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: 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: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

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

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...

Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

Art 21
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9Ro9pP2gc In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...

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

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

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

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'...

The Sunshine Boys (1975)

American Cinema 0
★★★ (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...

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...

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...

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...

World Cinema

Young Adult (2011)

Movies 1
★★★★ (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...

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

American Cinema 0
★★★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...

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...

Don Jon (2013)

American Cinema 0
★★★ (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...

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...

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...

Pierrot Through the Arts

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

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

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

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

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

James Joyce

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...

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...

Obituaries

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...

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...

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...

Jean-Paul Belmondo, the Face of the French New Wave, Dies At the Age of 88

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbAMIHLciGk Jean-Paul Belmondo, the actor whose crooked nose and raffish...

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

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

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...

Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

Art 21
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9Ro9pP2gc In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

Rams (2015)

Movies 0
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Ageing, unmarried, and unkempt, brothers Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) work side by side as sheep farmers in a cold and desolate valley in Iceland's northeast. Each the master of their own flock, they have not spoken for forty years owing to a dispute over their father's inheritance: considering Gummi the more conscientious worker, their father left him the whole of the land...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

Chinatown (1974)

American Cinema 0
★★★★ (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...

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

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...

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

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

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

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

James Joyce

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

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

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...

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

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

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

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

Obituaries

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

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

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...

Biz Markie, the Clown Prince of Hip Hop, Dies at 57 Years Old

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aofoBrFNdg The rapper, DJ, and record producer Biz Markie died...

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: Nappy Nina
N

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

Umeå Jazz Festival 2024

Music 0
Umeå, a small city on the northeast coast of...

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

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

Little Island Finally Floats as the Park Opens on the Hudson River

Art 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmzc8QHALA4 Back in 2014, the designer Thomas Heatherwick unveiled plans...

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.