British folk-rockers Steeleye Span were arguably at the height of their powers and popularity in the mid-1970s, and their television series Electric Folk, broadcast on BBC2 in 1974 and 1975, shows exactly why. The series showcased the band’s blend of traditional British folk music and rock and roll to perfection, with the added bonus of being recorded in some of Britain’s oldest stately manors…
Released respectively in 1976 and 1980, these The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit posters were sold in Athena, the British chain of art retail shops whose best-sellers—including Tennis Girl, also released in 1976, and Syd Brak’s 1982 Long Distance Kiss—were ubiquitous signifiers of the evolving aesthetic and sociological landscape in Britain…
In the late ’70s and afterwards, UFOs hit the big time in pop culture with countless books about abduction experiences, major Hollywood motion pictures, and quickie B-movie documentaries. But before this turn into widespread exposure, ufology was largely a field defined by tightly-circulated, sometimes even self-published, written and photographic evidence…
By Tom G. Wolf
Death is a touchy subject for most people. Intellectually, we know it’s inevitable, and yet it’s almost never discussed—until necessity intervenes. And for those of us who have spent time contemplating how we’ll depart this mortal coil, it tends to be in a fairly hopeful fashion: we’re lucid, surrounded by friends…
One of the most irksome things about my drizzly homeland of the United Kingdom is the widespread domestic habit of mistaking the material benefits of industrial and Colonial wealth, post-war socialism, and a happy lack of mass violence—all of which, for a good half century, guaranteed a relatively safe and stable life, good opportunities to better your lot, free healthcare, welfare, and a relatively graft-free state—for something as ineluctable as rain…
By Jake Pitre
The loss of filmmaker Nicolas Roeg at the age of 90 in November was deeply felt by cinephiles. Roeg was one of the most singular voices in movies for much of the twentieth century, influencing directors as varied as Christopher Nolan and Steven Soderbergh. When considering his legacy, it’s worth highlighting his most accomplished decade: the 1970s…
At the dawn of the 1970s, film audiences in the West began to discover martial arts films from East Asia. And one of the results of that cross-cultural exchange is this odd yet remarkable document from 1973, La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques? (Can Dialectics Break Bricks?)…
One often-overlooked but just as essential work of sci-fi during the cyberpunk Golden Age was Bruce Wagner’s early 1990s comic and eventual 1993 television series Wild Palms, a satirical vision of a media-saturated present/future crawling with mind-altering drugs, sinister conspiratorial cults, and ubiquitous computer technology promising transcendence.
In the tradition of the Photorealism and Hyperrealism movements that had evolved as offshoots of Pop Art, the paintings of musician, songwriter, and figurative painter Paul Roberts exist in the liminal space between perceived glamor and kitsch, taking their cues from the archetypes of genre fiction and the heightened realities of cinema and photography…
Resistance to Trump has been led by women in various forms: protesting, volunteering, donating, contacting elected officials, and becoming elected officials. As I’ve observed and participated in these activities, I’ve frequently wished that more people had the opportunity to appreciate All I Wanna Do, a 1998 film that subverts ‘80s sex comedy tropes through a distinctly female lens…
We Are the Mutants 