Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Ordinary voices

    Ordinary voices

    Ordinary voices get so little time and exposure that we tend to forget what they sound like, despite the fact that, by definition, they’re the voices that we hear every day. Somehow it comes to seem that the kind of speech we hear in TV dramas, in the lyrics of songs, in political speeches, in Read more

  • Old school concision

    Old school concision

    Much of the development of videogames passed me by, despite my early and continuing interest, thanks to my long voluntary exile in the Apple Mac gaming ghetto. Since I finally bought myself a console about three years ago I’ve been catching up, with a particular focus on the last ten years, which has been something Read more

  • Aesthetic symbols

    Aesthetic symbols

    Having been interested in comics for a very long time, I have of course been aware of manga. Until now, I haven’t read any, and my only knowledge of the genre has been second-hand, either through anime adaptations like Akira, or by reading what other people have written about it. It is one of the Read more

  • Not quite

    Not quite

    Martin Scorsese has something of a reputation as a film maker who does movies about criminals in New York, but Gangs of New York is not your usual Scorsese flick. It’s a historical drama, set mainly during the years of the Civil War, which draws much of its material from a book of the same Read more

  • Central admixture

    Central admixture

    Having recently read and written about Quicksilver, the book which precedes The Confusion in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy, there’s relatively little that I feel compelled to commit to my journal in respect of the The Confusion. To say it contains ‘more of the same’ sounds dismissive, but that’s essentially the truth of it, and Read more

  • Vivid conviction

    Vivid conviction

    Martin Scorsese enjoys making films about criminals. He likes representing their lives and their culture, and he often collaborates with actors who can improvise well, generating free-flowing, vernacular dialogue that’s sometimes hard to follow, but which creates an immersive sense that the audience is sharing their world with them. He’s also a technically gifted film-maker, Read more