Lipstick Traces goes to college

Possibly lost amongst all of the crazy goings on recently, or just not as well publicized, is this cool event happening Thursday evening up at Columbia University. The lecture should run about 40 minutes, along with a Q&A, and book signing.

Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces: Live
Thursday, November 19
Free and open to the public

In Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus delved into the cross-currents, tangles, and whirlpools that made such vastly different movements as dada, lettrism, the Situationist International, and punk part of a single current. To mark the just-published 20th-anniversary edition of the book, Columbia University presents Greil Marcus in a one-man performance of Lipstick Traces. The event will take place on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 6:00 p.m. at Altschul Auditorium, 420 West 118th Street.

In addition, the Music & Arts Library at Columbia University will display books by Marcus, books that influenced him, and posters, records, and other materials courtesy of the ARChive of Contemporary Music. The exhibition will be on display from November 1 to December 15, 2009 at The Gabe M. Wiener Music & Arts Library, 7th floor of Dodge Hall, at 2960 Broadway.

Greil Marcus is the author of Mystery Train (1975/2008), Dead Elvis (1991), The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997), The Dustbin of History (1995), Like a Rolling Stone (2005), The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice (2006), and other books. With Werner Sollers he is the co-editor of A New Literary History of America, published this fall by Harvard, and the editor of Best Music Writing 2009, published this fall by Da Capo. The first records editor at Rolling Stone, in 1969, in recent years he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, & Minnesota; this fall he is teaching “Music as Democratic Speech, from the Commonplace Song to Bob Dylan” at the New School.

A book signing will follow the event. Lipstick Traces: Live is co-sponsored by the Friends of the Columbia Libraries, the ARChive of Contemporary Music, and the Arts Initiative at Columbia University.