The Situationists, why bother explaining. There’s an entire web full of their traces and other people’s more or less useless commentaries.

Suffice to say, one of the many characters interwoven into the milieu of the SI in the late 50s / early 60s was the Brit Beat writer Alex Trocchi.

Sitting amidst a correspondence network of avant-gardists and radicals between Europe, UK and the US, Trocchi incubated a fairly visionary Project SIGMA, an evolving index and platform of counter-cultural contacts and information. Trocchi’s zine The Moving Times was a gateway.

Unlike Debord, Trocchi wasn’t into the exclusionist technique the SI used to define themselves and their program (a riff Debord no doubt borrowed from Andre Breton, just btw.)

Anyways, check out this writeup from Situ commentator McKenzie Wark, now you know that Trocchi actually existed. Trocchi fucked himself over in the long run with too much heroine, like many other illustrious figures of the day. So here’s a glimpse of what he got up to.

Excerpt from The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, available from Verso Books. McKenzie Wark  / RSVault