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Albums

Jugodefatuo – Bijù Bazar

Albums March 14, 2025 0

A Principino whose body dissolves and recomposes perpetually, leads...

Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka – Left up on the Tree

Albums February 28, 2025 0

For several years now Patrick Shiroishi and Dylan Fujioka...

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

Albums February 27, 2025 0

Working for almost a decade as Mariachi after getting...

Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Albums February 22, 2025 1

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Albums February 21, 2025 0

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

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

Behind the Song March 23, 2017 0

'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: Van Morrison – ‘Crazy Love’

Behind the Song May 4, 2015 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIaKy1vM9hs 'Crazy Love' is the third track from Moondance, Van...

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

Behind the Song June 25, 2015 0

Beginning her career in pop music at the age...

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

American Cinema May 25, 2017 2

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Behind the Song: Animal Collective – ‘Summertime Clothes’

Behind the Song August 22, 2015 0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxhaRgJUMl8 Animal Collective's eighth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was...

Tracks of the Week 19.01.25

Tracks of the Week January 22, 2025 0

Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...

Tracks of the Week 12.01.25

Tracks of the Week January 15, 2025 0

Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...

Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Tracks of the Week January 7, 2025 0

Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...

Tracks of the Week 17.08.24

Tracks of the Week August 21, 2024 0

Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...

Tracks of the Week 10.08.24

Tracks of the Week August 14, 2024 0

David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Movies October 22, 2015 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) owns a warehouse which manufactures and sells novelty goods - toilet plungers with supposedly non-breakable handles and so on - but channels all of his hopes into one venture: having carried out his research diligently, and as far as the vagaries of the promotion will allow, he has come to understand that by purchasing gross quantities of Healthy Choice pudding...

We’re the Millers (2013)

American Cinema August 19, 2020 0

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In what sounds like a riff on an old joke, a drug dealer, a stripper, a runaway, and a nerd climb into a camper van south of the border. David Clark (Jason Sudeikis) is a low-level marijuana dealer who finds himself beholden to his supplier, the sleazy businessman Brad Gurdlinger (Ed Helms), when a couple of street hoods make off with his stash. To cover the debt with a little added compensation, David reluctantly agrees to smuggle a 'smidge' of weed from Mexico...

Million Dollar Baby (2004)

American Cinema September 10, 2015 0

★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), from southwest Missouri, has worked as a waitress from her early teens. Stuck in grim poverty, she seeks a way beyond her circumstances, and determines to become a boxer. She turns up at a worn-down 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...

Rams (2015)

Movies August 7, 2016 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Ageing, unmarried, and unkempt, brothers Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) work side by side as sheep farmers in a cold and desolate valley in Iceland's northeast. Each the master of 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...

High Noon (1952)

American Cinema January 19, 2018 0

★★★★ (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...

World Cinema

We’re the Millers (2013)

American Cinema August 19, 2020 0

Halloween (1978)

American Cinema October 20, 2019 0

★★ (2 out of 4 stars) - In the suburban neighbourhood of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween night, 1963, while other kids are out trick-or-treating, a six-year-old boy without any apparent motivation creeps up the stairs, slips on a mask, and slashes to death his near-nude teenage sister. Fifteen years later he's still confined to Smith's Grove, a sanatorium for psychiatric patients, but he breaks out and returns to Haddonfield...

Paris, Texas (1984)

American Cinema March 5, 2020 0

★★★★ (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...

The Sunshine Boys (1975)

American Cinema July 29, 2019 0

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In The Sunshine Boys a pair of ageing and increasingly frail former comedians, Al Lewis and Willy Clark (George Burns and Walter Matthau), are brought together eleven years after their acrimonious separation in order to star one more time in a special for ABC. Veterans of the vaudeville circuit, their career together spanned forty-three years and six appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show...

Diego Maradona (2019)

Football December 2, 2020 0

★★★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.

Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant

Earthy Anecdotes April 21, 2021 1

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

American Cinema October 21, 2020 0

One of the most influential horror movies of all-time,...

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

Earthy Anecdotes November 23, 2016 0

In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

Earthy Anecdotes May 29, 2015 0

On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...

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

Art February 14, 2013 0

In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...

Rabindranath Tagore, E. E. Cummings; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Björk

Literature April 17, 2013 1

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali polymath, best known...

Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’

Literature October 6, 2014 0

Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...

Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore’ (1912)

Literature February 22, 2013 1

Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of...

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

Literature August 1, 2015 0

When the first issue of Others: A Magazine of...

James Joyce

Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce

James Joyce March 14, 2013 1

With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...

The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov and Homer in Maps

James Joyce February 15, 2016 2

When Ulysses was published on 2 February, 1922, it was the...

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

American Cinema May 25, 2017 2

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

Daily Visual June 16, 2015 0

Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...

Norm Macdonald Used To Think His Life Was Incomplete. Now It’s Finished.

Cultureteca September 16, 2021 0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7K-kaelQEs Norm Macdonald, the comedian whose mischievous glint and deadpan...

Michael K. Williams, Actor Who Illuminated the Lives of Marginal Black Men, Dies Aged 54

Cultureteca September 8, 2021 0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50RJhOFDmiA Michael K. Williams, the actor who became known for...

Charlie Watts, Steadfast Drummer of the Rolling Stones, Dies at the Age of 80

Cultureteca August 25, 2021 0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1_6z9oqet8 Charlie Watts, the backbone of the Rolling Stones for...

Charles Grodin, Star of The Heartbreak Kid and Midnight Run, Dies Aged 86

Cultureteca May 19, 2021 0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT6HIfhwtKo The actor, author, and talk show host Charles Grodin...

Subscribe to Culturedarm

A monthly subscription supports Culturedarm while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:

placeholder text

€

MonthlyAnnually

Albums

Jugodefatuo – Bijù Bazar

Albums March 14, 2025 0

A Principino whose body dissolves and recomposes perpetually, leads...

Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka – Left up on the Tree

Albums February 28, 2025 0

For several years now Patrick Shiroishi and Dylan Fujioka...

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

Albums February 27, 2025 0

Working for almost a decade as Mariachi after getting...

Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Albums February 22, 2025 1

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Albums February 21, 2025 0

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

Art August 12, 2015 21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9Ro9pP2gc In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...

Behind the Song: David Bowie – ‘Subterraneans’

Behind the Song February 9, 2016 0

'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...

Behind the Song: Van Morrison – ‘Crazy Love’

Behind the Song May 4, 2015 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIaKy1vM9hs 'Crazy Love' is the third track from Moondance, Van...

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

Behind the Song June 25, 2015 0

Beginning her career in pop music at the age...

Behind the Song: Animal Collective – ‘Summertime Clothes’

Behind the Song August 22, 2015 0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxhaRgJUMl8 Animal Collective's eighth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was...

Tracks of the Week 19.01.25

Tracks of the Week January 22, 2025 0

Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...

Tracks of the Week 12.01.25

Tracks of the Week January 15, 2025 0

Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...

Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Tracks of the Week January 7, 2025 0

Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...

Tracks of the Week 17.08.24

Tracks of the Week August 21, 2024 0

Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...

Tracks of the Week 10.08.24

Tracks of the Week August 14, 2024 0

David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Movies October 22, 2015 0

The Sunshine Boys (1975)

American Cinema July 29, 2019 0

Rams (2015)

Movies August 7, 2016 0

Three Men and a Little Lady (1990)

American Cinema March 12, 2019 0

★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - Three Men and a Baby is more than a guilty pleasure, it's one of the defining movies of the 1980s for the easy chemistry between its three leads, and for the panoply of fashion, interior design, and architectural styles it affords, an unconstrained movement of plaids and pastels under the neon lights and glass hallways of their luxe apartment and out in the bustling parks and streets of New York...

Halloween (1978)

American Cinema October 20, 2019 0

World Cinema

The Assassin (2015)

Movies February 18, 2016 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - In 9th century China, the weakened Tang Dynasty struggles to retain control over its militarised province of Weibo. Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) has been trained by the nun Jiaxin (Fang-Yi Sheu) to assassinate corrupt government officials, but though she possesses all of the art, she cannot bring herself to kill a man as he sits cradling his sleeping son. So Jiaxin, who has raised Yinniang from the age of ten, sets her charge a more personal task...

Little Women (2019)

American Cinema January 12, 2020 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Greta Gerwig imbues the seventh film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's classic coming-of-age novel with deft characterisation and heady momentum, across and finally through the screen. Each scene bustles with gesture and intonation even when its components aren't rushing headlong through the streets of Manhattan, idling about the parks of Paris, or swirling the ballrooms and striding fields and beaches in the vicinity of Boston, Mass...

The Rules of the Game (1939)

The Movie Review October 21, 2020 0

★★★★ (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.

Midsommar (2019)

American Cinema September 12, 2019 0

★ (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...

How to Steal a Million (1966)

Movies September 9, 2015 0

★★½ (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 Kléber-Lafayette Museum, he proudly loans to the illustrious Paris institution (which for the sake of the film occupies the building of the real-life Musée Carnavalet) his most prized possession, his Cellini 'Venus'...