Author: Oli
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Sweet reasonableness
Having had occasion to excavate some of my East Anglian roots in response to watching The Dig recently, I was well-primed to receive some insights into the history of my family in Norfolk, courtesy of my cousin Simon Gooch. His slim biography of Edwin Gooch is a fascinating account of…
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Doing it every day
Watching the second film in our self-selected route through Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, I had in my mind the strengths and shortcomings of Mangrove, the first one we saw. That film is incredibly sharp on the politics, the history, and the drama of the events it depicts, but somewhat…
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A fairly tail
Well, that’s two ShortBox comics in a row with a cultivated visual naïveté. However, where Núria Martínez’s Outspace is very obviously a digital work, Charlotte Mei’s Pipette & Dudley: Charming Dog Adventure wastes no opportunity to foreground the physicality of its artwork, the texture of Mei’s thick impasto bulging off…
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Excavating justice
I don’t come from Suffolk, but I’ve lived here the vast majority of my adult life, and I have family roots across Suffolk and Norfolk. If I feel a sense of belonging to anywhere, it’s here. The green, gentle hills, the un-British lack of rainfall, the distinctive speech patterns of…
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Rigorously nourishing
This album was a gift from a friend, who I imagine had it recommended to him for its prog connections, but found it a bit too spicy when it arrived. I had it hanging around for several years before I gave it a really deep listening, but now I have……
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Getting off the train
One of the books that has made the greatest impact on me is Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. In that tetralogy the protagonist pledges his allegiance to a rebel leader, and after an epic series of adventures finds himself face-to-face with the authority against which he is rebelling—at…
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Expert hand-holding
Worldbuilder, storyteller—these are Philip Pullman’s great strengths for me. As a ‘novel-maker’ he’s stuck in a rather old-fashioned, comfortable mode which doesn’t respond well to an overly critical reading, and as a philosopher (which all but the most unreflective authors of speculative fiction must be) he has some blind spots.…
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Writing history
History is what we write about our past—it’s the origin story a culture constructs for itself, from a variety of sources and through a variety of media. With Mangrove, from his Small Axe series of films, Steve McQueen is writing history, as much as he is filming historical fiction. Although…
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Blandgorgeousartsampler
It’s common for a bunch of artists to collaborate on a series, but Madi (as far as I know) has only been published as a single album, and the different contributors are deployed to produce aspects of the book’s formal structure, rather than simply taking it in turns to draw…
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Shiny dance machine
It was the 1980s. We all had glossy hair, wore shoulder pads, and made music with the same three models of FM synthesiser. Style was substance and everything was shiny. African musicians were beginning to make an impact on global record sales, and France was starting to be known as…
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Funny enough to be real
Black comedy crime dramas with inconclusive endings are almost a genre of their own now. The trick is to keep populating them with well thought-out characters and convincing concrete details, rather than leaning on tropes—in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Martin McDonagh nails that, making a film which is continually…
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An uncertain consolation
Comic books are an excellent medium for non-fiction. This is not a novel insight—during the Second World War instruction manuals for US soldiers were often provided in precisely that format. Visual explication can be far easier to retain and recall, but even so, comics are primarily associated with narrative fiction.…
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The good, the bad, and the oblivious
Watching John Ford’s acclaimed Western The Searchers gave me occasion to note how incomplete my education in cinema is, and how hard it can be to bridge the cultural distance between the third decade of the twenty-first century and the Golden Age of Hollywood. Put simply, although I could appreciate…
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Bonfire of the hierarchies
As a librarian, as a lover of history and the literature that constitutes it, as a custodian and celebrant of what might be called the collective archive of human discourse, it can be uncomfortable to hear someone shouting ‘burn the archive’, which is Siyabonga Mthembu’s opening declamation on this extraordinary,…
Oliver Arditi 