Mellsman

Well-known member
It’s why Jez Butterworth is a cunt. He doesn’t get close enough to the darkness lurking about this island, its coves and folds in forgotten maps. Not by a long way

Away days at football where it got surprisingly tasty - Chester, Peterborough, Plymouth, Gillingham
Jerusalem was extremely sanitised while purporting to be gritty.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Too true

Half of these gaffs/towns have become desired residences thanks to Covid, eg Clevedon, the entirety of Lincolnshire
 

version

Well-known member
One of the most depressing ones I've been through is Colne. You can feel the life draining out of you just driving through it.
 

woops

is not like other people
I grew up in a town called Burnley in east Lancashire. I'm not saying it's the grimmest place in the whole country but to my mind it's a strong contender.

First off, the weather. Burnley is an ex-cotton town (industry now obviously totally dead after it all went to India) and the story goes that cotton snaps less when there's a lot of moisture in the air, so they built the mills in the wettest part of the country. So it absolutely shits down at all times and is the only place I've ever been in my life where it rains horizontally

Second, it's half Muslim and there is zero integration, it's as though there were a line drawn down the middle of the town, BNP on one side and Islam on the other. Once our mate was stopped by the police while playing Asian Dub Foundation in his car and the police asked him "why are you playing paki music"

Third, the inhabitants of Burnley all wear a permanent gormless, slack-jawed expression as though they don't understand. I found them very small-minded and also violent of course, for example my brother had his arm broken on Christmas Eve in Blackburn (the next town along) this is no joke, Burnley is not far from Rochdale where there was the very sad case of Sarah Lancaster who was kicked to death simply for being dressed as a goth

someone mentioned cider drinking - there were some kids who used to hang out in a village called Whalley, one of them had a kid and i saw her down the park with a bottle of cider in the pram with the baby

In short not a place for people like me and I got out at the earliest opportunity.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
when he calls Burnley a small firm in their boozer to their terrier’s face, it could’ve gone so badly for a few seconds
 

forclosure

Well-known member
I find it interesting that the UK has managed to create this sense of the powerful urban elite versus the forgotten and left-behind towns given that it's such a small place in absolute terms. I mean, even leaving aside the fact that most people in Newham or Moss Side don't have much more in common with the actual elites than people in Sutton-in-Ashfield or wherever, it's just a bit weird that the geographical distances between metropolitan centres and the small towns that they're supposed to be disconnected from tend to be on the order of 30-50 miles at most, which is absolutely fuck-all when you compare it to the US idea of "flyover country" where people are literally hundreds of miles from the big urban cultural and economic hubs.
yeah great point the actual distance between left behind towns and urban areas is much smaller here but the way it's talked about makes it seem much MUCH greater

I mean you think about it with shows like Escape to the country where some retired couple want to live out their remaining years in Otters st mary or where ever they love to brag about how it's only a couple hours drive back to London
 

forclosure

Well-known member
and thats another great point @Slothrop people love to write about how the salt of the earth small town folk feel like they just can't connect with the events and goings on in Westminster (and there has been talk about moving Parliament from there in the past)

but from where my arse is sitting in Wood Green fam, there's people in the Sandlings estate near me who probably feel like they can't connect with what's going on there but i think this still speaks to the problem with working class being associated with white people and how the conversation at this point feels like people engaging with this association and trying as hard as they can to get people to break with it
 

sus

Well-known member
The irony of course is that Warhol comes outta... Pittsburgh PA.
So what counts as a "city"? John Mellencamp's song "Small Town", which romanticizes a lot of terrible hellholes, was actually written about Bloomington Indiana, a city of 80,000 people, the same as ancient Thebes at its peak.
This is also ~the case with my own hometown. Contra Dissensus lore, it was not a 100-person town in Wisconsin, but a small city of 45k in California, with a larger county ecosystem (~20min drive in either direction) of about 100k.

Small enough that gossip flew around, there was only one high school, etc. Large enough that the high school had classes of 350, i.e. there were kids in your class you couldn't name, that you didn't recognize, etc.

We were also a college town, college of 25k, and that changed things. Although it was a technical school for mid-tier agriculture and engineering folk—very culturally "basic" people, very fratty not very liberal artsy.

In Hayward, where I live now, the high school is about a quarter of the size. You get dynamics like, all the weirdos form a clique—there is one kid who is nerdy about anime, one who is into metal, one who is into folk dancing, etc, and they all hang out.

We had a bit finer-grained weirdo cliques, what with band/choir, and jazz band, and some small nerd cliques that were in neither. There was a skater clique in each grade, and a stoner clique, with some overlap.
 

sus

Well-known member
For people interested in Middle America and brain drain from small rural areas, this is probably the best article out there: https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/...iddle-america-and-the-problem-of-meritocracy/

Selection effects rule everything around us, and a cult of liberty just means self-selection has an outsized sway.

I don't know the answer, but you gotta imagine that media (Hollywood, Netflix, novels), which is ~propaganda for cities by people in cities, makes the situation worse.

Probably there's something pathological about only wanting to be around people who are just like you, just as smart and talented, etc. One, b/c the cumulative effects of this are terrible and underly inequality; two, because on an individual level, you probably give up a lot—the potential to be the smartest person in your town, to help run big infrastructure projects or sit on city council, to have a real positive effect on your local community—for... what? To be another mediocre XYZ in a sea of XYZs? That is, status is a local phenomenon. "Belonging" in the sense of similarity is more shallow than belonging in the sense of interdependence, being loadbearing with a community. In the terror of not "belonging" with your own kind, you forfeit the possibility of being a unique, much-needed jigsaw piece in a local puzzle.

This isn't just small-town stuff tho of course. Haiti has the same problems as Middle America in this regard. Competence flies off, leaves the rest to figure it out themselves.
 

woops

is not like other people
For people interested in Middle America and brain drain from small rural areas, this is probably the best article out there: https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/...iddle-america-and-the-problem-of-meritocracy/

Selection effects rule everything around us, and a cult of liberty just means self-selection has an outsized sway.

I don't know the answer, but you gotta imagine that media (Hollywood, Netflix, novels), which is ~propaganda for cities by people in cities, makes the situation worse.

Probably there's something pathological about only wanting to be around people who are just like you, just as smart and talented, etc. One, b/c the cumulative effects of this are terrible and underly inequality; two, because on an individual level, you probably give up a lot—the potential to be the smartest person in your town, to help run big infrastructure projects or sit on city council, to have a real positive effect on your local community—for... what? To be another mediocre XYZ in a sea of XYZs? That is, status is a local phenomenon. "Belonging" in the sense of similarity is more shallow than belonging in the sense of interdependence, being loadbearing with a community. In the terror of not "belonging" with your own kind, you forfeit the possibility of being a unique, much-needed jigsaw piece in a local puzzle.

This isn't just small-town stuff tho of course. Haiti has the same problems as Middle America in this regard. Competence flies off, leaves the rest to figure it out themselves.
Read my post upthread Gus, no way was I sticking around in that dump
 

luka

Well-known member
like, as if anybody talks to anyone anywhere anyway. no one is going to know you are a unique piece in their jigsaw. youre just another spam face ignored by everyone.
 

luka

Well-known member
we all stay indoors the whole time. people dont even go supermarket any more, not that anyone starts to talking to strangers in the supermarket in any case
 

luka

Well-known member
i sit outside in public and write poems for people and not even i talk to anyone, its completely transactional, ive been at it 5 years and never had a conversation let alone made a friend
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I mean it's funny a friend of mine whose the lead singer in this metalcore band decided one year to go Download festival after having not gone for years and she posted some status expressing her shock about how there's youts who think they're the coolest kids in the village because they rock Chuck taylors and listen to volbeat, meanwhile i'm sitting here and thinking yes...yes they do how is it that i don't have any connection to this stuff and i "get it" better than you?

On that note especially when you think about how rappers have taken a greater presence in music festivals in this country these days as Crowl brought up in some convo we had with some people Drake curating his own festival has alot to do with it all of a sudden the geriatrics running these thing realised that black people actually had disposable income and weren't just chinging each other and speaking in indecipherable slang so out goes all the mid-level indie bands who haven't meant fuck all in forever and in goes all the crooning rappers rocking Montclair and Armani that Barty loves so much

Yeah, Barty's taste is bizarrely home counties.
 
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