Creativist Society

The Generic Town

By Nicola Taylor - www.dramaqueensguide.com

I spent the past week at an Art Retreat in a remote town in the mountains of New Hampshire. The landscape was, of course, a photographer’s dream, at once tranquil and rugged and just generally stunning. But what really made me fall in love with the place was the artist’s community that had sprung up there. I’m a photographer but I don’t generally consider myself an artist, yet I loved this place where everyone seemed to be making something and offering it for sale. Every coffee shop was selling handmade jewellery and knitwear and photography prints. The towns were small and there were no chain retailers, not even a chain grocery store. It reminded me of growing up in a small town near the North Yorkshire moors and, although nowhere on this overpopulated little island can ever feel quite as remote as the wild places in the US, the area I grew up in was a place where the local villages were filled with independent restaurants and boutiques showcasing one person’s collection of interesting things. We didn’t have a McDonald’s or a Starbucks for years. 

When I went away to university I looked at towns like Exeter, Canterbury, York and settled on Norwich. All of them had their own individual feel. I loved Norwich for its quirkiness and sleepy charm. It had an old fashioned department store and hundreds of little pubs, all with their own character and history. It was a pain in the ass to get there as there was only a single lane road for the last hundred miles or so but I wanted to feel as if I were far away from home so I didn’t mind that. I went back to visit a couple of years ago and was saddened to find that my favorite Mexican restaurant, housed in the middle of a park, in a building which used to be the public toilets, had been torn down and a new shopping centre had sprung up in its place. In fact, the centre of the city seemed to be one great megapolis of chain retailers. I suspected that many of the bizarre retailers, selling comic book action figures, hand knitted accessories, costume jewellery and other curiosities would no longer be there. A quick online check of the local restaurants reveals that some of my favourites have survived, but have been joined by numerous Nandos, Bar Ha-Has, Bella Italias, Cafe Rouges and Frankie & Benny’s. 

I wonder if I went back to Exeter, Canterbury or York whether they would be any different. How long will the Shambles of York or the Lanes of Brighton survive? Every town high street looks the same. Everyone has the same stuff from the same stores. Personal style is fading and we’ve have become slaves to trends and fashions set by the buyers at Ikea, John Lewis and Laura Ashley. And this outsourcing of our tastes seems to reflect a greater homogeneity taking place in our culture. The job market has tolerated less and less individualism as everyone tries to fit themselves into the same corporate career shaped box. CV’s all look the same. Qualifications all look the same. When I was applying for university, one admissions officer told me that they were so oversubscribed with applications that were all essentially the same that sometimes it was just a question of fishing a name out of a hat, or sticking a pin in a list. 

All of this homogeneity isn’t good for our collective self esteem, where we all have a basic need to know that we are recognised and valued for who we are. When we can’t have that, we have little choice but to try and differentiate ourselves based on what we have. When everything is the same and we can’t differentiate based on what we have, we then turn to how much of it we have. We find ourselves with huge homes, bloated with stuff we that means little to us, bought to cheer ourselves up or distract ourselves from the alternating anxiety and boredom of a life that doesn’t speak to us. How many flat screen TVs or pairs of shoes will compensate us for the unacknowledged individual within?

The guest speaker at my Art Retreat was Jim Griffioen of the blog, Sweet Juniper, who gave a moving account of becoming a father and his realisation that, as a corporate lawyer, he would literally never get to see his daughter. Jim told a familiar story of buying stuff to compensate for the lack of a life, and to make himself feel like the long hours were worth something. So he left his job, and moved his family from California to Detroit where the unemployment rate is over 14% and there are an estimated 33,000 abandoned houses. Sweet Juniper shows Jim’s beautiful photography of some of these abandoned places. He talked about the fact that there are no chain stores in Detroit, not even a chain grocery store, pretty amazing for a city of close to a million people. But his talk wasn’t about the hardship of the city or the dangers faced. It was about family owned businesses making and selling home made produce, where the owners know their customers’ names and faces, it was about community projects and local folklore. What struck me about this was the sense of community that was springing up in such a large city, while in other cities, residents become more and more alienated from each other, living side by side without speaking. 

So, we are all blessed to have a choice (and I use choice just as Olivia does in her manifesto, as an opportunity to give things a go) about how we want our lives to look. When I choose to purchase from a group of artisans, all offering unique products, I can choose something which speaks to me and my own personal style. I am making a statement about who I am and who I want to be. When I purchase less generally, there’s space in my life for me to explore.  And when I’m exploring who I am and who I want to be, I can connect more easily to other souls also looking to express themselves. A look at the online community shows a huge contrast to brick and mortar retail. Artists are thriving by selling their products on sites such as Etsy and Not on the High Street, everything from bags made of reused fire hoses to banana pound cake. It seems to me that, once again, the online community is proving its creativist credentials. Sure the price is higher but this seemingly simple choice whether to buy mass produced or hand made has implications that stretch right across our culture. How do we want our towns to look? How do we want our personal relationships to look? How do we want our careers to look? Do we want fulfillment and personal connection or do we want our MTV? When the cost of cheap and mass produced is alienation and loneliness on such a basic level, is it really so cheap after all?