Lipstick Traces
A Secret History of the Twentieth Century
Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus's absorbing new study...dips in and out of the history of the Great Refusal, all the way from the medieval Lollards and Brethren of the Free Spirit to the Dadaists, the French Situationists, the Children of the May 1968 uprising in France and British punk rockers. Lipstick Traces, however, is no sedate academic record of libertarian revolt but a bold blending of anecdote, personal confession and cultural analysis, cutting backward and forward from Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols to the Surrealists, from Alexander Trocchi of the 1950's avant-garde group know as Lettrist International to George Grosz, from the Anabaptists in the 16th century to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Danny the Red of the French student rebellion...[Marcus's] book is impressively adept at bringing alive some of the dramatic moments of the history it charts...A coruscatingly original piece of work, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out.
--Terry Eagleton, New York Times Book Review
Lipstick Traces has the energy of its obsessions, and it snares you in the manner of those intense, questing and often stoned sessions of intellectual debate you may have experienced in your college years. It was destined, in other words, to achieve cult status.
--Ben Brantley, New York Times
A book about the twilight zone of art and revolution...[that] displays an intellectual confidence, or nerve, that more than convinces the reader to follow its unmarked trails.
--Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe
A cultural history of society's anarchic fringe.
--New York Times
Lipstick Traces...is a highly subjective account of rebellious gestures that recur from decade to decade, often in remarkably similar incarnations. Marcus doesn't belabor the division between high and low--he just ignores it, fluidly shifting from (sometimes obscure) source to source. Dada leads to punk leads to Police Academy, and Elvis movies prompt analyses of the Left Bank. Natch! That Marcus can kick off and end his exhaustive, but always clear-headed, cross-epochal trek with the Sex Pistols--and make it all cohere--is but one indication of how fully he meshes the academy and the gutter.
--Katherine Dieckmann, Voice Literary Supplement
Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces, The Dustbin of History (both from Harvard), and The Shape of Things to Come, The Old, Weird America, Mystery Train, and other books.