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 37: This week Adam has been revisiting Wilco’s 2011 album The Whole Love, but in a remastered and repackaged form full of demos, alternate takes and other ephemera one listens to once before heading back to the millionth spin of the endless perfection of “One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend). Weird title, but boy can that Tweedy write a tune. On the other hand, Tim begins discussing the recent Bong Joon Ho sci-fi film Mickey 17 before both he and Adam digress into reminisces about the rather terrible 80s TV show Metal Mickey, before, never one to leave a point or sentence dangling, getting back to Robert Pattinson’ssomewhat frustrating new film. Cool first hour, but a bit of a mess overall. Digressive! Unlike Anthony, however, who with calm and purposeful recounting fills us all in on his recent viewing of Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, a 2025 British television drama about the killing of a Brazilian electrician by London police. A compelling portrait of bureaucratic bungling and the death of an innocent man, streaming now on…Disney+? Huh, well there you go!

Week 36: This week Adam has been feeling his televisual roots, despite using the format as a punching bag in past episodes. HBO’s highly addictive new medical drama The Pitt and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new (severely underpromoted!) Netflix family drama Asura are both praised extensively as examples of how good the episodic format can be. As for Tim, despite some confusion about what platform it exists upon, he’s been digging a short and sharp game show called Lateral, which drills into various scenarios and solutions. In Tim’s own words, it’s ‘three people casting around to zero in on an explanation to what seems like an unanswerable problem’. Tim finds it all intensely soothing! Anthony, meanwhile, extols the virtues of various b-movies he’s found digging through the Amazon Prime catalogue, including the 1965 thriller The Satan Bug starring George Maharis and the 1953 sci-fi effort The Magnetic Monster, about a bunch of scientists who first make a new element and then have to save the world from it. Impractical! They’re short, they’re stylish, and entirely delectable in their unassuming way. Long live the programmer!

Week 35: Adam goes long about Hundreds of Beavers, a truly hilarious and quite incredible film. What happens when you mix silent era slapstick and Looney Tunes inspiration with digital possibilities and video game aesthetics? A masterpiece! Seriously, you doubting soul, check it out! Speaking of doubts, Tim is here to tell you that Pink Floyd at Pompeii in IMAX is a life-changing, soul-altering experience, and that he truly loved “the sheer analogue thickness” of the sound on that megascreen and on those megaspeakers. It’s the perfect way to engage with the Floyd’s goofy bombast, he insists. Adam and Anthony agree that this sounds cool and that Meddle is a great record. Anthony, meanwhile, is digging TV from Finland – Icebreaker, an 8-part drama on SBS that begins as something like a procedural before morphing into a ghost story. He says it’s nice to get away from the American Netflix slop which dominates TV discourse. As people who watch a lot of said slop, Adam and Tim agree but feel bad about it.

Week 34: Taking the sweet with the sour, Adam is digging Panda Bear’s new LP, Sinister Grift, with its somehow perfect mixture of melody, dub and moody soundscape. ‘Anywhere But Here’ is a particular fave, says he. So catchy you’d never know it was a divorce record! Tim, on the other hand, is reading books again, like a massive nerd. This week it’s Simon Schama’s memoir, Wordy, which rhymes with nerdy, I note. It’s at this point I’ll refuse to compare Tim with Mark from Peep Show though he’s practically daring me to. Anyway, Anthony, rather greedily, recommends THREE things this week. Clearly a man with too much time on his hands! He’s been digging ‘Spike Island’ from Pulp off their forthcoming new album, has finished season 2 of Severance, and, via some press tour content from Severance’s own Adam Scott, and Mr Scott’s R.E.M. fandom (yep, them again) he has come to appreciate the late band effort Accelerate. Truly, one of the great bands. Over and out!

Week 33: Adam, in a disgusting act of betrayal, sings the praises of another podcast – Richard Kingsmill’s Hi Fi Way: The Making of You Am I. And then, like the ageing Gen Xer he is, he goes on for too long about Tim Rogers. Good stuff! Tim ROBERTS, in comparison, is a paragon of focus, who this week has read 4000 Weeks: Time management for mortals, a book about productivity. Can he sell us on it? No, Adam and Anthony like wasting time too much. And what is Mr Dockrill up to anyway? If you’re answer was watching Joseph Sargent’s 1974 The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, that’s quite incredible and your psychic talents are wasted reading podcast summaries. Robert Shaw’s villainy comes in for particular praise here, while Anthony also takes time to perform a drive by on Tony Scott’s remake with John Travolta. True, it’s not very good. Check out Déjà Vu and Unstoppable though! No, really!

Week 32: Adam offers tempered praise for the recent adaptation of Nickel Boys, which has been racking up the awards, before reaffirming the source material, Colson Whitehead’s brilliant 2019 novel. Sometimes, as cliched as it is to admit, the book really is better. As for Tim, he wins various awards of his own, including Father of the Year, for introducing his progeny to the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who. A particular shout out to the ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ run of episodes here. No awards for Anthony, alas and alack, who nonetheless found himself delighted by Neil Young’s new/old Archive release, Oceanside Countryside, an album recorded and mixed in 1977 but, typical of quixotic Neil, scrapped by its author, who would eventually use these tracks in a slightly beefed up manner on Comes A Time and Rust Never Sleeps. In particular Anthony loves how cohesive it is — ‘a real album’, not a bunch of offcuts or alternatives.

Week 31: Adam extols the virtues of Pam Grier’s blaxploitation era at length, before calming himself to a sufficient degree to feel able to approach her late masterpiece, Jackie Brown. What a film, what a woman. Changing gears ever so slightly, Tim sings the praise of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the delight of digging into a Victoria-era doorstop, a temporal and intellectual speed wholly removed from our current moronic inferno. And Anthony, changing gears once more, sings a song of love for one of his personal faves, Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!, an album of ‘all bangers’ (Anthony’s words) without a second to waste as it blasts through 20 tracks in about 40 minutes!

Week 30: Betraying the inexhaustible but dauntingly disciplined German groove of his beloved Can, Adam rambled aimlessly for a while about their recent release, Live in Paris 1973. Meanwhile, Tim watered the garden while listening to a podcast with the alarming title The Coming Storm about the delightful scamps who invented 8Chan and destroyed the world. And, coming to a pistol fight with a stick of celery (his words), Anthony extolled the virtues of the new David Mitchell dramedy Ludwig, which scratched his particular BBC ‘park your brain’ itch.

Week 29: Adam found himself taken with the ambling melodic charms of Talking Heads’ The Big Country while also contemplating, like Byrne from his metal bird in the sky, a fundamentally unknowable and terrifying slice of an increasingly horrible place. Complicated! Consuming the country in a far more enjoyable fashion, Tim watched Kent McKenzie’s 1956 doco short Bunker Hill, which interviews the residents and scopes the sights of a location beloved by any real fan of the Noir. As for Anthony, he ticked another one off his list by finally seeing Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant, which kicked off a rather long discussion about loathing of England, John Howard (more loathing there) and ANZAC Day. What a terrible place! The United Kingdom, that is. Lucky that they also came up with Shakespeare, The Beatles, and Kate Winslet.

Week 28: After a long intro explaining why Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist was long but massively overrated, Adam slowly segued into his actual recommendations, two small single-setting films: Steven Soderbergh’s creepy little haunted house experiment Presence, and the new low-budget Aussie horror film You’ll Never Find Me, both of which he highly recommended. Kicking it up a gear, Tim extolled the virtues of the R.E.M. catalogue, from the murky but undeniably hooky I.R.S days to the Warner Bros era of pop stardom. Direct quote: ‘I finished painting a wall while listening to Green.’ A handyman AND a man of culture. As for our inexhaustible host, Anthony found himself, after All Night Long, desirous of yet more of Basil Dearden’s work, so viddied The Mind Benders, an odd tale of isolation tanks and spies starring Dirk Bogarde. While very much a film of its time, nonetheless, a big influence of Ken Russell and Altered States, opines Mr Dockrill!

Week 27: Adam wandered off to Hamer Hall to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings in concert, truly a clock-stopping miracle of harmony and songwriting. And boy can that Davey play guitar! The closest Adam will get to understanding the headbanger fetishisation of digital dexterity. On the other hand, Tim found himself surprised by Viggo Mortensen’s directorial debut, The Dead Don’t Hurt. While expecting a nice down-the-line ultraviolent genre effort, Tim was shocked to encounter a downbeat small-scale character-driven drama. In a good way, to be clear! And last but never least, Anthony was full of praise for the newie from the ever-industrious Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, The Purple Bird. After a slightly patchy decade, Anthony was thrilled to find Mr Oldham at the top of his game, revivified by the Nashville surroundings and a new producer, and particularly taken with the album opener ‘Turn To Dust’.

Week 26: Adam escaped the screenclogged world for a week and read a few things on holiday, most notably Willa Cather’s My Antonia, an evocative and tender tale of youth, the slow work of nature, and the sorrows of age. On another bookshelf in another house, Tim enjoyed Oliver Sacks’ Uncle Tungsten, particularly Sacks’ evocations of science and its tactile charms. Tim was full of praise for Oli’s ability to take something abstract and humanise it, its affectionate charms miles removed from the standard memoir form. And after resenting the non-clicked thumbnail judging him for many a month, Anthony cashed in on his Apple TV subscription and watched the first series of Severance, relieved to join the chattering water-cooler class and delighted by the show’s twisty unpredictability.

Week 25: Adam saw Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of LIfe and Death, which he found to be a ‘beautiful, romantic, funny, charming, silly, wistful film’, which was also ‘touching and poetic’. Tim revelled in a 4K remaster of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo at Bendigo’s Star Cinema, which he describes as ‘an irresistible movie’. And to commemorate David Lynch’s death, Anthony watched Lost Highway, which is ‘one of Lynch’s masterpieces’ that’s simply ‘a great Lynchian noir’.

Week 24: Adam tried, and failed, to get through the entire corpus of Van Morrison, but foundered on Common One (1980), which he found ‘waffling and indistinct’. Tim continued mining his children’s interests for his entry this week, with The Empire Strikes Back making its inevitable (and welcome!) appearance. And Anthony watched Children of Men (2006), which he somewhat pessimistically describes as ‘a documentary about what the world’s going to be like in two years’ time’. Chin up Anthony!

Week 23: Adam explored the ‘forgotten’ entry in Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, Lodger, drawing attention to the ‘oddly sincere and vulnerable’ 'Fantastic Voyage’ and the ‘rock/electro/borderline hip-hop’ of ‘African Night Flight’. Tim returned to the classics by watching Star Wars with his son, being struck by the film’s brilliant suspense-heavy setpieces and special effects, still startling after half a century. And after listening to Jon Ronson’s podcast Things Fell Apart, he checked out Ronson’s doco Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, where Ronson marvels at the methodical yet strange way Kubrick composed his movies.

Week 22: Adam revisited the TV series Freeks and Geeks, which he describes as a ‘note-perfect description of high school in the early 80s. While watering the garden, Tim enjoyed an unexpectedly relaxing podcast called If Books Could Kill, which gleefully demolishes terrible airport books like Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat. And Anthony finally finished Series 4 of Slow Horses, compellingly described as being ‘about a bunch of reject spies’.

Week 21: Adam returns to his happy place with The Band LP, an eternal classic. Ever the lo-fi purist, Adam recommends staying away from the recent remix, which robs the album of ‘a certain muddiness’. Tim found a YouTube clip of the Indian musician Avie Sheck, who performs a haunting version of Radiohead’s Creep with his mother, an Indian classical singer. And Anthony spent the week on iView watching Brian Cox’s Solar System, which ‘gives you a real close-up view of the solar system as well as some of the more unusual aspects of what’s going on around us.’

Week 20: Adam, while browsing YouTube, landed on the Eddie IIzzard comedy special Definite Article, which he classes as ‘one of the funniest standup specials I’ve ever seen … and the most British thing ever.’ Tim saw John Flanagan play a series of James Taylor classics (and a few of his own, including from his latest album Manhood Method Actor) with his band at The Old Church on the Hill, Bendigo. And Anthony, perusing Pitchfork like the unreformed hipster that he is, listened to Jeff Parker (from Tortoise’s) album The Way Out of Easy. As he says, ‘This album reminds me in some respects of Miles Davis’s A Silent Way … definitely something you’d recognise as jazz in the 21st century.’

Week 19: In a welcome salve to Tim’s ego, Adam has been watching Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part I, which he lauds (along with Christopher McQuarrie’s other entries) as ‘full of spectacle, wonder and wit’, powered by Cruise as ‘the last true movie star’. Gracefully vaulting over Adam’s extremely mainstream cultural touchstones, Tim has immersed himself in David Runciman’s podcast, Past Present Future, which has a great series on the history of bad ideas (including The Silent Majority). And Anthony saw a film that’s been on his list for a long time, 1965’s What’s New, Pussycat?, a ‘sophisticated adult sex comedy’ which — brace yourself! — has ‘dated very badly.’

Week 18: Adam read a 2009 novel called The Vegetarian by recent Nobel laureate Han Kang, which begins when a woman begins throwing away the meat in their fridge, He describes it as a ‘very sad, strange book’ — all in a svelte 160 pages! Tim, feeling self-conscious about the fact that his last week’s effort was a movie about a rubber dinosaur, maxed out his pseud cred by reading an Aeon essay on chaos theory by Brian Klaas, which was interesting and disconcerting at the same time, though his efforts to summarise it predictably became a shemozzle. Anthony watched a TV series called The Old Man, starring Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow as CIA operatives who go to Afghanistan to rescue Alia Shawkat. (Who wouldn’t?). He endearingly described it as ‘off the planet’.

Week 17: Leaning into his grand theme of intellectually rigorous albums with really boring cover art, Adam’s been listening to works from what he’s somewhat innocuously dubbed Jarrett’s ‘mid period’. A notable example is Concerts: Bregenz Munich, which ‘is like watching him take a phrase and find every single variation and inversion’, bringing out ‘the delight of his playing’. Bringing the roundup down to earth a little, Tim’s been watching the original Godzilla (1954), in which an innocent reptile is tormented by a group of malicious townspeople. And finally, Anthony' grabbed one of his most frequently (over)played albums off the shelf, REM’s Fables of the Reconstruction, which he lovingly describes as ‘one of my favourite albums of all time.’ (But then again, he says that about everything.)

Week 16: Boldly extending his range beyond the Zimmerman who sounds like the fingernails of Satan slowly dragging across shrapnel-encrusted sandpaper, Adam whiled away those balmy summer nights by imbibing Christian Zimmerman’s Deutsche Grammaphon recordings of Debussy’s Preludes. Throwing a bone to the two plebians with whom he shares a mic, Adam humbly demurred that he was ‘not expert enough to say that this is the best or the most definitive recording’ of this landmark work before promptly lauding it as such. Meanwhile, again delighted he had something non-animated to offer, Tim revealed that he saw the film A Different Man with Adam, which he thought was going to be a tearjerker like Mask but turned out to be something far kookier. Rounding off the week in culture, Anthony alarmingly indicated he was about to reveal a ‘personal secret’—which, fortunately for the podcast, was that he liked Star Trek — so much so, in fact, that he checked out Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a prequel to the original 1966 TV show. As Anthony compellingly describes this work of towering ambition, ‘there’s enough going on, and you’re in and out very quickly.’

Week 15: Adam was getting into Connor O’Malley’s Rap World (2024), a pseudo-documentary about, as he puts it, ‘three aimless suburban morons’—obviously, a film with no parallels to the situation at Love is Colder Than Death. In perhaps a more established entry in the canon, he was also lucky enough to see a new 4K print of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) in a sold-out session, in which Mifune grits, grunts, and slices through a grab-bag of dastardly foes, as was the style at the time. Tim saw Devil at the Crossroads, a Netflix film about the blues master Robert Johnson which was split down the middle regarding whether Robert got his preternatural abilities by selling his soul to Satan or by practising regularly. And Anthony, rounding out the documentary-fest, watched a YouTube doco on Fuller called The Typewriter, the Rifle, and the Movie Camera, covering the man’s tobacco-soaked trio of lifelong obsessions.

Week 14: Adam cements his status as a man of the people by reading Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations, by Bruno Monsaingeon (2002), though he did aim to make this pick less intimidating by claiming that his knowledge of Richter’s technique was ‘rudimentary’. While reading this, he was of course listening to Richter’s 1963 performance of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 32 in Leipzig. More importantly, he watched Chuck Norris’s luridly incompetent 1985 flick Invasion U.S.A. (Stay tuned for the spinoff podcast, website, and associated merchandise in which Anthony and I psychoanalyse the dodecahedronal cultural juggernaut that is Adam Rivett.) Tim, meanwhile, stuck closely to the tried-and-true comforts, with Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s deeply atmospheric 1946 film noir, Somewhere in the Night. And, rounding off the Norris-fest that invigorated all participants this week, Anthony indulged in Chuck Norris’s 1977 C.B. radio trucker film, Breaker! Breaker!, which, true to his salt-of-the-earth nature, he simply ‘couldn’t resist’.

Week 13: Tim gets back into the kids’ films with Disney’s short-lived foray into scaring little kids, The Black Cauldron (1985); Anthony went full Trad Dad and watched Terence Young’s 1958 WWII film Tank Force, with Victor Mature; and Adam has been rewatching Frasier ‘for the third time’, giving a special shout-out to the 1997 episode ‘Ham Radio’.

Week 12: Adam’s been watching Stuart Lee’s performance of the Van Morrison song Galway Girl, which is preceded by Lee simulating a nervous breakdown; Tim’s been watching the sci-fi series Orphan Black, featuring the sheer acting heft of Tatiana Maslany; and Anthony’s been listening to the first new song by one of his favourite 80s bands, Haircut 100, in 40 years … which he enticingly describes as ‘a piece of pure English pop with massive hooks.’

Week 11: Adam’s been getting into I Saw the TV Glow (2024), written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, a film which explores a growing friendship between two teenagers; Tim’s been immersing his kids (and himself) in the high-voltage star power of Freddy Mercury by watching Queen’s Live Aid set on YouTube; and Anthony watched an interesting film called The Current War from 2017, about Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse’s conflict over whether AC or DC current would become the global standard.

Week 10: Adam saw the 2014 crime film A Walk Among the Tombstones, starring the ultra-dependable Liam Neeson, which he happily described as ‘a legitimately excellent film’; Tim was enjoying the work of the 18th-century proto-selfie painter Joseph Ducreux (1735-1802), whose self-portraits seem like they could sit comfortably on an iPhone screen; and Anthony watched the stone-cold classic Raiders of the Lost Ark with his son, in one of those primordial parent-child viewing experiences.

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.’

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 1: Adam kicked off the cultural choices by listening to the album Tines of Stars Unfurled, from Tim Rogers and the Twin Set (2023); Anthony explored his kooky side with Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), and Tim blissed out to some Ozzy-free, jazz-heavy reinterpretations of classic metal with Jazz Sabbath (2020).