You could call this album a vanity project, a command-performance mixtape, a deeply personal tribute to lost youth—maybe even all three. It stands cloaked in darkness and mystery and captures a very special, even unique, time and place in musical history…
“Worldbuilding” has become a trendy word to throw around when it comes to fictional universes. Franchises with the luxury to build their worlds over multiple motion pictures costing billions and billions of dollars fill the media landscape. In David Keenan’s debut novel, This Is Memorial Device, we enter a world with a much more humble, much more homely set of concerns, but with a universe no less studded with outsized personalities…
As the microchip revolution took root in the late 1960s, one of the most obvious uses for the new miniaturization was in the field of mathematics. Digital computers’ original tasks had, of course, been related to calculating much faster than deskbound human beings. The power of a once-massive digital computer transferred to a handheld device would allow for a revolution in calculation, allowing mathematicians of all stripes, from accountants to engineers, to free themselves from lengthy and difficult slide rule calculating…
Thomas Dolby (born Thomas Morgan Robertson, he took the stage name Dolby from a nickname he received as a studio recording obsessive) burst onto the music scene in 1981 at the forefront of the new wave of post-punk bands using electronic instrumentation in the UK…
On July 5, 1987, the day after Independence Day, a year and two days after President Reagan’s centennial rededication of the Statue of Liberty, and at the height of the Iran-Contra hearings, a monumental story appeared in the Miami Herald. Penned by investigative reporter Alfonso Chardy, the piece claimed to expose the workings of a “secret government” in place during the first six-and-a-half years of the Reagan Presidency…
Burger King, founded in 1953 in Jacksonville, Florida, emerged in the 1980s as one of the main nationwide competitors to McDonald’s in the United States. In 1978, the probable year of this photo, former McDonald’s executive Donald N. Smith began revamping Burger King’s image, which included taking power away from franchisees, refreshing and standardizing the restaurant chain’s look, and most importantly adding new items to the menu…
The thunderous strains and spinning lozenges of this ITC ident preceded all kinds of disparate television programs from the 1960s to the early ’80s—from the surreal spy tales of The Prisoner, to the pre-Star Wars sci-fi of Space: 1999, to the beloved The Muppet Show. They were all distributed internationally by Incorporated Television Company (ITC), or ITC Entertainment, as the company was known in the States…
By Richard McKenna and Michael Grasso
Not many books have actually changed my life, but The Uninvited is one of them. Somehow, it coalesced the long-accumulating supernatural- and UFO-related ephemera I had been cramming into my eyes and ears at every opportunity and weaponized it against me…
Two years ago at Christmas, I parlayed a then-recent obsession with the weird, haunted media of 1970s Britain and the field of hauntology into an Amazon Wish List. When my wife and I were in the UK visiting family, I found most of that list waiting for me under the tree. A king’s ransom, for me the Yank, of barely-remembered and never-seen British television series…
Electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani got her start in the staid musical conservatories of Wellesley College, but left for the West Coast in the late ’60s to get a Master’s at Berkeley, where she met synthesizer designer Don Buchla and began experimenting with electronic instrumentation…
We Are the Mutants 