Lipstick Traces (62 page)

Soon enough, the battle was resolved—won—in a great, formal debate by professors over rules and regulations. The rules were changed, and everyone went back to real life. But though the Free Speech Movement would occasionally be cited in years to come as a harbinger of the storm of protest that swept the campuses of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a prefiguration of the protest against the Vietnam War, in fact the event, its spirit, in which people acted not for others but for themselves, with no sense of distance or separation, completely disappeared, as if it had never been.

For better or worse—it wasn’t my choice—this event formed a standard against which I’ve judged the present and the past ever since. Even though the event left nothing behind one could touch—no monuments, not even a plaque—I never got over it. Time passed and I tried to hold on to it, as an incomplete but indelible image of good public life. As an image it reappeared
in different shapes, in different times. I recognized it from afar in May ’68, when, in my own town, the open discourse and experimental action of the Free Speech Movement had long since been transformed into ideology and manipulation: during a Berkeley demonstration held in solidarity with the rioters in Paris, activists mistakenly distributed the leaflets denouncing the atrocities committed that night by the local police an hour or so before the police showed up. So I looked back, wanting more of what I’d briefly seen, seeking an anchor, and recognized the public life of a few years before in accounts of what revolutionary councils had been like in Petrograd in 1917, Berlin in 1918, Hungary in 1956—but reading the books, the event I’d been part of seemed almost as old.

I recognized this public life in punk—right away, with no idea why. As a fan I felt the way John Peel felt as a disc jockey: shocked. After so much had happened, after so much had stopped so fast, after so little had happened for so long, it felt as if the sound were coming from another planet, it seemed so remarkable that it was happening at all. But as I looked into this new event, the shock doubled. The event was a strand in a real tradition, partly grasped by its many authors, mostly not; the tradition had its own imperatives, which operated in a manner independent of what anyone might choose to make of them.

I found a tale composed of incomplete sentences, voices cut off or falling silent, tired repetitions pressing on in search of novelties, a tale of recapitulations staged again and again in different theaters—a map made altogether of dead ends, where the only movement possible was not progress, not construction, but ricochet and surprise. And so, pursuing this story, when I finally came across Debord’s homily on the ephemeral, his theory of “situations without a future,” I was drawn to it as I had been drawn to the noise in punk: to his frank and determined embrace of moments in which the world seems to change, moments that leave nothing behind but dissatisfaction, disappointment, rage, sorrow, isolation, and vanity.

This is the secret the Sex Pistols didn’t tell, which they only acted out: the moment in which the world seems to change is an absolute, the absolute of passing time, which is made of limits. For those who want everything, there is finally no action, only an endless, finally solipsistic reckoning. Thus Debord, over and over, quoting that sentimental line of Bossuet’s, “Bernard,
Bernard, this bloom of youth will not last forever”—words that, combined with those that follow them (which, once, out of all the times he used the phrase, Debord also quoted), are not sentimental at all. “Bernard, Bernard, this bloom of youth will not last forever,” Bossuet said to the dead saint. “The fatal hour will come—the fatal hour, which, with an inexorable sentence, will cut short all false hopes. On our own ground, life will fail us like a false friend. The wealthy of this earth, who lead a life of pleasure, who imagine themselves to possess great things, will be astonished to find their hands empty.”

There is a hint of transformation here, of resentment, leading—who knows where? There is the certainty of failure: all those who glimpse possibility in a spectral moment become rich, and though they remain so, they are ever after ever more impoverished. That is why, as I write, Johnny Rotten is a pop star who cannot make his fans forget the Sex Pistols, why Guy Debord writes books about his past, why the Hacienda is a nightclub in Manchester, England, and why, a few years before he died, Dr. Charles R. Hulbeck again became Huelsenbeck, left the U.S.A., and went back to Switzerland, hoping to rediscover what he’d found there more than fifty years before (not believing for a minute that he would), trying, he said, “to go back to some kind of chaos,” half-convinced that “liberty really never existed anywhere.”

If all of this seems like a lot for a pop song to contain, that is why this story is a story, if it is. And it is why any good punk song can sound like the greatest thing you ever heard, which it does. When it doesn’t, that will mean the story has taken its next turn.

This book does not pretend to be a history of any of the movements it addresses; the sometimes annotated list that follows does not provide anything like a comprehensive or even schematic bibliography, discography, or filmography of those movements. It is meant simply to keep the record straight—though, given the vast retrieval of Lettrist International and Situationist International writing and filmmaking over the last twenty years, and interesting commentary on it, and new and continuing work by and about dadaists and punk performers, that list is richer now than I could have ever imagined it might be, and in this section I have tried to keep up.

Films are listed by title, with the name of the director following, except when the director is a principal in the story I’ve attempted to tell, when films are listed by that person’s name. Recordings are listed by artist, with label and date of original release in parentheses; singles are noted in quotation marks, with albums and eps italicized; punk performers are noted by home town; in many cases only original releases are cited. Interviews from which short quotes from punk performers have been taken are generally not listed here, nor are daily newspaper reports.

Adorno, Theodor.
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life
(1951), trans. G. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1978.

Adverts (London). “One Chord Wonders”/“Quickstep” (Stiff, 1977, U.K.). “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes”/“Bored Teenagers” (Bright/Anchor, 1977, U.K.).
Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts
(Bright/Anchor, 1978, U.K.; augmented reissue, with “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes,” Essential/Castle, 1997, U.K.). Thirty years after the release of the first Adverts album, leader TV Smith put out
In the Arms of My Enemy
(Boss Tuneage). In the video for the single “Clone Town” he looked like someone you’d cross the street to avoid, old, beaten down, muttering to himself, a cannibal of his own rage. “Clone Town” wasn’t Smith’s best new song, but it presented the character he’d made fully: a crank, unwilling to keep his mouth shut, the man with the bad news: “You don’t really want to know how they get those prices so low!” he sang in a battering refrain, the phrase taking
on another exclamation point with every repetition—but you do, you do. See
The Roxy.

Ambler, Eric.
Cause for Alarm
(1938). Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1961.

An endless adventure . . . an endless passion . . . an endless banquet: A situationist scrapbook,
ed. Iwona Blazwick. London: ICA/Verso, 1989. Catalogue of the London installation of the exhibition “On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972.” Includes translations from
Internationale situationniste
and
Potlatch,
Michèle Bernstein’s 1964
Times Literary Supplement
essay “The Situationist International,” Alexander Trocchi’s “Invisible insurrection of a million minds,” excerpts from
Heatwave
and
King Mob Echo,
Sex Pistols documents (Malcolm McLaren’s 1978 “manifesto,” signed Oliver Twist: “They are Dickinsenian-like urchins with ragged clothes and pock-marked faces roaming the streets of foggy gas-lit London pillaging . . . This true and dirty tale has been continuing throughout 200 years of teenage anarchy and so in 1978 there still remains the Sex Pistols. Their active extremism is all they care about because that’s
what counts to jump right out of the 20th century as fast as you
possibly can in order to create an environment that you can
truthfully run wild in”).
See Bernstein,
Heatwave, King Mob Echo,
Trocchi.

Anscombe, Isabelle.
Punk.
New York: Urizen, 1978. Unique for its gallery of photos of London punks posing on the street—or hiding in plain sight.

Apostolidès, Jean-Marie.
Les Tombeaux de Guy Debord,
précédé de
Portrait de Guy-Ernest en jeune libertin.
Paris: Exils Editeur, 1999. According to one who would know, capturing its subject more acutely than any other book.

______and Boris Donné.
Ivan Chtcheglov: Portrait Perdu.
A strikingly designed and illustrated biography. See Chtcheglov.

Arendt, Hannah. “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” (1945), in
The Jew as Pariah,
ed. Ron Feldman. New York: Grove, 1978.

Arp, Jean (Hans). “Dadaland” (1938–1962), in
Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays, Memories,
ed. Marcel Jean, trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Viking, 1972.

______and Richard Huelsenbeck,
Dada in Zürich,
ed. Peter Schifferli. Zurich: Sansouci, 1966. See also
Dada•Anti•Merz.

Ascherson, Neal.
The Polish August: The Self-Limiting Revolution.
New York: Viking, 1981.

Association fédérative générale des étudiants de Strasbourg.
De la misère en milieu étudiant, considéré sous ses aspects économique, sexuel et notamment intellectuel et de quelques moyens pour y remédier.
Strasbourg: AFGES, 1966. Reprinted Paris: Champ Libre, 1977. See Situationist International (U.K.).

——Le Retour de la colonne Durutti.
Strasbourg: AFGES, 1966. André Bertrand’s comic strip as fold-out pamphlet. Courtesy Steef Davidson. Included in
full in
Lipstick Traces: une histoire secrète du vingtième siécle,
Paris: Allia, 1998, and in many situationist collections and commentaries.

Atkins, Guy.
Asger Jorn: The Crucial Years, 1954–1964.
London: Lund Humphries, 1977.

Au Pairs (Birmingham). “You”/“Kerb Crawler” (021, 1979, U.K.). Collected on Au Pairs,
Stepping Out of Line: The Anthology
(Castle, U.K., 2006—recordings from 1979 through 1983).
Equal But Different: BBC Sessions 1979–1981
(RMP, 1994, U.K.).

Auster, Paul.
In the Country of Last Things.
New York: Viking, 1987.

——The Locked Room.
Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1986.

Ball, Hugo,
Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary
(1927,
Die Flucht aus der Zeit),
ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (1974). Berkeley: California, 1996. See Raabe.

______“Tenderenda the Fantasist” (1914–20). Collected in
Blago Bung Blago Bung Basso Fataka! The First Texts of German Dada by Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Walter Serner,
trans. Malcolm Green et al. London: Atlas, 1995. An allegory of the savior as con man as entertainer, especially in the “The Prophet’s Ascent.” “Verily, nothing is as it seems,” the prophet says; soon he is “dazzled by the bluster of his own words.” He flaps his arms and flies—but the crowd in the city below, gathered to greet “a new God,” responds only with contempt. As with David Cross’s Allen Ginsberg and Cate Blanchett’s Jude dancing before a statue of Christ on the cross in Todd Haynes’s 2007 film
I’m Not There,
with Jude, aka Bob Dylan circa 1966, shouting “Do your early stuff!” the prophet gives in to the calls for his greatest hit: the one trick he’s known for. He produces “the magnifier,” a giant mirror, holds it up to the jeering rabble, and then vanishes as shards of the magic glass “sliced through the houses, slices through the people, the cattle . . . all the unbelievers, so that the count of the gelded mounted from day to day.” There is a blind but coded echo in the Adverts’ 1978 “Great British Mistake”: “I swoop over your city like a bird / I climb the high branches and observe / In the mouth, into the soul / I cast a shadow that swallows you whole / I swoop, I climb, I cling, I suck / I swallow you whole.”

Bataille, Georges. “The Notion of Expenditure,” trans. Allan Stoekl.
Raritan,
no. 3 (Winter 1984). Originally published in
La Critique Sociale
(Paris), no. 7 (January 1933).

Benson, Timothy O.
Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada.
Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987.

Berger, John. “Lost Prophets.”
New Society
(London, 6 March 1975). Review of Christopher Gray,
Leaving the 20th Century.

______and Alain Tanner.
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000,
trans. Michael Palmer. Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1983. Screenplay of 1976 film including interview with director Tanner on May ’68.