A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Stop. Go. Kill. Die.

Mar 31, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

What kind of trailer fits with a post about Euro coins? Well, if the face on the coin is that of Nikola Tesla, it’s not that difficult. Courtesy of the man who put Ethan Hawke in the aisles a Blockbuster and let him deliver the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, here’s…

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Sight and Sound: Man with a Movie Camera (feat. Roksana Smirnova and Misha Kalinin)

Mar 30, 2024Matt1 Comment

Wikipedia describes Man with a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov, filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman and edited by Vertov’s wife Yelizaveta Svilova, as an “experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film”. What kind of images does this conjure in your mind? My knowledge of Soviet art isn’t particularly broad, but it’s biased by what I’ve seen of Soviet propaganda: heroic, productive workers, didactic visuals showing us what the ideal communist world ought to look like. A utopia that, with the benefit of hindsight, often looks phoney, frightening or both.

Whatever I might have expected of Man with a Movie Camera, it’s very different from what the film actually is: an audacious, joyful approach to an art form that, even 36 years after its birth, was still in its infancy in many ways.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #175: A Game of Coins

Mar 29, 2024Oct 12, 2024Alan Kuhl Graham4 Comments

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.

On the 1st of January 2023, the Republic of Croatia adopted the Euro as its currency. It joined a currency union that stretches across the continent where around 350 million people use the same money. Well, not quite exactly the same. When a country joins, they are able to mint their own Euro coins, with a national design on one side. A coin that can be used wherever Euros are accepted.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: I call the xenomorph ‘Bitey’!

Mar 24, 2024Mar 24, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Remember that time when most of us were excited for Game of Thrones? When we’d look at the new cast members for the upcoming season and get even more excited? Sam’s interest in Game of Thrones began and, sadly, peaked with him bumping Jonathan Pryce in Dubrovnik, where he (Pryce, that is, not Sam) was filming for season 5 for what was at one point the hottest series on TV. Check out Sam’s Six Damn Fine Degrees for more on this encounter!

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Love, longing, loss: All of Us Strangers (2023)

Mar 23, 2024Mar 23, 2024Matt1 Comment

Would you say that, when you were a child, your parents really knew you? Did they see the person you considered yourself to be? Were there things you wished they’d known about you, but you were afraid of what they would think if indeed they did know? Did you feel that, in so many ways, you and your parents were strangers to one another?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #174: Walking into Game of Thrones in Croatia

Mar 22, 2024Oct 12, 2024samlinder3 Comments

Just like Mege confessed in last week’s post, I also stopped watching Game of Thrones after few seasons, not because I hadn’t initially found it riveting and exciting, but because the rampant sex, violence and surprise deaths had taken away pretty much all the characters I cared for by just the end of season 3 (especially in the infamous ‘Red Wedding’ episodes). My nerve-rattling and character-investing had largely been in vain, and so my friends and I called it quits.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: See Venice and die. Or kill.

Mar 17, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Getting into a series, a franchise, a fictional world: it requires time – and, yes, even energy. And sometimes it’s better to decide early on that it’s not worth it, as Mege writes in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees. Though sometimes, just sometimes, we have the choice between a long series of book and a series of film’s that isn’t quite as long.

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Forever Fellini: La Dolce Vita (1960)

Mar 16, 2024Mar 16, 2024Matt3 Comments

We all know the iconic images: the statue of Christ flying through Rome, transported by a helicopter; wild nighttime parties in the Baths of Caracalla; believers carrying the sick on stretchers, tabloid journalists and TV people crowding two small children that claim to have seen the Madonna; and, always and especially, Anita Ekberg in the Fontana di Trevi.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #173: Go build me a world to my liking

Mar 15, 2024Oct 12, 2024Mege3 Comments

To me, The Lord of the Rings is unreadable. Not because the writing is bad; it’s not. And not because I am not into fantasy; while it’s not my favourite genre, I don’t run for the hills if someone suggests a good fantasy novel to me. I have not yet read a bad China Miéville novel, if that is anything to go on. I am also not afraid of super-long novels, either – behold, I am the guy who read Infinite Jest and loved it. It’s just that investing myself in a heavy brick of a novel, there is a point where the text has to convince me that it’s worth wading through it for the next couple of days or weeks.

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