The Fall of Delta Green is a tabletop pen-and-paper role-playing game (RPG) in which the weird monsters, unknowable gods, and uncanny happenings of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos meet the American military, industrial, and scientific apparatus of the High Cold War period (the 1960s)…
By K.E. Roberts
White Lightning is the first in a long line of films and TV series about righteous lawbreakers in the post-Vietnam American South, where corrupt cops chase hot-rodding bootleggers and paid-by-the-mile truckers through the meager towns and backwoods scorned by “the people in Washington.” It’s a mythical land whose isolated, protective communities both resent and revel in their perceived marginalization…
By Richard McKenna and K.E. Roberts
I guess we should begin at the beginning. I first got into Judge Dredd and 2000 AD in 1983, when Eagle Comics (founded by Nick Landau) started anthologizing the strip for an American audience. The Eagle editions were in color (I had no idea the original 2000 AD was black and white for many years), and the Dredd comics came with new, mind-bending covers by Brian Bolland. I had been collecting comics pretty obsessively for a few years at that point, but had never seen anything like Dredd…
1983 was a pretty fertile year for fictional nuclear apocalypses in Western popular culture. 2019: After the Fall of New York, Endgame, Exterminators of the Year 3000, Stryker, and Le Dernier Combat were released in cinemas, while ABC’s The Day After and Britain’s BBC2 adaptation of 1961 dystopian novel The Old Men at the Zoo, updated to feature a nuclear attack on London, appeared on television…
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…
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…
I’m finding Saturday Night Fever a surprisingly slippery text to analyze in 2018. I rewatched it for this piece and it just seems like such an odd document. It’s not so much that it feels alien: the aspirational, ethnic, working-class swagger of Tony Manero is still with us in 2018, as cultural myth if nothing else…
I first heard The Hurting in 1986. A girl in my high school—a girl I had a big crush on—taped it off her older brother’s LP and let me borrow it (older siblings were like our Spotify). She never got that tape back. I knew of Tears for Fears at the time—everybody did. Songs From the Big Chair had blown up in the US in the summer of 1985…
By K.E. Roberts
London’s Ultravox was John Foxx’s band for three increasingly brilliant albums. Their debut, 1977’s Ultravox!, is an uneven but essential distillation of Roxy Music, art-rock-era Brian Eno (who produced, along with Steve Lillywhite), prog, minimalist electronica, and dub. The same year’s Ha!-Ha!-Ha!, on the other hand—a mere eight months separated the albums—is a focused and unsparing gnashing of teeth…
‘Til Tuesday formed in the early ’80s in Boston, from the same scene that had fostered post-punk legends Mission of Burma. Vocalist/bassist Aimee Mann had been in local punk outfit Young Snakes, and both Mann and ‘Til Tuesday drummer Robert Hausman had attended Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music…
We Are the Mutants 