russell brand - C or D?

ugh "nazis looked great" is such a lame, old gag.

I like his performance in the tempest. This adlib (an extra on the disc) is kind of amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBOMSzhIfjk

Just got round to watching the GQ thing. Genuine lols.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inB-6R1-4ng

fantastic.

russell brand's quite funny

it's pretty wonderful. more hypocrisy than bill hicks, obv, but he's the closest thing to him

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/sep/13/russell-brand-gq-awards-hugo-boss

it's almost as if the fashion industry is especially humourless

being ejected from a gq awards seems like a better evening than staying at the gq awards.

oh he is very annoying tho isnt he? like bill hicks, yes.

one day u will turn up, browbeaten & genuflecting, at the tentflap of the ilx commune, and we will let u in

Hicks' canonization conveniently overlooks a lot of straight dickery imo

I guess Brand has that Puck-ish thing going for him, the subversive glint. Hicks was just angry. Sometimes funny, but often mostly angry. But Brand seems as well suited to the internet age as Hicks was to the underground comedy era.

ilx has been browbeating me for years tbrr, the absence of genuflection is prob more down to their being bad at is than any real backbone on my part, either way i'm not going near yr flaps on my knees

it took me a long time to get over the twitchy annoying visual and stop being irritated enough to actually listen and/or pay attention to him but I have to say I really do enjoy him

Dating Jemima Khan, apparently. He splashed out and took her to Song Que.

Just re-read his Thatcher piece, which I still think captures something personal and profound that most obits fell short of.

the biggest ron paul stan on my facebook feed during the last two presidential elections is now the biggest reposter of russell brand posts.

oh no, that's that then

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/26/russell-brand-needs-more-than-wild-emotions

With women singers, escalation has gone from Debbie Harry's mildly revealing miniskirts of 25 years ago, through Madonna's bondage gear, to the semi-nudity of Christina Aguilera and Rihanna, to the actual nudity of Miley Cyrus.

haha okay dude

Everything Brand has said, I’ve heard before, especially since Occupy’s 2011 heyday; the radical suggestion that, yes, “Shit is fucked up, and bullshit,” was not first uttered by Brand and should not be more exciting nor appealing by virtue of emerging from his cheeky smile. As has often been pointed out, there is a constant conflict at play when radical or militant ideas or images enter the popular imaginary under capitalism (I’ve noted the example here before of a riot scene in a Jay-Z/Kanye music video): At the same time radical ideas might spread and resonate across mainstream and pop media platforms (and thus provide the potential for rupture), these ideas and images are recuperated immediately into capital. Brand calls for revolution, and online media traffic bounces, magazines sell, bloggers like me respond, advertisers smile, Brand’s popularity/notoriety surges, the rich, as ever, get richer.

Secondly, and more immediately worthy of attention given current Brand fever: His framing of women is nothing short of the most archetypal misogyny. I’m not asking Brand to be perfect, but I am asking that we temper celebrations of him according to his very pronounced flaws. Writer Musa Okwonga, responding to Brand and possibly coining the term “Brandwagon” was swift to elevate feminist concerns, too often ignored in the excitement around a celebrity appearing to have good politics....

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/25/i_dont_stand_with_russell_brand_and_neither_should_you/

http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299

oh nooooooo i was fearing this bump would be that stupid piece

complete load of throwing-my-toys-out-of-the-pram bollocks obv

Some people saw Bussell Brand outwit/take down Jeremy Paxman. Some people saw the exact opposite.

i'll confess i didn't read all of that article, but for somebody who complains a lot about how some Leftists behave to one another the writer sure seems to want to tell everybody what they ought to think

don't think i'm interested in reading apologists for hierarchy any more either

British leftist politics are super weird for us 'Mericans

it's a pathetic unfunny cliche but that scene in Life of Brian sums things up pretty accurately

I've liked a lot of stuff Mark Fisher's done but that article is idiotic. He wouldn't have trouble with "sour-faced identitarian piety" if he wasn't so bafflingly obsessed with revitalising a moribund working class identity that has nothing to do with class as an actual economic power relation.

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/6c5c9f48bf00 this response is good.

bafflingly obsessed with revitalising a moribund working class identity

There is something frighteningly conservative (to a Californian) about "authentic" British working class identity and the way it's policed.

this was good too

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/ray-filar/all-hail-vampire-archy-what-mark-fisher-gets-wrong-in-exiting-vampire-castle

There is something frighteningly conservative (to a Californian)

Dying here

there is conservativism there, but there's also a set of responses to the ongoing experiences of working class people. if there's a chippiness to some defences of the working class it should be seen in the context of a refusal by some economically and socially privileged commentators to acknowledge that class exists or is problematic. the same kind of experience i'm sure that people of colour or women experience when they're smugly told that we live in a post-racial or post-feminist culture.

having said that, i agree that much of the language of class is outdated, that the phrase "working class" has become so complicated and in need of qualification that there might well be better words to use. personally i think that left activists should be seeking to expand class consciousness and to forge the recognition that in 2013 the majority of people who consider themselves middle class are in a strictly Marxist sense proletarians. the notion of identity as a diversion from class struggle is pretty senseless imo, for reasons like those argued by Angela Mitropoulos above, and because to deny identities feels like a sectarian gesture or a nostalgia for older, privileged values

or to be briefer, people get funny about policing aspects of their identity when they're forever being told their identity doesn't exist

How can you deny class? In Britain it's even weirder when it cna be expressed in a strictly Marxist economic sense but also in a tribal identity sense by rockstars and their ilk, or ppl who've made it in business.

one way to deny class is by pointing out that plumbers are better paid than some notionally middle class people but you don't need me to enumerate, anybody can deny anything with enough brass neck

This wasn’t Johnny Rotten swearing at Bill Grundy – an act of antagonism which confirmed rather than challenged class stereotypes.

Yes, 'cos that's not what happened, get your facts right, mate.

throwing a hissy fit at the intersectionalists is a bit of an alarm bell - also where his argument falls down is that no one was denying class in the first place

like, pointing out pretty undeniable misogyny where you see it is not denying class

the only denial i've seen in this entire debate is denial of brand's sexism

saturated with working class intelligence and not afraid to show it

This is going on my business card, dontchaknow

throwing a hissy fit at the intersectionalists is a bit of an alarm bell

Yeah. Not addressing the essential rectitude of that kind of analysis kind of pulls the rug out of any arguments you can make about po-faced moralizers and guilt merchants.

i feel like my suspicion that people who oppose intersectionality just want to continue to not think about privilege would be exactly the kind of thing that feeds back into their persecution complex

well it pretty obviously is

no one ever argues against intersectionality as a (VERY SIMPLE) idea, they always derail the argument into tone policing, as if they'd happily take race etc into account if only some people on twitter weren't so rude

The one comment I did like was the one which takes the argument globally and considers what kind of privilege a working class person has in relation to workers in the developing world.

Most ppl come across as asses on twitter

It's like a global amplifier for blurting out shit you should probably think through.

personally i think that left activists should be seeking to expand class consciousness and to forge the recognition that in 2013 the majority of people who consider themselves middle class are in a strictly Marxist sense proletarians. the notion of identity as a diversion from class struggle is pretty senseless imo, for reasons like those argued by Angela Mitropoulos above, and because to deny identities feels like a sectarian gesture or a nostalgia for older, privileged values

behind this 100%

He's otm re: the neo-anarchists though

another important response (that taught me a lot i didn't know)

http://notjusttheminutiae.tumblr.com/post/67991755129/k-punk-and-the-vampires-castle

Moving along to the present, a battle for dominance is being played out on the terrain of identity by white male leftists stung by the explosion of new, subaltern perspectives emerging on social media platforms like twitter. What is being reconfigured here is the notion of democracy. If Fisher was listening he would hear that it is a democracy that moves beyond the kind of nationalism celebrated by Fisher, Owen Jones and Left Unity types who would like to see Labour return to being the party that built the NHS and the welfare state in 1945.
...
The British working class is not some monolithic lump waiting to have the right ideas injected into it. We are always striving towards the truth of our situation. To get there involves discussion. Some of it uncomfortable because it shows up those those nether regions we’d rather ignore. Like the casual racism or casual sexism. And it takes an act of courage, not malice, to point it out