Sitting here in 2019, I can confidently tell you where I was at 7pm on most weeknights between the years 1981 and 1986. I was sat in front of our living room TV, watching the adventures of the Doctor on my local PBS station…
Cash Box magazine was a music industry monthly that was in print from 1942 to 1996. Like its industry counterpart Billboard, Cash Box contained multiple weekly music charts based on music genres, from Pop to R&B to Jazz to Classical…
In the spirit of High Weirdness, this review will try to weave an impressionistic, magical spell exploring the commonalities Davis unveils between the respective life’s work and esoteric, drug-aided explorations of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick…
In late 1984 I encountered a film that would become, with the benefit of hindsight, the sine qua non experience of my 1980s sci-fi movie-going childhood. No, it wasn’t Dune or The Terminator or Ghostbusters, but a now little-remembered sequel to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s immortal cinematic classic 2001: A Space Odyssey…
In the 1970s, public belief in astrology and adherence to horoscopes rose to somewhere between a quarter and a third of Americans, but awareness of one’s own sun sign was quite high, at over 75%. Even those who did not believe Western astrology was in any way a predictive science enjoyed it as a pastime…
In August of 1987, thousands of New Age believers, curious skeptics, and others in search of a weekend road trip gathered at dozens of famous destinations across the globe to celebrate the combination of rare astrological alignment and the (purported) end of a Mayan calendrical cycle…
During my late-’80s adolescence on Boston’s North Shore, no automobile better represented a kind of aspirational working-class freedom than the IROC—so much so that it became a broad stereotype and cliché, even among marginally self-aware Italian-Americans such as myself…
By The Mutants
I’ve always been sort of morbidly fascinated by the music that toiled in the shadows of the big 1980s pop behemoths, which is why I love it when we do these “Six Songs” features. And as far as pop behemoths go, 1984 was The Year: Thriller was beginning its gradual slide out of supremacy, making way for other titans…
A little over thirty years ago, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Black Orchid limited series landed in comic shops. Gaiman, in the late 1980s probably known best for his history of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide series (Don’t Panic), and his novelistic collaboration with Discworld creator Terry Pratchett…
When our esteemed editor-in-chief recommended we look this week at the little-heralded-nor-remembered Endangered Species from 1982, I was cautiously optimistic. A B-movie starring Robert Urich, JoBeth Williams, Paul Dooley, and Hoyt Axton about cattle mutilations, shot on location in Colorado and Wyoming?
