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?)…
Broadcast television and nuclear fission: two technologies with their origins in the early 20th century study of particle physics, two technologies whose early development was situated in the years before the outbreak of World War II, and two technologies whose global prominence and predominance rose in the years immediately following the war…
In 1957, as the first artificial Earth satellite was launched into an elliptical orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in present-day Kazakhstan, American science was suffering a crisis in self-image. No one in the Federal Government had predicted that the Soviets would claim the gold in the race to low Earth orbit…
By K.E. Roberts
After many years of dabbling in snippets, I finally watched all 29 minutes of Kenneth Anger’s cult occult film Lucifer Rising. Shot between 1966 and 1972 but not distributed until 1980, the short is about, according to the director in 1966, “the Rebel Angel behind what’s happening in the world today”…
Back in high school in the early ’90s, I often found myself haunting the aisles of the big record shops in Harvard Square in Cambridge—HMV, Tower Records, and most importantly Newbury Comics—for any and all available rare import CDs from my favorite local bands: Pixies, Throwing Muses, the Breeders…
By K.E. Roberts
A lush selection of library and ambient music—the two often overlap—attempts to evoke the ocean in its many guises, an artistic practice that goes back in the West to the tone poems and symphonic sketches of classical composers from Beethoven to Debussy. After World War II, the orchestrations of what came to be known as exotica, a subset of lounge music, attempted to capture the enchanted South Seas…
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”…
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…
By K.E. Roberts
During the 1970s, original, feature-length scares could be found on TV almost every night of the week. They were cheap to make and, after Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, we were trembling and defenseless. The best known of these quickie horrors, many of which dealt enduring trauma to a generation of children often home alone…
By Richard McKenna and K.E. Roberts
Before we start on this episode’s Progs, let’s talk about, in my mind, the definitive Dredd illustrator—inarguably a definitive comics illustrator—Carlos Ezquerra, who passed away this week at the age of 70…
We Are the Mutants 