Lipstick Traces (64 page)

The Dada Reader,
ed. Dawn Ades, trans. Ades et. al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Writings from dada journals, including
Cabaret Voltaire,
Zurich,
1916 (Ball, “Editorial,” Emmy Hemmings, “Morphine,” Huelsenbeck and Tzara, “Dialogue between a Coachman and a Swallow”);
Dada 3,
Zurich, 1918 (Huelsenbeck, “The Work of Hans Arp”);
Dada 4–5,
Zurich, 1919 (Hausmann, “Latest News from Germany”);
Club Dada,
Berlin, 1918 (Huelsenbeck, “Foreword to the History of the Age”);
Der Dada 1,
Berlin, 1919 (Baader, Hausmann, Huelsenbeck, Tzara, “Year 1 of World Peace,” Huelsenbeck, Hausmann, Baader, “Put Your Money in Dada” aka “Invest in Dada!” see Lippard);
Der Dada 2,
Berlin, 1919 (“Join Dada”);
Der Dada 3,
Berlin, 1920 (Hausmann, “DADA in Europe”);
Dadaco,
Munich, composed 1920, unpublished (“What is Dada”). See also
Dada Zeitschriften.
Hamburg: Nautilus, 1978, facsimile reproductions of German dada journals, including
Club Dada
and
Der Dada.

Davidson, Steef.
The Penguin Book of Political Comcis,
trans. Hester and Marianne Velmans. New York: Penguin, 1982. Includes numerous situationist,
King Mob Echo,
and situationist-influenced comics and cartoons.

Debord, Guy (-Ernest).
Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici
(1985). Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Trans. Robert Greene as
Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici.
Los Angeles: Tim Tam, 2001. “Debord’s patron and friend Gérard Lebovici—a French film producer whom [Debord] met in 1971—not only supported Debord’s work by financing what was effectively a Situationist press, Editions Champ Libre, he also bought a cinema—the Studio Cujas in St. Germain—which projected Debord’s cinematographic production on a continuous and exclusive basis. This lasted only through 1984, however, when following the mysterious and still unsolved murder of Lebovici in a parking garage off the Champs Elysées, Debord withdrew his films in a gesture of protest and mourning classically situationist in its decisiveness. Incensed by the murder of his friend and by the manner in which the press reported it [in effect, blaming it on Debord as “bad company” and spuriously linking Debord to the French terrorist group Action directe—accusations over which Debord sued
L’Humanité,
the Communist Party daily,
Minute,
a rightist daily, and the national
Journal du Dimanche
for libel, and won], he then wrote [a book] in which he announced that ‘the outrageous manner in which the newspapers have discussed [Lebovici’s] assassination has led me to decide that none of my films will ever be shown again in France. This absence will be the most fitting homage’ ”—Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord”; in McDonough and Sussman.

Debord’s last book completed before his suicide on 30 November 1994 was
Les Contrats,
Cognac: Les Temps qu’il fait, 1995. “Published a few weeks after his death . . . The book consists only of three contracts passed between Debord and [Lebovici] . . . They are remarkable because they are totally unbalanced, Lebovici owing everything to Debord (especially money), whereas Debord had
almost no obligations. The last contract is actually for a film about Spain for which Debord was already paid, though he had never made and probably never even intended to make it. The purpose of this strange book was on the one hand to acknowledge Lebovici’s generosity, which goes beyond any form of contract . . . And on the other hand, its purpose is to show that until the end and beyond Debord remained free of any duty, obligation, or debt, free to transmit nothing (not even a film). It is even possible to consider this little book the last chapter of Debord’s much more famous
Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes.
Debord’s first step as a filmmaker in 1952 was a movie without pictures . . . But this last step is even more radical: it is not only a film without pictures but a film that has never been realized, which has only a strange contractual or more exactly a noncontractual existence, a film replaced, so to speak, by friendship”—Vincent Kaufmann, “The Lessons of Guy Debord,”
October,
no. 115 (Winter 2006).

In a letter to Levin in 1987, Debord replied to the question of whether his films might still be screened outside France: “Never again, and nowhere.” But see below.

______
Contre le cinéma.
Aarhaus, Denmark: Institute scandinave de vandalisme comparé, 1964. Scripts of Debord’s first three films with visual descriptions and technical notes, plus Asger Jorn’s startling introduction, “Guy Debord et le problème de maudit.”

______
Correspondance,
vols. 1–7. Paris: Fayard, 1999–2008. Vol. 1 trans. by Stuart Kendall and John McHale as
Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957–August 1960).
Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009.

______
Le marquis de Sade a des yeux de fille.
Paris: 2004, Fayard. Color facsimiles of art letters—experiments in collage, deconstruction, word-magic—from Debord to his friend Hervé Falcou, from 1949 to 1953, and in 1953 to Ivan Chtcheglov: the self-invention of a teenage dadaist. Courtesy Alice Debord.

______
Oeuvres,
ed. and annotated by Jean-Louis Rancon with Alice Debord. Paris: Gallimard, 2006. A 1,902-page volume collecting all of Debord’s books (other than
Fin de Copenhague,
and with
Mémoires
in black and white), including several not noted here, screenplays, virtually all published and unpublished essays (including “Histoire de l’Internationale lettriste,” 1956), all originally unsigned contributions to
Internationale situationniste,
letters dating to 1950, countless autobiographical and illustrative photographs (including one, from Cannes in 1951, with Debord as part of a crowd of eager boys gathered around Elvis Presley, aka Isidore Isou, who radiates glamour from head to foot), collages, detourned maps, historical photographs, and more.

______
Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, 1952–1978
(1978). Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Scripts of Debord’s first five films with visual descriptions. Trans.
as
Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents
by Ken Knabb. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003.

______
Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes
(Gaumont Video, 2005). DVD set of all of Debord’s films:
Hurlements en faveur de Sade
(1952);
Sur le passage de quelques personnes à traverse une assez courte unité des temps
(1959);
Critique de la séparation
(1961);
La Société du Spectacle
(1973);
Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu’hostile, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film “La Société du Spectacle”
(1975);
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
(1978); with Brigitte Cornand,
Guy Debord, son art et son temps
(1995, screened for the first time shortly after Debord’s suicide). The accompanying book includes “L’oeuvre cachée,” an interview with Olivier Assasyas, the filmmaker who supervised the project. For a vivid report on the audience-supplied soundtrack—that is, shouts, curses, cheers, arguments—at a 2009 screening of
Hurlements
at Lincoln Center in New York, see Zack Winestine, “Howls for Guy Debord,”
Film Quarterly
(Summer 2009); for comment on
Sur le passage
and
In girum,
see my “A Brief Affair,”
Artforum
(February 2006). See also Debord,
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni: Edition critique agumentée de notes diverse de l’auteur,
suivi
Ordures et Décombres.
Paris: Gallimard, 1999.

______
Panégyrique
(1989). Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Trans. as
Panegyric
by James Brook. New York and London: Verso, 1991. A critical autobiography in fragments, with a chapter on drunkenness as part of Debord’s life work (on the loss of taste imposed on alcohol by mass production: “No one had ever imagined that he would see drink pass away before the drinker”). Later published in a redundant edition with a second volume of photographs as
Panegyric Volumes 1 & 2,
trans. James Brook and John McHale. New York and London: Verso, 2004. “You Could Catch It,” a review from the
London Review of Books,
25 March 1993, is collected in my
The Dustbin of History.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard, and London: Picador, 1995. For biographies, see Apostolidès, Bourseiller, Bracken, Hussey, Jappe, Kaufmann, and Merrifield.

______
Préface à la quatrième édition italienne de “La Société du Spectacle.”
Paris: Champ Libre, 1979. Trans. Frances Parker and Michael Forsyth as
Preface to the Fourth Italian Edition of “Society of the Spectacle.”
London: Chronos, 1979. An elegy to Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the early fifties, so full of longing the pages seem to fly away as they’re read.

______“The Situationists and the New Action Forms in Politics and Art,” in Internationale situationniste,
Danger Official Secret Destruktion AF RSG 6.
Odense, Denmark: Galerie EXI, 1963. Exhibition catalogue in French, Danish, and English. Included in McDonough and Sussman, but translated from the French, not in the original English. The catalogue also included Michèle Bernstein’s
Victory of the commune of Paris, Victory of the Spanish republicans,
and
Victory
of the great jacquerie of 1358.
Bernstein and Debord had gone to Denmark for the RSG exhibit, inspired by the exposure by British activists of secret sites to which the British government was to be relocated in the event of nuclear war; it included word paintings by Debord, nuclear holocaust paintings by situationist J. V. Martin, and was to have included paintings by situationist Jan Stijbosch. Bernstein, 2009: “But Stijbosch didn’t arrive—I don’t know what happened to him, if he got drunk, fell in love along the way, if he got stuck in the snow—but he didn’t show up, and we needed his work for the exhibit. So Guy and Martin said to me, ‘Art should be made by everyone! Not just by specialists! Michèle, you will do the paintings!’ ‘I am not a painter!’ I said. I am not a painter! So I did the paintings—not really paintings [they were relief-maps with toy soldiers and other figures arrayed across their terrain, according to Debord “a renewal of the battle painting . . . it corrects the revolving of history we arrive at here, this time to the better”]—and sent Guy and Martin out to the store to buy the toys and used the plaster Martin had. The idea of turning the great proletarian defeats into victories—that was all mine.”

______
La Société du Spectacle
(1967). Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith as
The Society of the Spectacle.
New York: Zone, 1993.

______with Asger Jorn.
Mémoires.
Paris: Internationale situationniste, 1959, constructed 1957. Facsimile edition Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert aux Belles Lettres, 1993. “I wanted to speak the beautiful language of my century,” Debord quoted the last line of his book (itself a quote from Baudelaire) in a new preface. “I wasn’t so concerned with being heard.” An inferior edition was published in 2004 by Allia, Paris. See Boris Donné’s illuminating
Pour mémoires: un essai d’élucidation des
Mémoires
de Guy Debord.
Paris: Allia, 2004. See Jorn.

The Decline . . . of Western Civilization.
Directed by Penelope Spheeris. 1980. Includes performance by Darby Crash and the Germs.

De Quincey, Thomas.
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
(1821), ed. Alethea Hayter. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1981.

Dils (Los Angeles). “I Hate the Rich”/“You’re Not Blank” (What, 1977). “Class War”/“Mr. Big” (Dangerhouse, 1977).

D.O.A.
—
A Rite of Passage.
Dir. Lech Kowalski. 1980. The Sex Pistols on tour in the U.S.A. Most famous for the closing smack interview in the Chelsea Hotel with Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungeon, but most indelible for the scenes with Terry, of Terry and the Idiots, a talentless punk performer humiliating himself in front of middle-aged pub-goers, all bets placed on the notion that the freedom punk granted him to speak in public would actually lead him to discover something to say. See
Sid & Nancy.

Drabble, Margaret.
The Ice Age.
New York: Knopf, 1977.

Dufrêne, François, ed.
L’Autonomatopek 1
(Opus International, 1973, France). Includes recordings by Jean-Lous Brau, “Turn Back Nightingale,” Isidore Isou, “Lance rompues pour la dame gothique” (1945), and Gil J Wolman, “Ralentissez les cadences, mégapneume.” Courtesy Larry Wendt. See Brau, Wolman.

Les Enfants du Paradis.
dir. Marcel Carné, screenplay by Jacques Prévert. 1944.

Essential Logic (London). “Wake Up” (Virgin, 1979, U.K.).
Fanfare in the Garden: An Essential Logic Collection
(Kill Rock Stars) collects recordings 1978–1979 (minus the original “Wake Up”; see
Lipstick Traces
) and Lora Logic solo recordings through 1997, plus the 1980 Red Crayola/Art & Language single “Born in Flames,” the title song from Lizzie Borden’s film about feminist revolution. Singing in her highest, most unstable register, Lora steps across the lines of the tune as if she’s tip-toeing over bodies—daintily, and a little crazily. “We are born in flames,” she trills—and then the last word is taken even higher, floating away like a balloon. She turns around—you can hear her reverse position, as if in the studio there’s a mike in front of her and a mike in back—and begins to shout. “Of America’s mysteries, none remain,” she insists, but the mystery of who owns this voice is unsolvable. Words jump in the throat—“brutality,” “we broke the hidden tyranny,” “for which we stand,” “brings us to our knees”—but they fly off the body. Notes by GM. See
The Roxy,
X-ray Spex.

Fairport Convention. “Tale in Hard Time,” on
What We Did on Our Holidays
(Island, 1969). See also
Meet on the Ledge: The Classic Years
(A&M, 1999).

Firesign Theatre.
Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers
(Columbia, 1970).