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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

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...

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

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

Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Behind the Song

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

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

Behind the Song: Animal Collective – ‘Summertime Clothes’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxhaRgJUMl8 Animal Collective's eighth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was...

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...

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

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

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...

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...

Three Men and a Little Lady (1990)

★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...

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'...

Chinatown (1974)

★★★★ (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...

World Cinema

High Noon (1952)

★★★★ (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...

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...

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

★★★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...

Diego Maradona (2019)

★★★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.

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...

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...

‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev

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

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

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

Pierrot Through the Arts

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

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...

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...

Obituaries

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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...

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

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

Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

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

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

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...

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...

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

Cactus Flower (1969)

★★★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...

The Rules of the Game (1939)

★★★★ (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.

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...

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...

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...

World Cinema

High Noon (1952)

★★★★ (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...

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...

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'...

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...

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - Five teenagers take a road trip to visit an old family homestead in the musty heart of Texas. The radio plays the news, a grim recitation of industrial and environmental disasters and acts of wanton violence. They discuss astrology, retrograde planets and the malevolent influence of Saturn; stop off at the gravesite of a deceased grandfather amid reports of grave robbing; and after passing a slaughterhouse for beef cattle, they pick up a hitchhiker...

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

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...

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

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

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...

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

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

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...

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

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

Norm Macdonald Used To Think His Life Was Incomplete. Now It’s Finished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7K-kaelQEs Norm Macdonald, the comedian whose mischievous glint and deadpan...

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

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

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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