Author: Oli
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Surprisingly coherent contempt
Public Image Limited was the band that John Lydon actually wanted to be in. I have no idea whether he would have ended up being involved in music professionally, if Malcolm McLaren hadn’t thought he looked right for The Sex Pistols, but as soon as he was in a band…
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Homeric depths
‘Here’s looking at you, kid’. ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine’. ‘Round up the usual suspects’. ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’. ‘Play it, Sam’. Few if any films in the history of cinema have…
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A kitchen quadrivium
This book made a big noise on release, and Spouse bought me a copy for Christmas shortly thereafter, which I promptly forgot about. Last year I made a decision to start working my way through all the unread food books I’d been receiving for Christmas and birthday gifts, and since…
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Pretty appropriation
O Brother, Where Art Thou? is an altogether more straightforward seeming film than the Coen Brothers’ typical output. Goofy comedies were an established facet of their oeuvre by the time they made this movie (released in 2000), but even there their only piece with a comparably linear narrative was Raising…
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Elegant dismemberment
Zainab Akhtar at ShortBox is really the acme of independent comics editors: she just gets it. Everything she puts out is gorgeous. Some books in quite a low-key way, and others, like Beneath the Dead Oak Tree by Emily Carroll, in an overt and sumptuous way. It’s a brief fable…
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Glamour and technique
Technique is a weirdly invisible thing in film. Everything a director or an editor does is right there in front of you, but it’s somehow really hard to notice it. The whole business of film-making is a matter of glamour, a sleight-of-hand facilitated by distracting the audience with shiny baubles…
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Adversity included
‘Let’s be bold’, Hope and Social admonish their listeners in the song of that title, the third track of this vivid, broad-stroke album. They are very much preaching what they practise. It’s easy to describe them using terms like ‘relentlessly upbeat’ or ‘indefatigably positive’, because that’s certainly their vibe, but…
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Beautiful scaffolding
Certain themes and techniques recur throughout Joel and Ethan Coen’s films. Convoluted crime stories with arbitrary conclusions in which none of the characters possess any real agency are not their exclusive preserve—they specifically referenced Raymond Chandler when talking about their plotting of The Big Lebowski, for instance. Such tales have…
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Eyes the same size as her stomach
Luchie (as illustrator and cartoonist Lucie Bryon likes to call herself) was apparently blessed with extremely large eyes as a child. In pictures of herself as an adult, she has extremely large glasses. Although she writes in convincing idiomatic English, she is a Francophone, and this may be why the…
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Crashing out
We’ve been watching a lot of Coen Brothers films of late, which display so much love for the Golden Age of Hollywood that we’ve started to revisit some of those old movies ourselves. Of course Spouse and I remember them from their endless TV re-runs from the 1960s to the…
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Brash beauty
I knew nothing about Julian Lage before beginning to listen to this album, on the recommendation of James Beaudreau (an excellent but little-known musician whose music you should definitely seek out). In fact, I listened to Love Hurts a fair bit before I found out anything about its author, so…
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An essay in unreality
People like to ascribe meanings to Coen Brothers films. I mean, they must mean something, right? They’re so tricksy and complex, full of so many layers, that surely Joel and Ethan must be getting at something. When an interviewer asked them, in respect of The Hudsucker Proxy, whether they’d intended…
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Words and music by Cory Barlog
Having come late to the garden of gaming delights, I’m dropping in on some series at the end of a very considerable history, quite oblivious to its presence in the creative and design decisions that made the game I’m playing. The Assassin’s Creed series is one I got in on…
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Rapid charm
‘Oh no, the lizard! The lizard’ I was heard to shout when I first watched Bringing Up Baby—in fact I can remember shouting it. I was three years old. I remember, in no particular order, the ‘lizard’ (in fact a leopard), the collapse of the brontosaurus skeleton, the dog running…
Oliver Arditi 