Crease Magazine

by Buzz Drainpipe, scratched into the condensation of a pub window somewhere near closing time If Utoopia gave us the neon afterlife, Dave Morrison with Joe Soap drag us back to the graveyard of real life : rain-slicked pavements, wet cigarettes, ghosts that drink pints and still owe rent. 1981 is what happens when a bar band stares too long into its own reflection and realizes the jukebox has been whispering back. Morrison doesn’t sing so much as mutter in key —a sort of defeated romanticism halfway between Ian Dury and an unamused saint. Joe Soap, bless them, play like they’re trying to remember what rock’n’roll felt like before Thatcher turned the amps into metaphors. The guitars jangle like broken pint glasses; the rhythm section moves like clock hands in a blackout. There’s a track—“ Raincoats & Regret ”—that could’ve been a hit if it hadn’t been too honest. “ King’s Cross Angel ” sounds like it was recorded on a payphone between sobs and laughter. And then there’s “ ...

By Buzz Drainpipe In the static haze between AM radio and alleyway reverb, there was KISS — not the cartoon, not the marketing juggernaut, but the four New York kids who took the decaying pulse of the city and turned it into something electric. Their third album, Dressed to Kill , always stood apart — sleek, sharp, a record that smelled like fresh vinyl and sidewalk rain. And now, fifty years later, it plays like scripture. “Come On and Love Me” There’s a myth that KISS never had depth. But listen closely: there’s an acoustic guitar buried in there, like the ghost of a subway busker swallowed by glam. The remastered Dressed to Kill teases it out — the rhythm, the nuance, the pure heartbeat beneath the bravado. What was once swagger now sounds like worship. “Parasite” / “Almost Human” / “Cold Gin” / “Black Diamond” These are not songs — they’re working-class hymns, metal dusted with soot and bourbon. Parasite is an East Village exorcism; Almost Human a nighttime r...

I. The Posthuman Threshold: From Bounded Subject to Informational Body The transition into the posthuman age marks a critical rupture in Western philosophical thought, accelerating the deconstruction of the subject initiated by 20th-century anti-humanism. Traces of this intellectual lineage can be found in the foundational critiques of humanism offered by Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Heidegger, which were subsequently amplified by French poststructuralists such as Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida. However, the philosophical critique found its explicit realization with the advent of information and digital technologies. This technological impact formalized the shift, defining Critical Posthumanism (CPH) not merely as a theoretical position but as an operative formula: posthumanism equals poststructuralist theory compounded by technics. A core ontological condition of this new paradigm is the dissolution of the bounded self. N. Katherine Hayles posits that this posthuman condition...

By Your Esteemed Broadcast Engineer Sunday. The sacred day. The rest of the world is doing... whatever it is they do. Brunch? Chores? We wouldn't know. Because for us, Sunday is when the real work begins: The deep dive. The cultural excavation. The glorious descent into the streaming rabbit hole known as Tubi. Forget your carefully curated prestige dramas. This isn't about quality in the traditional sense; it's about vibe. It's about that specific, electric hum of a truly wild film making a direct bypass to your psycho-skull. So, grab that mainline coffee, dim the lights, and prepare for a broadcast from the fringes. Your Psycho-Skull Sunday Itinerary: Mad Science, Manic Girls, and Monsters – A Grindhouse Signal 1. Brain Dead (1990) The Signal: You're starting your descent into a reality-bending vortex. Before you hit the truly gonzo stuff, you need to recalibrate your brain. Bill Pullman plays a neurosurgeon whose sanity unravels after an experimental o...

by Buzz Drainpipe, written under a dying streetlight Some records sound like they were  made  in their time. Signal drift  sounds like it  invented  time, then died in the process. Before the eyeliner got smudged into fashion and the synths learned to smile, there was this: a frozen love letter to decay. The first track,  “Crisis Architecture,”  opens like an elevator to nowhere—chrome walls, no buttons, just your reflection stretching as you rise. The bass trembles like a power grid on its last breath. Every chorus feels like the echo of a civilization that uploaded its emotions to a dead server. By  “Tear Circuit” —the album’s midpoint—you start to suspect Utopia weren’t a band at all, but a signal accidentally received through a half-tuned radio, a séance caught on tape. The vocals don’t plead or preach; they  hover , like an abandoned thought that refuses to stop thinking itself. There’s warmth in the decay, though. “Midnight Repeater” pu...

THE 1989 ACTION DUO: OUT ON BAIL & BAIL OUT Forget the big-budget spectacles of '89. This morning, we're mainlining the unassuming, straight-to-video grit of two films whose titles are so similar they form a perfect, accidental thesis on the desperation of the late 80s: You either get Out on Bail or you Bail Out entirely. These movies are not sequels. They are cosmic echoes. Grab a dollar store action figure and your darkest pair of sunglasses. We’re in South Africa and Mexico, baby, and the justice system is a myth. SIDE A: OUT ON BAIL (1989) - Justice is a Drifter This one is a revelation. Our protagonist is John Dee (played by the great, rugged Robert Ginty), a drifter who witnesses a massacre and finds himself sucked into a conspiracy involving a crooked sheriff and town officials. Set in the dusty, sun-baked landscape of South Africa (a cheap stand-in for the American South, naturally), this is pure Post-Vietnam Vigilante Cinema filtered through a Cannon Fi...

I. The Gospel of Distortion: 1987 as the Analog Eschaton The year 1987 occupies a unique and transitional place in cinematic history, marking the high-water mark of analog freedom before the widespread shift toward digital media. This period served as a fertile crucible for a distinct brand of independent genre filmmaking, often characterized by its frenetic pace, thematic paranoia, and brazen disregard for mainstream sensibilities—the films often referred to as "mind benders." The enduring appeal of these productions is inextricably linked to the economic and technological upheaval catalyzed by the Video Home System (VHS). A. The Year of the Glitch: Contextualizing the Post-Reagan Landscape During the mid-to-late 1980s, the economic landscape of American filmmaking was heavily dominated by major Hollywood studios, where production budgets for major films frequently soared into the tens of millions of dollars. This centralization of capital naturally promoted homogenous conte...

I. The Seed: Analyzing Stephen King's Original Vision and Its First Adaptation (1977–1983) The enduring mythos of Children of the Corn began not as a cinematic spectacle, but as a chilling piece of folk horror literature. The narrative originated as a short story published in 1977 in Penthouse magazine and was later collected in Stephen King’s 1978 collection, Night Shift. The core premise centers on the seemingly abandoned, religiously corrupted town of Gatlin, Nebraska, which is ruled by a cult of homicidal children who worship a demonic corn deity known only as He Who Walks Behind the Rows. I.A. King’s Bleak Geography: Socio-Economic Setting and the Failure of Adult Authority in Gatlin The foundational terror of King’s story is rooted in the deep psychological dysfunction of the adult protagonists, Burt and Vicky Robeson. They are introduced as a "bickering couple" attempting a fraught cross-country road trip in a desperate effort to salvage the...

James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) form a single current in the hidden river of film history. On their surface, they’re gothic tales — thunder, shadows, eccentric hosts, tragic monsters. Beneath, they hum with an irony so refined it becomes tenderness. Whale’s camera doesn’t simply record dread; it composes wit out of unease. To watch Whale now is to see a kind of cinematic Taoism in action — the yin of horror and the yang of humor, the grotesque and the beautiful completing each other in balance. His films seem to whisper that monstrosity is not a curse but a mirror. Every scream hides a joke; every joke hides a scream. Though Whale never declared himself a queer artist in the modern sense, his sensibility saturates every frame. The queerness is aesthetic, structural, emotional — the theatrical staging, the arch dialogue, the sense that everyone’s playing a role because they must. His work is alive with empathy for outsiders who can’t conform with...

by Buzz Drainpipe There are albums, and then there’s this—an ashtray prayer disguised as a debut. Concrete Blonde isn’t trying to be your friend; it’s trying to keep you alive long enough to realize you already lost, and that’s the victory. It’s a Christmas present for your dealer wrapped in barbed wire and tinsel. It’s raising a toast to your sobriety with whatever’s left in the glass. Johnette Napolitano doesn’t sing —she excavates. Her voice sounds like it’s been sleeping under the freeway and woke up with visions. The guitars are half Chicano goth, half downtown siren, shimmering in the sodium glow of Hollywood self-doubt. Every bass note feels like a confession whispered through an amp on its last legs. There’s the poetry of the hangover, the rhythm of persistence. Your Haunted Head plays like a séance for the person you could’ve been, and Still in Hollywood reminds you that purgatory has its own skyline. By the time the album fades, you realize the world didn’t beat you—it...