Q: What do you get when you cross P.T. Barnum with Attila the Hun? A: The bloody, low-budget chaos of Mid American Wrestling.
Author Archives: Linda Lofstrom
Posted inNews & Politics
Underground Explosion
Underground Explosion By Linda Lofstrom At first glance Jay Bliznick looks more like a bouncer than the head of a film festival, even an underground film festival. But he’s quick to dispel any preconceived notions about underground films. “A lot of people make the mistake of identifying underground films as strictly films that were made […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Reel World: eight-tracks across America
Most people think of the eight-track tape as a dinosaur, assuming that it perished alongside other oddities of the 1970s, like leisure suits and pet rocks. But those bulky plastic cartridges containing loops of oft-interrupted–kerchunk!–audiotape continue to inspire Russ Forster, editor of 8-Track Mind, a zine devoted to keeping analog alive in our digital world. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: the art of Blab
Since 1986 Chicagoan Monte Beauchamp has been corralling eclectic groups of artists in Blab!, an anthology of deft illustration and discourse that recently received the comics industry’s most prestigious honor, the Harvey Award, named after the late Harvey Kurtzman, creator of Mad. “My idea was to do a one-shot publication focused on comics with a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Film Fest: underground’s day in the sun
Jay Bliznick was introduced to underground films by his local video store clerk, Christian Gore, who’d just started publishing the cult fanzine Film Threat out of a garage in Detroit. “I started to rent every weird film I could get my hands on,” Bliznick says. “Suddenly I realized that you could shoot something on Super-8 […]