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• 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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3
25
0

Albums

Judith Hamann – Aunes

Judith Hamann is a composer and cellist from Melbourne...

Whatever The Weather – Whatever The Weather II

Loraine James exists on her own frequency, to such...

Sylvie Courvoisier & Mary Halvorson – Bone Bells

The pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson combine...

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...

Behind the Song

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

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

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: 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...

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: Van Morrison – ‘Crazy Love’

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

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

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...

Halloween (1978)

★★ (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...

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...

The Sunshine Boys (1975)

★★★ (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...

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...

World Cinema

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.

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...

The Blind Side (2009)

★ (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...

North by Northwest (1959)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A Madison Avenue advertising man, run-of-the-mill if unusually tanned with his grey flannel suit an impeccable fit, stands up at the wrong moment in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Roger Thornhill has theatre tickets. He wishes to send a wire to his mother, but by summoning the wrong waiter and ostensibly responding to the wrong call, he gets mistaken for George Kaplan, a government agent.

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...

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

‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Joyce

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...

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

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

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

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...

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...

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

Judith Hamann – Aunes

Judith Hamann is a composer and cellist from Melbourne...

Whatever The Weather – Whatever The Weather II

Loraine James exists on her own frequency, to such...

Sylvie Courvoisier & Mary Halvorson – Bone Bells

The pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson combine...

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...

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: Van Morrison – ‘Crazy Love’

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

'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: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’

Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 1, Op....

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

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

★★★★ (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...

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...

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...

How to Steal a Million (1966)

★★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'...

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

Little Women (2019)

★★★★ (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...

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...

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...

The Blind Side (2009)

★ (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...

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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,...

James Joyce

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

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

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...

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

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

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...

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...

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...

Michael K. Williams, Actor Who Illuminated the Lives of Marginal Black Men, Dies Aged 54

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50RJhOFDmiA Michael K. Williams, the actor who became known for...

Culturedarm

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Tag: Montparnasse Musique
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