No Powerful Idea Lasts Long: The Memphis Group and the Look of the ’80s
Of the many cultural tributaries that flowed together into what we now think of as the visual aesthetic of the 1980s, one of the most prominent must be the Memphis Group…
“A Happy Metaphor”: Julio Le Parc’s ‘La Longue Marche’, 1974
La Longue Marche (The Long March) was completed in 1974, two years after Le Parc refused a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris (according to legend, the decision was based on a coin toss). The work consists of 10 separate but integrated panels featuring interweaving braids of vibrant prismatic color, and stretches to more than 65 feet in length…
The Meaning and the Drama: ‘U&lc’ Magazine, 1973 – 1999
The International Typeface Corporation was a private company founded in 1970 to take typesetting out of the physical, metal-setting world and into more “virtual” spheres like filmsetting and the nascent world of computer typesetting. For a quarter-century starting in 1973, ITC released its own print journal, called Upper & Lower Case, or U&lc…
“Darndest Thing You Ever Saw!”: BEST Products and Houston’s Indeterminate Facade
Drive down a fairly benign, suburban road in southeast Houston, Texas, and you’ll pass the parking lot that once housed the BEST Products showroom known as Indeterminate Facade. Located at 10765 Kingspoint Road, the still-hanging-in-there Almeda Mall is nearby, along with a shuttered public library building…
‘Ultra Minion’ by Kowalczuk and Czapiewski: Episode Eight
Episode eight of a dark sci-fi tale by Łukasz Kowalczuk and Maciej Czapiewski. Ultra Minion runs every Friday at We Are the Mutants…
Just Say No to Teenagers: Chuck Russell’s ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors’
By K.E. Roberts
As slasher franchises go, A Nightmare on Elm Street is certainly the most interesting conceptually: a former child murderer burned to death by the town’s vengeful parents returns years later to haunt and punish the community’s teenage children—by stalking their dreams…
One Sheet Terrors: Enzo Sciotti Film Posters, 1980 – 1990
The promotional artwork used on genre film posters, and later on VHS packaging, was often more important for establishing a foothold in the popular imagination than the films themselves. This was especially true in the Italy of the 1980s, where a thriving and competitive cinema industry was increasingly looking to the opportunities offered by foreign markets and the burgeoning home video trade…
“The Devil Had Worshipers Long Before Lenin”: The Occult Spy Novels of E. Howard Hunt
In his series of “Peter Ward” novels, published by various paperback houses (Signet, Dell, and Fawcett) between 1965 and 1971, Hunt conjures an agent with a pedigree strikingly similar to his own: Ivy League-educated (at Brown), possessing both a mysterious past involving disastrous CIA ops gone wrong and a burning desire to see himself accepted by the clandestine Washington D.C. power structure…
John Wayne Gacy and the Birth of the Murderabilia Industry
By Tom G. Wolf
Serial killers exert a peculiar hold over many among the general public. Their crimes are appalling, yet fascinating; their motives are frequently incomprehensible, sometimes even to the killers themselves. Yet people still find themselves drawn back again and again to these seemingly complex characters and the gruesome nature of their crimes…
‘Ultra Minion’ by Kowalczuk and Czapiewski: Episode Seven
Episode seven of a dark sci-fi tale by Łukasz Kowalczuk and Maciej Czapiewski. Ultra Minion runs every Friday at We Are the Mutants…
We Are the Mutants 