Returned back to Birmingham City Centre (briefly) I used it to spend a melancholy afternoon letting my old home turf take me where it leads.
It should be a shock to no-one that it’s different – change is inevitable – and in a place where you have had no opportunity to create new memories all you have are ghosts and a skeleton you can still see the shape of from underneath the new meat.
The dirt, graffiti, and fungi of culture is still there if you really look but it strikes me that everywhere is so produced, homogenised. All the shops have morphed into consumer brand experiences. Everything is a simulacra of the high end, hi-gloss, sleek chrome of polished glass. Food is the usual brands or fast food versions of other cultures street food with the flavours standerised and approved by committee and served in identical cardboard boxes. High street culture is either deluded about the disposable income of the average person or has given up on the working class completely trying to squeeze the last of the money from a rapidly shrinking middle class.
What it amounts to is a pantomime of affluence, a charade protecting a deeply broken system. The high street itself becomes a tool of hypernormalisation, reassuring everyone that everything is as it should be despite the evidence of day to day reality.
Maybe that’s why people are so willing to participate in this spectacle, perhaps it’s reassuring to pretend. Not actually shopping but collecting aesthetics, browsing for aspirations that we’ll go home and order a knock off version from Temu later.
In the nineties there was the trope of the ‘Valley Girl’ that was popular which was a shorthand for a certain type of shallow and vapid teenager dripping with white privilege, The whole thing was misogynist and largely subverted ad nauseam by the 2000s . In the ’90s, ‘Valley Girl’ was a shorthand for consumerism and privilege. Today, the trope seems quaint—shopping is no longer mocked but celebrated as identity curation.
But Birmingham endures. The Muslim and Christian evangelists still set up their stalls uncomfortably close to each other outside Primark, people still eat lunch on top of the dead buried underneath Pigeon Park. Gent, Lisk, and Foka still run rampant. We still meet on the Ramp. The system is broken but we are not.
When the city centre is nothing but a graveyard of brands I’m excited to see what we build in the ruins.
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Danny Smith is on a mission: to find Death – and have a word.
He’s lost, nearly forty, dumped, and surrounded by bin bags full of his clothes in his parents’ spare room.
Mourning not only the loss of the most important person in his life, but also the only future he ever really planned, his thoughts turn to death. If he’s going to start his life over, he may as well start at the end and work back. Find Death and become, if not friends, then at least on nodding terms. It’s not a good plan, but it’s the only one he’s got.
He’s stalking Death to Mexico. Home of The Day Of The Dead Festival, Santa Muerte the patron saint of drug dealers and the dispossessed, and a bloody cartel drug war that’s been going since the 80s. Death seems to be big over there.
The trail will take him to ancient temples, vibrant bustling markets, white sands, with weird tourists, and a neon blur of excess. Can he find his love of life now the love of his life has gone?
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