Ivan Chtcheglov - Activities

Activities

He wrote Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau (Formulary for a New Urbanism) in 1953, at age nineteen under the name Gilles Ivain, which was an inspiration to the Lettrist International and Situationist International. It included the phrase "the hacienda must be built", which influenced Tony Wilson of Factory Records in naming his Manchester night-club, The Haçienda.

He and his friend Henry de Béarn planned to blow up the Eiffel Tower with some dynamite they had stolen from a nearby building site, because "its reflected light shone into their shared attic room and kept them awake at night." He was arrested at Les Cinq Billards on Rue Mouffetard in Paris and committed to a mental hospital by his wife, where he was subdued with insulin and shock therapy, and remained for 5 years. He died in 1998.

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Famous quotes containing the word activities:

    When mundane, lowly activities are at stake, too much insight is detrimental—far-sightedness errs in immediate concerns.
    Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)

    Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.
    Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)

    That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreative body in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)