Peter’s Reviews > Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century > Status Update

Oh, those university of Strasbourg scamps!

The cats cradle of Marcus’ scholarship tightens around the kernel of the SI. At stake, the idea of potlatch evokes economies of scale, language as culture, and utility as the enemy of working folk. Good to see my old buddy Georges Battaille make an appearance!

The idea of making art by negating everything comes full circle with photography that seems artificial not because the artist posed the subjects, but because they were ready -made for posing and words that lose their power by having so much power they become gibberish.

Topics like psychogeography and society as a commodity we can reject began to flesh out how situationists evolve past the Lettristes

The lettristes international begin to sink under the weight of their ponderous intent, while the more pithy contributors (like Debord, Bernstein, and a few more) coalesce as the more focused Situationistes International. We move closer to the inevitability of the Sex Pistols.

Hurlements… a movie I could never sit through, but bravo to Debord for conceiving it.

The aims of dada and the tactics of the letters finally coalesce in situationist pretension with films that are long, absurd, and formally lazy.

Oh, the free spirits, the ranters! What a threat to hegemony these independent thinkers and street preachers must have seemed.

Oh my god, michel Mourre, what a spoiled brat! Hid time editing a newspaper, loafing in the army, and trying to reform the monastery in Toulouse — all of it precious and silly.!

Whoa! mourre and note dame in 1950! I’ve never heard of this!