Combining the insular self-sufficiency of a lunar module with the intimidating bulk of a futuristic tank, the GMC Motorhome was the perfect attack vehicle for the leisure wars of the 1970s when—encouraged perhaps by the hermetic novelties of the space race—the recreational activities of the wealthiest fragment of the planet began to reflect a growing preoccupation with what we might call modular living…
By Audrey Fox
Zombies have long stood as a cipher for a variety of fears that range from the AIDS crisis to environmental disasters to governmental malfeasance to the breakdown of the nuclear family. But the decision to focus on the post-apocalyptic element of these films, where humanity has been massively culled and civilization has ceased to function on a large scale, is particularly salient in a world that seems now more than ever on the brink of disaster…
I suppose I could go off on a rant here, as I usually do, about The Things We Have Lost, but I won’t. To quote the title of a Jacques Barzun book that I discovered (and subsequently bought) while browsing a bookstore, we get the culture we deserve…
By J.E. Anckorn and Michael Grasso
Muse enjoyed a brief moment of cool back when “Knights of Cydonia” rode the lands, but they’ve never been cool since. Liked by The Wrong Type of Nerd, Italian guys with great hair, and people who have very serious conversations about guitars in magazines called things like Fretful Gentleman Monthly, they seem to be trying a little too hard to be good at playing rock music for Serious Music Types…
The Instant City was an inflatable construction created in Northern Ibiza in 1971 to provide temporary accommodation for students attending the three-day 7th Congress of ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design). A series of brightly-colored, interconnected environments that housed up to 350 people at any one time…
Colonialism is often framed as an encounter with the other. The colonizer journeys abroad and finds a different world, different people, and difference itself. Yet, that difference often has a very familiar look. No matter where they travel, it sometimes seems, colonialists discover no one but themselves…
The Big Kitchen, one of the country’s first large-scale food courts, opened in 1977 in the underground concourse of the World Trade Center complex. Conceived by famed restaurateur Joe Baum and designed by Philip George and Milton Glaser, the Big Kitchen comprised 8,000 square feet and offered, among other things…
In 1984, I knew with absolute certainty that my life was about to change. The arrival of a paradigm shift had been announced to me through the pages of Your Computer magazine, and the tawdry provincial realities around me were soon to disperse like fag smoke on the breeze, making way for an exciting new existence whose structure would be hewn out of glowing, chirping digital matter…
I first encountered Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book series in 1985. I’d caught glimpses of the tatty-yet-much-loved BBC television series from 1981 on my local PBS station, and that sent me to the bookstore to find out what the heck this British science fiction comedy was all about. Over the summer of 1985 I tore through the paperback versions of the first three volumes in the series…
This album full of spiritually-minded pop-funk was the product of a pair of teenage artists—vocalist/drummer Chris McDaniels (then 16 years of age) and elder brother, guitarist, producer, and arranger London McDaniels (all of 17 in 1978). The brothers had grown up in Southern California among the music business…
