Rockwell, born Kennedy William Gordy, is the son of Motown founder Berry Gordy. Despite his father’s discouraging comments regarding his early songs, Kennedy wrote “Somebody’s Watching Me” in 1983 and submitted a demo to Motown under the name Rockwell because, as he claimed later, he didn’t want his father’s legacy to influence his success…
Though it was Richard Nixon who declared a “war on drugs” in 1971, it was Ronald Reagan’s “zero tolerance” policies in the 1980s that led to a massive spike in incarceration rates for nonviolent drug offenses: from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997…
The Chrysler Cordoba de Oro was a concept car unveiled at the Chicago Auto Show in 1970. Designed by Elwood Engel, Chrysler’s design chief from 1961 to 1974, the future-forward vehicle had a cantilevered roof, no A-pillars (the vertical supports in the window area connecting the roof to the car body), and experimental, grille-shaped headlights…
Occultima, Ltd. produced at least three occult-themed “test” booklets in the early 1970s. This one encompasses palmistry, witchcraft, astrology, crystal ball gazing, graphology (handwriting analysis), mediumship, clairvoyancy, ESP, precognition, and telepathy, with a series of questions in each section meant to gauge your potential in each “mystic skill”…
Edited by underground writer-cartoonist Leonard Rifas and published by Denis Kitchen’s Kitchen Sink Press, both issues of Corporate Crime Comics present a “collection of corporate atrocity stories” written and illustrated by a variety of prominent voices in the underground comics scene…
Escape from New York was John Carpenter’s most ambitious and biggest-budget film to date, and his first choices to handle visual effects were Jim Danforth (7 Faces of Dr. Lao) and John Dykstra, the latter the talk of the special effects world for his Academy Award-winning work on Star Wars…
By K.E. Roberts
The idea that alien astronauts visited the Earth at some point in primitive human history, endowing us with imagination and ingenuity—and possibly our genetic code—has become the cult religion of a hyper-materialistic Western world that consecrates nothing beyond its own egomaniacal gadgetry…
The computer camp concept was pioneered in 1977 by Dr. Michael Zabinski, a physics and engineering professor at Connecticut’s Fairfield University. Zabinksi had received several federal grants to train teachers at the University to integrate computers into their classrooms, and wisely thought of merging summer camp and computer training to reach young people…
Man, Myth & Magic, dubbed “the most unusual magazine ever published,” was the first mass market encyclopedia of the occult, published in the U.K. and Australia in 112 issues beginning in 1970…
By K.E. Roberts
Rosemary’s Baby, both Ira Levin’s 1967 bestseller and Roman Polanski’s meticulously faithful film adaptation of 1968, seeded the American consciousness with infernal terror at precisely the moment the country was supposed to be suffering its most desperate crisis of faith…
We Are the Mutants 