Lipstick Traces

by Greil Marcus

  Heatwave (London), 1–2 (July and October 1966). Mimeographed journal on youth culture and the avant-garde published by group of same name, including Christopher Gray and others, before affiliation with Situationist International. No. 2 includes Hausmann and Huelsenbeck’s “What Is Dada and What Does It Want in Germany.” Courtesy Fred Vermorel. Collected in King Mob Echo (Edinburgh: Dark Star, 2000).

  Höch, Hannah. Hannah Höch—Album, ed. Gunda Luyken. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004. From Höch’s scrapbooks.

  ______The Photomontages of Hannah Höch. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996. See Lavin.

  Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.

  Huelsenbeck, Richard. “Dada, or the Meaning of Chaos.” Studio International (London, January 1972). Edited version of a volcanic talk given at ICA (London), 1 October 1971.

  ______Deustchland müss untergehen! Berlin: Malik, 1920. Illustrations by George Grosz. Courtesy Klaus Humann.

  ______Dr. huelsenbeck’s mentale heilmethode, Bayerischer Rundfunk (Rough Trade Germany, produced by Herbert Kapfer and Christoph Lindenmeyer, 1992). This German-English radio-play version of Huelsenbeck’s “psychological salvation system” explodes all over the place: in readings, cabaret music, and songs, including “A Dadaist Hippie,” “Existentialisten,” “Hottentotten-kral New York”; in ghostly samples and lectures by Huelsenbeck himself; in “The End of the World” performed by both Huelsenbeck and Peter Blegvad, the latter in English, as a blues; and in “Röhrenhose Rokoko-Neger-Rhythmus,” a six-and-a-half minute running argument between a faux-Huelsenbeck and others, and himself, over how to pronounce “Huelsenbeck.”

  ______En Avant Dada: Die Geschichte des Dadaismus. Berlin: Paul Steegemann, 1920. Facsimile edition, Hamburg: Nautilus, 1978. Trans. by Ralph Manheim in Motherwell.

  ______Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, ed. Hans J. Kleinschmidt, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (1974). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Text of 1957 Mit Witz, Licht und Grütze, plus numerous essays including “On Leaving America for Good” (1969). See Kleinschmidt, Raabe, Sheppard.

  ______Phantastische Gebete (Fantastic Prayers). Frankfurt: Anabas Verlag, 1993. Facsimiles of the 1916 Zurich edition with illustrations by Hans Arp and the 1920 Berlin edition with illustrations by George Grosz, with commentary by Herbert Kapfer. Translations by Malcolm Green in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! The First Texts of German Dada by Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Walter Serner. London: Atlas, 1995.

  ______Weltdada Huelsenbeck: Eine Biograpfie in Briefen und Bildern, ed. Herbert Kapfer and Lisbeth Exner. Innsbruck, Austria: Haymon Verlag, 1996. Correspondence 1913–73, including many 1950s-’60s letters to and from Hausmann, Höch, Grosz, and Arp.

  ______Wozu Dada: Texte 1916–1936, ed. Herbert Kapfer. Frankfurt: Anabas, 1994. Fugitive essays, rants, and manifestos.

  Hussey, Andrew. The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001. Unreliable.

  Impresario: Malcolm McLaren and the British New Wave. Cambridge MA: New Museum of Contemporary Art/MIT, 1998. Catalogue for exhibition curated by Paul Taylor. Essays by Taylor, Jane Withers (“From Let It Rock to World’s End, 430 King’s Road”), and Jon Savage. See McLaren, Vermorel.

  Internationale situationniste. Internationale situationniste (Paris). Paris: Fayard, 1997. Complete 1958–1969 run of the principal situationist journal.

  ______La Véritable Scission dans l’internationale: Circulaire Publique de l’Internationale situationniste (1972). Paris: Fayard, 1998. Trans. by John McHale in an augmented edition as The Real Split in the International. London and Sterling VA: Pluto Press, 2003. Includes Guy Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti, “Theses on the International and Its Time,” with appendices on the Situationist International after May ’68. See McDonough, Raspaud, Theory of the Dérive.

  Ion (1952). Paris: Jean-Paul Rocher, 1999.

  Isou, Isidore. L’Agrégation d’un nom et d’un méssie. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.

  ______Contre le cinéma situationniste, néo-nazi. Paris: GB/NV/MB, 1979.

  ______“Les Créations du lettrisme.” Lettrisme (Paris), 4th series, no. 1 (January 1972). Lengthy mimeographed catalogue of lettrist approaches to the arts.

  ______“The Creations of Lettrism.” Times Literary Supplement (London, 3 September 1964). Greatly abridged version of the above.

  ______Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et une nouvelle musique. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.

  ______Oeuvres de Spectacle. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Includes screenplay for Traité de bave et d’éternité and “Le Manifeste du cinéma discrépant.”

  ______Traité de bave et d’éternité (1951). DVD by Archives Françaises du film/CNC Re: Voir, 2008; with English subtitles and notes by Frédérique Devaux. Also included in the DVD anthology Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema, 1928–1954 (Kino, 2007). See also Devaux, “Traité de bave de d’éternité” d’Isidore Isou, Crisnée, Belgium: Editions Yellow, 1994, a history and analysis of the film with the complete screenplay, many stills and ephemera, and Lettrist Poetry from “Traité de bave et d’éternité” (Bad Sound Quality Recordings cassette, 1995).

  Jackson, Michael. Thriller (Epic, 1982).

  Janco, Marcel. Marcel Janco. Givatayim, Israel: Massada, 1982. Career survey including masks, First Sketch of Cabaret Voltaire (1916), and the blazing dada abstract Torn Paper (1972). In Hebrew and French. See Naumann, Pomerantz, Sandqvist. Courtesy Gerald and Eleanore Marcus.

  Jappe, Anselm. Guy Debord (1993, 1995), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. An intellectual biography—the first of any kind—with a foreword by T. J. Clark.

  Joel, Billy. “The Longest Time” on An Innocent Man (Columbia, 1983).

  John Heartfield: Leben und Werk, ed. Wieland Herzfelde. Dresden: Veb Verlag der Kunst, 1971. Dada and after.

  John Lydon: Stories of Johnny, ed. Rob Johnstone. London: Chrome Dreams, 2006. Includes my “The Ballroom Blitz: From New York to Baghdad,” on Lydon as bad conscience.

  Jorn, Asger. Pour la forme: Ebauche d’une méthodologie des arts (1958). Paris: Allia, 2001. Writing, art work, and discoveries 1954–1957. Includes Guy-Ernest Debord, The Naked City.

  ______with Guy-Ernest Debord. Fin de Copenhague (1957). Facsimile edition Paris: Allia, 1986. Overpainted collage satire of advertising, mass media, and city planning, purportedly assembled and printed in forty-eight hours on the basis of a single visit to a single newsstand; rough sketch for Debord’s Mémoires.

  Joy Division (Manchester). An Ideal for Living (Enigma, 1978, U.K.). Unknown Pleasures (Factory, 1979, U.K.). Collected on Heart and Soul (London, 1997, U.K.).

  Jung, Carl G. “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious” (1936), in The Viking Portable Jung, ed. Joseph Campbell, trans. R. F. C. Hull. New York: Viking/Penguin, 1971.

  Karp, Walter. “Coolidge Redux.” Harper’s (October 1981).

  Kaufmann, Vincent. Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry (2001), trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. A rich journey through words and acts.

  KILL IT. London, 1977. On “snuff rock”—program notes for C. P. Lee’s play Sleak in the form of a punk fanzine.

  King Mob. “It Was Meant to Be Great But It’s Horrible: Confessions, S. Claus, 1968.” London, 1968. Broadside preceding King Mob demonstration in Sel-fridges. Collected with following items in King Mob Echo (Edinburgh: Dark Star, 2000). Courtesy Fred Vermorel. See McLaren.

  ______King Mob Echo (London, April 1968). A search for holes in the wall, by way of dada, the situationists, and Norman Cohn. Courtesy Simon Frith.

  ______“Posters Rejected by the L. S. E., October 25th to October 27th.” London, 1968. Anti-leftist hierarchy broadsides: a revival of Abiezer Coppe’s coprola-liac Ranterism. Courtesy Fred Vermorel.

  ______“Two Letters on Student Power.” London, November 1968. By Christopher Gray and Rich
ard Huelsenbeck—aka T. J. Clark. Courtesy Simon Frith.

  Kleenex (Zurich). “Beri-Beri”/“Ain’t You”/“Heidi’s Head”/“Nice” (Sunrise, 1978, Switzerland). “You (friendly side)”/“Ü (angry side)” (Rough Trade, 1979, U.K.). See Liliput, Marder.

  Kleinschmidt, Hans J. “Berlin Dada,” in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf Kuenzli, eds., Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt. Madison, WI: Coda/Iowa City, 1979.

  Knabb, Ken, ed. and trans. Situationist International Anthology (1981). Rev. ed. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006. Basic English-language collection of situationist writing; includes most major situationist essays and several important LI essays.

  Kraus, Karl. In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader, ed. Harry Zohn, trans. Joseph Fabry et al. Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet, 1984. Includes “Promotional Trips to Hell,” on Verdun vacations (1921).

  Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

  Lavin, Maud. Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

  Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Vintage, 1979.

  Lefebrve, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life (1947, 1958), trans. John Moore. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Seductive, noisy, always querulous, always open: Marx is the judge, alienation is the crime, the commodity is the defense, Surrealism is the prosecutor, and the reader is both the victim and the accused.

  ______Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II: Foundation for a Sociology of the Everyday (1961), trans. John Moore. London and New York: Verso, 2002.

  ______Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 3: From Modernity to Modernism (1981), trans. John Moore. London and New York: Verso, 2005.

  ______Introduction to Modernity (1962), trans. John Moore. London and New York: Verso, 1995.

  ______Position contre les technocrates. Paris: Gonthier, 1967.

  ______“ ‘7 Manifestes Dada,’ par Tristan Tzara.” Philosophies (Paris), vol. 1 (March 1924).

  ______The Survival of Capitalism (1973), trans. Frank Bryant. London: Allison and Busby, 1976.

  ______Les Temps des Mépris. Paris: Stock, 1975. Interview with Lefebvre. See McDonough (Ross).

  Lerner, Robert E. The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.

  Les Lèvres nues (1954–1958). Paris: Allia, 1998. Issue-by-issue facsimile edition of the Belgian post-surrealist journal, edited by Marcel Marien, with which the Lettrist International collaborated. See Marien, Theory of the Dérive.

  Lewis, Bernard. The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (1967). 2nd ed. New York: Oxford, 1987.

  Lewis, Jerry Lee. “Great Balls of Fire” (1957), three versions, with studio dialogue. On Classic Jerry Lee Lewis (Bear Family, Germany).

  Liliput (Zurich). “Split”/“Die Matrosen” (Rough Trade, 1980, U.K.). “Eisiger Wind” (Rough Trade, 1981, U.K.). Collected with Kleenex recordings on LiLi-PUT (Kill Rock Stars, 2001). Notes by Marlene Marder, Kim Gordon, and GM. See Kleenex, Marder.

  Lippard, Lucy R, ed. Dadas on Art. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977. Includes “Invest in Dada!” trans. Gabrielle Bennett of Richard Huelsebeck, Johannes Baader, and Raoul Hausmann, “Legen sie Ihr Geld in dada an!” originally published in Der Dada 1 (Berlin, 1919).

  Lipstick Traces (Rough Trade, 1993). A soundtrack to this book. Includes Slits, “A Boring Life”; Orioles, “It’s Too Soon to Know”; Trio Exvoco’s recreation of “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer”; Jonathan Richman, “Road Runner”; Jean-Louis Brau, “Instrumentation Verbale”; Buzzcocks, “Boredom”; Adverts, “One Chord Wonders” and “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes”; Raoul Hausmann’s “bbb,” which runs at exactly the same cadence as Gang of Four, “At Home He’s a Tourist”; Kleenex, “Ü (angry side)” and “You (friendly side)”; Guy Debord, voice-over from Critique de la séparation; Mekons, “Never Been in a Riot” and “The Building”; Liliput, “Split”; Gil J Wolman, “Méganeumies, 24 Mars 1963”; Raincoats, “In Love”; Bascom Lamar Lunsford, “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground”; plus the Huelsenbeck send-up “Röhrenhose-Rokoko-Neger-Rhythmus”; 1976 stage talk from the Clash (Joe Strummer: “Now it’s time for audience participation, right? I want to you all to tell me . . . what exactly you’re doing here”); Benny Spellman, “Lipstick Traces (On a Cigarette)”; and Hugo Ball’s “Karawane” as performed by Marie Osmond. Notes by Jon Savage.

  Logic, Lora. See Essential Logic.

  Lunsford, Bascom Lamar. “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” (1928). Collected on Lunsford’s Ballads, Banjo Tunes, and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina (Smithsonian Folkways, 1996) and on Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), compiled Harry Smith (Smithsonian Folkways, 1997). Lunsford first recorded the song in 1924 as a cylinder.

  Lydon, John, with Keith and Kent Zimmerman. Rotten—No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. Fleshed out in long stretches by interviews with various there-when’s, this “authorized autobiography of Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols” falls short of its subject: if he’d forced himself to write the book himself, you can imagine, Lydon might have had to confront both his success and his failure, but instead he pretty much denies everything. And yet, near the end, there’s a weird reminder of a passage from Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco’s 1988 detective story about the mysteries of the Knights Templar. One character is expounding on the difference between the “four kinds of people in the world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.” The lunatic, he explains, “is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.” After nearly 350 pages of insisting that the Sex Pistols were all about him, pages in which he tries doggedly to keep the world-historical stopped up in his bottle, Lydon offers this: “The Royal family has been brought up to believe it’s God’s will for them to be where they are. That’s what I find so disgraceful . . . Think back. The only group of knights that did good were the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar. They were all exterminated because they gave up money, power and position. They were like the early Franciscans and could not be tolerated by the British establishment and they were slaughtered to a man. What would you call them? Early Communists? Their love of humanity above the love of selfishness attacked the establishment by their very existence. They fought all their wars and were a pre-SAS, the top assassins of their day, but they gave up all worldly goods, too frightening for the powers that be to tolerate for too long. Now I’m certainly no Knights Templar and I’m not out looking for the Holy Grail . . . Which brings us back to the Royal family.” John Lydon may be a lunatic, but Eco’s syllogism remains intact: everyone else is a cretin, a fool, or a moron. See John Lydon.

  Marcus, Greil. “Historiograph: Cabaret Voltaire.” Common Knowledge, v. 2, no. 1 (Spring 1993). This book, boiled down to twenty pages in which all the characters appear in a simultaneous nightclub act. Written 1983.

  Marder, Marlene. Kleenex LiLiPUT: Das Tagebuch der Guitarristin Marlene Marder. Zurich: Nachbar der Welt Verlag, 1986. Off their records, everything they left behind. Preface by GM.

  Marien, Marcel. “Le Chemin de la croix (vii).” Les Lèvres nues (Belgium), no. 4 (January 1955). Includes text of Serge Berna/Michel Mourre 1950 Notre-Dame sermon, with commentary. See Les Lèvres nues. Photos by Raymond Haines of Berna and Mourre composing Mourre’s speech in the Café Saint-Claude are included in Lipstick Traces: Une histoire secrète du vingtième siècle. Paris: Allia, 1998. Courtesy Haines and Gullaume Godard.

  Marx, Karl. “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1843–44),” in Early Writings, ed. Quintin Hoare, trans. Gregor Benton. New York: Vintage, 1975.

  ______“The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret” (1867), in Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintag
e, 1977.

  Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925), trans. Ian Cunnision. New York: Norton, 1967.

  McDonough, Tom, ed. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002. Translations of many LI and SI essays, including Guy Debord’s “One Step Back” and “One More Try If You Want to Be Situationists,” on the founding of the Situationist International, with critical commentary including Kristin Ross, “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview,” Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith, “Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International,” and my “The Long Walk of the Situationist International” (1982).

  McLaren, Malcolm. The Ghosts of Oxford Street. Dir. Malcolm McLaren. 1991 (BBC). Conceived by McLaren in art school in the 1960s, planned as a history of the shopping street, realized as a BBC Christmas special, with McLaren promenading as Anticlaus—but he may be most present in Tom Jones’s performance as Gordon Selfridge, the American entrepreneur who drew a million people to his great Oxford Street department store the week it opened in 1909. It’s funny to have Jones’s Selfridge cover Barrett Strong’s 1961 “Money (That’s What I Want)” before the fact, though the joke goes on too long. But then McLaren explains how Selfridge looted his own company, how at 84 he was forced out, how every day he returned to stand in front of his store in shabby clothes, wondering, like any shopper, at the marvel he’d built. With real heart, Jones sings “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” and the scene runs away from its story and into McLaren’s: the agony of victory, the thrill of defeat. See King Mob.

  ______Paris (No! 1994). A mostly spoken-word album that attempts to recreate the territory around the Tabou, in the early 1950s, with Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Hardy standing in for Juliette Gréco, to whom McLaren got close enough to get her no. “ ‘Why don’t you sing this song, Juliette?’ ” McLaren says in “Miles and Miles of Miles,” his piece about Gréco’s affair with Miles Davis. “ ‘I can’t,’ Juliette said. ‘I only sing in French.’ ” See also Bertrand Dicale, Gréco: Les vies d’une chanteuse. Paris: JC Lattès, 2001.