I got involved with an American Situationist years ago that I’m going to refer to as “Ted”. I eventually had a falling-out with him (how Situationist, eh?). He tried to steal a book about Greek gods from my library, and I ran after him. He threw the book to the ground, I bent over to pick it up, and when I stood back up Whammo! he cold-cocked me with his fist on my left eye. Fortunately I wasn’t permanently injured.

I’d never heard of Situs or Psychogeography until I got involved with Ted, but one of the first things we did together was go on a derive in Georgetown. Him, me and another fellow each brought a camera and went in different directions and took pics, and then compared them. Ted’s photos were predictably “leftie”- unflattering pics of diners stuffing their faces at outdoor cafes. Mine were architectural as well as fashion photos of young punks. I don’t recall what the third guy’s photos were of.

Ted published a ‘zine at the time and I contributed an article about Nagualism which is on my website, minus the last “leftie” sentence that Ted editorially inserted. One can see the influence of Situ ideas insofar as the article takes previous texts and reworks them in a a “detournement” style.

After I “broke” with Ted (Ted was always “breaking” with people) he eventually organized a fairly large derive in Washington DC that was written up in a newspaper. He was stopped by the police during that derive because he graffiti’d the National Cathedral. This caused him to be denounced by the New York Psychogeography Assoc, who said that if he’d done the same in NYC he would’ve been thrown in jail. He was also compared to some guy who runs the London Psychogeography Assoc, as the guy in NYC said they were both just self-aggrandizing publicity hounds, which is a fair assessment of Ted.

Years later I started the Baltimore/Washington Psychogeography Assoc, which eventually became just the Baltimore Psychogeography Association. I put up a website and got a few people interested. My goal was to buy a house in Baltimore for a headquarters, and have it set up as a non-profit. Non-profits are big business here in Baltimore! There are houses in “bad” neighborhoods in the city one can purchase for not much money. However, to set the BPA up as a formal non-profit takes lots of paperwork. I didn’t want to do a derive until I was set up as a non-profit, as the US of A is notoriously litigious (esp perhaps Baltimore).

Meanwhile, I was attracting interest. I expressed my views online about separating Psychogeo from Situationist/leftie ideas- having been inspired by what was going on in England. I was immediately jumped on in an online forum by a guy with the online handle of “Stalin” of all things. He said that it was impossible to separate the two- without situ/leftie/political concerns, Psychogeo would just amount to wandering around, he said. Finally I’d had enough, and that’s when the whole experiment came to an end!