On 4th and Broadway: Remembering Tower Records
Having grown up in the 1970s, an era when record shops were a fixture in communities and often served as neighborhood social centers, I became obsessed with a small store located on 146th and Broadway…
Remembrance of Ramps Past: Hot Wheels Service Center Playset, 1979
A couple of years ago I posted an image on Twitter of the Hot Wheels Service Center Sto & Go playset seen above and got to feeling unexpectedly emotional (and more than a bit political) about it…
Wicked Good TV: Memories of Local Boston Broadcasting in the ’80s
I’ve written quite a bit about my broadcast-television-haunted childhood here at We Are the Mutants over the years; some might even call it a bit of an obsession, honestly. But this week we’ve been challenged to put together some of our memories of specifically local TV, and that’s something that I not only feel nostalgic about, but also tend to get a little political about…
Fiddle This: Yorkshire TV’s ‘Sounds Good’, 1985
Occasionally an artifact pops up that is such a perfect exemplar of the tropes we associate with a given historical period that it’s hard to believe it is real and not a bit of uncanny simulation designed to fuck with your brain. We’ve spoken about the phenomenon before, and Sounds Good is yet another such curio…
Great Movies, No Cables: ON TV Subscription Television, 1977 – 1985
ONTV was a “subscription television” service that would “unscramble” UHF channels in participating markets, including Los Angeles County, where I grew up. If you’re not sure what it means to unscramble a channel, let me tell you…
Cold War Interrupted: The Promise of ‘2010: The Year We Make Contact’
In late 1984 I encountered a film that would become, with the benefit of hindsight, the sine qua non experience of my 1980s sci-fi movie-going childhood. No, it wasn’t Dune or The Terminator or Ghostbusters, but a now little-remembered sequel to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s immortal cinematic classic 2001: A Space Odyssey…
Seeing Through the Airwaves: Thomas Dolby’s ‘Windpower’
By Ted Mills
It starts as it always does, with the sound of a cold, synthetic wind, whistling tones, and the nervous twitch of a Morse code signal. There’s a short intake of breath, a low om-like hum. A message needs to get through. And then our singer steps up to the mic…
Young Life Out Of Balance: The Impact and Legacy of ‘Koyaanisqatsi’
Throughout the latter half of the 1970s, ex-seminarian/political activist Godfrey Reggio and cinematographer Ron Fricke shot, assembled, and edited film footage from all over the United States—from the yawning chasms of southwestern American deserts to the teeming mechanized metropolises of New York and Los Angeles…
Signs and Wonders: When We Were Built by Books
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…
The ‘H.U.R.G.’ Deception or: The Day the Future Died
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…
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