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When Rodin Met GBS…there was nudity involved. Curator, Logan Sisley on the great French sculptor’s bust of the Irish writer.

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One or two things you didn’t know about putting on Wagner, including the importance of the pee-plot, with stage manager, Julia Carson-Sims, of Wide Open Opera’s production of Tristan und Isolde

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How to survive in the Joycean feeding Frenzy, with Michael West, who has co-adapted the just-out-of-copyright short story collection, Dubliners.

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Bessie Burgess and Mrs Gogan remember to breathe as they fight over a pram in the final part of Culture File’s very own Abbey (backstage) Trilogy.

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Violinist Lara St John on the best motto a young performer can be taught: When All Else Fails, Lower Your Standards.

[soundcloud]https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/60478788[/soundcloud]

Violinist Lara St John is mystified about the ongoing problems musicians have getting their (often extremely expensive) instruments on board aeroplanes.

The full interview with Lara, about her concert debut (aged 4!) her love of polka, and the importance of the motto “If all else fails, lower your standards” is on Culture File, 6.40pm, Thursday, 20th September, 2012, on RTE Lyric FM at 6pm. And on this tumblr ever after.

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Prowling the alleys with the ne’er-do-wells and rakes of “Tribes Alive” Paraic Breathnach’s dramatic walking tour of Galway’s old city.

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Can a composer possibly be pleased when someone says their music works very well in the background? Possibly, maybe, says Sam Jackson, a composer best known for his work with Druid Theatre Company.

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How to turn a 1,500,000-word novel into a 50-minute show, with the creators of Souvenir, an entry-level pass at Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

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Follow us to Finglas, where we sniff out the National Theatre’s Costume Hire department, where garments from scores of previous productions are cared for; and where we find a rather becoming hat.

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As hundreds of green theatrical talents are getting their first tastes of crappy reviews and stagefright at Dublin Fringe Festival, we meet some who are taking a slightly less extreme-sport route to stagecraft, via community theatre.

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Ken Thompson, sculptor and master-baker, on career options and carving.

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Simon Reynold’s Skypes in for an attempt to explain the rise and rise of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) in the United States.

Made this list a little while back in response to an RTE Guide request for Culture File’s favourite tunes. Surely it’s time to put it up here

1   Don Rendell & Ian Carr Quintet – Blue Mosque - Shades of Blue

Rather than wondering what my favourite tunes were, I looked them up on last.fm, which is a great service for telling you what you really like, ie, keeping track of which songs you actually play the most. And apparently, best of all I like this piece of 1960s British jazz, originally crate-crawled by Giles Peterson.

2   Iron & Wine – Sunset Soon Forgotten - Our Endless Numbered Days

What these songs mostly have in common is that they are slow and easy enough to be on my random go-to-sleep playlist. Actually that playlist often turns up some possibly unsetting tunes, like this one, which seems to be about death and grief. But is lovely for all that.

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Van Morrison did it, and so have Pixies. Latest to commit to performing an album in its entirety is Kíla singer and songwriter, Rónán Ó Snodaigh, who is set to perform all of five of his solo albums in a series of concerts in Dublin’s Whelan’s.

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Have you seen Billy? Run into Gorm? We join audience members as they assemble (forgive us!) for the first night of Flatpack, an opera with a libretto composed entirely of Ikea product names.

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But what’s Mrs Clitheroe wearing? Creating the audio descriptions for The Abbey’s production of an O’Casey classic.

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'Shut up And Play The Hits' is a concert documentary of a now famous night when the ultimate cool kids band, the LCD Soundsytem, played their farewell gig at Madison Square Garden, New York City. We relive the night of the greatest gig ever…

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Additional material from Luke’s conversation with mathematics’s author, Dana Mackenzie in which they talk about the work of Irish maths giant, William Hamilton. (Part 4 of 3. Ha-ha!)

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They move in mysterious ways. Dana Mackenzie explains how financial derivatives resemble gas molecules, and the mistake at the heart of the financial world’s most important formula. (Part 3 of 3)

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How whale geometry scooped Einstein by several millennia, and a short history of the apparently uncontroversial equation: 1 + 1 = 2, with author, Dana Mackenzie. (Part 2 of 3)

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In our Back to School special, Dana Mackenzie, author of The Universe in Zero Words, explores where — and why — maths and culture meet. (Part 1 of 3)