About

Hello, my name's Craig Schuftan, I'm an author, broadcaster and radio producer from Sydney, Australia, currently living in Berlin. I've written three books on music and popular culture; The Culture Club (2007), Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! (2009) and Entertain Us! The Rise and Fall of Alternative Rock in the 90s, which was published in June 2012.

This is my website, designed and constructed by my very talented friends at Paste. It looks a bit like a painting by Piet Mondrian, but instead of revealing the hidden order of the universe, it reveals the messy prehistory of pop music, the precise history of things, and the top speed of a wind-up penguin. There's a complete archive of triple j Culture Club radio stories, some videos of me talking about philosophy and disco, and a blog. Over here on the left you'll find illustrated excerpts from my books, here you can see some very nice pictures from the 'Entertain Us!' book launch, and somewhere in that box over there there's an 80s revival mix tape, some photos from my psychogeographic excursion to Hornsby, and a copy of that record with the guy saying "beat bang beat beat bang" on it. This is where I keep radio and print interviews, here's where we had that aztec beach party, here's that picture of me wearing a wig for the 'Blow Parade' album cover. Can I offer you a moth?

Schuf.

Like we're gonna die young

"Churches once held sacred are now but heaps of dust and ashes; and yet we have our minds set on the desire of gain. We live as though we were going to die tomorrow; yet we build as though we were going to live always in this world. Our walls shine with gold, our celings also... yet Christ dies before our doors naked and hungry in the person of his poor."

ke$ha

A suitor for agreement

"Like the pleasure of friendship, the pleasure of beauty is curious. It aims to understand its object, and to value what it finds. Hence it tends toward a judgement of its own validity. And like every other rational judgement, this one makes implicit appeal to the community of rational beings. This is what Kant meant when he said that, in the judgement of taste, I am 'a suitor for agreement', expressing my judgement not as a private opinion but as a binding verdict that would be agreed upon by all."

roger scruton | immanuel kant | jack black | high fidelity

Keep going

"Few people would fall in love had they never heard of love. Passion and expression are not really seperable. Passion comes to birth in that powerful impetus of the mind which also brings language into existence. So soon as passion goes beyond instinct and becomes truly itself, it tends toward self-description, either in order to justify or intensify its being, or else simply in order to keep going.

pre-raphaelites | denis de rougement | love | passion | beata beatrix

How You Became What You Are

"When I want to make a statue of a beautiful woman, I have a great number of them undress; all offer both beautiful parts and badly shaped parts; I take from each what is beautiful."

linder | diderot | d'alambert | the ideal

Here is the news

'When faced with the myth, the questions to ask are not about women’s faces and bodies but about the power relations of the situation. Who is this serving? Who says? Who profits? What is the context?