1982 was an amazing year for sci-fi, fantasy, and horror films: E.T., Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Creepshow, The Thing, Poltergeist, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, and The Dark Crystal all debuted that year. Another 1982 movie that was full of fantastic elements as well as fantastic music was Pink Floyd — The Wall. One of the greatest rock films of all time, The Wall tells the story of a young boy who grows up in post-war Britain and becomes a famous rock star. Eventually lost love sends him on a downward spiral of self-loathing that conversely sees him rise to the position of a fascist demigod. It’s all one big sprawling metaphor for the interpersonal traumas that find us detaching from friends and family until we’re each living behind these walls of our own making in the prisons we’ve created for ourselves.

Celebrating the 35th anniversary of this landmark film, here’s Pink Floyd — The Wall…

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Getting down to the last few days before we celebrate Halloween, here’s a documentary about the modern witch who brought us the most well-known system of modern witchcraft: Gardnerian Wicca, which was founded in the 1950′s by Gerald Gardner. Here’s Garner’s story from the Wiki…

Born into an upper-middle-class family in Blundellsands, Lancashire, Gardner spent much of his childhood abroad in Madeira. In 1900, he moved to colonial Ceylon, and then in 1911 to Malaya, where he worked as a civil servant, independently developing an interest in the native peoples and writing papers and a book about their magical practices. After his retirement in 1936, he travelled to Cyprus, penning the novel A Goddess Arrives before returning to England. Settling down near the New Forest, he joined an occult group, the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship, through which he claimed to have encountered the New Forest coven into which he was initiated in 1939. Believing the coven to be a survival of the pre-Christian Witch-Cult discussed in the works of Margaret Murray, he decided to revive the faith, supplementing the coven’s rituals with ideas borrowed from Freemasonry, ceremonial magic and the writings of Aleister Crowley to form the Gardnerian tradition of Wicca.

Moving to London in 1945, following the repeal of the Witchcraft Act of 1736 he became intent on propagating this religion, attracting media attention and writing about it in High Magic’s Aid (1949), Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959). Founding a Wiccan group known as the Bricket Wood coven, he introduced a string of High Priestesses into the religion, including Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne, Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone, through which the Gardnerian community spread throughout Britain and subsequently into Australia and the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Involved for a time with Cecil Williamson, Gardner also became director of the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft on the Isle of Man, which he ran until his death.

Gardner is internationally recognised as the “Father of Wicca” among the Pagan and occult communities. His claims regarding the New Forest coven have been widely scrutinised, with Gardner being the subject of investigation for historians and biographers such as Aidan Kelly, Ronald Hutton and Philip Heselton.

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Nowadays, it’s hard to remember a time when poetry really mattered. I still love to read poetry and write poetry, and I occasionally get out to read my words in a bar or a coffeehouse in Nashville where other poets gather to share their words, but it’s almost always a case of singing to the choir — nowadays the main audience for poetry is other poets.

But that’s not always how it was. 55 years ago, after World War II, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas began nearly five years of BBC appearances that found Thomas reading his verse, lecturing, interviewing and appearing on panels. Thomas was treated like a rock star and his busy touring schedule around Britain, across the Atlantic to America and back looks more like what we’d expect from a famous singer/songwriter.

Today, most of us think of poetry as something that is read in a book, but poetry has always been meant for speaking aloud and Thomas’s resonant voice and dramatic delivery captivated his radio and live audiences alike. He won and fostered a cult of personality, perpetuating a myth as the wild, drunken writer and eventually inspiring the Beats and The Beatles. Thomas supposedly drank himself to death in New York, consuming 18 straight whiskey’s in the White Horse tavern before slipping into a coma back at the Chelsea hotel. This version of the poet’s demise sounds perfectly punk rock. It’s also, almost surely, untrue.

Here’s a great Dylan Thomas biography from the BBC’s great Arena program…

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Warhol’s greatest contribution was his democratizing of fine art by claiming a space for consumer packaging — like Brillo boxes and Campbell’s Soup labels — in a museum setting.

Now, a new line of toys made in his likeness returns the favor. Medicom Toy is celebrating the artist on the occasion of his 15 Minutes Eternal retrospective in Japan with a line of its Bearbricks and two stand-alone figures that capture the iconic look of the artist and his art.

Have a look…

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British filmmaker Peter Watkins is a docudrama pioneer who has combined documentary and dramatic cinematic techniques to deconstruct historic events and cultural trends. A pacifist and a radical, Watkins’ best work examines media in general and film in particular to ask questions about the relationships between media and audiences.

A powerful and provocative filmmaker, Watkins’ films have regularly gathered both opponents and admirers. The War Game imagined a nuclear war in Britain. It was banned by the BBC but eventually won an Academy Award in 1966. Punishment Park explored a violent political conflict in the U.S. just as the shootings at Kent State were screaming from the headlines.

Even John Lennon name-checked Watkins as an influence:

Citing their 1969 Bed-in efforts and Peace Concert, an interviewer asked John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “Is there any one particular incident that got you started in this peace campaign?”. John answered, “…the thing that really struck it off was a letter we got from a guy called Peter Watkins who made a film called The War Game. It was a very long letter stating just what’s happening – how the media is really controlled, how it’s all run, and everything else that people really know deep down. He said ‘People in your position have a responsibility to use the media for world peace’. And we sat on the letter for about three weeks thinking ‘Well, we’re doing our best. All you need is love, man.’ That letter just sort of sparked it all off. It was like getting your induction papers for peace!” (p.144, The Beatles – A Celebration by Geoffrey Giuliano)

The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins provides a great primer on the man, his movies and the making of La Commmune in 2000.

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