Fred Chichin, one half of Les Rita Mitsouko, is no more (although there is more here, there and everywhere). * Our friend Tony O’Neill on Boris Vian. * Highbrow smut in Paris. * Who’s afraid of “JT Leroy”? * Jonathan Self on his brother Will: “When Will was three he packed a suitcase with toys — including my teddy bear — and ran away from home. He walked about three miles along the A1 and stood at a bus stop”. * Erotica 07. * The death of French culture (more here, here and here). * Ophelia of the Seine. * The cultural guerillas. * 80s underground New York. * Vivienne Westwood’s manifesto. * On Malcolm Lowry: “How do we parlay the author of one great book into “a great author”? It’s easy to stick to the great book, which you can read over and over, but you’re left with the problem of one. It’s odd to think how much a literary reputation depends on the author’s implicit offer — or threat — to do it again”. * Jon Savage mentions Paul Marko’s Roxy Club book in his 2007 round-up of rock books, as well as former 3:AMer Bertie Marshall’s Berlin Bromley: “The 30th anniversary of punk has not escaped publishers. In Berlin Bromley (SAF, £8.99), Bertie Marshall remembers being an underage gay boy exploding with bad drugs and an unhealthy Cabaret fetish — a true punk indeed. Although it has a cast of characters ranging from the Sex Pistols to Siouxsie Sioux, what sticks in the mind is just how hard it was to be gay in 1977″. * The “record Peter Ackroyd might have made” (Paul Simonon) is The Observer’s album of the year. * Britain’s rudest road signs. * A spanking new issue of The Great Small Fishes (see my interview in issue one). * Tristam’s new exhibition. Linder Sterling’s * Swells on the white English working-class: “The characters in Catherine Tate’s ‘Am I Bothered’ sketches might be white, but it’s hardly relevant. You hear the same half-affected, Punjabi-inflected, Afro-Saxon Estuary English from Radio 4’s stable of leftish comedians every time they ‘do’ a young person. The all but universal working/lower-middle class, southern youth accent addresses a massive generational gap, but it tells us nothing about the race of the kid being mimicked”. (Related: the absence of working-class people in novels.) * McGee on Lawrence. * An extract from Jean-Jacques Schuhl’s work-in-progress appears in the latest issue of Ligne de risque. * On Julian Maclaren-Ross. * An archive of Laurence Rémila’s articles. * Happy birthday to you dear Conrad. * Rare Strummer memorabilia to be published. (Related: Carbon/Silicon interviewed by ex Pistols Steve Jones.) * Jon Henley returns to London. * Les mots de la tribu. * Ginny Good. * Iain Sinclair on the disappearing Lower Lea valley. * Mozgate II. (Related: should Morrissey be the next England manager?!) * A merry festive season to you all!
First posted: Monday, December 10th, 2007.
