Cultural Sidetracks
As our regular listeners know, each week we share a piece of culture we’ve been getting into (besides our movie of the week, of course!).
Here’s the most notable cultural artefact each of us experienced from our podcast’s inception…
Week 25: Adam saw Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of LIfe and Death, which he found to be a ‘beautiful, romantic, funny, charming, silly, wistful film’, which was also ‘touching and poetic’. Tim revelled in a 4K remaster of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo at Bendigo’s Star Cinema, which he describes as ‘an irresistible movie’. And to commemorate David Lynch’s death, Anthony watched Lost Highway, which is ‘one of Lynch’s masterpieces’ that’s simply ‘a great Lynchian noir’.
Week 24: Adam tried, and failed, to get through the entire corpus of Van Morrison, but foundered on Common One (1980), which he found ‘waffling and indistinct’. Tim continued mining his children’s interests for his entry this week, with The Empire Strikes Back making its inevitable (and welcome!) appearance. And Anthony watched Children of Men (2006), which he somewhat pessimistically describes as ‘a documentary about what the world’s going to be like in two years’ time’. Chin up Anthony!
Week 23: Adam explored the ‘forgotten’ entry in Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, Lodger, drawing attention to the ‘oddly sincere and vulnerable’ 'Fantastic Voyage’ and the ‘rock/electro/borderline hip-hop’ of ‘African Night Flight’. Tim returned to the classics by watching Star Wars with his son, being struck by the film’s brilliant suspense-heavy setpieces and special effects, still startling after half a century. And after listening to Jon Ronson’s podcast Things Fell Apart, he checked out Ronson’s doco Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, where Ronson marvels at the methodical yet strange way Kubrick composed his movies.
Week 22: Adam revisited the TV series Freeks and Geeks, which he describes as a ‘note-perfect description of high school in the early 80s. While watering the garden, Tim enjoyed an unexpectedly relaxing podcast called If Books Could Kill, which gleefully demolishes terrible airport books like Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat. And Anthony finally finished Series 4 of Slow Horses, compellingly described as being ‘about a bunch of reject spies’.
Week 21: Adam returns to his happy place with The Band LP, an eternal classic. Ever the lo-fi purist, Adam recommends staying away from the recent remix, which robs the album of ‘a certain muddiness’. Tim found a YouTube clip of the Indian musician Avie Sheck, who performs a haunting version of Radiohead’s Creep with his mother, an Indian classical singer. And Anthony spent the week on iView watching Brian Cox’s Solar System, which ‘gives you a real close-up view of the solar system as well as some of the more unusual aspects of what’s going on around us.’
Week 20: Adam, while browsing YouTube, landed on the Eddie IIzzard comedy special Definite Article, which he classes as ‘one of the funniest standup specials I’ve ever seen … and the most British thing ever.’ Tim saw John Flanagan play a series of James Taylor classics (and a few of his own, including from his latest album Manhood Method Actor) with his band at The Old Church on the Hill, Bendigo. And Anthony, perusing Pitchfork like the unreformed hipster that he is, listened to Jeff Parker (from Tortoise’s) album The Way Out of Easy. As he says, ‘This album reminds me in some respects of Miles Davis’s A Silent Way … definitely something you’d recognise as jazz in the 21st century.’
Week 19: In a welcome salve to Tim’s ego, Adam has been watching Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part I, which he lauds (along with Christopher McQuarrie’s other entries) as ‘full of spectacle, wonder and wit’, powered by Cruise as ‘the last true movie star’. Gracefully vaulting over Adam’s extremely mainstream cultural touchstones, Tim has immersed himself in David Runciman’s podcast, Past Present Future, which has a great series on the history of bad ideas (including The Silent Majority). And Anthony saw a film that’s been on his list for a long time, 1965’s What’s New, Pussycat?, a ‘sophisticated adult sex comedy’ which — brace yourself! — has ‘dated very badly.’
Week 18: Adam read a 2009 novel called The Vegetarian by recent Nobel laureate Han Kang, which begins when a woman begins throwing away the meat in their fridge, He describes it as a ‘very sad, strange book’ — all in a svelte 160 pages! Tim, feeling self-conscious about the fact that his last week’s effort was a movie about a rubber dinosaur, maxed out his pseud cred by reading an Aeon essay on chaos theory by Brian Klaas, which was interesting and disconcerting at the same time, though his efforts to summarise it predictably became a shemozzle. Anthony watched a TV series called The Old Man, starring Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow as CIA operatives who go to Afghanistan to rescue Alia Shawkat. (Who wouldn’t?). He endearingly described it as ‘off the planet’.
Week 17: Leaning into his grand theme of intellectually rigorous albums with really boring cover art, Adam’s been listening to works from what he’s somewhat innocuously dubbed Jarrett’s ‘mid period’. A notable example is Concerts: Bregenz Munich, which ‘is like watching him take a phrase and find every single variation and inversion’, bringing out ‘the delight of his playing’. Bringing the roundup down to earth a little, Tim’s been watching the original Godzilla (1954), in which an innocent reptile is tormented by a group of malicious townspeople. And finally, Anthony' grabbed one of his most frequently (over)played albums off the shelf, REM’s Fables of the Reconstruction, which he lovingly describes as ‘one of my favourite albums of all time.’ (But then again, he says that about everything.)
Week 16: Boldly extending his range beyond the Zimmerman who sounds like the fingernails of Satan slowly dragging across shrapnel-encrusted sandpaper, Adam whiled away those balmy summer nights by imbibing Christian Zimmerman’s Deutsche Grammaphon recordings of Debussy’s Preludes. Throwing a bone to the two plebians with whom he shares a mic, Adam humbly demurred that he was ‘not expert enough to say that this is the best or the most definitive recording’ of this landmark work before promptly lauding it as such. Meanwhile, again delighted he had something non-animated to offer, Tim revealed that he saw the film A Different Man with Adam, which he thought was going to be a tearjerker like Mask but turned out to be something far kookier. Rounding off the week in culture, Anthony alarmingly indicated he was about to reveal a ‘personal secret’—which, fortunately for the podcast, was that he liked Star Trek — so much so, in fact, that he checked out Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a prequel to the original 1966 TV show. As Anthony compellingly describes this work of towering ambition, ‘there’s enough going on, and you’re in and out very quickly.’
Week 15: Adam was getting into Connor O’Malley’s Rap World (2024), a pseudo-documentary about, as he puts it, ‘three aimless suburban morons’—obviously, a film with no parallels to the situation at Love is Colder Than Death. In perhaps a more established entry in the canon, he was also lucky enough to see a new 4K print of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) in a sold-out session, in which Mifune grits, grunts, and slices through a grab-bag of dastardly foes, as was the style at the time. Tim saw Devil at the Crossroads, a Netflix film about the blues master Robert Johnson which was split down the middle regarding whether Robert got his preternatural abilities by selling his soul to Satan or by practising regularly. And Anthony, rounding out the documentary-fest, watched a YouTube doco on Fuller called The Typewriter, the Rifle, and the Movie Camera, covering the man’s tobacco-soaked trio of lifelong obsessions.
Week 14: Adam cements his status as a man of the people by reading Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations, by Bruno Monsaingeon (2002), though he did aim to make this pick less intimidating by claiming that his knowledge of Richter’s technique was ‘rudimentary’. While reading this, he was of course listening to Richter’s 1963 performance of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 32 in Leipzig. More importantly, he watched Chuck Norris’s luridly incompetent 1985 flick Invasion U.S.A. (Stay tuned for the spinoff podcast, website, and associated merchandise in which Anthony and I psychoanalyse the dodecahedronal cultural juggernaut that is Adam Rivett.) Tim, meanwhile, stuck closely to the tried-and-true comforts, with Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s deeply atmospheric 1946 film noir, Somewhere in the Night. And, rounding off the Norris-fest that invigorated all participants this week, Anthony indulged in Chuck Norris’s 1977 C.B. radio trucker film, Breaker! Breaker!, which, true to his salt-of-the-earth nature, he simply ‘couldn’t resist’.
Week 13: Tim gets back into the kids’ films with Disney’s short-lived foray into scaring little kids, The Black Cauldron (1985); Anthony went full Trad Dad and watched Terence Young’s 1958 WWII film Tank Force, with Victor Mature; and Adam has been rewatching Frasier ‘for the third time’, giving a special shout-out to the 1997 episode ‘Ham Radio’.
Week 12: Adam’s been watching Stuart Lee’s performance of the Van Morrison song Galway Girl, which is preceded by Lee simulating a nervous breakdown; Tim’s been watching the sci-fi series Orphan Black, featuring the sheer acting heft of Tatiana Maslany; and Anthony’s been listening to the first new song by one of his favourite 80s bands, Haircut 100, in 40 years … which he enticingly describes as ‘a piece of pure English pop with massive hooks.’
Week 11: Adam’s been getting into I Saw the TV Glow (2024), written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, a film which explores a growing friendship between two teenagers; Tim’s been immersing his kids (and himself) in the high-voltage star power of Freddy Mercury by watching Queen’s Live Aid set on YouTube; and Anthony watched an interesting film called The Current War from 2017, about Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse’s conflict over whether AC or DC current would become the global standard.
Week 10: Adam saw the 2014 crime film A Walk Among the Tombstones, starring the ultra-dependable Liam Neeson, which he happily described as ‘a legitimately excellent film’; Tim was enjoying the work of the 18th-century proto-selfie painter Joseph Ducreux (1735-1802), whose self-portraits seem like they could sit comfortably on an iPhone screen; and Anthony watched the stone-cold classic Raiders of the Lost Ark with his son, in one of those primordial parent-child viewing experiences.
Week 9: Adam watched a film he colourfully described as ‘a doozy’, Andrew McCarthy’s Brats, his study of the Brat Pack which also happens to be ‘an insane, incoherent, haunting vanity project’; Tim’s been reading Book of the Future with his son, a children’s book published in 1979 that predicts (often very badly) what life will be like in the Year 2000 and beyond; and Anthony’s been watching a 1971 Roger Corman film called The Red Baron, AKA Von Richthofen and Brown, which he describes as ‘a relatively large-budget movie with some amazing aerial photography.’
Week 8: Adam was reading a recent Australian novel, Nicholas John Turner’s Let the Boys Play; Tim was reading Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast (1981), while musing on how perfect Donald Sutherland would’ve been for the main role; and Anthony recently finished The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, by Sam Wasson, a bio on Coppola’s triumphs and struggles with Zoetrope Films.
Week 7: Adam was listening to ‘The Universal’ by Blur, off their 1995 record The Great Escape; Tim, again using his children as cultural-cred fodder, watched Pixar’s A Bug’s Life (1998) for the first time, being pleasantly surprised; and Anthony was enjoying the new Wilco EP, Hot Sun Cool Shroud (2024).
Week 6: Adam was waxing lyrical about Bertrand Bonello’s 2023 science fiction romance, The Beast (La Bête); Tim, relieved to be able to draw on his children’s tastes, watched The Neverending Story for the first time since he was five; and Anthony returned to David Cronenberg’s gross-out horror masterpiece The Fly for the first time in over 20 years.
Week 5: On the recommendation of George Miller, no less, Adam watched Clayton Jacobson’s 2006 Australian film Kenny, currently on Netflix; Tim was listening to the new Black Crowes album, Happiness Bastards; and Anthony’s recommendation is former White Stripes frontman Jack White’s album No Name (2024).
Week 4: Adam was (re-re) listening to Jeff Buckley’s Grace (1994), Tim was listening to the Mona Lisa Twins’ Live at the Cavern Club, and Anthony finally watched The Stuff, Larry Cohen’s satirical horror film from 1985.
Week 3: Adam was watching Conner O’Malley’s new YouTube standup special, Standup Solutions (2024); Tim was ploughing through the Rest is History podcast episodes on Custer’s Last Stand; and Anthony watched a Tubi documentary, Roger Corman: The Pope of Pop Cinema (2021).
Week 2: Adam was listening to a range of Keith Jarratt albums, particularly Changeless (1987) and especially the track ‘Endless’; Tim started reading James Clavell’s Shogun (update: he hasn’t finished it yet); and Anthony was listening to Thelonius Monk Plays Duke Ellington, with the highlight being a great version of ‘Caravan’.
Week 1: Adam kicked off the cultural choices by listening to the album Tines of Stars Unfurled, from Tim Rogers and the Twin Set (2023); Anthony explored his kooky side with Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), and Tim blissed out to some Ozzy-free, jazz-heavy reinterpretations of classic metal with Jazz Sabbath (2020).
