Look round charity shops in my area (East Midlands) for works of literary merit

>look round charity shops in my area (East Midlands) for works of literary merit
>find nothing but celeb bios/airport novels after 3 dozen shops in as many towns
>go to Cornwall and look round the charity shops in towns (St Ives & St Agnes were great for this)
>almost every single shop has joyce, milton, chaucer, shakespeare and usually a shitton of other canonical works
What did they mean by this?

wtf is east midlands? where do you live, illinois?

I don't know. I've picked up some pretty good stuff in charity shops in my small northern town, even saw a copy of Gravity's Rainbow in one

where in texas do you live? austin has some good shops. midland is all retarded oil riggers

where is midlands stupid like what is it between lol

...

my bad, never been to new england. looks cold af

I feel ya, my local shop in Devon has too many YouTuber books.

you’re the stupid one, any question like that can be answered with a search engine in 30 seconds time you fuckwit

Trust burgers to over-represent the extremes of the bell curve. Fucking retards.

I think it's an attempt at demonstrating American ''''''''''humor''''''''''

Even so, my statement still stands.

wealthier places tend to have better selections
my nearest oxfam bookshops are farnham and winchester, both pretty well off areas
there is always good stuff there
also usually lots of vintage stuff and folio society etc

Dude. I am west midlands. High five. Love finding gems in charity shops

>lol
Leave.

Indeed

Cornish hobbits are too drunk on cider to focus on works of literary merit, so they turf them.

I'm from Cornwall, but study elsewhere. Where did you go to find this?

Nigga you finna live in the shire lmao hobbit ass nigga

OP literally says St Ives and St Agnes

Hook, line and sinker.

It is exactly like this in Yorkshire. Absolute shite in most charity shops. However, when I went to Stratford-upon-avon last summer I came back with armfuls of Shakespeare (obviously), philosophy, and the rest.

It seems like the further south you go, the more Veeky Forums it gets

Good tip brah

Photos like the one OP posted make me want to kill myself. I don't know what it is, but there is something about that photo that is so unnervingly familiar that it just depressed the hell out of me. It isn't even the fact it's mostly charity shops, I guess it's just that I've walked along streets like that and that I know all over Britain there are streets just like that where people work and walk every day in total obscurity, earning a low wage, toiling on as best they can, dying and being replaced by others who do the same. I don't mean to sound edgy and of course these are fairly common thoughts on this board, but still that photo unsettles me.

I know the feeling lad.

Oxfam seems to have a way better selection than other charity shops in my experience

This, slightly more expensive though

I can't even articulate it. There is something so subjectively British about it, which in turn reminds me of the reality of life in Britain which in my experience is largely defined by a sort of weary, self-effacing humour that barely hides a sort of consistent, low-level bleakness underneath it all. I think back to my uni days for example, and the times I walked around purposefully getting lost and ending up in some suburb with a "highstreet" that looked just like this where people lived their whole lives and which I rarely learned the name of. Just to think there are over 80 million people on this island and that probably most of them are confronted with a sight like this most days is just very sad for some reason. I don't know what it is really, which I guess is a shame. I imagine it's a sort of terrifying reminder of my own cosmic irrelevance or something. Who knows.

Not even British, but I used to feel the same. I don't anymore, simply because of some changes in my life and perspective, including a regained appreciation of British identity and aesthetics. I advise you don't dwell too much in self-indulgent aesthetic sentimentalism, especially when it evokes a melancholy of the kind you described. I sure as hell know it's seductive to get lost in it. Try and figure out why you feel that way user and maybe change that. Or move somewhere you like.

Exactly. You can drive four hours and end up on a high street that's a slightly tweaked version of the one 20 minutes away from your house.

>posts thread about conditions in the third world
>thinks people will be interested
>claims Americans are retarded

Have some curry, Achmed, maybe you’ll feel better.

Oh ffs man why'd you have to trigger me like that
Yeah, and it can be depressing, which is why I moved up north, which is slightly better but still more of the same, cosmic irrelevance is a good way to put it - it's like this, and pardon the cynicism, miasma amongst the general day to day. Most British towns are the same, and me and my friends have often described the feeling of people in general just looking ill in certain parts, likely due to age, but there is something about the environment that just levels you, hard to describe...

I haven't lived in a place like that for several years at this point so it's not a result of being down about where I'm living (although I do live in a shithole). I just remember walking along countless streets like that one and every time I guess I've always felt supremely underwhelmed by the reality of everyday life as represented by such streets. The "highstreet" being no more than a place where people can buy tac to escape being at home alone all day or being bored or despondent. I think of my grandmother when she was alive catching the bus into town because she was lonely and just walking around alone and browsing shops like this and perhaps buying a bunch of off-brand energy drinks ("Glucorade") because she thought us grandchildren liked it. Or the seemingly unhappy, lifeless, worn-out middle-aged women and men working (or probably volunteering) in these places and the guilt I've always felt looking in their eyes considering I've had more opportunities and aren't likely to end up there. Or the skint mothers buying second-hand shoes or clothing for her kids in some charity shop while a group of students stand nearby laughing at the clothing on sale and deciding what to buy for their fancy dress party that evening. Just the horror of human life that things like that represent. Or seeing a big shelf full of shitty DVDs that I would never want to watch but which took hundreds of people if not thousands to produce, edit, market, distribute, design the covers for, produce the plastic for the cases etc, all for some weight-loss DVD by a celebrity I vaguely recognize or a gritty thriller that went straight to DVD and then into obscurity. The vast, vast waste of human time and effort simply to do something with their time rather than allow dread and unhappiness to overwhelm them.

Christ lads this thread got depressing

I agree about the appearance of illness etc. I don't know whether it's a class breeding thing, or whether the British working class have long accustomed themselves to a cramped, underappreciated, strained lifestyle and adopted a bleak, futile perspective to go with it, or whether there is actually something about the climate etc which causes what might be called the general British temperament. I mean even looking at country estates of dukes and barrons etc fills me with this feeling which just isn't good at all. Like this big, open, windy, damp, grey, cold, featureless landscape where some matter has been arranged into houses, and some matter has been sculpted into stairwells and trimmed hedges, but there is something very elemental about it in the sense that the external world is just drained of anything that might trigger and instinctive sense of meaning or wellbeing in the human observer. And in small towns or obscure cities it's worse. I often simply zoom into a random street on google maps and look at streetview, and what I see makes me want to an hero right away. Just recently I zoomed into the street where Philip Larkin lived in Hull, which was nice enough, but then within a minute of navigating the adjoining streets I end up somewhere like the OP, populated by people I feel I've already seen, like character-types on Grand Theft Auto. And the worst thing is I have absolutely no suggestions as to how this can be overcome, improved, or made more appealing. It's just very bleak to me.

That's normal for a thread concerning the UK

I was disappointed when I went to England. I thought everyone would be smart but everyone seems dumber than here (Australia)

Yep, a sameness and greyness, I do feel it infects your attitude, and agree it has shaped the humor to an extent - as to what can be done about it christ, no clue, I should probably move overseas. I don't know what it is but my closest friends seem to all have this romantic, and likely very flawed, view of Japan that might stem from our cultural indifference; I enjoy visiting new cities in the UK, and checking out the popular, and not so popular sights but it doesn't take long to become acclimatized to the same crabby texture of the housing, the local council, the same dissatisfied 40 something shopping clerk. Half of it comes from my temperament, and I'm not constantly donwtrodden by it, I mean my hometown Reading exudes Nostalgia to the point those same shitty streets make me feel belonging and joy.

Where abouts is this? Near you?

I caught the train to Bognor Regis earlier this year because I've always wanted to go. It was one of the most depressing days of this year, and it was a sunny day so I can't imagine what the winter would be like. The seafront experience was nice enough, but beyond that it's just a single pedestrianized highstreet full of charity shops, bargain stores, a supermarket etc, and then the same assortment of bland business parks, random blocks of council-seeming flats, barren industrial estates, empty rustic-themed pubs and so on for miles and miles. I sometimes feel like approaching people who work in, say, a travel agent in some bleak building in a run-down area of the city and asking how the fuck they manage to stay alive. Of course I never do but I've felt that impulse for years. I know alcohol, tobacco, anti-depressants, regional loyalty (football, stereotypes, local history etc) and so on goes some way to help, but the more elitist part of me keeps insisting that most people, consciously or not, simply numb themselves to much of life for the sake of not being overwhelmed by the dreariness of their tedious routines. I hate to keep spamming posts like this ITT and sorry for taking up so much space, but it's getting to me recently more than ever. I've actually been seriously thinking of buying a one-way ticket to the US recently and walking into the wilderness until I starve or freeze to death. All of my natural, instinctive reasons to keep living have just been eroded to the point where I feel like every day I am simply trudging through a raw, brutal, pointless graveyard of dead matter for no reason other than appeasing my animal will.

This is actually lively and diverse compared to many market towns, where even the tiny high street has been swapped out for a giant Morrisons or Asda

Relevant Parts of England:
>London
>Birmingham
>Edinburgh

Irrelevant Parts:
everywhere else

btw a lot of these charity shops (which killed small bookshops btw so dont deserve too much sympathy) are just putting out what they think will sell. If you actually ask they often have a lot of much better stuff in stock and will let you go back and have a look if you ask

user, remember when I told you not to lose yourself in self-indulgent melancholy triggered by aesthetics? You didn't follow my advice there did you? Don't get me wrong, it was a pleasure to read and a feeling much too familiar so you brought it back for me.

Not to dismiss your sentiment completely as there's truth to it, but I do think part of it is your own inner projection so you might want to attend to that. I also think that the British are and have been in a crisis of faith for quite some time now. Not in the theistic sense (well that too, but it's not what I'm getting at), but in the sense that they've lost their sensibility for the sacred and everything around them discourage them to uphold such a value. Unfortunately, you can't have beauty/live beautifully without sanctity.

I wish you all the best and hope that one day you'll walk down one of those many streets and they'll speak a different language to you.

nah the northern cities, though of course they have rough parts, are much better than birmingham or edinburgh, especially for music and cost of living

I guess the sense of belonging is what we should be thankful for (although I panicked the last time I visited my hometown because it felt alien to me). And yes I know the feeling about visiting random places. Most weekends I tell myself I'll wake up early and make an effort to visit somewhere close to London (Margate, Canterbury, Oxford, etc) but I never do any more. I visited Manchester one weekend this also but again it was just a brief rush of excitement upon reaching the train station and then a day of dejection as I wandered around random suburbs, parks, cemeteries, retail outlets and "modernized" pedestrian highstreets before getting back on the train and listening to a group of middle-aged women from Stoke who had visited Manchester for some teachers training course or something. The feeling isn't conducive to a healthy lifestyle or the maintenance of a civilisation at all.

It'd be interesting to compare American and British postindustrial shitholes--high street vs. main street. Having spent some time in both countries, I would say the biggest difference is probably in size and public transport, or lack thereof. Britain is small and everybody is crammed together like crabs in a bucket, while America is bloated beyond belief and endlessly spilling out into the surrounding environment

Edinburgh is the second greatest city in the UK.

Edinburgh's in Scotland, kiddo

Birmingham is only relevant if you want to get BLACKED. It's a majority non-White British town or at least it will be by 2021.

I'd say:

1. London
2. Oxford
3. Edinburgh
4. Bristol
5. Bath
6. St Ives
7. York / Newcastle

Its the lovely tumor of Kent known as Medway which is my god forsaken hometown (city) that I live in
>Relevant Parts of England:
>London
>Irrelevant Parts:
>everywhere else

FTFY mate

London is one of the ugliest cities I've been to. Not just the city itself but the people too

Lol that's Toronto. Canadian here. Uk looks comfy af. Although some cities look weird with the houses so close and no trees and shit. My uncle went to London and said it was a shit hole and called it a sess pool lmao. I don't really see how it looks nice to me.

I know, so when I say its the only relevant part of England its even worse. Maybe that's just Southerner bias though.

Rural Uk is comfy Uk, you will need money though

To illustrate my point: here is the highstreet of a random town (Weston) in West Virginia, USA.

To me this isn't very depressing at all, despite the fact I'm aware that unemployment, meth addiction, poverty etc are prevalent in the region. I often go to random US towns across the country (Montana, Maine, Nebraska etc) and rarely am I confronted with a highstreet that makes me feel a sort of anxious desire to kill myself. Maybe American posters feel differently, I don't know. But I would be happy to move to the town in the pic for a year at least and I imagine I'd be relatively content in some barely furnished studio apartment, drinking coffee, reading etc. But offer me the same prospect in a random British town and I wouldn't want to do it. Even when I visited the US in 2008 I felt a general sense of optimism, or a kind of potential being realized in some way at all times. I caught a train along the east coast which travelled through some run-down towns but even there I felt I was in a movie the entire time. And I didn't feel like this in Belgium, France for example, though even in those countries the small towns didn't horrify me the way British towns do. Even if you take a photograph of a person on an anonymous street, or a group of people at a house party that could be anywhere in the Western world, I can usually tell right away whether it's in Britain or not. And if it is in Britain it's usually not a good thing. It's just offputting and unsettling on a deep level to me.

I didn't see your post before I posted this:

>Medway

I guess that's what I mean. I live in London, and I suppose I am very ideologically submissive because although I really hate the city for the most part, there is some sense that I am "where it's at" despite the fact that my life is an absolute f*****g joke for the most part.

Philip Larkin is in my eyes one of the very best British poets because, living in Hull as he did, he managed to capture something essentially British, which is very similar to what Fernando Pessoa captures in The Book of Disquiet. It's a sense that despite the well-advertised importance of your distinct human Self, the reality of your daily life tells you something far different, namely that the external world for the most part is disappointing, bleak, ugly and underwhelming.

What's uniquely interesting (afaik) about British "culture" for example is the fact that sports fans embrace the notion that their hometown is the worst and bleakest place to live, that their team is the worst, and so on. In America it's all about hype, chants, and well-orchestrated displays of brand (colour, mascot, nickname etc) expression. But in Britain it's a bunch of poor bald men from Scunthorpe standing on a terrace in Yeovil on a dark wet night in November singing about how shit their hometown is. On the one hand it's very laudible and is a moving tribute to the pathos of human life. But on the other it's very very depressing.

There's lots of material for great literature here, so get writing.

For example, I just zoomed into one of several business parks in Medway and found this guy standing outside one of the man identical red-brick office units. What the fuck is going through this guy's mind? He wakes up in Medway, he drives 30+ minutes from his obscure suburb to some faceless business park, walks through drizzle under a low grey sky until he reaches his characterless, IKEA-fitted office with its dozen or so mostly middle-aged, mildly unattractive employees, sits down at his desk and contributes 0.000000000000000000000001% if that to the overall maintenance and development of British society, and at lunch he eats quietly from a plastic lunchbox or walks to some Tesco Extra to buy the same meal deal. And he does this for weeks and months and years, gradually earning enough money to drive to work in car which looks a little different and travels somewhat faster than the previous one, occupies a house larger than the last, travels to foreign countries where most time is spent within walking distance of the hotel, and then retires and potters around until it's time to die. All under a bleak Medway sky. Just look at the difference between the British version of The Office and the American one. There is something very bleakly distressing about the British version that makes it both funnier and far, far more depressing to watch.

pic related btw

this lad buys ket and xanax off hansa to get him through the week then gets smashed on the weekends with his mates and then posts on snapchat him piping some fit slag in his semi
probably drives around in one of those honda civic type r's

Probably true, but again perhaps it's some kind of autism or elitism on my part but that lifestyle to me represents a pretty desperate attempt to distract oneself and to revel in Mill-tier lower pleasures so that despair doesn't come knocking. It reminds me of my close friend as a kid, who used to walk around with me talking about forming a band, loving the Red Hot Chili Peppers, being shy around a particular girl, a new video game coming out etc. I saw him the last time I visited my hometown and he's now a conspicuous "gymrat" (tan, oversized vest, bulging muscles etc) and talked about getting fucked that weekend, about fucking the barmaid of one of the local pubs, about his intention to become a self-employed carpenter in a few years, his new car, etc. While I don't dismiss these things as valid human pursuits, there is just something about it all that suggest a semi-conscious submersion into a "local lad" character type as a means of not feeling unrooted, drifting and isolated in the universe. It may not even be worth articulating or attempting to explain at all, and may just be a set of "data" in subjective form about the context of a certain life and how it is moulded a certain way due to vast historical, economic, biological etc pressures and influences. I'll probably stop spamming now anyway.

I've been thinking about this in regards to one of my past friends, who was greatly overweight when I was closest to him in secondary school. I moved and after like 2 years he'd completely lost weight and had become super toned; he seemed to hate all memories of his past self and turned a little more narcissistic in my opinion - focused a lot more on self images, and 'bitches'. Old chunky him was far less interested in being/looking cool (to the point of contrivance), or as immersed in the fashion scene; far more laid back. Now he puts on the guise of being laid back whilst being extremely cautious to have others seeing him as such, it's kinda sad how people change.

Is Birmingham relevant? It was shit when I lived there and had hardly any jobs coupled with an oddly low-standard of culture that nobody seemed to have an issue with. The drinking culture in Birmingham is the absolute worst I've seen. The state of middle-aged baldies out on a Saturday night at Turtle Bay is just something else.

Everybody I met was lovely but I hated the culture.

>Canterbury

Lived there for three years (uni) and thought it was boring as fuck. I wish I'd have known what I knew now because it's actually a really nice place.

You posted a good example of a random "British" scene, so I've annotated it here.

I believe that everything within Red is pretty much indistinguishable from an American small town, and therefore is not unaesthetic (again, to me) and is acceptable and not really that depressing. Maybe even somewhat picturesque and "comfy"

Everything within Yellow has a "could be anywhere" appearance, meaning it could be some town in Latvia, or Russia, or Pennsylvania. This means that while it may be depressing, it isn't distinctively British in its depressing appearance.

Everything within Black however is in my opinion what gives this image a "British" look, and what makes me identify this as being a British town / city immediately. There is something cramped, grey and bleak about it that inspires in me feelings of dread and despair.

What are the best/least depressing/most beautiful cities in the UK lads? Edinburgh looks pretty nice, and I'm considering doing my postgrad there, but I hear there's a lot of snobbery (which I may or may not also exhibit)

a lot of the things in black could be from poland or any eastern european country t b h
agree with the red bits though, probably because they seem much more open

I love the West Country. I'm from Canada, but I visit Devon and Cornwall every other year. It's a very beautiful corner of the world.
I don't think I've ever seen a person under 30 years old there

Cambridge is also great.

Having never been to the USA, all I can think is that San Andreas captured the look of those type of towns perfectly.

what do you mean by relevant though, yeh its a world city and nowhere else is but it isnt the best place to live

Edinburgh is comfy because of the following reasons:

1. It is not a "flat" city and has a large, culturally significant landmark on a mountain in the middle (think of Athens).

2. Much of its inner city is built from a unique type of old stone (similar to Bath) and is still predominantly home to independent stores, cafes and restaurants rather than chain stores.

3. The accents are different and not disgusting (like, say, Bristol or Liverpool) and thus makes it feel even moreculturally distinct.

4. There are a ton of old, high-quality stores similar to Harrods but of a unique Scottish tradition (can't remember the name but I visited one old store when I was like 15 and it felt like being in a store in Diagon Alley)

5. The streets and pavements are wide and not constantly blocked by traffic, though not barren either, meaning a family may be raised there alongside young folk wanting to party etc.

6. The city isn't built to an American - and often Euro - template of neatly formatted city blocs with their respective retail units, but is instead full of back alleys, sidestreets, randomly dotted graveyards, churchyards, small parks and so on.

7. It snows there, which means it is very comfy.

8. Many streets share the appearance of London's west end (e.g. South Kensington), and though they aren't necessarily upmarket areas they are highly aesthetic nonetheless in a historical sense, meaning these buildings weren't erected at the lowest budget and to the smallest size to make as much profit as possible for the artistically myopic "developer"

The countryside sucks for young people. Those with any prospects have gone to a city, the ones without prospects are on drugs.

I could probably go on but won't. I visited Edinburgh for the only time on New Year's Eve / Hogmany and I loved every moment of my time in that city, despite the fact that my mother was manically depressed and my sister was in a really bad place too. We walked through the uncrowded Edinburgh Castle, I saw the Dixie Chicks (a band I loved at the time) on-stage one afternoon preparing their instruments but was too shy to yell out "I like your music!", I bought the White Stripes album "White Blood Cells" on CD from a comfy independent music shop on a steep cobblestone street and listened to "We're Going To Be Friends" in my hotel room (a fantastic b&b - I guess - in one of the above mentioned old upmarket-seeming streets), I listened to a bagpiper playing on the city street, I bought a Test-Icicles album from HMV and was praised by the male worker there for having good taste (I think he was just being nice), I ate an Angus Beef burger from a log cabin in the Christmas market, I listened to an old Scottish woman talking in a thick accent in a first-floor cafe, I walked through the above mentioned Scottish traditional store full of expensive tartan etc, I walked through a museum where some sort of ancient camera was stores (ocular something ), I walked into a random old building with ancient oak panelled walls, and also walked through the shopping centre at the base of the central hill which to me was a really nice shopping centre since it seemed to be underground and wasn't designed in hyper-modern sensory-overwhelming way, and then stood in the dark and windy drizzle watching Katie Melua and other musicians play on-stage in the open air while me and my sister tried to cheer my mum up and eventually had her dancing as clapping her hands. It was a really special few days in a really special city. It snowed too, which was just magical.

Understandable

Well it's decided then, everything you've said appeals to me. I was originally set on Glasgow but my friend tells me that sheer size of that city made him feel insignificant, and there's a romantic edge to Edinburgh that appeals to me. I've yet to visit it but think I'll get a megabus up there from Newcastle after Christmas.

yep if youre actually from the west country the Londoners holiday homes distortion of the property market mean you basically need to be independently wealthy to afford to live in your hometown...everybody leaves if you dont want to be a farmhand/some sort of tour guide

Yeah, people often complain about the holiday homes, but I didn't realize it was putting such a squeeze on the housing market. The economy out there is really in dire straights

be grateful that you still have areas in your country that at least look like they once had a soul. be grateful that there are a good amount of areas with a high concentration of white people.

>tfw the more I hear about England the more my dreams are shattered

I agree with the idea of some historian whose name I forget who said that to understand Britain you have to understand that the country died in 1945. Nowhere on the political sprectrum is there any sense of a national 'purpose' or place in the world or even of a meaningful culture. This is true of Europe in general but more acute in Britain because the newer form of authority (ie the business class) is far more deeply entrenched in power than it is elsewhere in Europe. The political sphere has been reduced to a sort of business mangement, and its essentially impossible for anything else to emerge. Hence the success of such a feeble appeal to emotion as represented by the Brexit camp. It helps that there are still a huge number of people alive who were brought up when Britain mattered.

I've stopped going to my local Oxfam in Newcastle since I keep finding the same old Dickens, Jane Austen, bad sci-fi novels and crime thrillers people read on holiday. I tend to have better luck when a new term is over and some Veeky Forums students hand in some books they don't need anymore but I was at least lucky enough to get some New York Book Review and Pushkin Press one time. It's just depressing the stock has become so predictable.

England is a lot like the siren from Greek mythology, sounds beautiful from far away but once you actually visit here you realize what a colossal shithole it all us.

A siren with a colossal shithole sounds good to me.

used books are gross anyway, ive thrown all mine away and am just building a core library of my favourites in hardback/leatherbound...btw I've started to realise how few publishers are printing really good quality books that dont cost £80 each

What is the deal with all the charity shops in England? 50% of the stores on each main shopping street seem to be OP shops.

1) Why?
2) How tf do they afford the rent, especially with so much competition?

I live in Princeton West Virginia. The only reason this town is even still alive is because the interstate exit dumps right onto highway 460 that runs parallel to town, and has plenty of exits into town. The next town over Bluefield has jack shit on their exit, and literally only exists at this point because there's a college there.

Meow meow >__^

many reasons but here are some
- many normal high street chains don't find it cost effective to open branches in small towns
- prohibitive costs - rents/leases, taxes
- online shopping taking over high street trade
- many chains have closed down many branches or gone out of business completely
- mergers of two chains mean only one branch is needed
- etc etc
charity shops do pay rent (although they may get favourable terms) but they get tax concessions so they are not in the same position as normal shops

altogether this means that ordinary small town uk high streets are becoming strange, haunted places with the same few shops
- crappy looking betting shops
- cheap mobile phone shops- either selling phone covers or screen repairs, or offering cheap calls to india etc
- a few ubiquitous chains- boots, wh smith etc
- coffee shops- costa
- charity shops of course
- poundland
- tawdry takeaway with not-quite-copyright-infringing name- "ken's lucky fried chicken"
- shop selling cheap clothes made by slave children in bangladesh
- doomed shop selling twee nick-nacks like wooden signs with wistful messages painted on them
etc etc

pic unrelated

1/ they probably make better money than youd guess
2/ they dont pay their staff (either employ disabled people or unemployed ppl in exchange for 'experience')
3/ there isnt much competition, the giant supermarkets have hollowed out most of the high streets

You type like Jordan Peterson speaks. Is that intentional?

bits of england have always been shitty mate
but there is still beauty here. many people never find it

...

Jesus Christ this is a depressing thread. I can't stop laughing at you bongs.

tell us about the state of american malls user

>his country isn't one endless series of brand new plastic strip malls and run down dilapidated strip malls with the same ~5 fast food chains between them where everyone is fat and drives from one store to another
Lmao, get some freedom™ already

whats teriyaki stix?

Are you still here?

Could you tell me more about your town and what life is like there? For some reason West Virginia in particular really interests me.

You know I thought a bit about this thread and what it means for art and reality itself.

I'm tempted to think that art exists in part because the overwhelming forces in the real, external world is not conducive to artistic expression or aesthetic appreciation. While small rural towns do tend to cling on to their traditional, beautiful appeal, the sheer power of the human desire for convenience, allied with the fact that those who "succeed" financially and otherwise in the outside world tend to be callous, brutish people with little time for subtle, sensitive, pure art means that the external world is simply bound to be organized and readjusted in a way that is beautiful not to artists and aesthetes but to the aforementioned two groups. Now I doubt myself because I'm forced to think of beautifully constructed rural trails, pretty streets and of course architecture from eras long past. But even so I imagine that in those eras class differences were even more conspicuous, and so a member of the upper class with appreciation for beauty could justifiably use large quantities of public funds to construct some sublime building on a high budget, whereas today it is more about simply building something as cheaply as possible, as quickly as possible, to make as much profit as possible. That may be a reductionist view of things, but I read stuff about "hypermodernity" and the sort of globalized aesthetic imposed by a free market mentality and I can't help but feel that progress simply equates to the ticking of boxes on the one hand (eradication of disease, literacy rates, life expectancy etc) but on the other a cheapening of human life for the sake of appeasing our most base instincts. The only artistic solution to this is to construct even more elaborate worlds internally in order to escape the real world which no longer satisfies us in a meaningful, perhaps even "spiritual" sense.

Teriyaki Stix, located in Retail Unit #188374 in Subregion 17 of Utah, United States of America is a Food & Consumer (Exotic) establishment founded in 2014. It is located within the Bank of America Mall Complex (Provo) where footfall has Decreased 17% in the last quarter (Q4 2017). It's motto is "Eat Well, For Less! (TM)". Thanks to the growing South East Asian population of Subregion 17 (2001: 0.8% / 2017: 1.1%) the restaurant has a sustainable consumer base within the local region, and also attracts customers from the College Student demographic in part due to its ongoing "Wacky Wednesday" discount for college students.

> those who "succeed" financially and otherwise in the outside world tend to be callous, brutish people with little time for subtle, sensitive, pure art

You're like the supreme gentleman of the working class aren't you buddy?

No, all this thread reveals is masturbatory wallowing in melancholy. Some good points were made, but at the end of the day all of this was a self indulgent exercise in mood projection over spaces.

Anyways, since you're all hopeless, I will recommend some reading that will be to your self-indulgent masturbatory taste: America by Baudrillard. Fucking hate that book, for the reasons mentioned above, but it's well written and your kind of temperament will definitely lean towards it.