From "Telstar" to "Vault of Horror," from Rattigan to Kerouac, from the Village of Bray to the Village of Midwich, help PZ link old ancient news and pop culture. I think I can see him, "Crawling from the Wreckage." Will he find his way? This show is brought to you by Mockingbird! www.mbird.com
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Here is the first time back after several months,and I couldn't be happier! It took a new computer (and system), acute in-person IT aid from Mockingbird's own Will McDavid; and the moral support of Mockingbirder and friend Hewes Hull. But "I'm Flyin'" ('Peter Pan', 1952) -- again. This brand new episode concerns personal belovedness (i.e., Grace) and its fruit (i.e., Christian compassion and all…
Why does one love rock 'n roll so dearly? Well, of course, the quality of a given favorite song -- its bass line, the vocals, the guitar solo, etc. -- connects with you(r ears) and makes you love it. But there's more to it than that: The real ground of one's love for a particular song is * Where you were when you first heard it. * And by that I mean: Where you were emotionally when you first heard…
Always searching for the words to describe breakthrough -- opening doors -- divine intervention in our 'safe-rooms' of pain and loss. Always searching for words, and also actions. How can you and I, dear listener, become like Edwin Starr in 1965: our own "Agent Double-O-Soul" for the sake of ... the world? Well, first, you need to be an object of love. Not the subject of love -- i.e., the lover.…
Rod Serling was born on Christmas Day (Squeeze, 1996) and that fact forever touched him. He wrote three scripts for the original 'Twilight Zone' that have a Christmas context, as well as the mother of all Christmas screenplays (of his genre) entitled "The Messiah of Mott Street". The latter he wrote for the 1969 anthology 'Night Gallery'. During the next two weeks I will be showing the two best of…
How do you help someone who is being pummeled by a persisting circumstantial or psychodynamic problem? Do you "advise" them? (Don't Do It - The Band, '72) Do you try to talk them out of it? (Again, don't -- Talk Talk, '82-'84) Do you avoid them? (Again, don't -- Animotion, '84. They won't let you, anyway.) What do you do? How do you actually help someone you love -- maybe it's you ("Baby It's You"…
I feel like I see more acutely than ever into the backing track of human experience. There is the "outside" of how our lives are going within givens and events, but then there is the "backing track" -- the enabling part, the staying part, the... well, the (kind of) Eternal Part. The two parts, the outside and the backing track, are separate. "Phosphorus" is a word one sometimes uses for this, but…
One has been thinking all week about those precious little girls from Camp Mystic. There's also a pastoral situation or two in which sharp suffering seems to have been "imposed" on people I love. Why and How and ... What ? I had a kind of visitation late one night this week. It came initially from ... Van Morrison. His song "Into the Mystic", from 1970, started to play inside my mind. Then a…
How does someone who is living, like it or not, in the last third of life, address everybody else who is living in the second third? It's an important question, cuz most of the time it's like two ships passing in the night. An older Episcopal priest used to come up to me about once a week -- he was assisting in a busy parish where I was rector -- and say, "Hey, Paul, relax. You're working too…
While one was within the second third of one's life, one had all these goals in view, of happy marriage, happy fathering, and (most of all, sadly) successful careering. That was the way it was -- and probably the way it is, at least for some who may be reading this. And in that (now) embarrassing order, too. But at this point it's beginning to look a little bankrupt -- at least the order of…
Every version or tradition of the Christian Faith offers an objective or corporealized dimension within a person's (longed for) relationship with God. For Roman Catholicism, it is the Real Presence of the Lord within the Elements of Bread and Wine. For pentecostalism, it is the embodied Gifts of the Spirit in miracles of healing and divine intervention, and often an accompanying gift of speaking…
