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Cosmic Ear, the New Mats Gustafsson and Goran Kajfeš Ensemble, Premieres in Umeå

Christopher Laws -
The saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and trumpeter Goran Kajfeš already seem to work at a maddening pace, major figures of the European avant-garde whose hands are all over the Swedish jazz scene, from Gustafsson's indefatigable Fire! trio and his foundational work with GUSH which now stretches back more than three decades to the freeform theatrics of his quintet The End,...

Umeå Jazz Festival 2024

Latest Selection

Chrystabell & David Lynch – Cellophane Memories

Albums

Meshell Ndegeocello – No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin

Albums

A Cultural History of the Potato as Earth Apple

Art

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Walter Reuther, Civil Rights, and the Presidential Election of 1960

Long Reads Christopher Laws -
I n the days leading up to the 1960 presidential election, the Republican Party resounded with a familiar refrain: a vote for John F. Kennedy, the fresh-faced senator from Massachusetts, would leave labour leader Walter Reuther pulling the strings. Walter Reuther first became headline news in the spring of 1937, when as president of a local branch of the United Auto...
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Beginning with the Beguine: Dances Named in Popular Song

Long Reads Christopher Laws -
From the time it began to flourish on record and on the big screen in the 1930s, to the present day and inescapably beyond, popular music has tapped and swayed to the tune of songs about dance. Less often, songs have not only been about dancing - cheek to cheek or buttock to groin - but have given their name...
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A Brief History of the Modern Man’s Hat

Long Reads Christopher Laws -
In the final decade of the eighteenth century, stirred by the ideals of the French Revolution, the top hat replaced the tricorne as the vogue item of headwear for fashionable Europeans. Already popular in France where it would become part of the costume of the Incroyables, the first top hat in England has been credited to the Frenchman George...
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American Cinema

Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene

One of the most influential horror movies of all-time, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remains more famous for its small budget than its hellish production in the summer of 1973. While the weather that year was relatively mild by...
Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford and The League That Got Away

In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop the English Football League, and appeared ready to finally grasp the title which they had been eyeing enviously for so long. It was Alex Ferguson's sixth season in charge of...
Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and orchestral work composed by Igor Stravinsky, premiered at the newly-opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. With choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and stage and costume design by Nicholas Roerich, the ballet was...
Art

Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne

In Banks of the Marne by the French artist Paul Cézanne, a solitary chateau peeks out from the dense foliage with its tower and spire, whitewashed walls, and wooden balcony. Several years earlier the painter had composed a similar...

Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant

Earthy Anecdotes Christopher Laws -
By the turn of the twentieth century, the Turtle Bay neighbourhood on the east side of Midtown Manhattan was a 'riverside back yard' for the city of New York. Imposing brownstones and squalid tenement housing butted up against the breweries, gasworks, and slaughterhouses which lined the waterfront. Eventually the waterfront would be reshaped by the United Nations headquarters, with dozens of diplomatic missions...

World Cinema

Football

Diego Maradona (2019)

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - One of the successes of Diego Maradona lies in how it manages to restore some of the luxe hedonism and heady momentum to a story so often shrouded by bloated excess. A keenly self-conscious Maradona pushes himself through sporting triumphs and binge cycles, as the barrio boy from Buenos Aires in the slum city of Naples embraces the fur coats and neon lights.
The Movie Review

The Rules of the Game (1939)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Instead Renoir produced a bawdy comedy with French airs and graces, which seems to share much in common with so many American films of the late thirties with their loose morals, gender distortions, and hedonistic flushes of romance. The inspirations may have been Marivaux and Beaumarchais, but in style and temperament The Rules of the Game rubs up equally alongside The Philadelphia Story and the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks.
American Cinema

Paris, Texas (1984)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) was introduced against a backdrop of blue skies and sandstone buttes, but his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) wears a yellow Stetson cap and stands in front of a commercial tower block, which turns out to be painted. He sells billboard signs for a living, but agrees to travel to Terlingua, South Texas, to pick up his brother...
Movies

Parasite (2019)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A family of four live in a cramped and roach-infested banjiha, a semi-basement apartment in Seoul. They crib free Wi-Fi from unsuspecting neighbours and a nearby coffee shop, and their only source of income, procured by the mother Chung-sook via WhatsApp, comes from the folding of pizza boxes for a local delivery service, a task at which they are only moderately successful...

Featured Reviews

Laura Cannell – The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined

Albums
The ever prolific Laura Cannell describes first hearing the music of the composer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen around 1997 when she left rural Norfolk and embarked on the London College of Music for her undergraduate degree. Her uncle, a professor of microbiology with a keen interest in early music, played her the Canticles of Ecstasy by the long-running...

Obituaries

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Modernism & Modernity

Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and orchestral work composed by Igor Stravinsky, premiered at the newly-opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. With choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and stage and costume design by Nicholas Roerich, the ballet was...
James Joyce

Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita

With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of 1918 until the close of 1920, James Joyce published the emerging episodes of Ulysses in The Little Review - the American avant-garde literary magazine founded by Margaret Anderson in 1914, and...
Art

Art and Architecture Towards Political Crises: The 1937 Paris International Exposition in Context

The 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne ('International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life') was held in Paris: the French capital's sixth and latest International Exposition, after fairs held in 1855, 1867,...
Literature

English Translations of ‘Funes the Memorious’ by Jorge Luis Borges

The impetus for Jorge Luis Borges attaining widespread international recognition came when, in May 1961, at 61 years of age, he was awarded the first Prix International alongside Samuel Beckett. The Prix International was an international award for literary merit,...

Behind the Song

American Cinema

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central aria from Friedrich von Flotow's Martha, a romantic comic opera in four acts. Flotow - who was born into a musical family, his mother playing the piano and his father the...
Behind the Song

Behind the Song: Chuck Berry – ‘You Can’t Catch Me’

'You Can't Catch Me', one of Chuck Berry's early singles, proved an unexpected commercial flop. It failed to chart upon its release at the onset of 1957 - despite being given prominence by the fledgeling rock and roll feature Rock, Rock, Rock!, which had opened in cinemas the previous month...
Behind the Song

Behind the Song: Charles Mingus – ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’

Charles Mingus wrote 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' as an elegy for the pioneering jazz saxophonist Lester Young, who died in March 1959, two months prior to the recording sessions for what would become Mingus Ah Um. A darkly elegant ballad with a lone dissonant note full of pathos...
Behind the Song

Behind the Song: David Bowie – ‘Subterraneans’

'Subterraneans' is the closing song on what has become perhaps David Bowie's most critically acclaimed album: Pitchfork placed Low at number 1 on their 'Top 100 Albums of the 1970s', on Q's list of the '100 Greatest British Albums Ever' Low was Bowie's highest entry at number 14, and while...

culturedarm

Where the strands of culture entwine.

Culturedarm brings together a diversity of music, literature, sport, food, television and film.

by Christopher Laws

Albums

Eri Yamamoto Quadraphonic – Fly with the Wings

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Harking back to her studies at The New School...

Bill Frisell, Andrew Cyrille and Kit Downes – Breaking the Shell

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The jazz veterans Andrew Cyrille and Bill Frisell have...

more eaze – lacuna and parlor

Albums 0
Notes for lacuna and parlor by more eaze state...

Featured Posts

Fire! – Testament

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There's a bit of the Lizard King about 'Work...

Culturedarm’s Albums of the Decade 2010s

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102. Azealia Banks - Broke with Expensive Taste (2014) From cowboy...

Nala Sinephro – Endlessness

Albums 0
The new album by Nala Sinephro opens as a...

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