Lipstick Traces (60 page)

is haunting Europe and will soon threaten the ruling classes of the world, from the bureaucrats of Moscow and Peking to the millionaires of Washington and Tokyo.
Just as we have made Paris dance,
the international proletariat will again take up its assault on the capitals of all nations, on all the citadels of alienation. The occupation of factories and public buildings throughout the country has not only blocked the functioning of the economy, it has brought about a general questioning of the society. A deeply-rooted movement is leading almost every sector of the population to seek a real change in life. It is now a revolutionary movement which lacks only
the consciousness of what it has already done
in order to triumph.

The result, after de Gaulle rallied the voting majorities (after changing his mind about resigning—and, he and the SI agreed, leaving the nation to civil war), was educational reform for students, and a wage increase for factory workers. If, as René Viénet wrote, commodity time stopped in May, free time moved too fast to keep or master; almost instantly, the noise that for a few weeks sounded like the beginning of a new language turned into babble, and today it is hard to read.

What is not hard to read is the account of what everyday life was like during the brief suspension of what almost everyone had taken everyday life to be. In 1954 the Lettrist International had committed itself to the perfecting of a complete divertissement; in 1968 Debord, the only member of the Situationist International left from those days, was able to recognize it.

The movement was a rediscovery of collective and individual history, a recognition of the possibility of intervening in history, an awareness of participating in an irreversible event (“Nothing will ever be the same again”); people looked back in amusement at the
strange existence
they had led a week before . . . people found themselves at home everywhere. The
recognized desire
for dialogue, for completely free expression, and the taste for true community found their terrain in the buildings transformed into open meeting places . . . the wandering of so many emissaries and travelers through Paris, through the entire country, between the occupied buildings, the factories, and the assemblies carried this true practice of communication.
The occupations movement was plainly a rejection of alienated labor; it was a festival, a game, a real presence of real people and real time.

In many of the more than three hundred books, many people tried to say the same thing: after all, they had seen it, done it, lived it out. They were trying to hold onto it as it vanished—of all the graffiti, Debord wrote, “perhaps the most beautiful simply said, ‘
QUICK
.’ ” As a momentary illusion, it was easy to dismiss—easy, even, to forget. As the realization of fantasies of a new city, fantasies that had been contrived and acted out fifteen years before, it was impossible to forget—and impossible to match. “Nothing will ever be the same again”—the slogan cut back against those who embraced it, cut them in half. “Years, like a single instant prolonged to this moment, come to an end,” Debord said in 1959, on the soundtrack to
On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time:
he was speaking of 1953. “What was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, inscribed in the fashions and illusions of an era carried away with it,” said a man in the voice of a radio newscaster. Debord spoke again, then a young woman: “What should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it . . . the years pass and we have not changed anything.”

“Once again morning in the same streets,” Debord said as he put daybreak footage on the screen. “Once again the fatigue of so many nights passed in the same way. It is a walk that has lasted a long time.” “Really hard to drink more,” said the newscaster; the screen went white. Then, in historical time, came the event: “the ‘sunrise,’ ” Debord said in “The Beginning of an Epoch,” in
I.S.
no. 12, September 1969, “ ‘that, in a flash, all at once, traces the shape of the new world.’ ” It was a turning point in history where history refused to turn; as a beacon of the future it revealed nothing so vividly as the past.

Punk song: a man stands in a room, bare save for a mattress, a few bottles, a few books. From his window he can see a crowd gathered before a huge, new public building. The setting is uncertain; you can’t tell if this is taking place in the present, in some tired near-future, or if the sodden familiarity of the scene locates the action well back in the past. A dignitary steps down from a reviewing stand to snip a ribbon. As the crowd presses up for a better look, the man in the room begins a keening sound: the strangled no of someone who’s spent too much time talking to himself, a voice that gives off not the slightest hope of winning a response. Stamping one foot, the man edges toward hysteria, then escapes it as his cursing takes on a hint of form.

He’s screaming quietly at his walls, at the people he has to look at, hating them and hating himself, wishing that the crowd were a loving community and that he could join it, though with his every jagged intonation—“and we bow to re–pub–lic . . . we bow to em–ploy–er . . . we bow to
God”
(a horrible, helpless loathing for the last word)—he drives himself out even of any fantasized community, past any possible communication. He loses his breath for a moment, loses his train of thought, then regains it; the listener, who feels almost ashamed to be listening, begins to realize that, at least to the man in the room, this cry-and-thump is some kind of music.

The singer has made his way down to the street; he stands on the fringes of the crowd, peering from behind a corner of the new building, still making
his noise.
Don’t look at him,
says a woman to her child.
Fucking drunks,
says her husband. The man leans out from the corner, as if expecting someone to actually acknowledge his presence. The way he carries his tune, all hesitations and broken cadences, tells how he holds his body: ready for abuse, maybe wishing for it. Abuse is a kind of communication: a perversion of community that in an inverted way might suggest community when nothing else does. So the man bears down harder; this is now a public assault, no matter that the public ignores it. It’s a riot, a rising, even if there is only one rioter—
so far,
he thinks. “Little girls, lit—tle girls, we’re innocent until pro–ven guilty,” he chants over and over. For a moment, he gives the words so much weight they sound as if they’re about to mean something; then the moment passes, and he sounds like a child molester. By then everyone else has gone home.

It is—it might as well be—1985. In Washington, following his overwhelming reelection as president of the United States, Ronald Reagan addresses members of his administration. “We made beautiful music together in the last four years,” he says, “but from here on in, it’s shake, rattle, and roll.” In Guatemala, mercenaries working with government troops to root out resistance to the state in place since Big Joe Turner first took “Shake, Rattle and Roll” to the top of the charts wear t-shirts printed with a version of an old slogan: “
KILL
’
EM ALL, LET GOD SORT
’
EM OUT
.” In Berkeley, near a crowded coffee bar, I finish the morning paper in which I’ve read these stories, and watch former mental patients force themselves on the busy bohemian bourgeoisie, begging quarters, tearing at their clothes, calling down the wrath of God. One man, who on any day can be seen carefully retracing his steps across the whole north side of town (never the south side—there is a border in the city only he can see), carries his trademark unstrung bow and quiver full of sticks; another has a series of messages neatly painted on his ruined pants and shoes. As I look, the wasted derelicts, none of them old, all of their clocks stopped, change into Ranters shouting obscenities in seventeenth-century English churches, Free Spirit adepts crouching in doorways in fourteenth-century Swabia: weird cultural survivals, time walkers, loop tracers. I’m carrying too many books in my head, product of living too long with my own—but how many, really, is too many, when the Cathars are still making news? The heresies and blasphemies that flowed from Abiezer Coppe’s mouth like lava in London in 1649 (“and lo a hand was
sent to me, and a roll of a book was therein . . . it was snatcht out of my hand & the Roll thrust into my mouth; and I eat it up, and filled my bowels with it, where it was bitter as worm wood; and it lay broiling, and burning in my stomack, till I brought it forth in this forme. And now I send it flying to you, with my heart”) today signify the extremes of a great social revolution, but they had their source, for Coppe, in Tourette’s Syndrome and coprolalia; there is a textbook case right here. A man rises to his feet, spinning, and the word “shit” comes down like rain, ten times, a hundred times; then in under a minute the man announces himself as every well-known rock ’n’ roll performer the name of whose group, or whose own first or last name, begins with the letter “J.” “I’m Jimi Hendrix, I’m Joe Walsh, I’m Junior Walker, I’m Jimmy Jones, I’m Michael Jackson, I’m Johnny Rotten, I’m Elton John, I’m Steve Perry, I’m Ian Anderson, I’m Jeff Beck . . .” I go home and listen to “The Building.”

The song comes from
it falleth like the gentle rain from heaven
—
The Mekons Story,
a collection of fragments and detritus that traces the first six years of an English punk band, founded in Leeds in 1977, temporarily defunct as of 1982. The record presents itself as a chronicle of possibility and failure. Vision collapses into bile, shared rage into private shame, wit into self-mockery, melody and beat into the drunken, electronically slurred narration that stitches the pieces together. Merely one of thousands of groups to come together on the terrain cleared by the Sex Pistols, the Mekons were best known as the band that took punk ideology most seriously: “Those who couldn’t play tried to learn, and those who could tried to forget.” They quickly blew their only chance to submit to the strictures and rewards of a major label, and disappeared into a pop wilderness mapped by none so well as themselves; on
The Mekons Story,
you can hear it all happen.

Released in 1978, the Mekons’ first, small-label recordings—“Never Been in a Riot,” “Where Were You?,” and “32 Weeks”—were preposterously rough, left-handed screeches about, respectively, a wish for trouble, a wish for affection, and the number of weeks of low-wage labor required to pay for various household objects, like refrigerators. They were self-conscious affirmations of punk crudity, stabs in a dark brought forth by turning out the lights, and they attracted attention in the small but growing punk community. Made in 1982, when “punk” was just another chapter in the history of rock ’n’ roll and no one was paying attention to the Mekons,
“The Building”—no instruments, no band, just Mekon Mark White’s throat and foot—is beyond crudity. As a smear of oblivion and public life, silence and public speech, it is the antithesis of self-consciousness, of ideology or even style: it is an event, even if as such it’s the tree falling in the forest, the building collapsing only in the singer’s mind. Naked, demanding that the world be changed, “The Building” is the first punk song, a rant going back far beyond the Sex Pistols; naked, damning the fact that the world is more like it is now than it ever was before, it’s also the last.

The whole of the story I have tried to follow is in this song. The primitivism of the music dissolves the temporal claims of the story and simultaneously subsumes its detail, assumes all of its debts: that is why the performance is so strong. It turns Jean-Michel Mension’s “general strike” into the punk song it almost was and punk songs back into the graffiti Mension almost wrote. All at once, certain that to speak a language everyone can understand is to say nothing, the man in the room calls up Hugo Ball flapping his wings in the Cabaret Voltaire, Wolman hissing and barking in the Tabou, the glossolalia of Debord’s
Mémoires,
Johnny Rotten’s unspeakable confusion in the last minute of “Holidays in the Sun.” All at once, now certain that to denounce the old world is to kill it and that to prophesy a new world is to call it into being, the man reenacts Huelsenbeck’s hateful Berlin speeches, Michel Mourre’s sermon in Notre-Dame, the LI’s decrees in “Rational Embellishments to the City of Paris,” the SI’s carnivalization of May ’68, the plea for destruction in “Anarchy in the U.K.” He reenacts none of them in the event, but just before they happened, and just after they made what history they made—after they happened out of it. Leaving these pseudo-events suspended in time, the man reenacts the judgment of history on all such attempts to make it, on all attempts to get out of the century, whether backward or forward: the judgment that save for madness or suicide there is no way out of one’s time. But of course this is not all that is happening in the song. So quiet, “The Building” is an echo of an explosion that actually took place.

“We wanted to create a situation where kids would be less interested in buying records than in speaking for themselves,” Malcolm McLaren said
of the Sex Pistols, and one result of “Anarchy in the U.K.” was a sort of giant answer record, an assemblage made of thousands of pieces, in dozens of languages, all over the world. It was a potlatch of yesses and noes that sounded like a conversation in which everything was at stake—a potlatch that, for a time, sounded like a conversation in which everyone was taking part.

This is what you can still hear in some of the artifacts the punk conversation left behind—in the Adverts’ “One Chord Wonders,” X-ray Spex’s “I Am a Cliché,” the Gang of Four’s “Return the Gift.” Destroying all limits on everyday speech, turning it into public speech, the conversation discovered a new subject: everyday life, which was revealed as public life. In this answer record, the most obvious facts of love or money, of habit or news, were neither obvious nor facts, but interested constructions, mysteries of credulity and power. In misery or delight, one could dramatize submission or resistance, false consciousness or negation. As in “Anarchy in the U.K.,” streets became potential fields of action, and ordinary buildings world-historical. As in “Holidays in the Sun,” the world-historical became a joke, then a horror movie. As in “Bodies,” the private self became the body politic, and that transformation produced an urgency, a spirit of collective vehemence—the thrill of speaking out loud driven by its own danger—that no record had quite contained before.