The TV show Twin Peaks, written and realized by Mark Frost and director extraordinaire David Lynch, has generated obviously millions of true fans worldwide who still meet at conventions to share theories and possible explanations for the many mysteries that inform the series. Even decades after the last episode of Twin Peaks season two was […]
Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, And Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction … by Iain Mcintyre and Andrew Nette (eds.)
The development and the origins of pulp fiction books are both well-documented and naturally before there was a market for those products, there was a demand for it. Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, however, starts not at the beginning of this genre, but dives deep into the phenomenon of the pulp books that dealt with subcultures […]
Folk Music in Overdrive: A Primer on Traditional Country and Bluegrass Artists by Ivan Tribe (2018)
By now (actually since the 1970s and thanks to a number of folk revivals) it is no secret that the geographical region of the Upland South was actually exploding with musical talent at the beginning of the 1920s. The states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and Carolina produced countless masters and some tuneful virtuosi. The artists […]
Giant Creatures in Our World by Camille D. G. Mustachio and Jason Barr (eds.) (2017)
Even as today every few years or so new films with giant monsters hit the cinemas, the „kaiju“ (“strange beast/creature”) genre is mostly belittled or ridiculed in academic discussion and film studies as well. This situation was not quite satisfying for this book’s editors Mustachio and Barr; considering the fact that the kaiju film has […]
Dark City. The Real Los Angeles Noir by Jim Heimann (2018)
With Dark City a very unusual portrait of an American city is now available. It impresses with many pictures of the city of angels that show the really shadowy sides, the ones that inhabitants from the early 1910s until the 1950s experienced, and that provided the soil and inspiration for many novels and movies. As […]
The British Blues Network: Adoption, Emulation, and Creativity by Andrew Kellett (2017)
After WWII, with the British Empire finally devoid of its former power and importance, young British blues enthusiasts invented their own vision of a new country, they – metaphorically – chose as their preferred home country an idealized (American) life, namely in creating the very personal America with lots of possibilities and adventure. As all […]
Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s by Alan Nadel (2017)
Alan Nadel, probably best known for his expert writings on the Atomic Age and American everyday life in the 1950s, has come up with another study of that period. A time when not just the permanent fears of a hot war or Soviet invasion were present, but also strange (or possibly communist) activities from your […]
Die Trikont-Story: Musik, Krawall & andere schöne Künste by Christof Meueler and Franz Dobler (2017)
Few record labels can look back on a lifetime of 50 years, even fewer can look on the past and find a very unusual history. Trikont, the oldest independent German music label, and, actually, the oldest independent label worldwide, now has reached that age. Those 50 years were worth a long book in the shape […]
Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America … by Steffen Hantke
The 1950s and 1960s were the decades when science-fiction movies boomed and during that time not so much technology, but disgust, shock, fear, basically all aspects of horror and horror movies, were used instead to give science fiction movies a certain direction by presenting miniature or giant creatures, mutants and every kind or harrowing creature […]