Author: Oli
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Sharing
Rachel Roddy’s second book is full of anecdotes and recollections, little narrative vignettes about her immediate household, the extended Sicilian family she’s married into, her English parents, the people from whom she buys food in Rome and Sicily, people she cooks with, and so on. I don’t go a bundle…
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Incoherent gold
Gold is a recurring symbol in American cinema, a useful stand-in when directors want to establish a dialectic between self-interest and sociality. Spike Lee makes knowing and witty use of this history in Da 5 Bloods, most obviously when a Vietnamese criminal informs the protagonists that he and his crew…
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Clever joy
Nuria Martinez cultivates a self-consciously naïve cartooning style, but her sophistication as an illustrator, and her narrative facility as a comics artist become quickly apparent from the outset of Outspace, her cute, colourful one-shot for ShortBox Comics. An upturned roller-skate in the fourth (or third?) panel of the first page…
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Fragments of story
So much discourse and tale-telling has entered our small house through the tiny window of our television—no bigger than the screen of a large laptop. It isn’t the ideal way to see cinematic work, but in recent months it has been the only way. Near the beginning of England’s first…
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Once upon a time in Canterbury…
Lots of regional music scenes have come and gone. Some we’ve heard of. We know that there were interesting things happening in electronic dance music in 1980s Detroit, because techno is now one of the most pervasive elements of global music; we know the same about Washington D.C. and emo,…
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Thresholds
We cross thresholds, we readers. Each book we read is entered through a portal, and marking those portals—projected onto the membrane between this and that, self and other, known and novel, given and made—there are images. I am not speaking metaphorically. For the last ten years, in my day job,…
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Complexities of service
With The Caine Mutiny, Humphrey Bogart continued his drift away from movie-star roles, playing a part in which his character appears weak, unlikeable, cowardly and possibly lacking in mental stability. The film is an ensemble piece, which gives as much screen time to his co-stars, and which locates the narrative…
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A game of madness
I’ve never paid particular attention to Nicholas Hawksmoor’s famous London churches, although I am familiar with some of them. I have, however, become embroiled as a reader in a complex literary game which has been articulated around them, through the work of several writers. My first encounter was through Alan…
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No detour
Slayer’s fourth album, South of Heaven was released when their sound and status were well-established, and it was conceived as a conscious effort to avoid slipping into cliché or repetition. With their reputation for blistering tempos there was nowhere to take them but down, and they combined this slowing with…
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Unquestioned liberalism
There’s a kind of nostalgia for the Cold War, almost in the same way that British culture incorporates a nostalgia for WWII. Some people miss the simplicities of that time—the black and white morality that was sold to them by their governments, which while no more substantial than the bizarre…
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Built in the telling
A ‘silent’ comic, which is to say a wordless comic, relies on the grammar of sequential art. This is a well-established grammar, with most of the characteristics of spoken language—it has a lexicon, a set of morphosyntactic rules by which lexical items are combined, and it has dialectical variations. Such…
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Oozing style and charm
In our trawl through Humphrey Bogart’s oeuvre we’ve been sticking to the best known movies—he acted in over seventy films. The African Queen is one of the most famous. It is relatively exceptional in several ways. For one thing it was shot largely on location in Africa, an unusual choice…
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Spending time
The experience of playing a narrative-focussed AAA game is getting progressively closer to the experience of watching a movie or a TV series, in terms of both visual fidelity, and of dramatic sophistication. Actors and writers who also work on film and TV are now routinely employed, and rather than…
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Joyous celebration
People whose names appear on albums are often not ‘professional musicians’ in the sense of someone who has honed their skills and technique in the exacting and instrumental way that implies. They are more often people whose primary drive could be summarised with a term like ‘self-expression’, or ‘creative fulfilment’—singers,…
Oliver Arditi 