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A bleak disturbance
Humphrey Bogart reputedly occupied something of a lonely place among his Hollywood peers—although he had his good friends, Louise Brooks, in a 1967 essay, wrote of his ‘isolation among people’. In fact, she suggested that the part he played in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place was close to his own character—a selfish devotion to… Read more
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Full marks
I hesitate to say too much about Karl Marx or Marxism in response to a book written by someone who could list their profession as ‘Marxist theorist’, but I do need to point out that I don’t consider myself a Marxist, and that I don’t believe that Marx or Marxism has a monopoly on progressive… Read more
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Staring back
Darkness, an absence of light, is an obvious, unavoidable presence in the visual realm. We live in a world of light, so when it’s removed we see its lack. It’s the most visible form of negative space. But darkness is a rich and diverse idea/feeling/aesthetic/domain. In music darkness exists by inference: it is often associated… Read more
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Craft and language
Coen Brothers genre pieces are rarely without an ironic twist or two, a knowing nod to the implausibilities of the conventions, or some acknowledgement of the shortcomings of of the genre’s paradigmatic works. True Grit is still recognisably a Coen Brothers movie, but it’s a much more straightforward homage to the Western than, say, Miller’s… Read more
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The city is not a city
A city is a complex organism. An ‘urbanist’ is a kind of sociologist, which suggests that to those who make cities their objects of study, it is people rather than buildings that constitute one. Indeed it’s possible to imagine a city without buildings—perhaps a large music festival, or historically a gathering of a nomadic people… Read more
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Balancing act
So what happens when you take one of the most distinctive and stylish rhythm sections of the post-punk era and pair them up with a much younger avant-jazz/experimental guitarist, who is one album in to what will doubtless be a storied recording career? Something disastrous, perhaps—there are an awful lot of things that might go… Read more
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