The Situationist International

My rough life as a groupie
Or, how I only break my glasses at awesome shows

by Dave Hughes
Columnist

For me, it's the end of an era.

The glasses I was wearing when the photo above was taken were more than 5 years old.

I bought them after my last pair met their untimely demise when someone crowd-surfed onto my face during the NOFX set at 1999's installment of the Warped Tour.

For purposes of self-aggrandizement, I'll point out that they were purchased before thick black frames were the height of emo hipness, and that I stuck with them even when that genre sank to depths of incoherence and lameness previously thought impossible.

By a conservative estimate, during those five years they helped me see more than 120 concerts with greater clarity, and without incident.

Since I've always thought that the most basic joy of live music is the physicality of the crowd, that's no small potatoes.

Which isn't to say they weren't slightly the worse for wear.

Through five years of rowdy shows and various bonehead moments, they'd taken enough beatings that they struggled to stay straight on my face, or even to stay on at all.

On Friday night, they took their final plunge.

Fittingly enough, they died in a mosh pit at Friday's The Situationist International concert at The Continental, which was the most punk fucking rock thing I've seen in years.

Let me back up a little to put the show in perspective.

Though I've been a music nerd since middle school, I was never really friends with musicians until I came to NYU.

So while I spent an inordinate - some might say unhealthy - amount of time listening to, thinking about and discussing bands, I'd never been party to the process in any way.

That sad fact abruptly changed last September, when my new roommate Pablo arrived at our Lafayette penthouse and deposited his drum kit beneath our spiral staircase.

Before I knew it, he was banging away with surprising prowess while fellow roomie Solomon riffed variations on the bassline from "House of Jealous Lovers" and resident madman Matt did offensive things with a keyboard.

They sensed chemistry. I sensed an impending headache.

Now I know that what I was mistaking as aural abortion was actually the gestation process that all music requires.

Solomon and Pablo had both been in bands of varying seriousness before, so they knew how it worked; Solomon even played first-chair upright bass in the New York Youth Symphony, which is as rock 'n' roll a credential as you can get.

Before long they'd found a lead singer and started in on the long process of finding their creative niche in this big ol' city.

The travails of musicians who want to create collectively have been so extensively documented that they are beyond cliche, so I won't discuss their battles over their band name - International or Internationale? Do we want people to think we're Communists? - or their struggle to find a guitarist with the chops necessary to rock with them.

Nevertheless, being their friend and house mate gave me a new and better perspective into the at-times-torturous process, and a much greater respect for all musicians. Except for Creed. They still blow.

It's brought me a surprising amount of happiness to see the band refine its crisply rhythmic, brashly hooky sound and begin to build a citywide reputation.

Even though I don't like everything they do, I take pride in being privileged to observe them do it.

At one of their first shows, in a state of rather sodden disappointment I muttered to a mutual friend that The Situationist International was a shitty band. "Yeah," he countered. "But they're our shitty band."

Several months on from that acoustically challenged gig, it's my unexpected pleasure to say that they're no longer a shitty band at all.

Since they can inspire a mosh pit rowdy enough to shatter my cherished specs at a hole like The Continental, you might say that they're already a rather good band.

I'm glad that I'll get to continue to see them fulfill their potential.

When I get new glasses their bright future will come more fully into focus.

Dave Highes is a columnist for Washington Square News. He can be reached at dhughes@nyunews.com - Washington Square News

THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
by Robert Lund

Background (quoted from various sources):
The Situationist International was a highly intellectual and imaginative leftist student movement with strong Marxist influences, located primarily in France during the 1960s. The Situationist writings have their greatest appeal to educated youth who oppose capitalism but dislike the banality of the Leninist, Trotskyist, Maoist or Social Democratic forms of "Socialism". By definition, the Situationist International was a revolutionary, dissident movement... far to the left of what was considered the official "left". Situationist writing is mostly inaccessible because of its heavy intellectual jargon. Its puzzle-like, complex style makes it something which those who have time to over-intellectualize feel proud to be a part of.

I hadn't read any of this, or heard of the original group, when I first heard The Situationist International perform at Don Hill's on Nov 17. I was really blown away by their musical style and the delivery of the lead singer, but the memory was kinda fuzzy. So I made it over for another show at Continental Dec 4th, and they were better than I remembered (I love when that happens!). Lead singer Geoff says he had been reading a book about revolutionary movements through the ages, and The Situationist International sounded pretty cool, so he took their name for the band. Other members less familiar with the original SI think using the name can be confusing, but it seems to fit the group well. This is a new group, no CD, no web site, just five talented guys with plenty of Raw Power, and Geoff's enigmatic lyrics. After their "last song" last night, the crowd wouldn't let them go without playing "Radical," a haunting quasi-political rant. Not in the obnoxious literal sense, but laced with elusive meaning - "Straight up ahead, I'm a radical" is the main hook, and talk of revolution leads to "so many revolutionary destinations / if you believe in miracles / if you believe in pain / well I hope you can find me / so we can make a change." Check it out at their MySpace profile. I think the original Situationist International would really like this band! - New York Waste Newspaper