Homeless ...again!

shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
there's this related thing of: what are we doing to our consiousnesses. the affects of what we spend our time doing. grid-life has to be very finely honed in most cases. getting the money and accommodation to line up, and organizing your life to be in a physical and mental state to perform at work.

one thing that's comprehensively happened in the last decade is a structure of ideas that is all about optimisation. protein being the archetypal example by this point. but also you know, make up tutorials and pick up artist advice. there's no room to slack. people used to complain about neoliberalism but the colonization of ideas at the moment is so much more intense than anything that happened in the 90s and 00s. the phones are so intimate and the platforms are so consolidated.

travel is one of the best examples i think in terms of how the ideas are organized now. you can take the piss out of people going backpacking to find themselves. but i haven't heard anyone say that in years. what i have heard and seen is people catching planes more or less to create photos and videos, mostly of themselves. the spiritual aspect has receded - ok whatever, it was always fake - but the adventure aspect even has receded.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member

Optimisation

i've just realised Stan is actually Gradgrind from the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens and he is a mouthpiece for the same Totalising Techno-Optimism that was endemic to the Age of Industry.
www.dissensus.com
 
pattycakes

pattycakes

Well-known member
Cities make themselves instagrammable now. Little streets with fake clouds suspended and colorful umbrellas.

IMG-20250415-WA0014.jpg


An extreme example in Athens

Everything soullessly boutique or artisanal. Same design templates downloaded from Pinterest. I was almost gonna write a post about it in the thread where @sus was talking about European towns all looking the same. Didn't get around to it. This is my first time back in Greece in 18 years. That's pretty much the window where this morphosis has taken place. It was just before smartphones and social media took off. Innocent times. Pretty interesting to see the before and after. Like waking up from a coma. Athens center used to have loads of rickety storefronts, all crumbly and held together with rusty nuts and bolts and bungee cords. A bit like the old Camden market. Barely any of that left now. Out in the suburbs you see a lot of abandoned mansions though. Foreclosed, repossessed. People no longer living it up quite the way they did. I miss the old world.
 
Ian Scuffling

Ian Scuffling

Well-known member
I took a solo road trip recently and thought about this "optimization" a lot, though with a slightly different framework. I slept in the car most nights and took at least one 2-3 hour hike every day. I found ironically that I was more settled and lucid internally while I was driving as opposed to walking with my cameras (Bolex Rex 4 and Praktica LB). I felt compelled to get the "perfect shot" on all of my little excursions, but on the road felt more like a tangible creature in a natural space, mediated by the car but nonetheless at the mercy of the elements (especially the desert). I felt so disconnected from my photography by the end, like a tourist more so than the James Benning-esque documentarian I was hoping to be. By the end of the trip a real sense of childlike wonder had settled in, and I tried to capture panoramas and attempted long pans hoping to capture the scale I was feeling internally. I wished I had more time to explore all the backroads and poorly marked trails I had passed by in the mountains and canyons.

All of this is to say I agree it's amazing how monotonized and streamlined our internal processes and monologues become living on any kind of grid. I haven't felt so unstructured and unattached possibly ever, and yet the second I felt any kind of behavioral and creative accountability I became debilitatingly self-conscious and codependent. Even the act of creation by way of image making is subsumed and assimilated into a particular mode of self-optimization as to be unrecognizable, completely homogenized in the structure of the instagram feed. Most of the images I took I felt would not be distinguishable from any other self-marketing "film artists." Even getting off the grid the virus of the iconosphere lies symbiotic in the eye.
 
Ian Scuffling

Ian Scuffling

Well-known member
My parents recently redid their basement as well with that awful grey linoleum flooring, and still don't understand my repulsion at their instinctual imitation of a J. Crew catalog. Someone more articulate than me on here might be able to describe this phenomenon of endless imitation of the "boutique and artisanal" to the point that that which was soulless in the first place becomes completely devoid of the mark of civilization.
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
Ian Scuffling said:
My parents recently redid their basement as well with that awful grey linoleum flooring, and still don't understand my repulsion at their instinctual imitation of a J. Crew catalog. Someone more articulate than me on here might be able to describe this phenomenon of endless imitation of the "boutique and artisanal" to the point that that which was soulless in the first place becomes completely devoid of the mark of civilization.
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it's called the simulacrum
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
shakahislop said:
radiohead are interesting in that they are grid-people and are primarily for grid-people but they hint at something outside of it
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Radiohead is a weird phenomenon. I think it's because they were reasonably mainstream-sounding at the start but then immediately started going a bit weird. The speed of the change, and the fact that under the weirdness were still to be found many catchy hooks, was enough to take their average Joe listeners with them.
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
Cheetos are gross though, nuts are at least nutritious, they can be boring and samey but they’re everywhere on the continent

Pickles too, anything ironically like saukraut so pickled/fermented options, yoghurt, water is always the fucker unless a town square has a font
 
G

GhostofKinski

Well-known member
pattycakes_ said:
Well shit. Have had triple whiplash the last couple of days. Ended up on the Island of Crete instead of Mykonos because it's supposed to be less swanky and more classic Greece, where Mykonos is basically a purpose built arena for rich people to mingle. Crete has history and charm and nicer nature. The jobs are supposed to be plentiful here too. As written upthread, the plan was originally thinking to go cash in hand but then chatGPT got my hopes up by telling me my german residency permit allows work in the EU because it was issued before Brexit. But, then yesterday, just as I was getting some serious leads on some great sounding jobs with accomodation included and 3 meals a day, i.e. the perfect thing for a homeless dude, I double checked and nope, chatGPT gives me a totally different story. It said the employer would need to apply for the visa. What the fuck chatGPT? Moral: don't always trust AI! The visa process is long, which makes no sense for the employer to go through when they can just employ an EU citizen with no hassle. No shortage of those at the mo either. So it's either back to cash in hand, or find an employer who wants to work with me. My CV is good, but maybe not sponsor a visa good. A lot of the ads I saw specify no visa, EU peeps only. Also the cash in hand option isn't as easy to come by now as it used to be here either because they've recently made all that much more risky with big fines due to right wing government and refugees crisis. So basically I'm fucked rn. Almost no money again. The easiest thing would be to either go back to Germany or Austria, where I can work but don't have anywhere to live. Or, go back to the UK. Which isn't happening. Ireland's an option, but idk. Feel kinda tied to the mainland at this point. It's such a fucker because the jobs I was getting lined up for were so sweet. Everything taken care of. First time in my life I've felt the direct effects of Brexit. Pretty angry about it all. What the fuck has it even achieved? Is there any good that came of it? Options now are to see if I can find a place similar to the above jobs in Germany or Austria with built in accommodation and hopefully they'll also cover travel costs. Fingers crossed on that. Or submit to the homeless life and just float around Crete for the rest of my days. There's definitely worse places to be.



Scuse the rant. Had to vent.
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Ireland is hiring.

I'm sure you've already thought of it but I am sure on Crete you can find a Irish bar/pub, or English speaking/style one.
Back in the day (1980's, not 1840's) when the Irish hit Bklyn w/o kith or kin, the bars (or parish priest) was where you'd see fella's walk in with nothing but a backpack, chat up the owner/bartender/regulars, and within day's I would see them going to/coming from a days work.

Sorry for your troubles, all the best to you.
 
pattycakes

pattycakes

Well-known member
Cheers @GhostofKinski. Could be worse. Know what though? I have a feeling that as the optimization and boutiques and grid world proliferates, the world of just walking in and getting paid under the table is receding, or maybe even becoming extinct. In the developed world at least. Would like to be wrong about that but this is the impression I'm getting right now in a country that historically has a reputation of being a place you would do just that. The repercussions are too high and there's incentives, commissions and quotas to catch it out. I could tell from the fearful look in the eyes of the guys who mentioned it that they took it serious. There's also the inverse corruption where those enforcing those laws will extort you once they have that kind of leverage on you. A fate much worse than getting caught. A guy I know in Athens has direct experience with dirty cops who do exactly that and have been causing him and his restaurant owning family absolute hell for years. Definitely need to press further on and keep trying though. There's got to be a rebel out there somewhere! Or become a monk.. let's see
 
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