no birds

The girl looking behind her in the center of this photo, taken during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," is my sister Valerie. She and the other kids are running from a flock of angry crows, to be added later with optical effects. The street the kids are running on is in Bodega, California, but the close-ups were filmed in front of a blue screen at Universal Studios. In one shot, Valerie has a mechanical crow attached to her sweater which she made flap its wings by pressing a button hidden in her clothing. I wasn't allowed to see the movie when it came out because I was four and it was too scary for me.

Pamelyn Ferdin

Facebook post, February 16, 2021

jill lepore | this is how they tell me the world ends

In the nightmare, sirens caterwaul as ambulances career down ice-slicked, car-crashed streets whose traffic lights flash all three colors at once (they’ve been hacked by North Korea) during a climate-catastrophic blizzard, bringing pandemic patients to hospitals without water or electricity—pitch-black, all vaccinations and medications spoiled (the power grid has been hacked by Iran)—racing past apartment buildings where people are freezing to death in their beds, families huddled together under quilts, while, outside the darkened, besieged halls of government, men wearing fur hats and Kevlar vests (social media has been hacked by Russia), flashlights strapped to their rifles, chant, “Q is true! Q is true!” 

from Zero Day, by Jill Lepore 

The New Yorker, February 8, 2021

tuff city radio | mike chips | psychedelic basement

 

love

country joe & the fish, electric music for the mind and body (1967)

 

cinnamon girl

the gentrys, the gentrys (1970)

 

a man needs a maid / heart of gold

neil young, live at massey hall (rec. jan 19, 1971)

 

chuck e's in love

rickie lee jones, rickie lee jones (1979)

 

don't get your back up

sarah harmer, you were here (2000)

 

i worship the ground you walk on

etta james, tell mama (1968)

 

side one:

in brooklyn

old compton street blues

the ballad of mary foster

life and life only

al stewart, love chronicles (1969)

baby driver

simon & garfunkel, bridge over troubled water (1970)

can't seem to make you mine

the seeds, the seeds (1966)

she lives (in a time of her own)

the 13th floor elevators, easter everywhere (1967)

the last time

janis joplin, big brother & the holding company (1967) 

i ain't no miracle worker

the chocolate watch band, the inner mystique (1968)

(unidentified track)

the doors, strange days (1967)

i'll be your mirror

the velvet underground, the velvet underground & nico (1967)

somebody to love (live)

grace slick & the great society, live at the matrix (1966)

side one: 

don't let it get you down (for rachel)

shouting in a bucket blues

when your parents go to sleep *

interview

internotional anthem

kevin ayers, bananamour (1973)

is it love?

t. rex, t. rex (1970)

friction

television, marquee moon (1977)

look at me now

electric light orchestra, the electric light orchestra (1971)

rene

small faces, ogdens' nut gone flake (1968)

canadian exodus

h.y. sledge, bootleg music (1970)

inside your mind

the fool, the fool (1968)

the beginning 

pink floyd, green is the colour / the journey (live, amsterdam, sep 17, 1969)

how do you sleep?

john lennon, imagine (1971)

side one:

thoughts for naught

a pot head pixie's advice

magick mother invocation

master builder

a sprinkling of clouds

gong, you (1974)

second set:

that's it for the other one

new potato caboose

born cross-eyed

spanish jam

alligator / drums / alligator

the grateful dead, live at the carousel ballroom (feb 14, 1968)

playlist from February 15, 2021

psychedelic basement is broadcast every monday night from 8-11pm on

tuff city radio, 90.1 fm, tofino - "All over the map, at the end of the road"

you can stream it here

oscar wilde on 'the importance of being earnest'

Oscar Wilde showed up at a rehearsal for his play "The Importance of Being Earnest" a few days before the opening, wearing his trademark green carnation pinned onto a three-piece maroon suit. After watching the actors for a few minutes he said, “Yes, it is quite a good play. I remember I wrote one very like it myself, but it was even more brilliant than this.”

molly burhans : "she had fallen in love with god"

She spent six months travelling, by herself, in Guatemala, where she volunteered with several NGOs. She was surprised by some of the fries she made. "They were Christians but not like the Christians you see on TV - none of the prosperity gospel crap," she said. "In fact, exactly the opposite. I began to think, Maybe I'm a Christian."

Burhan's family was nominally Catholic. She had attended a parochial school through third grade, and Mercyhurst and Canisius are both Catholic institutions. But when she went to church as a child, she said, "I'm pretty sure I was only in it for the doughnuts." When she was twelve, the Boston Globe published its "Spotlight" articles about child abuse by priests. She said her feelings about the Church, which had been "not spiritually mature," turned angry and hostile. "Here was this institution that had perpetuated colonialism, and now it was hiding a bunch of pedophiles." 

At Canisius, though, she experienced a spiritual awakening. She was working on a physics problem one day, thinking about limits and infinitesimal values, and suddenly she felt overwhelmed. "The Jesuits talk about seeing God in all things, and you can see God in all things through the infinite," she said. She began meeting regularly with a Jesuit spiritual director, who introduced her to the Examen of St. Ignatius, a demanding daily prayer exercise, which she described to me as "mindfulness on steroids."

As Burhand became interested in Catholicism, he social life changed. "I no longer had people to listen to John Cage or Frank Zappa with," she told me. Her new friends were "middle-class suburban campus-ministry members who liked belting Disney songs." She had no real regrets, thought, because she had "fallen in love with God."

from "Promised Land" by David Owen, a portrait of climate activist Molly Burhans 

The New Yorker, February 8, 2021

stephen dunn | stories

It was back when we used to listen to stories,
     our minds developing
pictures as we were taken into the elsewhere

 

of our experience or to the forbidden
     or under the sea.
Television was wrestling, Milton Berle,

 

Believe It Or Not. We knelt before it
     like natives
in front of something sent by parachute,

 

but when grandfather said “I’ll tell you a story,”
     we stopped with pleasure,
sat crosslegged next to the fireplace, waited.

 

He’d sip gin and hold us, his voice
     the extra truth
beyond what we believed without question.

 

When grandfather died and changed
     what an evening meant,
it was 1954. After supper we went

 

to the television, innocents in a magic land
     getting more innocent,
a thousand years away from Oswald and the shock,

 

the end of our enormous childhood.
     We sat still
for anything, laughed when anyone slipped

 

or lisped or got hit with a pie. We said
     to our friends
“What the hey?” and punched them in the arms.

 

The television had arrived, and was coming.
     Throughout the country
all the grandfathers were dying,

giving their reluctant permission, like Indians.

"Stories" by Stephen Dunn

from Local Time, Quill Press, 1986

garrison keillor | sea chantey dream

"I’ve found during the pandemic that my dream life has become quite rich: long novels with sustained dialogue. The other night I was working in the Orkney Islands on a trawler that hauled various goods from one port to another. The sea was calm. My shipmates spoke in a musical dialect that, odd as it was, I understood perfectly. Sometimes, hauling crates along a wharf, one of them would burst into song and we all sang together, a chorus of big burly men singing four-part harmony, rousing sea chanteys and heartbreaking laments for lost love. We walked through town past a barrelworks where men were shaping oak staves to make barrels to store whiskey in. We stopped in a tavern and had a glass of whiskey and sang some more. It was a fabulous dream. I’d love to go back and rejoin those men, if only I knew where the door is." 

Garrison Keillor, "An old Democrat in a chorus in the Orkneys" 

February 2, 2021