Lipstick Traces: Part VI: Greil Marcus
August 24, 2007
A Review
Lipstick Traces:
Greil Marcus
Part VI
by R.E. Prindle
Sometime in the early 1920s that supreme fantasist Sigmund Freud belatedly discovered the supreme impediment to the Jewish fantasy of world dominion- the Reality Principle. He should have discovered it in the Garden Of Paradise right at the beginning.
Freud had spent most of his life constructing a shining vision of the realization of Jewish dreams but he encountered that wall so wide you can’t go around it and so high you can’t go over it and it wouldn’t matter how many masochists beat their head against it that wall won’t fall down.
This was exactly the problem that the Free Spirits who are the centerpiece of this chapter faced. The Free Spirits of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries sect who evolved into the Libertines of the 18th century essentially were precursors of the ancient Jewish attitude that nothing was to be denied them; all things were permitted to the elect. As wild fantasists as the Jews they purportedly believed that if a woman had consecutive sex with ten different men if the last was a Free Spirit her virginity would be restored. As you can see the Reality Principle had no meaning for either sect.
Freud in the end chose to ignore the Reality Principle although how he maintained hope for the redemption of Jewish hopes is difficult to follow. It should have been clear to him that no matter how strenuously Jews pursued their dreams and fantasies they would always be doomed to failure.
As with the Garden of Paradise expulsion destruction would always be their lot. Ah, but there would always be that…remnant. What sort of dream is that?
Thus as Mr. Marcus points out even after the devastation of the death camps the Jews of Europe bounced back even before the ovens were cold with schemes to take over ‘our’ Europe. That is the remarkable story that Mr. Marcus tells us in this chapter.
I don’t know if Mr. Marcus is aware that every character in his historical novel is a psychotic. All of them are in full retreat from the Reality Principle. While I’m not sure he intends it all of them are facing terrific tensions in their daily living especially the ostensible protagonist of this story, Michel Mourre. I’m going to treat Mr. Marcus’ book as a novel and accept his interpretation of the feelings and emotions of his characters as real. Certainly he puts thoughts and notions in their minds that are beyond historians. So while the situations and characters he portrays may be factual enough his story isn’t.
The ostensible protagonist of the Invasion Of Notre Dame is a disturbed, psychotic Roman Catholic by the name of Michel Mourre. He had been reared a Communist with all the attendant utopian projections and fantasies. The test of the Communists and Mourre’s disillusionment came in 1940 when the Nazis arrived and the brave Communists including his father who had indoctrinated him crowded the train stations in an attempt to flee South.
Having lost one faith Mourre attempted a replacement in Catholicism. Catholicism failing him he was intellectually adrift wandering around the cafes of Paris spouting his discontent. He was a perfect tool. He quickly found those who knew how to use him.
These were a group of young Jews seeking to epater l’eglise. Scarcely skipping a beat on the way back from the extermination camps if they were ever in one they were continuing the Jewish war on Christianity and Europe that began long before Hitler and Stalin.
The group worked up a plan using Mourre as a tool to disrupt Easter services at Notre Dame in the year of Our Lord, 1950. How Mourre could allow himself to be duped in such an egregious manner is beyond me. Well, maybe it’s not. I was absolutely amazed- non-plussed, blown out of the water- to watch on television when Queen Elizabeth visited Jamaica to watch her being handed a sheaf of paper just before the cameras rolled and told that this was her speech. She actually read it sight unseen. If the Queen of England with a body of advisors to protect her from just such egregious errors can be duped, managed, hustled by bunch of ganja smoking hustlers then perhaps Mourre wasn’t at fault or perhaps White people are just fools. I’m still working on that one but I’m afraid of the conclusion I might have to reach.
At any rate Mourre wearing a Dominican outfit rushed up the aisles bearing a speech written for him by his Jewish confreres. Mourre must have been drugged or hypnotized. I don’t know what Queen Elizabeth’s excuse might be.
According to Mr. Marcus the speech was written by a Serge Berna one of Mourre’s Jewish handlers. The speech is written in the familiar J’ accuse manner made popular by the dupe and fool Emile Zola during the Dreyfuss Affair of the 1890s. One wonders whether Zola drafted his own letter or whether his Jewish handlers wrote it for him as in the case of Mourre. One is reminded of the ‘apology’ of Henry Ford that the American Jews wrote for him.
Although written in the first person so that Mourre mouthing the words would appear to be voicing his own thoughts he is actually expressing the views of his Jewish handlers. The language is violent, vicious and coarse expressing the deep Jewish hatred of Europe and America. It seems incredible that this message went unheeded especially coming as it did on the heels of the war. Despite both Hitler and Stalin the Jews had learned nothing.
Two quotes are outstanding of this deep abiding hatred. One should never hate nothing but hatred- Bob Dylan.
Quote:
I accuse the Catholic Church…of being the running sore on the decomposed body of the West (and)…your prayers have been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe.
Unquote.
That is very strong and violent language. The reference to our Europe clearly states that the conflict between Hitler, Stalin and the Jews was not one sided. It is less a question of Hitler and Stalin exterminating Jews than whether they authorized the killing of Jews before the Jews authorized the killing of Europeans. I have already mentioned the Jewish plan as expressed by their spokesperson, Noel Ignatiev, to exterminate the entire billion strong White species. The plan has been made public. If the reader refuses to take the plan and threat seriously the more fool he.
Once can cite numerous examples of Jewish murderousness as I have in my writing both on I, Dynamo and my writing on the site, ERBzine. I’m not going to repeat them now. You may consider me a prophet as Mr. Marcus considers himself.
The whole plan to bring ‘multi-culturism’ to the West is merely a variation on the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Just as the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Paradise shows the contradiction of the Jewish mind in which Semitism and anti-Semitism exist side by side so the story of the Tower of Babel that is a product of Jewish aspirations merely elucidates the principle of divide and conquer. The original notion said to be that in the building of the tower all spoke one language hence they could effectively coordinate their efforts. ‘God’, or the Jewish intellect, realized that if they spoke many languages i.e. if ‘multi-culturalism’ were introduced the peoples would not only not be unable to coordinate their efforts but there would be perpetual fighting.
Hence ‘multi-culturalism’ was introduced into Europe and America after the holocaust. That the Euroamericans would eagerly buy such a bill of goods shows what superb salesmen the Jews are.
Mr Marcus rather confusingly posits the origin of Lettrism to 1952 but then, if I read correctly, attributes the invasion of Notre Dame in 1950 to Isou and the Lettrists. I’m sure if I make Lipstick Traces my life’s work all will come clear.
At any rate Isou and disciple somehow kept Lettrism alive until 1957 when Guy Debord became involved and began the conversion of Lettrism to Situationism. Situationism somehow became involved with Theodore Adorno and the Frankfurt School. As soon as things calmed down in Europe and the Jews were safe again Adorno and the School sans Herbert Marcuse returned to the scene. Thus in this mysterious way Debord and the Situationist International, Adorno and the Frankfort School and Greil Marcus are brought into the same bundle and Mr. Marcus assumes his prophetic role.
It takes a tangled mind to tell a tangled tale.
The next stop on Mr. Marcus’ itinerary is entitled The Attack On Charlie Chaplin. A review of that will follow in Part VII.
I, Dynamo 
January 30, 2008 at 1:23 pm
I am continuing from the post that went wild and posted without my say so. Greil . . . Ladonna Jones is white, and HE KNEW IT. She was on TV EVERYWHERE at the time. It is impossible for him not to have seen this girl. But it doesn’t fit his fantasy, so he makes her black and figures the phony “intellectuals” reading Lipstick Traces will never know. I believe it was deliberate. And I felt better when I read that because I knew he full of shit. And I knew I could trust in my own judgements, without having to check it out with him first. Really. He was my idol. My mentor. My guide and shepard through rock and blues and country. And I got hurt like a lover who had been cheated and mistreated. He would tell me in a letter that I was taking him too literally again, when I clearly stated that I wasn’t. And it turns out that it really WAS literal in one case, but never mind. It was a “nice” meanness. He wrote back to me every time. Encouraged me. I felt I could not criticize him. I wasn’t raised that way. If someone is nice to you, you be nice to them. But the lies and burning hatreds that he held mounted up until he crushed something I had loved and enjoyed with my whole, whole heart. Trashed it like garbage and treated another human being (not me; a singer) like human garbage. He was shockingly cruel. And then he led a parade of critics who marched to his pipe.
When I see Bob Dylan unmercifully booed and cruelly taunted to tears, I wonder if Marcus just found this entertaining, and was literally excited to talk to him to ask him, truly “how did it feeeeeel?????” Remember his review of Dylan’s “Self-Portrait”? Knowing that this guy had been tormented about the globe, almost got killed because he was going insane over it all, and then made it back with good music that had a good heart, and one album was not quite so good, and Marcus sharpens a blade and plunges it into the wounded artists belly. “What is this shit?” Greil shouted, as clearly as if he had yelled “Judas!” Did he maybe even consider that the human being who read the review might be hurt? He knew he would read it. He wanted to hurt him, and hurt him badly. Yes, Dylan sort of seeks out punishers. But boy, he got a whallop when he picked him. And he really had enough by that time. He literally and figuratively “did his time.” John Wesley Harding is filled with unnecessary guilt and shame. The guy is already tormented up, down, and sideways. And he makes one album that is not as great as what? As the critics want it to be? And they beat the crap out of him. With Greil leading the charge. I should have known, dammit. I should have known. But I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.
RM
January 30, 2008 at 2:04 pm
If you find that other post, where this one started, where I talked about “are they Jews or and they Pitssburghians”? And where I gave a lot of autobiography so you would know that I am not attacking, but actually see your journey as an attempt to understand, to work this stuff out for yourself, to use the ‘net as it is meant to be . . . a place to not only “speak” but to speak freely, maybe be heard, and perhaps find spirits you never imagined were kindred. I do not think you are an “anti-semite.” People throw that around too easily. Yes, many Jewish people feel like strangers, and do not know how to deal with it. Who could? With humor, yes, but that’s not enough. Hitler thought his grandmother was Jewish, I wrote, and well . . . I said “NO, I would NOT kill HItler as a baby, dammit. I would adopt him.” My friends are German and Irish and “Anglo” and black and Latino and Lord knows what else. Perhaps many Jews do hate themselves, but I do not “Pity the Poor Immigrant.” And I do not pity the “Extremely Reformed” who want to move on into other worlds and do NOT hate themselves! You know what I hate? HATE! That’s why I hate. I don’t think you are a hater. I think you are trying to understand yourself, and perhaps with the assistance of others. That is what the ‘net is for. I remember the attack on Chaplin. But I also remember the other savage attack on someone who was not Prince. He actually created a fantasy charater: “an eleven year old black girl named Ladonna Jones.” Except that she’s WHITE. And he had to have known it. More in the other post about Greil’s bullshit and lust for cruelty, even visited, maybe especially, upon Bob Dylan. The one where I said I should have know this as soon as I saw “What Is This Shit?” “How does it feeeeel” indeed. He wanted to know how much he could treat another person like “shit” and hurt him badly even though that person had been so hurt already, and he knew it, and he wanted to cause real pain. I was always the stranger. I saw brutality in Florida visited upon black children in a public jr. high school that it was like being in the middle of a war or a holocaust. Streams of red blood on brown faces. Climb the trees and throw hard coconuts on their skulls and see if you kill somebody. I saw this, dammit. I tried to grab people out of the courtyard to relative safety. I was numb. I went to 17 differnent schools, but just before that, I went to a beautifully integrated school with EVERY kind of kid, and where I finally had a real childhood, with adventures, and woods, and all kinds of stuff!! And where I was not hated for always being “The Stranger.” I was always. “new.” Always strange. Never belonging. But I have finally learned to love myself because of people, all kinds of people, who love me. And they are a rainbow of peoples. Germans, American Jews, American Latinos and recent immigrants whom I do not pity, Armenians, black people, thank heaven because they never done me wrong, and oh, just every kinda person. There is no “the Jews.” And were the filmaker Jewish and Greek, or were they from Pittsburgh when they went to the smoky L. A.. Basin to make the “software” for the films? They were such fools. Nobody lived here because you couldn’t breathe!!!!!! That post. But I don’t hate or pity them; I am just amazed. Western Pennsylvania has been horrible, especially in the steel days. The only way out was football. Lotta Jewish ballplayers! Wonder why? Pittsburgh! Beaver Falls, where the Hungarian “swarthy” quarterback came from who the newspaper jerks called “ugly-handsome” because he wasn’t blond or buzz-cut. He wasn’t the All-American like Stauback, or that phony hypocrite from WAy BACK, O.j. He taught me to know and hate hypocrisy. And all of my “heroes,” excepting Greil, I guess, taught me to love, not to hate, to understand, rather than to criticize. Uh, that was the post that dissapeared. It was better. But this is the crux. Oh, Computer, my Computer, may I submit?
RM
January 30, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I just reread VI being on the site and reading your post. Sometimes I amaze myself. Can’t believe I write this stuff. Pretty incredible. ‘you may consider me a prophet’ where does stuff like that come from? I’m out before the public too. Oh well, if I said it I must mean it. Me and Greil, the two greatest novelists of the age.
February 21, 2008 at 6:26 am
I just read this one of yours now. I hope you see it somehow. Yeah, it is funny when you say wild stuff and you wonder “where the hell did THAT come from?” But I have needed a forum to throw my feelings about Greil for a long time now. This was the place.
But Dylan, he’s more significant anyway.
I’ll go back to where I think I know you’ll look.
Bye for now.
Robin
February 21, 2008 at 11:33 am
Gosh, the site is getting a mite disorderly, in terms of finding things, unless I haven’t learned the “blog method” quite yet. I mean, when I was regularly on Usenet, I didn’t know what a “troll” was, and I got REALLY pissed off, big time, ’cause this guy said he thought my post was part of a “troll.” I THOUGHT HE CALLED ME A “TROLL!” I was wild with rage, except that I had no idea that it did NOT mean an actual “troll,” but I kind of insincere POST (not a person) that was intended to throw the discussion off. Boy, I had quite a wild fight witha a guy over that, and then we became quite friendly and helpful.
So, I guess, in order to make blogging more like the thoughtful type that attracted me here (and the one thing that you saw that all supposedly “wise biographers” couldn’t see, even though it was clear as a cloudless, sunny day, or clear as a cloudless winter’s night when you can see, not just for miles, but for millions of miles, at least. (Throw in the Carl Sagan accent for laughs, but it’s true.) I mean, a guy who wrote a clear (and carefully BURIED) song called “Walls of Red Wing” finally, many years later, after SO MUCH water under so many bridges (it was the ’85, for chissakes! Dylan’s only “significance” at the time were the words he muttered about the farmers at Live Aid, and that Willie Nelson had met him – or knew him already, not sure at all – at the “We Are The World” sessions, and I think they went outside to really talk, cause that weird kid kept sitting near them, and I guess it was getting annoying. (And I guess both of them forgot when THEY were weird kids who nobody wanted to sit next to, or drink a can of Bud with, but that’s a whole other story . . . or in the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, is it really? I guess so . . . a whole different world, a whole different approach to music, although it’s ALL folk music, and it is ALL protest music, is it not? And why is a synclavier not an obviously “pure” instrument when compared to an old Fender guitar? That was old by then, but not when Dylan used it in the “Church of the Holy Folk Song” of Newport. Every generation kinda gives the old guys the creeps. You can see it. Hell, you would think Dylan, just for old times’ sake, would have objeted to Q throwing Prince out of the studio. (It was not because of an “ego” think between him and M.J.; it was because of something unfortunate, and misunderstood, that happened that very night. A guy like Dylan, who had been much misunderstood, not to mention “thrown out” in the past, should have been interested. And he should have thrown that stupid “check your ego” sign down on the ground, where it belonged. Hell, about 99% of those people were in the business because they had no “ego” to speak of to begin with. But, anyway, what happened was really unfortunate, and Q didn’t want to listen to what happened; he just wanted to throw Prince out. A shame, and For Shame. Because of a little of what football players call “stickum.” See, most performers insist that a slightly sticky residue be placed on the stage floor to prevent embarrassing falls. Fair enough. But ONE singer couldn’t perform, or even do any kind of dance – even a little one – WITH the stuff on the floor, because he did Jackie Wilson-style slides, and you can’t do them with that stuff on the floor. So he asked the guys to wipe it up for when he was briefly on the stage (I don’t remember if he performed, but I don’t think so: but he usually always went into a little dance, which that stuff would make difficult, if not impossible). So, they clean it up, and forget to put it back. Prince does his performance and hits the glassy part, and falls on his face: quite literally. People laugh and get a big kick out of it. Not Prince. He believes it was PLANNED. It was INTENTIONAL. To make him look foolish. Ridiculous, but I suppose, at a time when tensions were high, he could have seen it as a “trick” to hurt him. Prince DID come to the studio, for which he deserved credit! But he was extremely steamed at falling on live TV, especially since he though his “rival” planned it, which he did not. He came in, kinda “lookin’ for him,” you might say. He wanted a fight, before he would sing anything. Naturally, Q thought his “ego” was out of joint, and he wanted better billing or something, but that was NOT it. All Q had to do was to bring both of them outside and discuss what happened. It was important to let Prince know that it was not done one purpose, but that the guys in the back forgot to replace the “stickum.” And everything would have been quite grand. And bring the little fellow back in. But because the older guys all think the young ones have ego problems (why post that damn stupid sign), they just assumed something that wasn’t what happened. It wasn’t fair — to the public, or to whom they were supposedly trying to help, or to anyone. And Dylan, of all people, should have objected to anyone getting thrown out. But he was into being “an elder statesman” I guess at the time, and it let it happen. All the older fellows let it happen. But especially Dylan, ’cause he knew what it felt like to be misunderstood and to be thrown out.
But Dylan WAS an “elder statesman” by then, which means he had absolutely NO reason to lie to his friend about something that happened to him when he was a kid. If he wanted to tell the whole world – loudly, there were talk shows and such. He told a friend, knew it would get back to his family, of course, and I guess he was curious to see if they were still so paranoid that they’d pull this “Deveraux” thing out. And sure enough, as if it were 1965, they DID. Or she did. Maybe the dad would have said “ah, the hall with it.” But he was gone. The reasonable thing would be to back up your son and say it was a “youthful indiscretion” instead of getting your back up and referrring the writer to a shrink, and all of that. But I guess it was still a pretty big thing to them. To the rest of the pop world, it absolutely did not matter.
I guess that’s sad, in a way. The one thing that more or less shaped his life from then on, didn’t even matter any more. (Well, Minnesota got themselves in a tizzy that I think they are still in. But that’s all.) As for the popular music world, Dylan’s life didn’t matter anymore. (Funny how things work out; now there’s a feature film, which followed a big documentary, complete with fancy coffee table book and extra CD, etc. and other stuff, and right now he’s a sort “hot item.” Or his life is. And it’s a good thing, ’cause the young kids don’t know him, and you show ’em stuff and they like him, a lot. [The girls REALLY like him. And I mean ALL the girls: ethnicity be damned in this case. They tell me he’s “hot” and “sexy” and so on. Blew my mind, ’cause I remember when he was an unmentionable to younger kids. An “old fart.” But NOW, now that he’s unknown to them, he’s cool. Weird, man. [And Elvis is cool, too, ’cause he’s had a couple of recent hits! And that always gets their attention. But since he was not a formal poet-bard, but merely an interpreter, I can’t bring him in unless we’re knee-deep in musicology. But, damn, he did do that one song: “That’s Someone You’ll Never Forget,” which is mostly that line with filler lyrics. Red West wrote a melody to it, but when Red hit the studio, and they were into playing the tape back, Elvis goes “how do you like the new arrangement, Red?” I don’t think he liked it all, because it pretty much wiped out his melody and replaced it. This one was Elvis’s song about his mom. But guess what? Elvis is listening to some records and puts on “Odetta Sing Dylan” and finds a song that REALLY expresses how he felt when he came home to Graceland after the service, and it seemed so . . . brutally empty. It was not a “home” anymore, it was just a “house,” for a time. I remember seeing the film of him eating that welcome home cake in a desultory manner. Real bummed. And the one song that would really express how he felt hadn’t been written yet because the writer was still in Minnesota or thereabouts, and just a kid. But he will write it, soon, a song about total depersonalization: “can’t see my reflection in the water . . . can’t remember the sound of my own name.” Which is EXACTLY how he looked on that bleak day in Memphis in 1960, eating that “celebration” cake, when he sure as hell didn’t feel either like celebrating, or even come “home” to a place that wasn’t even “home” anymore. As I am going through this serious health situation with my mom {although yesterday, she was very responsive, and when my dad said, too loudly “we’re gonna leave now,” she turned beet red and shook until he ran to her and said we would not be leaving. After that, I could sleep at night. But I sure do know the feeling of a partially empty “home” that Elvis faced in 1960: when it first happened, you cannot imagine the abject lonliness. You feel like you are trapped INSIDE a Hank Williams song. It’s hard to explain. But that song “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” is kinda perfect: the docs all tell you to “be patient, that this kind of thing takes a long time before you know how it’s going to be, and we have to just suffer it out. And, well, “tomorrow” does seem like a hell of a long time. And sometime, you do lose your reflection in the water, and don’t even care to remember the sound of your own name. All of that genius inside that “bad” kid. And I wonder what happens to the kids today who have that genius in them, but they get sent away forever. So, no, today is definitely NOT a better time. It’s way worse, especially for kids. People hate them, you know. The politicians claim that everything is “for the kids,” when actually they despise them, including their own. Al Gore wishes his son didn’t prefer driving at 100 mph, but his son doesn’t give a damn about “global warming” or his father’s career, or any of it. And the “old man” is probably pissed at him son for being such a damn nuissance. People really do not like kids at all. It’s all talk. Or if they DO like them, they like them TOO much, if you know what I mean. Either way, kids have it lousy today, and I’m glad I was born when I was, even if we had no culture of our own.]
Anyway, maybe when you feel like anwering one of my posts, you could tell me about the rules of the “blog road.” Because it’s new to me, but I think I need to understand it.