Positing a fantasy world where Renaissance and Enlightenment values co-existed with the joys and preoccupations of the coming technological age, the Rondo Veneziano orchestra was the brainchild of Italian record label owner Freddy Naggiar, who noticed the lack of Italian instrumental music on the international scene and charged orchestra director and arranger/composer Gian Piero Reverberi to come up with someone or something to fill the gap…
Earlier this year, while on a YouTube nostalgia tear through NBA highlights from the late ’70s and early ’80s, I made the following observation on Twitter after watching a live performance of Grover Washington, Jr.’s “Let It Flow (For ‘Dr J.’)” set to vintage hoops footage: “The sound of my early childhood is ineluctably a Fender Rhodes electric piano”…
Blade Runner was not an immediate success upon its June 25, 1982 release, a fact that has become part of the film’s lore over the years. It had quite a bit of competition that same summer: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Tron, Poltergeist, and John Carpenter’s The Thing…
When Heavy Metal published 1979’s stand-alone Alien: The Illustrated Story to coincide with the release of Ridley Scott’s now-canonical sci-fi horror, no one knew what a “graphic novel” was. The adaptation, with frequently gruesome art by Walt Simonson and words by Archie Goodwin, was strikingly innovative while remaining true to Dan O’Bannon’s screenplay, and it soon landed on the New York Times Best Seller list…
By Richard McKenna and Amy Mugglestone
So, in summary, you should fantasize about boys, but you shouldn’t ask about sex, but you should stop acting in ways that make boys think you want sex. Even though you’re not supposed to know what that is. What the fuck, Jackie? I’m lost.
The first time I saw John Carpenter’s Halloween, I was five. No, I didn’t have terrible parents, but I did sneak downstairs after bedtime, sometime around the eponymous holiday, to find out what they were watching. I had nightmares for weeks, and, when my parents found out it was because I watched a horror movie behind their backs, I got in trouble…
I remember vividly the rich variety of books that I was surrounded by in childhood that talked about the history of magic, or then-current trends in paranormal research, or how investigators were searching for the signs of the afterlife on magnetic audio tape. If you grew up in the ’70s and ’80s like me, and loved books like these, then go out and get yourself a copy of Peter Bebergal’s Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural…
The itinerant fun fairs that stalked the British Isles, descending at regular intervals upon some desolate local field like shoddy Fortean dream cities, were once a major part of the informal national calendar. As a child growing up in the hinterland of the world’s most beautiful town—the gleaming futurist metropolis known as Doncaster, South Yorkshire—I was lucky enough to live near a fuck-off massive one…
Today we spotlight the work of Pancho Domínguez, a visual artist from Monterrey, Mexico…
I’m not likely to add much to the thousands upon thousands of words penned over the past decade or so on how formative an experience watching Children of the Stones (1977) as a kid was. Now considered one of the signal works forming the foundation of the British folk horror and hauntological aesthetics, the series is a brilliant melding of folk memory and technological aspiration, of magic and science, of tradition and progress, done in that ineffable way that only the British seem able to express satisfactorily…
We Are the Mutants 