30th March 2020
‘It’s the way they give birth these days, that’s the problem,’ the older bear said. Morrgh didn’t argue: it was a supermarket line and it was mid-winter; the sort of time that brings out the worst in everybody
26th March 2020
Frances Scott's new book of her photographic journey round her native Orkney, 'Undertow,' was launched in February in the Pier Art Centre Stromness, and in March at Streetlevel Gallery in Glasgow.
26th March 2020
If photography is the temporal art of the gaze, what is its condition at the edge, or the limit of space? What bonds, what risk of naming can secure it from being drawn off in the 'undertow'? Frances Scott walks the native territory.
24th March 2020
When I took the apple from the horse’s mouth, I thought I knew it didn’t want me to speak. -Not the horse. And not that this is speaking, or for that matter, even knowing.
22nd March 2020
Written before Macron's lock-down, of course, Jeremy Allan Hawkins observed that Parisians were walking through their city again. But did he see the same type of dilly-dallying, louche, truth-seeking, urban hanger-on as Baudelaire's flaneur? Or the existential and psycho-geographical explorers of Guy Debord's Situationists? Not quite...
21st March 2020
The tragic slowness of our reaction to the coronavirus and the putting of systematic safety measures in place has contrasted with the relatively swift and mature reaction of the French (and other nations) to this emergency. But is it a sign of a wider conservative and sclerotic inability to act that has taken hold of our society? How could we measure these things? Clarisse Godard Desmarest sets the ball rolling with a description of the terrible fires at both Notre Dame in Paris and Glasgow School of Art, and the reaction of the authorities in each case.
19th March 2020
The introduction to Benjamin’s Arcades Project, was written in 1938 but not published until long after his death. It is an attempt to categorically reveal how, through the apparent chaos and convulsions in 19th century Parisian culture and society, great explorations and exposés of the realities of the epoch and its ramifications for later generations, are afforded us by examination of the lives and works of its inhabitants.
14th March 2020
The man with the black horseshoe moustache had been allocated one of the breakfast tables that stood in a row against the glass panels. The hotel was so quiet this morning that all of its breakfasters were able to sit, as in fact they did sit, against the glass...
5th March 2020
Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a massive 2018 box office success in China which confused the hell out of the date-night audience it was marketed towards, has finally limped its way over to a UK distracted by Parasite. Long Day’s mixes art house boredom with trashy noir tropes and 3D, single-take gimmickry, un-bottling a whole jumble of questions about how and why we watch long, ponderous movies when we could be watching something else.
2nd March 2020
Taking inspiration from James Shapiro’s Contested Will Owen Dudley Edwards takes a wry look at the absurdist snobbery and the sheer daftness of the ‘who really wrote Shakespeare?’ tradition.