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 1: Adam was listening to Tines of Stars Unfurled (2023), an alt-country album by Tim Rogers and the Twin Set; Anthony was watching Ken Russell’s science fiction horror film, Altered States (1980); and Tim was listening to Jazz Sabbath, an album featuring jazz reinterpretations of Black Sabbath classics.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.’