With their autumnal hues and deft fusion of the geometries of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, the tarot cards illustrated by David Palladini and published in 1970 by Morgan Press evoke perfectly the fading glow of the previous decade’s psychedelic optimism…
The Halloween of my Northern English youth was more an informal folk festival than anything institutional, as a quick leaf through the TV schedules of the day will demonstrate: no pumpkins were deployed and you didn’t dress up; you just stayed indoors, turned the Herbert van Thal anthologies to the wall, and hoped to god no witches attacked…
Shrunk now to an almost infinitesimally small dot in the rear-view mirror, 1977 continues to cast a strange shadow over our times. Perhaps one of what my colleague Mike has adroitly termed “hinge years”—those points when incipient forces in the psychosphere coalesce and react with one another, causing reality to shift direction…
Occasionally an artifact pops up that is such a perfect exemplar of the tropes we associate with a given historical period that it’s hard to believe it is real and not a bit of uncanny simulation designed to fuck with your brain. We’ve spoken about the phenomenon before, and Sounds Good is yet another such curio…
By the summer of 1976, I was a child steeped in animal terror. Well, steeped in loads of types of terror, really, seeing as I lived in mortal fear of UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts with tricorn hats, the Wirrn, Teddy Boys, the witches that lived near my nana’s house, fire, escalators, electrical substations…
The indistinct line that a site like We Are the Mutants walks means that accusations of nostalgic indulgence are ever at the door, so let me put my cards on the table and state that I’d rather cave in my own face with a Pet Rock than listen to Intergalactic Touring Band again…
Perhaps taking its lead from Troubador Press’s 1969 Zodiac Coloring Book—and coming out the same year as Troubador’s Occult Coloring Book—the Occult Datebook‘s beautifully vivid images perfectly epitomize the occult’s shift into the mainstream…
I still think it’s the ambiguity that makes Dredd electric, though—the friction between this nightmarish prison-city policed by walking lawbooks and the fact that who the drokk wouldn’t want to see some trigger-happy lowlife get Lawgivered in the face?
In 1969, pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome commissioned renowned modernist architect Paul Rudolph to design its new corporate headquarters and research facility in Durham, North Carolina. The result was a visionary modular complex whose geometries created a futuristic melding of spaces and forms…
Though positing itself as an architectural practice, ONYX—like many of the progressive architectural concerns of the day—was as much a conceptual initiative as it was anything to do with concrete and construction…
We Are the Mutants 