• Members of the previous forum can retrieve their temporary password here, (login and check your PM).

DMT and the Beats

Migrated topic.
Try living on the road and on the rails and in the wilderness and see if you don't get dirty. You think getting clean is really that easy and "free" when you don't own or rent property? Try living in the field for weeks on end scrubbing yourself with baby-wipes. I've lived like that, people take sanitation for granted. You think they're dirty out of laziness? These people are glistening compared to those who are simply vagrant by circumstance, rather than by choice. I guarantee that those living such lives know the value of sanitation, and don't see it in such simple terms as soiled or unsoiled.

The Aztec's are hardly an example to live by for a subculture. The Aztecs were essentially empire and lived by enslaving the "dirty people," those who lived in the wilderness.

Do you really think the beats are any different from these people, apart from having the luxury of transitioning between civilization and transience?

I'm sorry, but I'm quite taken aback by these responses and the classism they entail.
 
Living in the wilderness one can clean himself in rivers and lakes (considering there is any, of course), like most (all?) indigenous people do.

obviously if you live in the streets in a busy city and can't get access to water, its not easy.. but thats also a choice, is it not?

I always thought that if I had 0 money, I would never live in a city. Why not start walking direction nature, or small town where they could be useful to somebody and get some food/shelter/water in return or find water and fruit trees and so on around?

I do understand if you have lived in such a way and therefore feel offended if people answer negatively, but also I think it is not necessarily classism if one is honest and just expresses that he does not like this kind of hygiene levels, right?
 
Amor, I'm sorry to have shocked you. But I have been all over the world and rubbed shoulders with the poorest people living hand-to-mouth and on the streets. I can tell you now that these people are less dirty than the people in those pictures.

I think the people portraited are deliberately making themselves mucky for effect, or revelling in dirtiness as part of their Western drop-out manifesto. Living autonomously does NOT mean living in filth. As I said before cleanliness is easy. And in any case I suspect it's staged for a photoshoot because the chicks are hot.

It is only in the West that you see an apparent predominance of dirty homeless people (although perhaps this is because one doesn't notice the better-kept 'hidden homeless'). Everywhere else in the world the people who live on the city streets (and also of course the indiginous peoples in the jungle/mountains/plains/deserts of 'developing' Africa/Asia/America) have appeared somewhat cleaner to me, in some of the most polluted cities in the world. I have seen people in famine-stricken and war-torn countries and they were all cleaner. In fact in one such country with both famine and civil war, I was laughed at by shoe-shine boys because my shorts got dirty. Imagine the people in your photos shining shoes, I expect they'd be smearing polish all over their face and clothes!
I'm sure that SOME of the poor in the 'developing' world are filthy, what I mean is that they are generally a lot cleaner. Perhaps this is because in the West to end up on the streets you have to either stop caring, or have a mental illness which causes you to overlook hygiene. Perhaps it's more that junk stops you prioritising your health. Or perhaps part of it is that people wear less clothes in warmer countries (generally the poorer ones) so appear cleaner, and skin cleans itself to an extent when you're sweating. In the 'developing' world, a lot more people live in poverty, so perhaps this very different demographic are not so inclined to give up personal hygiene.

And this isn't classisism, it's hygiene, nothing else. Think of the difference between a healthy cat cleaning itself beautifully, and a sick one neglecting itself and looking mangey. I wouldn't be surprised if the aversion to filth is an evolutionary response. If you don't wash whatsoever, I'll wager you die early, or at least spend a lot of time with the chronic shits.
 
I'm sorry Oyahoco, but I'd have to disagree with your observation.

Certainly, as Gandhi pointed out, the lower classes are often cleaner than those above them; those classes were accustomed to cleaning, as was often their vocation. That is certainly a clever and insightful observation for his purposes and quite relevant, regardless. The West--the US in particular--is not well adapted to extreme poverty, and it makes being homeless a bit more unsavory than in other, more poor, countries, where a greater portion of the population finds themselves in such circumstances and tend to adapt as a larger community and in a more organically malleable environment.

I've worked jobs where I would literally have to scrub 'til I I bleed and bankrupt myself over the heating bill to get adequately clean. Working strenuously with heavy equipment, outdoors in very dirty places will do that. I can't imagine train-hopping and scavenging for food would be much different. I've lived outdoors for long stretches of time with no running water (no, not even a river, believe it or not), you get dirty, but you don't take cleanliness for granted; you yearn for it, you seek it out, and if you revel in your dirtiness, it's not because you want to but have to. I've lived in many countries and seen a good cross-section of life the US, and it's not the dirt that calls my attention but what seems shine through despite the dirt. I live very cleanly and somewhat privileged and strive for a similar level of creativity and lust for life, yet I must still pay homage.

What I find significant about these photos is the fact that they seem to be living the way most of us are "too busy" or "too needy" or "too attached" to live. This is not an easy way to live, though the more deviant among the middle-class may fancy themselves as quite capable and--considering that they do not choose to live as such--somehow above or beyond it. Perhaps it's resentment that drives us to feel this way, resentment for the creative liberty and adventurousness that these photos portray. Did you know that one could easily be thrown from a train and killed on a switch-track? These pictures don't show such things, but they are implied for anyone familiar with train-hopping. Perhaps the greatest transgression in these photos is the fact that we can see them from the comforts of our own homes.

Our subcultures today are so far removed from those of the beats or the punks or the hippies that we must either grasp for these extremes or other similarly wild possibilities of life or stagnate in the void of cynicism and post-modernity. This subject demands much more clarification than a few posts, but I had not anticipated such a response. It's not that I'm so much offended by it, as it is that I feel my experiences, my interests, and the life that I've pursued to be incomparable to most of those whom I encounter. I do feel this to be somewhat class-based, but really, it's much more universal than that.
 
There are dirty people in all 'classes', honestly that doesn't come into it for me.

It's just my personal opinion, on how I like to live myself. Other people have every right to be as dirty or clean as they want...
covered in biohazard filth, or covered in carcinogenic artificial musks... I just prefer not to stand downwind of either ;)
 
Back
Top Bottom