Grim Britannia
- Thread starter k-punk
- Start date
luka
Well-known member
Rudewhy's not reading the thread! caught redhanded!
version
Well-known member
Doin' Time in Times Square, by Charlie Ahearn
Shot from his window, the forty minute video, called "Doin' Time in Times Square," includes everything you'd expect from candid 1980s Times Square footage—slow mo knock-out punches, neon XXX signs, plenty of cameos from the NYPD, and chaos. The chaos, however, is interspersed with quiet scenes from inside the apartment where all of this was being filmed from. It's been described as "the home video from hell," and was shown at the New York Film Festival in the 1990s.
version
Well-known member
I'm with Corpse. I don't find 70s Britain appealing at all. It's the Spar thing again.
luka
Well-known member
that's actually John Eden speaking at 1.30 in
sufi
lala
thread revival going well 
I spent a bit of time in Glasgow over the years, including with the last lot of Red Road residents - with the asylum seekers, before all that got pulled down 5 years or so ago i hear - it was still properly grim in the "slabs", i can confirm
it's odd to contrast that nostalgic feeling when I look at the 70's or 60's (before i even existed) residences empty of clutter, lack of material possessions or mass media saturation, lack of plastic, lack of stuff to do, lack of ephemeral belongings. what existed back then were items that had a much more solid and tangible and permanent reality than all the temporary crap we surround ourselves with now, it was chamberpots and clothes pegs and strange non-electronic utensils - my grandmother heating up our little vests on a 3 bar electric heater on cold mornings and the smell of paraffin in her kitchen when we was tiny tots
there are still places like this in the world, or there were back when i was travelling the impoverished lands, they left a strong impression on me, where the tide of materialism has run out, where a manufactured item is an anomaly, where you see a guy on the road in a football shirt and a kalash, nothing else but his herds. in countries that never signed a deal with soft drinks giants, whole regions far beyond where the electricity for cool drinks ran out, past where the scale of the space defied paved roads, where you can't find tobacco or petrol, where there is only one type of food available. i guess those places still exist, off radar, in faraway zones, only suffering in contrast to our ridiculous opulence. cooking on charcoal in the city. as well as our internal ghettos, asylum seekers are still in appallingly grim conditions all over, enforced deliberately by the tories. 10 years of toryism has bitten us to the bone, no solid material culture still exists, we are left with the froth. there was no amenities in Red Road, it was barely possible to buy food, even if you had cash, no commerce - the only food available was from the papershop, packaged and processed and marketised, paste! or the burger van, do you want an egg on top of that. the asylum seekers didnt have any cash though,
i'm fascinated about how we will revert to that level of (im)materiality due to economics or ecology, how dematerialisation will end up leaving us with that empty spaces again - when everything becomes electronic and plastic then there will come a time where we can just switch it all off, melt it all down to cook up whatever scraps we can glean
I spent a bit of time in Glasgow over the years, including with the last lot of Red Road residents - with the asylum seekers, before all that got pulled down 5 years or so ago i hear - it was still properly grim in the "slabs", i can confirm
it's odd to contrast that nostalgic feeling when I look at the 70's or 60's (before i even existed) residences empty of clutter, lack of material possessions or mass media saturation, lack of plastic, lack of stuff to do, lack of ephemeral belongings. what existed back then were items that had a much more solid and tangible and permanent reality than all the temporary crap we surround ourselves with now, it was chamberpots and clothes pegs and strange non-electronic utensils - my grandmother heating up our little vests on a 3 bar electric heater on cold mornings and the smell of paraffin in her kitchen when we was tiny tots
there are still places like this in the world, or there were back when i was travelling the impoverished lands, they left a strong impression on me, where the tide of materialism has run out, where a manufactured item is an anomaly, where you see a guy on the road in a football shirt and a kalash, nothing else but his herds. in countries that never signed a deal with soft drinks giants, whole regions far beyond where the electricity for cool drinks ran out, past where the scale of the space defied paved roads, where you can't find tobacco or petrol, where there is only one type of food available. i guess those places still exist, off radar, in faraway zones, only suffering in contrast to our ridiculous opulence. cooking on charcoal in the city. as well as our internal ghettos, asylum seekers are still in appallingly grim conditions all over, enforced deliberately by the tories. 10 years of toryism has bitten us to the bone, no solid material culture still exists, we are left with the froth. there was no amenities in Red Road, it was barely possible to buy food, even if you had cash, no commerce - the only food available was from the papershop, packaged and processed and marketised, paste! or the burger van, do you want an egg on top of that. the asylum seekers didnt have any cash though,
i'm fascinated about how we will revert to that level of (im)materiality due to economics or ecology, how dematerialisation will end up leaving us with that empty spaces again - when everything becomes electronic and plastic then there will come a time where we can just switch it all off, melt it all down to cook up whatever scraps we can glean
craner
Beast of Burden
If I have to listen to the radio in South Wales I usually end up listening to Absolute 80s. This is mainly because it's the least likely to play anything that is seriously going to ruin my day like Ed Sheeran. But I also appreciate all the layers going on with it: rump nostalgia and escape from the present; an expert transmitter of dreams and mental images; a commercial monolith flogging tickets to watch T-Pau and Sonia singing on a ferry. It doesn't work as well on Absolute 90s because 90s pop was not an efficient dream machine: its was already being eaten away from the inside by irony and pastiche. But nobody listens to Absolute 80s ironically. It's a stream of love.
I'm not an influencer, Leo.
I'm not an influencer, Leo.
These things were everywhere for a time, grimming things up.
And those funny little cars too.
sufi
lala
i also visited Harlem in the early 90's with the somali qat mafia, that was also grim, vacant lots, street violence right there, those guys had come from a land of minimal material culture to NY and in many ways they seemed to keep up a light footprint on the world, among the powerdressing geckos