couture naturelle

[for AnOther, 23/4/18]

People will always be drawn to the superficial, however ‘problematic’ they’re told it’s become; fashion is only a consequence of caring what others think.

roy oxlade, 'works from the 80s & 90s'

[for Frieze, 12/3/18]

Oxlade's critical essays, written throughout his career, consistently sent the 20th century to the wall. ‘Shakespeare’, he wrote in 2005, ‘was onto people like Marcel Duchamp.’ He threw out Amedeo Modigliani, Henry Moore, all pop art. Only a few escaped.

jeremy gavron, 'felix culpa'

[for the Telegraph, 3/3/18]

This is a genre that hangs on blanks and lacunae, the things that people don’t yet know. (If Philip Marlowe could just interview God, Chandler novels would be short.) In that sense, they’re stories of trying to listen: the investigator strains to pick out a clue, match his account to hers, track down a dingy address based on a name half-heard in a bar.

willy vlautin, 'don't skip out on me'

[for the Telegraph, 24/2/18]

Vlautin thinks in B-roll footage: broad sighing vistas of the Nevadan hills, wild horses bathing in the sun, pinyon pine and birch trees and creeks that trickle along. That characters have to live here, punctuating nature with their mess of cause and effect, seems like an imposition.

neville gabie, 'experiments in black & white'

[for Apollo, 19/1/18]

During the opening night, the audience saw his efforts in the flesh. Gabie walked over to a giant block of chalk, which had an axe tucked underneath it; he took up the axe, and hewed an edge from the chalk; then he hefted the chalk, moved towards an empty black wall, and began to scrape backwards and forwards from left to right.

lana and the bomb

[for GARAGE, 23/1/18]

Del Rey was born for the Bomb. Her voice is languorous and slow; her lyrics make emotion all too obvious. Everything’s so elegantly shaped and irresponsible that it challenges you to stay invested.

black cats, small victories

[for White Noise, 8/11/17]

At the match I attended in 2015, everything looked pleasantly wonky; during half-time, we could buy only one kind of beer and one kind of pie. This was the kind that came, inauspiciously, shrink-wrapped in a photo of a much better pie.