The Culturedarm 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.
Albums
Gustaf Dicksson, Post-Tragic, Sonja LaBianca and Frida Johanne – Stilla Dagar, Stilla Nätter/Stille Dage, Stille Nætter
Following the enchanting release Gwethilu: Songs for the Dark...
Wonkak Kim & Eunhye Grace Choi – Parang Saeya
At the start of this year, the bass clarinetist...
Behind the Song
Behind the Song: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’
Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 1, Op....
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...
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: 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: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’
Beginning her career in pop music at the age...
Tracks of the Week
Tracks of the Week 19.01.25
Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...
Tracks of the Week 12.01.25
Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...
Tracks of the Week 04.01.25
Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...
Tracks of the Week 17.08.24
Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...
Tracks of the Week 10.08.24
David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...
At the Movies
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.
Kalifornia (1993)
★★½ (2.5 out of 4 stars) - Brian and Carrie plan to drive from their home of Louisville, Kentucky to the golden state of California, stopping off at renowned murder spots along the way. Brian hopes to gain material for his book, with Carrie providing the photographic illustration. To top up their gas-guzzling Lincoln Continental, their notice for a ride share is answered by a curious couple, the childlike Adele Corners and her ragged minder Early Grayce...
Midsommar (2019)
★ (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...
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
★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...
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In February 1969 in Hollywood, fading television star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) frequents bars and gets ferried around by his old stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Booth lives in a trailer with his pit bull Brandy, in an empty lot behind the drive-in in Van Nuys, but Dalton keeps up appearances with a luxury home in Beverly Crest overlooking Beverly Hills...
World Cinema
The Swimmer (1968)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Ned Merrill is a lover of youth, a cad about town, a dreamer and in some ways an idealist plus one hell of a swimmer. He will be called a 'suburban stud' and a 'Peter Pan' by a woman who wonders aloud whether he will ever grow up, but for the meantime he is enjoying the Connecticut summer and has dropped in on a couple of friends, or more precisely in on their pool...
Rams (2015)
★★★★ (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...
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
★★★★ (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)
★★★ (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...
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.
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 Title That Got Away
In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...
Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring
On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...
Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne
In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...
Poetry
‘Love Recognized’ by Robert Penn Warren
The poem 'Love Recognized' by Robert Penn Warren seems...
Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore’ (1912)
Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of...
Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’
Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...
James Joyce
Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015
Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...
Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha
'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...
Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita
With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of...
Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce
With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...
Obituaries
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...
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...
Stephen Sondheim, Who Reinvented the Musical Theatre, Dies at the Age of 91
The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim died on Friday...
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...
Subscribe to Culturedarm
A monthly subscription supports Culturedarm while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:
• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• 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:
• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .
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Albums
Gustaf Dicksson, Post-Tragic, Sonja LaBianca and Frida Johanne – Stilla Dagar, Stilla Nätter/Stille Dage, Stille Nætter
Following the enchanting release Gwethilu: Songs for the Dark...
Wonkak Kim & Eunhye Grace Choi – Parang Saeya
At the start of this year, the bass clarinetist...
Behind the Song
Behind the Song: ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ by Bob Dylan
Great White Wonder which appeared in the summer of...
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 lone dissonant note full of pathos...
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...
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...
Tracks of the Week
Tracks of the Week 19.01.25
Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...
Tracks of the Week 12.01.25
Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...
Tracks of the Week 04.01.25
Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...
Tracks of the Week 17.08.24
Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...
Tracks of the Week 10.08.24
David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...
At the Movies
Midsommar (2019)
★ (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)
★★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'...
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - The Coen Brothers' first foray on Netflix feels curiously well suited to the format: curious because beyond the vagaries of the term 'anthology', which on film has sometimes meant multiple directors and is nowadays more often used for television shows whose series are self-contained, straddling the line between more conventional movie making and episodic or serialised television, what The Ballad of Buster Scruggs most resembles...
Enola Holmes (2020)
★★ (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...
North by Northwest (1959)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A Madison Avenue advertising man, run-of-the-mill if unusually tanned with his grey flannel suit an impeccable fit, stands up at the wrong moment in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Roger Thornhill has theatre tickets. He wishes to send a wire to his mother, but by summoning the wrong waiter and ostensibly responding to the wrong call, he gets mistaken for George Kaplan, a government agent.
World 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...
Halloween (1978)
★★ (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...
Chinatown (1974)
★★★★ (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...
Little Women (2019)
★★★★ (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...
High Noon (1952)
★★★★ (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...
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 Title That Got Away
In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...
Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring
On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...
Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne
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...
‘Love Recognized’ by Robert Penn Warren
The poem 'Love Recognized' by Robert Penn Warren seems...
Fred Moten & Brandon López – Revision
The poet and theorist Fred Moten has long occupied...
James Joyce
Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce
With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...
The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov and Homer in Maps
When Ulysses 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...
Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita
With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of...
Obituaries
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...
Juliette Gréco, Doyenne of the French Chanson, Dies at 93
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJSkGd-t6U
Juliette Gréco, doyenne of the French chanson, died on...
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...
Dean Stockwell, Star of Blue Velvet and Quantum Leap, Dies at 85 Years Old
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhPosL3UAN8
The actor Dean Stockwell 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:
• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• 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:
• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .
placeholder text
€
3
€
25
€
0
Albums
Featured Posts
Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams Offers a Beguiling Glimpse of a Fading Frontier
Denis Johnson's sturdy yet beguiling Train Dreams, from a...
McCoy Tyner & Joe Henderson – Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’
In the sixties Slugs' in the outer margins of...
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...
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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