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
Elori Saxl & Henry Solomon – Seeing Is Forgetting
The opening couple of tracks from Elori Saxl and...
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton – Anata
After last year's stunner, the critically lauded self-titled Los...
Toby Summerfield – Bodies of Water
Variously playing the guitar, baritone guitar, bass guitar and...
Behind the Song
Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’
Beginning her career in pop music at the age...
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...
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: 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: 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...
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
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...
Virgin Mountain (2015)
★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - Fúsi (Gunnar Jónsson) is forty-three years old and a virgin, still living at home with his mother. He spends his days working as a baggage handler at Keflavik airport, his evenings wargaming with his friend Mörður (Sigurjón Kjartansson), as together they painstakingly recreate the Battle of El Alamein, and each Friday he orders Pad Thai and eats cloistered in the same corner of the same restaurant...
Dream Scenario (2023)
Dream Scenario
Surreal Comedy • 102 minutes • United States...
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...
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...
World Cinema
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...
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...
Dream Scenario (2023)
Dream Scenario
Surreal Comedy • 102 minutes • United States...
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...
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
★★★★ (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...
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
Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore’ (1912)
Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of...
‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev
Silentium!
Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream,...
Fred Moten & Brandon López – Revision
The poet and theorist Fred Moten has long occupied...
James Joyce
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...
Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015
Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...
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...
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...
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...
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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€
25
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Albums
Elori Saxl & Henry Solomon – Seeing Is Forgetting
The opening couple of tracks from Elori Saxl and...
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton – Anata
After last year's stunner, the critically lauded self-titled Los...
Toby Summerfield – Bodies of Water
Variously playing the guitar, baritone guitar, bass guitar and...
Behind the Song
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...
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...
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: 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...
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
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...
Tully (2018)
★★★½ (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...
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...
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...
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...
World Cinema
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...
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...
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...
The Assassin (2015)
★★★★ (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...
The Switch (2010)
★★★ (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 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
Rabindranath Tagore, E. E. Cummings; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Björk
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali polymath, best known...
Emily Dickinson – ‘I Can Wade Grief’ (1862)
Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in...
Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’
Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...
James Joyce
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...
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
Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the Influential Producer and Dub Pioneer, Dies at the Age of 85
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTNam6GbJYg
Lee 'Scratch' Perry, the charismatic producer and restless pioneer...
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...
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 . . .
placeholder text
€
3
€
25
€
0
Albums
Elori Saxl & Henry Solomon – Seeing Is Forgetting
The opening couple of tracks from Elori Saxl and...
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton – Anata
After last year's stunner, the critically lauded self-titled Los...
Featured Posts
October Film: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964)
At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul ('À Meia Noite...
Julia Holter – Something in the Room She Moves
Since releasing her last studio album Aviary back in...
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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