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Situationist Comedy: Author Ken Knabb in San Francisco Tonight
“Religion,” Ken Knabb wrote in 1978, “undoubtedly surpasses every other human activity in sheer quantity and variety of bullshit.” It’s Knabb’s own lack of, er, bunk that’s helped him rally would-be radicals around his area of expertise, a Paris-born, Marx-bred group of avant-gardists called the Situationist International. Tonight is your chance to catch up with Knabb and the SI at City Lights Bookstore.
The SI sought nothing less than the revolution of everyday life through little more than a series of public pranks. It was all very sixties, sure. Yet its methods would later inspire punk rock and, later still, “culture jamming” (a practice explaining such curious facts of 21st-century life as flash mobs, rickrolls, and whatever it is Banksy does). By the time Knabb wrote his widely anthologized essay on religion, the SI was several years dead. Since then, he has established himself as the most prominent American embalmer of the movement.
His translations (Situationists International Anthology, 1980) as well as his own writings (Public Secrets: The Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb, 1998) are standard texts for readers looking to parse the SI’s often cryptic prose. Waking Life director Richard Linklater reads Knabb, and cultural critic Greil Marcus cites him. Even one of the author’s fiercest detractors stingily concedes, “Anyone who cannot read French and is now interested in the Situationist International owes Ken Knabb some kind of debt.” It’s a debt, we reckon, you not pay in rosaries and wafers.
Originally published in SF Weekly.
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