A review by nickjagged
The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark

4.0

This was a rough book to get into (probably due to my long time away from more complicated reading) but once I got into the swing of it, it turned out to be a fun, rewarding survey of the Situationist International movement and its assortment of orbiting personalities. In fact, it's the people who are not-quite involved in the SI that were the most compelling, the exception being Constant (ch 11) with his New Babylon. Pretty much single-handedly got me into urban geography as a field of study, so points to McKenzie Wark. However, I'll be taking a breather before returning to The Spectacle of Disintegration, Wark's followup about the later years of the SI. There's a tendency in this book to try and distill the arguments of the subjects while simultaneously surveying their actions and works, which is a fairly hit-or-miss venture. When it works, it really draws one into the subject matter, but when it fails it jettisons all momentum and doesn't always ramp back up before the next investigation. 4 stars not for the first half of the book but for the second (chapter 7 onwards).