http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/?p=2076

I’ve also met the (Not So) Wise brothers once, I didn’t learn who they were until afterwards but I found them to be pig-headed and ignorant. Nonetheless, unlike many of those in the thrall of situationist ideology, they do not deliberately lie. But you only have to look, for example, at Dave (Not So) Wise’s “Jumbled Notes: A Critical Hidden History of King Mob” to see what is wrong with him and his “ideas”. Here we have all the usual romantic crap I’ve come to expect from the (Not So) Wise brothers, in this case about a former prostitute. Under capitalism we all produce and reproduce our own alienation; being a prostitute is no different to pursuing any other form of alienated labour, but let’s not romanticise what is just another form of exploitation.

The (Not So) Wise brothers also write very badly and don’t understand how to organise material (this is very evident from “Jumbled Notes”). There are endless other matters too; such as the uncritical attitude of the (Not So) Wise brothers towards what they’d call ‘the Spectacle’ – and as a consequence they often reach false conclusions, although my view is there is no conscious dishonesty involved in this. For example, the claim Dave (Not So) Wise makes in “Jumbled Notes” about Charlie Radcliffe working with the rock band Jefferson Airplane. Yes that band used Charlie’s name on the sleeve of one of their albums, but this was simply because they considered him to be cool and to have cachet; the Airplane never spoke to him about this and he didn’t have any contact with them (let alone work with them). Dave and Stuart (Not So) Wise are a couple of boring old fools, although judged on the basis of the comments you’ve left elsewhere on this blog they are not nearly as foolish as you!

In terms of your own failure to muster and organise arguments, it would have made more sense if you’d left the inanities I’m responding to here at the end of the second blog comment thread about Chris Gray:

http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/?p=1530

As you know, improbably enough Chris had a longish scene with Sue Cohen. I’d met Chris a few times before he started his thing with Sue, and then, while I was living in Sue’s flat in Belsize Ave. Chris became, well, a feature. Dave Robbins was living there too. We had some decent chats about stuff, but even before he and Sue went off to India I thought he was a bit too mystic and my general response was to tell him to stick it all in his third eye. When they came back from their trip, so to speak, Sue was all dressed in Orange shit (tho, typically, Chris avoided that) and they regularly sat down cross-legged in the living room and chanted loads of bollocks to the smell of joss sticks. Chris was behind my expulsion from Belsize Ave. but at least he and Sue made sure that John Gravelle took me in to his Chalk Farm squat, for which I’m very grateful to them both, John being still the best anarchist revolutionary all time brilliant nice guy I ever met. When he came back from India, or wherever it was they went, Chris gave me a book written by his guru, which I never read, but I remember the dedication: “To Duff, to put the cat among the pigeons”. Some pigeons, I’d say, some cat says you.

I suppose all the obiturary eulogies to Chris are fair enough, and I think it’s OK to play up the good bits, tho the way they played down his mystic phase, if that’s what it was, and his numerous flakey bits was not exactly telling it like it was. I always felt that the guy was a bit like Auden – he tried on hats, and he never really knew where he was or what he thought. He didn’t really have much to do with the best exploits of King Mob; I’d give peope like Nicholsonsmith, the Wise brothers and Dick Pountain most of the credit for those, tho what the hell do I know. I hung around with the King Mob people a bit, and I was always impressed with their energy and intelligence – at least they’d seen through all the Trots rubbish and were basically anarchists. Many of them, including Chris, came around to the LSE when the shit hit the fan in 68 and certainly livened things up.

Finally, in light of some of the crap I’ve read on this thread, let me say that in my few meetings with the Wise brothers they were unfailingly charming and modest. Their characters apart, they’ve done a lot to stimulate and enrich anarchist debate, and you’d have to go a long way to meet more intellectually-challenging folk.

You keep claiming I wrote the Belle de Jour books, but you’ve yet to provide any evidence for this. You just repeating the claim and seem think this will prevent people from noticing you haven’t substantiated it.

Regardless of whether you are or are not one of the (Not So) Wise brothers, one of their personal circle, someone from the very slightly wider circle of people who admire their writing, or in fact have read nothing by the (Not So) Wise brothers but are posting here because a friend or the voices in your head are telling you to do so, I appear to have wound you up.

As for your joking about the Wise brothers’ surname. Sophisticated. Maybe it’ll catch on? Nothing like a little bit of sugar to help the poison go down.

Personally I think it’s good to be decent, and haven’t got much problem with self-righteousness either. You know you’re twisting.

But enough. You’re a fucking liar when you say you see Dave Wise as nothing worse than a well-meaning old fool. (Dig the “old”. Cheap. Not an old “revolutionary” like that ridiculous arsehole Chris Gray then?) You called him an entrepreneur, and for the reasons I said. Oh sorry I’m so boring I didn’t see it was a “joke”. I’m not in his “circle” by the way. What goodness is there in calling someone an entrepreneur, to your idiot market who take you seriously, someone who’s not an entrepreneur and never has been?