Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Harvard University Press Title: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

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Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Harvard University Press

aged stains

The obvious silliness of someone who is of a very different generation intellectualizing on a subject that may not need it was clearly beyond the scope of the publishers thinking. If this book had anything to do with Punk it would read loud, fast and short.

Despite that many view Mr. Marcus as having a level of "importance" in the field of music journalism, I would prefer that he stays within areas that are closer to his generational concern. Bob Dylan is always looking for another bit of blind praise.
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Harvard University Press

a primer for the uninitiated

a close, "academic" reading of L.T. would render great many imperfections-factitious or otherwise. However, this is a freely associative account offered as post-structural fodder. When written in ('90) there was little stateside interest in situationism/lettrism/fluxus et. and scholars of the a.garde (i can only think of a handful) were slow to consider art/lit. movements beyond the hegelian arc. yes I had read "society of the spectacle" , knew of the lettrists work, dada, lautremont bla bla-all very predictable stuff for those in the "avant know"-but what I found alluring about L.T. was its anti-academic, messy essence- a welcome shift from hackneyed scholasticism.
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Harvard University Press

A Catalog of Style Leaps.

I agree that this book is a page turner. A great balance of text and contexts. If you are intrigued by it's subject matter (Pistols/Dada/etc..) you'll have a hard time putting it down.



Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Harvard University Press

Reeling, heady, and fun

Don't start this one looking for a textbook - or anything bland, well-researched, and scholarly. The writing style fits well with the Punk idea - Marcus is clearly quite intelligent and well-read, but you can't possibly forget that he's a journalist at heart. The book is sensationalist at times, but that's allowed - I don't think he means for it to be read like a research paper. It's really long and free-associative, so it can be exhausting to read, but if you have the time and the interest it will certainly expand your view of the past century, and maybe change your ideas about the world in general just a little bit.
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Harvard University Press

What do dada, the Orioles, and the Sex Pistols have in common?

Very little. But a sometimes interesting stroll through Greil Marcus's random brain farts.

"It's just a bunch of stuff that happened."

-- Homer Simpson
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Harvard University Press

Product Description

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.

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."

Although the Sex Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, Lipstick Traces is not a book about music; it is about a common voice, discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs, collages, and classic texts from Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias, solitary refusals, impossible demands, and unexplained disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an insistent sense of tragedy and danger, Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.