Author: Oli
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Worlds and authorities
I was spurred by the recent BBC TV adaptation of Northern Lights to re-read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, mainly because I couldn’t remember enough of the plot to grasp how they’d changed it, but also because when I read it before (aloud, to Spawn at bedtimes), it had…
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None of this matters
The Big Lebowski is such a legendary movie that it’s almost embarrassing to admit this is the first time I’ve watched it. It possesses all the accoutrements proper to a cult film: sold-out repertory screenings, enthusiasts quoting large contiguous chunks of dialogue at each other, multiple regular fan conventions, and…
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Luminous possibilities
Cwtch is a long-distance collaboration which concluded last year, between Paul Foster, a Welsh electronic music producer, and Marie Craven, an Australian singer and lyricist. Pixiegraf is the album which started it all, back in 2008. Originally conceived as a release under the rubric of Dementio 13 (Foster’s main project),…
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A book to sort you out apiece
A viral disease is sweeping the world, killing indiscriminately. Well, nearly. Its fatal impact is concentrated in a particular minority, one that many in society seem to regard as expendable, as less valuable than the average. At least in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it’s socially unacceptable to vilify older people…
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A play on the screen
I think of Shallow Grave as a film I know, but on reflection I think I saw it once, on TV, within a couple of years of its original release. It’s Danny Boyles’s first feature, Ewan McGregor’s cinematic debut, and an early milestone in the careers of Christopher Eccleston and…
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For Pete’s sake!
In 1983 or 1984, I had a good look around Charles Jencks’s Thematic House, then recently completed. It is now the only Grade I listed building in the Ladbroke Conservation Area in Kensington, owing to its unique importance as an early example of Postmodern architecture. I was given a thorough…
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Worth digging
Funk Factory is something of a period piece. It comes from an era where the boundaries between jazz fusion and funk were widely blurred, and it combines complexities appropriate to the former with the kind of pop silliness associated with the latter—along with some stunning grooves, of course. Funk Factory…
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Reunion tour
Unspecified possibilities are the stuff of optimism. At the end of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, when Renton strolls off into the sunset with a bag of cash, we don’t know what will happen next for him, but we know he’s decided to choose life. He’s going to go and find fulfilment,…
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Abstract affective allegory
Like all the books published by ShortBox, Jonathan Djob Nkondo’s After Laughter is a beautiful object, printed to a high standard, its bold, two-colour cover intriguing and inviting. The ShortBox website describes it as a ‘silent’ comic, which is to say it has no text. While I’m not one for…
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Filmic mythology
If the daft comedy Raising Arizona was a film made of style, with Miller’s Crossing the Coen Brothers showed that the same basic material could still be used to construct something dark and serious, much as it had been in the Classical Hollywood era. Every shot, every line of dialogue,…
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Habitable insouciance
I haven’t seen a great deal of James Stokoe’s work, but what I have seen has been right up my street. He contributed to Prophet, one of the most psychedelic recent SF comics, and he drew the cover for the first issue of Protector, a promising new series from Image…
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Socks off
Clever, metatextual movies don’t have to be intellectual or gnomic: sometimes they can just be hella entertaining. The most obvious way in which this occurs is through generic playfulness, which is the beating heart of Knives Out: ‘this is a murder mystery’ is written through it like the name of…
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Lining up their ducks
The Clash were one of the first bands I got into as a teenager—late as usual, they broke up just before I started listening to them. I started with Combat Rock, then worked by way through the rest of their albums, learning the words and getting to know the recordings…
Oliver Arditi 