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...
Bill Frisell, Andrew Cyrille and Kit Downes – Breaking the Shell
The jazz veterans Andrew Cyrille and Bill Frisell have...
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...
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: Van Morrison – ‘Crazy Love’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIaKy1vM9hs
'Crazy Love' is the third track from Moondance, Van...
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: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’
Beginning her career in pop music at the age...
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 10.08.24
David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
World Cinema
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Stephen Sondheim, Who Reinvented the Musical Theatre, Dies at the Age of 91
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TofC3KD-h8M
The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim died on Friday...
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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€
25
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Albums
Eri Yamamoto Quadraphonic – Fly with the Wings
Harking back to her studies at The New School...
Bill Frisell, Andrew Cyrille and Kit Downes – Breaking the Shell
The jazz veterans Andrew Cyrille and Bill Frisell have...
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...
Behind the Song
Behind the Song: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’
Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 1, Op....
Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’
Beginning her career in pop music at the age...
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: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha
'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...
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 10.08.24
David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...
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 Out-of-Towners (1970)
★★ (2 out of 4 stars) - Imagine Jack Lemmon at his most highly strung, for instance in The Odd Couple, a Neil Simon film from a couple of years earlier, when Oscar Madison arrives home late from work after stopping off at a bar and Felix Ungar's meatloaf has dried out, and Oscar thinks that gravy just comes, and then confuses a spoon with a ladle...
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...
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 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...
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
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...
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...
October Sky (1999)
★★★ (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...
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...
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...
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
Rabindranath Tagore, E. E. Cummings; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Björk
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali polymath, best known...
Emily Dickinson – ‘I Can Wade Grief’ (1862)
Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in...
Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore’ (1912)
Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of...
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...
Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015
Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Bill Frisell, Andrew Cyrille and Kit Downes – Breaking the Shell
The jazz veterans Andrew Cyrille and Bill Frisell have...
Featured Posts
Johannes Vermeer and the Location of The Little Street
Johannes Vermeer emerged around 1655, aged just twenty-three, and already fully...
Little Island Finally Floats as the Park Opens on the Hudson River
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.
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