Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • A kitchen quadrivium

    A kitchen quadrivium

    This book made a big noise on release, and Spouse bought me a copy for Christmas shortly thereafter, which I promptly forgot about. Last year I made a decision to start working my way through all the unread food books I’d been receiving for Christmas and birthday gifts, and since then every other non-fiction book Read more

  • Pretty appropriation

    Pretty appropriation

    O Brother, Where Art Thou? is an altogether more straightforward seeming film than the Coen Brothers’ typical output. Goofy comedies were an established facet of their oeuvre by the time they made this movie (released in 2000), but even there their only piece with a comparably linear narrative was Raising Arizona. This isn’t to say Read more

  • Elegant dismemberment

    Elegant dismemberment

    Zainab Akhtar at ShortBox is really the acme of independent comics editors: she just gets it. Everything she puts out is gorgeous. Some books in quite a low-key way, and others, like Beneath the Dead Oak Tree by Emily Carroll, in an overt and sumptuous way. It’s a brief fable about anthropomorphic foxes (or possibly Read more

  • Glamour and technique

    Glamour and technique

    Technique is a weirdly invisible thing in film. Everything a director or an editor does is right there in front of you, but it’s somehow really hard to notice it. The whole business of film-making is a matter of glamour, a sleight-of-hand facilitated by distracting the audience with shiny baubles such as unfeasibly attractive stars Read more

  • Adversity included

    Adversity included

    ‘Let’s be bold’, Hope and Social admonish their listeners in the song of that title, the third track of this vivid, broad-stroke album. They are very much preaching what they practise. It’s easy to describe them using terms like ‘relentlessly upbeat’ or ‘indefatigably positive’, because that’s certainly their vibe, but to do so would actually Read more

  • Beautiful scaffolding

    Beautiful scaffolding

    Certain themes and techniques recur throughout Joel and Ethan Coen’s films. Convoluted crime stories with arbitrary conclusions in which none of the characters possess any real agency are not their exclusive preserve—they specifically referenced Raymond Chandler when talking about their plotting of The Big Lebowski, for instance. Such tales have a distinguished pedigree, and they Read more