I had this stuck on the walls of my student digs for a year or two.

I photocopied it out of this

Which I picked up here

 
 (most likely in the famous basement)



while interviewing for colleges in the winter of 1980


that Christopher Gray collection is well worn from use, you'll notice

during those two terms off (dole-idling mostly) before going up to start my freshman year in the autumn, I read and reread Leaving the 20th Century


inspired by it, after nightfall me and my brothers would go around our small commuter town, gluing speech bubbles with "subversive" utterances in them on top of advertisement posters

i made my own comic strip and glued it to the town's glass bottle recycling dumpster

there were various other pranks and "happenings" intended to "shatter bourgeois reality" and create chinks and fissures of doubt and hope in the commuter drones of Berko

yes, well... 

the adolescent mind is a fertile ground for Situationist ideas, unchecked as it is by any responsibilities and barely tethered to the reality principle

the interest carried on into the undergraduate years (disappointed, I was, to find the Anarchist Group to be non-receptive, indeed they were among the least ludic and poetic types around, actually...  but the Margin/Monitor crew were much more amenable)

when you're at university, stuff like On the Poverty of Student Life makes a lot of sense

later I had my doubts about their ideas

Paul and I wrote a critique of Situationism's influence on rock -- McLaren and all his children and imitators -- for Melody Maker, in time for the 20th anniversary of 1968

(it had all started with McLaren for me, of course -- reading the third part of a Melody Maker 1978 or '79 series  by Michael Watts about McLaren and the Pistols, it got me wondering who the Situationists were, they sounded like the most evil and subversive band ever, I just had to get the records...)

(when I started working at MM, i was finally able to get hold of the first two installments of that Watts/McLaren series, but I'm not sure I ever got around to reading them )

i had moved on to other French philosophes and their combination of jouissance and fatalism seemed more suited to the times

in recent years, though, i've come around to the idea that the Sits were right about more than they were wrong about

correct about boredom

correct about the spectacle

correct about play

certainly their ideas have a lot of explanatory power in terms of the history of rock, popular music, youth culture, rave, etc

the ideas do have to be modified for the digital age, the Internet age, the games era  --  social media and blogging and tumblrs and tweeting as the capture of the participatory / ludic  impulse -- a new improved Spectacle that incites and demands our activity, rather than enforces passivity/isolation

hence the DIYstopia

but here I am right this second DIY-ing, uncontrollably

captured




(French original of the comic strip can be found here if you scroll down aways along with a bunch of other Situ images and ephemera)