Time of the Season

I'm living in a movie that doesn't move me - Pete Shelley

See, that quote is interesting because it comes from a song called "Boredom" from the Buzzcocks. Boredom being the important part. The influence of the Situationist writers and artists was poking through. Flash foreward a few months, and Tony Wilson opens Factory Records as a vessel for Joy Division to release records. Wilson saw Factory as a Situationist statement, much like Malcolm McLaren felt when he started managing the Sex Pistols. The latter was probably the biggest Situ joke ever perpetrated on the world.

Let me give you some backstory, because its important. The Situationiste Internationalle was (is?) a collective of artists and writers that came together in a small town in Italy in 1957. Their goal was to supersede art itself, abolishing the notion of it being a separate specialized activity and transforming it into an everyday activity. From their standpoint art is revolutionary, or it is nothing. In this way, they saw themselves completing the missions of Dada and Surrealism while abolishing both.

Ever since I first heard about all of this in a 5000-level art history class at Wayne State University, I was immediately fascinated. To me, it made total sense, but only when you really boiled it all down to the simplest ideals of the movement. Raoul Vaneigem's book "The Revolution of Everyday Life" is like a fucking bomb. Also, "Days of War, Nights of Love" from Crimethinc is a good dumbed-down, yet highly romanticized Situationist primer.

I also want to say that I'm bothered by the way some people exploit revolutionary art for their own selfish purposes. "The Shape of Punk To Come" from The Refused, and everything from the singer's (Denis Lyxzen) current band The (International) Noise Conspiracy are good exposure for Situationist and revolutionary thought. They wrapped up subversion in a punk sound. Not that its a new idea (see MC5, et al), but they did it so well, and appealed to the kids in a way that galvanized a generation. Too bad too many of those kids saw it merely as yet another fashionable trend in punk rock. Fuck 'em.

I need to really get down with it, and just say what I'm tryin' to say here. I'm bored. Sofa king bored. Its not as simple as just having nothing to do. That isn't the problem. There are plenty of things I could be doing. It isn't just right now, its life, its work, its love, apathy, empathy, compassion, hatred, and the absolutely most boring problem of all: indifference.

I'm drawn to the romance of revolution, but I feel like its all just recuperation in the end. Whereby the revolution is repackaged as a saleable commodity, and I'm eating it up. It isn't real. The revolution begins with everyday life, unfortunately Vaneigem's book is so dense and inaccessible, I can't read it for much more than a half hour at a time.

Is revolution and art my escape from boredom? Hell no. I'm not Guy Debord or Asger Jorn, I'm not a pretentious (oh believe me, they were pretentious) artist trying to turn the world on its head when no one will listen. They spoke of psychogeography and derives and detournements as revolution and life merging into art, but I'm not seein' it.

We live in a world where one can alleviate boredom by throwing a velcro-suited dwarf against a velcro wall, you can eat battered and deep-fried candy bars until your arteries bloat with death, I could walk into the next office and staple my boss to his cubicle wall by his button-down shirt. The options are endless, but they aren't for me. This is not my idea of fun.

But that begs the question, is fun the only respite from boredom? What about anger and pain? I know most cutters cut themselves to control their pain, but could it also be out of boredom? Maybe they're just trying to feel something.

I could smoke a cigarette, watch the squirrels outside my office window, get drunk, listen to music, whatever, I'll still be bored. I'm compassionate and empathetic by nature, maybe the way to alleviate boredom is to step outside of what I know. To step outside of who I normally am. Maybe I should turn off some internal filters for once.

Maybe I should tell you to fuck off more often. Maybe I should leave behind the office job. Maybe I should seriously stop sitting on my hands, and start walking on them instead.