Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Perfectly lonely

    Perfectly lonely

    This spectacular and lavish volume from Chris Ware is the second of his beautiful large books that I’ve read. Rusty Brown is apparently an ongoing character that he’s been drawing for some time, a rather selfish and manipulative man-child nerd who takes advantage of his nerd friend Chalky White’s good nature. Rusty Brown the book,… Read more

  • Surprisingly coherent contempt

    Surprisingly coherent contempt

    Public Image Limited was the band that John Lydon actually wanted to be in. I have no idea whether he would have ended up being involved in music professionally, if Malcolm McLaren hadn’t thought he looked right for The Sex Pistols, but as soon as he was in a band he clearly had his own… Read more

  • Homeric depths

    Homeric depths

    ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’. ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine’. ‘Round up the usual suspects’. ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’. ‘Play it, Sam’. Few if any films in the history of cinema have contributed as much to spoken… Read more

  • 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