PZ's Podcast
by Mockingbird
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
Episodes
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Episode 416 - "Have To Believe We Are Magic" (1980)
Realism is exactly correct in our observation of life as it is, and especially of human nature as it is. So-called "film noirs", produced right after World War Two, were right to present life, and human nature, as it really is -- which is "noir" (i.e., dark), confused, self-serving and ultimately...
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Episode 415 - "Nur Wir Zwei"
PZ sets considerable store on the difference between "Either-Or" and "Both-And". 'The world' likes to interpret reality in terms of "Both-And" -- fatal adjectives like "complicated" and "nuanced" abound! The Reality of Life, however, is different. The Reality of Life is "Either-Or Resulting in...
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Episode 414 - "Placebo"?: No.
An interesting new book from Germany has just been translated into English and a review of it in the Times Literary Supplement (August 21, 2026) concludes with a most consequential sentence. The book is entitled Soul Magic: A Century of Psychotherapy, and the author is Steve Ayan. The…
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Episode 413 - "Red Planet Mars" (1952)
'Love is the Answer' to almost all human problems; but more accurately stated, 'Belovedness' is the Answer. Love springs from belovedness, and almost every rock song that has ever been sung echoes this. It's an important distinction, tho', between love and belovedness, because love is almost…
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Episode 412 - "The Searchers"
A special cross-posting of PZ's appearance on Directed by God, a podcast and YouTube show produced by and 'starring' Reagan Wells and Seth Farmer. PZ was served as guest host for their episode on The Searchers, the 1956 film directed by John Ford. The episode was filmed in Cathedral Church of the...
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Episode 411 - Lorna Doone? Brigadoon!
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...
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Episode 410 - HELLO (H E L L O) E L O
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…
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Episode 409 - Agent Double-O Soul
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 ......
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Episode 408 - Christmas in the Twilight Zone
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...
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Episode 407 - Magic Cancellation
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…
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Episode 406 - Sail On, Sailor
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…
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Episode 405 - Into the Mystic
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...
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Episode 404 - A New Demographic? (Pt. 2)
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…
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Episode 403 - A New Demographic? (Pt. 1)
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...
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Episode 402 - Pixie Dust (Essential)
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...
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Episode 401 - It's a Stretch!
It's been too long but here is my new episode. It started with the second-to-last scene in an 'Outer Limits' episode from 1963 entitled "The Human Factor". Brought yours truly straight to tears. Then we hurtled through time to 1996, to Cliff Robertson's touching redemption at the end of another...
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Episode 400 - Jordan, Meet Jackie
This is a sort of "marker" podcast -- my 400th. It's kind of my summing up on the subject of human identity and the origin of human satisfaction. The cast cites a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, and do note that the interviewer is almost as interesting as the interviewee I also quote John...
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Episode 399 - Sligh and the Family...
Everyday I see how little I know. Everyday I see how little I've read, or seen, or heard. (Thought I had, but hadn't.) A prime example of this is Agnes Sligh Turnbull. Have you ever heard of Agnes Sligh Turnbull? (You probably have.) She wrote very successful novels in the 1940s and '50s, and...
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Episode 398 - Can You Read My Mind?
There is a roughly four-minute sequence in the middle of the first Superman movie (1978) that hits the stratosphere of movie emotion -- and of real-life emotion, too. It is the scene in which Superman takes Lois Lane's hand and flies her leisuredly over Manhattan Island. As the pair glide over…
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Episode 397 - Out of the Deeps
I so want to connect with my hearers when I preach or speak. Yes, one has a Message -- the One-Way Love of God embodied in the Compassionate Christ. But if it doesn't really connect with the listener -- with the sufferer! -- it is not able to do its job. J.B. Priestley (d. 1984), who had…
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Episode 396 - Chapel in the Pines
I'm thinking about ecclesiology today. Rarely do. But a combination of J.B. Priestley's "low anthropology", a couple of recent lightning bolts from outside space and (present) time, and a fresh glimpse of the touching statue of "The Compassionate Christ" outside Cathedral Church of the Advent in...
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Episode 395 - "Time Is On My Side"
Can't believe I got to see Irma Thomas in person a few years back. (Saw The Stones performing the same song in 1965 on their first American tour. Have to pinch myself that that really happened. But it did.) But time is on my mind just now. This is for two reasons: 1) Two old friends died under...
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Episode 394 - Philemon -- I mean "Philemon"
Every day these days I seem to find out something important that I didn't know before. For example, that Burton Cummings has just released a new album. Or that one of Joe Dante's favorite movies is a Spanish religious satire released in 1995. Or... that The Fantasticks is really good! Or that the...
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Episode 393 - Los Straitjackets & T.S. Eliot
Eliot's line from 'East Coker', "Old men ought to be explorers", never gets... old. It is inspiring, counter-intuitive, awesome, and, yes, within our reach. And everyone's -- not just that of "old men". But I never understood it -- really -- until I met Los Straitjackets: their music, I mean. How...
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Episode 392 - Garden of Eden
Mockingbirder Joey Goodall recently composed a public note of praise for 'PZ's Podcast', and his very act motivated this caster to record a new one. Joey's approbation instantly created within me the desire to put some fresh thoughts out there. Instantly! That's the way love works -- which is to...
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Episode 391 - An Optimistic Tragedy
I often think about persisting impasses and persistent patterns in life. How can you "live with" -- handle -- habitual defeats, whether from outward circumstance or inward personality, without wanting to throw yourself overboard; or, as Herr Moltmann used to say, without wanting to turn in your...
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Episode 390 - Glenda, Meet Jurgen
John Zahl recently said that God seems to be interested not so much in preventing our suffering as in redeeming us from it. (I might add, through it, even.) My long friendship with the theologian Jurgen Moltmann, who died June 3rd at the age of 98, began with a somewhat dramatic "happening" that...
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Episode 389 - The New Perspective on Paul
Now "here's a howdy-do" (The Mikado, Gilbert & Sullivan). How does Joe Meek shed light on that ascendant movement -- and it still is ascendant -- within New Testament scholarship and interpretation? Let me say how. Admirers of Joe Meek's amazing productions like to say that he was way ahead of…
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Episode 388 - Self Portrait
Consideration of these (thousands of) new "Tea Chest" tapes from Joe Meek is such a blow to old assumptions. For example, I thought I knew his music pretty well. Even dedicated a book to him once, despite his having been dead since 1967. So now come out a Ton, a TON of new recordings by the Man…
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Episode 387 - A Cappella (Acappullco)
The new release of hundreds of Joe-Meek tapes and tape-excerpts from the "Tea Chests" of yore is a fresh flashlight into the nature of reality within this broken/fallen world. Did any of us have any idea of how much good material is contained within these acetate tapes that were packed up in the...
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Episode 386 - I Am the Eggman
It was quite arresting, decades ago, when a young artist in New York City told me that, despite appearances -- she came across as confident and hopeful -- she felt inside herself as if she were an egg that had been hurled against the wall, broken in a hundred pieces and dripping down the white...
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Episode 385 - Jack, Be Nimble -- NOT!
I keep hearing the word "nimble" these days. It comes up in relation to declining and therefore merging church institutions, in which a press release declares that the sale of a church property or the merger of two diminished churches or dioceses will now enable the Church to be more "nimble" in...
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Episode 384 - Theme & Variations
Mary Zahl was recently the guest on an episode of a podcast known as "The Brothers Zahl" (out this summer). The subject of the cast was parenting, and I can think of no better illustration of a good parent. Mary listed three core themes of enduring motherhood/fatherhood that feel utterly right to...
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Episode 383 - Do You Need a Receipt?
I wonder if you are ever struck by the ubiquity of this phrase at the end of every checkout line in the known universe: "Do you need a receipt?". Or, in grocery stores, "Find everything you were looking for?". Or, again in every cell-phone (business) call on earth: "Is there anything else I can...
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Episode 382 - We Interrupt This Program
You can't help noticing, if you study Soviet-Era Iron-Curtain sci fi illustrations and posters -- an activity which I feel sure governs your every waking minute -- that there are ZERO aliens or extra-terrestrial forms of life to be seen. The Soviets and the East Germans, who did in fact excel in...
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Episode 381 - Up the Down Staircase
I'm trying to put into words the core principles of accessible Christian theology. Not mentally or intellectually accessible, but feeling-accessible -- heart-accessible -- and therefore actually and experientially accessible! Karl Barth promulgated what was called a "theology from the top down".…
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Episode 380 - It Only Takes a Minute, Girl (Pt 2)
I don't tire of quoting Thomas Cranmer's 'meme' that goes like this: "What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies." That is so true to life. Now note its difference with the sentence quoted in part one of this cast by my old episcopal acquaintance in Australia: "Nothing can be...
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Episode 379 - It Only Takes a Minute, Girl (Pt 1)
An old acquaintance, an Australian bishop, has been quoting recently from a popular cartoonist and kind of pop philosopher "Down Under" named Mike Leunig. The bishop quoted an aphorism from Leunig in relation to his long-term hopes for the Anglican Church in Australia: "Nothing can be loved at...
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Episode 378 - PZ's Mature Thoughts Concerning Rock n' Roll
Personally, I think that one's most cherished tunes come from ... oneself. By which I mean that the music you love may say more about you than about the music itself. You hear a Pretenders single and it calls you instantaneously back to the person you were when you first heard it. "Don't You…
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Episode 377 - Happy 50th, Rod McKuen
I've been thinking some about "borderland" states, meaning extremely strong states of mind and feeling that are not necessarily explicit, but are nonetheless real. Borderland states of mind are when you are in despair concerning your life, or your primary relationships, or simply the way you feel...
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Episode 376 - Fury
One just can't get over that repeating, concluding forcefulness of Los Straitjackets' music by which they almost always save the best for last -- like in the wedding at Cana, sort of. They light up the sky in the last third -- sometimes even the last fifth -- of their covers and their songs. Like...
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Episode 375 - New Morning
Heard a sermon last night that cut to the quick. It evoked the image of a "new priesthood" -- a new movement of God in the New Year. The preacher's vision of life and the work of God in the world felt inspired to the first power. And then I thought of Jack Kerouac -- right in the middle of her...
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Episode 374 - The Girl I Married (TZ 1987)
On December 29th, 2023 Mary and I have been married exactly 50 years. What a marker for us! (I truly feel it and celebrate it.) This marker-episode concerns the primacy of individual belovedness over any and everything else, including career and professional achievement. This primacy becomes...
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Episode 373 - “Everybody’s Talkin’” — NOT!
Bishop Colin Buchanan died November 29th in Leeds Infirmary, and there’s been almost no coverage of it — not even in the Church press. Astonishing! Colin was one of the most influential ministers and scholars in the Church of England during the 20th Century. Yet it seems today as if he almost…
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Episode 372 - We've Only Just Begun
This Christmas podcast is in honor of Mary's and my 50th Anniversary, which comes on December 29th. She and I are both in thankful awe of having made it thus far. And happily! To me this is worth celebrating. The cast sets out two requirements, or better, signs, as I see it, for an enduring...
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Episode 371 - At the Earth's Core
That's a fun movie, from 1976, in which a group of Victorian English people are mistakenly rocketed into inner space, right down to the core of the earth. (What they find, well, you can probably imagine.) But the title and the premise are good: There's newness to be found at the center of the…
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Episode 370 - Serling's Miracle, and Ours
When I survey... not the Wondrous Cross, but the world as it's currently going, it's hard not to despair. So many things seem and feel wrong -- are wrong. Providentially (as I see it), I've been directed back to Rod Serling. He was so focussed on justice, and especially social justice; and also…
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Episode 369 - Don't You Care
God spoke to me recently. Not through a mediated form -- albeit it was through another human being. Not through concept nor reading nor paradox nor metaphor nor memory. But right Here and Now! I was truly blown away. It was neither expected (at all) nor on a subject about which I'd been thinking....
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Episode 368 - Straining Out Gnats and...
I've been much affected by the pictures of murdered and bombed children from Israel and Gaza in the last week, and found myself comparing these unutterably tragic losses with some of the other issues on which our world is fixed. It almost seems like there's no comparison between the bloody burial...
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Episode 367 - "Summer of '42"
If you want to get to the core, the very heart, of a person's -- say, your own -- experience of Grace, ask them (i.e., ask yourself) to tell you about an experience of acceptance or belovedness that came to them at a low point in their youth or childhood. Get them to tell you about that one...
About this show
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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Mockingbird
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