Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Rhyming cinema

    Rhyming cinema

    One thing I’ve had reinforced through watching the Rudolph Maté directed Robert Mitchum vehicle Second Chance (1953), is the total disconnect between Golden Age Hollywood movies and their posters. This is not a particularly egregious example, but still: ‘sky-high excitement atop a South American peak’ refers to scenes set and filmed in Mexico, and as Read more

  • For the bakers

    For the bakers

    I’m fortunate enough to be closely related to someone (my mum) who is something of an authority on the state of scholarship around bread and baking, and she recommended Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery as remaining one of the best secondary sources, more than forty years after its publication. My interest in the Read more

  • Light touch, heavy themes

    Light touch, heavy themes

    I inhabit a timeline in which the definitive version of Michael Moorcock’s huge fantasy sequence is The Tale of The Eternal Champion, available in your version of reality only in second-hand copies which sometimes slip between the parallels and turn up for sale in independent bookshops (or on Amazon). In your reality Moorcock disavowed this Read more

  • Mumbling in the pocket

    Mumbling in the pocket

    On the last day of last year, the death was announced of one of the most enigmatic and under-recorded figures in alternative hip-hop, which had occurred two months earlier. MF Doom reached his greatest commercial success, and most would say his creative peak, in collaboration with Madlib, with whom he released the album Madvillainy under Read more

  • Surface is depth

    Surface is depth

    Orlando is a very complex and sophisticated film based on a very complex and sophisticated book which I haven’t read. For this and other reasons I’m sure I missed a great deal when I watched it, but I was thoroughly entertained. It has a very post-modern, nineties sheen to it (it was released in 1992), Read more

  • No conflict

    No conflict

    The American economy has had its ups and downs—in the 1970s manufacturing crashed so badly that several large cities were pretty much wiped out. But when the financial crash hit in 2008 the economy was less obviously predicated on a few huge industrial employers, and the ensuing collapse was more widely distributed. For the first Read more