Tubular Terrors: ‘A Cold Night’s Death’
By J.E. Anckorn
Other reviewers have said that A Cold Night’s Death is an excellent movie so long as you ignore the last five minutes, but I’m here to tell you the opposite is true…
Screen Time for Rent: Granada TV Commercial, 1977
This 1977 TV commercial for Granada TV Rental opens a window onto an almost forgotten aspect of the relationship the British viewing public once enjoyed with their television sets…
“Splashing the Volcano”: ‘Dianetics’ in the Age of Reaganomics
By K.E. Roberts
Anyone who was watching TV in the late 1980s remembers the commercial: probing personal questions appear in white text on a black screen as a Tangerine Dream-esque synth riff pulsates in the background. ”How can you increase your mind’s potential?”…
Game Room Challenges and Computer Labyrinths: The Sears Wish Book, 1981
The Sears catalog was, by the outset of the 1980s, an American institution nearly a century in the making, providing an A-to-Z inventory of mail-order household goods for even the most far-flung consumers in the United States…
We Are the Mutants Turns 10
By The Mutants
Jesus, 10 years. Launch date: August 29, 2016. Since then we’ve published almost 600 articles: many of them, in my opinion, are important contributions to cultural history and culture at large…
God Hates Hippies: Jack Chick’s ‘The Broken Cross’
By K.E. Roberts
The comic foregrounds Chick’s particularly virulent and extremist brand of Christianity—many of his tracts have been rightly classified as hate speech—and marks a very early foreshadowing of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early ‘90s…
Blank Generation: Steven Levy’s ‘The Unicorn’s Secret: Murder in the Age of Aquarius’
To interested observers in the 1970s, Ira Einhorn was the paragon of the bleeding-edge, Age of Aquarius thinker. He founded free classes on psychedelics, conducted one of the first “Be-ins” on the East Coast…
Chaos, Magick: The Sorcerers Apprentice Occult Bookshop
Grimy, esoteric capital of the ‘80s North of England, post-Thatcherism Leeds was a peculiarly dual-natured place. An increasingly moribund industrial economy still haunted by the atrocities…
Chants, Prophecies, and Cultic Transmissions: Boards of Canada’s ‘Inferno’
Fans of fraternal Scottish music duo Boards of Canada could be forgiven for being a little overexcited when news of the feverishly anticipated fifth LP, Inferno, the group’s first new music in 13 years, arrived through a series of postal packages stuffed with VHS tapes…
Life in the Hive: Franco Leprino’s ‘Integrati… Disintegrati’
The work of 24-year-old Sicilian musician Francesco Leprino, Integrati… Disintegrati is a suite of music and sound that constantly oscillates between euphoria and anxiety, blending the “organic” sounds of “real” instruments like acoustic guitar and flute, with Moog synths…
Electronic, Ethereal, Sublime: Paul Williams’ ‘Aquarius’
By K.E. Roberts
Unlike most library music, Aquarius is a complete work in itself. It’s like a soundtrack to an imaginary film, and Williams uses both traditional and experimental arrangements to tell the story…
