I have never seen anything more golden than the London Central Mosque’s dome in stormy weather. Running out of Regent’s Park through Hanover Gate, a strong blow of wind rushed blossom bits in my eyes and I stopped. Spring is a wicked season. (“Spring is a wicked temptress!”, and so on). I stopped between two trees so thick, they created a small frame of the minaret with its crescent moon and the dome. The sun had pierced through, coating its copper alloy cladding against a very dark sky. At first, it was a big banality, too predictably divine and imposing. It was what the devoutly religious would have called God and it was what the atheists would have called nature’s with a small “n” game of light after rain. Again, I have never seen anything more golden. The running heart rate and the throbbing of my temples (which you magically hear internally sometimes) dramatized it. It was neither God nor nature, (or Nature or god). It was a child’s first sight of snow, a big idea, first words, a forced pause to venerate the physics of colour and the human eye. It was the best example of vision. Spiritual and not.
We’re halfway through 2023 and critics are slouching towards their Best Records Of The Year So Far lists. They’re rarely happy about it. If dicing releases every 12 months is arbitrary, then six months is labor on a factory line, wood chips for the content mill. But this year, I feel like they hate these lists more than usual. They’re having a hard time picking much. And maybe you are, too. P...
At the close of 2022, Bitcoin wasn’t just down—it was so down that its precipitous fall was breaking records. One report from Bank of America suggested that the collapse in value was the fifth-worst for any asset in financial history. Despite steady gains this year, it hasn’t even come close to its November 2021 peak, and now things are about to get shaken up like a bead in a baby’s rattle w...
In Ari Aster’s 2016 short film C’est La Vie, Chester Crummings, a homeless man, speaks directly and combatively to camera about his life and society at large as he wanders the streets of LA, surviving, begging for change and casually murdering people. At one point, he says: “You know what Freud says about the nature of horror? He says it’s when the home becomes unhomelike. Unheimlich.”
In Sig...
