Rev. Fred Lane is a genre unto himself. He’s a singer few have ever heard of who inspires deep devotion among the converted. Admittedly, that’s a familiar template, but no one’s ever bent that template quite like Lane. With Icepick to the Moon, director Paul “Skizz” Czykz tells the many-layered story of Fred Lane and […]
In 1985, Makoto Tezuka, a twenty-two-year-old film student, directed a zany tribute to films where bands play themselves in fictional situations á la the Beatles’ Help!The Legend of the Stardust Brothers wasn’t seen by anybody outside of Japan until 2018, when it was finally translated and re-released in theaters and eventually on home video. The […]
In college, my African-American Literature professor devoted his lessons to an overview of the corpus—we read and wrote about some novels, but the classes were mostly devoted to his summarizing and explaining the significance of works we hadn’t read and weren’t assigned. I questioned (silently) how worthwhile this was, but the dividends of cultural literacy […]
When I saw there was a person who endeavored to write about punk drumming, I’ll admit that (as a punk drummer myself) I was equal parts intrigued and skeptical. I wondered how it would hold my attention on a seemingly simple subject. Never have I been so pleased to be proven wrong. Not only did […]
James Spooner is a Los Angeles artist and activist who may be best known as director of the documentary Afro-Punk, a film that focuses on the experience of Black punks. Similarly, in the graphic novel The High Desert, Spooner uses his uses his visual art skills to tell the autobiographical story of a young Black […]
Jim Saah grew up in the DC area and began photographing punk bands early in the 1980s. Like many of you, I’ve seen various photos taken by him over the years, particularly of seminal DC legends like Minor Threat, though I may not have known at the time they were taken by him. His pictures […]
I think I first became aware of Ms. Braun's photos in Flipside. I probably did see her work in Maximum Rocknroll as well, but if you were looking to get blown away visually, then Flipside was your ticket because they ran photos larger than MRR, and sometimes even as a two-page spread. There was also […]
Ben Snakepit has been drawing three-panel comics about his day for over twenty years. And despite how mundane or boring his day was, his zines (later turned books) were hard to put down. It’s not that they’re drawn great (Ben is actually a very good illustrator despite what his comics look like or what he […]
I tried this one multiple times, but it just didn’t grab me—prose littered with modifiers and unneeded words proved too daunting for me to dive any deeper into the trilogy of “a strange world of wonder and deceit.” Sorry, mang. –Michael T. Fournier (Grand Mal Press, grandmalpress.com)
It’s rare for me to find a work of art that satisfies on as many levels as this does. A multimedia work combining arresting photographs, a heartbreaking novella, and a pamphlet purportedly reprinted from an obscure Creationist geologist (more on that later), this book manages the tricky feat of balancing all of those balls in […]
As someone who has written about mental health and also has a background in the punk scene, this book of twenty stories about mental health, substance use, and punk rock is right up my alley. At first I was concerned because the editor’s introduction meandered and the first chapter could’ve used a heavier editing hand […]
After some initial “ranting and raving” from the desk of its creator, Joe3, plus “some additional thoughts on typewriters,” Alternative Incite #5 boldly launches into pages of frank commentary on mainstream media news articles on topics as wide ranging as time management, dying careers (including librarian, which is news to me as a librarian), and […]