Bang

Bang (pronounced bhang)

(1) A loud, sudden, explosive noise (such as the discharge of a firearm).

(2) A resounding stroke or blow.

(3) In informal, use, a sudden movement, show of energy or instance of something suggesting great value, energy, vitality or spirit (source of many idiomatic forms such as “started with a bang”, “went off with a bang”, “great bang for the buck” etc).

(4) Suddenly and loudly; abruptly or violently.

(5) In figurative use, precisely; directly; right (such as “bang on” or “bang in the middle” (ie exactly correct” or “bang to rights” (caught red-handed; guilty as sin).

(6) In informal use, a sudden or intense pleasure; thrill or excitement (now less common).

(7) In slang, various senses of precision such as “bang off” (instantly; right away) or “bang on” (marvelous; perfect; just right).

(8) In vulgar slang, the act or instance of sexual intercourse (with many variants, the most infamous the gangbang).

(9) In the jargon of mining, civil engineering etc, the physical explosive product.

(10) In the slang of drug users, an injection or other form of dose of a narcotic; a shot of heroin which proved lethal.

(11) In US criminal class clang, to participate in street gang criminal activity.

(12) In the slang of typology & the printing trade, an exclamation point, a variant being the interrobang (a punctuation mark (‽) which merges the question mark (?) and the exclamation mark (!) to indicate a query made as an interjection).

(13) In Irish slang, a strong smell (often used of halitosis (chronic bad breath)).

(14) In regional slang (limited apparently to the New England region in the US), an abrupt left-turn by a road-user (Boston, Massachusetts) or a left, right or U-turn (more generalized); the typical use is “bang a left/right/uey”. The equivalent use in Australia & New Zealand is “hang a left/right/uey” although there a U-turn is known also as a “U-bolt”.

(15) In regional slang (limited apparently to urban areas in Nigeria), to fail an exam.

(16) In mathematics, a factorial (on the basis the factorial of n is often written as n!)

(17) In the jargon of financial markets, rapidly or in high volumes suddenly to sell (an equity, commodity, currency etc), causing prices to fall.

(18) In the jargon of hairdressing, as bangs, a number of variants of the fringe.

(19) In reggae music, an offbeat figure played usually on guitar and piano.

(20) In vulgar slang, to have sexual intercourse with (sometimes with the implication of “without consent”.

(21) To strike or beat resoundingly; to pound; to strike violently or noisily.

(22) To hit or painfully to pump.

(23) To throw or set down roughly; to slam.

1540-1550: From the Middle English bangen, from the Old English bangian or borrowed from the Old Norse banga (to pound, hammer), both from the Proto-Germanic bangōną (to beat, pound), from the primitive Indo-European ben- (to beat, hit, injure).  It was cognate with Scots bang & bung (to strike, bang, hurl, thrash, offend), the Icelandic banga (to pound, hammer), the Old Swedish bånga (to hammer (from which modern Swedish gained banka (to knock, pound, bang), the Danish banke (to beat) & bengel (club), the Low German bangen, & bangeln (to strike, beat) (the German dialect banken may originally have been imitative), the West Frisian bingel & bongel, the Dutch bengel (bell; rascal) and the German Bengel (club) & bungen (to throb, pulsate).  Bang is a noun, verb & adverb, banged is a verb & adjective, banger is a noun, banging is a noun, verb & adjective; the noun plural is bangs.

Of the universe

The origin of the term “Big Bang Theory” (which describes a model accounting for the origin and most of the dynamics of the (present) universe during the last 14 billion years-odd) is traced to a chance remark by English astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) on BBC Radio in 1949 but it wasn’t until the late 1960s it came widely to be used in scientific circles and a few more years before it was part of the common public language.  Hoyle always denied he’d intended to be disparaging of what was then a theory some 30 years old and this most historians came to accept although certainly he was unconvinced of the idea’s soundness and for some decades clung to his preferred “steady state” model of the universe.  The steady state position is sometimes misunderstood as something like “twas ever thus” but is better understood as “constant process”, the crucial difference that while the steady staters held matter constantly was being created as the universe expands, the big bangers believed the distance between the matter which came into existence a fraction of a second after the big bang increased as the universe expanded from its one-time singularity.  Hoyle never quite became a big banger but as the evidence mounted, he modified his model to become what was dubbed “a quasi steady stater” although his increasingly convoluted explanations forcing observations to somehow fit his belief convinced few.  The criticism of Hoyle was he made cosmology into a kind of theology.

Noted golfer Paige Spiranac (b 1993) is active on Instagram and recently posted a “Life update” to her four million followers, advising “I have bangs now”.  Hopefully, she will keep us informed and there will be more to come.  For golfers, she has posted a set of invaluable short clips called Paige Quickies which are guides for both the experienced wishing to hone their techniques and those taking up the sport.  Being highly qualified, she filled one gap in the instructional market with a collection of tips for “busty golfers” (specific weight distribution a significant element as the body pivots when swinging a club).  On Instagram, in less than 24 hours, the clip garnered over 2.6 million views.

Hoyle's use of the term “big bang” while it did graphically emphasise the difference of opinion between the two schools of thought, was unfortunate as a contribution to public understanding because of the connotations of the words  “big” & “bang”, most imagining the origins of the universe as starting with a huge, noisy explosion whereas what was envisaged by the theorists was a sudden “cosmic inflation” (of space), a process which continues and was in the 1990s found to be accelerating although not everywhere equally.  The big bang theory is now the orthodoxy in the mainstream scientific community though some questions remain unanswered including the mystery of why, based on a number of calculations which explain many other things, over 90% of the universe’s matter is “missing” (or at least can’t be observed).  The fudge to “explain” that has been the twin concepts of “dark matter” and “dark energy” which are more “speculative concepts” than a theoretical model and best understood as an elegant way of saying “don’t know”.  There have been a number of suggestions to account for the “missing matter”, the most intriguing being the notion the calculated “matter number” might be too high because of “drag effect” created by the operation of time itself.  Time obviously is important otherwise everything would happen at the same time and who knows what else it does; recently, particle physicists reported having witnessed pinpricks of darkness moving faster than the speed of light without breaking the laws of relativity so there's much still to be understood.

Of cars

Big banger and old banger: John Greenwood (1945-2015) in “Spirit of ’76” Chevrolet Corvette, Le Mans 24 Hour, June 1976 (left) and a despondent Lindsay Lohan with Herbie while in “old banger” state, Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005), the Corvette an “8-banger” and the Beetle a “4-banger”.  The Corvette was powered by a 427 cubic inch (7.0 litre) big-block V8 and although forced to retire after a failure in the fuel delivery system, while it was running, nothing in the field could match the mark of 222 mph (354 km/h) it set thundering down the then 6 km (3.7 mile) Mulsanne straight.  In 1976, Mulsanne had yet to be distorted by the silly chicanes added in 1990 at the behest of the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (the International Automobile Federation, world sport's dopiest regulatory body)).

With cars, “banger” proved productive.  Because an ICE (internal combustion engine) always includes a “power stroke” (or its equivalence), in which the fuel-air mix explodes (the combustion causing “a bang” which sequentially is the sound from the exhaust system; to aficionados sometimes a pleasing tone, sometimes not), in slang, vehicles came to be described by the cylinder count thus (most frequently “4-banger”, “6-banger” or “8-banger”).  However, a car could also be a “big banger” (one with a large displacement ICE, usually a V8 with the appellation coming from the “big-block” era of the post-war years when Detroit mass-produced engines with pistons the size of paint cans) or an “old banger” (one old, worn out or battered”.  Old banger was synonymous with “clunker”, “beater”, “hooptie”, “jalopy”, “wreck”, “crock”, “shitbox”, “rustbucket” etc and the dubbing came either from the appearance (“banged up” in the sense of being dented or damaged) or the “banging” noise (backfiring, a damaged exhaust system etc) the dilapidated machines emanated.

Of sausages and such

Bangers & Mash by the Daring Gourmet.  Not everyone garnishes their B&M with chopped parsley.

Unrelated to ICEs, a banger could be (1) one who bangs (in any sense (sex, violence etc), (2) the penis (3) a sausage (the use reputedly based originally not on any resemblance to a penis but, dating from the time when they were produced by encasing the contents in the intestine casings of slaughtered animals (often sheep), the combination of excess water in the mix and the impervious skin making them susceptible to exploding if not punctured prior to being cooked), (4) the breasts of a female (and thus usually in the plural) and (5) in popular music a highly rated song (some of which would be enjoyed by (6) headbangers (that subset of music fans who “dance” by violently shaking their heads in time to the music)).

Rolling Stone magazine No.169, September 12, 1974.  Rolling Stone and Playboy magazine in the 1960s & 1970s attracted a large audience of the market segments attractive to advertisers and alongside the content with which both most were associated, they attracted respectable authors to write about politics and interview subjects such as celebrity philosophers and Nazi war criminals.

As well as being a noun plural “Bangs” is also a proper noun as a surname, the most noted being Lester Bangs (1948–1982) who in the late 1960s began to write reviews of popular music, prompted by an advertisement in Rolling Stone magazine inviting reader submissions.  He wouldn’t have thought what he criticized was “pop” and Rolling Stone magazine (first published in 1967) was one of a number of titles that created an ecosystem in which classifications proliferated with clear “hierarchies of respectability” evolving among those who regarded “pop” as a serious musical form and Bangs definitely was one of them; before the mid-1960s, popular music usually wasn’t written about with the tone of reverence afforded to jazz, opera, the avant-garde and such.  Bangs died a drug-related death although not the traditionally “messy” one associated with the field he critiqued.  Having contracted influenza, he was self-medicating with an opioid analgesic and a benzodiazepine; his overdose was ruled “accidental”.

Of hair

In hairdressing, the noun “bangs” is used to describe a number of variants of the fringe (or sections of hair) cut straight across the forehead, the derived verb used as “to bang the hair”.  Sometimes there are “left and right” bangs but even when a style wholly is a conventional fringe the convention is to speak of “bangs”, although hairdressers, especially when constructing something asymmetric, will refer to the “left” or “right” bang.  Although there are on the internet claims the use is based on the notion of a clipped hair “bursting out” (ie “explosively” in a figurative sense and thus based on “bang” in the sense of something sudden), verified evidence confirms “bangs” joined the rich jargon of hairdressing late in the nineteenth century as a clipping (get it?) of “bang-tail”, a term then used for decades in used in equestrian circles to described a horse’s tail being allowed to grow long and then cut (docked) straight across (the painless cut called a “bang-off”).  Apparently with origins in Scotland before spreading south and across the Atlantic, it joined “gee-up” as a phrase with equine roots enjoying a re-purposing for wider use.  The OED cites the first use of “bang” for the cutting of human hair to 1878 and within half-a-decade US newspapers and periodicals had adopted the plural form “bangs” when referring to a straight-across cut of hair on the forehead.  It was in the late 1880s the imaginative use “lunatic fringe” was coined (a century later to become a popular name for hairdressing salons) and “fringe” remained the dominate use in the UK and much of the Commonwealth while the US opted for the punchier “bangs”.  As a tool of US linguistic imperialism, the internet in the twenty-first century did its job and throughout the English-speaking world, bangs now peacefully co-exists with fringe with youth tending to the former.

Takes on Cleopatra with bangs long & short.

Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011) in Cleopatra (1963, left) and Lindsay Lohan (b 1986) in Liz & Dick (2012).  Based on period sculptures, it seems likely the queen had curly hair but because of the prevalence of their appearance on women in surviving art from Ancient Egypt, bangs became entrenched in the public’s imagination of Cleopatra and film directors accordingly complied.  While it's true that the look (on men and women) does appear on much surviving imagery from Ancient Egypt it must be remembered that then, as now, public art was not necessarily representative of the appearance of the wider population although it probably did align with that of the elites.  Also, the as the archaeological records make clear, the consistency of style (straight-cut bangs (ie a horizontal fringe) across the forehead with hair apparently perfect (often shoulder-length and symmetrical) which appears dense, geometric, and highly regular was achieved with the use of wigs of human hair, wool, or plant fibres.  Carefully constructed and styled into clearly repeatable forms, the blunt bangs, at least among certain parts of society, must have been an enduring fashion statement.

The “bang” technique with origins in equine grooming is used with ponytails and is called the “straight blunt cut”; for this purpose the only substantive difference between a “pony's tail” and a “ponytail” is scale.

While, whether of human fringes or horses' tails, “bangs” might be a nineteenth century coining, the hair style is as ancient as humanity, the prehistoric origins doubtlessly a simple expedient to keep the hair from dangling in the eyes, the trim presumably a tiresome task in the era before scissors.  From that humble beginning evolved eventually the array of styles now available, at least some of which allegedly have been a political statements of group solidarity.  A fine “brief history of bangs” is maintained by Odele Beauty (their “Rinse Blog” an indispensable source of technical information) and there it’s claimed Cleopatra’s (Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator (Κλεοπάτρα Θεά Φιλοπάτωρ (“Cleopatra father-loving goddess” in the Koine Greek); circa 69 BC–circa 10 BC, Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51-30 BC and the last active Hellenistic pharaoh) “famous fringe is apparently a myth” although on the basis of surviving art, it seems likely Ancient Egyptians “wore blunt-cut bang wigs as early as 3000 BC” and whether or not they were the “influencers”, the look spread north to the Greece and Rome of Antiquity, Odele Beauty noting Augustus (Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (known also as Octavianus (Octavian)); 63 BC-14 AD, founder of the Roman Empire (27 BC-476 AD) and first Roman emperor 27 BC-14 AD) “wore his hair combed into a short, forehead-framing fringe, setting a new trend (later dubbed the “Caesar cut”) that future emperors would follow.”  

Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc, 1901), oil on canvas by Albert Lynch (1860–1950).  The short bangs were always present in older paintings of Joan of Arc but it wasn't unusual for modern artists to be influenced by contemporary trends.  Monsieur Lynch left no notes so it's not known if he had in mind the circa 1901 style what of what later would come to be known as a “bloshie young woman”.  Joan of Arc (circa 1412–1431) sometimes was depicted bangs blunt and not but artists had her variously blonde or brunette and with hair wild or coiffed and their images may reflect what male artists thought such a woman should look like.

Surviving European art from the Medieval to Modernity confirms bangs seem never to have gone away and the emergence of the word late in the 1800s suggests they must then have been a quite a thing.  By then, bangs had survived seventeenth century disapprobation of the church, priests finding fashion trends symbols of ungodly vanity and inappropriate for modest, pious women.  However what cemented bangs in their cultural place seems to have been the social ripples from World War I (1914-1918), the so called flappers of the “roaring twenties” taking to them as an adjunct to the other forms of fashion minimalism they adopted as earlier, restrictive conventions were shrugged-off.  Although it had earlier also enjoyed some less pleasing connotations, “flapper” in the sense of the “bright young things” of the era is thought a re-adaptation of the nineteenth century Northern English slang meaning “teen-age girl” and it referenced the hair not routinely being “put-up” in the adult manner and instead kept in plaits or braids, left to “flap about” as she moved.  The 1920s re-cycling of “flapper” retained the connection with “lively young girl” and had nothing to do with hair; bangs had been around for millennia before the flappers but they made them one of their signature looks.  Since the 1920s, trends have ebbed and flowed in the cyclical way fashion works and bangs variously have been softened, blunted, gained wispy curls (not to be confused with the dreaded “fly-away bits”), bulked up as “bumper bangs”, trimmed back to be the “baby bangs” of pixie cuts and evolved in the twin streams of the “curtain bangs” which seductively would drape over the eyes and the dramatic, “set piece installations” made famous by Farrah Fawcett (1947-2009) which for years provided hairdressers with a solid income stream as young ladies everywhere demanded the same thing.

Although it’s not uncommon to see headlines like “Bangs are back”, that’s misleading because they never went away; like hairdressers, headline writers have their own methods of operation.  It would be more accurate were the sites to headline which bangs are trending and that’s now a global thing because it matters not whether a trend is noted as happening in Seoul, Sydney, Seattle and Santiago because on the internet everything is happening at the same time and looks now wax, wane or die in global unison and while the imaginative can doubtless describe some variants, beyond than the basic, self-explanatory forms (short, straight, blunt), there are really five distinct bangs:

Air bangs (seen here in conjunction with long side bangs also favored by goths).

(1) Air bangs are characterized by being light and sparse.  First defined as an element of K-beauty (the aesthetic of South Korea which encompasses hair, clothes, cosmetics music) etc these are known also as “Korean bangs” but their alternative name (see-through bangs) better describes the look.  Despite the name, they are not ideally suited to those with thin or wispy hair and like just about every style, work best with thick locks which provide a better contrast and more scope for styling.  Professional stylists caution those at home crafting air bangs from a conventional fringe to do the process slowly because it's easy to over-estimate to much need to be cut (specialized tools are available).  One advantage of air bangs compare with a straight cut is that in using unequal-length strands, that aspect of precision is avoided but the look does work best if there's a perception of consistency in the spacing. 

Baby bangs: On Pinterest, this was described as a “statement cut” and on that the content provider didn't expand but one suggested statement might be: “admission of guilt”.  Still, the bangs do mean attention is drawn to her lovely sanpaku eyes so there's that.

(2) Baby bangs are short, straight or blunt-edged bangs which are used usually in coordination with the shorter flavours of bob, the reason for that being that if paired with more voluminous cuts, the bangs tend to “get lost” or worse, look like mistakes.  Micro bangs are also “bangs writ small” but differ in that the look is used with styles other than bobs and is identified by being ; not usually considered conventionally attractive, it appears more on catwalks and in photo-shoots than on the street although some do (unwisely) pick up the look.  Baby bangs really suit only a tiny sub-set of the population (most of whom are aged under 15) and should be thought the Pontiac Aztec (2001-2005) of hair-styles in that they're functional, offer good visibility and undeniably are distinctive but are ugly.  All that can be said for both is that on the inside, looking out, one doesn't have to see them. 

Lindsay Lohan with curtain bangs, done in the “twin-hemispheric” or “double polyspheric mode”.

(3) Curtain bangs are long bangs, parted in the centre (although there have been asymmetric interpretations) and designed to resemble a two-drape curtain tied at the side, partially to reveal the face.  The leading edges of the most artfully styled sit just at the point where the eye color is visible and devoted fashionistas wear them with a “curtain reveal top” in which the curve of the garment matches that of the bangs, something which can be as hard to achieve as it sounds.  With a change of as little as a half inch (12.5 mm), stylists can use curtain bangs to change the perception of the shape of a face, the most popular visual trick being elongation, making a “round” face appear something more sought (heart, diamond or inverted triangle).  Combined with skilfully applied makeup, the transformation can be dramatic. 

An emo selfie with classic emo bangs.  The expression is emoesque but the vibrancy of the colors on clothes and bandana is untypical, emos tending more to goth-flavored looks with black and gray although purple seems now less of an emo thing.

(4) Emo bangs are less concerned with shape and symmetry, the important thing being the sweep of hair from the forehead fully covering at least one eye and maybe partially obscuring the other.  Amateur psychiatrists and other students of the emo (a distinct sub-set of humanity) probably have their own thoughts on whether the emo’s goal is to limit what they see of the world or to limit how much others see of them.  Emos are however pragmatic and although their have the honor of an eponymous style, they're also sometimes seen with various bangs. 

There seems little to suggest bangs are a reliable marker of TERFdom and those wishing to assert where they stand on TERFness should probably don an appropriate T-shirt.

(5) Not all agree TERF bangs should be thought a distinct class but they are short, straight, blunt-edged bangs seen usually with shorter cuts (not necessarily bobs).  The term is said to have originated on the microblogging platform Tumblr (which vies with MySpace for as the social media site to have suffered the greatest loss between its high-valuation and most recent sale) when in 2014 a user posted the suggestion such bangs seemingly were exclusive to TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists).  That obviously was impressionistic and it was never clarified whether the suggestion was intended humorously but if not, it’s an example of a gaboso (pronounced gah-boh-so).  A gaboso (Generalized Association Based On Single Observation) (also as the verb gabosoed) is the act of taking one identifiable feature of someone or something and using it as the definitional reference for a group; it ties in with logical fallacies.  While it’s doubtful many professional hairdressers have TERF bangs in the lexicon, it seems novel enough to warrant a mention.

Situationism

Situationism (pronounced sich-oo-ey-shuh-niz-uhm)

(1) A fork of Marxist political philosophy, a collection of (often abstract) theories used to build critiques of existing structures.  The overt political project emerged from the merging of a number of politically-minded, mid-twentieth century avant-garde art movement.  

(2) A theory in psychology which holds that personality and behavior is influenced more by external, situational factors than internal traits or motivations.

1955: A compound word: situation + ism.  Situation was from the early fifteenth century Middle English situacioun & situacion (place, position, or location), from Middle French situation, from the Old French situacion, from the Medieval Latin situationem (nominative situatio) (position, situation), the construct being situare (to locate, to place), from situs (a site, a position), thus situate +‎ -ion.  The Latin situs was from the primitive Indo-European root tkei (to settle, dwell, be home).  The meaning "state of affairs" was from 1710, extended specifically by 1803 to mean "a post of employment".  The suffix -ion was from the Middle English -ioun, from the the Old French -ion, from the Latin -iō (genitive -iōnis).  It was appended to a perfect passive participle to form a noun of action or process, or the result of an action or process.  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done).  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  The use in political philosophy technically dates from 1955 (as situation ethics) although its origins can be traced to (at least) the nineteenth-century beginnings of sociology.  It was first seen in applied psychology in 1968 (as situational ethics) with publication of a monograph by Walter Mischel (1930-2018) who in later writings displayed some ambivalence.  Situationism is a noun, situationist is a noun & adjective and situationally is an adverb; the noun plural is situationisms.

The Internationale Situationiste (Situationist International)

Formed in 1957, dissolved in 1972 and eventually more a concept than a movement, the Situationist International (SI) was a trans-European collective of avant-garde artists and political radicals envisaged as a fusion of art & revolutionary activism; although originally a loose structure, it was later noted for its rigidity and its core critique was of modern consumer society, particularly under advanced capitalism. Influenced by criticism that philosophy had tended increasingly to fail at the moment of its actualization, the SI, although it assumed the inevitability of social revolution, always maintained many (cross-cutting) strands of expectations of the form(s) this might take but, just as a world-revolution did not follow the Russian upheavals of 1917, the events of May, 1968 failed to realize the predicted implications; the SI can be said then to have died with the discursive output between 1968-1972 treated either as a lifeless aftermath to an anti-climax or a bunch of bitter intellectuals serving as mourners at their own protracted funeral.

SI art: The Change (1957), paint on hardwood by Ralph Rumney (1934-2002).

The SI’s origins were in the north-western Italian town Cosio di Arroscia where, during a conference, several experimental art movements resolved to merge, the most prominent being (1) the Lettrist International, (2) the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and (3) the London Psychogeographical Association.  Tellingly, although many original members were focused on the imagery of art, the most influential figure was the French theorist Guy Debord (1931-1994) who had in left-wing circles become fashionable after the publication of a number of essays in which he argued modern capitalist societies had become dominated by what he called “spectacle”.  That was the thesis he most fully explored in his most famous work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) which asserted: (1) social life had become mediated by images, media & commodities, (2) real human relations were being replaced by a passive consumption of representations and (3) individuals increasingly experienced life as spectators rather than participants.  What all this meant was Western society had become a system where appearance (depictions of a “construct of reality” which were simulacrums) had replaced lived experience.

SI Agitprop.

Despite the political slant, when formed, the SI certainly retained an identity as something artistic and although membership was erratic with factional alignments constantly shifting, there always was a strain which valued the art for its intrinsic qualities at least as much as for any utility as propaganda pieces; indeed, it was the notion of art abstracted from some purpose which was the SI's constant fault-line.  Those most influential in the early days of the SI had been much affected by the physical damage suffered by so many European cities during World War II (1939-1945) and especially the possibilities offered by re-building, thus the interest in concepts like unitary urbanism and psychogeography, essentially a response to the sociological aspects of the re-construction of those cities in the immediate post-war period.

SI propaganda: The Situationist Times 6: International Parisian Edition, Paris, December 1967.

The Situationist Times was an international, English-language periodical created and edited by Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong (1939–2024), six issues published between 1962-1967.  Envisaged as a radical compendium encompassing Situationist tactics such as détournement and a printed form of dérive, the journals included essays, artwork, “found” images, and fragments of works concerned with such issues as topology, politics, and spectacle culture.  In the anarchist sprit of the collective, Ms De Jong insisted the periodical must be a “completely free magazine, based on the most creative of the Situationist ideas” and what appears on the pages does over the years show traces of the political and aesthetic schisms which would characterize the SI.  As well as the SI’s usual suspects, contributors included the English astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) who (inadvertently) coined the term “big bang” and the French writer Noël Arnaud (pen name of Raymond Valentin Muller (1919- 2003) of the school of pataphysics (one of the late nineteenth century’s more curious alternatives to orthodox science which may (as QAnon seems to have) begun as a joke but took on a life because it so appealed to people who “wanted it to be true”).  With the failures of the Parisian revolutionaries in 1968, SI’s historic moment passed and the seventh edition of The Situationist Times, (The Pinball Issue) remained incomplete and was not published although extracts of the content have appeared.

SI Art: Untitled (Peinture collective situationniste) (1961).

As was done with the SI's “pieces by the collective”, Guy Debord and Jeppesen Victor Martin (1930–1993) signed along with eight other artists; within two years all except Debord and Martin had been expelled so in that sense, no work better illustrates the creative tensions which rent the SI.  Those “cancelled” in some cases regarded their erasure from the SI rolls as a badge of honor and Debord couldn't have them burned at the stake or taken outside and shot (which had over the years been the fate of a few artists who displeased a dictator) so there was that.  

Prior to the formation of the SI, some of what had been written about the form the physical reconstruction of post-war Europe should take had attracted interest from political theorists, especially those in anti-authoritarian Marxist circles who would come to position themselves as the inheritors of western political liberalism, notably the Lettrist International (formed in 1952).  In the way the European left did things in the early post-war years, the SI was conceived as an even more radical collective movement which wholly would renounce any connection with high-art and deal instead with the functional business of psychogeography, dissolving rather than exploring the boundaries between life and art.  However, whatever might have been the purity of the founders' intentions, because what the SI produced was eye-catchingly visual, it attracted practitioners in many fields of art and an audience which enjoyed the supposedly subversive pieces as just another spectacle.  That was tribute to the striking posters but wasn’t something which best pleased the uncompromising activists who viewed art merely as something with a revolutionary political purpose; factions formed and any commonality of interest between the utilitarians and the artists proved insufficiently strong to maintain the SI as a unified movement.  From formation to extinction, inherently it was fissiparous although, while members could be kicked out of the SI, it didn't mean their work ceased and the Scandinavian Drakabygget group (noted for the memorably titled Journal for art against atomic bombs, popes and politicians) essentially ignored their expulsion and continued to exhibit and publish in the Situationists vein.

SI art: Industrial Painting (1958), monoprinted oil paint, acrylic paint & typographic ink on canvas by Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio (1902–1964).

Unrolled from a wooden spool and extending just over 75 metres (246 feet) Industrial Painting was one of a series of abstract works Pinot-Gallizio painted in this mode.  Unspooling in a swirl of blotches of colors, the idea was to recall the vibrancy of figures moving along a city’s streets and a deliberate limitation of the design was only some 9 metres (30 feet) could be displayed at one time, the idea being to emulate a journey in which much of what’s just been seen fades or vanishes from memory as the traveller proceeds along their path.  In an indication of the way the SI worked in an industrial age, Pinot-Gallizio made these works on his “painting machine” which he built with mechanical rollers attached to a long table.  What emerged was, in contrast to most of what came from “conveyor-belt” mass production, chaotic and wholly unique.

Modern situationist; modern spectacle: French content creator & author Léna Situations (Léna Mahfouf, b 1997), in Georges Hobeika (b 1962) black gown with inverted V-neckline (technically a wedge), Academy Awards ceremony, Los Angeles, March 2026.

Ms Mahfouf uses “Léna Situations” as an online pseudonym because that was the name of the fashion & lifestyle-focused blog she, as a teen-ager, created in 2012; it gained her a “brand identity” and was thus for some purposes retained in adulthood.  The blog would have seemed familiar to the members of the SI because her concept was sharing fragments of her life in different “situations” which might be defined by the place, the outfit worn or what was being experienced so was thus a series of spectacles, able to be understood as fragmentary relics of time & place or a series of narratives.  Using that model, platforms like Instagram have allowed just about everybody to become a situationist and while Debord didn’t live to see such things, he’d have recognized (if not approved) “social lives mediated by images, media & commodities”.

Charli XCX (stage-name of English singer-songwriter Charlotte Emma Aitchison (b 1992)) in a Christopher John Rogers (b 1993) white fit & flare dress with ruffled peplum, featuring a more conventional implementation of the V-neckline.

Ms Mahfouf's retention of a youthful online pseudonym is not unique, Charli XCX another example.  The star herself revealed the stage name is pronounced chahr-lee ex-cee-ex; it has no connection with Roman numerals and XCX is anyway not a standard Roman number.  XC is “90” (C minus X (100-10)) and CX is “110” (C plus X (100 +10)) but, should the need arise, XCX could be used as a code for “100”, on the model of something like the “May 35th” reference Chinese internet users, when speaking of the “Tiananmen Square Incident” of 4 June 1989, adopted in an attempt to circumvent the CCP's (Chinese Communist Party) “Great Firewall of China” censorship apparatus.  In 2015, Ms XCX revealed the text string was an element in her MSN screen name (CharliXCX92) when young (it stood for “kiss Charli kiss”) and, after appearing in the early publicity for her music, it gained critical mass so Charli XCX we still have.

SI art: Lettre à mon fils (Letter to my son, 1956-1957), oil on canvas by Asger Jorn (1914-1973).

What quickly coalesced as the core of situationist theory was the concept of the spectacle, an explanation of the mechanism of advanced capitalism’s modern tendency towards expression and mediation of social relations through objects and for structuralists it was a compelling model.  It was beyond a critique of materialism and might have been more effective had the SI been able to resist using the increasingly layered and complex language of the mid-twentieth century Marxist discourse, a sub-set of language which would come to delight academic deconstructionists but often baffled others.  As well as Debord’s writings, Belgium philosopher Raoul Vaneigem’s (b 1934) The Revolution of Everyday Life (1968) was a seminal work; in the riots of 1968, both proved influential, less as entire texts than as sources for the epigrammatic and graffiti-friendly phrases (Sous les pavés, la plage! (Under the paving stones, the beach!), L’ennui est contre-révolutionnaire (Boredom is counter-revolutionary) and Ne travaillez jamais (Never work!) among the most replicated) which appeared all over French cities during the uprising.  In that, the SI thus proved the primacy of objects in social relations (whether hegemonic or not) although the SI generally held that “situationism” was a meaningless term, a position necessitated by their inherent rejection of ideologies, all of which they dismissed either as useless utopian myths or constructed superstructures existing only to create the social controls required to serve the economic interests of a ruling elite.  Much of the history of the SI was one faction rejecting another; indeed, the SI’s transition from artistic to political movement was less organic than disruptive.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

The critique of the consumer society resonated strongly with student radicals who were the failed revolutionaries of 1968 but, remarkably for a crew which was so influential on mass-movements, the SI was always tiny (it wasn’t untypical for there to be fewer than two-dozen active members) with internal conflicts and expulsions common, Debord given frequently to banishing members he believed had compromised the group’s revolutionary aims, the worst sin of heretics apparently the creation of art which shocked by virtual of its appearance but did nothing to in anyway transform society; comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) might have called such transgressors “formalists”.  Neglected for decades, the concepts developed by the SI attracted renewed interest in the social media age as much of what they’d described suddenly seemed familiar.  Key SI concepts included (1) psychogeography (the study of how urban environments affect emotions and behaviour, (2) dérive (drift) in which a wander through a city was documented with illustrative images, (3) détournement (appropriating using existing cultural elements (advertisements, comics, artworks etc) and, in subversive ways, repurposing them to undermine their original ideological message) and (4) constructed situations which were “moments of life” (events, environments, experiences) created for no purpose other than breaking the passivity of everyday existence.  If all that sounds something like what may have appeared in the check-list used by the designers of Instagram, TikTok and such, it hints (1) the SI may have been onto something and (2) as US billionaire investor Warren Buffett (b 1930) put it when explaining the outcome of class warfare: “We won”.

A requiem for the SI: No Title (1975-1976), lithograph on paper by Constant Niewwenhuys (1920-2005).

Debord no more wanted the SI to be what would come to be called a “think tank” any more than he wanted an artist’s colony but certainly envisaged it as a theoretical vanguard rather than a conventional political organization, his view being that even if created as something “revolutionary”, such movements tended to be “captured” (ie absorbed into the very system they were created to subvert or at least oppose).  That was why the orthodox SI position was not to exhibit their works in galleries or museums because, in the spirit of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) notion “the medium is the message”, once radical art was hung in such places, it became merely another commodity in the “spectacle”, dissenters accused of “recuperation” (a SI concept in which radical ideas had been neutralized and absorbed by mainstream culture).  So, members who were judged to have misunderstood or diluted Situationist orthodoxy (ie disagreed with Debord) were expelled, the rationale being what was valued in adherents was “quality rather than quantity”.  Although supposedly in the tradition of Marxist collective decision-making, Debord exercised extraordinary informal authority within the SI (despite the group officially rejecting hierarchy) and in practice, personally defined the SI’s theoretical parameters.  In a nice touch which would be familiar in places like the Soviet Union, the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)) or the modern Republican Party’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) faction, the “culture of exclusion” was ritualized in the journal Internationale Situationniste which regularly would publish lists of those un-personed (including the reasons), the former members denounced in harsh language, the worst insults including accusations of “theoretical confusion” and the practicing of mere “pseudo-Situationism”; by the time of dissolution in 1972, the membership consisted of Debord and one remaining loyal soul.  The SI, at least in the more reductionist works, did create some genuinely interesting critiques of the post-war West and some of the early art was, if not exactly novel, certainly stark and compelling.  However, it remains hard to identify enough ideas to justify the volume of text produced and phrasing it in what was surely deliberately difficult language does suggest there was an attempt to conceal the repetition of thought.

Now

Now (pronounced nou)

(1) At the present time or moment (literally a point in time).

(2) Without further delay; immediately; at once; at this time or juncture in some period under consideration or in some course of proceedings described.

(3) As “just now”, a time or moment in the immediate past (historically it existed as the now obsolete “but now” (very recently; not long ago; up to the present).

(4) Under the present or existing circumstances; as matters stand.

(5) Up-to-the-minute; fashionable, encompassing the latest ideas, fads or fashions (the “now look”, the “now generation” etc).

(6) In law, as “now wife”, the wife at the time a will is written (used to prevent any inheritance from being transferred to a person of a future marriage) (archaic).

(7) In phenomenology, a particular instant in time, as perceived at that instant.

Pre 900: From the Middle English now, nou & nu from the Old English nū (at the present time, at this moment, immediately), from the Proto-West Germanic nū, from the Proto-Germanic nu, from the primitive Indo-European nū (now) and cognate with the Old Norse nu, the Dutch nu, the German nun, the Old Frisian nu and the Gothic nū.  It was the source also of the Sanskrit and Avestan nu, the Old Persian nuram, the Hittite nuwa, the Greek nu & nun, the Latin nunc, the Old Church Slavonic nyne, the Lithuanian nū and the Old Irish nu-.  The original senses may have been akin to “newly, recently” and it was related to the root of new.  Since Old English it has been often merely emphatic, without any temporal sense (as in the emphatic use of “now then”, though that phrase originally meant “at the present time”, and also (by the early thirteenth century) “at once” (in the early Middle English it often was written as one word).  The familiar use as a noun (the present time) emerged in the late fourteenth century while the adjective meaning “up to date” is listed by etymologists as a “mid 1960s revival” on the basis the word was used as an adjective with the sense of “current” between the late fourteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  The phrase “now and then” (occasionally; at one time and another) was in use by the mid 1400s, “now or never” having been in use since the early thirteenth century.  “Now” is widely used in idiomatic forms and as a conjunction & interjection.  Acronym Finder lists 26 NOW acronyms including National Organization for Women; Night of Worship; No Other Way; Nightmares on Wax; Never Open Wide; National Orchestra of Wales (UK); Negotiable Order of Withdrawal; New Opportunities for Women; No Opportunity Wasted; Nonhazardous Oilfield Waste; Northamptonshire Orchestral Winds; Network-grade Optical Wireless.  Now is a noun, adjective & adverb, nowism, nowness & nowist are nouns; the noun plural is nows.

Right here, right now: Acid House remix of Greta Thunberg’s (b 2003) How dare you? speech by Theo Rio.

“Now” is one of the more widely used words in English and is understood to mean “at the present time or moment (literally a point in time)”.  However, it’s often used in a way which means something else: Were one to say “I’ll do it now”, in the narrow technical sense that really means “I’ll do it in the near future”.  Even common occurrences treated as happening “now” (such as seeing or hearing something) are really experiences of past events.  Because light travels at a finite speed, it takes time for it to bounce from something to one’s eye so visual perception is an exercise in looking back to the past; even when reading something on a screen or page one’s brain is processing something from a nanosecond (about one billionth of a second) earlier.  For most purposes an essential conveniece, “now” is but a convincing illusion and even though, in a special sense, everything in the universe is happening at the same time (now), while that can be imagined, it's not something easily experienced because of the implications of relativity.  None of this causes many problems in life but among certain physicists and philosophers, there is a dispute about “now” and there are essentially three factions: (1) that “now” happened only once in the history of the known universe and cannot again exist until the universe ends, (2) that only “now” can exist and (3) that “now” cannot ever exist.  These positions do appear irreconcilable.

Does now exist? (2013), oil & acrylic on canvas by Fiona Rae (b 1963) on MutualArt.

The notion that “now” can have happened only once in the history of our universe is nuanced because even the concept of "universe" is contested.   According to some cosmological theorists, variously there may be many universes, some which used to exist, some exact duplicates of our own (even containing an identical Lindsay Lohan), some extant and some yet to be created (or "emerge"; the speculations differ).  An alternative view is "our universe" may now be in one of its many phases, each which will start and end with a unique “now” and that's tied up with the nature of time, the mechanism upon which “now” depends not merely for definition but also for existence.  That faction deals with what is essentially an intellectual exercise whereas the others operate where physics and linguistics intersect.  Within the community holding "now can never exist" there's a sub-faction arguing that to say “now” cannot exist is a bit of a fudge in that it’s not that “now” never happens but only that it can only every be described as a particular form of “imaginary time”; an address in space-time in the past or future.  The purists however are absolutists and their proposition is part of the nature of infinity, something which renders it impossible ever exactly to define “now” because endlessly the decimal point can move so that “now” can only ever be tended towards and never attained.  If pushed, all they will concede is that “now” can be approximated for purposes of description but that’s not good enough: there is no now.

nower than now!: Lindsay Lohan on the cover of i-D magazine No.269, September, 2006.  If initial capitals are eschewed, it's a hint the publication is positioned as "edgy".

The “only now can exist” faction find tiresome the proposition that “the moment we identify something as happening now, already it has passed”, making the point that “now” is the constant state of existence and that a mechanism like time exists only a thing of administrative convenience.  The “only now can exist” faction are most associated with the schools of presentism or phenomenology and argue only the present moment (now) is “real” and that any other fragment of time can only be described, the past existing only in memory and the future only as anticipation or imagination; “now” is the sole verifiable reality.  They are interested especially in what they call “change & becoming”, making the point the very notion of change demands a “now”: events happen and things become in the present; without a “now”, change and causality are unintelligible.  The debate between the factions hinges often on differing interpretations of time: whether fundamentally it is subjective or objective, continuous or discrete, dynamic or static.  Linguistically and practically, “now” remains central to the human experience but whether it corresponds to an independent metaphysical reality remains a dispute that, pleasingly for those involved, can go on endlessly because there's unlikely ever to be a "right" answer.  Pleasingly, most people "now" alive and most who have existed have dealt with the concept "now" and its companions (past & future) without being much troubled by the squabbles among philosophers or cosmologists.  

Cosmologists, if so minded, can dwell less on the nature of “now” because they have the “Andromeda paradox”, one of the consequences of Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) theory of special relativity.  What the paradox does is illustrate the way “now” is relative and differs for observers moving at different speeds, the effect increasing as distances increase, such as when the point of reference is the Andromeda galaxy, some 2½ million light years distant from Earth.  Under special relativity, what one observer sees and perceives as “now” on Andromeda will, by another, moving at a different relative speed, be perceived as occurring in the past or future.   This can happen at any distance but, outside of computer simulations or laboratories, the effects of relative simultaneity are noticeable (even at relatively low speeds) only at distance.  The way to conceptualize special relatively is to imagine everything in the universe happening "at the same time" and "work backwards" as distances between objects increase.  

Seated vis-a-vis (literally "face to face"), Lindsay Lohan (b 1986, right) and her sister Aliana (b 1993, left), enjoying a tête-à-tête (literally, "head to head"), La Conversation bakery & café, West Hollywood, California, April 2012.  Sadly, La Conversation is now closed.  

Among the implications of the Andromeda paradox is that although the sisters would experience their discussion as something in the "here and now", to a cosmologist they are looking at each other as they used to be and hearing what each said some time in the past, every slight movement affecting the extent of this.  Because, in a sense, everything in the universe is happening "at the same time", the pair could have been sitting light years apart and spoke what they spoke "at the same time" but because of the speed at which light and sound travel, it's only at a certain distance a "practical" shared "now" becomes possible (although, in theory, quantum entanglement may be able to overcome the "distance problem).  One wholly speculative notion even connects "now" with at least one of the mysterious pair "dark energy" & "dark matter", two possibly misleading terms used to describe the "missing stuff" which the cosmologists' models indicate must exist (in great quantity) in the universe but haven't been yet been identified or even described.  The idea is that "dark energy" may be time itself, the implication being that not only can time be used as a measure in the currently accelerating expansion of space but may be the very force responsible for the phenomenon.  Thus far, the speculation has attracted little support and nobody seems to have suggested any sort of experimental test but, the standard in the scientific method is disproof and "time may be dark energy" has yet to be disproved.  The notion of time as a form of energy is intoxicating and linked to the idea time either (1) may have been "started" by the unleashing of energy at the moment of the universe's creation or (2) time was that energy and the ongoing (and accelerating) expansion of the universe is just "time being time".  Certainly, time is a useful because without it everything literally "would happen at the same time" and that in some theories is what was happening (or "not happening") prior to what's now usually (if misleadingly) called the "Big Bang".  So the absence of time may have happened before and may happen again and in that state the nature of "now" would for many reasons be uncontested.