Authors: Greil Marcus
Bernstein, Michèle.
La Nuit.
Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1961.
______“The Situationist International.”
Times Literary Supplement
(London, 3 September 1964). Collected in
An endless adventure.
______
Tous les chevaux du roi.
Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1960. Reissued Paris: Allia, 2004. Trans. as
All the King’s Horses
by John Kelsey. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008. The folk song “Aux Marches du Palais,” from which the book’s title phrase comes, can be found on Yves Montand,
Chansons Populaires de France par Yves Montand
(Columbia, 1963/1992). See Debord, “The Situationists and the New Action Forms in Politics and Art.”
Berréby, Gérard, ed.
1948–1957: Documents relatifs à la fondation de l’Internationale situationniste.
Paris: Allia, 1985. Anthology including most lettrist publications by LI members; all LI publications; Asger Jorn,
Pour la Forme
(1958); and color facsimile of Jorn and Guy-Ernest Debord,
Fin de Copenhague
(1957). Courtesy Donald Nicholson-Smith. See also Jorn,
Potlatch, Les Lèvres Nues.
______
Textes et Documents Situationnistes 1957–1960.
Paris: Allia, 2004. Fugitive pieces, art, and text collages along with material from early numbers of the journal
Internationale situationniste.
Berry, Chuck. “Johnny B. Goode” (Chess, 1958). “Johnny B. Goode,” alternate take with studio dialogue (1957), on
Rock ’n’ Roll Rarities
(Chess, 1986/1991).
Bertrand, André. See Association fédérative générale des étudiants de Strasbourg.
Bettelheim, Bruno.
Surviving and Other Essays.
New York: Vintage, 1980.
Boomtown Rats (Dublin). “I Don’t Like Mondays” (Columbia, 1980).
Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne.
Bernard, que prétends-tu dans le monde?
(1653). Paris: Allia, 1999. The central passage for Guy Debord: “Bernard, Bernard, disait-il, cette verte jeunesse ne durera pas toujours: cette heure fatale viendra, qui tranchera toutes les espérances trompeueses par une irrévocable sentence; la vie nous manquera, comme un faux ami, au milieu de nos entreprises. Là tous nos beaux desseins tomberont par terre; là s’évanouiront toutes nos pensées. Les riches de la terre, qui, durant cette vie, jouissent de la tromperie d’un songe agréable, s’imaginent avoir de grands biens, s’éveillant tout à coup dans ce grand jour de l’éternité, seront tout étonnés qu’ils se trouveront les mains vides. La mort, cette fatale ennemie, entraînera avec elle tous nous plaisirs et tous nos honneurs dans l’oubli et dans le néant. Hélas! on ne parle que de passer le temps. Le temps passe en effet, et nous passons avec lui; et ce qui passe à mon égard par le moyen du temps qui s’écoule, entre dans l’éternité qui ne passe pas; et tout se ramasse dan le trésor de la science divine qui ne passe pas. O Dieu éternel! quel sera notre étonnement, lorsque le judge sévère qui préside dans l’autre siècle, où celui-ci nous conduit malgré nous, nous représentant en un instant toute notre vie, nous dira d’une voix terrible: Insensés que vous êtes, qui
avez tant estimé les plaisirs qui passent, et qui n’avez pas considéré la suite qui ne passe pas!” “Bernard, Bernard, he said, this green youth will not last forever: the fatal hour must come when all beguiling hopes are dashed by a judgment without reprieve; like an untrue friend life will fail us in the midst of our enterprises. Then all our fine plans will come to dust; then all our thoughts will vanish away. The rich of the earth who during this life bathe in the illusion of a pleasant dream and suppose themselves the owners of grand assets will awake all of a sudden in the bright light of eternity quite astonished to find their hands empty. Death, that lethal enemy, will drag off all our joys and honors with it into oblivion and nothingness. Alas! we speak only of passing the time. But verily, time passes, and we pass with it; and everything pertaining to me that passes by virtue of time’s flowing away enters eternity, which passes not away; and everything is gathered into the storehouse of divine knowledge, which passes not away. Oh Everlasting God! how great will be our astonishment at the moment when the severe judge who presides over the other time into which he escorts us willy-nilly, confronting us in an instant with the whole span of our life, tells us in a terrible voice: How deluded are you, so highly to have esteemed joys that pass, yet to have paid no heed to what is to follow and will never end!” Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, 2009.
Bourseiller, Christophe.
Vie et Mort de Guy Debord.
Paris: Plon, 1999. Careful.
Bracken, Len.
Guy Debord
—
Revolutionary.
Venice, CA: Feral House, 1997. An attempt to live up to the name of its publisher.
Brau, Eliane.
Le Situationnisme ou la nouvelle internationale.
Paris: Debresse, 1968. Commentary on Lettrist International by a participant.
Brau, Jean-Louis.
Cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi! Histoire du mouvement révolutionnaire étudiant en Europe.
Paris: Albin Michel, 1968. Extensive discussion of lettrist movement and LI by a participant. Includes Front de la jeunesse, “Notre Programme,” as appendix.
______“Instrumentation verbale” (Achèle, 1965, France). Courtesy Larry Wendt. See also Chopin, Dufrêne,
Lipstick Traces,
Wolman.
Brown, Bernard E.
Protest in Paris: Anatomy of a Revolt.
Morristown, NJ: General Learning, 1974. Brown begins by reading the walls of Paris during May ’68; there was a version of his history in “Hillary’s Class,” on the women of Wellesley
’69
facing the devil’s choice between career and family—a
Frontline
documentary that aired on PBS on 15 November 1994. The ground opened up straight off, at commencement ceremonies: Republican senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the main speaker, had just concluded his remarks on student protest (“a perversion of democratic privilege”) when Hillary Rodham, the first Wellesley student chosen to address her own class, stepped up in turn. In a gesture familiar from years to come, she put aside her speech and talked back: “As
the French student wrote on the wall of the Sorbonne, ‘Demand the Impossible.’ We will settle for nothing less.”
Buster, Prince.
Judge Dread Featuring Prince Buster
—
Jamaica’s Pride
(Melodisc, c. 1965, U.K.). Includes Judge Dread trilogy: “Judge Dread,” “The Appeal,” and “Judge Dread Dance” (“Barrister Pardon”).
Buzzcocks (Manchester).
Spiral Scratch
(New Hormones, 1977, U.K., recorded 1976). Reissued 2000 (Mute, U.K.).
Time’s Up
(Mute, 2000): full set of “No re-mix demos, All recorded live, No dubs . . . One afternoon, October 1976, 4 Track, Cost ‘about £45.’ ” Includes “Lester Sands (Drop in the Ocean),” a blind retrieval of Ranter heresies (“Every creature is God,” it was written in 1646, “every creature that hath life and breath being an efflux of God, and shall return to God again, be swallowed up in him as a drop in the ocean”), and covers of the Troggs’ 1966 “I Can’t Control Myself” and Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s 1970 “I Love You Big Dummy.” With compendious scrapbook, including chief songwriter and vocalist Howard Devoto’s statement on leaving the band in 1977 (“I don’t like most of this new wave music. I don’t like music. I don’t like movements. Despite all that, things still have to be said. But I am not confident of Buzzcocks’ intention to get out of the dry land of new waveness to a place from which these things could be said. What was once unhealthily fresh is now a clean old hat”), a 1977 interview with Devoto (“The hero” of the songs, Devoto says, “is well and truly fucked up and like all profound and fucked up heroes wants to cajole others into getting in on the act too.” “Who are you thinking of in particular? Iggy Pop? Van Morrison?” “No. Des Esseintes, Dostoyevsky’s underground man or any of them existentialists.” “And ‘Boredom’?” “Well, I don’t get bored by myself, though other people have an amazing capacity to do it for me. So I had to stretch myself a bit”), and video of the Buzzocks’ first performance, at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, July 1976; notes by GM. See also
24 Hour Party People
(Winterbottom), where Devoto appears as a men’s room attendant.
Chopin, Henri, ed.
Du Revue-Disque 33
(Multi-Techniques, 1968, France). Ultra-lettrist sound poetry, including Gil J Wolman, “Mégapneumes 67, ‘La Mé-moire.’ ” Courtesy Larry Wendt. See Wolman.
Chtcheglov, Ivan.
Écrits retrouvés,
ed. Jean-Marie Apostolidès and Boris Donné. Paris: Allia, 2006. Including the complete, original version of “Formulary for a New Urbanism” (1953; English translation by Ken Knabb at
bopsecrets.org
), other visionary essays, asylum letters, and color reproductions of paintings, drawings, and collages 1950–1956. See Apostolidès and Donné.
Clanton, Jimmy. “Go, Jimmy, Go,” with studio dialogue, on
The Ace Story Volume Two
(Ace, 1980, U.K., recorded 1959).
Clark, Larry.
Teenage Lust: An Autobiography.
New York, 1983.
______
Tulsa.
New York, 1971.
Clark, T. J.
The Painting of Modern Life
(1984). New York: Knopf, 1984. See McDonough (Clark, Nicholson-Smith).
The Clash (London). “White Riot”/“1977.”
The Clash.
“Complete Control” (all CBS, 1977, U.K.). “White Riot,” “1977,” and “Complete Control” collected on
The Singles,
which also includes the broken, blindingly passionate “This Is England” (CBS, U.K., 1985), where the country Joe Strummer and his bandmates once tried to remake turns its back on them.
Cohn, Nik.
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: Pop from the Beginning,
rev. ed. London: Paladin, 1972. Originally published 1969 as
Pop from the Beginning
(U.K.) and
Rock from the Beginning
(U.S.).
Cohn, Norman.
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages
(1957), rev. ed. New York: Oxford, 1970. Includes appendix of numerous Ranter texts. “Conclusion” of 2nd ed. (London: Mercury, 1962), which differs significantly from this edition, was also used; courtesy Paul Thomas.
Les fantatiques de l’Apocalypse,
as the situationists knew the book, was published in France in 1962.
Conner, Bruce.
Mabuhay Gardens.
Düsseldorf: NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft, 2006. From 1978, photographs of Bay Area punk bands at the San Francisco nightclub that like no other artifacts capture the form as a moment of doubt and possibility, a moment certain to vanish even as it appeared. Conner (1933–2008): “There would always be a certain amount of tension. Just because it’s the first show at that venue, perhaps—but it might be their first show ever. They were doing something new, so they hadn’t codified it, got it rehearsed, were bored with it. Things would go off in directions that perhaps they would never do again. Or the band would disband! And they wouldn’t
be there
anymore. There was one group that performed called Ointment. I thought they were wonderful.” Conner’s photo shows the singer off his feet, his hair standing up, his tie so tight around his collar he seems to be hanging himself. “He kept doing these guillotine-type things: hopping up and down and grabbing his neck. Vale said he thought Ointment was the best punk band he’d ever seen. And they only performed that once.” Introduction by GM.
Coppe, Abiezer.
Selected Writings.
London: Aporia, 1988.
Cortinas (Bristol). “Fascist Dictator” (Step Forward, 1977, U.K.).
Costello, Elvis (London).
This Year’s Model
(Columbia, 1978).
Croce, Arlene.
The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book.
New York: Dutton, 1972.
Curtay, Jean-Paul.
La Poèsie lettriste.
Paris: Seghers, 1974. Includes appendices with poems by major lettrists.
Dada Almanach,
ed. Richard Huelsenbeck. Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1920. Facsimile edition, New York: Something Else Press, 1966. The English edition, trans. Malcolm
Green et al. London: Atlas, 1993, is burdensomely annotated, with an ugly design incorporating a warehouse’s worth of extraneous additional material—but almost a century’s worth of paranoid delusions of grandeur have not quite recovered the language (let alone the frame of reference) Walter Mehring found in Berlin for “Revelations”: “The First DADA dynasty will replace immediately the maxim: lay it on hard! in every school, on kitchen and chamber pots, above museums etc. Since its Balkan division (Hausmann-Tzara) began the Albanian interregnum in collaboration with the Viennese
Bankverein
and the Italian
Banca Commerciale,
and launched its missionary activities among the Shiite Bektashiyahs, even simple jobbers at the stock exchange are beginning to realize . . .”
Dada•Anti•Merz: Arp Schwitters Hausmann,
ed. Marc Dachy (Sub Rosa, 2005, EEC). Includes fourteen dada poems by Hans Arp, recorded 1961; seven 1919–1920 Hausmann sound poems, including the letter-poems “bbb” and “fmsbw,” recorded 1956 and 1957, and “Soundreel,” recorded 1959, plus the 1947 “Imaginary Interview with the Lettrists.”
Dada for Now: A Collection of Futurist and Dada Soundworks
(Ark, 1985, U.K.). Includes contemporary recreations by Trio Exvoco of Hugo Ball sound poems and their riotous version of the Huelsenbeck-Janco-Tzara “L’Amiral cherche une maison à louer” (all composed 1916).
“Dada ist global. Ist Dada auch local?”
Tages-Anzeiger,
Zurich, 16 March 2002. On the announcement by Swiss Life, then owner of 1 Spiegelgasse, of its intent to convert the Teen and Twenty disco on the site of the Cabaret Voltaire into shops, sixty young people, dressed in their most reputable and disreputable costumes, occupied the space. They painted their faces white, or put on masks, and, for the
Tages-Anzeiger
photographer, held black strips over their eyes, precisely as one would hold up a disposable camera, but without hiding their grins. The occupation lasted three months, during which the present-day dadaists put on poetry readings, plays, and films. After their eviction by police, Swiss Life reached an agreement with the city of Zurich to reopen the spot as the Cabaret Voltaire, with a shop, a museum, and a wildly decorated nightclub that hosted bands, poets, and performance artists of all kinds: Dada Haus. In 2008, the right-wing People’s Party forced a referendum on the public funding of the site—this following notice of a performance in which a sex therapist was to cast prospective sex slaves for her female clients. “Zurich’s not gaga. No taxes for dada” was the People’s Party slogan. The referendum was defeated, with the result that the city of Zurich guaranteed funding through 2011. As Huelsenbeck, Hausmann, and Baader put it in 1919, “Dada is the only savings bank that pays interest in eternity.”