In Praise of Pulp – The Art of Mort Kunstler

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In Praise of Pulp

The Art of Mort Kunstler

May 26th 2012 by James Vaughan

Kitsch The magazine rack at the local drugstore. Memories from my childhood in the late 50′s and early 60′s. Illustrated covers on the lower shelves. Screaming titles in bold, bawdy, blazing headlines. MALE… MAN’S LIFE… SAGA!!! Were these a kind of grown-up comic book? But this was much better! Silly, costumed caricatures talking in word balloons was little kid stuff. This was about real life. These covers were Art. Actual paintings of epic poportion and theme. Dizzying amounts of detail sucking me into a world of  terrible, bullet whizzing, danger and heroism. Was this the truth about the world out there? Somewhere, during my lunch of grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup, Nazis were torturing scantilly ( continue reading... )

The Cocktail Nation - Queens Of Vintage

Episode 266    May 12th 2013

This week we talk to the publisher of an online magazine called Queens Of Vintage, her name is Lena Weber and recently she interviewed me in her kings of vintage portion of the website so I thought we should have her on to talk vintage culture and the English scene. Plus the best exotica and lounge music from across the globe.

Design “We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard!” John F. Kennedy, Sept. 12, 1962. Rice University, Texas. Huh! What did he say? President Kennedy’s speech, kicking off the Space Race, was inspired words. But everyone knows the real reason we went to the moon. We went because it was COOL! What showed us how cool it really was going to be was the artwork of Robert McCall. In the Space Age of the 1960′s, at a time when  fuzzy black and white TV had only three channels, magazines like LIFE and LOOK were ( continue reading... )


Film When the opening credits for an Alfred Hitchcock film start rolling, it’s impossible to not be instantly captivated. The simple concept, bold graphics, and dynamic animations are all evidence of Saul Bass’s genius at work. Saul Bass began his career by designing print ads for movies. His first collaboration with director Otto Preminger was the film poster for Carmen Jones. From there, it seemed a ( read more... )

Readable In America, the 1950s and 60s spawned The Monster Kids. These were kids, mostly pre-adolescent boys, who assembled Aurora model kits of Frankenstein or Dracula after school; read Tales From The Crypt comics with a flashlight under the covers at bed time; and sneaked downstairs on Saturdays to watch the late-night horror movie show on TV with spooky hosts like Zacherle, Chilly Billy, or Ghoulardi. ( read more... )

Science The religion of The Atom died with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. With that fall from grace came the end of many of our utopian dreams. A responsible future of conservation and organic carrots just wasn’t very exciting. Although widespread use of the atom remains controversial; 436 reactors remain the source of 15 per cent of the world’s electricity. In some European countries atomic power ( read more... )

Science Atomic power was projected to be very cheap. We were going to have electricity coming out of our ears! We would not have to import oil from crazy foreigners or dig up whole states looking for coal. Utility companies and government agencies around the world took up the chant of the mighty atom. Nuclear power plants were seen as a springboard for third world countries ( read more... )