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• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
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Albums

DaYe 大叶 – Road to Spring 甘泉路

Albums 0
Trained as a classical pianist, on her new album...

Luke Martin – To Be Worthy of Pessoa

Albums 0
The Portuguese poet and author Fernando Pessoa composed his...

Judith Hamann – Aunes

Albums 0
Judith Hamann is a composer and cellist from Melbourne...

Whatever The Weather – Whatever The Weather II

Albums 0
Loraine James exists on her own frequency, to such...

Sylvie Courvoisier & Mary Halvorson – Bone Bells

Albums 0
The pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson combine...

Behind the Song

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...

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...

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

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

American Cinema 0
★★★ (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...

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...

Teen Wolf (1985)

American Cinema 0
★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - It would be naive to suggest that things were simpler back in the 1980s, but when it came to the movie preferences of adolescent males, they were less demanding at least. True it was the era of high concept film, of space operas and extra-terrestrials and all-action archaeologists, of darkening or neon-clad dystopias, of robots and terminators, of zombies and ghosts and gremlins...

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...

The Switch (2010)

American Cinema 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...

World Cinema

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...

Kalifornia (1993)

American Cinema 0
★★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...

Diego Maradona (2019)

Football 0
★★★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.

The Switch (2010)

American Cinema 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...

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...

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

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

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

‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev

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

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

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

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

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

James Joyce

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

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

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...

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...

Obituaries

Brazilian Architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha Dies at the Age of 92

Art 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NidZvaQQrsA The Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha died on...

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

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50RJhOFDmiA Michael K. Williams, the actor who became known for...

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...

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...

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

DaYe 大叶 – Road to Spring 甘泉路

Albums 0
Trained as a classical pianist, on her new album...

Luke Martin – To Be Worthy of Pessoa

Albums 0
The Portuguese poet and author Fernando Pessoa composed his...

Judith Hamann – Aunes

Albums 0
Judith Hamann is a composer and cellist from Melbourne...

Whatever The Weather – Whatever The Weather II

Albums 0
Loraine James exists on her own frequency, to such...

Sylvie Courvoisier & Mary Halvorson – Bone Bells

Albums 0
The pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson combine...

Behind the Song

Behind the Song: Animal Collective – ‘Summertime Clothes’

Behind the Song 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 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: Van Morrison – ‘Crazy Love’

Behind the Song 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 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

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...

Amazing Grace (2018)

American Cinema 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...

The Assassin (2015)

Movies 0
★★★★ (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...

Teen Wolf (1985)

American Cinema 0
★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - It would be naive to suggest that things were simpler back in the 1980s, but when it came to the movie preferences of adolescent males, they were less demanding at least. True it was the era of high concept film, of space operas and extra-terrestrials and all-action archaeologists, of darkening or neon-clad dystopias, of robots and terminators, of zombies and ghosts and gremlins...

Diego Maradona (2019)

Football 0
★★★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.

World Cinema

Diego Maradona (2019)

Football 0
★★★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.

Amazing Grace (2018)

American Cinema 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...

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Movies 0
★★★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...

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...

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...

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

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

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

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

Literature 0
Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...

Pierrot Through the Arts

Art 2
Pierrot, the sad clown in white face and loose...

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

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

James Joyce

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...

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

James Joyce 1
With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...

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...

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...

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

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1_6z9oqet8 Charlie Watts, the backbone of the Rolling Stones for...

Culturedarm

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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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culturedarm

Where the strands of culture entwine.

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

by Christopher Laws

Albums

DaYe 大叶 – Road to Spring 甘泉路

Albums 0
Trained as a classical pianist, on her new album...

Luke Martin – To Be Worthy of Pessoa

Albums 0
The Portuguese poet and author Fernando Pessoa composed his...

Judith Hamann – Aunes

Albums 0
Judith Hamann is a composer and cellist from Melbourne...

Featured Posts

McCoy Tyner & Joe Henderson – Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’

Albums 0
In the sixties Slugs' in the outer margins of...

In Performance: Nina Simone – ‘I Loves You, Porgy’

In Performance 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7RoA-JI6Us Of those songs which became standards and entered into...

Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou – Souvenirs

Albums 0
The piano style of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou - 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.

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