Invitation to Hell definitely follows on well-trod thematic ground, examining the American nuclear family’s impulse to conform and keep up with the Joneses in suburbia. But it’s on the execution, in the casting, and in a few of the left-field plot developments that the film really shines…
Using as its inspiration English Heritage, who preserve the very bones and sinews of English feudal hierarchy in the form of the nation’s stately homes and historical sites, Sharp’s English Heretic project seeks to détourne these edifices of authority…
“Album covers… defined you,” says Hipgnosis founder Aubrey “Po” Powell in his “Welcome to Hipgnosis” history in 2017’s Vinyl . Album . Cover . Art: The Complete Hipgnosis Catalogue, a 300 plus page full-color hardcover monster that reproduces the collective’s entire album cover output from 1967 to 1984…
Visualizing a better world has never been more important, or more difficult. The promise of utopia—or at least a world that places its values on health, happiness, and lovingkindness—has been an object of pursuit for philosophers, theologians, and regular folks since the dawn of human civilization…
It’s practically impossible to imagine popular music in the year 2020 without taking into account the central role digital sampling now plays in making beats and reshaping melodies…
Here is a global subculture, in the days before wide adoption of the internet, which ends up assembling and organizing itself in a modular, fractal, rhizomatic manner. Here, despite all odds and with very little in the way of resources either professional or financial, small groups banded together over a shared occult interest, one that likely exposed many of their members to mockery and derision…
In 1989, at the very end of the Cold War, a group of four prominent mainstream and alternative comic book writers and artists created a double volume graphic novel exposing the rampant injustices, assassinations, and terrorism facilitated by the CIA and its creatures worldwide, ostensibly to fight global communism in the years following World War II…
The CB fad of the 1970s entered the public consciousness through a series of economic, political, and technological circumstances. The 1973 oil crisis, which put long-haul truckers in a tough spot due to gas shortages, along with the new federal 55 mile-per-hour speed limit, made CB radio a key method of information dissemination for truckers in a newly hostile economic environment…
A couple of years ago I posted an image on Twitter of the Hot Wheels Service Center Sto & Go playset seen above and got to feeling unexpectedly emotional (and more than a bit political) about it…
The state of play in home coffee brewing in America during the early postwar period offered very little opportunity for a good cup of joe. The electric percolator, long America’s choice for home brewing, would often overheat and burn the coffee, or send foul, bitter-tasting grounds back into the brew…
