Culturedallroundman Has Moved!

Having hosted this website as a WordPress.com blog since January 2013, earlier this week I made the transition to a self-hosted site, utilising WordPress.org software and a theme variously recommended and selected from Themeforest.net. While writing and posting with WordPress.com has proved remarkably straightforward, I felt ready for the greater demands necessitated and the greater flexibility afforded by self-hosting. I also believe that I will be better able to display the breadth of my articles via the new site: highlighting, for instance, previous cultural pieces which I spent a fair amount of time on and which are as topical as ever, yet can only be found with difficulty here owing to the nature of the blog. The new site is more versatile and more colourful.

I am still in the process of reworking all of my posts to function in perfect harmony with the new site. Perhaps I’ve managed to fully update fewer than half so far; but all of my recent posts have been updated and hopefully upgraded, as have a majority of my longer-form pieces. The site is, in short, ready for viewing.

I’ve just transferred my followers here over to the new site. The procedure can apparently take up to twenty-four hours, and from my understanding concerns only those people who have been following via email. Those who have already been transferred presumably won’t see this post, and they’ll start receiving notifications regarding new posts over on the new site. This brief message is to inform followers via WordPress.com – or anyone else who happens upon this page – about the move.

The new site can be accessed at www.culturedallroundman.com. This site in the process reverts to culturedallroundman.wordpress.com, where it will remain.

Nine Photographs of the Mist; and One Video of a Lake

As a sort of coda or poetic epilogue to the series of photographs of Sweden which I posted last week, here are ten visuals: nine photographs of the late-evening mist, and one video of the falling sunlight upon a lake, all taken across several nights at Norra Renbergsvattnet, outside of Skellefteå.

What Tribulations Await the New Doctor Who?

I have never watched an episode of Doctor Who. And yet when I read on Sunday of the proposed announcement of a new Doctor – an announcement which was to be made live, so I read, broadcast via BBC television – my imagination was taken in and held captive. I thought up the following words, sentences depicting the potential views, inclinations, and life experiences of the new Doctor; which formulations I have now adjoined to the following pictures.

It is in short a comic strip set closely within the fictional world of the Doctor Who television series. You may click to enlarge the comic strip.

A Redesign of My Various Tumblr Pages

Towards the end of last week, I revamped those various tumblr. pages which relate to this site. The ‘tumblr’ link in the menu at the top of the site serves as a gateway to these; and they are all linked at the very bottom of the site, in the section suitably headed ‘My Other Sites’.

culturedarm serves to summarise and link to the pieces published here; it contains shorter and slightly looser posts on topics from music to comedy to architecture; audio and video files; and occasional photographs. visualarm provides a sort of visual compendium of what is posted here, at culturedarm, and less frequently amsterdamarm: it allows me to expand visually on whatever I’ve posted elsewhere. audioarm and poetryarm are collections of poetry and music.

My revamp essentially saw me replace the four distinct themes which characterised each of the four pages in turn – and which were drawn and edited from various sources – with a single theme, consistent throughout with minor visual differences. I owe to ‘blink and it’s over’ from http://themecloud.co/ for the new theme. I felt like a change, I appreciate the consistency, and I really like the theme’s layout: I think it is lively and engaging yet still structured and clear, and it supports all manner of posts and insertions faultlessly.

culturedarm:

visualarm:

audioarm:

poetryarm:

The appearance of amsterdamarm remains the same:

amsterdamarm: A Blog and a Guide to the City

amsterdamarm

Over the past couple of days, or really since the weekend, I’ve been working on a sort of hybrid, a cross between a blog which will consider daily life in Amsterdam, with an emphasis on art and culture, and a cultural guide to the city. The site is ready to ‘go live’, I think; and this post serves to recognise and declare the fact. The site’s address is:

http://www.amsterdamarm.com/

and it will be linked from this moment on at the top of the page, via the lowercase ‘amsterdam’.

The site is supposed to complement this one, and its related tumblr. pages, culturedarm and visualarm. Lengthy reviews of musical events, art exhibitions, and restaurants will remain here and be linked via amsterdamarm. Obviously all extensive discussion, hypotheses and analyses and explorations regarding pieces of art will remain here. The site will, in its first endeavour, essentially be a place where I can blog about some of the more immediate goings on in the city, providing briefer, more throwaway, but nevertheless engaging comments, depictions, reviews, highlights, and so on and so forth. I’ll post pictures of the city on a regular basis too.

The second part of the site consists of a series of guides to the city. At the moment, I have produced fairly extensive guides to the city’s musical venues – popular, classical and jazz – and cinemas, featuring pictures, descriptions, directions, and links. Another guide currently details what may be found upon visiting the city’s four most prominent art museums: the Van Gogh, Stedelijk, Hermitage Amsterdam and Rijksmuseum. These guides, the latter in particular, will be updated in the coming days and weeks, and continually thereafter. A fourth link will, provisionally at least, simply collate all those postings on the front page which relate to food, to restaurants, bars, and cafés. I roughly intend to produce a guide to the best shops and markets in the city for music, for art, for literature, for food. The site may also develop and extend in unintended ways.