Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Hefty, rough-hewn cuboids of harmony

    Hefty, rough-hewn cuboids of harmony

    The river of jazz once had the appearance of a mighty current with many tributaries, but now it more resembles a great delta, where it meets a number of other broad waterways at the point of their issue to the ocean. The past of this river is populated with many futures. Free jazz was once… Read more

  • History, re-mediated

    History, re-mediated

    ‘Palazzo’ is a term that is bandied about quite casually in Italy, and although it is technically cognate with ‘palace’, it refers to any kind of grand residence, from the substantial townhouses of the prosperous bourgeoisie to the vast combined residences and governmental seats of dukes and bishops. The principal seat of Sicily’s Norman monarchy… Read more

  • Migratory death-drives

    Migratory death-drives

    Emigration seems to offer a fresh start, a blank slate; this is often what is hoped for by those that practice it. In many cases, of those fleeing conflict or extreme economic deprivation, this is a more than reasonable aspiration, and the contrast that is occasioned by a successful migration may well be so great… Read more

  • A horizon obscured by banality

    A horizon obscured by banality

    I’m generally unimpressed by assertions of a cultural distance between Northern and Southern Europe. Such ideas usually revolve around differing attitudes to work and leisure, the importance of food and family in the South, the more relaxed lifestyle found in warmer climates, and so on. I don’t dispute that such differences exist, but I tend… Read more

  • The sound of the unnamed

    The sound of the unnamed

    H.P. Lovecraft, the lonely, bitter, racist, visionary poet of American horror, conceived ancient malevolences from the beyond the limits of the knowable, unnameable terrors from the vast gothic hinterland where knowledge is madness. It seems quite apposite then that his most famous creation was literally unnameable when Metallica devoted to it the nine-minute instrumental with… Read more

  • The elision of geography

    The elision of geography

    At the age of fourteen I was lucky enough to spend a few hours, one afternoon in Los Angeles, with the two writers who were then probably the best known skalds of that city’s architecture – Esther McCoy and my grandfather, Reyner Banham. It was not an edifying afternoon, as I was not at the… Read more