Cut adrift

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Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
Recently I've been feeling cut adrift, alienated from the city I live in (London) and more widely the UK.

I think the reasons for this are pretty standard. When I first moved here 20 odd years ago London felt a like a place designed around my interests. Lots of record shops, small clubs, pirate radio, dive pubs, second hand bookshops etc.

Now yoga, gyms, health food predominate. London no longer really cares about what I am interested in. It has moved on.

One way to look at this is obviously gentrification. But I think it's a bit different to that. Buying second hand krautrock records and going to Plastic People are just as much the activities of a comfortably off leisure class as is yoga and artisan coffee.

It's more that what I like, and what my friends like, no longer really has any sway. In high school terms, the jocks have won. The weird kids, the nerds and the geeks and the stoners once ran things but we don't anymore.

In a way this is all just middle class whining. And irrelevant compared to the real struggles of people getting priced out of boroughs etc.

But still, this feeling that once one was part of some kind of zeitgeist and now no longer is, it's a difficult adjustment.

So, interested in your thoughts. Do you feel cut adrift? Have the jocks won? Why and how?
 
shiels

shiels

_
This is kind of what my ‘here and now’ post was about on dematerialisation stop stealing my ideas
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
I think the process you describe is true, Simon but it is a process of ageing as well as a process of economic shifts.

For me there is less of the things I really liked in my 20s and 30s but I have learnt to cherish what is left and I have less energy and inclination to do that stuff now anyway.

I can sit at home all smug with a huge collection of records, books and fanzines. And digital versions of these things. I still like pottering about in places like Housmans books and radical bookfairs and charity shops but it's more window shopping than buying stuff these days. Cafe OTO is my new Plastic People (lol).

I have less younger friends than I used to because they've been pushed out.

I still love London but maybe it is increasingly the idea of London now and my memories, I'm not sure.

On Saturday I went to the old biffers' place which is the Mildmay Social Club and then ended up drinking and dancing late at a friend of friends very young very drag very LBTQ+ birthday bash. So there are still these weird contrasts and surprises.
 
shiels

shiels

_
I’m only joking it’s loosely related. I think it’s a feeling that different threads have hit on, floating, rootlessness
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
Maybe also when you're young there is a feeling of "do I belong here, what is there left to discover" but now you realise that you did belong here as much as anyone and the delights of Willesden are perhaps not as intense and they might have been.
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
Thurston Moore opened a pop up record shop on Stoke Newington Church Street and I haven't been arsed to go there yet.
 
S

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
john eden said:
I think the process you describe is true, Simon but it is a process of ageing as well as a process of economic shifts.
Click to expand...

Yeah I'm sure it's related to getting older. But I do wonder if there's a bigger cultural shift here. Like I'm sure that 60s hippies felt pushed out by punks or whatever but perhaps there was a sense of a baton being passed on?

Whereas now it feels more fundamentally that something has come to an end, rather than the next generation of weird kids usurping us. The jocks have won.

This is also tied up in my mind with the decline of the left as a political force. All these people who once ran this town, have no where to go now.
 
sufi

sufi

lala
Simon silverdollarcircle said:
Recently I've been feeling cut adrift, alienated from the city I live in (London) and more widely the UK.

I think the reasons for this are pretty standard. When I first moved here 20 odd years ago London felt a like a place designed around my interests. Lots of record shops, small clubs, pirate radio, dive pubs, second hand bookshops etc.

Now yoga, gyms, health food predominate. London no longer really cares about what I am interested in. It has moved on.

One way to look at this is obviously gentrification. But I think it's a bit different to that. Buying second hand krautrock records and going to Plastic People are just as much the activities of a comfortably off leisure class as is yoga and artisan coffee.

It's more that what I like, and what my friends like, no longer really has any sway. In high school terms, the jocks have won. The weird kids, the nerds and the geeks and the stoners once ran things but we don't anymore.

In a way this is all just middle class whining. And irrelevant compared to the real struggles of people getting priced out of boroughs etc.

But still, this feeling that once one was part of some kind of zeitgeist and now no longer is, it's a difficult adjustment.

So, interested in your thoughts. Do you feel cut adrift? Have the jocks won? Why and how?
Click to expand...
where do you live? you should turn around to face the suburbs rather than the city, all that discomfort will fall away
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
Kids' capacity to be weird is now multi-directional and fragmented and not (usually) about shops or specific places.

So you are right in that subculture is now over as we understand it and what happens is largely invisible.

I think that is the sort of break you are talking about and it is tied into land value and rent skyrocketing. Or is a reaction to it perhaps.

Plus on the surface a lot of kids do seem quite conservative worker-bee conformist types but then you get the 2011 riots or people camping out on Waterloo Bridge with ER.
 
S

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
sufi said:
where do you live? you should turn around to face the suburbs rather than the city, all that discomfort will fall away
Click to expand...
It's funny you should say that cos we were just talking about moving out to zone 6 at the weekend. Currently in Streatham hill.

There's some thing very appealing about the suburbs that I can't articulate. A sense of home even tho ive never lived there
 
S

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
The continued existence of dissensus itself is one example of what I'm talking about. I mean message boards and forums were ubiquitous in the early days of the internet werent they. But then things moved on but somehow we didn't.
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Simon silverdollarcircle said:
It's more that what I like, and what my friends like, no longer really has any sway. In high school terms, the jocks have won. The weird kids, the nerds and the geeks and the stoners once ran things but we don't anymore.
Click to expand...

one of my bits of schtick is that the tech entrepreneurs who made social media are nerds and wierdos and misfits and as such have created these virtual terrains in which they thrive. the social currency on twitter isn't being good looking or having cool clothes; it's having the wittiest comment or the hottest take or the most apt pop culture reference (memes). it's an entire social regime based on being a nerd. the social lexicon of online life champions the nerds.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
it's transatlantic, too. what you describe is equally applicable to someone who many years ago moved to NY in their 20s.
 
S

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
sadmanbarty said:
one of my bits of schtick is that the tech entrepreneurs who made social media are nerds and wierdos and misfits and as such have created these virtual terrains in which they thrive. the social currency on twitter isn't being good looking or having cool clothes; it's having the wittiest comment or the hottest take or the most apt pop culture reference (memes). it's an entire social regime based on being a nerd. the social lexicon of online life champions the nerds.
Click to expand...

That's a good way to think about it yeah. The nerds have ceded the material realm to good looking kids who want to go to the gym.

A part of me can't believe that we let it slip through our fingers though
 
version

version

Well-known member
Simon silverdollarcircle said:
The weird kids, the nerds and the geeks and the stoners once ran things but we don't anymore.
Click to expand...

sadmanbarty said:
one of my bits of schtick is that the tech entrepreneurs who made social media are nerds and wierdos and misfits and as such have created these virtual terrains in which they thrive. the social currency on twitter isn't being good looking or having cool clothes; it's having the wittiest comment or the hottest take or the most apt pop culture reference (memes). it's an entire social regime based on being a nerd. the social lexicon of online life champions the nerds.
Click to expand...

I was going to make a similar point to barty. The nerds dominate the internet. They also dominate culture via things like superhero movies, Game of Thrones, video games and whatnot. There was a thread on here a while back called "The Empowered Nerd".

Simon silverdollarcircle said:
The continued existence of dissensus itself is one example of what I'm talking about. I mean message boards and forums were ubiquitous in the early days of the internet werent they. But then things moved on but somehow we didn't.
Click to expand...

Reddit's pretty popular though. 4chan too. And there are tons of Discord groups, Twitter communities, Facebook groups etc.
 
HMGovt’s Glorious Return!

HMGovt’s Glorious Return!

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Simon silverdollarcircle said:
That's a good way to think about it yeah. The nerds have ceded the material realm to good looking kids who want to go to the gym.

A part of me can't believe that we let it slip through our fingers though
Click to expand...

The change has been that the false opposition of jock Vs nerd has collapsed. You now have the Alcebiadian Chad, who is perfectly well informed and technically competent but also jacked, redpilled and couldn't care less.

All through my teens and twenties I believed sport and exercise and masculinity were utterly beyond contempt and precluded having any sort of life of the mind, but of course it's possible to have both.
 
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Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
HMGovt said:
The change has been that the false opposition of jock Vs nerd has collapsed. You now have the Alcebiadian Chad, who is perfectly well informed and technically competent but also jacked, redpilled and couldn't care less.

All through my teens and twenties I believed sport and exercise and masculinity were utterly beyond contempt and precluded having any sort of life of the mind, but of course it's possible to have both.
Click to expand...

I need more on this. This fundamental divide has been essential to how I've viewed the world.

Have you ever had a good conversation with someone with loads of muscles?
 
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