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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
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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
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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
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Open worlds
Aladdin Sane was my first Bowie album. Not the first Bowie I heard, and not even the first of his albums I listened to, but the first one I lived with until I learned it. It was among a collection of albums that had belonged to my dad, that his brother Jake saved until I… Read more
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Everything happens only once
My exploration of Kim Stanley Robinson’s oeuvre is proceeding in a kind of pincer movement, reading books alternately from either end of his writing career, and closing in on the midpoint. I didn’t start right at the beginning, having read several of his earlier novels already, but with Antarctica, published in 1997, and I’ve just… Read more
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My grandfather’s hats
It’s a strange privilege to have had a grandfather who was, as he once put it, ‘world famous to five hundred people’. He was actually downplaying his public profile there, although that’s a fair description of many academics, whose disciplines tend to be both obscure and globally distributed. In my grandfather Reyner Banham’s case, his… Read more
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