IdleRich

IdleRich
Just been reading through this... some interesting points made no doubt.
Always think about Berlin in the 70s/80s when it was the heroin capital of the world and you had rockstars moving there cos of the easy drugs but seemingly a kinda lawless and violent centre with junkie punks all over the shop, climbing in the toilet to steal your stuff - like in Cristiane F etc - and it's very attractive in a way, or the glamourised view we have is. I have a good friend in Germany, I guess he's in his 50s, and he loves that era but at the same time he readily admits it must have been pretty horrible... not sure if he actually said grim but that's no doubt what he meant.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Bezos is making more money than ever during lockdown I understand just to confirm what you were speculating on above.
 

luka

Well-known member
New York in the 70s and 80s too. that sense that you could occupy space, move in, infiltrate it, have your wicked way with it. there's a freedom that comes with the retreat of capital.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
why do those desires have this particular quality which the opposite of what you might naively expect from a society like this
I think a better question is why anyone would expect people's desires to be for things which are unhealthy?

we're a half-century into a more holistic view of health and wellness in the West, long since monetized

we also live in the age of optimization of everything, including health and fitness - again, well monetized

and the last few generations have been able to see the results of a life of excess for their predecessors

even with all that it's not like people don't indulge in tons of unhealthy desires
 

luka

Well-known member
those parties in the public parks of the Bronx, abstracting electricity from the street lights to power the sound systems.

i was talking about how lockdown has made all of us in London far more at ease in public space. as if, for the first time, we were allowed to treat it as if it were ours.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
But I reckon that that still had an actual glamour that Berlin didn't - Berlin had filthy-glamour but NY still had expensive bars and rich people.
 

luka

Well-known member
But I reckon that that still had an actual glamour that Berlin didn't - Berlin had filthy-glamour but NY still had expensive bars and rich people.

thats true i was just talking about the spaces and freedoms opened up when capital retreats.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I mean maybe the most interesting is when that all rubs up against each other but I dunno where that happens now...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Cos my guess is that in 80s Berlin you might find Iggy Pop or Nick Cave or something passed out in a junkie squat... but you didn't have the opposite thing with some squatters somehow in a super glam flat snorting coke with supermodels and businessmen. Maybe that's just my romantic idea of NY though I dunno.
 

RWY

Well-known member
Growing up in Glasgow in the 1990s, all of the housing schemes and comprehensive redevelopment areas such as The Gorbals retained the dilapidated grimness and prevailing poverty that consumed the city in the 1970s - many areas still looked the same as they did in those videos from the 1970s/80s that I posted in the Time-Capsules thread. Things began to shift in the 2000s where the worst of the housing stock was demolished, leaving many huge expanses of empty land throughout the city, whilst what remained was refurbished and repainted to quite a decent standard - although the overuse of white and greys does tend to give these estates an aesthetic not disimilar to that of a hospital. I can't think of any housing in the city now which still retains that look and feel, bar Govanhill whose problems are more intwinned with the refugee communitees that have taken hold there.
 
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vimothy

yurp
onset of current era probably happened at different rates across the country. I used to go to belfast a lot in the 80s and 90s and it was pretty grim there too
 

RWY

Well-known member
My mum told me that her memories of Glasgow as a teenager in the 1970s are ones of constant boredom - there's a similar atmosphere in that infamous documentary of the Millwall football hooligans of the same era. As mentioned earlier, that particular type of boredom has long since disappeared forever.
 
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