Jean-Michel Mension (24 September 1934 – 6 May 2006) was a French radical active in the Lettrist International, from which he was expelled as "merely decorative",Jean-Michael Mension, The Tribe, Verso 2002, p91 and the Ligue Communiste.
Mension was the son of Paris-born Communist Party activists who were active in the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Mension described the life of the Lettrist group and their associates in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1952–1954, in a book-length collection of conversations with Gerard Berreby and Francesco Milo, The Tribe.Jean-Michael Mension, The Tribe, Verso 2002 For a period, he was a close associate of Guy Debord, founder of the Lettrist International and later of the Situationist International, and wrote several texts for the Lettrist International journal Potlatch.Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces Secker & Warburg, 1990, p358, p365
Mension appears in photographs taken by the Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken and published in his book Een liefdesgeschiedenis in Saint Germain des Prés (1956): "(He) turned himself into a living poster and paraded through the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés with cryptic slogans scrawled up and down his pants...A few days later, Mension and Fred got drunk, streaked their hair with peroxide, and stumbled through the quarter slapping female shoppers and picking fights with businessmen."Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces Secker & Warburg, 1990, p345 Some commentators have detected a prototype of punk outrage in Mension's style and behavior.Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces Secker & Warburg, 1990; see "Lipstick Traces on a Cigarette"
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