21st century
Graham Fuller
Illogical in its twists and turns, elusive as a fading dream but not stylistically dreamy – Christian Petzold’s optimistic romantic tragedy Undine is a ciné-conundrum par excellence. It seems, at first glance, a dismayingly insubstantial work for the maker of such discomfiting German cultural and political critiques as Yella (2007), Barbara (2012), Phoenix (2014), and Transit (2018), but nothing could be further from the truth. Undine (Paula Beer) is an apparently self-sufficient Berlin freelance historian in her mid-twenties who lectures on the city's Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
“This book is a journey of historical discovery, set out sequentially in order to convey a sense of what has changed over time.” Add to this sentence, the title of the work from which it is taken, The Art Museum in Modern Times, and you’ll probably have a reasonable sense of Charles Saumarez Smith’s latest book. Simple, effective – Smith presents us with a series of case studies of museums, placed in chronological order according to each’s unveiling. Following a brief introduction to the Traditional Museum (“bastions of intellectual and scholarly conservatism, dedicated to the understanding Read more ...
Liz Thomson
For the last couple of years, until we were so rudely interrupted, I’d been spending chunks of the year in New York, a city I’ve come to know well these past 25 years. I’d once found the idea of it intimidating, scary even. A migraine-inducing sensory overload. Once there I came to understand it as a collection of neighbourhoods, villages, some a little intimidating perhaps, and as a basically friendly city where people looked out for one another as they do (or do not) in London. Yes, there are people with whom you avoid eye contact but there are many more strangers with whom you chat, on the Read more ...
Charlie Stone
If it weren’t for the warning on the blurb, the first chapter of Double Blind would have you wondering whether you’d ordered something from the science section by mistake. It's a novel that throws its reader in at the deep end, where that end is made of "streaks of bacteria" and "vigorous mycorrhizal networks" that would take a biology degree (or a browser) to decipher. As is often the case, though, it’s worth it once you’re in. Double Blind is one of those rare books that does everything the blurb claims it will do. Humorous, philosophical, gripping and – yes – scientific in turn, this is a Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Trilogies (it is noted, in the term’s Wikipedia entry) “are common in speculative fiction”. They are found in those works with elements “non-existent in reality”, which cover various themes “in the context of the supernatural, futuristic, and many other imaginative topics”. All of these apply in some sense to The Things We’ve Seen, the latest novel from Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo. The title owes itself to a line by the poet Carlos Oroza; the full version (“It’s a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as a given”) is one of a number of cut-phrases that loop and reverberate at Read more ...
Robert Beale
There’s an atmosphere of tender restraint through most of the programme created by Ruby Hughes and Manchester Collective for Lakeside Arts at the University of Nottingham. It was streamed live yesterday afternoon, and, as is the way with most performances just now, was in an empty hall, with its slightly strange "empty" acoustic affecting the spoken word as the artists introduced their music.Talking to an audience is very much the style of Manchester Collective, though, and artistic director Rakhi Singh does it with natural ease even when she can’t see who she’s talking to. She and the other Read more ...
theartsdesk
On Valentine’s Day 2011 Disc of the Day album reviews sprang into being, and has been solidly reviewing five albums a week ever since. Out of the many thousands, which ones did we rate the most? To mark 10 years since its inception, 12 of theartsdesk’s music writers mark the occasion by choosing an Album of the Decade. They appear in alphabetical order by writer.Alt-J – An Awesome Wave – by Russ CoffeyThe early 2010s was a period when UK rock music slowly lost its swagger. The harsh economic climate meant songwriters increasingly forgot about the good times; instead, they turned their minds Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
“Burglar alarms jangled through the empty hallways of Paradise Block.” In this ramshackle, lonely tenement, such alarms might be one’s only company. Yet, in this intricate collection of short stories, the inhabitants’ lives intertwine. Alice Ash’s debut collection steadily follows the tropes typical of the short story, but the tales overlap, creating a compendium that almost morphs into a novel but retains the unsettling gaps crucial to the genre.Of course, stories collated together in one place often share themes or ideas, but Ash takes this further, picking up characters and motifs from one Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bicep's second album fufills the promise of the first, released in 2017 to wide acclaim. Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar, friends since childhood from the city of Belfast, draw inspiration from Chicago house, Detroit techno, Italo disco and other now vintage dance genres. They appeal as much to a younger generation for whom their heady mix of dancefloor styles feels fresh and new, as to an older crowd for whom the duo serve up quality nostalgia.Made over two years and the result of a trawl through 150 demos, "Isles" reflects the impact of Bicep's move to London and exposure to music from Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
One of the finer episodes in Raven Leilani’s startling debut (which contains an embarrassment of fine episodes) comes about halfway through, when Edie, our young, struggling black narrator, starts working as a rider for a “popular in-app delivery service”. The gig gives her tantalisingly brief contact with a spectrum of outlandish New Yorkers and their equally peculiar needs. Here is a snippet of her survey of this garden of late capitalist delights:A vial of rosewater for a customer in Greenwich Village whose labradoodle humps me down the stairs. Band-Aids and cigarillos for a customer who Read more ...
Robert Beale
Jonathan Bloxham makes his debut as conductor with the Hallé Orchestra in the third of the Hallé’s Winter Season concerts on film. It’s a poetry-connected programme in several respects and features poet laureate Simon Armitage reading both his the event horizon (to introduce the whole programme) and Evening (immediately before Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite).The event horizon is engraved in steel on the Hallé St Peter’s centre (pictured below right with Simon Armitage), where the concert was filmed, and reminds us in one way of what we’re missing: do you remember when concerts used to begin “ Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures is a collection of transcripts, recording weekly group lectures delivered by Mark Fisher to his students at Goldsmiths, University of London during the 2016/17 academic year. These lectures provide the substance of a module of the same name, taught within the university’s then-newly formed MA in Contemporary Art Theory. In his capacity as a lecturer, Fisher coaxes his students through the questions explored and raised by the concept of postcapitalist desire, described as the “shadow” to the ideas explored in-depth in Fisher’s earlier, Read more ...