Eventually they gave up, paid the bill, and walked slowly from the restaurant to the Randolph and Lake entrance to the Brown Line. They walked through the Financial District, which had emptied out at 5 p.m. and echoed like a ghost town at night. Around them, the city’s tallest skyscrapers gleamed; hundreds of stories of empty offices hovered over their heads. The dark street was covered with snow, pounded so hard into the pavement that it cracked like glass under their boots.
On the empty Brown Line, the trains seemed unusually rickety as they whipped around the sharply curved corner of the Loop. Taer and Nix held hands and Taer attempted to curb the dark mood by insisting that Berliner was probably delayed, without his phone, in an area with no reception, or running out of battery power. Nix said nothing. The train went along its course, shaking. They transferred to the Blue Line and rode it back to Taer’s apartment.
Nix asked to stay in Taer’s bed and Taer agreed with a little half hug against Nix’s shoulder. They planned to drink some more and watch television—probably Law and Order: SVU, a mutual favorite—but their plans evaporated when they returned home.
Inside the apartment, they found a terrible mess. The cushions on Taer’s couch had been slashed; her refrigerator and freezer doors were open and some of the contents had been pulled out. Her pots and pans were on the floor. In her bedroom, Taer’s dresser drawers had been pulled out of their frames and upended. Her mattress had been cut open, her bed frame was dismantled. The suitcase Nix had been living out of was turned over and her clothes had been picked through. There was a hole in Taer’s bedroom wall.
Nix accused Berliner; to her thinking, he was the only possible culprit. It did seem likely she was right, as Berliner hadn’t shown up to dinner and knew they would be out of the house at that time. Nix thought the whole dinner was a ruse. Taer called the police. A pair of CPD uniformed cops arrived half an hour later and took down a report. Although Taer mentioned Berliner, they told Nix and Taer evidence was too scarce and no one would have time to investigate the burglary.
Taer and Nix slowly cleaned the apartment. They swept up the broken glass, put the pots and pans back in their cabinets, and threw away any food on the floor, but—exhausted—they left the mess in Taer’s bedroom. They fell asleep on a torn mattress with the empty dresser drawers on the floor around them, like a kind of vegetation. They slept pressed together on one side of the mattress until Taer woke up suddenly. She heard, from somewhere inside the apartment, a loud thud.
Waking Nix, who relayed the story to me later, Taer slid out of the bed and grabbed a dictionary off her bookshelf to use as a blunt weapon. She crept into her living room and saw the silhouette of an intruder picking through the remains of her couch cushions. As the silhouette turned, Taer swung the dictionary at his or her head as hard as she could. Her hit landed, but Taer dropped the dictionary because of the pain and shock in her arms. The intruder also dropped the items he or she was carrying, before slamming Taer into a wall and sprinting out of the apartment. Dazed, and bleeding from the side of her head, Taer groped for the light switch. With the lights on, she turned her attention to the items that the intruder had left behind.
Nix stumbled into the living room and found Taer examining her spoils of war: a pocket-size sketchpad and gun. The gun was a .22 caliber, single action, Smith & Wesson pistol with a thumb safety, wooden grip, adjustable target sights, and a blue steel finish.‡ Nix picked up the pistol, made sure the safety was on, and unloaded it, while Taer thumbed through the sketchpad. Each page of the pad was filled with a hand-drawn street map, and on the inside of the front cover, someone had written Molly Metropolis’s personal cell phone number.
Under the harsh florescent bathroom lights, Nix put Neosporin on Taer’s scalp. Both wide awake and jittery, Nix opened a beer and Taer opened the sketchpad. Taer hoped for text more illuminating than Molly Metropolis’s had been. The sketchpad disappointed her, however. Berliner never wrote. He drew, and he only drew maps. On each page, Berliner had drawn a crude street map and dated it. Occasionally the maps were labeled with street names, or landmarks. Berliner also drew a series of symbols on each map, though he didn’t provide a key for what the symbols meant.
Finding the sketchpad indecipherable, Nix and Taer’s conversation devolved into perhaps their most significant argument. They had been fighting so often because, as Nix puts it, “sometimes you get into a mode where you’re fighting all the time and the only times that feel honest and passionate are the times you’re fighting.” The gigantic blowup, which Taer recounted in her journal and Nix explained to me in detail, ended their pattern of argument and reconciliation that characterized the earliest part of their relationship.
The meat of the fight was about Nix and Taer’s personal safety. Though Nix’s mother and her family were devoted hunters, Nix, like her father, hated guns; the appearance of one was enough to put her off entirely. She wanted to destroy Berliner and Molly Metro’s notebooks, flush the pages down the toilet, and never think about them again. She tried to do so. In response, Taer grabbed Berliner’s sketchpad from the vanity and ran out of the bathroom. Nix pursued her. They tussled over the sketchpad; Taer tripped over a cabinet drawer and fell hard, smashing her head on the wall and floor, and tearing open the skin on her elbow.
Taer’s fresh injuries chastised Nix. She brought out the Neosporin again and apologized profusely. According to Taer: “I wouldn’t have cared if I broke my wrist, she was so guilty about hurting me, it fixed everything. She’s going to help me look for Molly!” Nix agreed to let Taer call Berliner again in recompense for making her fall. Again, they called from Nix’s phone, but discovered the number had been disconnected.
Nix told me the story of the break-in sitting at my kitchen table, while the sounds of the street blew in through open windows. Nix smoked, a habit she had picked up from Berliner after the Lake Michigan incident. Left-handed, her smoking emphasized her missing fingers. I think she always took off her prosthetic fingers before coming to see me.
“After we called Nick and found out his phone was disconnected, we were just tired. We went back to bed, and I was rubbing her back—she liked that—and telling her all about Molly. She liked that, too. Molly had this thing, where she’d buy a lot of books on a subject, and sit on the floor, and surround herself with the books, and read little bits from all of them. When she was trying to learn about something. We didn’t usually have time for her to do that, so it didn’t actually happen all that often. She hadn’t had time for it for months, by the end of it. But early on—before ‘New Vogue Riche’ came out, especially—she had a few days where she could just, you know, ‘learn stuff’ on the floor, with all these books. I was telling Taer about that, and she asked me what kind of things Molly liked to learn about. The only one that I could remember was the Situationists. She loved reading about the Situationists. Do you know about them?”
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.”ǁ They 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.
Understanding the Situationists’ desire to remake the city begins with World War II, specifically with the bombings carried out all over Europe by both the Allies and the Luftwaffe. After the war, huge swathes of European cities had to be rebuilt from rubble. An architectural design movement called “modernism” or “functionalism,” which favored function and rationality over all else, dominated the rebuilding process. As functionalism took over, art and spontaneity were leeched out of city planning. Even in cities like Paris that didn’t sustain much wartime damage, urban planners developed and implemented new architectural techniques for moving people around like products on a belt in a factory.
One of the first Situationist writings, “Formulary for the New Urbanism,” written by Chtcheglov and heavily based on Debord’s ideas,a described this “disease” of functionalism and the Situationists’ cure: unitary urbanism. Unitary urbanism is the Situationist social theory that art and the movements of everyday urban life shouldn’t be separated into isolated sectors, but continually mixed together as a way of life. By collapsing the boundaries between art and life, work and leisure, public and private, the Situationists wanted to recast the city as a space of fun and play.
In his fantastic analysis of the Situationists’ early years The Situationist City, Simon Sadler discusses the Situationists’ desire to “collectively rethink the city.” To fully escape and undo functionalism, Debord and the SI imagined building a brand new city in the Situationist image, which would eventually span the whole globe. The Situationists weren’t trying to do something simple; they wanted to change the whole world in a massive way. “They were at war with the whole world, b
ut lightheartedly.”b As an answer to their hunger for a new way to live, in the mid- to late 1950s Constant began developing the plans for this world-changing city, which Debord named New Babylon.
Constant was born in Amsterdam in 1920. His father was a corporate manager and his mother was a music lover. Constant took up the violin at age ten and continued to play until his death. Debord met Constant through Jorn, the Situationist whose art-world success funded most of the SI’s exploits.
In 1957, when the SI formed, Constant was in the midst of his second marriage (of an eventual four). He had a receding hairline, a sharp wit, and by all accounts smiled often. Debord and Constant’s friendship bloomed over long stretches of drinking and talking at late night cafés when they were in the same city, and over the exchange of letters when they were apart. They both dedicated themselves passionately to their various artistic and political projects, and for a time they got along very well because of that shared enthusiasm.
Riffing off Debord’s ideas, Constant’s New Babylon was the only large-scale project to fully incorporate all the Situationist ideas about aesthetics. Constant believed architecture should be playful, and respond to desire rather than urban efficiency. In New Babylon, no one was treated like a statistic on a Traffic & Congestion report. Instead, New Babylon was “une autre ville pour autre vie”—another city for another life.
Constant designed models of sections of New Babylon; he depicted New Babylon in paintings and sketches. He also collaborated with Debord to create collage art, the most famous of which is called “The Situationist City,” which served as an aesthetic guideline for New Babylon. Constant also wrote frequently about New Babylon for Internationale Situationniste.
The Ghost Network Page 7