Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was a central figure in the hod rod and custom car scene that flourished in 1950s and early 1960s Southern California. Born in Beverly Hills to German immigrants, Roth grew up in Bell, California, home of “speed shop” Bell Auto Parts and nearby Slauson Avenue, a popular drag strip. After a stretch in the Air Force, Roth became a sign painter at Sears and, in 1958, starting designing cars out of his garage…
By the early 1980s, TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons had fully taken over the rec rooms and breakfast nooks of North America. The release of the three Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks between 1977 and 1979, along with countless AD&D adventure modules, codified optional and advanced rules that had been growing throughout the mid-1970s…
Though nominally providing undemanding weekly amusement for children, British children’s comics from the late 20th century provided a platform for many artists—and writers—with distinctly idiosyncratic and obsessive sensibilities often bordering on what, in a different context, might have been considered “underground”…
Last week, a story came across the We Are The Mutants news desk that inspired equal parts hope and dread: a reboot of the classic paranormal documentary series In Search of… is in the works, appropriately hosted by 21st century’s Mr. Spock, Zachary Quinto. I like Quinto well enough, and appreciate the sentiment of trying to resurrect probably one of the most important television shows from my youth. But of course I’m extremely skeptical about how well it will recreate the oddball outsider art aesthetic of the original series…
Hundreds of books on various psychic phenomena—both surveys and how-to manuals, sometimes both—were released throughout the 1960s, as the paranormal, especially ESP, began to be taken seriously by academics and the American and Soviet intelligence communities. What makes Sixth Sense notable, apart from a convincing cover illustration, is that it’s essentially a kid’s book…
These two odd little volumes were discovered a few months ago in an antiquarian book shop in Canterbury, UK. Published by the British Society of Dowsers in 1980, Dowsing and Archaeology and Site and Survey Dowsing collectively offer a few dozen short articles, culled from the annals of the Journal of the British Society of Dowsers over the half-century leading up to 1980. As the book titles make clear, these articles take dowsing past its usual folk magic remit of finding sources of water and into territory usually ceded to archeologists or metal detectorists: finding ancient objects and the outlines of ancient structures…
Being home to the Roman Catholic Church means that much of Italy’s spectral pomp and terror of the incomprehensible is already spoken for. The remaining quota of mystery and conspiracy is filled out by the country’s myriad crypto-political shenanigans and unsolved crimes. Despite the obsession of the Etruscans and ancient Romans with the shades of their ancestors, the Italy of the the ‘60s and ‘70s was an altogether more pragmatic place…
In the wake of the passing of Ursula K. Le Guin last week, I took the opportunity to revisit one of the more fascinating products of her life and career: the 1980 television-movie adaptation of her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven. Produced by station WNET in New York City, the film is the summation of nearly a decade of technological and artistic experimentation in public television…
For reasons which are not immediately apparent, it is difficult when speaking of the late Mark E. Smith to avoid a descent into cliché. Ironic, given that an aversion to cliché was among Smith’s defining characteristics; yet predictable, given the efforts a sizeable portion of his admirers and media interlocutors consistently made to reducing him to a caricature…
There are two Amityville horrors: the first happened in the pre-dawn hours of November 13, 1974, when 23-year-old Ronald Defeo Jr. shot and killed his father, mother, two brothers, and two sisters while they slept. He confessed to the murders the following day, and during the trial told the court that “voices” told him to do it. The second happened when a young couple, George and Kathleen Lutz, moved into the former Defeo residence…
We Are the Mutants 