Author: Oli
-
The truth is a collage
We recall and communicate experience as coherent, continuous, meaningful – it is so important to us to do so that we will construct sometimes heartbreakingly arbitrary meanings to impart coherence to our experience of happenstance, as when a child ascribes the disappearance of a parent to their own failings. But…
-
Past the blank horizon
Timothy Leary, the 1960s prophet of psychedelic self-transformation, saw parallels between seekers of enlightenment and seekers of oblivion. I forget where, perhaps in the introduction to The Psychedelic Experience, he observes that the sanyasi and the addict both seek the means to detach their consciousness from the continual demands of…
-
A gently chromatic narrative
The Island is a short and beautiful allegory. It’s a simple exploration of solitude, of withdrawal, of re-engagement, and of the fear we may feel of aspects of ourselves. The story is told with a minimum of dialogue, and a lot of delicately shaded crayons. It’s a consequence of the…
-
Journey’s end
Eight kilometres to the north, and many lifetimes away from Noto, lie the remains of its corpse. Here was journey’s end for the continuous relay that connected Jesuits, merchants, nobles, criminals, prisoners, artisans, guardsmen and peasants to the Iron Age Sicel people, after whom Sicily is named, Noto’s founders; to…
-
Achimeric multistable fusion
Something said in a primary school playground in a dispute over parental status, one assumes, Hard Normal Daddy is one of my favourite album titles. It’s also one of my favourite albums, although I haven’t lived with it as long as other Squarepusher releases, having come at Tom Jenkinson’s oeuvre…
-
Same difference
How To Be Autistic is an important book. There are, I imagine, countless books about autism: medical books, popular science books, memoirs of the parents of autistic children, heart-warming novels about cognitively impaired savants (think of the Barry Levinson film Rain Man), and so on. Since the word autismus was…
-
The primacy of the useless
For much of my life I have done ‘nothing’, and for almost all of it I have resisted or involuntarily recoiled from the ‘somethings’ that I was supposed to do. At school I was horrified by the expectations of teaching staff and my peers alike, and to this day I…
-
The island’s amnesiac heart
At the approximate heart of the island of Sicily there is a site which it is hard not to regard as its historical or spiritual centre, although it is far from the oldest dwelling known there, and certainly not unique in the political and economic power which it embodied –…
-
A socially situated erotic
Enigmatically named band releases enigmatically titled record featuring enigmatically titled songs (other than ‘Full Trance Effect’). I like some enigma in my groove, it makes me pay attention. Urban Homes emerged from a largely punk background (so their potted biog on the Altin Village & Mine Records website has it),…
-
Mutually constituted histories
British commercial comics have always been an idiosyncratic little world, in comparison to the vast American scene with its division of labour, standardised conventions, and industrialised processes. When 2000AD came along in 1977 it was written by a bunch of iconoclasts and radicals, determined to see what they could get…
-
The bright glare of professionalism
We were welcomed to the (deep breath) Antonio Salinas Regional Archaeological Museum of Palermo by a dole of small turtles, lazing in the fountain in the entrance courtyard, to the great delight of Spawn. Clearly taking equal pleasure in the water and the sun, which they scaled one another to…
-
Connected food
The first time we brought Spawn to Edinburgh to callously abandon her tearful little face in a soulless new-build apartment block, we were directed by a recommendation in our hotel to a nearby ‘Italian’ restaurant. We ate there, possibly twice, and we ate there again when we came to visit,…
-
Downtempo crepuscular negotiations
I don’t know who the DJ Fontana is who remixed this album, but it’s presumably not Elvis Presley’s drummer, who died last year at the age of 87. There is some minor overlap in track names between this record and the first Black Gold 360 release, but I couldn’t tell…
Oliver Arditi 