Released respectively in 1976 and 1980, these The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit posters were sold in Athena, the British chain of art retail shops whose best-sellers—including Tennis Girl, also released in 1976, and Syd Brak’s 1982 Long Distance Kiss—were ubiquitous signifiers of the evolving aesthetic and sociological landscape in Britain…
In the late ’70s and afterwards, UFOs hit the big time in pop culture with countless books about abduction experiences, major Hollywood motion pictures, and quickie B-movie documentaries. But before this turn into widespread exposure, ufology was largely a field defined by tightly-circulated, sometimes even self-published, written and photographic evidence…
By Tom G. Wolf
Death is a touchy subject for most people. Intellectually, we know it’s inevitable, and yet it’s almost never discussed—until necessity intervenes. And for those of us who have spent time contemplating how we’ll depart this mortal coil, it tends to be in a fairly hopeful fashion: we’re lucid, surrounded by friends…
One of the most irksome things about my drizzly homeland of the United Kingdom is the widespread domestic habit of mistaking the material benefits of industrial and Colonial wealth, post-war socialism, and a happy lack of mass violence—all of which, for a good half century, guaranteed a relatively safe and stable life, good opportunities to better your lot, free healthcare, welfare, and a relatively graft-free state—for something as ineluctable as rain…
By Jake Pitre
The loss of filmmaker Nicolas Roeg at the age of 90 in November was deeply felt by cinephiles. Roeg was one of the most singular voices in movies for much of the twentieth century, influencing directors as varied as Christopher Nolan and Steven Soderbergh. When considering his legacy, it’s worth highlighting his most accomplished decade: the 1970s…
At the dawn of the 1970s, film audiences in the West began to discover martial arts films from East Asia. And one of the results of that cross-cultural exchange is this odd yet remarkable document from 1973, La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques? (Can Dialectics Break Bricks?)…
The 1980s saw the gradual ascendancy of cyberpunk narratives in popular science fiction. The genre projected Western societal trends seen in the decade—corporate conglomeration, the rise of computer networking and global media, and the ascendancy of Pacific Rim economies, most prominently Japan—into a vision of the future bursting with high technology controlled by a few neo-feudal corporate interests…
In the tradition of the Photorealism and Hyperrealism movements that had evolved as offshoots of Pop Art, the paintings of musician, songwriter, and figurative painter Paul Roberts exist in the liminal space between perceived glamor and kitsch, taking their cues from the archetypes of genre fiction and the heightened realities of cinema and photography…
Resistance to Trump has been led by women in various forms: protesting, volunteering, donating, contacting elected officials, and becoming elected officials. As I’ve observed and participated in these activities, I’ve frequently wished that more people had the opportunity to appreciate All I Wanna Do, a 1998 film that subverts ‘80s sex comedy tropes through a distinctly female lens…
With the passing of Christmas and the arrival of the NFL postseason, minds turn to one of the premier football toys from the era before kids were able to hook video game consoles up to the living room TV. Before Madden, before Tecmo Bowl, before Atari Football even—there was Electric Football…
In 1970, Chile began a new experiment in society and economy with the democratic election of Salvador Allende, who would bring about a socialist Chile under his party Unidad Popular, a mixture of socialist, communist, and radical groups. In order to realize his platform, Allende and the UP enacted…
By Zhu Bajiee
Warhammer is held up by the far-right as a shining example of a fictional property that enshrines the authoritarian ideal of “might makes right” and encapsulates an exclusionary worldview that seeks to justify intolerance and violence against the Other while enforcing strict social hierarchy, making mockery of egalitarian values and ideas of social progress. Yet it was not always thus…
Broadcast television and nuclear fission: two technologies with their origins in the early 20th century study of particle physics, two technologies whose early development was situated in the years before the outbreak of World War II, and two technologies whose global prominence and predominance rose in the years immediately following the war…
From the early ’70s through the early ’90s, Canadian artist and activist Carl Chaplin produced and exhibited a series of paintings depicting the atomic destruction of major cities from around the world “to point out the horror of what would happen to all of mankind in a nuclear war.” The series was called Art Nuko, and it became quite controversial…
In 1957, as the first artificial Earth satellite was launched into an elliptical orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in present-day Kazakhstan, American science was suffering a crisis in self-image. No one in the Federal Government had predicted that the Soviets would claim the gold in the race to low Earth orbit…
