Authors: Greil Marcus
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 Richard 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: Vintage, 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.
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.