Greil Marcus

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  music November 2017

  Slash: A Punk Magazine from Los Angeles, 1977–80

  Slash: A Punk Magazine from Los Angeles, 1977–80, edited by Brian Roettinger and J. C. Gabel. Los Angeles: Hat & Beard, 2016. 496 pages.

  THE PORTRAIT DRAWN IN THIS BOOK—an enormous compendium of photos, mini-memoirs, drastically reduced facsimile pages from the Los Angeles–based tabloid-form magazine; original band interviews reprinted as inserts; and special sections for Gary Panter’s Jimbo comix and flaming editorials from Claude Bessy, aka Kickboy Face—is of people having fun. While oversize and heavy, the volume is fast on the eye and throughout its nearly five hundred pages maintains

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  print December 2016

  Greil Marcus

  THREE AMBITIOUS EXHIBITIONS and their equally ambitious catalogues (all published by Scheidegger & Spiess) appeared in Europe and New York in this centenary year of Dada—along with a little companion publication from just before. One stood out because it brought the usual sprawling cast of characters into sharp focus and unexpected conversations: “Dada Africa: Dialogue with the Other” at the Museum Rietberg, Zurich, and the Berlinische Galerie. Not that that cast isn’t all over the rest: “Dadaglobe Reconstructed” (at the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Museum of Modern Art, New York), “Genesis

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  passages March 2016

  David Bowie

  AT THE END of Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003), David Bowie’s 1975 “Young Americans” plays in full for more than five minutes, under a roll of still photographs of American misery, with blocks of black-and-white scenes from the 1930s (Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn and more) alternating with present-day color. It’s a typical von Trier cheap shot, as exploitative of the song as of the fierce story Nicole Kidman’s face has just told. But the music escapes; it sucks you in. You are hearing, even watching, the song more than you’re watching von Trier’s sour montage. The rush of the sometimes

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  books January 2016

  Asger Jorn and Jacqueline de Jong

  The Case of the Ascetic Satyr: Snapshots from Eternity, by Asger Jorn and Jacqueline de Jong, with texts by Axel Heil, Karen Kurczynski, Marc Lenot, Roberto Ohrt, and Kevin Repp. New York: JdJ/D.A.P., 2015. 2 volumes, 56 pages, 1 folder, 48 ephemera items.

  EVEN THE FORMAL HEADING ABOVE will give you no sense of this book. The definition of a title, never mind the neat totality suggested by an elegant case and a cover painting, won’t help solve this case—all punning inevitable. Better to start in the middle, blank, with a fragment, a piece of pinkish-gray paper scavenged from a hotel, an

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  music January 2015

  Viv Albertine’s autobiography

  VIV ALBERTINE was the guitarist for the Slits, the female London punk band that could have been called Upheaval. Her autobiography is a great book. It can stand next to Chuck Berry’s Autobiography (1987), Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One (2004), and Jenny Diski’s The Sixties (2009). But no genre can hold it.

  The title refers to Albertine’s mother’s judgment on the only things her teenage daughter cared about—and the title hits home near the close of the book. “Side One,” the first half of the story, ending with the demise of the Slits in 1981, is a tremendous ride, coursing through infinitely

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  print November 2014

  Jess’s murals

  YOU OPEN A CLOSET DOOR in an otherwise nondescript playroom with a lot of natural light and come face-to-face with a barbershop pole with descending swirls in orange, cream, and black. In a narrow bedroom hallway you look up, and what could be Celtic markings, then Paleolithic meanders, are running below the ceiling.

  There is color everywhere, and everywhere there is the suggestion of the occult. There’s the hint of some unnamed ritual being performed, its meaning lost, its images somehow still persisting; there’s the echo of a joke, the setup clear, the punch line forgotten generations ago.

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  film March 2014

  Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis

  INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, Joel and Ethan Coen’s re-creation of the Greenwich Village folk-music milieu, set over a few days in the winter of 1961, came into focus for me about halfway through. The Coens’ Job-like title character, played by Oscar Isaac, has hitched a ride back from Chicago, where he’s failed a last-chance audition. The owner of the car is fast asleep; Davis is driving in a snowstorm in the middle of the night. He’s got the radio on, and for a moment an old folk song comes through the speakers: some impossibly addled, a cappella, doo-wop version of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”

  It was

• passages February 2014

  Lou Reed

  LAST DECEMBER, a little over a month after Lou Reed died—on October 27, at age seventy-one—Brett and Rennie Sparks of the gothic folk duo the Handsome Family were asked, at an event at the New School, how much his work had affected theirs. A lot, Brett said. “I’ve heard that Lou Reed could be kind of confrontational,” someone in the audience said. Funny how these rumors get around.

  Lou Reed was confrontational about life. It might be a matter of staring life in the face, as he did in “Street Hassle” in 1978, a hipster’s tale turned into a stoic homily on fate; of humor rushing out in

• books Summer 2013

  Greil Marcus

  GREIL MARCUS

  I recently heard the Edinburgh-raised Philip Kerr talk about the inspiration for his Berlin cop Bernie Gunther—the character first appeared in the Berlin Noir trilogy, and the Nazi shadow has since taken him to Argentina, Cuba, and back to wartime Germany—in terms of the American-born Raymond Chandler’s British upbringing and education. “It’s the Englishness of Chandler,” he said. “You can hear that tinkling melody in every page he writes.” Chandler was writing in the same years in which Kerr sets his stories: “What if Philip Marlowe went to Berlin instead of Los

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  music November 2012

  Robert Johnson

  ON FEBRUARY 21, 2012, at the end of a White House blues night, President Obama sang a chorus of Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago.” Two weeks later, on March 6, to mark Johnson’s centennial, the Apollo Theater in New York staged the tribute concert “Robert Johnson at 100,” featuring, among many others, the Roots, offering “Milkcow’s Calf Blues,” Living Colour with “Preachin’ Blues,” Elvis Costello with “From Four Until Late,” both James Blood Ulmer and Taj Mahal taking on “Hellhound on My Trail,” Bettye LaVette with “I’m a Steady Rollin’ Man” and “When You Got a Good Friend,” Shemekia Copeland

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  print September 2012

  TWENTIETH-CENTURY VOX: MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND THE MECHANICAL BRIDE

  THE TELEVISION DRAMA MAD MEN—featuring advertising-agency creative director Don Draper as the hero whose outer cynic is locked in combat with his inner existentialist—was first set in the late 1950s; it has now reached 1966. When the parents of Megan Calvet, Draper’s new wife, arrived in New York from Montreal, it was hard to see Calvet père as anything but a wave to Marshall McLuhan, the ultimate media savant as media celebrity in the mid-1960s. McLuhan was so big that in 1977, years after his moment had passed, he could still offer Woody Allen a great coup, allowing the actor-director

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  passages April 2011

  Captain Beefheart

  “GOD, PLEASE FUCK MY MIND FOR GOOD!” Captain Beefheart shouted at the end of Doc at the Radar Station, his second-to-last album. It was 1980, and it was a dare to whatever version of God might be present to receive it: his audience, maybe; music itself. Or it was a dare to time—the fifteen years since he’d made his first record, or the thirty years to come. Can you shut me up? Can you scramble my rhythm and my words until they’re a labyrinth I’ll never escape? I’ll do it first!

  His first record—a single that was cut in 1965 in Los Angeles, a street sign away from Glendale, where he was