Comments on: Entertainment!

By: Delicious Pundit

Delicious Pundit — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 02:54:03 +0000

This is good. Is there going to be a “CT Consumer Guide” now that Christgau’s been fired?

By: Tom Lynch

Tom Lynch — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:27:40 +0000

As opposed to all those dead men who can ably defend themselves, having anticipated all posthumous attacks decades in advance!

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 22:05:11 +0000

Engels, your twisted sense of reality makes it very difficult for you to function appropriately in the world of today. Here you have needlessly defended an innocent man who needed no defense whatever, in effect subtly casting aspersions on his character— a dead man who is unable to defend himself, no less.

By: engels

engels — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 21:10:05 +0000

What the fuck is wrong with violently hating everyone in the world, more or less?

Nothing, John, obviously: for many bloggers it seems to be an asset.

By: Seth Edenbaum

Seth Edenbaum — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:23:03 +0000

I’m amused I guess by the need to see Gof4 as somhow successful at something other than expressing contradictions, and to accept retrospective observations by King or Gill as somehow reflecting what either of them thought when they were 25 year old ex students of T. J. Clark.

I’ve met King and Gill, the latter a couple of times and I had reason to think he wasn’t that much of a feminist. And King runs a software company. You can hear the change from intelligent angry pretentious postadolescent cafe revolutionaries, to sad ironic complacent professional adulthood in the span of 4 albums.
Interesting stuff. Not brilliant but I liked it.
Academic control freaks as hipster leftists. There was something new about it at the time. But the academic control freak thing is another part of the problem, init?

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:21:31 +0000

What the fuck is wrong with violently hating everyone in the world, more or less? Debord is now on my to-read list.

By: Sometimes I Wish I Were a Professor of “Critical Studies” « Organizations and Markets

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 18:57:47 +0000

[...] The reference is to the pop group Gang of Four, not this Gang of Four (or, for that matter, this one). I suppose the analysis is deep, in a critical studies kind of way. (Crooked Timber has all the gory details.) [...]

By: engels

engels — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 18:29:43 +0000

Harry – I do not personally find “Pourquoi détestez-vous la France?” to be an intelligent or fair-minded critique of Debord. If the sentence I quoted was not meant seriously then I can’t object to it, except to say that the joke was lost on me. But perhaps we can put that one down to the Spectacular nature of internet relations.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 17:39:51 +0000

“Return the Gift” was recorded because their contract reverted rights on rerecorded songs to the band after 20 years; a best-of compilation would have been owned by EMI.

By: harry b

harry b — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 17:32:27 +0000

engels—I was teasing about him doing it every time. I thought it was funny (I didn’t think my Russell comment was funny, though, and it was in a comment not a post!) I suspect that my and Scott’s common history has familiarised us with more people than we’d care to know who do appear at least violently to hate everyone in the world more or less.

By: Uncle Kvetch

Uncle Kvetch — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 17:01:18 +0000

But I find the new record itself preferable to any of the anthologies culled from their albums. In duplicating the original songs they somehow change them in ways it defies my vocabulary to sum up. You can listen to Return the Gift online for free, here.

I certainly will do so, as soon as I’m freed from the iron grip of my capitalist overlords (i.e., when I get home this evening). The whole exercise struck me as, well, silly and pointless, frankly, and I say that as someone who loves the band. But your post (fascinating stuff, btw) has prompted me to rethink this.

As for recuperation, I think the Mekons summed it up much more pithily than the Go4 ever did:

When I was just seventeen
Sex no longer held a mystery
I saw it as a commodity
To be bought and sold
Like rock ‘n’ roll

By: engels

engels — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 16:05:23 +0000

Thanks, Perianwyr! To Scott’s other two forceful defenders: I do not deny that Debord was an alcoholic. I was objecting to the claim that he violenty [sic] hates everybody in the world, more or less, which I think might be politely described as “uncharitable” or “overhasty”, rather than “pithy and hilarious”.

By: perianwyr

perianwyr — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 15:52:03 +0000

oh well then you had better stop reading them.

By: joel turnipseed

joel turnipseed — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 15:47:41 +0000

Bravo, Scott: great stuff.

As to this: “…confirm the thing I find most irritating about blogs.”

What’s that? Pithy (and, in the case of Scott’s, hilarious) character descriptions?

“HELL NO!” I say.

(Must now go contemplate GoF lead as middle-aged suit while filling out grant/fellowship applications that stave off my own return to corporate life…)

By: astrongmaybe

astrongmaybe — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 15:47:16 +0000

Engels: go easy. The comment on Debord is hardly that far of the mark, after all. He was an alcoholic (and then some), as well as one of the 20th century’s great polemicists, fuelled by an magnificently omnidirectional hatred. While he did romanticize ‘comradeship’, he inevitably ended up loathing and ostracizing a large number of ‘comrades’ and friends. None of that lessens Debord’s peculiar greatness one iota, imho. I’m sure he would barely contest a word of it, except that he would pretty much contest everything anyway.