Authors: Greil Marcus
Five Million Years to Earth
(U.S.),
Quatermass and the Pit
(U.K.). Directed by Roy Ward Baker, screenplay by Nigel Kneale. 1967. In 1994 director Paul Tickell and scenarist Jon Savage contrived the Arena/BBC television film
Quatermass•Punk and the Pistols•The Pit
—the most corrosive punk performance footage imaginable intercut with uncanny rejoinders and prophecies from the original 1958 BBC version of
Quatermass and the Pit.
Courtesy Michèle Bernstein.
Foster, Stephen C., ed.
Lettrisme: Into the Present,
special issue of
Visible Language
(Cleveland), 17 (Summer 1983).
Fraser, Ronald, ed.
1968: A Student Generation in Revolt
—
An International Oral History.
New York: Pantheon, 1988. For May ’68, the most stirring, quotidian testimony. Donald Nicholson-Smith is among the speakers.
Front de la jeunesse. See Brau, Jean-Louis.
Gang of Four (Leeds). “At Home He’s a Tourist”/“It’s Her Factory” (EMI, 1979, U.K.).
Entertainment!
(EMI, 1979, U.K.). Collected on the anthology
100 Flowers Bloom,
with notes by Jon Savage (Rhino, 1998).
Gillett, Charlie.
The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll
(1970), rev. ed. New York: Pantheon, 1983.
God and the State (Los Angeles).
The Complete Works of God and the State
(Independent Project, 1985, recorded 1983).
Gordon, Kim. “ ‘I’m Really Scared When I Kill in My Dreams.’ ”
Artforum
(January 1983).
Gray, Christopher, ed. and trans.
Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International.
U.K.: Free Fall, 1974. Redesigned edition, London: Rebel Press, 1998.
The Great Rock
’n’
Roll Swindle.
Directed by Julien Temple, screenplay by Malcolm Forger. 1980. With Malcolm McLaren as the man behind the curtain, a deliriously fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols—opening with the London Gordon Riots in 1780 and ending in a porn theater. In 2000 Temple switched sides with the straight but equally acute
The Filth and the Fury,
made for the surviving band members, who, Temple said, had been “scarred for life,” with he as much as anyone responsible for dragging them through “the chemotherapy of fame”—and who had by then won rights to their names, stories, and royalties. There are gestures at social contextualization—an opening collapse-of-England montage—but as Johnny Rotten makes clear, he wasn’t fighting unemployment or corruption or racism or Pink Floyd—he was fighting resignation, in all its forms. He thinks he lost: “I can take on England,” he says of himself and Sid Vicious. “But I couldn’t take on one heroin addict.” Eight years later, Temple went back to home ground with
There’ll Always Be an England: Sex Pistols Live from Brixton Academy / The Knowledge of London: A Sex Pistols Psychogeography.
At the show, an original-line-up reunion from 2007, there seems to be almost as much footage of the audience as of the band, and what’s odd is that you see almost no one holding up a cell phone camera, taking a picture of an event instead of living it out, even if a 30th anniversary show is a picture of another show before it is anything else. Instead people are shouting, jumping up and down, shoving, and most of all singing their heads off. Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock (“You’re a lucky cunt,” Rotten says near the end, “because this is the best band in the world”) find moments they might not have found before. The British tourist song “Beside the Seaside” is sung in full as a lead-in to “Holidays in the Sun”; in the fiercest passages of “God Save the Queen” and “Bodies” a true dada vortex opens up as words lose their meanings and seem capable of generating entirely new ones. But the real fun is in the
Psychogeography
(“The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of
individuals”—
Internationale situationniste,
no.1, June 1958, which is to say a matter of inheritors retrieving ancestors after the fact)—which is the band minus Rotten taking us on a tour of its old haunts. Cook and Matlock look the same as they did in 1976, merely older, but Jones is unrecognizable. On stage he looks like his own bodyguard; here, wrapped in a heavy coat, with dark glasses and a cap pulled down, he could be a mob boss or merely a thug with money in his pocket. The three are touring Soho: “It’s like a fuckin’ Dickens novel,” Jones says, surveying the sex shops, the dubious hotels, the strip clubs they once played (the El Paradiso, they remember, was so filthy they cleaned the place themselves). “I feel like a bucket of piss is going to come flying out the window.” They visit pubs, search for old performance spaces (“Do you know where Notre Dame Hall is? The Sex Pistols did a show there—ever heard of the Sex Pistols?”), and like spelunkers navigate dank hallways until they reach their old rehearsal space and crash pad off Denmark Street. Rotten’s caricatures of the band members are still on the walls, plus “Nanny Spunger” and “Muggerade” (manager Malcolm McLaren by way of Malcolm Muggeridge). There is the outline of a manifesto, words running down a wall:
AWFUL
HEARTACHE
STUPID
MISERY
ILL BOOZE
END DEPT ILL
SICK
DISMAL
“This is where we began to take it seriously,” Glen Matlock says. “If there was half an idea floating around, we was in a position to do something about it.”
Grosz, George.
A Little Yes and a Big No,
trans. Lola Sachs Dorina. New York: Dial, 1946.
Hausmann, Raoul. “Club Dada Berlin, 1918–1921” (26 July 1966), in
Dada Berlin: 1916–1924.
Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. An obscure but invaluable memoir.
______
Courrier Dada
(1958). Paris: Allia, 1992.
______“Dadaism and Today’s Avant-Garde.”
Times Literary Supplement
(London, 3 September 1964).
______
Poèmes phonetiques complètes
(S Press Tapes, West Germany). See
Dada•Anti•Merz, Lipstick Traces,
and especially
Germany-Dada,
directed by Helmut Herbst (Museum without Walls/KVC Entertainment, 1986), with performance by Hausmann of letter poetry.
______
Raoul Hausmann 1886–1971: Der Deustche Spiesser ärgert sich.
Ostfildern-Ruit,
Germany: Museum für Moderne Kunst Photographie und Architektur/Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994. Exhibition catalogue, opening with two 1929 portraits of Hausmann by August Sander. See also Benson.
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.).