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Sign up to Culturedarm's weekly newsletter, which features a carefully curated blend of current articles, posts from the archive and sizzling hot tracks of the week.
Albums
Eri Yamamoto Quadraphonic – Fly with the Wings
Harking back to her studies at The New School...
Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli – Our Time
Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli share sustained notes and...
Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas and Misha Mullov-Abbado – Za GĆ³rami
On their debut outing as a trio the vocalist...
Hayden Pedigo – Live in Amarillo, Texas
There's a staggering purity of tone to Hayden Pedigo's...
Behind the Song
Behind the Song: Animal Collective – ‘Summertime Clothes’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxhaRgJUMl8
Animal Collective's eighth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was...
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 loneĀ dissonant note full of pathos...
Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9Ro9pP2gc
In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...
Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’
Beginning her career in pop music at the age...
Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha
'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...
Tracks of the Week
Tracks of the Week 27.07.24
Usually navigating the nooks and crannies of South London...
Tracks of the Week 20.07.24
On the opening song 'Stella Maris' from his debut...
Tracks of the Week 13.07.24
Antonina Nowacka's third solo album opens as though suspended...
At the Movies
Enola Holmes (2020)
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(2 out of 4 stars) - Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown), the youngest sibling in the illustrious Holmes family, grew up for all intents and purposes as an only child. At the lavish country house which is now on the cusp of being consumed by nature, she was home-schooled by her mother, who provided an unorthodox education encompassing everything from word games, chess, and jujitsu to chemistry, botany, and lawn tennis played indoors...
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
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Ā½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), fromĀ southwest Missouri, has worked as a waitress from herĀ early teens. StuckĀ in grim poverty, she seeks a way beyondĀ herĀ circumstances, and determines to become a boxer. She turns up at a worn-downĀ Los Angeles gym, owned and run by Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) with the help of Eddie 'Scrap-Iron' Dupris (Morgan Freeman): a former boxer himself...
High Noon (1952)
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(4 out of 4 stars) - Will Kane (Gary Cooper), the marshal of a small frontier town in New Mexico Territory, gets married in a small civil ceremony to his beautiful young wife Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly), a Quaker whose imminent plans include a family and a convenience store someplace else. Fully intending to play the doting husband, to that end it is also Kane's last day on the job, and he hands in his badge...
The Out-of-Towners (1970)
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(2 out of 4 stars) - Imagine Jack Lemmon at his most highly strung, for instance in The Odd Couple, a Neil Simon film from a couple of years earlier, when Oscar Madison arrives home late from work after stopping off at a bar and Felix Ungar's meatloaf has dried out, and Oscar thinks that gravy just comes, and then confuses a spoon with a ladle...
Don Jon (2013)
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(3 out of 4 stars) - In Japan grown adult men - thirty, forty, fifty years old or more - lie prostrate in their childhood bedrooms, which they never leave, as their ageing parents push parcels of food beneath the door. On their beds they clutch plush life-sized cartoon figures, somehow prepubescent but boasting ginormous boobs, and between the heaving and moaning they not only cry but orgasm into their pillowcases...
World Cinema
How to Steal a Million (1966)
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Ā½ (2.5 out of 4 stars) - Nicole Bonnet (Audrey Hepburn) is the daughter of an art forger, who has gathered so many supposed masterpieces in his private collection that he has won considerable renown in the world of art. Approached by the KlĆ©ber-Lafayette Museum, he proudly loans to the illustrious Paris institution (which for the sake of the film occupies the building of the real-life MusĆ©e Carnavalet) his most prized possession, his Cellini 'Venus'...
Chinatown (1974)
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(4 out of 4 stars) - Chinatown is a detective story, loosely inspired by the California water wars which took place between the fledgeling city of Los Angeles and the surrounding Owens Valley in the early twentieth century. The pivotal figure in those wars was William Mulholland, the chief architect of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, whose career came to an abrupt end with the failure of the St Francis Dam in 1928...
Uncut Gems (2019)
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(4 out of 4 stars) - Juggling a growing amount of debt, Howard has begun pawning off as sports memorabilia the collateral he receives for loaning out his jewels. When the opal finally arrives from Ethiopia, the basketball player Kevin Garnett can hardly avert his gaze. Howard accepts a 2008 NBA Championship ring as Garnett takes lend of the opal, immediately pawning it for the sake of a little liquidity unbeknownst to Demany and the Boston Celtics star.
The Switch (2010)
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(3 out of 4 stars) - Kassie Larson (Jennifer Aniston) is in her thirties, and she's single, and with no romantic prospects on the horizon she decides she can no longer wait to have a child. She talks the matter over with her best friend Wally Mars (Jason Bateman) - they dated six years ago, and though it didn't work out they've got along swimmingly ever since...
Cactus Flower (1969)
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Ā½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - More than mere confection, which by nature lies there enticingly and dwindles the more that we eat, and just like the titular cactus which sits on dental assistant Stephanie Dickinson's desk, cannily marking her transformation, Cactus Flower positively blossoms. The third film in three years from director Gene Saks - hot on the heels of two resounding Neil Simon success stories...
Earthy Anecdotes
Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant
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...
Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene
One of the most influential horror movies of all-time,...
Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford and The League That Got Away
In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...
Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring
On 29 MayĀ 1913,Ā The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...
Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at MĆ©dan by Paul CĆ©zanne
In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...
Poetry
Emily Dickinson – ‘I Can Wade Grief’ (1862)
Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in...
‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev
Silentium!
Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream,...
Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’
Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...
James Joyce
Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha
'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...
The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov and Homer in Maps
WhenĀ UlyssesĀ was published on 2 February, 1922, it was the...
Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita
With EzraĀ Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of...
Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015
Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...
Obituaries
Stephen Sondheim, Who Reinvented the Musical Theatre, Dies at the Age of 91
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TofC3KD-h8M
The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim died on Friday...
Kenzo Takada, the Japanese Designer Who Revolutionised French Fashion, Dies at 81
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7E4bITT4t8
With the wet weather and surging coronavirus already putting...
Norm Macdonald Used To Think His Life Was Incomplete. Now It’s Finished.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7K-kaelQEs
Norm Macdonald, the comedian whose mischievous glint and deadpan...
Ned Beatty, Deliverance, Nashville, and Network Actor, Dies at the Age of 83
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TwyrAS2lU8
The actor Ned Beatty died of natural causes on...
Subscribe to Culturedarm
A monthly subscription supports Culturedarm while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:
ā¢ The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
ā¢ Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
ā¢ Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
ā¢ Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
ā¢ Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
ā¢ The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .
Lock it in and fuhgeddaboudit with an annual subscription to Culturedarm, which supports the site while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:
ā¢ The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
ā¢ Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
ā¢ Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
ā¢ Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
ā¢ Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
ā¢ The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .
placeholder text
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3
ā¬
25
ā¬
0
Albums
Eri Yamamoto Quadraphonic – Fly with the Wings
Harking back to her studies at The New School...
Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli – Our Time
Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli share sustained notes and...
Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas and Misha Mullov-Abbado – Za GĆ³rami
On their debut outing as a trio the vocalist...
Hayden Pedigo – Live in Amarillo, Texas
There's a staggering purity of tone to Hayden Pedigo's...
Behind the Song
Behind the Song: Animal Collective – ‘Summertime Clothes’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxhaRgJUMl8
Animal Collective's eighth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was...
Behind the Song: David Bowie – ‘Subterraneans’
'Subterraneans' is theĀ closingĀ song on what has become perhaps David Bowie's most critically acclaimed album:Ā 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...
Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha
'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...
Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’
Beginning her career in pop music at the age...
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 loneĀ dissonant note full of pathos...
Tracks of the Week
Tracks of the Week 27.07.24
Usually navigating the nooks and crannies of South London...
Tracks of the Week 20.07.24
On the opening song 'Stella Maris' from his debut...
Tracks of the Week 13.07.24
Antonina Nowacka's third solo album opens as though suspended...
At the Movies
Big (1988)
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(2 out of 4 stars) - The lastĀ of a cluster of movies, all released within the space of a year between the autumn ofĀ 1987 and the summer ofĀ 1988, to depict youths turning into or swapping formsĀ with adult men - the others were Like Father Like Son (1987), Vice Versa (1988), 18 Again! (1988), and the Italian film Da grande (1987), which isĀ often cited as theĀ inspiration for Big - in BigĀ thirteen-year-old Josh Baskin...
Adam’s Rib (1949)
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(4 out of 4 stars) - Adam and Amanda Bonner, a couple of happily married lawyers who live in an upper-floor apartment in New York, begin to clash when they land on opposite sides of a trial for attempted murder. Adam views the matter in black and white, believing that Doris Attinger broke the law and deserves to be punished, while Amanda delights in teasing out some of the nuances of the case, perceiving an opportunity to rail against gender imbalances...
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
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(4 out of 4 stars) - In 1902 an inscrutable gambler, John McCabe (Warren Beatty), arrives in the fledgling town of Presbyterian Church in the northwestern United States.Ā A hazy rumour has him as a gunslinger, and McCabe uses innuendo and disorder to quickly assert his position in the town, acquiring three prostitutes and opening a whorehouse, to which he plans to add a saloon...
Don Jon (2013)
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(3 out of 4 stars) - In Japan grown adult men - thirty, forty, fifty years old or more - lie prostrate in their childhood bedrooms, which they never leave, as their ageing parents push parcels of food beneath the door. On their beds they clutch plush life-sized cartoon figures, somehow prepubescent but boasting ginormous boobs, and between the heaving and moaning they not only cry but orgasm into their pillowcases...
Amazing Grace (2018)
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(4 out of 4 stars) - At the height of her powers, Aretha Franklin went to church: to the New Temple Missionary Baptist in Los Angeles for two nights in January 1972, where she intended to return to her roots with a live recording of gospel music. The ensuing double album, Amazing Grace, would go double platinum, and it remains the best-selling record of her long and storied career. The acclaimed film director Sydney Pollack was tasked with shooting the performance for a feature...
World Cinema
Rams (2015)
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(4 out of 4 stars) - Ageing, unmarried, and unkempt, brothers Gummi (SigurĆ°ur SigurjĆ³nsson) and Kiddi (TheodĆ³r JĆŗlĆusson) work side by side as sheep farmers inĀ a cold and desolate valley in Iceland's northeast. Each the master ofĀ their own flock, they have not spoken for forty years owing to a dispute over their father's inheritance: considering Gummi the more conscientious worker, their father left him the whole of the land...
Midsommar (2019)
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(1 out of 4 stars) - Through a few snapshots of comforting mundanity - the boys' scenes could be from a Judd Apatow movie, minus the laughs - we come to learn of Dani and Christian, a young American couple whose long-term relationship has started to crack. Spurred on by his friends, who find her too needy, Christian has already begun separating himself from Dani, for her part made anxious by her bipolar sister...
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
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Ā½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - When it comes to the blockbuster action movie, three franchises remain. There is the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other assorted comic book pictures, y'know, for kids; Tom Cruise, most clearly for the ever stellar Mission: Impossible series, wilfully forgetting Jack Reacher but with shoutouts to American Made, Edge of Tomorrow, and the upcoming Top Gun sequel, sure to be a success; and then there's The Rock...
Tully (2018)
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Ā½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - Tully is the third collaboration between director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, following on from Juno (2007) and Young Adult (2011). All three films deal with the role of women as child-bearers, looking in turn at teenage pregnancy and adoption, miscarriage, and postpartum depression, which in this case borders on psychosis...
The Switch (2010)
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ā
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(3 out of 4 stars) - Kassie Larson (Jennifer Aniston) is in her thirties, and she's single, and with no romantic prospects on the horizon she decides she can no longer wait to have a child. She talks the matter over with her best friend Wally Mars (Jason Bateman) - they dated six years ago, and though it didn't work out they've got along swimmingly ever since...
Earthy Anecdotes
Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant
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...
Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene
One of the most influential horror movies of all-time,...
Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford and The League That Got Away
In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...
Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring
On 29 MayĀ 1913,Ā The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...
Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at MĆ©dan by Paul CĆ©zanne
In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...
Poetry
Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’
Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...
Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore’ (1912)
Alexander Blok (ŠŠ»ŠµŠŗŃŠ°Š½Š“Ń ŠŠ»Š¾Šŗ) (1880-1921) was the foremost of...
James Joyce
The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov and Homer in Maps
WhenĀ UlyssesĀ was published on 2 February, 1922, it was the...
Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015
Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...
Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce
With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...
Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha
'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...
Obituaries
Jean-Paul Belmondo, the Face of the French New Wave, Dies At the Age of 88
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbAMIHLciGk
Jean-Paul Belmondo, the actor whose crooked nose and raffish...
Biz Markie, the Clown Prince of Hip Hop, Dies at 57 Years Old
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aofoBrFNdg
The rapper, DJ, and record producer Biz Markie died...
Toots Hibbert, Reggae Pioneer and Lead Vocalist of the Maytals, Dies Aged 77
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErQ2UB44k-o
Toots Hibbert, the pioneering reggae musician who imbued his...
Ned Beatty, Deliverance, Nashville, and Network Actor, Dies at the Age of 83
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TwyrAS2lU8
The actor Ned Beatty died of natural causes on...
Subscribe to Culturedarm
A monthly subscription supports Culturedarm while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:
ā¢ The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
ā¢ Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
ā¢ Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
ā¢ Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
ā¢ Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
ā¢ The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .
Lock it in and fuhgeddaboudit with an annual subscription to Culturedarm, which supports the site while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:
ā¢ The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
ā¢ Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
ā¢ Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
ā¢ Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
ā¢ Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
ā¢ The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .
placeholder text
ā¬
3
ā¬
25
ā¬
0
Albums
Eri Yamamoto Quadraphonic – Fly with the Wings
Harking back to her studies at The New School...
Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli – Our Time
Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli share sustained notes and...
Featured Posts
Culturedarm’s Albums of the Decade 2010s
102. Azealia Banks - Broke with Expensive TasteĀ (2014)
From cowboy...
Joni Mitchell’s Blue Turns Fifty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYyyf9rRurc
Blue by Joni Mitchell found the artist at an...
Clotted Hinderparts and Privy Drains: Game of Thrones and a History of Death on the Toilet
The twentieth century saw an abundance of famous toilet-related...
Weekly Newsletter
Sign up to Culturedarm's weekly newsletter, which features a carefully curated blend of current articles, posts from the archive and sizzling hot tracks of the week.
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