At the beginning of the 1970s, a sense that techno-industrial man’s ongoing destruction of the environment would ultimately lead to global doom was widespread in the West. Married to these concerns was a parallel worry about the exponential impact of a population explosion due to these same 20th-century agricultural, medical, and scientific advancements…
Over the course of my many explorations of British hauntology of the 1970s over the past five years, I found myself enjoying a pair of television adaptations, produced a decade apart, full of deep mystical themes reaching back into the marrow of ancient Britain…
n the mid-1970s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was in a period of transition. The final manned Apollo mission to the Moon, Apollo 17, had returned to Earth in December 1972; no further Moon landings were planned. NASA had recently kicked off their Skylab experiments in short-term orbital space station living (and détente-inspired collaboration with the Soviets), as well as announcing a reusable fleet of Space Shuttles…
In the spring of 1971, it seemed everyone on the fringes of mainstream society in North America was trying to build geodesic domes: soaring gridwork domes made of plastic and steel, of wood, of concrete. Inspired by technocratic engineer-turned-counterculture guru and geodesic dome evangelist R. Buckminster Fuller, hundreds of back-to-the-land hippies sought to use his elementary architectural example…
Presenting its array of multi-purpose household gadgets in a breathless, urgent style to fit into a half-minute or full-minute commercial slot, Ronco set the standard for the late-night direct mail sales pitch on television…
On the vernal equinox in 1980, a group of local dignitaries gathered on a ridgetop near Elberton, Georgia, to witness the dedication and unveiling of a monument made of six colossal slabs of Georgia blue granite. The Georgia Guidestones have remained the center of a firestorm of controversy in the nearly four decades since their unveiling…
After Martin Scorsese burst onto the scene with the one-two social realist punch of 1973’s Mean Streets and 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, he produced an ode to the milieu from which he sprang, a briefer-than-feature-length trip to his parents’ walk-up apartment in Little Italy for Sunday macaroni and gravy…
Like many folks my age, I first encountered crusading news photographer Carl Kolchak (played by the imminently charismatic and recognizable Darren McGavin) thanks to The X-Files creator Chris Carter’s repeated praise of the character as one of the biggest influences on his creation of Mulder and Scully…
O’Neill’s account of his two decades in a wilderness of conspiracies related to the Manson Family ultimately suggests some of the blame falls at the feet of a Cold War American intelligence/law enforcement/academic complex deeply compromised by its commitment to beating the Soviets at all costs…
I’ve written quite a bit about my broadcast-television-haunted childhood here at We Are the Mutants over the years; some might even call it a bit of an obsession, honestly. But this week we’ve been challenged to put together some of our memories of specifically local TV, and that’s something that I not only feel nostalgic about, but also tend to get a little political about…
