Chaos and 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…
“There Ain’t Nothin’ Different”: When Dystopian Sci-Fi Ruled the Cola Wars
By K.E. Roberts
Star Wars and the Cola Wars collided, launching a series of futuristic, high concept TV ads that included all the major players. At the heart of it was one Ridley Scott…
Drive and Survive: Milton Bradley’s ‘Thunder Road’, 1986
Incredibly, it took only four years for the spectacle to regurgitate the absurdist nightmare future that George Miller had assembled in 1982’s Mad Max 2 as that most inane and transitory of commodities: a children’s board game…
“The Sightings Take Place Only in Their Minds”: Bob Rickard’s ‘UFOs’, 1979
First released in 1978 by Archon, a publisher based in London’s Soho district, UFOs gains some added legitimacy from the fact that it was written by Brit Bob Rickard, who in 1973 founded what would eventually become the Fortean Times, a monthly magazine devoted to…
“Qualified, Competent, Sincere”: The MUFON Symposium Proceedings
The suggestive commonalities of these disparate MUFON presenters does seem to buttress the now-common view that the entire world of postwar American ufology was a giant blind alley meant to distract from and obfuscate top secret U.S. military programs…
Good Vibrations: The Legacy of the NASA Voyager Recordings
By K.E. Roberts
There’s a lot going on here, but let’s start at the beginning: did Voyager I and II really collect sounds from the outer planets and their moons as they passed by? Yes, in a way. Each of the probes was equipped with something called a Plasma Wave Subsystem…
You Can Only Watch 20 Films for the Rest of Your Life
By The Mutants
Think about the list strategically. It’s for the rest of your life! What will you watch when you’re sad? When you’re high? When the holidays roll around? When you’ve got the flu? When you need to believe that goodness prevails?
Kool Kelly’s Place: True Confessions of an ’80s Bedroom
By The Mutants
A few months ago my dad sent me a whole bunch of pictures on a flash drive. This was one of them. It’s my bedroom in 1987. I’m 15…
Ain’t No Golden Age: On the Banality of Nostalgia Memes
By The Mutants
The image is important because it captures something desperately tragic about where we’re at and how we see ourselves…
“An Important Place in Their Lives”: Musicland Sales Brochure, 1978
By The Mutants
How do you describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it before exactly how it felt to walk into the record store before the internet? When music was your life.
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Possessed’
Blatantly trying to ride the audience numbers of 1973’s The Exorcist, the same year’s Satan’s School for Girls, and 1976’s The Omen and Carrie, The Possessed is, predictably, imbued with the whole period’s ubiquitous post-Watergate feeling of gloom…
We Are the Mutants 