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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: 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...

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...

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: 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: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

American Cinema May 25, 2017 2

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

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...

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'...

Cactus Flower (1969)

American Cinema March 13, 2018 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...

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...

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

Movies October 27, 2016 0

★ (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

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.

Young Adult (2011)

Movies September 9, 2015 1

★★★★ (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...

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...

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...

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...

Pierrot Through the Arts

Art March 7, 2013 2

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

‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev

Literature January 4, 2013 3

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

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

Literature September 5, 2015 0

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

James Joyce

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

James Joyce January 12, 2015 0

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

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...

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...

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

Cultureteca December 6, 2021 0

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

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...

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

Cultureteca November 11, 2021 0

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

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...

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...

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: Charles Mingus – ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’

Behind the Song July 20, 2016 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: 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...

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: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

Behind the Song June 25, 2015 0

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

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...

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

Movies October 27, 2016 0

Risky Business (1983)

Movies October 25, 2015 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...

The Switch (2010)

American Cinema September 17, 2019 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...

Toni Erdmann (2016)

Movies September 25, 2019 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...

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...

World Cinema

Amazing Grace (2018)

American Cinema October 15, 2019 0

★★★★ (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...

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...

October Sky (1999)

American Cinema December 9, 2019 0

★★★ (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...

Chinatown (1974)

American Cinema August 25, 2019 0

★★★★ (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...