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My piece on René Girard’s mimetic desire appeared on the Guardian Books Blog today.
One Thousand Cranes Can’t Be Wrong
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This appeared in the winter 2009 issue of Flux magazine (issue 71, p. 14):
One Thousand Cranes Can’t Be Wrong
An introduction to Matthew Coleman’s “action painting of the heart”
Matthew Coleman had always been an artist — even when he saw himself as a writer or a filmmaker — but it took the mother of all depressions to open up his eyes. “The intensity, the violence of what I went through completely changed me,” he explains. Coleman’s work is the product of “heightened states of feelings”: the canvas is a “battleground” on which the artist squares up to his demons, wielding the palette knife like “a sword”.
The (noble) savage beauty of the Hand Bursts series — which culminates in a bloody mess that could incarnadine the multitudinous seas — conjures up the fleeting patterns Coleman creates on sundry beaches and then captures on camera. The Lines You Should Not Cross are vicious red pencil renditions of the artist’s bouts of self-harming, but they are also reminiscent of those lines literally drawn in the sand that will be, as it were, littorally washed away. The vibrancy of Coleman’s works often comes from this tension between the compulsion to freeze moments in time and the desire to dissolve into an eternal here and now.
The Cry of a Thousand Cranes — red, blue and yellow origami birds hanging in the Saatchi Gallery or from a tree in the artist’s back garden — was inspired by the old Japanese legend according to which whoever folds 1,000 paper cranes will be granted a wish. When I ask him if he believes in this legend, Matthew Coleman just smiles. Then he says, “I want yellows and blues and reds, I want to see them everywhere I walk, all exploding like fireworks”. We both stare in silence at the cranes gently swaying in the breeze.

Leaving Things Out
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From Paul Morley, “On Gospel, Abba and the Death of the Record: an Audience with Brian Eno,” The Observer 17 January 2010 (Features section, p.10)
“A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn’t. [...] One of the innovations of ambient music was leaving out the idea that there should be melody or words or a beat… so in a way that was music designed by leaving things out — that can be a form of innovation, knowing what to leave out.”
Burn Baby Burn
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Leo Benedictus, “Brian Duffy: ‘Photography was dead by 1972′” The Guardian 12 January 2010
One morning in 1979, Brian Duffy, then one of the most famous photo-graphers in the world, came into work. One of his assistants told him they had run out of toilet paper. His memory is hazy, he admits, but what happened next became an episode of snapper folklore.
“I realised,” he recalls in a documentary that airs on BBC4 tonight, “that I was making decisions about toilet paper. And I thought, ‘This has got to end.’ Either by me murdering my staff, killing myself, or setting fire to the whole fucking thing.” So he gathered every negative and transparency he had ever shot and burned them on a fire in his back garden. After that, he never took another picture.
Except, as it turns out, negatives do not easily catch fire. And when they do, they produce an acrid black smoke: this bonfire ended when an official from Camden council peered over the fence and insisted Duffy put it out. Duffy packed what remained away in shoeboxes in his attic and turned to painting and furniture-restoring. It was only in 2007, when his son Chris went through the boxes, that he reluctantly agreed that they were worth another look. This led to a show in London last year – the first, anywhere, of his career.
To devotees of photography, these surviving pictures were like a salvaged stack from the library at Alexandria.
…So when did it cease to be interesting? Duffy offers some clues in the BBC’s documentary. Talking with Bailey, he says he feels the US photographers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon “fucked photography for us”. What does he mean? “They got there,” he says, referring to their revolutionary work, which pushed at the boundaries of photography. “You’re a bit annoyed when someone does something and you go, ‘Shit! I was just about to do that!’”
The result, says Duffy, was that “photography was dead by 1972″. He takes a rare pause, then explains: ”Everything had been resolved between 1839 and 1972. Every picture after 72, I have seen pre-72. Nothing new. But it took me some time to detect its death. The first person who twigged was Henri Cartier-Bresson. He just stopped – and started painting and drawing. God, he was useless.”…
…So Duffy experimented, until he felt the scope for experimentation had ran out. By the 1970s, he was doing most of his work in advertising — with people he didn’t like, on briefs that bored him. “The more I got into it, the more I realised I was hanging out with things I was diametrically opposed to. And they wanted me to keep a civil tongue up their rectum.”
So he burned everything….</p
Remembering Jacno: France’s First Punk
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This appeared on the Guardian Music Blog on 9 December 2009:
Remembering Jacno: France’s First Punk
The new wave icon, who died last month, founded the Parisian punk scene and pioneered French electropop

“Denis Denis, oh with your eyes so blue/Denis Denis, I’ve got a crush on you.” So sang Debbie Harry on Blondie’s first European hit in 1978. At the time, there were persistent rumours that the Denis in question was none other than Denis Quilliard — better known as Jacno — who died from cancer at the age of 52 last month. After embodying the post-punk years in France, Jacno (his soubriquet, which he acquired as a chain-smoking teenager, was a tribute to the graphic designer who created the iconic Gauloises cigarettes logo) had himself achieved cult status.
Despite being at the heart of the original Parisian punk scene, Jacno hated the herd mentality associated with such movements. One of his more recent songs is called “Je viens d’ailleurs” — “I Come from Elsewhere” — and in his book of interviews, he repeatedly refers to himself as a “martian” (which is quite fitting given his resemblance to Bowie circa The Man Who Fell to Earth).
Jacno met the beautiful Uruguayan Elli Medeiros (now Mme Brian de Palma) during a student demonstration in 1973. They became an item and formed the Stinky Toys (a reference to both Dinky Toys and New York Dolls). Following their first chaotic gig in 1976, the band acquired a reputation for debauched drunkenness that eventually alienated EMI who were about to sign them.
At Malcolm McLaren’s behest, they played the 100 Club punk festival following which Elli appeared on the cover of Melody Maker. Their eponymous first album sold — as Jacno used to point out — as many copies as the Velvet Underground’s debut. And like the Velvets, their small fanbase included such luminaries as Andy Warhol. When he arrived at Orly airport in the summer of 1977 — having been invited to attend the inauguration of the Pompidou Centre — the Pope of Pop was sporting a conspicuous Jacno badge. Over the following days, Warhol would court the young musician assiduously (albeit unsuccessfully), famously painting his portrait on a restaurant tablecloth using a borrowed make-up kit.
On their second album, the Toys abandoned their original riff-heavy sound and explored colder, quirkier climes. The band disbanded after an Altamont-style gig during which a fan was killed by rampaging Hells Angels. It was time to move on.
In 1980 Jacno became the poster boy for the Jeunes Gens Modernes (“Modern Young Things”), a label coined by a local magazine to describe the resolutely elitist post-punk scene based around Le Rose Bonbon nightclub. He provided the soundtrack to Olivier Assayas’s first short movie, including an instrumental entitled “Rectangle“, which no record company would release at first, although it ended up being a massive hit throughout Europe. The film also included a bittersweet track sung by Elli that marked the birth of the Elli & Jacno duo which would go on to sell millions of records until the couple split up in 1984.
Jacno also produced albums by some of France’s greatest stars like Jacques Higelin or Etienne Daho, but he will go down in history as a pioneer of electropop who anticipated the late 1990s French Touch. By playing schmaltzy 1960s “yéyé” tunes on Kraftwerk-style synthesisers, Jacno provided a perfect retro-futurist soundtrack to the melancholy innocence of adolescence. Paris will never be quite the same without him.
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My short tribute to Jacno appeared on the Guardian’s music blog today. You’ll find it here.


