The Stuff of a Town

‘[This stone] is for me a wolf, noble and courageous, with hollowed flanks, nicked with wounds and blows. And it always will be, even tidied into horizontal layers or domesticated into vaults. As I bring proportion and harmony to the abbey, it alone will keep its independent spirit; even…

Screen Icons: Film, Religion and the Future

There is something strange going on beneath the secular veneer of our age. Over the last decade, there has been a succession of European films which deal with religious experience. Today, a largely silent, black-and-white film about a nun in 1960s Poland…

‘I Think Astronomy is a Bad Study for You’: Notes on the Griffith Observatory

I hated L.A. I tried to like it, but five days of driving a in constant swarm of gridlock in the uncomfortable late September heat inspired in me a curious claustrophobia at odds with the sprawling…

‘Productive Vulnerability’: Mykki Blanco and Cakes Da Killa’s Queering of Hip-Hop