best business name ever
This is one for the “Things That Only Bone Would Find Funny” file. Photographed in the Eagle Rock neighborhood this afternoon: an eyeglass shop named for a famous book by Guy Debord, which was one of the manifestos of a Marxism- and Surrealism-influenced group in Europe called the Situationist International (the ideological forebears of today’s culture jammers).
A couple of notes:
1. Society of the Spectacle is a good book. It’s mostly about how culture is repackaged as image, and how those images now mediate our interactions. It also provides some critiques of transnational capitalism from long before “globalization” became a commonly-used term. The book is sort of dense, but Kalle Lasn (the publisher of Adbusters) writes about Situationism in Culture Jam, as does Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces, his history of punk rock. Both of those books are accessible and rad.
2. One of the best things about Society of the Spectacle: the earliest copies were bound in sandpaper, so that Debord’s book would fuck up any other book unfortunate enough to be placed next to it on a bookshelf.