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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
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Albums

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

Albums 1
Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Albums 0
Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Muslim Shaggan – Asar

Albums 0
Over the populous span of South Asia, a region...

Dave Sewelson, Gabby Fluke-Mogul, George Cartwright, Anthony Cox and Steve Hirsh – Murmuration

Albums 0
The Arkansas free jazz outpost Mahakala Music says that...

Klein – thirteen sense

Albums 0
For her last album marked the South London maverick...

Behind the Song

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

Behind the Song 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 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIaKy1vM9hs 'Crazy Love' is the third track from Moondance, Van...

Behind the Song: David Bowie – ‘Subterraneans’

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

Behind the Song 2
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...

Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

Art 21
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9Ro9pP2gc In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...

Tracks of the Week

Tracks of the Week 19.01.25

Tracks of the Week 0
Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...

Tracks of the Week 12.01.25

Tracks of the Week 0
Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...

Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Tracks of the Week 0
Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...

Tracks of the Week 17.08.24

Tracks of the Week 0
Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...

Tracks of the Week 10.08.24

Tracks of the Week 0
David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...

At the Movies

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

American Cinema 0
★★★★ (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...

Paris, Texas (1984)

American Cinema 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 Blind Side (2009)

American Cinema 0
★ (1 out of 4 stars) - The Blind Side purports to tell the real-life story of Michael Oher, depicted here as a poor oversized black kid from the ghetto. He's in and out of foster homes thanks to an absentee father and a drug addict mother, until the father of one of his friends - on whose couch he has been sleeping - brings him to the attention of the football coach of a local Christian school...

Three Men and a Little Lady (1990)

American Cinema 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...

Big (1988)

American Cinema 0
★★ (2 out of 4 stars) - The last of a cluster of movies, all released within the space of a year between the autumn of 1987 and the summer of 1988, to depict youths turning into or swapping forms 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 is often cited as the inspiration for Big - in Big thirteen-year-old Josh Baskin...

World Cinema

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

Movies 0
★★★★ (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. 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...

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Movies 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...

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

American Cinema 0
★★★★ (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...

Risky Business (1983)

Movies 0
★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - Joel (Tom Cruise), a teenager coming towards the end of his time in high school, lives with his parents in a leafy Chicago suburb. He is good-looking and his parents are wealthy, but they are also demanding, and he subsumes a fluent strain of existential angst with worry over schoolwork and his future prospects. Beyond a litany of tests, he is involved in a Future Enterprises programme...

Cactus Flower (1969)

American Cinema 0
★★★½ (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

Earthy Anecdotes 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 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 0
In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

Earthy Anecdotes 0
On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...

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

Art 0
In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...

Poetry

Pierrot Through the Arts

Art 2
Pierrot, the sad clown in white face and loose...

Emily Dickinson – ‘I Can Wade Grief’ (1862)

Literature 0
Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in...

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

Literature 0
Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...

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

Literature 1
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali polymath, best known...

James Joyce

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

Daily Visual 0
Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...

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

James Joyce 0
With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of...

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

James Joyce 1
With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...

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

American Cinema 2
'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Obituaries

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

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7K-kaelQEs Norm Macdonald, the comedian whose mischievous glint and deadpan...

Brazilian Architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha Dies at the Age of 92

Art 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NidZvaQQrsA The Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha died on...

Biz Markie, the Clown Prince of Hip Hop, Dies at 57 Years Old

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aofoBrFNdg The rapper, DJ, and record producer Biz Markie died...

Jean-Paul Belmondo, the Face of the French New Wave, Dies At the Age of 88

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbAMIHLciGk Jean-Paul Belmondo, the actor whose crooked nose and raffish...

Culturedarm

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

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

Albums 1
Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Albums 0
Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Muslim Shaggan – Asar

Albums 0
Over the populous span of South Asia, a region...

Dave Sewelson, Gabby Fluke-Mogul, George Cartwright, Anthony Cox and Steve Hirsh – Murmuration

Albums 0
The Arkansas free jazz outpost Mahakala Music says that...

Klein – thirteen sense

Albums 0
For her last album marked the South London maverick...

Behind the Song

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

Behind the Song 2
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: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

American Cinema 2
'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Behind the Song: Van Morrison – ‘Crazy Love’

Behind the Song 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIaKy1vM9hs 'Crazy Love' is the third track from Moondance, Van...

Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

Art 21
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9Ro9pP2gc In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...

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

Behind the Song 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...

Tracks of the Week

Tracks of the Week 19.01.25

Tracks of the Week 0
Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...

Tracks of the Week 12.01.25

Tracks of the Week 0
Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...

Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Tracks of the Week 0
Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...

Tracks of the Week 17.08.24

Tracks of the Week 0
Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...

Tracks of the Week 10.08.24

Tracks of the Week 0
David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...

At the Movies

Toni Erdmann (2016)

Movies 0
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Winfried Conradi is so given to practical jokes that he practically depends on them. When he opens the door of his home in the spa town of Aachen, he regales the postman with an elaborate deception featuring look-alike brothers, prison terms, erotic magazines, and mail bombs, tipping the postman for any distress accrued and to make amends for his own strange excesses. He carries a pair of false teeth...

Adam’s Rib (1949)

American Cinema 0
★★★★ (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...

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Movies 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...

Halloween (1978)

American Cinema 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...

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)

American Cinema 0
★½ (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...

World Cinema

The Blind Side (2009)

American Cinema 0
★ (1 out of 4 stars) - The Blind Side purports to tell the real-life story of Michael Oher, depicted here as a poor oversized black kid from the ghetto. He's in and out of foster homes thanks to an absentee father and a drug addict mother, until the father of one of his friends - on whose couch he has been sleeping - brings him to the attention of the football coach of a local Christian school...

The Switch (2010)

American Cinema 0
★★★ (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...

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

American Cinema 0
★★★ (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...

Kalifornia (1993)

American Cinema 0
★★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)

American Cinema 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...

Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant

Earthy Anecdotes 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 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 0
In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

Earthy Anecdotes 0
On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...

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

Art 0
In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...

Poetry

Pierrot Through the Arts

Art 2
Pierrot, the sad clown in white face and loose...

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

Literature 1
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali polymath, best known...

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

Literature 1
Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of...

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

Literature 0
Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...

James Joyce

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

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

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

James Joyce 1
With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...

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

James Joyce 0
With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of...

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

American Cinema 2
'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Obituaries

Kenzo Takada, the Japanese Designer Who Revolutionised French Fashion, Dies at 81

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7E4bITT4t8 With the wet weather and surging coronavirus already putting...

Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the Influential Producer and Dub Pioneer, Dies at the Age of 85

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTNam6GbJYg Lee 'Scratch' Perry, the charismatic producer and restless pioneer...

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

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7K-kaelQEs Norm Macdonald, the comedian whose mischievous glint and deadpan...

Dean Stockwell, Star of Blue Velvet and Quantum Leap, Dies at 85 Years Old

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhPosL3UAN8 The actor Dean Stockwell died of natural causes on...

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

by Christopher Laws

Albums

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

Albums 1
Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Albums 0
Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Muslim Shaggan – Asar

Albums 0
Over the populous span of South Asia, a region...

Featured Posts

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

Music 0
The saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and trumpeter Goran Kajfeš already...

McCoy Tyner & Joe Henderson – Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’

Albums 0
In the sixties Slugs' in the outer margins of...

Shellac – To All Trains

Albums 0
The last Shellac album lands with almost shockingly poor...

Weekly Newsletter

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