{"product_id":"lipstick-traces-a-secret-history-of-the-twentieth-century-twentieth-anniversary-edition-9780674034808","title":"Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century  Twentieth Anniversary Edition","description":"\u003cp\u003eGreil 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 Rottenwhere 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 demandsdemands on society  art  and all the governing structures of everyday lifeseem 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 Parisbased 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45666300723253,"sku":"ByrdShop_0674034805","price":35.42,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780674034808.jpg?v=1782427627","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/lipstick-traces-a-secret-history-of-the-twentieth-century-twentieth-anniversary-edition-9780674034808","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}