![]() And it abandoned the formal style of academic discourse in favour of a cultural criticism that moved between music journalism, autobiographical reflection, and an experimental intellectual history that put the Sex Pistols and the Frankfurt School together as if they were volatile elements capable of blowing a hole in the fabric of existence: ‘listen to Metal Box by PiL, Johnny Rotten’s post-Sex Pistols band, read Minima Moralia as you listen, and see if you can tell where one leaves off and the other begins’. It insisted that there could be a politics to not working. ![]() ![]() ![]() It spoke directly to the sense of powerlessness that virtually everyone I knew (other than law graduates) was experiencing. It took the apparent formlessness of everyday life and made it an object of serious, even urgent interrogation. Lipstick Traces jolted me in a way that I still remember. There was a sense of almost boundless freedom, but also a creeping anxiety at the complete absence of purposeful activity and the feeling of being fundamentally unable to make meaning out of all that empty time. I had finished a bachelor’s degree and was doing next to nothing other than drinking coffee, playing chess and lingering aimlessly at the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda. Sometime in the early 1990s, I stumbled across Greil Marcus’s book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989). ![]()
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