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

Albums 0
A Principino whose body dissolves and recomposes perpetually, leads...

Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka – Left up on the Tree

Albums 0
For several years now Patrick Shiroishi and Dylan Fujioka...

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

Albums 0
Working for almost a decade as Mariachi after getting...

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...

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

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

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

Behind the Song 0
Beginning her career in pop music at the age...

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

Virgin Mountain (2015)

Movies 0
★★★ (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...

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...

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...

Pickpocket (1959)

The Movie Review 0
★★★ (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...

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...

World Cinema

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...

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...

October Sky (1999)

American Cinema 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...

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

Movies 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...

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...

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

‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev

Literature 3
Silentium! Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal the way you dream,...

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...

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

Literature 0
When the first issue of Others: A Magazine of...

James Joyce

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...

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...

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

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

Obituaries

Toots Hibbert, Reggae Pioneer and Lead Vocalist of the Maytals, Dies Aged 77

Cultureteca 0
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

Cultureteca 0
The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim died on Friday...

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...

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...

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

Albums 0
A Principino whose body dissolves and recomposes perpetually, leads...

Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka – Left up on the Tree

Albums 0
For several years now Patrick Shiroishi and Dylan Fujioka...

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

Albums 0
Working for almost a decade as Mariachi after getting...

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...

Behind the Song

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

Behind the Song 0
Beginning her career in pop music at the age...

Behind the Song: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’

Behind the Song 2
Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 1, Op....

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: 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: Van Morrison – ‘Crazy Love’

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

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

Hard Eight (1996)

American Cinema 0
★★★★ (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...

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

American Cinema 0
★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...

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

Movies 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...

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...

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...

World Cinema

How to Steal a Million (1966)

Movies 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'...

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...

Million Dollar Baby (2004)

American Cinema 0
★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...

Virgin Mountain (2015)

Movies 0
★★★ (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...

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

Literature 0
When the first issue of Others: A Magazine of...

James Joyce

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...

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

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

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...

Obituaries

Ned Beatty, Deliverance, Nashville, and Network Actor, Dies at the Age of 83

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TwyrAS2lU8 The actor Ned Beatty died of natural causes on...

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

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRlEFT-44Ik Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court...

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

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

Culturedarm

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.

Modal title

Newsletter
All
Subscribe
All
Subscribe

Tag: International Women's Day
I

culturedarm

Where the strands of culture entwine.

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

by Christopher Laws

Albums

Jugodefatuo – Bijù Bazar

Albums 0
A Principino whose body dissolves and recomposes perpetually, leads...

Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka – Left up on the Tree

Albums 0
For several years now Patrick Shiroishi and Dylan Fujioka...

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

Albums 0
Working for almost a decade as Mariachi after getting...

Featured Posts

Culturedarm’s Albums of the Decade 2010s

Lists 0
102. Azealia Banks - Broke with Expensive Taste (2014) From cowboy...

Nala Sinephro – Endlessness

Albums 0
The new album by Nala Sinephro opens as a...

Indonesia’s New Capital Will Be Called Nusantara

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhKKoo06sis At the mouth of the Ciliwung River, with a...

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.

© Culturedarm 2024. All Rights Reserved.