Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

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I saw Greil Marcus when I was at Berkeley in the late seventies. I’m not sure whether it was a lecture or just a walk by but ever since, his writing connects me to that place and those years. The compilation also charted within the Top 40 in Finland and Ireland and in Japan the album only managed to peak at number 243.

And from here Marcus embarks for his big dig. Soon after he places side-by-side the Pistols’ safety pin through the queen’s mouth in ’77 perfectly mirroring the Atelier populaire poster of May 1968 of a bandaged head with a safety pin through the mouth (33-34). Kanazawa University Research: Researchers Define a Nanopipette Fabrication Protocol for High Resolution Cell Imaging Slash N' Burn (live at Club Citta, Kawasaki, Japan)" (from Gold Against the Soul (Japanese version)) The device used to link these diverse individuals and movements is the metaphor of the medium; Johnny Rotten is a passive creator whose body is taken over by what Marcus describes as 'the voice,' but which we might just as well call the muse, or God – because it's a higher authority. In his description of the last Sex Pistols concert, Marcus portrays Johnny Rotten as a puppet whose actions are controlled by an occult force:Marcus quotes the musician Paul Westerberg as saying that he became enthralled with the Sex Pistols because “It was obvious that they didn’t know what they were doing and they didn’t care.” That statement is the core belief of all the movements that Marcus explores. He artfully shows that this is not a declaration of nihilism but a striving for liberation from what the Situationists called “The Spectacle.”

The role of temperature has also played a part in the analysis, where the switch from a low temperature of 200ºc to a high 500ºc shows peak shifts and different intensities. Gladysz, et al. have analyzed their results through the chemometric techniques, Cluster analysis, and Principal component analysis. I've been considering re-reading it because I have 2 sons entering into the pre-adolescent period of serious and deliberate consideration over their identity and the means of self expression available to them, either immediate or by proxy. They are artistic and they are kind. They don't like what they see happening around them but they enjoy taking advantage of it. When I first read this I was so excited someone had managed to reasonably accumulate so much of this particular variety of comparative history. I recall being impressed by ideas moving through history, time and again there being such movements toward liberty of self expression. Marcus surveys a catalog of artifacts and ephemera to offer that there is something interesting about patterns of revolutionary symbols and gestures that appear in disparate parts of history. He does not suggest that they are mere coincidence; nor does he posit that they form some sort of intentional or even conscious continuum. These reoccurring phenomena simply provoke us to imagine alternative histories to the one we are accustomed to hearing, and to ask questions of that established history.This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands—demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday life—seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris—based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and ’60s; the rioting students and workers of May ’68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen.” Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. “I am an antichrist!” shouted singer Johnny Rotten—where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise.