Does your ‘masculinity’ need to seduce me?
‘That one.’ ‘Straight.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Damn.’ I’m sitting in the smoking area of a club. I’m surrounded by a mash-up of oversized shirts, denim, fine-artists, dramatists, bob-cuts, and dope. ‘But he’s coming over.’ Amid empty benches, he sits beside me. I notice o
Has Spotify changed the way we listen to music?
I sit writing this piece to the driving soundscapes of Rival Consoles, a British artist I first came across last year. I’m fairly sure that I discovered him through a Spotify algorithm, most likely a song ‘radio’ manufactured to keep me quietly happy as I focus on something else. All I can rea
Nothing Ever Happens
Christianity has always been a fundamental part of me. My earliest memory is of crouching beneath a pew in the parish church where my family would worship when I was a child. My mother became a priest when I was eight. I sang in a church choir every Sunday and I’ve heard more sermons than [&hellip
THE EYING OF MY SCARS
“Collection of Sylvia Plath’s possessions to be sold at auction” reads Tuesday’s Guardian. Up for grabs are the proof copy of Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963) and her pre-publication author’s copy. Both are written on: her proof edition is “carefully corrected”, and her author’s c
Art Riot: Post-Soviet Actionism at the Saatchi Gallery
In September 1917, a month shy of the Bolshevik Revolution, T.S. Eliot wrote that “Europeans […] fail to note that there are many kinds of Russians, corresponding to the many kinds of their fellow countrymen, and that most of these kinds, similarly to the kinds of their fellow-countrymen
Exorcising Mississippi’s Cemeteries
“Mississippi had no art except in cemeteries”. These words of Eudora Welty’s, a comment on her photographs of graveyards around the state, have strangely buried themselves in me. It is not that the general sentiment is unfamiliar. Southern artists frequently motioned towards themselves as awkw
Busybodies of the Small Town
My grandmother is eighty-one years old and hasn’t yet learned how to sit still. This afternoon she’s delivering poinsettias to a woman from her church whose husband is unwell, then going to the fruit shop, the deli, the butcher’s. She’s talking – in that current-quick way of hers ̵
The Time is Now
‘In order to fulfil my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord’, announced President Donald Trump on June 1st 2017 from the White House. Yet the irony is plain to see as this summer both Texas and Florida were plunged
Inbetween Places; The Trouble of Transport in Travel
Ankara Bar crouches in a pothole between the alleys of Penang. The tattered sign above the door is barely visible through the limp streetlights, and the green water drooling out of the drains creeps up your feet the longer you squint to read it. The name of the shop can be a bit misleading. The [&he