Authors: Greil Marcus
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).
Spellman, Benny. “Lipstick Traces (On a Cigarette)” (Minit, 1962).
Spencer, Neil, and Paul Rambali. “Malcolm and Bernard: Rock ’n’ Roll Scoundrels.”
New Musical Express
(London, 9 August 1980). Interviews with Malcolm McLaren and Bernard Rhodes.
Straram, Patrick.
Les bouteilles se couchant: Fragments retrouvés et présentés de Jean-Marie Apostolidès et Boris Donné.
Paris: Allia, 2006. Pieces of a Moineau’s novel by a Canadian member of the Lettrist International, with all the characters appearing under their real names.
Suburban Press
(London). Nos. 1–6 (1970–1974). Journal on suburbia and consumer life published by Jeremy Brook, Jamie Reid, and Nigel Edwards. Courtesy Jon Savage.
Suicidal Tendencies (Los Angeles). “Institutionalized,” on
Suicidal Tendencies
(Frontier, 1983).
Sussman, Elisabeth.
On the Passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time: The Situationist International 1957–1972.
Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1989. Catalogue of an exhibition (Centre Pomidou, Paris, ICA London, ICA Boston) curated by Peter Wollen, Mark Francis, Elisabeth Sussman, Greil Marcus, and Thomas Y. Levin. Critical essays (including my “Guy Debord’s
Mémoires:
A Situationist Primer”) and translations by Levin, including Debord, “Two Accounts of the Dérive,”
Les Lèvres nues,
no. 9 (1956) and “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art” (1963), and a complete English facsimile version of the matchless situationist panorama, “The World of Which We Speak,”
Internationale situationniste
no. 9 (August 1964).
Theory of the Dérive and other situationist writings on the city,
ed. Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa. Barcelona: Museu d’art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996.
Effectively designed collection of translations of pieces from pre-situationist sources (including Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive” (
Les Lèvres nues
no. 9, 1956),
Internationale situationniste,
and more than three dozen items from
Potlatch,
including Michèle Bernstein’s “Dérive by the Mile,” Gil J Wolman’s “Take the First Street,” Asger Jorn’s “Architecture for Life” (all 1954), and “Plan for Rational Improvements to the City of Paris” (1955).
Thompson, Gudrun. “Manners for Muggings.”
Damage
(San Francisco, June 1981).
Time Zone (New York). “World Destruction” (Celluloid, 1984).
Trocchi, Alexander.
Cain’s Book
(1960). New York: Grove Press, 1992. Foreword by GM.
______
Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader,
ed. Andrew Murray Scott. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991. Including the title manifesto, originally published as “Technique du coupe du monde” in
Internationale situationniste,
no. 8 (January 1963). See also Andrew Murray Scott,
Alexander Trocchi: The Making of the Monster.
Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991, and
A Life in Pieces: Reflections on Alexander Trocchi,
ed. Allan Campbell and Tim Niel. Edinburgh: Rebel/Canongate, 1997.
______
Sigma Portfolio.
London: Sigma, 1965. Twenty-six items assembled by Trocchi, including his “Potlatch—An Interpersonal Log” (1964).
______
Young Adam
(1954). London: John Calder, New York: Riverrun, 1983. See also
Young Adam,
dir. David Mackenzie (2003).
Tucholsky, Kurt. “Danton’s Death.” See Willett.
24 Hour Party People,
dir. Michael Winterbottom. 2002. A hilarious, wrenching fictional film about Factory Records, with unforgettable restagings of the first Sex Pistols show in Manchester and Joy Division doing “Louie Louie.” See Wilson.
The Twenties in Berlin: Johannes Baader, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch.
London: Anneley Juda Fine Art, 1978. Includes interview with Vera Broido-Cohn on Baader.
USA for Africa. “We Are the World” (Columbia, 1985).
van der Elsken, Ed.
Love on the Left Bank.
London: Andre Deutsch, 1956. Reissued Stockport, U.K.: Dewi Lewis, 1999, with van der Elsken’s other Moineau’s photographs, collected in
Parijs!
(below), dropped in, thus destroying the book’s original form as a photo novel. With Dali Myers as the iconic Ann, whose face traveled the world. Rod McKuen used a painting based on one of van der Elsken’s Myers images for the sleeve of his 1959 album
Beatsville
(Stanyan, 1998), a satire of San Francisco bohemianism that has its moments (the reissue includes McKuen’s notorious 1959 “The Beat Generation,” which in 1977 Richard Hell turned into “The Blank Generation”). Myers looks out alluringly from an ab-ex background as Rod, inhabiting one of van der Elsken’s
Moineau’s shots, gazes into his wine glass as if it’s the last stop in his journey to the end of the night.
______
Parijs! Foto’s-1950–1954.
Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1981. Everything was in place for transformation into cliché—sex, drugs, violence, poverty, bad art (you can catch a similar spirit in Astrid Kirchherr’s photos of the Beatles in Hamburg, half in the grunge of their Reeperbahn nightclubs, half in her existentialisten milieu)—but also movement, tension, the unknown. Looking at the way people stand, shout, or pass out, you can feel the blank sense of freedom that followed the war all over the west compressed into this one shabby bar and nobody there having the slightest idea of what to do with it. Or almost nobody: in one picture, at one table, a few youthful megalomaniacs—among them Serge Berna, Michèle Bernstein, and Jean-Michel Mension, who are visible, and Guy Debord, who isn’t—were working on the problem. And you can feel that, too. See also
Ed van der Elsken: Long Live Me!
ed. Bas Vroege, Anneke van der Elsken-Hilhorst, and Flip Bool, Edam, Netherlands: Paradox, 1997, for essays on van der Elsken’s photography and films, notably Thomas Honickel’s “Go and Get Your Pictures!” focusing on van der Elsken’s Paris work.
Vanderhaeghe, Guy.
My Present Age.
New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1985.
Vaneigem, Raoul.
The Movement of the Free Spirit: General Considerations and First-Hand Testimony Concerning Some Brief Flowerings of Life in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and, Incidentally, Our Own Time
(1986), trans. Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson. New York: Zone, 1994. Or, as Patrick Buchanan put it on 8 May 1998, in a blog titled “How Does This Guy Survive”: “As one Leo Hodge wrote in a January letter to The Wall Street Journal, the Zeitgeist of the Clinton era can be found in antinomianism, the Christian heresy ‘that one is exempt from socially established moral standards by virtue of the state of grace conferred by one’s faith in a belief system. In 14th century Europe, the Brethren of the Free Spirit (aka Beghards) flaunted both moral law and church doctrine because their exalted status as saved Christians raised them above the rank of ordinary mortals. Under the special dispensations claimed by the Brethren, sex and theft seemed to head the list.’
“Among today’s secularized moral arbiters, a leader’s character is judged less on how he conducts his private life than where he stands on public issues. Enlist in all the enlightened causes—gay rights, abortion rights and so on—and one gets a pass in his private sins.
“Antinomian ‘decadence,’ writes Hodge, ‘can be “justified” if one has been consecrated in some sect of egalitarian religion.’ And the mark of the elect is ‘conspicuous compassion,’ a demonstrated capacity to feel another’s pain.
“Many marvel that Clinton shows no remorse or shame at the most tawdry of revelations that would embarrass and humiliate most men. But a sense of shame is the other side of the coin of a set of moral beliefs. Perhaps Clinton
exhibits no shame, because, in his own code and heart, he has done no wrong and is but an innocent martyr to the malice of the unenlightened.
“ ‘The antinomian true believer,’ writes Hodge, ‘replaces morality with the pieties of his belief system, and no longer recognizes any obligation to abide by the rules established to make a communal existence possible.’
“Anybody got a better explanation?”
_______
Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations
(1967), 2nd ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith as
The Revolution of Everyday Life.
Seattle: Left Bank, and London: Rebel, 1983.
Vargas Llosa, Mario.
The War at the End of the World,
trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984.
Ventura, Michael.
Shadow Dancing in the U.S.A.
Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1985.
Vermorel, Fred.
Vivienne Westwood: Fashion, Perversity, and the Sixties Laid Bare.
London: Bloomsbury, 1996.
______and Judy Vermorel.
The Sex Pistols: The Inside Story
(1978, 1981), rev. ed. London: Omnibus, 1987.
Viénet, René.
Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations.
Paris: Gallimard,1986. Narrative with numerous documents and illustrations. Abridged ed. trans. as
Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, France, May ’68.
London: Rebel, Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992.
Les Visiteurs du Soir.
Dir. Marcel Carné, screenplay by Jacques Prévert, 1942.
Vollmer, Jurgen.
Rock
’n’
Roll Times: The Style and Spirit of the Early Beatles and Their First Fans.
New York: Google Plex, 1981. Photographs from Hamburg and Paris.
Walker, Benjamin.
Gnosticism: Its History and Influence.
Wellborough, North-hamptonshire, U.K.: Antiquarian, 1983.
Warner Communications. “Entertainment—An Essential Part of Life,” in
Annual Report.
New York: Warner Communications, 1977. Courtesy Bruce McGregor.
Wenner, Jann. “Peter Townshend” (1968).
Rolling Stone
(San Francisco), 17 & 18 (14 & 28 September 1968). Collected in
The Rolling Stone Interviews.
New York: Paperback Library, 1971.
Willett, John.
Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety, 1917–1933.
New York: Pantheon, 1978. Includes Kurt Tucholsky, “Danton’s Death.”
Williamson, Sonny Boy. “Little Village,” with studio dialogue, on
Bummer Road
(Chess, 1970, recorded 1957).
Wilson, Edmund. “Night Thoughts in Paris, 1922,” in Loren Baritz, ed.,
Sources of the American Mind,
vol. 2. New York: John Wiley, 1966.
______
To the Finland Station.
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972.
Wilson, Tony.
24 Hour Party People: What the Sleeve Notes Never Tell You.
London: Channel 4, 2002. See Savage,
24 Hour Party People.
Wire. “I am the Fly” (Harvest, 1978, U.K.).
Live at the Roxy—April 1st & 2nd 1977 / Live at CBGB Theatre, New York—July 18th 1978
(pinkflag, 2006).
On Returning (1977–1979
) (Restless, 1989).
The Scottish Play: 2004
(pinkflag, 2004). At the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco in 2000 they were pure punk in shape and attack—punk as wish, as what it could be, as ideal—but without any baggage as to clothes, attitude, history. Never big stars, they carried nothing more than their old or young-looking selves and their sound onto the stage. Expressions were dour; movement was minimal. Colin Newman, Robert Gotobed, B. C. Gilbert, and Graham Lewis played as if they had invented punk—or stumbled on it the day before, as if their project was so conceptual it was over before it began. Doubt and nervousness underlay every tune. The cryptic invitations of the words—even if you caught little more than titles (“I am the Fly,” “Dot Dash,” “French Film [Blurred]”)—suggested code.