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.
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!
In the autumn of 2009, my mother was in the last few months of her fight against cancer. In fact, she’d battled more than one cancer throughout her life, and even when she was doing well, the knowledge of how it had affected her life and the fear of its return, at some point, in some shape, was always with her. Earlier in 2009, an episode had revealed that one of the tumors had returned and metastasized, making it clear, if not to her then to most of her family members, that this would be her last fight, and it was just a matter of time until she lost it.
My father, who had retired early (not entirely of his own volition), looked after her while she was still at home, before her final stay at hospital. They’d not always been very happy together, but they had seemed to find a way of being kind with each other during the last couple of years they were both alive. But there was a weekend when my dad said he wouldn’t be around – I don’t remember the details, but I assume he needed a break, as anyone would. So my sister and I split the weekend between ourselves, and I looked after my mum for the first part of it. This meant that I prepared dinner for the two of us – pasta, predictably – and, just as predictably, I brought along a film we could both watch together. The film: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, in which Geoffrey Rush played the iconic English comedian and actor.
Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!
1924 was a good year in culture. James Baldwin was born, author of the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), the collection of essays Notes of a Native Son and If Beale Street Could Talk, which Barry Jenkins adapted into a beautiful movie in 2018, and much, much more. So was Marcello Mastroianni, the archetype of the disaffected Italian playboy, and Hollywood icon Lauren Bacall. The composer Gabriel Fauré died (you’ve certainly heard the sublime “In Paradisum” from his Requiem), as did Franz Kafka – and indeed Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. Thomas Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) was published, as well as E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.
In other words, there would be a lot to write about with respect to 1924, so honestly, there is little excuse for… this.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 