Author: Oli
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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 by Oscar Isaac, is no exception to this rule. He has no home, no stable relationships, no money, few gigs, and no recording contract. He does have a large stack…
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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…
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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’, since the founding act of drone metal is called Earth, but the slow, heavy movements of Asva’s Futurists Against The Ocean produce an affect which is reminiscent of little else.…
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A bleak disturbance
Humphrey Bogart reputedly occupied something of a lonely place among his Hollywood peers—although he had his good friends, Louise Brooks, in a 1967 essay, wrote of his ‘isolation among people’. In fact, she suggested that the part he played in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place was close to his…
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Full marks
I hesitate to say too much about Karl Marx or Marxism in response to a book written by someone who could list their profession as ‘Marxist theorist’, but I do need to point out that I don’t consider myself a Marxist, and that I don’t believe that Marx or Marxism…
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Staring back
Darkness, an absence of light, is an obvious, unavoidable presence in the visual realm. We live in a world of light, so when it’s removed we see its lack. It’s the most visible form of negative space. But darkness is a rich and diverse idea/feeling/aesthetic/domain. In music darkness exists by…
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Craft and language
Coen Brothers genre pieces are rarely without an ironic twist or two, a knowing nod to the implausibilities of the conventions, or some acknowledgement of the shortcomings of of the genre’s paradigmatic works. True Grit is still recognisably a Coen Brothers movie, but it’s a much more straightforward homage to…
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The city is not a city
A city is a complex organism. An ‘urbanist’ is a kind of sociologist, which suggests that to those who make cities their objects of study, it is people rather than buildings that constitute one. Indeed it’s possible to imagine a city without buildings—perhaps a large music festival, or historically a…
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Balancing act
So what happens when you take one of the most distinctive and stylish rhythm sections of the post-punk era and pair them up with a much younger avant-jazz/experimental guitarist, who is one album in to what will doubtless be a storied recording career? Something disastrous, perhaps—there are an awful lot…
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We don’t need no stinking…
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a film that’s been lurking in my brain since childhood, having been on the BBC’s regular repeat cycle in the 70s and 80s. ‘We don’t need no stinking badges’ is a famous misquote from the movie, which has been replayed everywhere from Broadway…
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Everlasting uncertainty
Having watched a lot of Coen Brothers movies lately, I’m starting to see their kind of purposefully aimless plotting as a norm, and when watching other films in which narrative incident seems arbitrary, it’s easy to ascribe them the same kind of inexplicability. Shit happens. Random happenstance springing from shambolic…
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Sharing the fun
Herbie Hancock was right at the beginning of his career as a sideman when he made his debut recording as a leader. Takin’ Off is quite a debut. Blue Note Records obviously thought Hancock had something, because aside from allowing him to retain the publishing rights to his tunes they…
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One face in a thousand
In Rhetorics of Fantasy, her important structural taxonomy of fantasy literature, Farah Mendlesohn identifies four key types of fantasy, defined by the way that they relate the fantastical to the prosaic. The first and most widely used is the ‘portal-quest fantasy’, in which the protagonists either pass through some kind…
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The past present serious tense
Roger Deakins’s brilliant cinematography has been conspicuous in some of the Coen Brothers’s films—in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, for example, which is not one of their strongest releases, or the black and white The Man Who Wasn’t There, which was. But in other movies it’s just quietly excellent, conveying…
Oliver Arditi 