Culture
Viagra Boys
By Anna Zhila, art and music critic The Beautiful Sickness of Viagra Boys There is a particular kind of energy that radiates from the music of Viagra Boys. It is the sound of a fever dream, of a bar fight breaking out in a philosophy department. It is the squall of a saxophone colliding with…
Lara Peake
By Anna Zhila, art and music critic The Quiet Violence of Lara Peake There is a certain kind of performance that does not announce itself. It is a quiet, almost forensic, examination of a character’s inner life, one that reveals itself not in grand gestures, but in the subtle flicker of an eye, the tense…
Why Lindsay Lohan’s "Freaky Friday" Homage is More Than Just Nostalgia
By Michael Mittelman There is a certain kind of cultural artefact that lodges itself in the public imagination, not as a masterpiece, but as a memory. The 2003 Disney comedy Freaky Friday is such an artefact. It is a film that is, by any objective measure, a piece of light, and largely forgettable, entertainment. And yet, for…
Esther-Rose McGregor: the Girl Who Bit the Apple
An actor and model who has worked for Miu Miu and Stella McCartney since she was sixteen, and what it takes to refuse the story that binds women's pleasure to shame.
Nitter with Natter
By Yulia Tulegenova Why We Confuse Nitter with Natter There is a strange and revealing confusion that has crept into our digital language. It is the confusion between two words that sound alike, that feel alike, but that come from two entirely different worlds. The words are “nitter” and “natter.” One is a piece of…
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods
By Maria Bregman, writer, art and literary critic The Unsettling Calm of Walden Pond There are certain books that function less as stories and more as mirrors. They sit on the shelf for years, gathering dust and cultural baggage, until one day you pick them up and find, with a startling and uncomfortable clarity, that…
Saltburn Film Review
By Yulia Tulegenova, artist and film critic The Glorious, Empty Violence of Saltburn There is a certain kind of film that arrives like a beautifully wrapped gift box, promising a familiar, elegant pleasure. Emerald Fennell's Saltburn was marketed as just such a gift. We were led to expect a sun-drenched, homoerotic drama, a story of two beautiful young…
Denis Sulta: the Honest Noise of a Glasgow Producer
Hector Barbour broke through in 2015 with It's Only Real. On instinct over polish, and how a decade of club records built an argument for a different kind of artistry.
Someone Ate the Famous Banana Artwork. Again.
By Anna Zhila, artist, art and music critic A visitor to a French museum has eaten a well-known piece of art: a fresh banana taped to a wall. The work, by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, is titled “Comedian.” The incident happened at the Centre-Pompidou Metz in eastern France on July 12th. A Calm Reaction According…
Jwan Yosef
By Yulia Tulegenova, artist, literary and art critic The Art of the In-Between: Jwan Yosef’s Beautiful Duality There is a certain kind of artist whose work is forged not in a single, stable identity, but in the unsettled space between two worlds. Their art is born from a state of permanent negotiation, of never quite…
Dafne Keen
By Anna Zhila, art and music critic The Feral Intelligence of Dafne Keen There is a quality some actors possess that has little to do with the lines they speak. It is a kind of physical authority, an intelligence that lives in the body. You see it in the way they hold a silence, or…
Tlya X An
By Anna Zhila, Music and Art Critic The Total Art of Tlya X An. You find an artist, every so often, who's doing something more than just making songs. They are building a world. Tlya X An is one of those people. Listening to her work, watching her, you feel like you’re stepping into a…
Cordell Broadus
By Anna Zhila, art and music critic The Unexpected Education of Cordell Broadus There is a certain kind of story we expect from the children of the famous. It is often a story of imitation or rebellion, of either following dutifully in a parent’s footsteps or veering dramatically away from them. But what happens when…
Aliens. The Fossil God of LV-426
Some things are frightening because of what they are. The xenomorph is one of them. But some things are frightening because we don’t know what they are. In the silent, cathedral-like chamber of the derelict ship on LV-426 sits the greatest mystery of the Alien franchise: the fossilised pilot, fused to its arcane technology. Nicknamed the Space…
Bbno$
By Anna Zhila, artist, art and music critic The internet is a voracious machine for creating disposable pop stars. Yet, somehow, the Canadian rapper Bbno$. Which brings us to Alexander Gumuchian, the Canadian rapper known as Bbno$ (pronounced, he tells me, Baby No Money). You almost certainly know his work, even if you don't know…
