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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
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
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• 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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3
25
0

Albums

Jugodefatuo – Bijù Bazar

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

Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka – Left up on the Tree

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

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

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

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

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

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

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

Behind the Song

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: Animal Collective – ‘Summertime Clothes’

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

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...

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 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

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - On the morning of Saint Valentine's Day, 1900, the schoolgirls boarding at Appleyard College prepare for a day picnicking at Hanging Rock. In raptures they recite poetry from the Valentine's cards they have presumably sent one another; they put on their muslin dresses, and in a cross between a balletic embrace and an evolutionary procession, they awkwardly help each other with their corsets; and then they are off, but at the rock three of them vanish...

Uncut Gems (2019)

★★★★ (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.

Risky Business (1983)

★★★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...

Young Adult (2011)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), a 37-year-old ghostwriter for a series of young adult novels soon to be cancelled, returns to her small Minnesota hometown, angling to hook up with her old high school flame, who is married and has just become a father. Her attempts at seduction are already inappropriate, but prove much grosser than this, culminating in a blowout at a birthday party...

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

★ (1 out of 4 stars) - Vampires on film are best taken seriously. As archetypes, strange and sad figures who permeate given spaces while proving difficult to grasp, they model for us fear, loneliness, and alienation, and are uniquely suited to expressive visual contrasts of light and dark. The great vampire films, Nosferatu (1922), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), and more recently Let the Right One In (2008), more than mere formal exercises...

World Cinema

Amazing Grace (2018)

★★★★ (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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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 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

Pierrot Through the Arts

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

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

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

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

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

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

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

James Joyce

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...

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

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

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

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

Obituaries

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

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

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

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

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court Justice, Dies at the Age of 87

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRlEFT-44Ik Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court...

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...

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

Jugodefatuo – Bijù Bazar

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

Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka – Left up on the Tree

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

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

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

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

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

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

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

Behind the Song

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

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

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: Van Morrison – ‘Crazy Love’

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

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

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

Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

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

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

Adam’s Rib (1949)

★★★★ (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...

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.

Pickpocket (1959)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - Michel the titular character of Robert Bresson's snappily downcast Pickpocket is a renegade, a nihilist, one of cinema's Nietzschean Übermensch and most of all a real churl. He is the surliest of apostates with the hint of a bad boy persona that might suggest Marlon Brando or James Dean in blocking or on the amateur stage, for as is Bresson's wont the lead Martin LaSalle was a rank novice...

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

★ (1 out of 4 stars) - Vampires on film are best taken seriously. As archetypes, strange and sad figures who permeate given spaces while proving difficult to grasp, they model for us fear, loneliness, and alienation, and are uniquely suited to expressive visual contrasts of light and dark. The great vampire films, Nosferatu (1922), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), and more recently Let the Right One In (2008), more than mere formal exercises...

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)

★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

October Sky (1999)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - October Sky is a quaint coming-of-age picture utterly characteristic of this period in American cinema: polished but earnest, overtly sentimental, full of local colour, ostensibly presenting some hard-hitting themes without ever straying from the steely confines of quaint. It's in the same mould as films like The Cider House Rules and especially Billy Elliot, which it preceded by more than a year...

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - The hotly anticipated follow-up to what has already become a cult classic, in John Wick: Chapter 2 our eponymous hero goes to Rome, as the series curiously begins taking cues from Dan Brown and all things Da Vinci. There's a dash of Underworld mixed in there too: this is a world where neon store fronts, modern art installations, subways and the original film's streamlined desire for vengeance butt up against cobbled streets and catacombs...

Don Jon (2013)

★★★ (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...

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - Five teenagers take a road trip to visit an old family homestead in the musty heart of Texas. The radio plays the news, a grim recitation of industrial and environmental disasters and acts of wanton violence. They discuss astrology, retrograde planets and the malevolent influence of Saturn; stop off at the gravesite of a deceased grandfather amid reports of grave robbing; and after passing a slaughterhouse for beef cattle, they pick up a hitchhiker...

Hard Eight (1996)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A black and blue semi-trailer truck passes by a coffee shop whose exterior lights are askew, and a man in a dark overcoat waits for the truck to pass, pauses for a moment more, then crosses the road towards coffee. Outside the diner a young man sits on the ground, bedraggled and bestubbled, knees up, arms crossed and looking despondent...

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 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

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

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

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

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

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

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

‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev

Silentium! Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal the way you dream,...

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

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...

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

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

Obituaries

Stephen Sondheim, Who Reinvented the Musical Theatre, Dies at the Age of 91

The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim died on Friday...

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...

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...

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...

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