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• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
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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: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

Uncut Gems (2019)

American Cinema 0
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Juggling a growing amount of debt, Howard has begun pawning off as sports memorabilia the collateral he receives for loaning out his jewels. When the opal finally arrives from Ethiopia, the basketball player Kevin Garnett can hardly avert his gaze. Howard accepts a 2008 NBA Championship ring as Garnett takes lend of the opal, immediately pawning it for the sake of a little liquidity unbeknownst to Demany and the Boston Celtics star.

The Rules of the Game (1939)

The Movie Review 0
★★★★ (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.

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...

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...

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...

World Cinema

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...

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

Movies 0
★★★★ (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...

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...

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...

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.

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

Pierrot Through the Arts

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

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

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

‘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...

James Joyce

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

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

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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: 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: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

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

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: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’

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

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...

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 Rules of the Game (1939)

The Movie Review 0
★★★★ (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.

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 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...

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...

World Cinema

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...

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...

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

Movies 0
★★★★ (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...

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)

American Cinema 0
★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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the Influential Producer and Dub Pioneer, Dies at the Age of 85

Cultureteca 0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTNam6GbJYg Lee 'Scratch' Perry, the charismatic producer and restless pioneer...

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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

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...

Shellac – To All Trains

Albums 0
The last Shellac album lands with almost shockingly poor...

Nala Sinephro – Endlessness

Albums 0
The new album by Nala Sinephro opens as 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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