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