the situationist.

How to get to new york, part seventeen

Thanks for reading How to get to new york season 2, brought to you by this laptop here and a couple dozen cups of coffee some of which were piping hot and most of which were forgotten at my desk for probably too long. If you want to read more from the series, including last season’s efforts (from Summer/Fall 2024), you can find it in full here.

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“Have you ever seen two or three dozen rats scurrying out of a dumpster?” he asked, looking off into the blue yonder down the wet street. “I have. I have and you wouldn’t believe it.” I tried not to roll my eyes at this but I did laugh and ask what he meant.

I found him smoking outside a coffee shop. He was the most interesting person here — not in a good way, I suppose — because he was the only one here who I hadn’t seen before sitting with a cup of coffee, a laptop, or a book in some capacity. It was a rather wet spring afternoon and the rain had started again, slashing at the windows while I waited behind him for a small black coffee. He talked the barista’s ear off about Guy Debord and The Spectacle so after the fact, when I saw him underneath the terrace outside, lighting up, I had to go see what he had to say for himself.

“Have you ever walked past a crackhead,” he continued. “Going absolutely wild on a slide whistle, saying he’s going to destroy you just as soon as he’s done with this tune here? There’s the Bronx for you.”

“That’s fascinating,” I said.

“But that’s what it’s like,” he said, looking off into the distance again. It felt like he was insisting. I didn’t get his name though I would get it later.

A handful of weeks later on a significantly drier and warmer night, I ran into him again outside a house party in Bucktown. One of the crucial on-ramps to the I-90 was closed for construction and so the traffic back-and-forth down Diversey had become a standstill for the length of a song on my summer playlist and, almost as if on queue, traffic would give in and the bus would move forward twenty feet. Thank god for airpods. I had been into big band film scores at the time. This trip took the better part of an hour and was, for me, a trial in self-discipline: the small car stuck in traffic to the side of the bus, something like one of those small fish that attach themselves to large sharks, was a prius being driven by a small man dressed like a revolutionary war soldier complete with hat, powdered wig, and brown buttoned jacket. He was sweating profusely and glancing up at the bus every couple minutes up in a red-faced grimace. This wasn’t the man I met outside of the coffee shop, he doesn’t come up in this story after this — I never met him again, or at least I haven’t yet — but his inclusion here feels important to the story in some way I can’t quite put my finger on.

The man I met outside the coffee shop weeks ago was loitering outside the party when I finally arrived. He had been drunkenly talking shit about the Argentinian president (and I agree, by the way), leering between two feet and making small gestures with his third american spirit of the night. He looked something like a thirty-something Johnny Rotten with his hair slicked back but resisting the gel and standing straight up in accidental spikes. I learned soon enough that he was still in his twenties despite the severe bags under his eyes. “Always been told I have an old soul,” he said when I asked him how old he was.

I learned quite about him that night after we went back inside: his name, his relationship status, two rather severe breakup stories — which, I might add, didn’t paint him in much of a good light — four musical groups he’s been a part of but none of which are currently active, his favorite writers, bands, film (Breathless, because why wouldn’t it be), and his finally his name.

Anyways, I’m going to refer to him L— for the sake of anonymity and he eventually asked me what I do and I told him I write a blog. He said, “oh.” I said it was basically Only Fans for journal entries. He said, “oh,” again. He asked for my Insta and I relented. Upon returning home at around 2am, I made a quick scroll through his Instagram, worried vaguely at whether scrolling his account would lessen his bizarre presence in the world, whether his account would feel like a robbery from the very real eccentric I had met twice, but thankfully this wasn’t at all the case.

L— turned out to be an unemployed graffiti artist living in Logan Square whose dayjob was spray painting the bathrooms of a Chicago coffee shop chain with a graffiti sink next to a real sink, a graffiti toilet next to the real toilet, a graffiti toilet paper holder next to the real one, you get the point. Much more interesting to me, though, was that for the past couple years he’d been in what appeared to be a poorly dampened manic fervor attempting to recreate one of the slogans from the May ’68 revolutionary moment in France, those being

REVOLUTION CEACES TO BE THE MOMENT IT BECOMES NECESSARY TO BE SACRIFICED FOR IT

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID

NEITHER GODS NOR MASTERS

DOWN WITH THE ABSTRACT, LONG LIVE THE EPHEMERAL

AFTER GOD, ART IS DEAD

DOWN WITH A WORLD WHERE THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WON’T DIE OF STARVATION HAS BEEN PURCHASED WITH THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WILL DIE OF BOREDOM

CLUB MED, A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN OTHER PEOPLE’S MISERY

DON’T CHANGE EMPLOYERS, CHANGE THE EMPLOYMENT OF LIFE

NEVER WORK

CHANCE MUST BE SYSTEMATICALLY EXPLORED

RUN, COMRADE, THE OLD WORLD IS BEHIND YOU

BE CRUEL

THE MORE YOU CONSUME THE LESS YOU LIVE

LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME, INDULGE UNTRAMMELED DESIRE

PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT REFERRING EXPLICITLY TO EVERYDAY LIFE, WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS, HAVE CORPSES IN THEIR MOUTHS

and

UNDER THE PAVING STONES, THE BEACH!,

but rather than merely repeating the above phrases, his goal was to place them in an original and modern context without changing a word.

As he typed out in his manifesto, which consists of a handful of Instagram posts consisting of four squares of sans-serif fonts separated by deep fried images of pop culture mid-century intellectuals in black and white ~grain~ (not unlike the aesthetics of Instagram account avadaco_ibuprofin’s social media output), L— makes the claim that he has uncovered a schematic for resurrecting the Situationist movement from the 1950s-60s moment in France, from the scrapyard of history, to bring it roaring back into the zeitgeist of the mid 2020s by evoking one of the above phrases as if the words themselves could be ancient incantation. However they would have to be rediscovered — they couldn’t simply be repeated. The phrases would have to be discovered organically as they were discovered in the 60s by a member of the Situationist International, only in the 2020s as they pertained to the 2020s.

“The phrases would have to have space to breathe”, he wrote in one of what turns out to be a handful of manifestos (he appeared to write a new one every 4-6 months). “The connections would have to be of this world and not the world of post-war France.”

So, to keep himself honest, he claimed to have avoided reading the above phrases himself, had copied and pasted them into the instagram square, for the sake of the manifesto, without looking at the forest for the trees for himself — so that, rather, he could discover the trees for himself (and hopefully, by extension, for everyone else); to keep himself honest, he deputized a friend with the phrases on hand to check his work after each session. Each session appeared to be an hour or so of him spray painting random phrases in black lettering across the same while wall of his apartment before repainting. He was, by all means, a serious artist.

Further on into the Instagram explainer, on the third square, he wrote that this life’s purpose was originally inspired by a hazy fugue surrounding a Borges story he had one time read out loud to one of his ill-fated flames while he was coming in and out of a shrooms trip. Afterwards he had decided to embark on an attempt at reverse engineering some future-minded protest season from history and bring it into the actual future, the future according to where the various revolutionary movements lingered anyways, where it could be fully realized: in the now. The French Revolution had been far too violent and the American Revolution too pedestrian and bourgeois, so L— had gone with the Situationists. At first, he wanted to himself somehow become the Situationists by studying French, moving to Paris, attending the few cafés that still exist from the time. He had an idea from his teens that time travel might in fact be possible if, instead of transporting an individual backwards to a long-gone era, the long-gone era could be brought into the present to surround an individual. There wouldn’t be too much of a difference, he reasoned, if one wanted to live in the 60s instead of the 2020s, in pulling the collective reality of the 60s forward into the 2020s like a tie-dye shroud one could reside in. It very well could be possible to time travel the world, rather than the individual.

But this never quite panned out for L—. Having barely made a dent in finding a work permit or even marrying a French widow, he quickly realized Paris wasn’t the city he thought it was. This wasn’t the romance he’d expected. This wasn’t the food. He moved back to New York, eventually, but also found that this wasn’t what he had hoped either — the rent prices far too high and expensive retail and crumbl cookies dominated seemingly every city block of manhattan — so he settled for Chicago instead, a more “real and grounded” city where he would spend the next six years attempting to reverse engineer Situationist slogans in the context of our times, taking up the “synactical habits”, as he described them, of the Situationists, the main habit being “wielding a spray-paint can as anyone else would hold a pen”, to resurrect their dream. “Keep the dream alive!” he declares over and over again on Instagram, along with “the moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.”

The rest of his Instagram feed is assorted attempts at the phrases listed above. He seemed to just have thrown words onto the wall, photographed whichever seemed promising, sent them to his friend to check his work according to the Situationist texts of the 60s, and posted the best efforts on his feed. There’re hundreds. Here’s a couple, not the actual words of the Situationists but rather his own attempts at nailing down their graffiti’d language:

DON’T FORGET THERE’S MOVEMENT INSIDE PIPES

FRANKENSTEIN ALIVE ALL SYMBOLS SO WE CAN KILL THEM

DECONSTRUCT THE DERIVATIVE

and

SAY NO TO BOREDOM. SAY YES TO SURPRISE.

But then, finally, in the final post following in this format of black spray paint on white walls, dated three months prior to my meeting L—, he had appeared to have achieved his goal finally. He (appeared, at least) to have resurrected a phrase.

In the May protests of 1968, a prominent slogan, penned by Raoul Vangeiem, went,

PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT REFERRING EXPLICITLY TO EVERYDAY LIFE, WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS, HAVE CORPSES IN THEIR MOUTHS,

and such a slogan feels like a decent critique of the cultural forces of the 1960s in postwar Paris. After the war, the Catholic Church and nuclear families were encouraged in France just as they were in the United States. Stability was paramount after the world wrenched itself apart with heavy oil powered machinery for six years. I imagined some of the old McCarthyist types would adjust their glasses on their gnarlish noses and purse their mouths if they saw something like this on the wall of the subway. And besides the prudes, weren’t there so so many Leninists and Trotskyists, the occasional dastardly Stalinist or Maoist running around, taking themselves and their theorizing with the utmost seriousness? Certainly this above quote also lampoons them effectively. But it can’t seem to escape the 50s and 60s, can it? To this day, it’s still locked up in the 1968’s moment and it lacks a certain contemporary pizzaz — like, sixty-something years ago? — Can you even imagine? How could the above phrase possibly be relevant to our contemporary world? It was written for a time of reunification after disaster, not for the crumbling we now experience in 2025, so it’s easily forgotten, cast aside, moved on for something less aged.

But what L—’s done now, decades later, is he wrote the following on the wall of his bedroom in spray-paint,

PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT REFERRING EXPLICITLY TO EVERYDAY LIFE, WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS, HAVE CORPSES IN THEIR MOUTHS

and posted it to his instagram. The last line alone, HAVE A CORPSE IN THEIR MOUTHS, gives such a massive blow to the chest, to the heart area that’s beating a little faster now like a steady beat on a set of toms, and it’s become impossible to look away or plug your ears anymore. The phrase as a whole ties together Twitter/X nihilists perfectly, the Dimes Square scenesters, the assassination of Brian Thompson by Luigi Magione, the political machinations of Curtis Yarvin, all of it, together in a startling package, and lights it on fire. WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS. Yes! YES! More! MORE! Because certainly our political leaders, whether they’re liberal or republican, all have a corpse in their mouths. The connections go everywhere. A web is created. L— is writing here for a generation of thinkers and visionaries, but also for the youth. He’s writing for the present moment. He himself said that he’s never read the quote above from the situationists, and that he came up with it on his own through this delicate process of his. I believe him. I can only imagine how ecstatic he must have felt when his friend, with the copy of quotes in his hand, confirmed that it was indeed a quote from the Situationists of the 60s. I can only imagine the glee he must have felt, resurrecting the past like this…

Mark Fisher’s work on Hauntology still lingers with me like the smell of toothpaste does when I can’t quite fall asleep. There have been revolutionary moments in the past, revolutionary instincts, but now what’s left of any of them but t-shirts hanging on racks at Urban Outfitters? I sometimes feel like I’m cross-legged at the thrift-store of history, like we all ought to be, but that something feels off: the smell is not quite right in here. History ought to smell like fertilizer or, at the very least, furniture — not like hand sanitizer.

Could you imagine unearthing the past in thirty-forty years’ time from today, a future where all sources of stimulus are non-real noise — by this point the natural world is more-or-less dead, and attempting to find the bones of history in there? Could you imagine… Think of the universe it could create, after forty-years of post-Truth, to create new formations, whole new cultural contexts entirely from the ~now~ and not from the ~then~. This, more or less, is my estimation of L—’s project in resurrecting the Situationists. If the past isn’t resurrected now into this new world being born, will it cease to be?

Lefebvre, kicked out of Russia by the Soviets over his theory on a “dialectics of moments” spoke about the Situationists, looking back on the sixties, in an interview in ’75:

“The theory of moments converged with research on the creation of an ambiance, of situations… The idea of escaping from the combination of elements of the past—of repetition—was an idea that was at once poetic, subversive, and audacious. It already implied that this was a project with a difference. It isn’t easy to invent new pleasures, or new ways of making love… an utopian idea—but not really—since, effectively, we lived, we created a new situation, that of exuberance in friendship, that of subversive or revolutionary microsociety in the very heart of a society which, moreover, ignores it.”

And society has forgotten the Situationists, it seems. Except for L—, who still bandies on with his crusade to bring them back as if he could exhume Debord’s burial plot and find that he’s still in there, twiddling his thumbs waiting. But L—’s achievement never resurrected the Situationists, not really. And, based on the little I know about him, mostly based on his social media, his lie has rotted from the inside out because of this mad, enraptured pursuit towards resurrection. The idea of copying over the Situationists has seemed to eat him from the inside out. Now I am imagining a person’s canker sores eating them alive, mouth first, feet last, and the image I have in my head of this is not too different from what must have happed to L—. But perhaps that’s just a part of his process and it has yet to divulge its true potential to the world — after all, he’s only in his twenties. There’s plenty of time. And I’m not one to judge. We all have our processes. All the romantic poets died young it seems, sure, but Whitman took his time with the first edition of Leaves of Grass, released when he was 36. And the final version wasn’t out until he was on his deathbed.

Maybe L— still does hope that he himself is Debord reborn in some way. But probably (my guess) is that he wishes he had been there when the May ‘68 protests were happening. The memory of an adventure lives long after its conclusion. Maybe L— was smarter in this regard; perhaps he realized, as almost all armchair revolutionaries eventually do, that the flashlight we try to shine at the future reveals nothing as vividly as it does the past.

The last time I saw L— was at a live performance at The Whistler, in a performance he called called “LETTERS”, something he promoted on his Instagram before it went dark.

This winter had been a long one with plenty of emotional turbulence for me and spring had finally opened the doors to some sort of stability, some sort of brushing off of emotional malaise to become a better and more exciting version of myself, so I had to get myself out and about before I became as sedentary as a rock in my apartment, so when I saw L— was running a live performance in Logan, I had to check it out. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since the summer before so here was a chance to check in on the oddball, see what was up.

I went with two friends of mine whom I went through great lengths to drag along: one from an old job at a restaurant that no longer exists where we served tables together, and another I met through a dinner party. She brought a joint we smoked outside. The rest of the bar was filled with a typical Logan Square vibe of burnout poets, media students, twenty-something alcoholics in graphic design, and burnt out older millenials and gen x punks who are still looking for whatever social life they had before the pandemic, as if it were underneath a rock or something. Gen Z has no such past relationship with the world, though, and they’ve only ever spent their social lives reposting square flyers; Gen Z will be remembered as a people passing through without leaving much of a trace, I fear.

Anyways, before the performance and before L— took to the stage, I returned from the bathroom where I looked at myself long in the mirror, worrying for a brief moment whether I was becoming a mollusk or some other clammy thing of the high seas and the performance began.

A massive flat piece of styrofoam was put against the back wall by two men in massive pants. L— stood up from a chair near the stage, stepped up the steps, and began to speak to the audience. “At the screening of my first student film, who knows how many years ago, back in college, I waited for the scene in which footage of a Sinclair-era meat factory was played underneath the audio of sand being poured out of a pint glass with the flashing letters blaring across the screen, saying, ‘YELL NOW’, and while the scene played I emptied six bags of all-purpose flour onto the crowd from the balcony above, and you couldn’t begin to imagine the sounds created.”

The audience sat silent, some looked vaguely up at the ceiling to check whether there were any sacks of flour lurking.

He then began to speak loudly, “THE MEANING OF MODERNITY IS IN ITS NEGATIONS. ANY SIGN IS ABLE TO BE TRANSFORMED INTO ANY OTHER, MAYBE EVEN ITS PERCEIVED OPPOSITE. CULTURE IS UNDEAD. ECONOMICS IS A HOAX. THE FREE PRESS A PARODY OF ITSELF. I STILL BELIEVE IN MY OWN DESIRES. I STILL BELIEVE IN CASTLES OF ADVENTURE, TREE HOUSES, AND HACIENDAS” and with a sudden convulsion began going at the large styrofoam wall like he was fighting it with a spray can of black paint whirling out streams of black paint while he yelled out letters at random.

It took us a minute or two to figure out there wasn’t any intended pattern to the letters L— was yelling out — at least three phones out filming — and the words he spray painted on the styrofoam, with frictionless, efficient technique, I might add, were by all means nonwords, or pure gibberish.

He looked into the small crowd from the stage, continuing to say letters out loud, “J… X… D…”, as if he had expected everyone else to join along with the random letters spoken out loud, and eventually he locked eyes with someone in the crowd, a twenty-something with a ponytail and a perfectly trimmed mustache, who stood up and also began to speak letters randomly. “B… J… O…”

L—, still standing on the stage, clearly excited though perhaps also a little nervous by this development, continued reciting letters, “D… Q… T…”, when suddenly the man who stood up in the crowd began unleashing what can only be described as a explosion of scarcely-phonetic sounds that defy any available lexicon. The entire bar turned and watched with an awestruck sort of horror. Unknown tongues and languages from throughout human history stripped for parts unleashed across the room, bounced off the walls as purified as linguistic organs could possibly be. Floating in the bourbon-barrel scented air they touched down not all at once into all ears not quite recognizing what they were hearing. The man’s tongue thrashed against the sides of his mouth and his teeth snapped and snarled. Sounds flew out of his head as if they were launching out of the top. A bartender stopped shaking a cocktail and L—, still standing on the stage, his stance unchanged from before, stopped speaking himself and merely watched. The noise felt broad and piercing at the same time, as if it could end the dictatorship of language as a whole in which “the discourse” feels like a small spot more minute than even the smallest of lice. It was a bottomless pour of noise which made everything in the old syntax feel obsolete, broken, alien; it opened the doors for new and personal contexts that closed again once the noises were absorbed.

As the audience member’s howl began to slowly dissipate, he attempted to continue but he could barely stutter out the vowels and consonants at this point. He coughed, said sorry, and sat back down.

The room remained silent for a moment. L— looked at his graffiti’d wall behind him and spray painted a large X across everything he had written. He looked at the crowd. All were silent. There was some shuffling towards the door. A small cough from a man in a trench coat. The audience member who had stood up looked around with an ecstatic smile. L— said, “I don’t understanding this bit at all anymore. I’m sorry. I afraid I should go.” He left the stage, stepped into the small crowd, walked out the door. We watched him go in silence. His Instagram went dark that night. I never saw him again.

I like to imagine the pre-phonetic babble that was spoken that night somehow slipped out the door of the Whistler that night, that no matter what it was, it still circles the Earth like a satellite waiting to return home. The sounds still exist and will never not exist. Any lack once spoken persists until resolution. Like the uncashed cheques of history, when it returns it will return casting off new echoes.

Next week: