Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • No detour

    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 a more textural approach to Read more

  • Unquestioned liberalism

    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 claims of today’s post-truth politics, Read more

  • Built in the telling

    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 variations are largely a matter Read more

  • Oozing style and charm

    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 at the time—and the shoot Read more

  • Spending time

    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 recording a series of voice-over Read more

  • Joyous celebration

    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, songwriters or bands performing their Read more