Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

I did, but I asked Nix to explain.

“They were this political group in the 1960s, sort of led by Guy Debord, and they were interested in the city and culture. Anyway, I was telling Cait about this and as I was talking to her, I realized: every time I’d seen Molly do her book thing, I mean, every single time, she was researching the Situationists. There wasn’t some other topic. There wasn’t even a plethora of topics. I hadn’t noticed before because I had my own work to do, but I’d gone for months thinking Molly was a dilettante, but she actually had this razor-sharp focus. She might’ve even tried to make me think she was treating things lightly, so I wouldn’t start to wonder why she was so interested in the Situationists, I don’t know.

“So, obviously, Cait was into figuring out what was going on with the Situationists. She didn’t have anything else to do. And that was one way Cait and Molly were alike. Razor-sharp focus, I mean. Tunnel vision. Like that Justin Timberlake song.” Nix sang a few bars: “I’ve got tunnel vision / for you.” Her singing voice leaves something to be desired.

The morning after the break-in, Taer woke Nix up early. She bought Nix a cup of coffee and they took the Blue Line to the giant Harold Washington Library Center in the Loop. Taer checked out a dozen books on the Situationists; she and Nix carried them home in two heavy backpacks. Taer wanted to read all the books Molly had read.

Back at her apartment, Taer sat on the floor of her bedroom, spread the books out all around her. Nix took a picture, told Taer she looked very Metro-esque, then napped. Taer started devouring the Situationists texts.

* Caitlin Taer’s Facebook page, accessed June 28, 2012; www.facebook.com/caitlin.taer/posts/9302341872395726138572.

† To fill in a gap in Cyrus’s story: Berliner later told Nix one of the reasons he stood them up was because his girlfriend, Kraus, didn’t think it was a good idea at the time. I get the sense Kraus changes her mind a lot, and has kind of poor instincts. — CD

‡ Thanks to Berliner allowing me to briefly examine his sketchpad and for relaying the weapon’s details, as I didn’t have access to the firearm.

In July 1957, in the middle of a warm but dry summer, activist and aestheticist Guy Debord “summoned,”* eight compatriots to a small town in northern Italy called Cosio d’Arroscia. Attendee Ralph Rumney took some candid black-and-white photographs of the group on the city’s streets. In Cosio d’Arroscia, all the buildings are made out of stone, all the doorways are narrow, and the shadows cling to the structures like skin. †The city looks so much like a rocky labyrinth that anyone would think the eight women and men chose Cosio d’Arroscia because the design of the city fell in line with the group’s ideas about architecture, but the draw of the location was at least partially free room and board. They stayed at a hotel run by one of their aunts. The meals were provided; the wine was cheap.

The eight were all members of one or another of several prominent avant-garde groups active at the time: the Letterist International, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association. The goal of their trip was to combine the three groups into a single entity and after a week of drinking, writing, talking, and wandering the streets, they christened their newly formed avant-garde group the Situationist International (SI). For several years, the SI pursued an aesthetics-based approached to social change, but by 1968 the Situationists had transitioned into a completely political group; their early creative concerns had been shed like an ill-fitting coat. The Situationists’ role in the political unrest that gripped French students and factory workers in May of 1968 has been well documented, but is not of interest here. It is with the SI’s early years that Molly Metropolis concerned herself.

The group’s beginnings were inauspicious, but their aims weren’t modest. Debord and the Situationists wanted to tear cities down and rebuild them; they wanted to remake the world. As with so many of us, the Situationists didn’t achieve their lofty goals.

Cosio D’Arroscia barely remembers the Situationists. The bar where Debord and the others drank still stands and is still owned by the same family, who commemorate their Situationist heritage with a little plaque outside the bathroom. That plaque constitutes the entirety of the town’s acknowledgement of the origins of the SI. In the 1980s, the city had gained control of the old hotel the Situationists stayed in and converted it to a nursing home for the town’s rapidly aging population. There are no other Situationists sites to visit. ‡Ultimately, the bar and hotel don’t matter; only the streets matter. §

In the early days of the SI, Debord focused on aesthetic social practices. In late 1950s and early 1960s, in the hours between midnight and sunrise, the Situationists roamed the streets of Paris. They drank wine as they walked, in pairs or in groups of six or seven, getting drunk and talking about architecture. The SI’s drunken nighttime walks through the streets of Paris were not a pastime, but “playful-constructive behavior.” ǁThey put a high value on playfulness and took their walking very seriously.

The walking groups could contain any of the core members of the Situationists: Asger Jorn, who funded much of the Situationists’ activities even after being expelled from the group for being an artist; Ivan Chtcheglov, a wild, charismatic, beautiful, and precocious twenty-three-year-old who was known for his explosive personality, and was at one point committed to a mental hospital by his wife (where he received shock therapy); Jacqueline de Jong, a poised and sharp student of fashion and drama, who was born somewhere in the Netherlands but fled the country as a child with her parents just before the Nazi occupation; Elena Verrone and Verrone’s husband Piero Simondo, whose aunt owned the Cosio D’Arroscia hotel; Constant Nieuwenhuys, who always referred to himself only as Constant (like Cher or Madonna) and was the immensely gifted artist and architect of the Situationist city New Babylon; Michèle Bernstein, Debord’s wife and the Situationists’ most gifted writer, who authored some of the Situationists’ most important and coherent statements of purpose; and of course, Debord himself.

Debord was tall, wore round glasses, and was more charismatic than physically attractive. He had a loud voice. He liked to drink and argue passionately, preferably at the same time. A French news broadcaster once asked Bernstein to describe Debord’s best attribute and she deadpanned, “He wears a suit very well.” Debord’s clothing was often rumpled, stained, and torn.

A decade younger than most of the Situationists’ other prominent members (not including Chtcheglov, who wrote some of the movement’s most influential early pieces, then missed many of the group’s pivotal moments while institutionalized), Debord asserted his influence on the Situationists through the force of his personality. As a leader, he was both aggressive and enigmatic. He was also charming, well-read, and gentle when he needed to be, but he was ambitious and never backed down from a fight. He devoted himself singularly to the group from the first days of its existence and expected everyone else to have the same level of commitment. Though some historians have argued that Constant or Jorn or even young, crazy Chtcheglov really steered the Situationists during their early years, most people consider Debord the leader of the avant-garde both logistically and ideologically. Through sheer force of will, creating a cult of personality around himself and his writing (each essay carefully edited by Bernstein), he conquered history. When most people think of the Situationists, they think of Debord. It was Debord who wanted to tear down the cities and build new ones.