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!
Jason fights the Hydra (courtesy of Ray Harryhausen) in 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts (Video source: Movieclips.com).
Matt was right of course in his latest instalment: the fact that this series of articles, amazingly, is close to reaching its 300th iteration comes down to the fact that our handful of writers and podcasters just simply can’t stop coming up with free (and often wild) associations for the upcoming week: from John Garfield to Garfield the cat, from camp cinema to Bill Camp, or from Christopher Lee to Metallica. Every entry almost immediately begets a next one, sometimes going down completely unexpected avenues and joining personal favourites with life-long trauma, latest reviews with childhood memories or quasi-philosophical reflections with pulp explorations. Every post-recording conversation spawns the stuff for three more episodes and two new series on average. Our team of baristas has really become the Hydra on film, popping up with a new head each time one thinks the topic at hand has been exhausted.
What Matt conveniently omits in all this is the fact that in this dynamic, he’s truly the hydra’s original head, the OG (or OH?), so to speak, who has not only maintained our lovely project in some form or another for close to two decades, but is also its bustling machinery in the back- and foreground. I can only speak for the last six years in which I’ve had the privilege and pure joy of joining recordings and blogs on a regular basis, but without his passionate maintenance of our monthly (now bi-monthly) episodes and on our growing formats of articles, this engine could have easily come to a halt many seasons ago. This only allows for the free flow of ideas and the enthusiastic inclusion into the next available slot, so that our list of planned topics is now almost as long as the ever-growing list of potential ideas. In all this, Matt not only makes us keep our schedules, but he diligently and skilfully edits our sometimes epic and not seldom free-wheeling conversations into enjoyable listening experiences. I’m still amazed to listen to episodes I have been a part of and it’s often an almost out-of-body experience to be able to be part of them.
Matt, of course, is also the heart and soul of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture’s content: his passion for anything related to film, popular culture and the myriad aspects related to it (with more than a few origins in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which I had the pleasure of finding out over time) is more than remarkable. In each year on duty, I’ve discovered another one of Matt’s passion projects: the Criterion reviews, the binging of epic series, the pleasure of video games, the Bergman retrospective, the love of the Coens and Lynch, especially.
I made Matt’s acquaintance way back in the early Noughties, when I was a student of English Literatures and Languages at the University of Bern, and Matt was teaching excellent and memorable classes on Shakespeare, contemporary poetry and modern drama. He first supported me in my filmic nerderies when I started screening thematic retrospectives to students at the end of long lecture days in the English Department’s student film club. We casually bumped into each other over the years around Bern and its cinemas. You might not realise but Matt basically lives at Bern’s Rex cinema part-time, catching a staggering number of their screenings every month.
In Greek mythology, it’s Hercules who fights the Hydra. Targeting the monster’s body rather than its heads proved instrumental (Image source: Maximusdigital.com).
He must have remembered me somehow years later: just when the COVID lockdowns had deprived us of so many of things to pursue, he reached out to me to join Julie and him for an episode on Hitchcock characters. I was nervous and overprepared, but the two of them managed me somehow, and we hit it off. Never would I have imagined, however, that I would go on to be one of the hydra’s regular heads of our wonderful project, which now includes four dedicated podcasters (plus guests) and half a dozen regular writers. Slashing heads off a topic only to discover that several heads grow back is now the basic mode of our team, and the free associations seem to keep flowing endlessly foreseeing many more anniversaries to come. Matt’s work is absolutely essential in this, his enthusiasm and openness to fresh approaches a prerequisite for the continued joy that we all feel and the freedom this gives everybody to be inspired by everything film, culture and so much more!
Our hydra is very much alive, and not even Jason or Hercules can stick their mortal sword into the monster Matt has created. After all, it’s a tried and tested beast, born of Typhon and Echidna and sibling to other beasts like Cerberus and the Chimera. Its lair, according to Greek mythology, is the swamps of Lerna, the very entrance to the Underworld of Hades, after all. It features up to nine heads, with the central one being immortal. In other words, our team of baristas and our listeners might be slashing the beast as much as we want by contributing, listening and reading, but Matt at its core will make sure we live to see another day, another episode, another installment, potentially forever!
Thank you Matt, you’re one of a kind, a character written by the likes of the Coen brothers, directed by David Lynch, creature-created by Ray Harryhausen and scored by Bernard Herrmann. Your wonder about film is Spielbergian, your dedication to detail Jacksonian, your wit Wilderian. Long may our Hydra live!
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 