The Long Seventies Podcast

We talk about the eccentric and brilliant jazz musician/band leader Sun Ra’s 1974 movie Space Is the Place and its connection to Afrofuturism and Afrofuturism’s 20th century roots in new religious movements. 

We talk about the giant boom in imported Japanese musical gear during the Long Seventies and what effect it had on music during and after the time period. 

We talk about 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a seminal film in the annals of the horror genre and doing a little brainstorming as to why the movie was so frightening to audiences of the Long Seventies. 

In 1971 a small group of anti-war activists successfully pulled of a plot to break into an FBI office, steal secret files & get them published by a major newspaper, beginning the process of outing COINTELPRO.

We talk about the 1970 documentary Chariots of the Gods based on Erich Von Daniken’s book the spawned the ancient aliens craze. Also some rambling about memetic theory and how the west went through an epistemic crisis in the Long Seventies. 

We talk about the history of American MONEY, banking & Nixon closing the Gold Window in 1971 after a bank run on the Federal Reserve and Fort Knox. 

We talk about the era of existential car chases through the lens of Hollywood vision and Detroit muscle. 

We introduce the Decade of Dope series and talk about the history of drugs from Mesopotamia to Richard Nixon. 

We talk about the quintessential Boston crime novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970) and compare it to the film adaptation, starring Robert Mitchum. Hard boiled dialogue and hard nosed criminals trying to avoid doing hard time. 

We talk about post-period horror movies that are throwbacks to the Long Seventies genre and discuss how the concept of Hauntology might explain why TLS is such a rich source of cultural artifacts for filmmakers to unearth and recycle.