#localism

[rawjeev]

“Cultural pluralism and multilingualism are the planetary norm. We seek the balance between cosmopolitan pluralism and deep local consciousness. We are asking how the whole human race can regain self-determination in place after centuries of having been disenfranchised by hierarchy and/or centralized power. Do not confuse this exercise with "nationalism", which is exactly the opposite, the impostor, the puppet of the State, the grinning ghost of the lost community.”

—Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild.

#cultural pluralism #culture #pluralism #community #state #hierarchy #nationalism #power #decentralisation #local #localisation #localism

[justalittlesolarpunk]

Some details from the zine I made on my sailing artists’ residency. I’m a poet not a visual artist so please don’t judge the very homemade vibes haha. I really enjoyed the whole experience, and will share some photos soon!

#Tidalpunk #sailing #art #collage #zine #SailBritain #solarpunk #slow travel #localism #environmental justice

[philosophicalconservatism]

"To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love of our country and to mankind. "

Edmund Burke, Reflections On The Revolution In France.

Be suspicious of any ideology that attempts to leapfrog over our most immediate social connections in order to make a primary loyalty out of a "love of mankind"

#localism #community #family

[mjalford98]

St George & Merry England!

This country may have a more complicated past than some may like to think, but let us never forget that which made our country great. Let us build upon it, learning from the successes as well as the mistakes and failures; let us make England great again and put the "Great" back into "Great Britain!"

Work is underway rebranding my website as part of my developing photography & photojournalism business, with the aim of having my "Michael's Mission" blog/podcast launch on Pentecost Sunday 19th May. Together we can restore England to her true greatness and help other nations revive theirs too!

Happy St George's Day everyone!

#England #history #heritage #St George's Day #Great Britain #blog #podcast #Traditionalism #Localism #photography #Christendom #Traditional Catholic #Tradentine Mass #community #culture #Christian heritage #Europe #Catholicism #entrepreneur #Christian photographer #liturgy #church #Catholic entrepreneur

[lewis-mumfords-ghost]

#personal #urban planning #urbanism #third places #politics #localism

[joemuggs]

The Local is the Local

OK this is another unfinished article. Entirely my fault this time. I wrote it as a draft for a magazine, who asked me to rejig it (entirely fairly in this case, it's a bit bitty), but life events stopped me doing the rewrite in time - and the longer it sat on my hard drive the more of a burden redoing it felt.... So I just need to dump it here, get it out there, and then develop the theme in a new way next year. Because it IS about something important to me (to all of us really), so hopefully having it out in the world will help me get my thoughts in order. Interesting sidetone: I had not heard of Cory Doctorow's concept of "enshittification" when I wrote it!

**********

To paraphrase Dickens, they were the shittest of times, they were the even shittierest of times. The litany of war, pestilence, impoverishment, looming destruction, failing institutions and all the rest really, really isn’t funny any more. Just shit. Even the lowest-information of punters notices the decline daily: not just when they need services like police or doctors or public transport, but in the very fabric of things. Even the relatively cosy market town where I live with my family – having moved out of South London to the New Forest in 2017 to give our two then-small kids space and fresh air – noticeably has crumbling building facades and a lot of shut-down shops, and the big towns are worse.

Our nearest cities are Southampton – which to be fair has never recovered from its PTSD from World War II anyway – and Bournemouth. Bournemouth, too, has always been a bit tatty – seedy too, the epitome of faded Victorian glamour – but nonetheless energetic, like the party town it is: a kind of Brighton minus the airs and graces. Lately, though, that energy is muted to say the very least. The city centre is eerie as anything with some of the biggest department and chain stores boarded up with nothing to replace them. It’s not quite a wasteland, but it’s not itself, either. It’s not right. It feels sad.

It’s easy to get angry about this stuff. It’s even easier to get down and defeated. A decade and a bit of neglect of… well…everything in the name of austerity has weakened everything, eroded the resilience needed to ride out the latest economic shocks. And the state of towns and cities doesn’t just symbolise this, they are the heart of the problem, the ebbing away of commerce and socialisation in them drives atomisation. Often it feels like too many people are beaten down, resigned, heading not towards riots but just towards a creeping anomie, distancing and acceptance of inevitable worsening of… well… everything.

There are oases of hope though – albeit slightly odd ones. Some of the best times I’ve had in Bournemouth lately have been at record fairs. Now, yes, I’m a middle aged man with decks and Kallax shelves in the garage, but honestly, this isn’t what you’re thinking. These aren’t just forums for people like me to jostle and hustle over dusty crates and bore on about rare pressings. They’re family affairs. They’re fun. The Eats’n’Beats fair takes over coffee roasters’ courtyards, with food, clothes and craft stalls. Re:Warm’s pop up shop is run by Balearic geezers, taking over a craft brewery taproom so people of all ages can eat, drink and socialise all day long around the music.

There’s two vital parts to this, the first being the food and drink. Food halls, stalls and fairs have maybe got a bad name lately, thanks to blanded out mall versions, price gouging at festivals and – worst – the gentrification spearhead affairs masterminded by hospitality industry wideboys to create bourgeois enclaves in big cities where almost all white attendees can sample safe packets of “ethnic” experience for £8 a recycled cardboard plateful. But step outside the metropoles and the picture is very different. People are thrilled by culinary variety, and very glad indeed to support local cooks and produce merchants. Food fairs are actual special occasions.

Back in late 2020, Covid still running amok, Owen Hatherley wrote a piece for the Guardian about high street regeneration focusing on how the people of Preston, Lancs took the initiative in what he called “craft beer social democracy, based on small trades doing interesting things.” My antennae sparked on reading it and I couldn’t get the phrase “craft beer social democracy” out of my head. If an arch Corbynist like Hatherley could find things to love in something so close to the Cameronian Big Society / Jamie Oliver Big Lunch model, odd things were afoot.

The second element in play is music, especially club music, and the culture that comes with it. The Balearic aspect in particular – laid back, anything-goes, not beholden to the doof-doof, but smart and interesting sounds – provides the perfect atmosphere to come-one-come-all daytime events. Even in a staid village, get a few people sitting around on haybales drinking craft cider and eating pizza, play “I’m Not in Love”, some Soul II Soul and some Róisín Murphy on nice speakers, and hey presto: vibes upon vibes. And just as importantly, the hypersocial, and now cross-generational, nature of club culture provides its own infrastructure to build on too – again, something easy to take for granted or write off as facile if you’re in a major hub city, but a lifeline if you’re out in the gammon-infested sticks. I already knew this thanks to my wife being a founder of the Big Fish Little Fish family rave organisation, and getting to see the joy it brings to relatively socially isolated parents, but seeing the same vibe connections seeping into genteel school fetes and pub gardens has been an eye-opener.

That linkage into subculture in turn links into a different sort of urban regeneration: the DIY venue. Last year, not that long after I’d made contact with the Bournemouth record fair crews, I got invited to write about the music scene in Tyneside and was bowled over by the sense of an area relatively overlooked by arts funding and the culture industry determined to build its own infrastructure. Venues like Cobalt, Star & Shadow, The Lubber Fiend and World Headquarters are created and maintained not just for their own scenes but with a sense of adding to the fabric of the city. Again, as with the Preston story, something that stood out was the "odd blend of hard-left politics and entrepreneurialism" that comes when communities pull together.

My weekend in the Northeast made me think again about other spaces I’ve attended, been in touch with or heard friends enthuse about. Sheffield’s Hope Works, a proper down and dirty techno dive that every year blossoms into the No Bounds arts festival across the city. Rye Wax in Peckham, the record-store-café-venue that’s been in suspended animation since Covid lockdown but is about to be reborn with an Arts Council funded youth mentorship programme in tow. Futtle brewery in Fife. Spit And Sawdust skate art cafe bar in Cardiff. Partisan, The Carlton Club and White Hotel in Manchester. The Golden Lion, Todmorden. The Cellar Arts Club in Worthing. Sneaky Pete’s in Edinburgh. Future Yard in Birkenhead. Club Uniquity in Somerleyton, Suffolk. Café Indie in Scunthorpe...

There are dozens more besides, crucially each with its own approach and character, a million miles from the sanitised O2 / Carling / Live Nation owned £7 plastic-glass-of-rat’s-piss monoculture that has taken hold of venues and festivals in this country. Some are built around dance music, but many around indie rock or noise/experimental music, or LGBTQ+ scenes, or all of the above. Often there’s radical politics behind them, but just as often you’ll find a hodge-podge: as in Hatherley’s “craft beer social democracy”, necessity makes for interesting alliances, and hard left and woolly libs, idealists and bootstrap entrepreneurs, rigorous ethical frameworks and widepersons of the blag economy, will rub along together.

But whatever their individual slant, they tend, crucially to have deep roots in some kind of subcultural history. At the time of writing I’m preparing to head up to Bristol to chair panel discussions at the Black Gold Vinyl Fair at Lost Horizon HQ. This gig/rave venue, cafe, gallery, marketplace and VR studio (!) is run by the team behind Shangri La – the successor to Lost Vagueness as Glastonbury Festival’s “naughty corner” – with an ethos eyeballs-deep in mischievous hippie/anarchist-leaning squatter history, but also the organisational nous that it takes to be part of the 21st century double-fenced Glastonbury megalopolis. That sense of subcultural history – folk culture, even – has been brought brightly to life just recently by the celebrations of what would have been the late, great Andrew Weatherall’s 60th birthday. They may have begun in superclub fabric, but they progressed through smaller venues in Belfast and Glasgow to close with a weekender in the strange, storied Golden Lion in Todmorden.

All of this – the food fairs, the vinyl and beer all dayers, the record shops with charcuterie, the little rave dives with coffee machines and yoga classes in the daytime, all of it – is sorely needed. The triple whammy of Brexit, Covid and the Cozzy Lizzy (as we must now call the economic collapse) have hit the music industry very, very hard, and gigs and festivals worst of all. Even international acts are finding it hard to tour and will do for the foreseeable future, which is going to be career ending for some – and for many of the tens of thousands of people who prop up the infrastructure. It’s hard to overstate the damage, but there are at least crumbs of comfort for young acts, local scenes and little venues held together with gaffer tape and deranged strength of will.

And our towns and cities need them, too. It’s been wild seeing the conspiratarians and antiwokers turn on the 15 Minute City as the latest target for spittle flecked ranting. But hopefully, maybe this can be a galvanising force for all the rest of us to remember that actually, yes, our neighbourhoods can be better. The craft beer and food court aspects may have got a bad rep as being bougie or gentrifying, but that is a misunderstanding and ultimately snobbery. Thankfully the subculture parts – whether it’s punk, rave, balearic, queer scenes or whatever – do still manage cut across class and other social boundaries. And ultimately, given the right welcoming atmosphere, having a drink or a cake and listening to tunes is pretty inclusive as activities go.

Oddly enough, there isn’t really any map to this territory, there’s no guidebook to where to find the truly independent happenings. Perhaps that’s because those big brand sponsored faux-popups, box parks and gentrifier vanguard food courts with their PR budgets suck up all the air of publicity, perhaps it’s because the indie spaces are too cranky, too individual, too busy just staying afloat to link up into a movement. They need each of us to seek them out.

We don’t really have a flagship community space in this bit of the south coast just yet – at least I don’t think we do: I’d love to be surprised and proved wrong. My exploration of our nearby cities has been cursory until recently, having had social life limited first by young children, then by two years of Covid disruption. Only now, with my kids hurtling into their teens, am I really finding my feet socially and musically. But between a few ramshackle bars and shiny breweries and those fun afternoons rifling through tunes and eating fancy cookies, I am finding a few glimmers of hope. And in these shittest of times hope is, of course, the most precious commodity of all.

#food culture #subculture #localism

[eternal-echoes]

Subsidiarity

An organism cannot fully flourish if it is interfered with – if you cage it, put it in fetters, constantly poke and prod it, or even just make yourself a nuisance, as a horsefly does.  It needs room to breathe, freedom of action, and the opportunity to make use of its special talents and knowledge.  

Social organisms are like this too.  A family has a concern for its members that is stronger than that of which outsiders are capable, and a knowledge of their needs that is greater and more intimate than that of outsiders.  The family ought therefore to be left to run its own affairs as far as possible, with outside agencies either assisting or interfering only when the family simply cannot otherwise continue to function properly. Even then, when such intervention is necessary, it ought as far as possible to be those closest to the family itself – the extended family first and foremost, then local public authorities when absolutely necessary, and so on through the concentric circles mentioned earlier – who provide the assistance in question.  

What goes for the family goes for other social organizations.  The presumption is that they are to be left alone by higher-level social organizations, and that presumption can be overridden only when intervention is necessary to restore the proper function of the lower-level organizations, and only to the extent and for the time that this is necessary.

...

Like the organic conception of society enshrined in the principle of solidarity, the principle of subsidiarity is at odds with socialism and any other political program that would in the name of “social justice” usurp what private enterprise, local communities, churches, and in general what Edmund Burke famously called the “little platoons” of society can accomplish.  

It is important to emphasize that this is a moral principle, and not merely a pragmatic one. The claim isn’t merely that a central government may opt not to meddle in the affairs of smaller scale institutions if it judges that this may be more efficient. It is that it must not meddle unless it is strictly necessary to do so.

...

Hence, socialism cannot be justified in the name of social justice, because social justice rightly understood is a matter of solidarity rather than egalitarianism, and because solidarity goes hand in hand with subsidiarity.  

- Edward Feser

#Edward Feser #subsidiary #quotes #localism #distributism #politics

[coffinwoodx]

ok so for those of you who don’t know, there’s this twitter account of a japanese local hero mascot named dentman who went viral recently due to this tweet

but yeah he saw the tweet. and his response went viral as well (which is how i found his account)

and he just has like. hourly posts reminding you to brush your teeth

oh and his rival? his name is mr. mutans. whenever dentman posts he makes a post of his own, ofc

but THAT’S NOT ALL. literally while making this post i found a THIRD ACCOUNT that’s all about taking your meds

safe to say i’m losing my mind

anyway the point of all this was that people are ALREADY beginning to draw them ship art 😭

and the reactions are everything

I CANT ADD ANY MORE IMAGES BUT TRUST ME THIS IS SO FUNNY

toxic one-sided dentman yaoi wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card but it DEFINITELY IS NOW!

#what the fluoride #toxic doomed yaoi #this is so funny #dentman #mr. mutans #mr.mutans #mutans #ohga man #ohga #twitter #tokusatsu #japanese mascots #local heroes #🍬 #🦷 #🍬🦷 #long post #50k #60k #70k

[theblob1958]

people are saying do it scared, but you also gotta do it alone. you'll miss out on so much you want to do if you wait til someone will do it with you. do it scared and do it alone.

#missed out on a whole year I could have skated at my local roller rink because I didn't want to go alone #and now it's closed and I won't ever get that year back. sometimes you gotta do it alone if you want to do something

[justalittlesolarpunk]

Hello Earth! Looking to make connections with likeminded people and share good news and positive ideas. Not sure what this blog will evolve into (probably nothing as I have a busy life) but I’d love to follow you if you’re posting about similar stuff!

#solarpunk #tidalpunk #cottagepunk #lunarpunk #environmentalism #climate justice #social justice #community #localism #green anarchism #anarchopacificism #queer liberation #feminism #racial justice #disability liberation #worker rights #friendship #guerrilla gardening #community energy #permaculture #permablitz #progressive #neopaganism #trans rights #literature #poetry #ecology #afrofuturism #asian futurism #indigenous futurism

[saulwexler]

how to explain to non-americans that the better call saul ads aren’t exaggerated for comedic effect they are super normie

#better call saul #[name rhyme] did someone hurt you? I’ll kill them. I’ll make them suffer. i’ll burn the world down until we are the last 2 in it #local lawyer tag

[hobgobknowsbest]

#goblincore #goblin vibes #cryptidcore #goblin culture #goblin things #goblin community #eldritchcore #goblin brain #goblin behaviour #goblin energy #goblin posting #local cryptid #will o the wisp

[mjalford98]

A collection of photos from the St Patrick's Day parade in Bristol on Sunday 17th of March. For a celebration of traditional Irish culture, it was quite modern and flamboyant, and not without its references to more progressive political agendas (though I've heard of worse), it was wonderful to see how many people come together to enjoy and appreciate a culture that, inasmuch as it has spread across the globe, remains of distinct localised origin.

This is why I am a photographer, to explore in visuals culture in all its various forms, the good, the bad, and the ugly, exploring what makes communities tick, what brings people together, and what pulls them apart. It is local culture that brings communities together, forging links between people and the places the live in, no matter their origin or background, and if we want local and national cultures to continue playing that role, then we must do everything to preserve their identity and uniqueness through all the cultural convolutions of an increasingly globalised world.

#St Patrick's Day #Bristol #parade #shamrock #bishop #Traditionalist #culture #politics #community #photography #city life #localism #Irish culture #Irish traditional music #celebration #heritage #local culture #popular culture #folk culture #folk music #Irish folk music #national culture #cultural identity #culture photography #Christianity #Christian heritage

[magnetostits]

the barbenheimer experience i had was so funny i saw oppenheimer first and in a quiet scene we could literally hear ken singing in the theater next to us and then during barbie it when was quiet we could hear a fucking explosion coming from the oppenheimer screening

#literally everyone in the theater started laughing both times #barbenheimer #oppenheimer #barbie #ken #greta gerwig #christopher nolan #cillian murphy #margot robbie #rhis was the only time i was glad my local theater is a shithole #normally it’s so annoying hearing the show next to you #but this time it was hilarious

[fleuvien]

#girlhood #girlblogging #girlblogger #tumblr girls #old tumblr #fleuvien #this is what makes us girls #girlblog #it girl #just girly things #girl interrupted #lana del rey #black swan #hyper feminine #locally hated #ldr #lana del ray aka lizzy grant #lanadelrey #ultraviolence #nfr #bambi doe #doll #pinterest #just girly thoughts #just girly wishes #im just a girl #cinnamon girl #coquette #cool girl #tumblr girlies

[myjetpack]

a cartoon for the guardian

#cartoon #libraries #support local libraries #tom gauld