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.
Albums
Eri Yamamoto Quadraphonic – Fly with the Wings
Harking back to her studies at The New School...
Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli – Our Time
Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli share sustained notes and...
Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas and Misha Mullov-Abbado – Za Górami
On their debut outing as a trio the vocalist...
Hayden Pedigo – Live in Amarillo, Texas
There's a staggering purity of tone to Hayden Pedigo's...
Behind the Song
Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’
Beginning her career in pop music at the age...
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: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’
Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 1, Op....
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: Animal Collective – ‘Summertime Clothes’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxhaRgJUMl8
Animal Collective's eighth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was...
Tracks of the Week
Tracks of the Week 27.07.24
Usually navigating the nooks and crannies of South London...
Tracks of the Week 20.07.24
On the opening song 'Stella Maris' from his debut...
Tracks of the Week 13.07.24
Antonina Nowacka's third solo album opens as though suspended...
At the Movies
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...
Toni Erdmann (2016)
★★★★ (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...
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...
Risky Business (1983)
★★★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 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.
World Cinema
Don Jon (2013)
★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In Japan grown adult men - thirty, forty, fifty years old or more - lie prostrate in their childhood bedrooms, which they never leave, as their ageing parents push parcels of food beneath the door. On their beds they clutch plush life-sized cartoon figures, somehow prepubescent but boasting ginormous boobs, and between the heaving and moaning they not only cry but orgasm into their pillowcases...
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...
Hard Eight (1996)
★★★★ (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)
★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...
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...
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,...
Emily Dickinson – ‘I Can Wade Grief’ (1862)
Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in...
Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’
Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...
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...
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
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...
Biz Markie, the Clown Prince of Hip Hop, Dies at 57 Years Old
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aofoBrFNdg
The rapper, DJ, and record producer Biz Markie died...
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...
Ned Beatty, Deliverance, Nashville, and Network Actor, Dies at the Age of 83
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TwyrAS2lU8
The actor Ned Beatty died of natural causes on...
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 . . .
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Albums
Eri Yamamoto Quadraphonic – Fly with the Wings
Harking back to her studies at The New School...
Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli – Our Time
Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli share sustained notes and...
Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas and Misha Mullov-Abbado – Za Górami
On their debut outing as a trio the vocalist...
Hayden Pedigo – Live in Amarillo, Texas
There's a staggering purity of tone to Hayden Pedigo's...
Behind the Song
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...
Behind the Song: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’
Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 1, Op....
Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha
'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...
Tracks of the Week
Tracks of the Week 27.07.24
Usually navigating the nooks and crannies of South London...
Tracks of the Week 20.07.24
On the opening song 'Stella Maris' from his debut...
Tracks of the Week 13.07.24
Antonina Nowacka's third solo album opens as though suspended...
At the Movies
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...
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...
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - From a modern perspective, the original and best film version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three almost seems to lack a final act: when the shakeout comes and the criminals attempt to make their getaway, there is no major chase sequence, limited gunfighting, and the villains for the most part - faced with the ambling steeliness of Walter Matthau's Lieutenant Zachary Garber - prove their own undoing...
Teen Wolf (1985)
★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...
Enola Holmes (2020)
★★ (2 out of 4 stars) - Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown), the youngest sibling in the illustrious Holmes family, grew up for all intents and purposes as an only child. At the lavish country house which is now on the cusp of being consumed by nature, she was home-schooled by her mother, who provided an unorthodox education encompassing everything from word games, chess, and jujitsu to chemistry, botany, and lawn tennis played indoors...
World Cinema
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...
Parasite (2019)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A family of four live in a cramped and roach-infested banjiha, a semi-basement apartment in Seoul. They crib free Wi-Fi from unsuspecting neighbours and a nearby coffee shop, and their only source of income, procured by the mother Chung-sook via WhatsApp, comes from the folding of pizza boxes for a local delivery service, a task at which they are only moderately successful...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce
With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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
Eri Yamamoto Quadraphonic – Fly with the Wings
Harking back to her studies at The New School...
Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli – Our Time
Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli share sustained notes and...
Featured Posts
Indonesia’s New Capital Will Be Called Nusantara
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhKKoo06sis
At the mouth of the Ciliwung River, with a...
Emahoy Tsegu̩-Maryam Gu̬brou РSouvenirs
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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