Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Congenial hubris

    Congenial hubris

    Spouse and I first visited The Sheep Heid Inn at the end of a long walk with Spawn, through Holyrood Park in near total darkness. It was the Saturday before November 5, and we’d been planning to climb Arthur’s Seat for a view of any fireworks that might be going off, but low cloud and… Read more

  • Energy and entertainment

    Energy and entertainment

    My long-interrupted project to read or re-read all of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books has at last been resumed, after several years’ hiatus. Volume 3 in this 1990s omnibus series brings together the original four Hawkmoon novels, which were the first Moorcock I ever read, aged thirteen. I read the books as they were written:… Read more

  • Perfectly judged

    Aaron Gibson’s songwriting is perfectly married to his delivery, each as gnarled and burnished as it is raw and young-at-heart. Stylistically, his musical materials are somewhere in the borders between alternative rock and Americana, with a powerfully narrative lyrical approach. Warm, triadic harmonies are built into dramatic structures in which dynamics are as central as… Read more

  • Sexy stabby

    Sexy stabby

    Illustration is a word that usually implies instrumentality, a visual work that’s auxiliary to something else. More broadly, you might illustrate a point, which implies one utterance in support of another. But illustration also suggests an approach to drawing (or potentially to any kind of picture-making) which locates its meanings in the objects it represents.… Read more

  • A dark, involute surface

    A dark, involute surface

    Monstress is pretty much the only commercial comics series I’m following, other than 2000AD and its associated properties. I enjoy it basically for Marjorie Liu’s straightforward fantasy storytelling and Sana Takeda’s absolutely sumptuous art: it’s something I can enjoy as entertainment without having to think about it too hard. Its aesthetics are more or less… Read more

  • A new loop

    A new loop

    I’ve been lucky with Star Wars games. I played X-Wing and Tie Fighter in the early 90s. both of which are now regarded as classics of their genre, and when it made it onto Mac I played the RPG Knights of the Old Republic, which is sometimes cited as one of the best games of… Read more