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Behind the Song

Behind the Song: ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ by Bob Dylan

Christopher Laws -
Great White Wonder which appeared in the summer of 1969 is often regarded as the first significant bootleg album, a collection of twenty-four tracks which captured Bob Dylan two years earlier with The Band as they recorded what would later emerge as The Basement Tapes, or the fledgling folk singer almost a decade back as he hunkered down in...

Annie Hall (1977)

American Cinema

Umeå Jazz Festival 2025

Music

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams Offers a Beguiling Glimpse of a Fading Frontier

Literature

If You Like Bosch, You Might Like . . .

Television

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Walter Reuther, Civil Rights, and the Presidential Election of 1960

Long Reads Christopher Laws -
In the days leading up to the 1960 presidential election, the Republican Party resounded with a familiar refrain: a vote for John F. Kennedy, the fresh-faced senator from Massachusetts, would leave labour leader Walter Reuther pulling the strings. Walter Reuther first became headline news in the spring of 1937, when as president of a local branch of the United Auto...
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Beginning with the Beguine: Dances Named in Popular Song

Long Reads Christopher Laws -
From the time it began to flourish on record and on the big screen in the 1930s, to the present day and inescapably beyond, popular music has tapped and swayed to the tune of songs about dance. Less often, songs have not only been about dancing - cheek to cheek or buttock to groin - but have given their name...
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A Brief History of the Modern Man’s Hat

Long Reads Christopher Laws -
In the final decade of the eighteenth century, stirred by the ideals of the French Revolution, the top hat replaced the tricorne as the vogue item of headwear for fashionable Europeans. Already popular in France where it would become part of the costume of the Incroyables, the first top hat in England has been credited to the Frenchman George...
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Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene

One of the most influential horror movies of all-time, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remains more famous for its small budget than its hellish production in the summer of 1973. While the weather that year was relatively mild by...
Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford and The Title That Got Away

In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop the English Football League, and appeared ready to finally grasp the title which they had been eyeing enviously for so long. It was Alex Ferguson's sixth season in charge of...
Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and orchestral work composed by Igor Stravinsky, premiered at the newly-opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. With choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and stage and costume design by Nicholas Roerich, the ballet was...
Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne

In Banks of the Marne by the French artist Paul Cézanne, a solitary chateau peeks out from the dense foliage with its tower and spire, whitewashed walls, and wooden balcony. Several years earlier the painter had composed a similar...

Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant

Earthy Anecdotes Christopher Laws -
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...

Culturedarm's Best of the Year

Featured Reviews

Dino Saluzzi – El Viejo Caminante

Albums
The new album by the bandoneon player Dino Saluzzi sounds like the cover suggests, which is to say that it evokes shaded parks and dusty streets in the twilight or amid the gentle bustle of a late afternoon when couples are making dinner plans, parents are rounding up their children and the few last stragglers are still making their...

Don't Miss This

Jolie Holland & Max Knouse – Wolf Dispatch

Described as a 'spare little thing', on Wolf Dispatch the musicians Jolie Holland and Max Knouse...

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)

In the films of John Cassavetes the threat of violence can get right up into the nostrils...

Mad Men: The Other Woman

From the season one episode 'Babylon' which first shines a light on Peggy Olson's creative talents...

Pat Thomas – The Bliss of Bliss

Loitering with intent in the vicinity of a stool, Pat Thomas begins to pull sawing shapes...

New Orleans, Louisiana, 1980 by William Eggleston

What is it that makes this image - New Orleans, Louisiana, 1980, taken by the American photographer William Eggleston...

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World Cinema

The Movie Review

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.
American Cinema

Paris, Texas (1984)

★★★★ (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...
Movies

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...
Movies

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...

Modernism & Modernity

Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and orchestral work composed by Igor Stravinsky, premiered at the newly-opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. With choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and stage and costume design by Nicholas Roerich, the ballet was...
James Joyce

Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita

With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of 1918 until the close of 1920, James Joyce published the emerging episodes of Ulysses in The Little Review - the American avant-garde literary magazine founded by Margaret Anderson in 1914, and...
Art

Art and Architecture Towards Political Crises: The 1937 Paris International Exposition in Context

The 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne ('International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life') was held in Paris: the French capital's sixth and latest International Exposition, after fairs held in 1855, 1867,...
Literature

English Translations of ‘Funes the Memorious’ by Jorge Luis Borges

The impetus for Jorge Luis Borges attaining widespread international recognition came when, in May 1961, at 61 years of age, he was awarded the first Prix International alongside Samuel Beckett. The Prix International was an international award for literary merit,...

The Western

Albums

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its marshal cut adrift, lauded by some viewers as an allegory against McCarthyism and containing in Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly one of the most memorable pairings ever on screen in...
American Cinema

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...
American 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...
American Cinema

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance - starring James Stewart and John Wayne - is often considered the last great film John Ford directed, in a career that comprised around 140 films over a period of fifty years. Released...

culturedarm

Where the strands of culture entwine.

Culturedarm brings together a diversity of music, literature, sport, food, television and film.

by Christopher Laws

Albums

Elori Saxl & Henry Solomon – Seeing Is Forgetting

Albums 0
The opening couple of tracks from Elori Saxl and...

Joshua Chuquimia Crampton – Anata

Albums 0
After last year's stunner, the critically lauded self-titled Los...

Björn Meyer – Convergence

Albums 0
The bassist Björn Meyer has been showcasing his wares...

Featured Posts

Culturedarm’s Albums of the Decade 2010s

Lists 0
102. Azealia Banks - Broke with Expensive Taste (2014) From cowboy...

October Film: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964)

Monthly Film 0
  At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul ('À Meia Noite...

Ran (1985)

The Movie Review 0
In flattened perspective four warriors splay across the screen. For a moment as the opening credits roll...

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