Jacno, co-founder of the Stinky Toys (who played at the legendary 100 Club punk festival in 1976) and pioneer of French electropop, has died. * Jean-Philippe Toussaint lands the Prix Décembre. * Punk Poet Laureate John Cooper Clarke interviewed in the Indie: “There may be a group on Facebook called ‘John Cooper Clarke for Poet Laureate’, but the truth is that, in terms of the quality of his writing and the affection he inspires, he has already secured the status of a kind of John Betjeman for the Ramones generation”. * Estates of despair. * Writers who sing; singers who write. * Alain de Botton interviewed about the, er, beauty of work, plus a piece about office meetings. * Claude Lévi-Strauss is no more. * Hammer festival. * The Believer’s Art issue. * Paleo-future: the future that never was. * Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood on being propositioned by Andy Warhol. * Tosh Berman on Jah Wobble. * Rarely seen early shots of the Sex Pistols. * Stewart Home’s tour of Paris. See also his International Manifesto of the Left Bourgeoisie. * Swells tribute scheduled for December. * Tintin the revolutionary and Bolaño, the not so revolutionary, apparently. * Photographing Brigitte Bardot. * Bad language. * The return of The Raincoats. * The Grand Anarcho-Dandyist Ball. * The rise of the neuronovel. * Gavin James Bower: big in Norway. * Jude Rogers on Kraftwerk: “For a girl who remembered her father buying a Spectrum ZX81 as a tiny child, and the same man marvelling over the arrival of the pocket calculator, no wonder this combination of homeliness and strangeness in Kraftwerk’s music — the heimlich and the unheimlich — had a lightning effect”. * Bauhaus women.
First posted: Sunday, November 8th, 2009.
