by Greil Marcus
Mekons (Leeds). “Never Been in a Riot”/“32 Weeks”/“Heart and Soul” (Fast Product, 1978, U.K.). “Where Were You?”/“I’ll Have to Dance Then (On My Own)” (Fast Product, 1978, U.K.). The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen (Virgin, 1979, U.K.). The Mekons Story (1982, Buried Treasure, 2008).
Meltzer, Annabelle. Latest Rage the Big Drum: Dada and Surrealist Performance. Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1980.
Mension, Jean-Michel. La Tribu: Entretiens avec Gérard Berréby and Francesco Milo. Paris: Allia, 1998. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith as The Tribe. San Francisco: City Lights, 2001. Ground zero for the Lettrist International: a man swims back through rivers of alcohol to Paris in the early fifties, when he was a teenage delinquent with borrowed ideas in his head and cryptic slogans painted on his pants. As an intense and subjective account of the creation of a subculture, this is also a true work of bookmaking, with illustrations (including a leaflet announcing a 1950 “Grand Meeting” of the Circle des Ratés) and marginalia completely contextualizing the story. With a passage like this—just a man in his mid-sixties sitting in the same café just across from the Mabillon metro station—you don’t stop: “The real neighborhood was here, at the Café de Mabillon, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Not the Dupont-Latin. The Dupont-Latin was the porch, or the beach, before the great departure; and you had to cross the Boul’ Mich’—leave the Latin Quarter, was the way we put it—to make the voyage from the Dupont-Latin to the Mabillon: that was the initiation. Most people got lost, got drowned, on the way over. There were some even who went back home right away, but the vast majority of the people from the Dupont drowned crossing that ocean.” Mension followed with Les temps gage: aventures politiques et artistiques d’un irrégulier à Paris, described by a co-mariner as 400 pages of “I fucked, I drugged, I fucked.” Paris: Noésis, 2001. See van der Elsken.
Merrifield, Andy. Guy Debord. London: Reaktion, 2005. Incense-burning.
Milosz, Czeslaw. The Captive Mind (1951, 1953), trans. Jane Zielonko. New York: Vintage, 1981.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The Worst of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (Pye/ATV, 1970).
Motherwell, Robert, ed. The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (1951). Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Mourre, Michel. Malgré le blasphème. Paris: René Julliard, 1951. Trans. A. W. Fielding as In Spite of Blasphemy. London: John Lehmann, 1953. “I did not know Michel Mourre, who immediately repented, and I did not participate in the scandal,” Guy Debord wrote Gilles Cahoreau in 1989. “But shortly afterward I got to know two leaders of the operation, Ghislain de Marbaix and Serge Berna, also imprisoned for the attack, who became my friends. It is true that the scandal was the expression of the most radical hooligans of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, like the subsequent attempt to dynamite the Eiffel Tower, and in this sense it counted among the acts that led to the formation of the situationist movement.” One who did know Mourre was an eighteen-year-old François Truffaut, who covered Mourre’s trial for Elle. Along with the actress Ariane Pathé he was among the fans who visited Mourre during his psychiatric confinement; they met for lunch the day after Mourre’s acquittal, and Truffaut became part of the crowd that surrounded Mourre during his time as a celebrity—attracted to Mourre, Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana suggest in Truffaut: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), as “the kind of outlaw inevitably attacked by the establishment,” as he had been to Marshal Pétain, “not a political sympathy, but one for lost causes generally, ‘a shared emotion for all the maligned of the earth’ [Truffaut].” Such an identification—that the follower is who he follows, that they share a profound sympathy that cannot be shared with others, a version of what, in his François Truffaut: 1932–1984 (Paris: Julliard, 1989), Gilles Cahoreau describes as Mourre’s “quest for the absolute” (“extreme rightist, existentialist, seminarian”)—leads directly to the end of the world: the discovery that the followed has barely noticed the follower. Cahoreau describes a party in July 1950, thrown by Truffaut’s girlfriend Liliane Litvin for what Truffaut called “anyone who was anyone in 16mm and journalistic Paris,” including Alexandre Astruc, Maurice Scherer, Claude Mauriac, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, and “the couple of the month”: Mourre and Ariane Pathé, “neither of whom,” Cahoreau writes, “harbored a memory of François that night.” “The rest of the evening was straight out Rules of the Game,” Truffaut later wrote to a friend, in a letter quoted by de Baecque and Tourbiana. “Intrigues, rows in the street, doors slamming. Liliane played Nora Grégor . . . I was Jurieu, there had to be a victim.” Truffaut went home, cut his right arm twenty-five times, and passed out in sheets covered with blood. “Now,” he wrote after Liliane put his arm in a sling, “I’m like Frédéric Lemaitre in Children of Paradise.” See Marien.
Naumann, Francis M. “Janco/Dada: An Interview with Marcel Janco.” Arts Magazine (November 1982).
Neville, Jill. The Love Germ (1969). London and New York: Verso, 1998. Paris, May ’68: as a resistant strain of VD makes its way through the story—in a novel that catches the shock, joy, doubt, and idiocy of the event like nothing else—wonders flare up. “Later she saw a girl writing on the wall of a bank: ‘Je decrète l’état de bohneur permanent.’ Then the girl offered the watching Jane the chalk. But all Jane could think of were a few words from a Walt Whitman poem she had been forced to learn at school in Nebraska: ‘Alone on the beach at night.’ ”
“The Notre-Dame Scandal.” Transition (Paris), 6 (1950).
Orioles. “It’s Too Soon to Know” (It’s A Natural, 1948). “The Deborah Chessler Story,” from Rolling Stone, 24 June 1993, is collected in my The Dustbin of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, and London: Picador, 1995.
Penguins. “Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine)” (Doo-tone, 1954).
Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment. Directed by Jerry Paris. 1985.
Pomerand, Gabriel. Saint Ghetto des Prêts. Paris: O. L. B., 1950. Facsimile edition in English trans. as Saint ghetto of the loans: Grimore by Michael Kasper and Bhamati Viswanathan. Brooklyn: Ugly Ducking, 2006. The band-leader, novelist, and all-around scene stealer Boris Vian (1920–59) was everyone who was anyone on the Left Bank after the war. In his 1950 Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (trans. Paul Knoblach, New York: Rizzoli, 2005) the quarter centers on rue Dauphine, “where the sinister Tabou sinks into the entrails of the earth.” There are on-the-scene photos of William Faulkner, Greta Garbo, Orson Welles, Simone de Beauvoir, Anouk Aimée, Buster Keaton, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Django Reinhardt, Richard Widmark, Juliette Gréco leaning out of a rumpled bed to put on a record, and a movie-star handsome Gabriel Pomerand. “Twenty-four years old, almost five feet seven inches tall, shaggy-haired, black eyes, 100 pounds,” Vian writes in a book originally commissioned as a tourist guide, and republished in 1974 and 1997 as an art book. “He has been, in succession, a parasite, a prisoner, a student, a resistance fighter, a writer, a gigolo, and finally a husband. His dream is to be a member of the Académie Française and a billionaire . . .
“Pomerand was one of the more surprising elements at Le Tabou during its heyday of glorious evenings. He had a very personal manner in which he would vociferate his lettrist works in the faces of the spectators, and we would always wonder where that voice came from and if there was enough of it left for him to continue with the next word. Word? Is word the word for it? Are there such things as lettrist words?
“Pomerand is equally known for a series of bogus conferences that he held in the Hall of the Society for Geography. The first, The Advantages of Prostitution, was truly a riot but ended up with the author going to trial because there are always a few moronic and obsessed finks who come to listen to things that they are obviously not cut out for. So they go and register a complaint and because of this one might very well end up in prison, even if the five hundred other members of the audience did have a sense of humor about it. That’s what we call freedom ever since Pope Pius XII took control of the French gov
ernment. Michel Mourre, who perhaps had his fill of listening to the priests on the (so-called) national radio every Sunday, also felt the effects of the present situation and decided he would like to bring his word into their houses. But our freedom at the present moment functions like a one-way street.”
Pomerantz, Marsha. “Back to Chaos.” Jerusalem Post Friday Magazine (16 March 1984). On Marcel Janco’s revival of the Cabaret Voltaire.
Potlatch. Collected as Guy Debord présent Potlatch (1954–1957). Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1996. Nos. 1–29 of the Lettrist International newsletter, plus no. 30 (15 July 1959), with “The Role of Potlatch, Then and Now.” Introduction by Debord.
Public Image Ltd., aka PiL (London). Metal Box (Virgin, 1979). Originally three 12” 45s in a film can; the 1990 reissue offered one CD in a four-and-three-quarter-inch tin: that is, a PiL box.
Quantick, David. “Punky Adventures on the Wheels of Peel.” New Musical Express (London, 15 February 1986). Interview with John Peel.
Raabe, Paul, ed. The Era of German Expressionism, trans. J. M. Ritchie. Dallas: Riverrun, 1980. A richly annotated anthology of testaments, reports, memoirs. Includes Richard Huelsenbeck, “Zurich 1916, as it really was” (1928) a reply to Hugo Ball’s 1927 Flight Out of Time.
Raincoats. “Fairytale in the Supermarket” (Rough Trade, 1979, U.K.). Included on The Raincoats (1979; Geffen, 1997, with notes by Kurt Cobain and Ana da Silva).
Raspaud, Jean-Jacques, and Jean-Pierre Voyer. L’Internationale situationniste: Protagonistes/chronologie/bibliographie (avec un index des noms insultés). Paris: Champ Libre, 1972. Schematic reference.
Reid, Jamie. Up They Rise: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. Poor reproductions in black and white; text by Reid and Jon Savage. Includes Death Culture Stalks the Suburbs, update of Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? There’s a huge skull in Nigel and Cecilia’s split-level living room: “At first it had just been a blurred image on the thick pile carpet, but as the weeks progressed it materialized and solidified behind the crushed velvet pouffe. Nigel: ‘Oh don’t worry about it Cecilia . . . I’m just pretending it’s not there . . . Funny, I almost like having it around.’ Cecilia: ‘But darling, what does it mean? Is it something we’ve done?’ ” Celtic Surveyor—Treasure Isles: More Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid, London: Assorted Images, 1989, repeats many images in rough color.
Richman, Jonathan. “Road Runner,” from Beserkley Chartbusters (Beserkley, 1975). See Lipstick Traces.
Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art (1964). New York: Oxford, 1978.
Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Includes “The Gospel of Truth, 1, 3 (29–30),” trans. George W. MacRae. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1977.
Rosenberg, Harold. “Criticism-Action,” in Act and the Actor (1970). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
______“Surrealism in the Streets,” in The De-Definition of Art (1972). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
The Roxy London WC 2 (Jan-Apr 77) (EMI, 1977, U.K.). Ambient recording: “the complete construction of an atmosphere.” Includes performances by Adverts, Eater, Slaughter and the Dogs, Wire, and X-ray Spex. The Roxy London WC2: A Live Punk Box Set (Castle, 2005, U.K.), the original disc plus five more, includes full sets by the Adverts, where TV Smith sometimes seems to be chasing his own songs like a man on the street chasing a thief, and X-ray Spex, where Lora Logic meanders through Poly Styrene’s songs as if she’s never played before and probably won’t again. She drifts, but pushes the music into its center; she sounds at once completely lost and completely confident.
Sandqvist, Tom. Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire. Cambridge MA: MIT, 2006. See Janco.
Savage, Jon. England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991). Rev. ed. London, Faber and Faber, 2001. Graceful, relentless, from the inside and from the outside: the best book.
______, ed. The Hacienda Must Be Built! Essex, U.K.: International Music Publishers, 1992. A history of the Manchester nightclub. See Wilson, 24 Hour Party People.
______Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture. New York and London: Viking, 2007.
Schneider, Peter. The Wall Jumper, trans. Leigh Hafrey. New York: Pantheon, 1983.
Sex Pistols (London). “Anarchy in the U.K.”/“I Wanna Be Me” (EMI, November 1976, U.K., withdrawn January 1977, reissued). “God Save the Queen”/“No Feelings” (A&M, May 1977, pressed, destroyed). “The week they were all assaulted—beaten, razored—when they truly could not go out except in clandes-tinity—the polarization in England was beyond belief. It was a crunch. There was an enormous support all over England for the Sex Pistols—not just among teenagers, but among very young kids, ten, twelve—and from all sorts of people who were definitely not kids, such as myself—and as well from people who were a good bit older than I: people who really seemed to think that Johnny Rotten was the Antichrist—that out of all this chaos and destruction would come the millennium: the return of the sixties.”—Denis Browne, assistant to Alexander Trocchi, 1983. “God Save the Queen”/“Did You No Wrong” (Virgin, May 1977, U.K.). “Pretty Vacant”/“No Fun (live)” (Virgin, July 1977, U.K.). “Holidays in the Sun”/“Satellite” (Virgin, October 1977, U.K., withdrawn after legal complaints over misappropriation of sleeve art). “When I woke up this morning, to celebrate my birthday, I put on my favorite record: the Sex Pistols. But when ‘Holidays in the Sun’ came on, it struck me—someday, when I have a child, and I want to tell my son or daughter about my favorite record, I’m going to have to explain what the Berlin Wall was.”—Andrew Baumer (1952–2001) of Minimal Man, 6 January 1990. Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols (Virgin, November 1977, U.K., Warner Bros., U.S.). Includes A-sides of singles, plus, among other tracks, “Bodies.” Kiss This (Virgin, 1992, U.K.) includes all official Sex Pistols recordings, including the post-Rotten “My Way” and “Silly Thing” and a July 1977 concert recording; notes by Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock, John Lydon. The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle (1979; Virgin, 1992) includes “Johnny B. Goode” and “Road Runner” with studio dialogue and “Belsen Was a Gas” (recorded 14 January 1978 in San Francisco at the band’s last performance). “What can you say about a 25-year-old legend that died?” Neva Chonin wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003 review headlined “Sex Pistols’ Lydon tries, but can’t revive rage on reunion tour at Warfield.” “That it changed your life, changed music history, hated the Beatles?”
Shattuck, Roger. “Paris Letter.” Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature (Urbana, IL, August 1948). On lettrism and existentialism.
Sheppard, Richard, ed. New Studies in Dada: Essays and Documents. Hutton, Drif-field, U.K.: Hutton, 1979. Notable for Karen Füllner, “The Meister-Dada: The Image of Dada through the Eyes of Richard Huelsenbeck,” numerous obscure and untranslated documents by Huelsenbeck, Baader, and Hausmann, and a lengthy chronology by Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf Kuenzili.
Sid and Nancy, directed by Alex Cox. 1986. Where a phrase like mise-en-scène helps; you need a concept that vague to pretend to know why songs contrived a decade before, sung by actors who off-screen disclaim any feeling for them, can still terrify and thrill. The 1998 Criterion Collection edition includes documentary features with commentary by Gary Oldman, Chloe Webb, Julien Temple, Lech Kowalski, and GM. See D.O.A.
Situationist International (U.K.). Ten Days that Shook the University: The situationists at Strasbourg. London: Situationist Interntional, 1967. Translation of De la misère en milieu étudiant, with introduction, and postscript, “If you make a social revolution, do it for fun.” Illustrations from Le Retour de la colonne Durutti. The Strasbourg events echoed the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley two years earlier; Strasbourg itself was echoed many times in the years immediately following, and then it disappeared—only to reappear, perhaps with its spirit of fun and prank missing, forty-three years later. “Police Arrest 19 at New School Building
,” ran the headline to Colin Moynihan and Sewell Chan’s 10 April 2009 New York Times story on the occupation of a university hall in downtown New York City—part of an unfolding mass protest demanding the resignation of the school president and his deputy. They had no understanding of the radical, dissenting mission that had brought the New School into being, many students insisted; the president, Bob Kerrey, responded that he had brought the New School into the twenty-first century. “Around 7 A.M. several dozen students, standing on the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue, erupted into cheers when several masked people appeared on the roof of 65 Fifth Avenue, waving red and black flags and lifting clenched fists into the air,” the Times report read. “The students on the roof draped banners over the side of the building that read, ‘Kerrey and Murtha resign now!’ . . . As senior police officers and fire officials arrived on the scene the masked students on the roof used a megaphone to address the crowd below. One of the masked figures read a lengthy critique of capitalism and contemporary life, which a student below identified as ‘On the Poverty of Student Life,’ that originated at the University of Strasbourg.” “I thought you’d like to see the maximalist manifestos produced by the New School students who were also quoting Situationist texts at Friday’s ‘occupation,’ ” wrote Jim Miller, a professor at the New School and a leader of the Faculty Senate, which had given the New School president a vote of no confidence. “Their screeds make Guy Debord sound like an old-fashioned rationalist, if you ask me.”
Slash (Los Angeles). 10 and 11 (May and July 1978). Interview with Malcolm McLaren.
Slits. “Once upon a time in a living room” (Y/Rough Trade “official bootleg,” 1980, recorded 1977). Reissued as Official Bootleg (JVC, 2008, Japan).
