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Oliver Arditi

Writing all the things.

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Once upon a time in Canterbury…

Lots of regional music scenes have come and gone. Some we’ve heard of. We know that there were interesting things…

Mark from the Zoo, Mr. Loop, The Brewdelics, The Bury All

Thresholds

We cross thresholds, we readers. Each book we read is entered through a portal, and marking those portals—projected onto the…

A Musical Offering, Charco Press, Fionn Petch, Luis Sagasti

Complexities of service

With The Caine Mutiny, Humphrey Bogart continued his drift away from movie-star roles, playing a part in which his character…

Bogie, Edward Dmytryk, Humphrey Bogart, The Caine Mutiny

A game of madness

I’ve never paid particular attention to Nicholas Hawksmoor’s famous London churches, although I am familiar with some of them. I…

Hawksmoor, Iain Sinclair, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd

No detour

Slayer’s fourth album, South of Heaven was released when their sound and status were well-established, and it was conceived as…

Dave Lombardo, Jeff Hanneman, Kerry King, Slayer, South of Heaven, Tom Araya

Unquestioned liberalism

There’s a kind of nostalgia for the Cold War, almost in the same way that British culture incorporates a nostalgia…

Bridge of Spies, Coen Brothers, Ethan Coen, James B. Donovan, Joel and Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Mark Rylance, Matt Charman, Rudolf Abel, Steven Spielberg, Strangers on a Bridge, Tom Hanks, William Fisher

Built in the telling

A ‘silent’ comic, which is to say a wordless comic, relies on the grammar of sequential art. This is a…

A Land Called Tarot, Gael Bertrand

Oozing style and charm

In our trawl through Humphrey Bogart’s oeuvre we’ve been sticking to the best known movies—he acted in over seventy films.…

Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, Katherine Hepburn, The African Queen

Spending time

The experience of playing a narrative-focussed AAA game is getting progressively closer to the experience of watching a movie or…

Ghost of Tsushima, Sucker Punch Productions

Joyous celebration

People whose names appear on albums are often not ‘professional musicians’ in the sense of someone who has honed their…

Cory Wong, Cory Wong and the Green Screen Band, funk, soul, Yes Wave

Outside in the Village

A musician’s life is usually precarious, especially if you’re attempting to work as a featured artist. Llewyn Davis, as played…

bob dylan, Coen Brothers, Dave van Ronk, Ethan Coen, Garrett Hedlund, Inside Llewyn Davis, Joel and Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, John Goodman, Oscar Isaac

A museum of Tom Kaczynski

Behind their classically laid-out, commercially styled covers (complete with old-school colophons to tickle the collector’s fancy), the first two…

Cartoon Dialectics, Fieldmouse Press, Solrad, Tom Kaczynski, Uncivilized Books

A ritual of world-building

A rich, deep evocation of… Well, it’s something of a cliché to say ‘the movement of the earth’, or ‘geology’,…

Asva, drone, drone metal, Futurists Against The Ocean, Jessika Kenney, Trey Spruance

A bleak disturbance

Humphrey Bogart reputedly occupied something of a lonely place among his Hollywood peers—although he had his good friends, Louise Brooks,…

Gloria Grahame, Humphrey Bogart, In A Lonely Place, Nicholas Ray

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