers self-actualize, seven-ton stone replicas of Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil would be squatting in place of pachyderms. But throughout the city are billboards for the mall that read "Premiere Yourself;" the mall is using fame to sell clothes and food and trinkets the way advertisers use sex to sell... everything.

The truth is, a mall this high-budget had to do something; the basic appeal of malls is that they are designed to be safe and convenient places to stroll around and spend money. Since Hollywood & Highland has the disadvantage of being in an otherwise unsafe and inconvenient neighborhood, it needed an ass-ripping idea to get the asses in the mall: Fame sells. The interesting part is, it's probably the first mall to attempt this. The sad part is, it will probably work.

But, really, I don't care. I'm not going to fight traffic or wait for a subway just to buy a pair of Dockers. Trouble is, other people will. In an era where we have more millionaires than at any time in our history and they just keep getting richer, the question "Who wants to be a millionaire?" has become the answer, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? It's a TV show, a viable way to become rich and famous in an era where the qualifications for fame have diminished but the number of hopefuls has increased. This is a tragic and wicked belief to foist on people who are slowly giving up on the idea that a steady career can give them personal and financial fulfillment. At Hollywood & Highland, they would have you believe wealth and fame are readily attainable. And they are. To people who've already attained them.

I'd like to close this with two security guards who, like the authors of the quotes I stepped on, shall remain anonymous. (It is my hope that you will relate the security guards' views to your own hopes and goals.) While I was nosing around asking questions like "Who's the owner of this facility?" (to which only a publicist would give me a direct answer, leading me to suspect he was lying), the first security guard told me that the idea behind this mall was that famous people would shop here.

"They're gonna open up a Versace," he added, as if that were icing on the cake for people already rich enough to get Vera Wang herself to come over to their house to hop on the Singer and whip up something strapless and daring.

So there you have it. At least one of the many non-famous low-wage employees there is a pod person, a humanoid who really believes that this behemoth with homeless people milling outside it like little fishes under the ass of a shark will be a happy Mecca for the presently and future famous.

He is wrong. A few rich and famous will trickle through as quietly as possible, just like they do all over town. They will show up every year for the Oscars at the adjoining Kodak Theater and the wannabes will be screaming at them from behind velvet ropes, just like they do elsewhere. And they will get the hell out of Dodge right after the ceremony to enjoy themselves in the exclusivity of private parties, just like they've always done.

As for the other anonymous security guard, when he found out I was writing a review of the mall, he said, "Hope it's a positive one."

"You like this place, do you?" I asked.

"Yeah. They gave me a job. "

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