Author: Oli
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Animal friends
Putting animal heads on the characters in cartoons is a widespread and long-established device—as I very recently noted with respect to Bryan Talbot’s Grandville. Through this device, the cartoonist, who aims to visually communicate any number of observations that couldn’t emerge through mimetic representation, is able to access a smorgasbord…
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A public meditation
Charlie Cawood is going places. I mean, I certainly hope he is going places in his career, but that’s not what I mean. I mean I’m going places. When I listen to Cawood’s music on Blurring Into Motion, I go places. It’s an album of place and journey, of concrete…
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Hurtfully real
Paula Rego’s lumpen figures, often so sturdy their proportions seem dwarf-like, have such presence, such immediacy, that it’s easy to forget they are mediated. So much more real than figures in a photograph, which are rarely more than optical phantoms, they are imbued with mass and duration, in a sense…
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Beautiful, beautiful violence
Many comics today feature anthropomorphic animals, or animal-headed humans, as do animated cartoons, prose fiction and other media. Anyone writing a history of this practice would probably start with Egyptian deities, or with the lion-headed palaeolithic Löwenmensch figurine, but as I know very little about the topic I have no…
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Now’s the time
Time is an important theme for now. Wait, what did I just write? For the concept of ‘now’ it seems tautological to stress time’s importance, but it is also an important theme in Now, the sixth and last in a series of exhibitions of that name held at the Modern…
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Enough of a twist
High Georgian ceilings, above vast, perfectly proportioned sash windows, speak to me of cosy home comfort. Wherever I am, if I can look up and past my surroundings to that kind of a backdrop, I’m back in toddler-hood, lazing in that delicious torpor of the up-too-late surrounded by noisy, kindly,…
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Having the wrong fun
Although I spend much of my working life judging books by their covers, The Manchurian Candidate offers an object lesson in not judging movies by their posters. It presents itself as a kind of gritty, serious, political thriller, and is a remake of a pretty well-known 1960s film, which I…
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Saccharine artillery
My awareness of Squarepusher began at uni, where I studied the bass guitar. Unsurprisingly, an out-there electronic producer, who also happens to integrate a prodigious facility on bass guitar into his work, went down well among students on my course. This was relatively early in Tom Jenkinson’s career, and he…
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A book on the wall
For a small, softly-spoken country, Scotland carries a large intellectual stick. Voltaire said that ‘we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation’, and its influence during the Enlightenment would probably be hard to overstate. It’s difficult to find agreement on exactly what or when the Enlightenment was, but…
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Distant whispers
Whispers sometimes reach our ears from long-silenced voices, reverberations reflected by a documentary record that has diversified over the last century-and-a-half to include photography, recorded audio, video and a still expanding palette of newer media. Tradition and transmitted recollection have been augmented by technologies with an appearance of truthfulness, which…
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Capitalising on the dark
Darkness is an abundant resource during December in Edinburgh. To many of the city’s residents, trapped in an indoor workplace during the season’s fleeting daylight hours, this may sound like an insufferably upbeat formulation, but for anyone wishing to capitalise on festive cheer, it’s a gift. Christmas markets, cosy shop-fronts,…
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Congenial hubris
Spouse and I first visited The Sheep Heid Inn at the end of a long walk with Spawn, through Holyrood Park in near total darkness. It was the Saturday before November 5, and we’d been planning to climb Arthur’s Seat for a view of any fireworks that might be going…
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Energy and entertainment
My long-interrupted project to read or re-read all of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books has at last been resumed, after several years’ hiatus. Volume 3 in this 1990s omnibus series brings together the original four Hawkmoon novels, which were the first Moorcock I ever read, aged thirteen. I read the…
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Perfectly judged
Aaron Gibson’s songwriting is perfectly married to his delivery, each as gnarled and burnished as it is raw and young-at-heart. Stylistically, his musical materials are somewhere in the borders between alternative rock and Americana, with a powerfully narrative lyrical approach. Warm, triadic harmonies are built into dramatic structures in which…
Oliver Arditi 