i guess the idea that 'negative' social energies can be redirected and inverted into perfecting the reigning negativity is nothing new (ie 'the apprentice' - both the tv series and the picaresque proletarian of yore - is always encouraged to turn class hatred back on his own class in order to ascend from it), but this marks a new level of assimilation even for graffiti.

What is radical research? Does it emanate from grass roots social movements, the universities, both, or neither? Melancholic Troglodytes review AK Press’s recent collection of ‘militant research’ with an illustrated tour following the book's line of enquiry from the ‘ivory tower to the barricades’

Professor,
take off your bicycle glasses!
I myself will expound
those times
and myself.

Finally, the pundits of Creative Economies and all that malarkey will be forced to confront their own bastard child: SportArt. Despite the eagerness to strip mine 'creativity' and 'leisure' in an effort to stave off economic doom, the consensual hallucination of a Creative Economy on which it rests is turning more psychedelic than value-producing. While erstwhile 'industry leaders' like super-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist subject themselves to marathon public mea culpas (cf.

Stewart Home reviews two new publications dealing with the Situationist International and other political currents of the 1960s: Art-Ist magazine's Situationist International special issue and Dancin’ In The Streets!, a collection of texts from Rebel Worker and Heatwave

Did Guy Debord kill the avant-garde? Two new translations of works by the Situationist capo de tutti capi (Complete Cinematic Works and Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici) give ample proof of death’s regenerative effects, says Stewart Home

Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents, Guy Debord, translated and edited by Ken Knabb, AK Press, Oakland and Edinburgh 2003

Benedict Seymour discusses Simon Sadler's latest work
(MIT Press, hb £24.95)