A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

I’ll freely admit to it: sometimes when I follow Julie in our ongoing associative chain, it can feel quite daunting – the reason being that Julie is just such a treasure house of knowledge when it comes to cinema. Not that I’m a slouch in this department, or at least that’s what our yearly results at the best local cinema quiz suggest – but it doesn’t compare to Julie. Because Julie reads so goddamn much about films, actors, directors, studios. And here I am, an avid reader who, nonetheless, barely ever reads any non-fiction books. I have some memoirs of directors and actors standing in my bookshelf, but if push comes to shove, I’ll grab a novel over anything that looks like it comes from the Land of Non-Fiction. So, if Julie goes before me in our Six Damn Fine Degrees series (which is soon approaching its 300^th instalment! how crazy is that??), I know that I’m following our resident professor of filmology and filmography, the woman who knows why Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon is a pack of porkies. She’s the one who can write a post such as last week’s about screen icon Elizabeth Taylor and how her private life, her public persona and her work in cinema formed a very particular blend.

I’m the guy who can take one of Julie’s well-read, heartfelt posts about actor John Garfield and, going from the sublime to the ridiculous, follows up with a post about a certain orange, lasagna-loving fat cat.

But then, that’s a big part of why, after running this incarnation of the blog and podcast for almost nine years (and the earlier version of the site goes back about 18 years by now!), is still so much fun for me. The Six Damn Fine Degrees feature is a great example of this, but it’s certainly not the only one. While we get along brilliantly and often are quite in sync on whatever culture we discuss (though we’re by no means a hive mind), we bring very different things to the table. Julie, as I’ve already said, is the film historian and connoisseur of very early Hollywood. Alan complements her very well in that respect, having grown up in the UK in the 1980s, he brings that very specific perspective and experience to the table, from O.G. Doctor Who (before it went away and then, years later, regenerated into something else) to video nasties. Sam, meanwhile, is a superfan both of James Bond and Alfred Hitchcock, and he’s very much into movie soundtracks, bringing that particular expertise to posts and podcasts about film soundtracks, such as in the episode we did on the collaboration between Steven Spielberg and John Williams, or this 2021 episode about film music in general. Let’s not forget last year’s addition Melanie, who has introduced both our readers and the Damn Fine oldtimers to Korean and Chinese streaming series, and much else beyond. And that’s not even mentioning Mege, Eric, and the various guests we’ve had on the podcast.

You’d think that such a relatively small team for a website and a podcast would run out of ideas after a while, that we’d have gone through all the combinations and permutations of people and topics. In practice, though, this isn’t even close to the truth: practically every time some of us get together (virtually, usually, but sometimes in person), we come away from it with more new ideas. When we started doing a second monthly podcast, our espresso episodes, with this conversation in April 2022 between Sam and Julie (also about movie soundtracks), it was in part because we felt that we had so many more things we wanted to talk about than fit into twelve regular episodes per year. To be honest: if it wasn’t for time (we’re still waiting to hear from a rich impresario willing to fund us quitting our day jobs and going full-time!), we could easily do a weekly podcast. Ideas beget ideas, and we’re probably already set for the next couple of years of summer series on a specific topic.

So, this is, for me at least, what has always made A Damn Fine Cup of Culture tick, and what keeps it ticking: the compact but nonetheless many-headed hydra that is the gang here Chez Damn Fine. The combination of personalities and interests and obsessions. The way that one of us can bring up a topic or a filmmaker or even just a couple of words, and someone else picks this up and runs with it – often to weird and wonderful places. And that’s not even mentioning the many, many heads out there: our audience. We hope that you have at least as much fun following our exploits in culture as we do whenever we put together our heads.