Situationists and Street Riding
Somehow yesterday Guy Debord was brought up in conversation.
Tommy didn’t know Debord, so I went onto YouTube hunting for some documentary type of videos to show my fellow worker.
We watched videos and talked about Debord, his work Society of the Spectacle, and the Situationist International.
One of the important practices of the Situationists was the flaneur. This is a fancy french word for wandering around in a city. It was coined by Baudelaire, and practiced and written about by Walter Benjamin before the Situationists.
It came to me last night when I was getting ready for bed that there are some striking parallels between this reimagning of the city through aimlessly wandering its streets and the street riding now common among BMX riders and skateboarders. So this morning I googled skateboarding and situationism and I got a couple of hits. So I wanted to share those in case anyone cares about the aimless wandering that goes on in my mind.
First is someone named DJ Balli who wrote this piece: “SITUATIONISM ON WHEELS: SKATEBORED IS NOT SKATEBOARD”
to accompany his “In Skatebored We Noize!” piece.
My introduction to riding bikes was through freestyle BMX and specifically riding BMX bikes in Baltimore City looking for interesting architecture that we could roll on or jump off. My personal experience is very much that this process of discovering or rediscovering a city in this way fundamentally influences your view of the city and society.
I will cap off this post with an old (perhaps embarrassingly old) video that I shot and edited featuring BMX riding in Baltimore City.