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Bonfire of the hierarchies
As a librarian, as a lover of history and the literature that constitutes it, as a custodian and celebrant of what might be called the collective archive of human discourse, it can be uncomfortable to hear someone shouting ‘burn the archive’, which is Siyabonga Mthembu’s opening declamation on this extraordinary, incantatory album. But there is… Read more
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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 on memoir or ‘life writing’—I’m… Read more
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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 ‘don’t need no stinking official… Read more
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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 transforms something that apes the… Read more
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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 lockdown, we decided to watch… Read more
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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, the Bronx and hip-hop, Canterbury… Read more
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