Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Complex simplicity

    Complex simplicity

    This sweet-natured, simple tale of friendship and love is as straightforward as comics get – except that it’s completely backwards. Unusually for an English-language publication, it’s laid out as a manga, running from right to left, from the front cover, through each page, to its conclusion. When I first picked it up I wondered if Read more

  • For the birds and bees?

    For the birds and bees?

    Money, it’s a gas Grab that cash with both hands, and make a stash – Roger Waters Generally speaking, I think of money as a crime. I can imagine, quite easily, a variety of economies in which it does not figure, and I analyse its function in the real world as a commodification of both Read more

  • Plugged, but not hinged

    Plugged, but not hinged

    If you’ve heard of Perhaps Contraption you’re probably under the impression that they’re an avant-garde brass band, and you may even have seen them marching around summer festivals pushing a pram and making noises that are neither plugged nor hinged. Their debut album, ten years old this year, is something different however (i.e. it is Read more

  • A ritual of sipping and nibbling

    A ritual of sipping and nibbling

    I am wearing my new coat. It is a rather jaunty, fashionable coat, but it is also very smart, so I feel quite in command of the situation as we enter the Signet Library in Edinburgh. I have elected to go scruffy for this visit to the city, rather than taking the tweed-jacketed option, but Read more

  • Veils of allusion

    Veils of allusion

    Iain Sinclair walks London’s sacred geometries, pursuing a dérive that moves obliquely across the familiar, prosaic territories of the city. Or he consecrates the geometries of his walking. Or he territorialises a sacred ambulation. This triangle, of place, movement and meaning, is the tripod on which these two short books stand – anthologised in a Read more

  • A fable for the devouring

    A fable for the devouring

    This book smells great. It’s a slim, perfect-bound volume, in a tall, narrow, custom format, printed to a very high standard, its pages heavy with dark ink. I want to eat it. Its physicality, its insistent presence as an object, is paralleled, and probably produced in part, by the solidity of Ariel Ries’ figure drawing. Read more