Last night I watched a 1948 film noir movie called He Walked By Night, which some sources seem to be calling one of the defining films of the genre. A while back, I bought this as part of a 10 pack of film noir movies ranging from 1934 to 1951, all of which land squarely […]

I picked up Migene Gonzalez-Wippler’s book, Santeria: African Magic in Latin America, on a recent used bookstore trip in Baltimore for six dollars. According to the book’s introduction, it was one of the first English-language books ever published on the subject of Santeria, in 1973. For that reason, I imagine it is rather significant, […]

This is one of my all-time favorite movies and I watched it again for the second time this past weekend. I like to watch this movie at times when I feel like I am undergoing spiritually significant transformations because it gives me a sort of mythical ammunition to deal with these difficult situations. […]

As an ardent (perhaps militant) Philip K. Dick fan, I can’t decide whether or not the new movie adaptation of A Scanner Darkly by Richard Linklater is marketed directly towards me or towards the general public looking for a stylish sci-fi head-trip. But then, that sort of self-questioning and doubt is part and parcel of […]

The role of the historian is to catalog and interpret events which have occurred in the past and to weave them into a meaningful narrative for people in the present. Typically we think of history as the broader story of a nation or of a people. But history is made up of minute interactions between […]

It was two weeks before moving out of my sublet in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood that I first met Saab Lofton. He appeared at the door of my bedroom wearing and a homemade red and blue superhero costume, with white wrestling shoes and a cape held together by a Che Guevara pin.
He was […]

I’ve been watching a lot of kids’ television shows lately with my niece. Being around kids so much the past couple weeks has really put a lot of things in perspective for me. One show that I’ve found interesting has been LazyTown.
Originating in Iceland and played on the Noggin network, it features a heroic […]

I’m not a big fan of flying. I recently read Orson Scott Card’s 1977 novel, Ender’s Game, on a flight across country, my first in about five years. It was a pretty cool book to read 30,000 feet in the air, since so much of the book takes place in the weightlessness of space. […]

The Messiah of Morris Avenue is a contemporary religious satire disguised as a quest for faith, or vice versa. It employs some clever near-futuristic extrapolation (and some painful groaners) to tell the story of an America which has lost the Christian “Culture Wars” and devolved into an uptight sex-starved theocracy.
At the top of […]

I have theorized myself into a stupor. Alien bloodlines manipulating history, occult orders sacrificing children in palatial basements, governments beaming mind control waves over an unsuspecting populace, the fast-approaching apocalypse, time travel experiments gone haywire… It’s all starting to seem - well, a little quaint.
The level of weirdness, of impossibility, of paradox that I […]

Michael Tsarion is a man with a mission. Like many conspiracy researchers, his mission is to “wake people up” to the hidden power dynamics at play all around us. In particular, Tsarion seems to see himself as sort of a real-life counterpart to The Da Vinci Code’s “professional symbologist” Robert Langon. Where Langdon cracks codes […]

Last night, I finished reading Philip K. Dick’s 1964 novel, The Penultimate Truth. The plot follows a constellation of characters living in a near futuristic world where atomic war has ravaged the face of earth, forcing the majority of its citizens into underground “ant tanks”, while robots and a few military men battle it […]

Instead of X-Men III: The Last Stand, a more apt title for the third X-Men movie might have been X Men III: Fear and Loathing (of Female Sexuality). Because really, that’s what the movie is about once you dig beneath the CGI.
I found the film to be incredibly misogynistic, surprising because I didn’t think one […]